Tallgrass Read online

  “Hello, Afton.” Mom gave up her chair to Mrs. Gardner. Mrs. Reddick didn’t seem to notice the change, nor that the rest of us stood up then. Mom said she’d stop by in the morning, and Dad and the sheriff asked the Reddicks if they needed any help with the chores. They didn’t answer or even look up.

  “My boy will be by to do the milking,” Mrs. Gardner called as we opened the door.

  “No need,” Mr. Reddick said, pulling himself together. “If I don’t do chores, I can’t know what to do with myself.”

  Mom and I got into the truck, while Dad went to the sheriff’s car with Mr. Watrous so that the two of them could drive together to the Tallgrass camp. Mom started the motor, but before she put in the clutch, she locked her door, then reached over and locked mine. On the way home, I asked if Susan’s dying meant that the Reddicks would be kinder to Helen, maybe ask her to move back in with them. That would be a nice thing for God to do for Mrs. Reddick, I thought.

  “Her mother will want her to come home, but Mr. Reddick’s a stubborn man. You wouldn’t think it, but sorrow just makes some people harder, and my guess is, he’s one of them.”

  DAD AND THE SHERIFF didn’t stay long at the camp. As Dad said, “There isn’t the slightest bit of proof one of those jaspers is guilty.”

  “There’s plenty of folks who think so,” Mom said. She’d just called the last of the Jolly Stitchers, arranging for them to take food to the Reddicks. Every one of the women had asked if a man from the camp had murdered Susan.

  “Maybe you ought to have called the missionary circle instead,” Dad said.

  “Oh, they’d be just as bad. Besides, they’d pray for Susan’s soul instead of fixing covered dishes. Prayer’s not going to do the Reddicks any good if they starve to death.”

  “Might not do them any good if they don’t, either.” Dad slid his eyes over to me, then looked back at Mom and asked, “Have you seen any signs around here—” But Mom cut him off with a shake of her head.

  “It’s best to keep a look out. Maybe you better talk to Squirt,” Dad said, biting his lip. Mom told him she already had.

  She hadn’t said much, however, only that bad men sometimes lurked around the barn or peeked in windows, and I had to be ever vigilant. I pointed out that I slept upstairs, and that anybody who came into the house would have to pass her and Dad’s bedroom on the first floor to get to me. Mom told me men sometimes tricked little girls in other ways. “Don’t ever let anybody pull up your dress . . . .” She paused, embarrassed, but I had a good idea of what she was talking about. Like all farm kids, I’d seen bulls mount cows, and I thought it was something like that with men and women, although I couldn’t understand why anybody would do that with a little girl like Susan. I wished I could talk to Marthalice, but since I let Mom read all of my sister’s letters, I didn’t dare ask her to write to me about that.

  When Bud came in from milking, Dad told us what had happened at the camp. By the time he and Sheriff Watrous got there, the guards knew all about Susan’s murder, so they’d been sure the sheriff would be along. They’d already made up a list of the men who’d had passes to leave the camp the day before, but all of them had been back by nightfall. “Of course, someone could have sneaked out,” the sheriff remarked.

  “Who would that be?” Will Tappan, who was in charge of camp security, asked.

  The sheriff leaned an elbow on the counter of the guard shack and scratched the back of his neck. “Anybody been causing trouble? Anybody been caught cutting the fence at night?”

  Mr. Tappan shrugged. “They’re model people—or prisoners, I guess you’d call them, since they’re locked up against their will.”

  “You know what Walter Lippmann said. The fact they haven’t got caught is proof they’re up to something,” Sheriff Watrous told him.

  “The next person who tells me what Walter Lippmann said can eat my shoe. You got any proof one of these boys is responsible, or are you just trying to throw suspicion on them because you’re too dumb to find the real killer?”

  “Now hold your horses, bub.” The sheriff held up his hands. “A little girl’s got ravished and killed. We never had any of that in Ellis before the Japanese got here.”

  “You never had twelve straight days of snow the last of December before they got here, either. Are you going to blame the Japanese for that?” Mr. Tappan took a few seconds to calm down. “Sheriff Watrous, you know you don’t have an ounce of proof, or you’d have told me when you walked in here. If you keep talking like that, things’ll be rougher’n a cob around here. You’ll have half the farmers patrolling the Tallgrass Road with shotguns.”

