stuffed toys, beach chairs. In slow moments, Will and the other men told jokes or traded punches. In busy times, they just sweated and kept the cars rolling.
When his shift ended at 3:00, Will was glad he could ride home with Aunt Amanda. He adjusted the quarter-pane window to blow the wind onto his face.
“It looks like you survived Buddy,” she said as they pulled onto the pike. “Tell me what happened. What did he have you doing?”
“I had to sweep the lot.” Will looked in the side mirror at his grimy face. He should’ve washed better before he left. “Got these as a result.” He opened his palms to show her.
Aunt Amanda glanced at his hands and shook her head. “I was afraid of that. He can be a scoundrel, that man. I’m sorry you hurt your hands. I thought he had given up that little ritual.” The wind blew one of her gray curls loose, but even after a day of work, her HoJo’s uniform looked freshly ironed. “I thought about warning you, then realized you’d find out soon enough. You just go along with his demands, and he’ll leave you alone eventually.”
His whole life, Aunt Amanda Wingert had warned him about everything—swimming in the deep hole, riding his bike on the road, playing his sax too loudly, even in the barn. And later, drinking Old Tom Stoddard’s home brew. Yet here, for the first time, she hadn’t said a word. Will was too tired to ask why.
Aunt Amanda reached to turn on the radio. The announcer said that at least forty U.S. soldiers were killed in Korea in battle that day. She quickly clicked it off.
Will watched the trees slip past. He leaned against the door and closed his eyes. He didn’t want to think about Dickson or Korea or anything. The wind blew his hair as he fell asleep.
6
Same Day
The morning after the fire, Ada woke to the taste of smoke and the thought of Jesse Shupe. She didn’t want to remember him, yet there he was, touching her chin, clucking his tongue at her. She wondered what he had thought last night, and if he was all right. Mid told her that he had to sit in the ambulance for a little while, but he didn’t stay there long. Ada brushed her hair and tried to think about something else. She didn’t look out the window.
Instead, she made tea—that was all her stomach could handle. After a few sips, she called Mabel, her manager at HoJo’s, to tell her she wouldn’t be coming to work today. “I need to stay home,” her voice hoarser than usual.
Mabel had heard about the fire, about her mother’s hands, and said, yes, of course. “Stay home tomorrow, too, if you need to.”
Ada mixed batter for biscuits. Even if she couldn’t eat, she could feed her parents. She remembered when she was eight and her mother forced her to stay inside. Ada wanted to go out with her father and brother, wanted to help with the milking. “Why do I have to stay in and Nathan can go out?” she had asked.
“Women cook,” her mother replied and handed her a fork to beat the eggs.
Ada still didn’t like the kitchen, its dark confinement, or recipes written to confuse her, or worse, the stove that once caught on fire. But she could cook breakfast while her mother slept.
She slid the biscuits into the oven and pulled out the skillet to fry ham and eggs. When she opened the refrigerator, Ada saw the slab of ham and slammed the door shut. Bile slid up the back of her throat. The ham looked like her mother’s raw flesh.
Ada took a deep breath and opened the refrigerator again. She grabbed the bowl of eggs and then the ham. The skillet was already hot; she sliced off two pieces, which sizzled in the pan. She took another sip of tea.
Her father entered and said good morning, nothing else. He poured coffee and sat at the table to read the paper, but he just stared at his hands, the pages not turning.
Ada flipped the ham and thought about last night. After Uncle Mark left, her father had kept apologizing to her and her mother, so much that he’d started to cry. “I shouldn’t’ve put that hay up. I thought it was dry. Rain was coming and so I rushed it. And now this.”
Ada had left the kitchen after that. She had only ever seen her father cry at his parents’ funerals, didn’t want this new memory, so much already broken. She went out to the meadow to check on the animals, and then she just wanted to sit on the back ridge, far from the house and the remains of the barn. Later, when she snuck back in, the light in her parents’ bedroom was already out.
This morning, neither Ada nor her father knew what to say, so Ada served his ham and eggs and took a plate upstairs to put on her mother’s bureau, her mother still asleep.
After breakfast, they headed out to do the milking. Ada wore her mother’s bonnet and followed her father. She wished Nathan was behind her—like we’re kids again, she thought. They passed her mother’s bed of peonies, the patch of horseradish by the garage. Halfway across the wide dirt lot that separated house from barn, her father stopped in the mud. She didn’t want to look, but how could she not?
Before them lay the black bones of the barn. Metal sheets of roofing twisted under timbers or rested scattered in the meadow like shiny leaves torn from a giant tree. One piece rocked in the breeze, a steady thump-thump, thump-thump. The rock walls of the bottom floor still stood, blackened and crumbly. Their window holes framed the sky. The smoke, the rock walls, the rubble—all of it made Ada remember those photographs of bombed-out cities from World War II. Smoke stung her eyes, filled her nose, and she tasted the wetness of charcoal. She forced herself to focus beyond the debris, where the orange globe of sun broke the horizon.
“Hard to believe,” her father said softly. Three chickens pecked at dead crickets. One bird hopped up the cement steps that used to lead to the corncrib. A cow mooed from the pen, so her father turned to walk up the hill. Ada fell in behind.
In the shed, their milk cows waited, heavy udders sagging. The bossy ones pushed others away, but most faced out toward where the barn once stood, their eyes cloudy. Belle mooed when she saw Peter, her loud call sounding different with no wall to bounce from in echo. Ada rubbed old Molly’s jaw and watched Star, the new cow, against the far wall of the shed. Her back was slick from the burn. She didn’t look at them.
Daisy, another cow, nudged Ada’s hip. As she petted her, Ada realized, This is Seven’s daughter. She wished she hadn’t remembered.
Her father pulled out his toothpick and looked over the herd. “Haven’t had to milk by hand in fifteen years.” He handed her a bucket and pointed to the corner. “I washed out the old milk cans. Not sure what the co-op will say, but hopefully they’ll take it.” He turned to the nearest cow, and Ada did the same. They settled on their stools, held buckets between their feet, and began the slow process of squeezing out the warm, white fluid.
Ada rested her forehead against Daisy’s flank. She closed her eyes, felt the cow’s warm skin, its slow, steady breaths. If the creamery didn’t take their milk, they’d have to dump it out on the pasture. And they needed that milk money to pay for a new barn. They both knew this, just like they knew these cows would have to be milked, by hand, two times a day, until the barn was built.
As she milked, Ada tried to think about something else—her job at HoJo’s, the patch of blueberries, a few of them ready to pick. She tried to recall the last time she had healed, just the other day, when she’d chanted over Ellie’s little girl, who had an earache. But that seemed too long ago for a memory now pierced by flame.
