Chapter One

November 15, 2008

 

Michael Kingsbury stepped out the front door.  A cold sprinkle of rain landed upon his cheek, stinging ever so slightly, and like the many tears he had cried over this past year, it slowly trickled downward to the corner of his lips.  He wiped it away as he drank the hot coffee his mother had made for him.  He glanced around the lawn.  Dead leaves were blowing across the lawn, dropped from a single oak tree that stood in the front yard.  There had been two oak trees, standing symmetrically on both sides of the brick sidewalk, but over the summer, one had become diseased and taken out.  A pile of leaves had gathered in the corner by the garage.  He would bag them later, if the weather cooperated.  However, it did not look like it would.  An early winter storm was breathing down on the Midwest with snow, sleet, and heavy winds.  He was thankful he would be spending this day indoors.

 

            Michael had spent much of the last three months planning for this day, trying to figure out how he was going to tell his family what he now knew.  Only his wife Dana knew what he was going to tell them.  However, she did not know how it ended.  That ending had made his yearlong journey worth every effort. 

How to begin the story was really the issue Michael had faced.  He could not just blurt out what he knew, that would be too traumatic, especially after what had happened last year.  No, he had to tell the story a certain way and that had been the challenge.  He had verification of everything he was going to tell them, thanks to a few people he had met along the way.  A young attorney, who paid him a visit last year, had set this story into motion.

He was still shivering as he remembered last year.  The day had been so nice, the grass was still green, and the autumn leaves were a beautiful backdrop upon which to set the stage for a wonderful family gathering.  So much had changed.

He really just wanted a few minutes of solitude, a little time alone to gather his final thoughts before he joined his family in the dining room.  They knew he was there to tell them something.  They just had no idea what. 

           

            The temperature was unseasonably cold for mid-November, nearly forty degrees colder than the weekend they visited last year, but it had been that way for almost a month.  The cold Canadian air had moved in early and the Midwest was bracing itself for one of the worst winters in recent history.  With the gusts, the wind chill was easily in the low teens.  The ominous, low-lying clouds enveloped the sky like a heavy wool blanket wrapped over the bare, skeletal branches.  The autumn breeze whistled by, scattering the fallen brown, crumpled leaves across the lawn into the lifeless flowerbeds that ordinarily would still be bursting with the autumn colors of gold and orange.  However, things were no longer ordinary.  After everything he had learned over the past year, he wondered what was ordinary.

            He dug his hands deep into his jeans’ pockets, hoping to keep his fingers warm as he thought about what it was he was about to do.  One side of him wanted to abandon this idea altogether.  Nevertheless, he knew he had to tell them.

            He reached into his shirt pocket and gently unfolded the letter.  The aged parchment was beginning to fray along the creases like a tattered shirt collar, simply from the number of times he had unfolded it.  Still, those words composed more than fifty years ago, were as moving as they were last year when he had first read them.  Even now, his arms would break out in goose bumps and his eyes would fill with tears as he read those heart-rending words.  The emotion he felt from reading that letter was nothing compared to the words scribed upon the other note in his pocket.  That was the communication he received just a few months ago which ultimately persuaded him to tell his family what he had discovered.

            There were so many things for him to consider.  In one sense, he had gone over everything a hundred times.  He had all the documentation he needed.  He had fully analyzed every page of the worn, russet colored, leather diary, while dozens of yellow sticky notes protruded outward from its many pages, each with a detailed notation.  The newspaper clippings he copied were in the correct order.  He summarized and typed the conversations with people he met along the way.

            On the other hand, it was the first time that anyone had heard the entire story from start to finish.  He feared that maybe, in the interest of discovery and his passion for what this story revealed, he might have jumped to an erroneous conclusion somewhere along the line.  He had been careful, maybe too careful in some instances.  Hadn’t he?

“Are you ready?”  He heard his wife’s gentle voice as she slipped out the front door and placed her hand onto his shoulder.  “Or do you need a few more minutes?”

            “I will be right there,” Michael replied.  He did not look at her, but she knew there were tears in his eyes.  He took a deep breath and wiped his face.

            “Are you sure I should do this,” he asked her as they walked back inside.

