Faithfully a Hidden Life

Summer mornings we cut across the alfalfa field. If it wasn’t yet haying season, the long, leafy alfalfa held a kind of coolness, and our trip then was a respite, a quarter hour of shadow and damp among all the many sun-wracked days in that big dry country. If the swather had already come through, the heat radiated up from the baked ground, and beneath our sneakers the cut stalks popped and snapped like small bones. And no matter the season, there were grasshoppers, a virescent whir of them about us. We aimed ourselves for the far corner of the field, maybe half a mile away, where the gravel road bisected the barbed wire fence. Once there, my older sister, her long, straw hair always about her face, put her shoulder to the gatepost and slipped the wire noose from off the top and yawned the gatepost open just wide enough for my brother and me to slip through, then she stepped through herself and again put her shoulder to the gatepost, sliding the wire noose back down over it. In the white, raveling light my grandmother called to us from the front porch, where most mornings we found her dipping water from the rain barrel for the spindly lilac she loved and fussed over. We, however, were partial to her hollyhocks, which she never watered and anyway ringed the house, grew even through the cracks in the cement, those tough, refractory pinks and whites and yellows.

What matter that we spent nearly half our growing-up days at our grandparents’ house? That our grandparents’ house was as much home as home ever was? Even now, the wonders and silences of that house rustle and shift, flap their iridescent wings inside me. By the front door there was an old dark green rotary phone on the wall, the various party-line rings jangling and strange. I could never remember which combination of rings was my grandparents’—one short, two short, one short and one long?—and more than once I answered only to hear the dark-haired Mack girl from two farms over greeting her boyfriend with a breathy whisper. Down the hall, there were three bedrooms, and we were allowed in two of them. We took turns falling into the old feather bed, soft thump and whoosh as the down rearranged around you. We pulled open the dresser drawers to study the musty back issues of Western Ag Reporter, one of which featured a grainy picture of our grandfather feeding hay in a snowstorm. We folded back the closet doors then, held in our hands for perhaps the thousandth time the hems and hips of tattered, translucent rose-patterned dresses, ponderous hot irons, the cool, cracked leather of old boots, stiff-haired wigs that both fascinated and repelled us.

If it was late August or early September and Babe McDonald, the lamb buyer, had come through town, we would spy on our grandfather in his office, where he sat punching numbers into his electromechanical adding machine. He reached out with his right hand and smacked the keys in short, staccato bursts and now and again leaned forward, pulling up the unspooling paper and peering through the bottom of his bifocals at the blue sums. My grandfather’s office had a certain smell, leathery and still, a trace of wax or oil running through it, a smell I associated with the cracked linoleum and the framed sepia photos of our unsmiling prairie ancestors, a few of which were hung on the wall, the others sitting atop the full bookshelves. There were boxes of books in the closet, too, which was where my grandfather kept his rifles, save his .22, which rode without fail in the gun rack in his rear pickup window.

We sat up to supper at the oval table in the kitchen. There was always meat—hamburger steaks or roast beef or leg of lamb—and boiled potatoes and maybe green beans or creamed corn and a small china bowl of sweet pickles and black olives. My grandmother took only the smallest portions...