The German Wife(22)

After a while, I swung off my horse and stepped closer, touching his shoulder gently to get his attention. Henry looked at me, his eyes wild with panic and rimmed red with sweat and irritation from the dust, and maybe some tears. This wasn’t like Henry—he was usually calm as a cucumber, even when he’d messed up.

“Look at this,” he said, his voice breaking. “Just look at it, Lizzie. They say that there was damp soil all over these high plains, down at the three-feet mark. It didn’t matter how dry the season was—the moisture was always there. But look at this. Just look at it.”

I looked down at the dusty hole he was standing in.

“No wonder the crops aren’t growing,” he whispered miserably. “We’re trying to grow them in a goddamned desert.”

With Henry standing in that hole, for the first time in our lives, I was taller than he was. I clapped my hands onto his shoulders and gently shook him.

“Sorry,” he said. He cleared his throat and lifted his chin. “I’m sorry, Lizzie. Don’t fret—I promise it’s going to be fine. I’ll fix this. Maybe I can get a job on an oil field. Or I read in the paper that there were jobs in El Paso on one of those New Deal projects. I’ll move away...get a wage. Then we can keep the farm and pay him back.”

“Henry.” Mother and Dad seriously considered letting him go off in search of work after the bad harvest in ’31. Dad talked him out of it because he expected things would turn around quickly, and in a good year, or even a reasonable year, it would have been tough to run the farm without Henry. But it was way too late for that. The papers were full of stories of rural folk like us who left their farms, hoping to find better conditions in the cities, only to find things there were a different kind of awful.

“What are we going to do?” I whispered unevenly.

Henry climbed out of the hole. He dusted himself off and he swung himself back up onto the horse.

“The best we can do is go down to the far field and see if there’s any good news down there. Then we go back to the house and we’ll collect the eggs. We’ll feed and water the horses.” He nodded, as if he was talking to himself more than me. “Yep, that’s it. One foot in front of the other. We’ll think only about whatever the next step is and we’ll do that over and over for as long as we have to until things get better.”

After that day in the field, Henry just stopped talking. He was still working as hard as he always did—always fixing something or building something, making the most of every minute of sunlight. But as soon as the sun went down, he went to bed, and most mornings, I had to wake him up because for the first time in his life, he was sleeping in. He didn’t even want to go to church.

One Saturday night, after he’d gone to bed early again, I sat out under the stars on my own, looking up through the lingering dust haze to the stars. I was trying to figure out what to do. I didn’t want to alert Mother and Dad to the situation with the judge because I didn’t want to betray Henry’s confidence, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that my brother needed help.

When I heard the door open, I assumed Henry changed his mind about going to bed, but it was Mother who sank into his chair opposite me. I started and almost dropped my mug of Henry’s bathtub gin in my haste to hide it.

“Give me some of that,” she said.

“It’s—uh—Mother—”

“I know about Henry’s grain alcohol, Lizzie,” she said, making a grabbing motion for the mug. Shocked, I passed it to her, only to be even more shocked when she knocked the whole lot back. She shuddered, then exhaled and rested her head against the back of his chair.

“You think you’re like your daddy, don’t you?” she said, eyes still closed.

“I am like Daddy,” I replied. Everyone always said so. Dad and I were famously quick with a scowl or to point out the negative in a situation, unlike Mother and Henry, who were the sunshine to our rain.

“Honey, you’re me all over. You have your dad’s hair and his pragmatic nature, but that’s about it. You’re strong as an ox in body and spirit. Those boys of ours aren’t like us.”

“I don’t know what you mean,” I said.

“You and me are survivors, Lizzie. We keep moving forward. We find a way, and if there isn’t a way to be found, we make one. Those boys are more inclined to crumble and break than you and I are to even consider giving up.”

“Henry isn’t like that,” I argued. “Henry is like you.”

“Don’t kid yourself, honey. I don’t know what’s going on with Henry at the moment, but that boy is every bit as tormented as your father is on his worst days.”

“Judge Nagle wants the loan settled,” I blurted. Mother sucked in a sharp breath. “He’s pressuring Henry for money. The judge is having trouble of his own because so many of his tenants have gone bust. He says he might sue Henry to get the farm even though the deed is in Daddy’s name. It can’t be true, can it?”

“Honey,” Mother said gently. “If Dad had been able to get that loan from the bank two years ago, we’d have already lost the farm.”

I was startled to realize she was right. Whether the money came from Judge Nagle or from the bank, we still had no way to repay it. I looked out over the moonlit fields and felt a pang of presumptive grief for a loss I hadn’t even realized was inevitable. “Mother, I love this place.”