            “Michael, the story you are going to tell them is so important to their understanding of who they are and where they came from.  They must know what happened.  You said it yourself, remember?”

            “I know, but I just never thought this day would get here.”

            “Well, it’s here and they’re ready.  Not to mention, I am just going crazy waiting to hear it myself.  You have been teasing me for the last three months about the conclusion.  So just relax and come with me to the dining room.”

Then she stopped, turned around, and looked deep into his eyes, the same way she had said, “Yes” when he asked her to marry him.  “I am right here with you sweetheart.”

            He knew then, it was time to tell them.

 

* * * * * * *

 

His family gathered around the table and they had left the chair at the head of the table empty.  That was where his briefcase sat.  Inside it was a series of newspaper clippings and letters, filed inside of folders, neatly organized in the order he would tell the story.  It is not that he didn’t think they would believe him.  However, to see the actual evidence, written down, just as he had found it, would only make the story more amazing.

“Thank you for agreeing to do this,” Michael said.  “This is going to take a while.  I was not very sure how to start this.  That was the biggest challenge for me.  But the best way, I think, is to start back in the 1930’s during the Great Depression with our great-grandparents, Earnest and Rose Kingsbury.”

His family looked around.  It was not what they were expecting at all.  They were certain what he was going to tell them was about what happened last year.  He would get to that, eventually, but not for a while. 

“You remember Grandma Kingsbury?”  She had been dead for thirty years now.  “This story is really about her, but it affects all of us.  I would like all of you to travel with me, back to a time many years ago.”

That is how Michael began his story.

 

Chapter Two

July 1930

 

The blistering sun peered down upon the Kingsbury farm like an oppressive ruler watching over his peasants.  It had been like this for twenty-seven days, not so much as a drop of rain to calm the swirling dust.  The temperature had soared to over one-hundred-degrees for nearly two weeks straight and the land was brown, the trees were barren and the sounds of hungry cattle echoed a suffering wail across the countryside.

            Four-year-old Robert Kingsbury sat on the edge of the back porch, his gaunt legs dangling over the steps, tapping back and forth in an impulsive rhythm.  With a contorted walking stick, he scrawled the letters of his name into the red Oklahoma powder that had blown in from the south.  The stick, with an orb of scarred wood that connected two long, thin twigs, reminded his mother of the wounded leg of her uncle after he returned from The Great War and she did not like it.  Robert would not throw it away as she had asked.

He watched the sky darken as a single gray rain cloud floated overhead and the gloomy shadows disappeared.  The temperature seemed to cool ever so slightly, a gust of wind smattered his face with grainy pellets of dust, and he coughed.  Seconds later, the shadows were back and his eyes began to burn from the sweat and from the dirt.

The ruler’s eyes returned.  He would provide no water for them today.

 

* * * * *

 

 “Claire, would you please take a look outside and check on Robert?”  Emily asked as she finished putting the breakfast dishes into the cupboard.  “He is being awful quiet out there and that worries me.  Make sure he is still out on the porch and hasn’t wandered off to that pond to skip rocks again.”

“I just looked out on him,” Rose replied in her deep southern accent as she finished beating the wrinkles out of the bedspread.  “He is sittin’ on the porch, writin’ in the dirt.  He has that ugly stick of his again.”  Claire was already outside.

“Thank you,” Emily shouted back across the small three-bedroom house.  “Every time I take it away from him, he starts throwing those fits,” she said quietly to herself, running her fingers through her hair.  She exhaled deeply out of fatigue just as Claire returned to the kitchen.  “Thanks dear,” she said to Claire with a spring in her voice, hiding the frustration.  “That stick is ugly as all get at, but it seems to keep him near the house and I really don’t want him out in the sun and getting burned again.”

“Emily, would you mind takin’ a look at the chicken?”  Rose asked.  “It should be just about ready.”

“Sure Rose.”

Emily opened the cast iron oven door and lifted the lid from the black kettle.  The steam from the broth rose and she could smell the delectable scent of garlic.  She pulled a carving knife from the drawer and gently sliced the meat between the breast and the leg until she hit the bone.  It was white, through and through.

