Vampires in the Lemon Grove

Proving Up

“Go tack up, Miles!” says Mr. Johannes Zegner of the Blue Sink Zegners, pioneer of the tallgrass prairie and future owner of 160 acres of Nebraska. In most weathers, I am permitted to call him Pa.

“See if your mother’s got the Window ready. The Inspector is coming tonight. He’s already on the train, can you imagine!”

A thrill moves in me; if I had a tail I would shake it. So I will have to leave within the hour, and ride quickly — because if the one-eyed Inspector really is getting off at the spur line in Beatrice, he’ll hire a stagecoach and be halfway to the Hox River Settlement by one o’clock; he could be at our farm by nightfall! I think Jesus Himself would cause less of a stir stepping off that train; He’d find a tough bunch to impress in this droughty place, with no water anywhere for Him to walk on.

“Miles, listen fast,” Pa continues. “Your brother is coming—”

Sure enough, Peter is galumphing toward us through the puddled glow of the winter wheat. It came in too sparse this year to make a crop, wisping out of the sod like the thin blond hairs on Pa’s hand. My father has the “settler’s scar,” a pink star scored into the brown leather of his palm by the handle of the moldboard plow. Peter’s got one, too, a raw brand behind his knuckles that never heals — and so will I when I prove up as a man. (As yet I am the Zegner runt, with eleven years to my name and only five of those West; I cannot grow a beard any quicker than Mr. Johannes can conjure wheat, but I can ride.)

Pa kneels low and clasps his dirt-colored hands onto my shoulders. “Your brother is coming, but it’s you I want to send to our neighbors in need. Boy, it’s you. I trust you on a horse. I know you’ll tend to that Window as if it were your own life.”

“I will, sir.”

“I just got word from Bud Sticksel — you got two stops. The Inspector’s making two visits. The Florissants and then the Sticksels. Let’s pray he keeps to that schedule, anyhow, because if he decides to go to the Sticksels first …”

I shiver and nod, imagining the Sticksels’ stricken faces in their hole.

“The Sticksels don’t have one shard of glass. You cannot fail them, Miles.”

“I know, Pa.”

“And once they prove up, you know what to do?”

“Yes, Pa. This time I will—”

“You take the Window back. Bundle it in burlap. Get Bud’s wife to help. Then you push that Inspector’s toes into stirrups — do unto others, Miles — and you bring that man to our door.”

“But what if the Inspector sees me reclaiming the Window from Mr. Sticksel? He’ll know how we fooled him. Won’t he cancel their title?”

Pa looks at me hard, and I can hear the gears in his head clicking. “You want to be a man, don’t you, Miles?”

“Yes, sir. Very much.”

“So use your wits, son. Some sleight of hand. I can’t think of everything.”

Increasingly time matters. I can feel it speeding up in my chest, in rhythm with my pounding heart. A flock of cliff swallows lifts off the grassy bank of our house, and my eyes fly with them into the gray light.

“Hey,” says Peter. He comes up behind me and shovels my head under his arm — he smells sour, all vinegary sweat and bones. “What’s this fuss?”

So Pa has to explain again that when the sun next rises, we’ll have our autographed title. Peter’s grin is as wide and handsome and full of teeth as our father’s, and I smile into the mirror they make.

“Tomorrow?”

“Or even tonight.”

Behind them, Ma seeps out of the dugout in her blue dress. She sees us gathered and runs down the powdery furrow like a tear — I think she would turn to water if she could.

No rain on our land since the seventh of September. That midnight we got half an inch and Pa drilled in the wheat at dawn. Most of it cooked in the ground; what came up has got only two or three leaves to a plant. Last week the stalks started turning ivory, like pieces of light. “Water,” Pa growls at the blue mouth of heaven — the one mouth distant enough to ignore his fists.

He mutters that this weather will dry us all to tinder, lightning fodder, and he’s spent every day since that last glorious hour of rainfall plowing firebreaks until he’s too tired to stand. Ma’s begun to talk to the shriveling sheaves in a crazy way, as if they were her thousand thirsty children. My brother pretends not to hear her.

