The fall of alice k, p.4
The Fall of Alice K., page 4
“Saved from what? Saved from destruction? Saved from a blackout? Saved from hell, fire, and brimstone? Saved from what, I ask!”
“Shush up,” her mother said. “I think you know. You seem to think you know everything else. Aldah is the one to watch.”
“What on earth does that mean?”
“She is the one who is leading the way down. She is the messenger of what is in store for all of us.”
Alice wished there could have been witnesses who could see that her mother was the one who was pulling everything and everybody down, not Aldah. Her mother was a whirlpool of darkness. Even when Aldah reflected their bad feelings back at them, she was still their messenger of hope. She was the one who could teach them how to trust the moment without fear. Alice was convinced that Aldah was a threat to her mother’s gloomy view, so her mother had to shoot her down. It was that simple.
“Why do you always have to look at the dark side? Why do you always have to make all of us feel bad?”
Alice waited for her mother to respond, but she just sat there. Alice didn’t wait for the ice cube to melt: she walked back into the house. Her father sat in his swivel chair reading the newspaper and seemed unaware of the conversation that had just transpired on the porch. Aldah was still sitting at the table, with that calm expression that suggested she was daydreaming contentedly. Alice went over and combed Aldah’s hair, then led her into the living room and told her that she could watch television for an hour. Alice pushed her sister’s hair back over her tiny ear, and as the colorful pictures came onto the screen, the calm spread over her cheeks to produce a face of total contentment. If Aldah was a messenger of anything, her message was to live every moment for what it was worth. Looking at Aldah made Alice think of the line from the hymn that went, “It is well, it is well with my soul.”
While Aldah watched TV, Alice started a bath.
“There isn’t any hot water!” she yelled.
“Come out here,” said her father.
“What’s going on?”
“I turned off the hot-water heater.”
“Say again?”
“Keeping fifty gallons of water hot all day makes as much sense as letting your car run when you’re not using it.”
“I need a bath.”
“It can wait.”
“Wait? This dirt can wait?”
“Heat a little water on the stove and wash your face and hands.”
“You’re kidding.”
“I’ll turn the hot water heater on for an hour at night. And that’s it.”
“What’s going on?”
“We have to conserve.”
“I do conserve.”
“You’re going to have to conserve a lot more.”
“We have plenty of water.”
“Water’s not the problem. Heating it is. At least a hundred a month.”
“This is nuts.”
“It’s common sense.”
“You look like you got cleaned up.”
“Not with hot water.”
“I’ll just wash with cold water then.”
“Good idea.”
Instead of going to the bathroom, Alice glanced into the living room to see her sister watching cartoons. She walked outside past her mother without speaking. She strolled toward the double garage and backed out the red Ford 150 pickup. Alice started with a bucket of soapy water and a big bristle brush and went to work on the bed of the carriage box. She got on her knees and scrubbed down every groove of the pickup bed. She went after every spec of dirt and manure, every caked-on spilled whatever. Then she hosed it down and went back with a sponge and dry cloth. She got a fresh bucket of water and soaped the entire cab and body. She was an hour into it before she brought out the wax. And then the chamois skin. She scrubbed the tires, and then went back and polished the chrome. She vacuumed the inside. She Windexed the windows—inside and out. People who worked at car washes could have learned something from her. She made that pickup shine. She made it glow like red fingernail polish. She made it so shiny it screamed to the fresh blue sky. Then she parked it out front where anybody driving by would see it. She made the 150 the shining star of their farm. The 150 sat there like a bright plaything of the world, singing, “Look at me! Look at me! Look at me!”
Her father, who stood beside the house looking in her direction, interrupted the glorious moment.
“Any reason you’re doing that on The Lord’s Day?” he shouted.
5
The smells from Ben Van Doods’s feedlot reached the Krayenbraak farm before the county health department declared the rotting carcasses a hazard and had the rendering plant load them up. When Alice looked at the sudden transformation, the clean feedlot was like a taunt that dared her to remember the grim sight that had been there.
The next day notice was published in the paper, and posters went up in stores and on light poles around Dutch Center advertising Ben’s farm sale.