“It’s ready,” she said.  “And it smells delicious.  Any sign of the men yet?”

Emily’s hair was the dark brown of bold coffee.  While she had worn it long over her shoulders most of her life, she now fashioned a short finger wave cut with tightly shaped ridges close to her scalp that accented her long, willowy neck.  She was five-foot six inches tall and now, in her sixth month, was beginning to show clear signs of her pregnancy on her otherwise slender body.  Her jawbones were firm and distinctive and her eyes soft with bursting chocolate eyelashes.  She turned heads as she walked.  With her new hairstyle, many thought she looked like a movie star and few would argue that she was the most beautiful woman in town.  She was far too modest to ever admit, or even so much as to think, herself to be that beautiful.  When she spoke, she did so tenderly and shyly and often avoided looking into the other person’s eyes as she talked.  As much as it was shyness, for many it was an adoring quality - a sense of innocence, of modesty.  For many men, her husband Harold included, her temperance was inviting.  She wore a heart shaped pendant on a long silver chain that rested below the neckline of her dress.  It had been a gift from Harold on her wedding day. 

            “No sign of them yet,” Rose said as she pulled back the curtains and peeked out the front window.  “But I s’pect they’ll be pulling in any time.  I’ve got 11:55.”  She said as she glanced at the wooden cuckoo clock sitting atop the mantle of the fireplace.

Cooking the food for the men who tirelessly worked the fields was as significant as anything else was on the farm.  Preparations for the meal usually began immediately after they cleaned the kitchen from breakfast, usually two hours or so after the men left for the fields. 

The summer sun rose high into the noon sky and the hungry men would soon appear from the fields, just as they always did at the peak of the day.  They would arrive in the old farm truck, eat, and then, wasting little precious sunlight, return to the fields.  When they arrived, they expected their lunch not only to be ready, but that there would be plenty of food for them to eat.  Second helpings were a given.  Thirds were common.  It was hot and the men were hungry, very hungry. 

They were always hungry.

The Kingsbury farm, nestled in the rolling hills of Southeast Kansas, once consisted of fifteen-hundred acres of thriving pastures with roaming cattle, flowing wheat fields, and golden corn on stalks that rose high into the air.  The nearest town was the settlement named Humboldt that stood on the Neosho River in Allen County, Kansas.  It was a German settlement named after an explorer, Baron Von Humboldt, in 1857.  Like many towns, Humboldt developed around a community square.  Originally, intended to serve as the county seat, it later lost out to a faster growing community with more political influence.  The Lutheran Church stood at the center of the town, just across the street from the square, and served as the central point, not only in a geographic sense, but too in an historic, religious sense. 

The Lutheran’s had settled this small community in the mid 1800’s.  There were other Protestant denominations and there were the Catholics, which had just built a new church on the north end of town.  There were the Baptists and the Methodists and even a few Presbyterians, but Lutherans were the largest denomination by a margin of two-to-one.  Everyone attended church at one of the six churches in town and a few traveled out of town. 

The Kingsbury’s farmland had belonged to Ernest since 1906.  He was now fifty-one.  Years ago, it now seemed, Earnest had been heavy set, with a plump belly, a barrel chest, thick arms, and stout hands.  In 1928 when the farm began to wither, he too became thin, more worn and his skin became dry and cracked like the deep crevices of the soil upon which he made his living.  By 1930, the farming income was only twenty-percent of what it had been five years earlier.

Ernest too had lost sixty pounds.

 

The drought. 

It began quietly two years earlier following the modest winter of 1928.  Snowfall that winter had been very light and when the heat of summer arrived in late May, the drought roared across the land.  The pastures were dry and withered, the cattle too scrawny for market, and the crops were seared, dried, and crumpling.  The corn was scarce upon its ears.  Earworms and other bugs had taken their share, boring through the husks and then slowly and deliberately feasted upon the corn.  They would lay their eggs inside the husks and in the summer, they hatched and the worms began to grow, eating away at the corn.  The ears were small and the kernels were underdeveloped.  Once she finished cutting away the earworm damage, there was little if anything left to eat or to feed the hungry animals.

