straight ahead through the windshield. Aldah’s pink-lipped face looked out smiling from the backseat. Alice excused herself to leave the Rev to clean up the pieces of whatever had been started with the Vangs. Mai kept smiling. She held out her hand to shake Alice’s and Lydia’s. So did Nickson. Their mother smiled and held out her hand too.
Whatever the bumper sticker had meant to the Vangs, it didn’t intimidate them. Unless they really knew how to hide their feelings, it didn’t even phase them.
“That was an experience,” said Lydia as they walked away.
“Those two guys?”
“We can do better than that,” said Lydia. “I meant the Vangs. They’re interesting. Did you watch Nickson?”
“He seemed shy,” said Alice.
“He wasn’t shy about the way he looked at you.”
“Give me a break,” said Alice. “I must be over a half foot taller than he is.”
“We all look up to you, darling.”
As Alice walked toward the Taurus, she knew she and Lydia had entered a new circle of energy with the Vangs, a whole different kind of cultural fire than they were used to. These people, especially Mai, were fired up inside and wearing an invisible shield on the outside. They probably would have to tame down that foreign fire in Dutch Center, but the invisible shield? They’d need that.
When Alice got into the car, neither of her parents asked about the Vangs, but Alice sensed an unease. Even if both of her parents would argue vehemently that they held no prejudices against foreigners, Alice knew better. The Mexicans who had moved in to work at the dairies and packing plants attended a Catholic church ten miles from Dutch Center, so no one had to experience the strangeness of seeing them in the next pew. Out of sight, out of mind. Occasionally a missionary convert from Africa would appear in their church, but their visits were always short; and there were a handful of foreign students attending Redemption College, but few of them attended Alice’s church. The Vangs were a rarity, and seeing them no doubt stirred the calm waters of her parents’ habitual church comforts.
Alice could feel the space around her compact with silence in the backseat of the car with Aldah. It wasn’t the kind of silence that suggested her parents had quarreled about the way her mother stormed out of church. This was different—a pressured silence that was building up in the front seat. Alice suspected the silence had everything to do with the Vangs, but she wasn’t about to open the conversation on that topic. Instead, she would meet their silence with her own and simply stare out the window.
Which she did: in a casual analytic mode, she categorized the farms as they passed by. Successful farms. Teetering farms. Abandoned farms. Successful farms were like people wearing expensive clothing—not showy, just that confident look of neatly buttoned doors and well-groomed roofs, the kind of farms that would appear on the covers of farm magazines. The teetering farms were like people wearing mismatched clothing—a shining tractor next to a gate that nobody bothered to repair. The abandoned farms had no pretense at all, disheveled but carefree with their tall grass and their splintered doors wagging in the breeze like shirttails that someone didn’t bother tucking in. Abandoned farms were like homeless hitchhikers ready to take a ride from anybody who passed.
Alice knew that the Krayenbraak farm was a teetering farm but it didn’t have any mismatched clothing. Its troubles were hidden behind a facade of order and tidiness: no loose hinges, no loose barbed wire, no loose shingles.
Three miles from the Krayenbraak farm her father stopped the car at a “cornfield corner,” an intersection where the cornfields obstructed the view in all four directions. Alice thought for a moment that he was simply being his cautious self or that he might be stopping to appreciate the beauty of the flourishing cornfields, but then she saw her mother’s shoulders tighten and knew this was the moment they had chosen for the dam of silence to be broken.
4
As her father drove slowly through the intersection, the dam broke with her mother’s sharp-edged voice from the front seat: “Do those people speak English?”
“Of course,” said Alice quickly. “Nickson will be at Midwest and Mai will be at Redemption. You know that. She has a scholarship.”
“The mother speaks English?”
“Not much,” said Alice. “Not yet.”
“What kind of name is Nickson?” asked her mother, and for the first time since they had started driving, she turned toward the backseat. Alice couldn’t tell if her expression was genuinely curious or if she was mocking the name.
“Not sure,” said Alice.
“Nick-son, Nick-son,” repeated Aldah.
“Could they have named their son after President Nixon?” That was her father’s voice.
“I could ask him,” said Alice. “It didn’t seem strange to me.”
“They sure are small, aren’t they?” said her mother.
“Compared to us, most people are small,” said Alice.
That made her father chuckle, but Alice figured he was probably chuckling to keep the conversation from getting into awkward territory where their daughter would turn on them and accuse them of who-knows-what. Alice was in no mood to accuse them of anything. So far the conversation had kept them away from the truly awkward matter of her mother storming out of church. Let me dwell in calm waters for the rest of the ride home, Alice thought.
Beside her, Aldah clenched her pink-stained handkerchief. Pink peppermint stains marked the corners of her lips. Alice unwrapped the wadded-up bumper sticker, took Aldah’s stained handkerchief, and rewrapped the bumper sticker around it.
“Stop,” said Aldah when they came to a corner that did have a stop sign.
“Very good,” said Alice “Now watch for the ‘Slow’ sign on the next hill.”
“McDonald’s.”
“No, that’s not McDonald’s. That mailbox says ‘Duh-Duh-Dykstra.’”
“Cheerios.”
“You’re being silly.”
Aldah giggled, then laid her head against Alice. “Nap,” she said.
Aldah laid her head onto Alice’s lap, but before she could sleep they were home to the Krayenbraak farm. Her mother had the oven set so that her one-dish meal was ready. Her father opened with prayer, and then the language of grim silence began. The stale kitchen air was filled with the gibberish of hogyard smells assailing the odors of a hotdish embellished with Hamburger Helper. The dry joints of the old oak table asked incoherent but shrill questions when Alice’s father put his hand down firmly next to his plate. Her mother throttled the slim saltshaker when she picked it up, and then, in movements that were uncharacteristically quick for her, she shook the life out of it in a seeming effort to resuscitate the comatose hotdish.
Alice took small bites, wanting her mouth to be free to utter real words in case she would suddenly have to come to the defense of the Vangs, but it was Aldah’s presence that spoke most clearly. She was the canary that went down into the dark well
