Harlan would be gone two, three weeks at a time. Not many women can cope with that kind of lonesomeness and Griselda wasn’t one of em. So Jack Ryne come along to comfort her. Riding a fine Mustang, best horse in Spirit Lake.
*****
Cora now, you couldn’t keep her to the homeplace if you strapped a plow to her back. I know we was sometimes the talk of folks, the way Cora would come strolling across someone’s place chewing on a hickory stick in her boy’s overalls, hair ragged short because she clipped it herself with sheep shears, toting along some Indian artifact she found back in the bluffs. Howdy doo, she’d say, have herself a drink of water out of the well and stroll on. I’d hear about it a couple days later and I know there was folks saying I should of reined her in.
But I couldn’t do that. It was in Cora’s blood. I remember our first harvest here, when times was still good. Cora just turned up down in the fields, right next to the reaper, pretty as you please. She wasn’t but three years old. I held her on my lap as she grabbed at the chaff floating by, her thin hair smelling like wheat and everything in the world seeming open and possible. That was the fall of ’28. Good times ain’t been seen around here since.
Cora knows this country better than anyone since the Indians, I guess. The draws and the buttes beyond the farm ground, every plant and animal and bug and fish. How many times did she show me things I never knew existed: deer beds, trout eggs, seep draws, edible berries.
“What are these even called?” I asked her once.
“Hackberry.”
“How did you know you could eat em?”
“I tried one.”
“You could of got sick to death, girl. You can’t go around eating things you don’t know what they are.”
She shrugged. “I know.”
Being with Cora the world took on a wondering glow. I noticed cows had marvelously shaped noses, like she said, how ladybugs flitted like storybook fairies, ants dancing on the sand in the wind. You don’t go restraining a creature like that. No sir.
*****
There wasn’t no harvest that October of ’36. Some of us had known since May, when didn’t nothing come sprouting out of the alkali-killed ground. Some of us by July, when it hadn’t rained in three months and Spirit Lake got too low to pull any more irrigation water out of. Some by September when three hailstorms in four days pounded the last living crops into dust and nothing. October should of been harvest. Instead them of us that hadn’t run off to California or taken to laboring gathered at the Gleaner’s Union warehouse that we built together, talking about what was and what might of been. Pass around corn whiskey, roll another smoke.