            “Emily, if you can finish shucking the corn and put it in the pot I will go fetch another bucket of water from the well,” Rose said as she lifted the pails from below the soapstone sink.  Her southern voice was scratchy, a result of the dust that seemed to cloud the skies.  Her father had come to Kansas from Kentucky after the Civil War and brought along with him a southern accent and a deeply rooted Southern lifestyle.

            “Sure Rose.  Claire darling, would you mind asking Robert to come inside and to get cleaned up for lunch?”

            Claire nodded and walked toward the back porch.

            “While you are at it, see if you can hide that stick from him.”

             Claire stepped onto the back porch and looked down at Robert. 

“Your mom wants you to come inside and get cleaned up for lunch,” she said.  “The men will be coming back from the fields here pretty quick.”

Robert continued to kick his feet against the porch.  He did not reply.

“Robert, you know I am only telling you what your mom has asked me to.”

“Yeah, I know,” he finally said.  “What’s for lunch?”

“Chicken.”

“Hmm.”  He threw his stick onto the ground.

She knelt down beside him.  “You know your mom wants you to throw that stick away.  She says she doesn’t like it.  She said it reminds her of her uncle Jack who had his leg blown-up in the war.”

Robert did not reply.  He knew she did not like it. 

“Come on inside and change your clothes.”

“I don’t want chicken.  I want to stay out here and play.”

“Robert,” she demanded.  “Your mother said to come inside.”

Robert hated cleaning up and he resisted, testing her.  Claire was unruffled by his protest.  She simply stared him in the eyes until he finally conceded out of respect for his aunt, who was also his best friend.  She walked with him through the kitchen and to his room.  He removed his clothes and put on a pair of faded and torn hand-me-down overalls. 

Claire was pudgy but in a cute, young girl sort of way.  Her cheeks were soft pillows with a smattering of freckles across the fair skin of her face.  Her bottom teeth were crooked and already stained, gapped at the top of her central incisors and her hair was sandy brown, bobbed just below her neck.  She was a smart young girl, who with very little formal education could read and write years beyond her age.  She had Emily to thank for that.  Unlike her two brothers, known for their fare share of rowdy behavior, particularly around the schoolhouse in their younger days, discipline had never been a concern.  Her mature sense of responsibility had earned Emily’s trust and to her delight, she spent a large part of the day watching and caring for her nephew who was just six years her junior. 

“How come I don’t get to see my daddy very much now,” Robert asked.

Claire helped him fasten his overalls. 

“You see,” she began.  “Right now the men are out harvesting the wheat so that we can sell it so people can eat it.”

“How come we can’t eat it?  I’m kinda hungry.”

“We all are Robert.  Right now though, they have to sell the wheat so that we can buy clothes and food.  It’s not easy right now.  Nobody has much money and so it is hard for the men to sell their wheat.  That’s why they are working so hard now.  If they can get the wheat cut and get it to town before anyone else, they are more likely to sell it.”

While most ten-year-old girls, even in this period of despair, played around the city square with their yo-yos or joined in a game of tiddlywinks, Claire was helping prepare the food and some of the basic chores of the farm like taking slop to the animals and gathering eggs from the chicken house.  When she was old enough to begin to want and need things of her own – nice clothes or the newest toys for example - the depression had stolen away every cent they had and she now wore dresses made from gunnysack.  She often went barefoot, which stained her feet with the blanched dye of the red dust.  She had only one pair of shoes and she tried the best she could to keep them clean for church on Sundays. 

There were things Claire wanted but could not have.  She was perceptive enough to know that nobody had those things.  She understood the poverty and the plight of the farmer, it was evidenced everywhere she looked and so she did not ask for that which she could not have.

Even in her sadness, she was proud. 

She knew no better.

 

* * * * *

 

Emily finished placing the forks on the cream lace tablecloth to the left of the plates and the knife and spoon to the right.  Although the sterling silverware was in need of polishing and the tablecloth was worn, stained, and fraying in all four corners and along much of the edges, she did her part to make the meal as nice as possible.  Rose only polished the silver twice each year - once before Thanksgiving dinner and the other before Christmas.  The plates were white with three hand-painted tiger lilies and gold trim that, like the plates themselves, was beginning to wear.  She returned to the stool near the sink and began peeling away the husks from the corn and tossing them into a metal bucket on the floor.  She cut away the stems and removed the silky strings that weaved in and out of the rows of corn and she flicked off a few remaining earworms into the bucket. 

