off her face. She looked at me. “What are you wearing?”
Our sister, Susan, appeared in the doorway leading to the kitchen. “He was scared of the storm,” she said, “so he put on that blanket and plastic hat and hid under the stairs.”
I was so happy Elizabeth was home, I didn’t even bother to defend myself.
“I wish I’d been under the stairs,” Elizabeth said. “The weirdest thing happened.”
She told us her story, and we listened, rapt, and we asked her to repeat it. The best part was when she got into the ditch, waited, then just stood up and drove home. Elizabeth! Elizabeth could survive anything.
“You mean there was actual gravel in the air?” I asked.
“Yeah, not just sand but, like, big pebbles. Bam-bam-bam-bam! Hitting the windshield.”
“Did you leave the truck running?” Susan asked.
“Yeah!” she said, and laughed. “Luckily I put it in park!”
We laughed: Elizabeth had been in some sort of mini-tornado and had left the truck engine running. But probably it would have been funny even if she’d turned it off. Mainly we were giddy that Elizabeth was safe. We were all safe. The storm had knocked down a few small branches and sent a bucket reeling across the lawn, but that was all.
After the piano students left and the rain stopped, we went outside and looked at the truck. Much of the paint on the hood had been scoured away, and the windshield had dozens of pits and dings. But it wasn’t broken.
I looked up to Elizabeth as if she were a giant. She was seven years older than I was. Her letter jacket was so heavy with medals from track and basketball, it must have weighed five pounds. She had scars on her ankles from being spiked by other runners, scars on her knees from falling on cinder tracks. She had the same dishwater-blond hair I did, and a fast-trigger jump shot so rare among girl basketball players that opponents sometimes did a double take.
I could think of nothing better to be than a Jeremy version of Elizabeth: athlete, scholar, bale-chucking, manure-shoveling farm kid, pickup racer, lifeguard, horse rider. Hers were the shoes I aimed to fill.
On the day of that storm, the one both Grandma and Elizabeth raced home, my father was working in his office in the basement of the state capitol in Jefferson City. There were no windows, and the office was so deeply buried that even the loudest thunder couldn’t be heard. He was at his desk when suddenly—blink!—the lights went out.
Food, Animals
The way it worked is that we would stop at Alvina’s house about once a week, either on the way home from Jefferson City or having come from school in Russellville. If you volunteered or were conscripted into service, you opened the car door and stepped onto the white pebbles of Alvina’s driveway. Unless it was winter, you left the car door open. If Alvina was near, you said hello or waved. She was nice.
You entered the shed and went through the dim first room, then stepped down one step that was never quite where you expected it to be. There on the left was the deep cooler, and you reached down and pulled out a gallon of fresh milk, which was cold and heavy. The huge glass jar was wet because the cooler was filled with water and you lifted the jar carefully and there was no easy way to hold it. No handles. If we were picking up two gallons, someone came with you. One of your parents. Or a sister. One person could carry only one jar. That was the equation.
You now stood, holding eight pounds of milk, in one of the dark places of the world. This, though, simplified your exit. All you had to do was aim for the light coming through the doorway that led outside. And once you got the milk back into the light of day, you saw it—the milk itself—for the first time. White. You climbed back into the car and put the jar on the floor, and held it upright by squeezing it between your shins and keeping one hand on the lid. The lid itself was the size of a saucer. As the driver pulled carefully back onto the blacktop, accelerating slowly, you realized the milk was moving in the jar. You were reminded that it was liquid.
From Alvina’s, you drove south to Mount Hope Road, then rolled along the gravel road—down four hills, up four hills, but not in that order—and then turned into the long driveway. The driveway traced the perimeter of a grassy hill. At a bend in the driveway you looked at the gravelly shoulder where turtles could be found surprisingly frequently—say, once a year. Tortoises. This was also the corner where long ago your sisters saw a rattlesnake and walked around it by cutting through the field. So the story went.
The car climbed the little hill—slowly—and then you saw the house, the barns. On your right was a valley of pastures and fields. There were lines of trees along the fencerows. One of the ponds was down there.
When the car got closer to the farmhouse, the terrier and the small black cat would issue forth from the front porch, and that—that moment—was one of the best parts of the day. Here was your universe, your sun and your moons. You carried the milk inside—and if anything it seemed colder now than when you’d first lifted it into your arms—you hefted it onto the counter, you unscrewed the tremendous lid, and you skimmed the cream from the top. With the cream, we would make butter or occasionally whipped cream or sometimes ice cream. As for the milk, we drank it and used it for baking and sometimes gave a splash of it to the cats. We mixed it with a dollop of yogurt and put it in a jar and put the jar in an insulated box and put the box down by the refrigerator’s warm exhaust and in the morning the milk would be yogurt. During the summer, we put the milk on our cereal, and during the school year when we weren’t allowed cold cereal, we drizzled a little milk on our oatmeal. Just a little. It helped cool the oatmeal. “Oatmeal, meet milk. Milk, meet oatmeal.” That’s the kind of thing we would say.
The milk was not pasteurized. It was not homogenized. It tasted like something. Something singular. Alvina’s cow wasn’t a Holstein or Jersey, or any other breed of cow that you would encounter at the state fair. There was nothing written in any textbook about this kind of cow. It was a milk cow of indeterminate origin. It was a small cow. Brown.
Those huge glass jars. We never broke a single one.
We. Us. Ours. We were five in number. We were a father, a mother, a sister, another sister, and a brother. Our father wore navy pinstriped suits and drove into Jefferson City each day, where he worked with legislators and the chief clerk and the speaker of the house and his own staff of researchers. The soles of men’s shoes clicked on the polished floors of the long corridors. The parking garage was a spiral. The capitol building sat on a bluff overlooking the muddy Missouri River.
Our father drove home at night and changed out of his suit and into khaki work pants and a blue shirt and then he did chores. He fed the cows and horses and cats. Closed the chicken coop. Other times he cut brush with the tractor, chainsawed, stacked hay bales in the hayloft, mended fences, helped a cow deliver her calf in the middle of the night. There was a row of boots on the back porch: rain boots, work boots, steel-toe boots, snow boots.
Our father who came from a farm not so far away, who had gone to the state university and married our mother there, then continued on to a university on the East Coast that was so famous that simply stating the fact of his enrollment there was essentially a form of bragging, and therefore the name was rarely spoken. Our father who was a doctor, but not that kind of doctor. The room in the house that we called the study—but which was also a bedroom—had three walls of bookshelves, floor to ceiling, the titles inscrutable. Greek and Latin. Plato and Augustine. He would sit in a chair after dark. Just a regular chair, not a soft one. And he would
