The German Wife(11)

Even as a little girl, that struck me as absurd. My mother was as much a farmer as my father was. If he was in the field working, she was often right alongside him, or back at the house tending that vegetable garden that was almost a farm in itself. When Dad wanted to buy the tractor, my mother sat in on every call and every meeting, and they made the decision between two models together. Mother’s temperament was made of cast iron. Nothing scared her. Nothing fazed her. And nothing was too hard for her.

Girls could be farmers. I’d seen it with my own two eyes in Mother.

I heard the roar of an engine as I set the last of the day’s eggs into my basket. Being so far back from the main road, we didn’t really get any drive-by traffic, so I knew it was Dad, and the violent acceleration and grinding gears were a dead giveaway—the meeting had not gone well.

When I went inside, I found Mother sitting at the table, a bowl of half-shelled peas in front of her. She forced a smile, but I could see the strain around her mouth. Dad was in his room with the door closed. If it was daytime and that door was closed, then Dad was in bed, and he wasn’t coming out anytime soon.

“They can’t give us the loan,” she said in a low voice. “Since the banking crisis, the manager can’t lend money as easily as he used to. We didn’t understand the new rules.” The banks had all been closed for a time earlier in the year. With the Depression worsening, there had been a panic rush of people trying to withdraw their money, and that led to a bunch of banks collapsing. The government closed them all, made sure they were viable, then reopened most of them with new rules to keep people’s money safe. “Dad thought the farm would be good for collateral, but the bank said the price of land is dropping so fast they can’t risk it. We don’t have anything else to offer as security, so...”

The truck started just then, and I ran back to the door, just in time to see Henry spin the wheels as he took it right back out the drive.

“Those boys of ours, Lizzie...” Mother sighed, shaking her head sadly. “Neither one of them has the good sense to drive properly when they’re upset.”

“Where is Henry going?”

“I expect he’ll be going off to see Betsy,” she said, reaching for the peas.

“What are we going to do?”

She thought about that for a long time—long enough that I’d taken the seat opposite her and started helping with the peas before she answered.

“You know, I really do not have any clue how we’ll do it, but I am sure we’ll figure it out,” she said at last. “This isn’t the only crisis your dad and I have navigated together, honey. When we got married, Dad wanted to expand the farm to a thousand acres and he used to say we’d need a whole lot of children to help us run it. But that first year...” She sighed and turned back to the stove, where the peas were now over heat, bubbling away beside a pan of potatoes, sizzling in bacon fat. “You know it took us a few years to get pregnant after we were married. Then we had that tiny baby girl who was born way too early, and I got so sick after she was born.”

Mother never spoke her name aloud, but I knew about Elsie, the baby who didn’t ever get the chance to breathe. On Sundays, Mother always dressed for church early. An hour or even more before we had to leave for service, she’d walk a hundred feet or so to the lonely tree on our property. In the summer of 1909, when Mother and Dad took possession of the first two hundred acres of land around that spot, she had shipped in five little Texas live oak saplings—intending to grow them all together in a row to create a shady spot for future children to play in. One by one and despite her best efforts, the first four trees died. Mother had been a typist in Chicago before she married Dad. She didn’t know a thing about growing plants until she learned the hard way on the land.

After the baby died, Dad built a little bench seat beside that last surviving tree, and he inscribed the name Elsie on the back of it. That was Mother’s remembering place. When I learned to read, I asked about that scripted lettering etched into the back of that chair. In haunting, uneven tones, Mother told me about the tiny baby girl who didn’t survive.

“The doctor came to check on me a few months after she was born. I asked him about having another baby and he looked down his nose at me and he said, ‘Mrs. Davis, some people just are not meant to be parents,’” Mother said softly. “But I knew in my heart I was meant to be a mother.”

I didn’t know how to tell her that I knew something in my heart too. I had known my whole life that I wasn’t meant to be a mother. Maybe I’d been traumatized by the way she spoke of that poor lost baby. Maybe I’d been too afraid of that heartbreaking seat beneath the oak tree when I was little, or maybe I’d indulged my fascination with farming too much, like Mother sometimes said when she was nagging at me to be nicer to the boys at church. She so desperately wanted me to find a boy to date. But even at the age of seventeen, I was certain.

The problem was, I still couldn’t quite figure out how to avoid being a mother. Henry would inherit the farm, so it seemed the only way to get my own farm was to get married. Marriage meant children, and children would mean less time for farming. More time for diapers and feeding, more time for keeping the house. Less of what I knew I loved.

“Two years later, Henry was born, and eventually you joined us too,” Mother said, her gaze softening. She waved a hand vaguely as she added, “For that first year after we lost that baby, everything felt hopeless. We were all alone in this tiny little house with that great big sadness.” She smiled, then nodded, as if she’d convinced herself too. “This moment feels just like that one. I don’t know how things will work out, but in my heart, I am certain that everything will be okay. All you and I have to do is to have faith and keep our chins up.”