Chapter 1 - The Girl at the Door
The little girl standing on my porch looked as though one more night might kill her. She could not have been more than six, barefoot on sun-warmed boards, dirt streaked along her cheeks where tears had dried and been replaced by dust. Her faded brown dress hung from shoulders too narrow for a child, and a baby was tied against her chest with a strip of old flour sack. The infant could not have been more than two months old. His head rested crookedly beneath the orange light of a July sunset, his lips pale, his tiny breaths too quick. Yet the girl did not ask me for bread. She raised her chin, looked straight into my eyes, and said, “Mister, I need work.”
For fourteen years I had lived alone in that farmhouse beyond the cottonwoods at the edge of Holt County. Fourteen years since my wife, Anna, had died. Fourteen years since our eight-year-old daughter, Lily, had been buried beside her beneath two white stones on the hill. Or so I had believed. Grief had turned the house into a museum of things I no longer touched: Anna’s blue mixing bowl, Lily’s school slate, a yellow ribbon in a bedroom drawer. I worked the fields, fed the stock, spoke when business required it, and kept the rest of my words locked inside. So when the child said she wanted work, I almost answered like a man bargaining over fence posts. “What kind of work?” I asked.
“I can sweep. Gather eggs. Carry kindling. Pull weeds. Wash things that ain’t too heavy.” Her knees trembled as she spoke, but she tightened one arm around the baby and forced herself to remain standing. “My brother hasn’t eaten proper in three days.” That was when her words seemed to move farther away, and I began noticing the things hunger had written on both children. The baby’s lips were dry. His skin had a waxy color. His breathing came in faint, rapid bursts. The girl was starving too, but she stood as straight as she could, as though weakness were a luxury she could not afford. “What’s your name?” I asked. “Rose Kelly.” She touched the baby’s back. “This is Samuel.”
When I asked where their parents were, Rose’s face changed in the smallest possible way. Not grief exactly. Something harder. “Mother’s dead,” she said. “Father’s gone.” The person caring for them, she explained, was her mother’s cousin, Martha Baines. My stomach tightened at the name. Everyone in our part of the county knew Martha. She washed laundry for half the town, sold bitter patent medicines from a crate behind her kitchen, and appeared at the courthouse whenever relief money was being distributed. “The county pays Martha for you?” I asked. Rose nodded. “She says that’s why we owe her.” Samuel made a thin wheezing sound, and that sound ended every question I still had. I opened the door wider. “Bring him inside.”
Rose did not move. She stared past me into the dim kitchen where the last sunlight lay across the floorboards. “What will it cost?” she asked. For a moment I thought I had misheard her. “Food. Milk. Sleeping,” she clarified. I told her it would cost nothing. Her eyes hardened with a maturity no six-year-old should possess. “Nothing always costs later.” The sentence landed harder than any accusation. I swallowed and tried again. “Then call it wages. Tomorrow you gather eggs.” She immediately asked how many. I said as many as the hens gave us. “And that pays for milk?” she asked. “For tonight.” Her mouth tightened. “And after tonight?” I looked at Samuel. “We make sure he survives tonight first.” That was when her courage cracked. “Is he dying?” “I don’t know.” “Please don’t lie.” “I won’t.”
I warmed goat’s milk on the stove, diluted it with boiled water, and added a little sugar the way Anna had once taught me when a neighbor’s baby had been sick. Rose watched every movement of my hands. She did not sit until I ordered her to. She did not eat the bread I put beside her until Samuel had swallowed a few weak mouthfuls from a spoon. Only then did she tear off a corner and chew slowly, as if speed might offend somebody. “You know babies?” she asked. “My wife did.” “Where is she?” “Dead.” Rose nodded with the solemn practicality of a child who had heard the word too often. “You got children?” The question nearly made me drop the cup. “I had a daughter.” “What was her name?” “Lily.” Rose lowered her eyes to Samuel. “She was bigger than me.” “Yes,” I said. “She was.”
The sun disappeared behind the wheat fields, and darkness gathered quickly beyond the windows. I carried an old cradle from the attic and wiped fourteen years of dust from its rails. Rose followed me upstairs, Samuel still bound against her chest, and stopped in the doorway of Lily’s old room. Nothing in that room had moved since the week of the funeral. The quilt remained folded at the foot of the bed. A little wooden horse stood on the dresser. On the wall, pencil marks showed Lily’s height from age five to eight. Rose stared at them for so long that I finally asked what she was thinking. “My mama used to mark me on a wall,” she said. “She said every mark meant I beat another winter.” Then she touched the last line beside Lily’s name. Her fingers began to shake.
May you like
I told myself it meant nothing. Children said strange things. Grief made fools of lonely men. But as Rose untied the flour-sack sling, something slipped from beneath her dress and struck the floor with a soft metallic click. It was a small brass locket, blackened by age, hanging from a thin cord. My lungs forgot how to work. I knew the tiny dent near the hinge. I knew the faint flower scratched into the back. I had bought that locket at the county fair for Anna when we were newly married, and years later she had given it to Lily because our daughter loved to wear “something of Mama’s.” I had believed it was buried in a coffin fourteen years ago.
Rose snatched it up and held it against her chest. Fear flashed across her face. “I’m not stealing,” she said quickly. “It was my mama’s.” I could hear my own heartbeat in the silent room. “Rose,” I whispered, “what was your mother’s name?” The girl hesitated, watching me the way a trapped animal watches an open gate. Then she answered. “Most people called her Lillian Kelly.” She looked down at the locket, rubbing the dent with one thumb. “But when she got sick, she told me her real name used to be Lily.” Outside, thunder rolled far beyond the western fields, though the sky above the house was still clear. For fourteen years I had lived beside my daughter’s grave. That night, for the first time, I wondered who was actually buried there.
