Marilyn, 1959
The dogs barked again, as if to chase off the night. I knew there was something out there. My coonhounds could raise the dead with their barking. Maybe there was a predator after the chickens. Or possibly an intruder. I scanned the shrubs, fields and thickets, glowing a purple hue under the sliver of moon that crept dimly toward the horizon.
I pulled my coat about me because it wouldn’t do to get chilled, sitting out there in the adirondack chair. With the porch light off, I could see pretty well in spite of the moon’s reticence. I watched for movement. This scenario had played out several nights in a row. Each time, it was the same thing. Dogs going ballistic. No movement I could detect, and no obvious cause. Still, I kept my senses tuned. I wouldn’t admit to myself or another living soul that I felt fear. Everyone said a woman should never live alone in a farmhouse, and I was determined to prove them wrong.
I sensed movement and glanced quickly to my right. But it was only Chance, my fat old dame cat, who was afraid of her own shadow. She crept near, soundlessly. And we sat together in the night. Waiting.
The dogs settled, whimpering quietly over in their kennels, as if the danger was over, or they were bored with it. I heard the chickens cackling, low. That was how I knew that whatever it was had not gone away. The stillness deepened. The moon hung lower, glowing crimson. Even the crickets seemed to have lowered the volume of their singing to allow me to detect whatever was out there.
Then I saw him. It was only for a moment, in silhouette, before he moved back behind the blackberries again. I picked up the rifle from my lap and cocked it.
“No. Please. Don’t shoot!” The voice came from the thicket. A deep man’s voice. “Marilyn. I’d like to talk to you.”
How did this intruder know my name? I would have sworn on a million dollar bill I had never heard that voice before in my life.
I stood, raising the gun. “I am absolutely going to shoot. Non-negotiable. Unless you have some spectacular explanation for what you’re doing on my land.”
In fact, he did. “It’s Bruce,” he said. “Your brother.”
I scoffed at that — a rough bark in the night, reminiscent of my hounds — after which the stillness and evening damp fell around me again. The thing is, I didn’t have a brother. I had been an only child.
In my earliest memory, I was in a room bathed in light. A prism hung from the room’s only window where it swayed in the breeze blowing in, creating colorful flitting fairies that scampered across the walls, this way and that.
So few memories remain from my earliest days, but I have always believed my memory of that room on that day to be my oldest one. It is incomplete, like an old photograph that only half survived a fire, and I am not even certain it is real, for I spent my early childhood in a tiny home with dark walls — a home, it seemed, from the dark ages. There were no big windows there, and what little light entered the house seemed to be filtered as if by the lens of time.
But the memory of the room of light has played in my mind all these years, lingering with me as if it must hold some importance.
As I watched the colored prism reflections playing across the walls, my mother walked in. I suppose I had been napping and woke to the light-filled space and the dancing prisms, and forgot to call for her. I believe I was about one or two years old.
Instead of coming to me, she walked to the window. She was lost in thought, and seemed not to notice me. Was she as mesmerized as I was by the flitting prism fairies? I suppose not, because she was staring far away, as if whatever she sought was just beyond the horizon, like the things we want most often are.
“Momma?”
She turned to me, then, with such depths of sadness in her eyes that even as a tiny child I was startled, and began to cry. The sparkling prisms turned to colorful blurs as if they were melting away. And a hole opened up in me, the first fissure in my innocence.
I remember nothing more from that time.
There are so many more memories from later on, mostly in the dark little home with creaking floorboards where we lived in the little village of Mankato. I think of it as my growing up house, though it was really only the place of my young childhood. It was there I helped mother to garden and raise chickens for meat and for eggs on a parcel hardly large enough for the home itself. But the garden and chickens somehow kept us fed through the warm months, and provided a bit of money for the things we didn’t produce ourselves.
