So in the same family album, while Edith and Lyman are growing up, their mother, Ada, seems to be sinking down. In one picture after another, she looks smaller, shorter, thinner. Her cheeks suck into bone, her thin brown hair turns to sparse gray. By 1913, in what must be the last picture taken of her, she stands barely as tall as Roy’s shoulder, and he was no more than five feet eight himself. In the picture I’m talking about, Ada looks like she might be her husband’s mother. About all you can make out of her face in the grainy photograph is her big eyes, staring not at whoever it was that held the camera, but away, off towards something in the distance.
Then in 1914, in August, in the hottest month of the year in Holt County, she got sick. They say it was the flu, and people did die of the flu then. But I believe, and Edith says, that it was more than just a virus bug that killed her. It was all those years of looking east; it was almost two decades of being married to Roy. Once, when her own mother died, she had gone back home to Johnson County on the train, and she had stayed so long after the funeral that Roy had had to go out and bring her back. She never went a second time. Now, on the High Plains of Colorado, she lay up there in the second-story bedroom, with the windows open to catch any breeze there was, sweating and burning up with what maybe only one of her family still believed was just flu fever. So it was almost the same story again. It was almost like the two times she had delivered babies there in that same bedroom. Only it was August this time, and instead of her arms and legs going rigid as sticks, she seemed as weak as water now. She didn’t make much of a bump under the sweat-soaked sheets. She didn’t move.
On the second or third day of this, she told Roy, “I want her now.”
“What?” he said.
“I want her to come. I think it’s time.”
“Now, damn it, Ada . . .”
“Please,” she said.
Maybe Roy thought she was talking out of her head, that it was just fever talk, but when she seemed worse by the middle of the afternoon when the sun was the hottest, he drove the half mile west to get the pipe-smoking half-Indian woman. She was an old woman now, though her eyes were still clear and black, and her hair was still the same straight brown; her hair never did get very gray. But she had some trouble mounting the stairs, so that Edith had to help her. When she was led into the room where Lyman and Roy stood against the wall, she first pulled the blinds on the windows and then sat down on the wood chair beside the bed.
After a while Ada opened her eyes. She fumbled her hand out from under the bedsheet towards the older woman. “I thank you,” she said.
“Do you want anything?”
“I thank you for coming.”
They stayed that way the rest of the afternoon. Later, Roy went out to feed and milk the cows, while Edith continued to smooth the bone-thin yellowing forehead with a cool washcloth and Lyman went on staring at his mother from his place against the wall, like he was rooted there, like he didn’t dare do anything else but stand and stare at his dying mother. Ada slept for several hours that way, with her loose hand held by the other woman, who also managed to sleep some, sitting up in the chair beside the bed. The old woman’s head rocked back above the top of the chair, and her dark mouth dropped open a little.
At six Roy said they should eat. So he and Edith and Lyman went downstairs to the kitchen where Edith warmed some potatoes and green beans, sliced some bread, and made a fresh pot of coffee. When the food was on the table in front of him, Roy said grace and began to eat.
Between mouthfuls he said, “You didn’t tell me that red-faced cow was going dry.”
“What?” Lyman said. He was pushing his beans around on his plate.
“She’s damn near dry. You never told me.”
“I forgot.”
“What else have you forgot?”
“Nothing. I don’t know.”
“Never mind, Daddy,” Edith said. “Not now.”
“We need the milk,” Roy said.
After supper, Edith put the dishes to soak and took a plate of food and a cup of coffee upstairs to the old woman. They found that she was awake now, smoking one of her scarred briar pipes. She had raised the blinds again, and the blue pipe smoke drifted out the opened east window. She didn’t want the food. Beside her, Ada still lay silent in the bed, like a thin wax child.
“Did mother say anything?” Edith asked.
“No.”
“Did she wake again?”
“No. She’s resting. She’s getting ready.”
“I believe she does feel cooler now, don’t you think? Maybe the fever’s broken.”