ONE
Dorothy
I arrived at the Kansas farmhouse in a summer storm.
They say the wind was so violent, it made her hair go sideways.
I don’t know who she was, only that I clung to her, sobbing. There was blood on her face, they say. Speckled across her hollow cheeks.
“Please,” she said to the couple standing in the doorway. “Take her.”
She tried to hand me over, but I fought her, fingers clawing at the fabric of her jacket.
“I want to go home!”
I remember saying the words. Sometimes I wake up screaming them.
If I lie real still, if I close my eyes, if I strain my memory, I can see her.
She’s shouting at me, but there is no sound, only movement. Hair whipping around my face. Dark sky rolling above.
There is the sharpness of her desperation and the taste of ash on my tongue.
Cyclone season always bears desperation.
And carnage.
Aunt Em and Uncle Henry had never planned to havechildren, but how could two good people turn away a sobbing child?
“She’ll come back for you,” Em said as she wiped the dirt from my face after the storm broke. “Don’t you worry.”
The next week, Henry built me a bed from the barn wreckage. He let me hammer in some nails, let me try the handsaw.
“You sure you’ve never built a bed before?” he asked me, hands on his hips as he supervised.
“I’m sure,” I told him, because I didn’t even know what a hammer was until then.
“Well, fine work.” With his face hidden by the shadow of his brimmed hat, I didn’t know he’d been lying. I didn’t know for many years after that he’d rebuilt the bed that night just to make sure it was solid and sturdy.So it would last.
Now, as an adult, I can see it for what it was—distraction. Letting me hammer in some nails and saw at some wood helped free up the worry gnawing at my insides.
She wasn’t coming back. No one was coming back for me.
Henry knew better than most how to drive away grief and suffering. He was a man always in motion, running from a broken heart.
He’d found himself back on the Kansas prairie after his father died, then his mother, then two brothers back-to-back in the war. He was the youngest of his family. He was never supposed to inherit the family farm.
He got it anyway.
If the work helped distract him, then Aunt Em helped heal Henry.
Before the farm, before losing his family, Uncle Henry traveled around the country. A busker, with a guitar at his hip, aharmonica strapped around his neck, and a drum at his foot, he made money with his music.
He’d arrived in New York City chasing something. Maybe a place to belong. He liked to joke that he was Goldilocks and each town he visited a bed. “None of them fit,” he’d say. “One too loud. Another too big. Some came close, but maybe they were too cold or too hot or too mushy.”
When I was a girl, I loved anything that even remotely smelled of fairy tales and Henry could twist anything into a story.
“The Big Apple felt just right,” he’d go on. “And playing music for the tourists was honest work. Work I liked. Most days, I could thump at my drum, strum at my guitar, close my eyes, and travel to another world. But not that day. That day I foundher.”