  “I know that, and it might not be such a bad thing. Maybe if we’d had patrollers, Susan Reddick wouldn’t be lying in a box at the funeral home,” Sheriff Watrous said.

  Then Dad broke in. “I think the sheriff’s hoping to eliminate your boys, Mr. Tappan.”

  “How’s he going to do that, Mr. Stroud?”

  Dad suggested the guards check the fence around the camp to see if it had been cut. That could mean someone had crawled under the barbed wire.

  “That wouldn’t tell you who. We already know kids have been sneaking out. How do you think those three little boys who were scared so bad down by your place got out? Maybe you’re thinking they went after the girl.”

  One of the guards laughed.

  “You’d not make a joke of it if you’d seen what was done to little Susan,” Sheriff Watrous said.

  “Nobody’s making a joke of it,” Mr. Tappan told him. “I’m just saying if you blame any of these Japanese without you’ve got proof, there’ll be bad trouble in Ellis about it. Folks around here are itching for a reason to go after the Japanese, and you know it. You tell them one of our boys is responsible, and all hell’s going to break loose. Now if you’ve got the proof, you tell me, and I’ll bring the boy in here so’s you can talk to him. But if you don’t, you better go on into Ellis and keep your people from committing a criminal act of their own. This is federal property, and they wouldn’t want to get mixed up with the FBI.”

  When Dad finished telling us about the camp, Bud said, “There’s nothing the sheriff can do to calm people down if they get riled up.”

  Mom nodded. “From what the Jolly Stitchers say, they already are.”

  BURYINGS WERE ALWAYS A big draw in Ellis, no matter who the dead person was. Mom said people attended services because they wanted to show respect for the deceased and sympathy for their loved ones, but Dad thought it was a way to ensure a big crowd at their own funerals. “Folks take attendance. They remember you weren’t at their grandfather’s funeral, so they stay away from yours,” Dad said. “Most measure a man’s importance by how many show up at his service.” He might have been right, because I’d heard Mom say that forty-seven, or sixty-eight, or, one time, ninety-seven people had attended a funeral.

  That was not the reason so many people turned out for Susan’s burying three days after the Reddicks found her in the haystack. Some went because they loved Susan and her folks— well, at least they loved Susan and Mrs. Reddick. That’s why Mom and Dad and Granny and I were there. Bud would have gone, too, but his furlough had ended, and he’d had to return to the army. But others wanted to look at poor Susan in her coffin and gawk at her parents. The service was held in the cemetery, and folks drove in from all over the county—Mom counted 147 persons. There were families with kids, couples, and several women standing alone. I wondered if one of them had broken the commandment with Mr. Reddick. My bet was on the woman who was wearing pumps instead of boots and had a half a dozen ermine tails lined up and attached to her coat with a clasp. She was the prettiest lady at the funeral. But why would a woman who looks like that commit adultery with porky Mr. Reddick? I wondered.

  As we drove down the road to the cemetery, Dad stopped to pick up a woman who was walking by herself—Helen Archuleta. She hadn’t had her baby yet, and she looked tired, but maybe that was because her face was red from crying.

/>   “Your folks are over there,” Mom said after Dad parked the truck and we were making our way through the graves.

  Helen took Mom’s arm and whispered, “They don’t want me. Can I stay with you?”

  “Maybe all’s forgiven,” Mom told her.

  Helen shook her head. “They didn’t even tell me about Susan. I heard what happened at the store.” Helen had worked at the soda fountain at the Lee Drug until she started to show. Then, since customers didn’t want a pregnant woman waiting on them, Mr. Lee found work for her to do in the back room. “A woman was talking about it, and at first, I didn’t even know it was Susan. When I heard, I just cried my eyes out. Mr. Lee had to tell me to go home and rest up. I thought he’d dock me, but he didn’t.” She turned her head toward her parents, but when her father looked over the crowd, Helen drew her arms close to her sides and stared at the ground.