“That’s that,” said Alice’s father. “Now let’s tend to the work the Lord has given us to do.”
Should she feel guilty for starting to think about herself instead of the miseries of someone else? She could spend her senior year pitying herself that their farm was probably in as much trouble as Ben Van Doods’s, or she could start thinking of next year, when she could leave her work shoes on the porch and step out with a suitcase, ready for a college dormitory. She could curl up and wither as a pathetic manure-stained farm girl in a manure-stained farm economy or she could shed her farm-girl image like a pair of manure-stained blue jeans. Whatever hope she was going to have for the future would require work, just as her father said, but the work she was determined to do was the kind of work that would save her from being a farm girl forever.
She had learned what she looked like to city people when she visited Sioux City malls. She spent two hours one afternoon on a shopping trip “looking for bargains” but actually looking at city folks looking at farm folks. After an hour of sharp-eyed study, she saw what they saw: that perpetual look of bewilderment or surprise on the farm kids’ faces. That dumbfounded expression that said, “Huh? What’s that? What’s going on?” Farm boys were the most pathetic with their awkward swaggers they thought made them look like tough city kids. Instead, it made them look as if they had spent too much time riding broncos and didn’t know how to use their legs for walking. The older farm folks stood out too in the way they always made—or tried to make—eye contact with everyone they met, as if everybody in the world were somebody they knew or who would want to know them. And they were distracted by anything that was going on around them. When they were outside, they looked up if an airplane or helicopter flew overhead. They stared yearningly at passing emergency vehicles. Farm folks had an uncomfortable and gratuitous curiosity about everything! And, yes, Alice Marie Krayenbraak knew what “gratuitous” meant. Straight-A Alice knew the meanings of “gratuitous,” “exacerbate,” “gobsmacked,” “syllogism,” and a million other words, but she still had that wide-eyed farm-kid look about her, and she knew it—and she knew how hard it would be to shed that look. No matter how hard they tried, farm folks, whether old or young, just didn’t have any sophistication. If animals had distinct characteristics of their breed, so did Iowa farm folks. They were their own breed—hicks. It was written all over them. The syllogism stuck in Alice’s head: All Iowa farm folks look like hicks. I am an Iowa farm folk. Therefore, I look like a hick. Being over six feet tall didn’t help. To city people, she had to look like a gawky hillbilly.
Dealing with dead hogs or her own family’s sagging farm was easy compared to smelling like the cattle yards and looking—at best—like the cover girl of Country Home magazine. She had dropped out of 4-H when she was fifteen and hidden her one purple and ten blue ribbons in the bottom of her underwear drawer. Grand Champion in Beef Showmanship. Finalist for Junior Livestock Queen. She had the medals, but if she was going to have a life beyond the millennium, it was not going to be as a farm girl.
Alice watched how models on TV walked across the stage, then practiced in front of her bedroom mirror. She stood at the magazine rack in Deweerds’ Drug reading Vogue. She resolved to erase every smudge of farm life from the person who strutted her lanky presence through the world. A year from now she’d be packing her bags for college and entering a world where she could tell people whatever she wanted. She wouldn’t stare at passing ambulances. She wouldn’t make eye contact with everyone she met. She wouldn’t smile as if she knew or wanted to know everyone who crossed her path. She would walk with a delicate light step that suggested her feet had never touched an unfriendly surface, and certainly no surface as disgusting as cattle hoofprints in their own dried manure. No one would have to know she was a person whose life had been hay bales and John Deere tractors and soybeans and corn silage and weed spray and chemical fertilizers and hogs and steers. A year from now she could invent her past and create her future. She’d burn her work shirts. She’d burn her work shoes. She’d step into the world from the covers of Glamour and Cosmopolitan. “Who, me?” she’d say, and raise an eyebrow. “Oh, yes, I did grow up in a Midwest farm community. I certainly knew people who lived on farms. I even visited them sometimes. Goodness. How could any civilized human live with those smells!”
