Early Warning

Rosanna felt herself prickle. “Well, I don’t know about that, but he always admired this farm you had, Roland.”

“Wanted to get his hands on it, I’ll be bound.”

“I think Walter knew his hands were full.”

“Who planted that north field out there?”

“My son Joe, and also my brother John.” She made her voice clear and bright. You never knew what a drunk could remember. She went into the pantry to find the tea.

She hadn’t thought of Roland Frederick as having a point of view. He was an efficient farmer with a beautiful farm, and then he wasn’t. He had the most beautiful house and the most admirable wife; everyone in the neighborhood had thought of them as Mr. and Mrs. Frederick, never Roland and Lorene. When Mrs. Frederick had her stroke it had been an impersonal drama, tragic but wordless, the sort of drama that farm country abounded in. Now, looking at Roland, Rosanna knew that he had a story, too, something howling and painful that could make a claim on her, on Joe, on Lois, on Minnie. On Annie. Whatever Minnie said, this was his farm. Rosanna poured out a cup of tea and pushed it toward him, but he stopped it with his hand, so she took it back and folded her own hands around it. She said, “Well, I wish you’d tell me some of the places you’ve visited.”

He ate one cookie and half the biscuit, rolling bits around in his mouth and then swallowing them.

Finally, she said, “Are you working now?”

“At the stockyards. Omaha.”

“That’s steady work.”

“I shoulda left this place when I first had the chance.”

“When was that, Roland?”

“Was all set up I was going to Chicago to work for a man my father knew in the shoe business. Before the first war. Start by doing the books, then go on the road, selling shoes. Well, my dad died right then, and my uncles hated to see me go, so they made it real easy to get going on the farm. Lorene was my second cousin, you know. From over around Grundy Center, where three of the uncles lived. Oh, they suckered me. Everyone was just scared to death of the sins of the world. Lorene was a good girl — she would watch over my spirit.” And then he put his head down on the table, his old, dirty gray hair right on the little plate, and he started bawling. Rosanna moved the plate. She said, “I’m sure they thought they were acting for the best.”

“They never had any doubt about it. Or about anything else.”

“You were a good farmer. Walter respected you. And Minnie and Lois are both such good girls. There’s more to everyone than meets the eye. But there is what meets the eye, too.”

Roland took a deep snort and sat up, then pulled a dirty bandanna out of his pocket and wiped his nose. Rosanna picked up the plate, carried that and the teapot to the sink. He was out of the room just like that, and she skittered after him, not quite knowing what she would do if he headed up the stairs, but he didn’t. He went straight to the front door and left without another word. Rosanna closed the door behind him.

Through the window, she saw him go down the steps, look around, and make his way to the car parked there — a Ford, maybe a ’48. He sat in it for a long while, and then drove away. The car was gray. She wrote that down on a scrap of paper.

It took her two days to tell Minnie. Really, it was that she didn’t want to see the very thing she saw when she related the incident — Minnie’s nostrils flaring and her eyes hardening.

Minnie said, “He’d better not come back.”

“He might not.”

Rosanna didn’t ask who owned the farm, where the papers were. Worse came to worst, they could vacate the house for a few years, the few years that Roland had to live. She said, “Your father is pretty far down the road now, Minnie.”

“That’s the good news, then.”

“I suppose it is, yes.”

Rosanna never knew if Minnie told Lois or Joe. As for herself, Rosanna thought of telling Granny Elizabeth about it, maybe just as a way of hearing more about Roland’s uncles — she would have a thing or three to say. But in the end she said nothing, feeling each time she opened her mouth that there was some species of betrayal in it.

—

THE TWINS WERE eighteen months old now, walking (and standing and staring and screaming and sitting) just like other children more or less their age, and Andy found herself increasingly preoccupied with those baby scrapbooks her brother’s wife had sent when they were born. Andy had gotten Janny’s to the six-month mark — the last photo was of her sitting up in the baby bath with her fingers in her mouth. Richie’s and Michael’s — not even birth pictures. Birth pictures of the twins existed, but they reminded Andy more of mug shots than of baby photos, naked in incubators, little skinny limbs and odd heads, no hair except where it shouldn’t be, on arms and back, like monkeys. She had stuffed the scrapbooks onto the upper shelf in the closet in Richie and Michael’s room, and every time she slid open that door, she would see their spines, white, pink, and blue, the silliest objects in her very modern house, ready to get thrown out.