  I felt so sorry for her. What if I’d died, I thought, and my folks wouldn’t let Marthalice come to my funeral? I couldn’t even imagine that.

  “I have a right to he here. She’s my sister, after all. It’s all right for me to he here, isn’t it, Mrs. Stroud?”

  “Of course it’s all right,” Mom told her.

  “If the baby’s a girl, I’m going to name her Susan.”

  “Why, I would, too,” Granny said. “And if I had a boy, I’d name him Loyal.”

  “You already did.” Dad put his arm around Granny. It was not one of her better days.

  I took Helen’s hand, which was bare and cold, and said, “Susan missed you. She told me so.” I didn’t make that up. We’d talked once about how nice it was to have big sisters and how we wished they were still at home. I added, “She was glad I told you she worked on that quilt square. She wanted you to know. She said after your baby came, she was going to ditch school to go see you.”

  Helen held my hand a minute before putting her own back into her pocket and squeezing her elbows to her sides. “I’m dreadful cold,” she whispered, more to herself than to us.

  Snow had fallen all day, and the wind stirred it up as we waited for the minister to begin. Men stomped their feet and coughed into their hands. Women tightened the wool scarves tied under their chins. One snuggled her hands deeper into a muff that looked as if it were made from old men’s beards. I flattened my earmuffs against my head to keep my ears from stinging. We all wished the funeral would get under way and that it wouldn’t last long. I hoped they wouldn’t open the lid of the coffin for a viewing. I didn’t want to look at Susan’s dead face, snow falling onto it. I shivered at the thought, and Mom put her arm around me and drew me close, but it didn’t help. The temperature was below zero. It was so cold that the grave diggers had used dynamite to blast a hole in the frozen earth for the grave.

  The aching cold might have been the reason the service was indeed short. Or it could have been that the minister didn’t know what to say about a little girl who’d been ravished and murdered. He said Susan was brave and good and told us the Lord had His reasons for taking her, which we would understand in the fullness of time. I asked Dad what the fullness of time was, and he said it was when God got around to it. Mother told us both to be still.

  I wondered what he would have said if I’d been murdered instead of Susan. That I won the three-legged race with Betty Joyce on field day the year before and came in second in the seventh-grade spelling bee? Or that I did my share of chores without complaining and that I was a good milker? I was glad I wasn’t dead, because Mom and Dad would be embarrassed that there wasn’t anything more to be said about me. And I’d have hated for people to come across my tombstone and read “Good milker.”

  We sang “Jesus Loves Me“—Dad, too, and I was surprised that he knew it. I asked Granny once if Dad had gone to church when he was a boy, but it was one of her bad days, and she replied, “I don’t know your daddy, dearie.”

  We finished the service with “Going Home“; then everyone pushed forward to tell the Reddicks how sorry they were. Some wandered to other graves, ones that had been decorated before Christmas. The wreaths and evergreens were brittle now, and the red ribbons were limp from the snow. Helen turned toward the road, and Mom told her to wait in the truck and that we’d drive her to town. I was glad they didn’t lower the coffin into the grave then. I couldn’t bear to see Susan put into that cold, dark hole and have dirt piled on top of her.

  As we walked past Susan’s coffin, a woman said, “Why doesn’t somebody open the lid? I wouldn’t have come all this way if I’d known the lid was going to be closed. I surely would like to see what the Jap did to that little girl.” Mom gave her a stern look, and the woman said, “Well, wouldn’t you?”

  “No,” Mom said. “And how do you know who did it?”

  “Well who else would? Nothing like that happened around here before the Nips came.” The woman looked around to see if anyone agreed with her, and several people nodded.

  “It’s already started,” Dad said after we shook hands with the Reddicks and were walking back to the car.

  “What else are people to think, Loyal?” Mom asked. “There are thousands of men in that camp, so there’s bound to be a few bad apples, just like with people anywhere.”