“Inspection day,” Pa booms at Ma’s approach. “He’s on the train now.”

“The Inspector? Says who? Who thinks they’re proving up?”

“Bud says. And we are. Daniel Florissant, Bud, the Zegners.”

Pa leans in as if to kiss her, whispering; she unlatches her ear from his mouth.

“No! Are you crazy, Jo? The Inspector is a rumor, he’s smoke! I can make you a promise: no such person is ever coming out here. How long do we have to wait before you believe that? A decade? What you want to risk—” She looks over at me and her voice gets quieter.

A silence falls over the Zegner family homestead, which Pa splits with his thundering hymn:

“You faithless woman! How can you talk like that after we have lived on this land for five years? Built our home here, held out through drought and hail, through locusts, Vera—”

Peter is nodding along. I have to tiptoe around the half-moon of my family to get to the sod barn. As I tack up Nore I can hear Ma worrying my father: “Oh, I am not deaf, I hear you lying to our child—‘It’s verified.’ ”

“Bud Sticksel is no liar,” I reassure Nore’s quivering rump. “Don’t be scared. Ma’s crazy. We’ll find the Inspector.”

After the defections and deaths of several settlers, the Sticksels have become our closest neighbors. Their farm is eighteen miles away. Bud used to work as a hired hand in Salmon, Ohio, says Pa. Came here the same year as our family, 1872. He’s an eyeblink from being eligible to prove up and get his section title: 1. Bud’s land by the lake is in grain. 2. He’s put a claim shanty on the property, ten feet by twenty. 3. He has resided on his land for five years, held on through four shining seasons of drought. (“Where is God’s rain?” Mrs. Sticksel murmurs to Ma.) 4. He has raised sixty acres of emerald lucerne, two beautiful daughters, and thirty evil turkeys that have heads like scratched mosquito bites. The Sticksels have met every Homestead Act requirement save one, its final strangeness, what Pa calls “the wink in the bureaucrats’ wall”: a glass window.

Farther south, on the new rail lines, barbed wire and crystal lamps and precut shingles fire in on the freight trains, but in the Hox River Settlement a leaded pane is as yet an unimaginable good. Almost rarer than the rain. Yet all the Hox settlers have left holes in the walls of their sod houses, squares and ovals where they intend to put their future windows. Some use waxed paper to cover these openings; the Sticksels curtained up with an oiled buffalo skin. The one time I slept at their dugout that hide flapped all night like it was trying to talk to me: Blab blab blab.

“I know you don’t belong here,” I replied — I was sympathetic—“but there isn’t any glass for that empty place. There’s one Window in this blue-gray ocean of tallgrass, and it’s ours.”

“Now, Miles,” both my parents preach at me continually, in the same tone with which they recite the wishful Bible rules, “you know the Window must benefit every settler out here. We are only its stewards.” Pa long ago christened it the Hox River Window and swore it to any claimant in need. (I sometimes think my parents use me to stimulate goodness and to remind themselves of this oath, the same way I untangle my greedy thoughts by talking to the animals, Louma and Nore — because it’s easy to catch oneself wanting to hoard all the prairie’s violet light on the Hox panes.) He says our own walls cannot wear the Window until we prove up — it’s too precious, too fragile. So we keep it hidden in the sod cave like a diamond.

Our house is a dugout in a grassy hill — I’ve sent three letters to my cross-eyed Cousin Bailey in Blue Sink, Pennsylvania, and in each one I fail to explain our new house to his satisfaction. Cousin Bailey uses his fingers to sum numbers; once he asked me if the winged angels in heaven eat birdseed or “man-food” like chocolate pie. The idea of a house made of sod defeats him. He writes back with questions about bedrooms and doors, closets and attics. “No, Bailey, we live in one room,” I reply impatiently. “A ball of pure earth. Not enough timber for building walls on the prairie so we dug right into the sod. It’s a cave, where we now live.”

