After the man had turned his attention back to the game, Maud whispered to Frank: “Darling, do you think that is such a good idea?” Already, not five minutes had passed since those few raindrops had spattered down, and the sky was a blue as bright as a piece of china, with not a single cloud in sight.
“Don’t worry, Maud. The almanacs are certain on the point that we’ll have rain early this week. Those rain clouds were just the harbinger. Farmers do get themselves all in a tizzy about rain, understandable, but you know as well as I do that this climate suits the wheat crop perfectly. We’ve had three straight years of bumper crops. ‘Rain follows the plow,’ as they say. And you know what? Even if, for some reason, I’m wrong, and it doesn’t rain, that fellow will come into Baum’s Bazaar to collect, and I’ll have created something much more valuable than the dollar I spent. I’ll have created a customer! For that one dollar, I’ll probably sell him another ten dollars to boot!” Frank, so impassioned about what he was saying, had raised his voice, and the farmer turned around again with a smirk on his face and said, “Nope, betcha won’t!”
Frank just smiled sunnily and tipped his hat, and just at that moment, a Hub City Niner hit the ball with a crisp thwack and the ball sailed up into the bright blue sky and then clear over the ball field fence. The crowd jumped to their feet, crying out in delight as the player jogged around the bases, capturing the game for Aberdeen’s home team.
As they walked home from the ball field, little Robin grew tired, and Frank hoisted him up onto his shoulders. As they strolled along together, Maud was struck by how their little family felt peaceful, as if they belonged here in Aberdeen. To cap it all off, for the first time, Maud sensed a glimmer of movement, just tingling bubbles tickling her under her navel. She said nothing, but a small smile lit up her face. It was the end of a beautiful day.
A week later, on Sunday, it had not yet rained.
* * *
—
A BASEBALL CRANK. That’s what Frank had turned into. As the secretary and chief booster of the Hub City Nine, he threw his efforts into promoting his team. It certainly lent an air of gaiety to Aberdeen, which, as a dry July turned into a parched August, was otherwise teetering on the brink of a bad year. The ticket sales at the first game had exceeded one thousand, and all of the town’s newspapers could talk of little else. For the team’s first out-of-town trip, Frank organized a marching band, and more than five hundred townspeople accompanied the players as they boarded the special train that would carry them to their next match in the neighboring town of Webster.
At home, Frank and the boys seemed to breathe the game. Bunting and Robin spent all their time playing catch with a genuine Spalding ball that Frank had brought home from the store for them (replacing the first two, which the boys had lost in the tall prairie grass). Maud was only passingly interested in the ins and outs of baseball, and she gently remonstrated with Frank when she thought he was taking too much time away from the store—worried that he was focused on too many things at once.
But Maud was relieved in one way. Frank’s baseball fascination kept him occupied and out of the house—she’d seen no more of the melancholy fear related to her upcoming parturition. Maud had learned to live, for the most part, with the shadowy fear of childbirth that was every woman’s lot. She managed to keep it distant and boiled down to the essence of a pinpoint, barely perceptible in her field of vision, although with the slightest encouragement, her fear could swell, billowing up like a menacing black cloud settling over her home, her life, her future.
To lose a child, as Julia had, was a terrible thing, but nothing haunted a woman like the bright faces of her children. Their gentle, obdurate patience when she combed a tangle from their hair or helped them put on their nightdresses. Trust. Children believed that their mother would rise and set as reliably as the sun, having no idea that danger lurked nearby, that each subsequent child might try to snatch away his mother’s life as he made his way into the world. These were the terrified thoughts that could occupy Maud’s mind if she let them. So, she didn’t think. She cooked and cleaned and washed and scrubbed and tatted and mended and took long walks and visited with the neighbors and brewed tea and said her prayers. Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, Maud prayed under her breath as she worked. She found the bubbly glimmers of life as intoxicating as ever. And yet, the shadow remained.
* * *
—
AS AUGUST WORE ON, the weather continued hot and dry. Clouds would mass only to depart without rain, leaving a big blue empty sky. The pleasant warmth of early summer had turned to torpor. Grass dried up. The afternoon winds carried a fine gray dust that crept into every corner. Not a drop of rain fell.
Now, anywhere you went in Aberdeen, drought was all anyone could talk about. The economy of Dakota was based on the price of wheat, and already where there should have been acres of lush growing fields, there were expanses of shriveled brown stalks. Everyone seemed to have an idea of what to do about it, from raising funds to creating artesian wells to seeding the clouds—a good idea, if anyone could invent a way to do it—but for the time being, they all watched anxiously. Maud had quickly learned what Dakotans already knew: as the farmers went, so went the towns. And if the townsfolk were suffering, then the farmers were hurting hard. Maud worried how Julia was faring. She wrote to her sister constantly but received few letters in return, and those few had a somber tone that did nothing to ease her concerns. Finally, Maud broached the question that had been plaguing her since baby Jamie’s death. Had Julia reconsidered? Would she send Magdalena to Aberdeen?
A week later, Maud received a brief reply.
My dearest Maud,
Thank you for your kind offer to let Magdalena live with you. I’m afraid that I must decline. In light of your delicate condition, I fear that she should grow too attached to you only to suffer a loss. I keep you in my prayers daily, Maudie dear, and hope that you will pass safely through the shadowy vale. God speed.
Your loving sister, Julia
Maud’s hand trembled violently as she beheld the letter. She crumpled it and threw it into the fire. A moment later, Frank came into the parlor.
He rushed up to Maud. “Darling? What is it? You are so pale! You looked like you’ve seen a ghost.”
Maud said nothing. She stared into the fire, watching the paper curl, spark, and burn until the black ashes floated up the flue.
I’ve seen a ghost, Maud thought, and it is mine.
CHAPTER
19
ABERDEEN, SOUTH DAKOTA
1889
Matilda arrived the week before Thanksgiving with a plan to stay all the way through Maud’s accouchement and recovery, to help with the household and the baby. But, as this was Matilda, she also brought a second mission: to help with the organizing effort to secure votes for women in the brand-new state of South Dakota. At the train station, Maud caught sight of her mother, framed in an open doorway of the passenger car. She was wearing a black silk dress, and her hair, now snow white, was coiled at her nape. Pausing at the top of the passenger car’s iron steps, Matilda looked like a queen surveying her subjects. Maud was struck by how poised and confident she appeared, how unlike the other women milling around the depot. As Matilda descended the steps and alit on the platform, Maud couldn’t help herself. She rushed forward and embraced her mother, not remembering how large her belly had become, the result being that Maud’s belly landed first, before the kiss.
Matilda beamed at the sight of her younger daughter. She looked her up and down and then proclaimed her fit as a fiddle.
Back at the house, Maud installed her mother in Robin and Bunting’s room. The boys would bunk with her and Frank while her mother was in town. T.C. had left several months earlier, traveling out west, hoping to find investment properties farther along the railroad line, and had to miss his mother’s visit.
“I’m still worried about Julia,” Maud confided to her mother as they sipped tea in the parlor. “She seems well enough in body, but fatigued in mind. She took the loss of the baby very hard, and the medicine she takes for her sick headaches makes her so subdued…”
“You know my feeling about patent medicines,” Matilda said. “Your sister would be better off sticking with natural remedies. I sent her lavender oil and told her to put a drop on her handkerchief and inhale it slowly.”
“Perhaps she does, Mother, but she seems to rely more on Godfrey’s Cordial.”
Matilda stared out the window, lost in thought. “You and your sister are so different—born of the same mother, suckled at the same breast, and yet…”