I can draw every inch of that house, as if I lived there yesterday. Though small and cramped overall, its spaces were homey and intriguing — just the thing for an inventive young mind. Oddly, off the kitchen on the north side of the house, there was an enormous larder the size of a baby nursery. It was mostly empty, except for our skimpy provisions — some cherries and plums from the local farmers that we put up each summer, and any tomatoes, green beans and root vegetables we had on hand. It had a small doorway at the back that led down to a root cellar which we only used in the hottest summers. Presumably the home’s builders had need for vaster storage than required to support its inhabitants.
“They kept slaves here,” Mother said once. She pointed, indicating the land west of our chicken coop. Our little house and parcel bordered a larger estate with some farm acreage, and it was conceivable that servants or slaves were required to work the fields, harvest the produce, and even handle canning and storage. In the 1930s, we believed such practices to be outdated and cruel, but my imagination toyed with the idea that I was living where perhaps a slave girl my age had once toiled. What might she have been like?
Mother smirked at me as she sent me off to the garden to pick the beans. It seemed she understood that I could not help but compare my life to that of a slave child. “You are a lucky, lucky girl! You want for nothing. And no one owns you.” But she did not truly understand what went on in my mind. What she did not know is that I longed for a sister or a brother. Someone to talk to and help with chores. Being the only child made me feel empty inside. Worst of all, when I returned to the schoolhouse at the end of summer, the other children would be jostling with their siblings and telling stories of how they spent their summers with their families.
If the summer days were difficult for the amount of labor, I dreaded their conclusion at the end of each day, as I feared the darkness, and the eerie silence of the rural nights. My tiny bedroom had pine walls covered with knots that looked like dark eyes peering at me. Mother shooed me out of her bed if I went to her, telling me there was no use in both of us losing our sleep over my foolish anxiety. And so, by the light of a kerosene lamp, I carried on conversations with the wall people, as I came to think of them — a tactic that gave me dominion over my fear.
“Julius, you have done nothing but stare into space all evening. Are you bored? Shall I read you a story? And you, Maria. What are you crying about?”
Maria was always crying, with a long streak pouring from the corner of her eye like the tear of a wounded child. She never answered, but I imagined that she felt better, knowing someone cared. “Shall I tell you how I tripped over a melon vine today? It will cheer you up.”
If I spoke too loud, Mother would call to me from the other room. “Who are you talking to, Marilyn? Go to sleep. I want you up gathering eggs at dawn.” She was a no-nonsense woman, or perhaps had become so by necessity. What must it have been like raising a child as a single parent in the Depression years? It never occurred to me what hardship and loneliness she must have endured. Not until I looked backward to examine my childhood much later.
Once I had spoken with each of the wall people, telling them about my day and fixing their worries, I would turn out the lamp, listen to its soft sizzle as the kerosene wick snuffed out, and then drift off to sleep — a rest that felt swift and fleeting, as I was always terribly tired. It seemed I would merely blink, and then wake to the sun rising and the crow of our rooster, Amos.
And then I jumped from bed, threw on my clothes and ran to the hen house, for more than once I had discovered a neighbor child, even more destitute from the Depression economy than we were, snitching our eggs.
In fact, that is how I met Beckett. One day, just before dawn, I stepped out of the backdoor of the house into the dewy morning with my egg basket. I stretched and yawned, certain I was alone. I gazed across the garden. How remarkable the tiny moisture droplets looked on the tomato leaves and in the fine gossamer strings of a spider web that stretched artfully between two leafy mounds of zucchini plant.
Then I heard something. It came from the hen house, but it was an unnatural sound, a bumping and awkward rustling, not the familiar scratching and muttering of our chickens. Then the door to the hen house opened, and a boy emerged, dirty and dressed in tattered clothing, with our eggs tucked into the rolled-up ragged edge of his shirt.
He raised his eyebrows. “Oh.”
I crossed my arms and studied him. He was thin and had the pallor of a ghost. But his face had a funny, impish quality. I wondered what he would be like to talk to, under other circumstances. “How many do you have?”
“Only four.” He looked back toward the door of the hen house, as if contemplating whether he would have to put the eggs back, then he looked down the path to the road, to freedom.