At the end of her junior year at Midwest Christian, she had tried to ignore the insults from boys who didn’t like her. She might have been all right in their eyes if she were just a star athlete, but she was an A-student star athlete—a combination that they couldn’t handle, so they had retaliated with the only weapon they had: name-calling insults. “Ass and a beanpole.” She knew she wasn’t the first lean female to get the label, and she was sure the labelers didn’t have the brains to invent it. At the time, she thought it wasn’t bothering her much. She had thought, “At least I have a brain at the top of my beanpole,” but over her dateless summer, the label chipped away at her confidence. Maybe I am unattractive. Maybe I look as stupid as they really are.
She granted that there were bigger issues in the fall of 1999 than her pathetic appearance. The dire fantasies about Y2K were not only coming from her mother: the entire Dutch Center community had more than its share of people who were totally convinced that something terrible was going to happen at the turn of the century. “God moves in two-thousand-year increments” was the common declaration. “Something big is going to happen!”
Something big is always happening, Alice thought. How about the collapse of the farm economy? How about a feedlot full of bloating Chester Whites? How about the fact that we are probably going broke on our farm? But her family’s money troubles and the money troubles most farm families were having in the fall of’99 were lost in the barrage of Y2K talk, and farm families worrying about their survival made easy prey for the religious fearmongers of Dutch Center who ignored the fact that the stock market was soaring and Microsoft and Apple were breaking records every week. The wild profits told the wackos that the devil was distracting people with filthy lucre while the end drew near. Though some investors somewhere were making millions as the millennium approached, on the farm market-ready hogs were selling for the price of a carton of cigarettes and driving people like Ben Van Doods to his acts of desperation. The wackos had an explanation for bad farm prices too: it meant the Almighty was preparing people for the time when they would no longer have earthly needs.
Alice was smart, and she knew she was smart. Her grades told her she was smart and most of her teachers told her not only that she was smart, but that she was “promising, brilliant, disciplined, focused, goal oriented” and the whole long list of good-student attributes.
The one teacher whom Alice admired more than all the others put together was Miss Den Harmsel who taught the advanced English classes. Miss Den Harmsel rarely reminded Alice that she was smart, and she didn’t have to. Her expectations of Alice said it all. Miss Den Harmsel told Alice to read John Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath and Toni Morrison’s Beloved over the summer. “You’ve already read the Brontës, Austen, and Dickinson. You must read these Americans before college.”
Pleasing Miss Den Harmsel was one of Alice’s biggest summer pleasures—and there hadn’t been very many. She kept the books stashed in the haymow of the barn, sealed in a plastic bag and behind a bale against the south wall. This way she didn’t have to worry about her mother walking in on her while she was reading and telling her to go take care of Aldah. Alice already gave Aldah more time than her mother did, so it seemed only fair that she should steal some reading time while the steers were eating. She deserved private reading time—for her mind, for her education, for her future—and for Miss Den Harmsel who, perhaps even more than Lydia, knew that Alice was destined for bigger and better things than hog and cattle feedlots.
Being a model student was still no defense against the creeping fear that visited her at night when she tried to sleep. Worse than the fear that she looked like a country hick, she couldn’t keep the fanatical talk from sinking in: What if those wackos are right? What if the worst is yet to come? What if something really big was going to rain down upon them? She pictured clouds of fire coming from nowhere, devouring the wicked but leaving believers untouched as all of their friends and family rose from the grave incorruptible. Did she have to be on the reverend’s side to be among the incorruptible?
Alice wasn’t sure what she believed. She prayed because it gave her a feeling of relief and acceptance. Her prayers were sometimes pleas for whatever she wanted at the moment, but more often they were prayers of thanksgiving because in spite of everything bad going on in the world, she was the recipient of amazingly good fortune, though she wouldn’t use that word around the Rev because he said fortune was a heathen idea. Still she prayed, “Thank you, God, for giving me the strength and mind to deal with this big messy world.”
When she finished a prayer like that, she could hear her mother’s voice: “Thanking God for your superiority? When will you ever learn humility?”