  The five of us crowded together in the cab of Red Boy, and we drove Helen back to the drugstore. Then we went to Fellowship Hall behind the church, where mourners were already waiting for cake and coffee. The cakes, which had been dropped off before the service, were lined up like Christmas packages— devil’s food with chocolate icing, white cakes with pink or yellow icing, lemon, caramel. There must have been a year’s supply of sugar rations on that table. Mrs. Rubey had brought a German chocolate cake—“It’s called a Victory cake now,” she whispered to Mom—and Mrs. Jack had made her beet cake. I knew better than to eat that one. Besides, Dad and I always chose Mom’s cake because we knew how embarrassed she’d be if nobody ate it. She’d used Granny’s recipe to make a Scripture cake. It called for six cups of Jeremiah 6:20 and two cups of Numbers 17:8 and about ten other ingredients that you had to look up in the Bible. But Mom used the recipe so often that she knew that six of Jeremiah 17:11 meant six eggs, and a pinch of Leviticus 2:13 was salt.

  Mom put on an apron and stood behind the table, cutting slices of cake and setting them onto plates. I took a piece of cake for Granny and led her to a chair, then went back to the table to help Mom.

  People were crowding into the hall, filling it with the smell of wet wool. They stamped their feet, leaving puddles of melted snow. Women took off their scarves and fluffed up their hair. A few men blew their noses. At first, people talked quietly, mumbling greetings and whispering. A man laughed and was hushed. But after a while, the voices rose and folks began to speak in normal tones. As they pointed to the cakes they wanted and the ladies sliced them, they complained about the cold, telling how thick the ice was on the water trough that morning, and more than one claimed that it was so cold, the thermometer got stuck.

  “Cold as a witch’s tit,” Mr. Jack said in a loud whisper, nudging the man next to him. He was as big a jerk as his son.

  “What’s that, Mr. Jack?” Mom asked.

  “Why, I’m just saying I never seen it so cold,” he replied, then told her he wanted two kinds of cake. As Mom cut them, I saw that Mrs. Jack’s beet cake was still whole. Even her husband wouldn’t eat it.

  “That man’s dumb enough to haul water in a sieve,” said Mrs. Gardner, who was standing next to Mom.

  Mr. Lee stopped in front of Mom and asked which cake she’d made. Mom pointed to an empty plate. “It’s gone, but there’s an awful good beet cake here,” she said.

  Mr. Lee leaned over the table. “Don’t try to fool me, Mrs. Stroud. I got some compounds at the drugstore that taste better than that.”

  When the last people in line had gotten their refreshments, Mom said she thought she’d take a slice out of the beet cake.

  “Really?” I asked. Beet cake was slimy and tasted like pig slop. Besides, you would die i
n agony if you ate something out of the Jack house.

  “Duty does not demand that you do so,” Mrs. Gardner told her.

  “Maybe not, but courtesy does,” Mom replied. She cut a piece so big that it looked like three slices had been taken out of the cake. Mom took a bite, pursing her lips a little. Then, looking around to see if anyone was watching, she used her fork to push the cake into the garbage pail.

  “Here, Mary. I never could stand a martyr.” Mrs. Gardner raised an eyebrow as she handed Mom a piece of lemon cake.

  I began picking up dirty plates, carrying them into the kitchen, where women were washing dishes and putting them away. A man handed me his coffee cup and asked if I was the Stroud girl. I told him I was, and he said, “Your dad ought to send you off to school in Denver so’s what happened to the Reddick kid don’t happen to you.”

  I stared at him, my mouth open, because that was a terrible thing to hear, especially from someone I didn’t know. Maybe that man killed Susan, and I’m next, I thought. I wondered if murderers stalked their victims the way some wild animals did.

  “You’re as close to that camp as the Reddicks, you know,” he continued. It frightened me that he knew where I lived.

  “Don’t scare the little girl. You don’t know for a fact who did this,” another man told him.

  “Don’t I?”

  Before the second man could answer, the room became still, and I looked over at the door, where the sheriff was standing, his big felt hat in his hands. He looked uncomfortable at the attention and started for the cake table.

  “You got anything to tell us, Sheriff Watrous?” someone asked him.

  “When I got something to tell, I’ll tell you,” he said.

  “I guess that means he ain’t figured out which Jap done it,” Mr. Jack said in a loud voice. “Some sheriff we got here.”

  Sheriff Watrous took a plate from Mom, then slowly turned to face Mr. Jack. “You think you can do a better job, do your”