“Take them and go.” I kept my voice low, hoping Mother wouldn’t hear.
He started toward the road. “My name’s Beckett.”
I nodded. “Marilyn.” I glared at him as he moved down the path. When he neared the hedgerow by the road, I called to him. “Hey. Beckett!”
He waited at the edge of the path, watching me warily. I pulled a fat zucchini off the vine and handed it to him.
He gave the slightest smile, but said nothing. Then he was gone.
I turned back to the house, but stopped still. Mother stood watching me from the back stoop, arms folded, her face stern. I remained frozen in place. What was the punishment for such an offense — for giving away our carefully grown food when we were just making ends meet, ourselves? A lashing? Going without meals? I had always been such a good girl. This was new territory for us both.
After a few moments in this stand-off, Mother’s face broke into a sly smile. It was as if she had desperately wanted to find fault with me, but had come to her senses. In my shoes, she would have done the very same.
Beckett, it turned out, lived a little way down the road. Something had become of his parents, which we weren’t to find out about until much later. He was living with his aunt and uncle, who were goat farmers. But they had fallen on hard times, as the goats had become infected with brucellosis. The goats stopped delivering live births, and the aunt and uncle were not able to sell the milk or meat because it was infected. We learned of these things over time.
A few days after the incident in the hen house, Beckett began to come by of an afternoon or evening, offering to help Mother with chores and gardening.
“I’m not paying you,” Mother said. “There may be some rich folks around here somewhere, but you are not looking at them.”
“That’s okay. I wasn’t asking for pay.” Beckett looked around the kitchen. The remains of our supper sat on plates by the sink — a crust of bread on one, a bit of leftover roast on the other. We had plenty, and had not finished everything.
Mother handed him a broom. “Fine. You sweep up while Marilyn washes the dishes. Then if you work up an appetite, I believe we could make a plate for you.”
He took the broom. But he watched as I scraped the plates into a trash bin.
Times were indeed hard, but Beckett taught me that there were people even less fortunate than ourselves. Next to him, we lived like royalty. That evening, after Beckett swept the kitchen and ate a meal that he politely devoured, we went to the larder for flour to make sweet rolls for the morning. There he saw our fresh vegetables, our drying herbs, and the rows of canned plums, peaches, cherries and beans we had been putting up that summer in preparation for the cold season.
I looked at him, and saw his throat and cheeks tighten. Was he going to cry?
He scanned across the shelves. “This is… incredible.”
I looked around the larder. Each year, it seemed, we got more efficient with our gardening. We grew more, harvested more, canned more, and made more trades with local farmers. Our shelves were full. I grabbed the flour jar. “Come on. We won’t get those rolls ready by standing here talking.”
Beckett looked around once more and then followed me back to the kitchen where we got out a bowl, a spoon, and a measuring cup and began measuring the flour. He watched each thing I did with interest, smiling at the smallest things, like the way I measured out the yeast with a large wooden spoon — just guessing the approximate amount needed.
“How do you know how much of that to put in?”
“I just do. Once you learn to bake, you get the knack of it soon enough.”
We made a double batch and I sent him home with one pan full, draped with a clean kitchen towel to allow it to rise. Mother noticed, but said nothing. I felt happy, thinking of Beckett waking up in the morning and making hot sweet rolls for breakfast with his aunt and uncle.
Mother helped me clean up and put the flour away. “He’ll just be back for more tomorrow, you know.”
“Yes. I know.” We exchanged a glance. We were both smiling.
So — no, I did not have a brother, or a sister. Beckett became like a brother to me. And more. We were to become connected in ways I could never have imagined then. Over time, the winds of change would blow through our lives again and again, tossing us every which way, like seeds from a dandelion. But once it all started, there was no stopping it.
Thank you for reading. This is chapter one of a novel I’ve begun working on. I would love your feedback.
I would like to say a huge Thank You to The Writers’ Block for the opportunity and encouragement. This is my entry in the “First Chapter Challenge” contest. The genre is literary fiction. This is a new work in progress. It does not yet have a title.