6
By five in the afternoon of September 1, Alice was in a same-old same-old place in farm-girl hell. The scene was their cattle feedlot. Seventeen years on planet Earth and this is what it added up to: feeding two hundred thousand-pound steers on a sweltering afternoon. Horseflies buzzing through the stench of baked manure. Her copy of The Grapes of Wrath sitting on top of the control panel, tightly wrapped in plastic to protect it from corn and feed-supplement dust.
She stood at her workstation, a six-by-six-foot cubicle next to a towering white silo. This was the kitchen, the preparation room with its panel of switches on plywood boards. Switch number one started the rotating arm that scraped the corn silage from the silo, and switch number two started the auger that sent the silage rolling into an elongated mound down the center of a cement feed bunk. The odor of corn silage was not tantalizing but was lemon bath oil compared to the stench cloud that roamed the farmyard.
The moan and clatter of the augers brought the steers lumbering shaggily forward. They nudged themselves into rows to become intimate diners facing each other across the feed bunk. Silage was their first-course salad with its own vinegar dressing of fermented corn juice. The steers flicked each other’s ears while their noses smeared each other’s cheeks.
Switch number three started a smaller auger that corkscrewed a mixture of minerals into the cracked corn, and switch number four sent the combination streaming like crumbled corn bread over the silage. Enriched cracked corn equaled pounds gained equaled dollars. What she was doing was supposed to create the miracle that could save their farm: thick, juicy, expensive steaks for the rich.
Switches number five, six, and seven turned on the barn light, the silo light, and the big searchlight that could pull the curtain on darkness to expose any sick animals in the far corners of the feedlot. Switch number eight turned on a space heater directed at her feet and legs. She didn’t need the lights or the heater. The midday sun had driven the temperatures into the high nineties and was holding them in the mideighties. A scorcher of a day draped in a heavy blanket of humidity.
The churning auger spit bits of cracked corn in her face as it spread the golden color down the bunk. When she wiped her lip on her sleeve, the yellow dust mixed with her sweat looked like the slime collecting on the steers’ noses. She pulled at her shirt. Her sweat had plastered it to her neck and shoulders. She wiped her face again, then smeared what she’d gotten from her face onto her jeans. The heat heightened the scent of everything, but the smells of the silage and cracked corn were no defense against the hogyard stench that swam through the thick air and spread its sickening flavor a hundred yards from the hogyards to the cattle feedlots where she worked. A whole farmyard under a dome of bad air. She inhaled a mouthful with every breath. Hot stinky air. The smell would stay in her wet shirt like a bad aftertaste, and her breath would smell like hog crap.
She was quite capable of handling this scene without resentment. The agony came only when she imagined herself being watched by someone her age who attended an Eastern prep school. The preppy would see a gangly country hick, a measly laborer who at best listened to corny religious music and entered the Rice Krispies bar competition at the county fair. She watched her hands working—the grime under her fingernails and the hard calluses on her fingers. No wonder people who worked on farms were called farmhands. The hands said it all: her hands were who she was.
Looking at her hands led her to the rest of the stinky truth of her life. Sweat had turned her light blue shirt into a dark blue. Sweat dripped off her lip and trickled down her neck under her ear. Sweat was a friend and a bother. She gave it credit for opening her pores and keeping her skin cool, but it was also busy soaking things in. Sweat as sponge. It sucked in dust. Dirt dust. Corn dust. Mineral dust. Dried steer manure dust. Steer dandruff dust. And it sucked in smells, the whole barnyard smorgasbord of vaporized manure and silage and tractor diesel fuel. It probably sucked in the smell of steer breath. Then that awful itch when the intense heat slathered them all together. The back of her neck itched. The top of her head itched. She resisted scratching her head because she didn’t want her dirty hands to make her hair dirtier. Trying to think of something besides the itch just turned it into a herd of ants moving down her back. The worst thing was that she knew the tracks of sweat were leaving tracks of bad smells all over her body. Her only comfort—and it was an uncomfortable comfort—was knowing she wouldn’t be near any Romeo in the next twenty-four hours. Perhaps things would change in the romance department once school started and she’d given herself a good fall cleanup.