Each move she made reminded her of the discomfort that had come on so unexpectedly that morning.

 

Emily had awoken with a nauseous feeling.  She realized when she sat up in bed at the rooster’s crow - another natural timepiece in the land of just-barely-enough-to-get-by – that something felt unusual.  However, she crawled from her bed anyway, awoke her husband and he was quickly off to work the fields with his father and brother.  She had felt the pain several times since.  Sometimes it was an uncomfortable twinge, other times it bore into her like a hot iron prod etching its brand into her skin, as she had seen her husband do to the cattle.  If it did not go away by the end of the day, she promised herself, she would go see her doctor.  By noon, it was starting to dull, but occasionally, maybe every thirty minutes or so, she felt a cramping pain.

It took about five minutes to clean the corn and she dropped the ears into a pot of boiling water and watched as it sank to the bottom and as it cooked, slowly boiled to the top. 

            Rose returned with a bucket of well water; droplets of sweat trickled down the sides of her weary face.  “What do we have left?”

            “I just put the corn on and the table is set,” Emily replied.  “I think we are just waiting for it to cook and the men to arrive.”

            The field the men were threshing was more than three miles from the house, too far for the dinner bell to reach, even if the wind was blowing in the right direction.  If they were busy and Earnest forgot to check his pocket watch, they might not arrive until almost 12:45.  Most times, however, their stomachs were their best timepiece and give or take five minutes, they would arrive on cue, otherwise risking a cold meal. 

            “If you see that truck pulling up, you call for me dear,” Rose said as she wiped away the tiny beads with an old towel she then threw into a basket of laundry.

Rose Kingsbury was a large woman.  She wore wire-rimmed glasses with simple rounded lenses - although her piercing brown eyes had long since worsened.  She had not bought new glasses in almost ten years.  She stood five-feet-eight-inches, weighed nearly 240 pounds, and could throw hay bales with the best of any man.  Her hands were dry and hardened from years of labor and her hair, black with graying strands, was normally tucked into a bun at the crown of her head, or covered with a white bonnet she tied under her chin.  She poured the water from the tin bucket into a pitcher and from it into the five glasses on the table.  She placed the pitcher into the icebox that had been refilled around ten o’clock that morning by the Humboldt Ice Company, which delivered ice from town every two days. 

“Robert, can you set this outside on the back porch?”  She handed her grandson the bucket of slop.  He quietly tiptoed across the porch toward the steps where his stick lay and ducked below the window so his mother would not see him.  Claire caught him from the screened door, grabbing hold of his shirt collar. 

“Robert,” she whispered to him in a somewhat stern voice.  “We’ll play again after lunch.  Come on back inside.” 

Robert leaned his stick against the house and followed his aunt back inside.

From a distance, Claire saw a belt of brown dust drifting from the gravel road.  It was far too distant to be sure, but once the truck came into view, it was time to make sure that everything was ready. 

“They’re coming up the road,” she said.  “They just crossed the creek.”

Emily hurried to help Rose as she finished breaking the chicken into pieces – the legs, breasts, wings, thighs and even the neck.  None of the chicken went to waste.  It was mandatory for the men to wash before they sat down at the table, which gave them about five additional minutes.

            Emily grabbed the silver serving tray of chicken and carried it to the table.  It was not very heavy, but she nearly dropped it.  Had she needed to carry it a few more feet, she likely would have.  She felt queasy so she took a drink of water from her glass.  It was not proper to sit before everyone arrived at the table, but she did so anyway.  Just for a second.  Though not long enough for Rose to even notice.

            The corn had cooked for only ten minutes, but Rose pulled it from the burner anyway.  She removed each cob from the boiling water with a wooden spoon, let them drain and then she placed the corn onto a serving tray and handed it to Claire. 

            The table was set, the glasses filled, and the truck was stopping in front of the house.

It was time for dinner.