“A grave,” says Peter, a joke I don’t like one bit. It’s our home, although it does look like a hiccup in the earth. The floor is sod, the roof is sod, hardened by the red Nebraska sun — if it ever rains again, water will sheet in on our heads for days. The mattress sits on a raised cage of wild plum poles. My mother covers the cookstove with her mother’s pilled linen tablecloth to keep the lizards and field mice and moles and rattlesnakes and yellow spiders from falling into our supper. (Although she threatens to pull the cloth if we get cheated out of another harvest, and let every plaguey creature into our soup: “The wheat’s not getting any taller, Jo, but our boys are. They need meat.”)

Pa and Peter and I dug out the room. Pa used the breaking plow to sculpt the sod into six-inch slabs of what folks here call Nebraska marble. He stacked these into our walls, arranging each third layer in a cross-grained pattern with the grass side down. In summer, this room can get as hot as the held breath of the world. We dug a sod stable for the team of horses, the hogs, and Louma, our heat-demented cow. She’s got the Hereford lightning up her red flanks — it looks like somebody nailed her with a bucket of scalding paint. She chews slop with a look of ancient shock, her vexed eyes staring out from a white face. In truth, her eyes look a little like Ma’s.

My horse is Nore, who I’ve been riding since she was a two-year-old filly. She’s jet-black and broody and doesn’t fit with my father’s team. Up on her back I’m taller than any man out here, taller than a pancake stack of Peters. I saddle Nore, explain the day to her, her ears flattening at the word Inspector.

Behind the stalls, my father is shaking my mother like a doll.

“He’s a rumor, huh? Then I’m going to shove the fellow’s arms through the coat sleeves of that rumor! He’s real, and so are we Zegners. By sunrise we’ll own our home, if you can muster faith. Faith the size of one — damn! One seed of some kind. It moves mountains. How’s that go, Vera, in the Bible? Apple? Pumpkin?”

“It’s a mustard seed, Jo. Yahweh is not baking any pies.” Ma’s voice is shaking now, too. “Miles is eleven years old,” she says slowly. “The Sticksels are a half day’s ride for you …”

Pa catches sight of me, and I duck his gaze. I hope he shakes the looniness right out of her. I’m ready to ride.

Ma never yells at me. But lately her voice is dreadful even when it’s cheerful, singing out of the well mouth of our house. Hoarse, so that it sounds as if the very sod is gargling sand. She’s not sick, or no sicker than anybody else — it’s the dust. I hate the strain in her voice as she tries to make a happy tune for me and my brother, when her yellowish eyes are sunk deep in her face and every long note she holds shoves her ribs through her dress. She hasn’t been fat for two years.

I was the last Zegner born in Pennsylvania. The three girls were born here, and buried in a little plot under the tufting gama grass, next to the sixty acres we have in wheat. Aside from salt thistle and the big sunflowers in July, nothing grows on top of the girls. Ma won’t allow it. She’s of the opinion that each of her daughters would have lived had we stayed in Blue Sink. Long-nosed and blue-eyed—“like you, Miles.” Tall and pin-thin, like the women in her family.

That’s how my sisters look to me, too. Glowing taller and taller. White legs twining moonward, like swords of wheat. They sprout after dark. Some nights the heat is suffocating and it wakes me. Through the hole in our kitchen where the Window will go I watch my mother kneeling in their field, weeding thistle. The three sisters sway behind her back. They stare at me with their hundred-year-old faces. They know they missed their chance to be girls. The middle one smiles at me, and her white teeth outshine the harrow. She gives me a little wave. I wonder if she knows I’m her brother.

When red dawn comes Ma’s at the cookstove with her face to the leaping flame, and I’m afraid to ask her if I was dreaming.

I cannot tell Pa or Peter about the sisters, of course. And not Nore — she’s a horse, she spooks. Lately I won’t even pray on it, because what if God tells them up in heaven that I’m terrified to meet them? Sometimes I talk to the pig, who’ll be butchered anyhow come Christmas Eve.

“I’ll be fine, Ma.”

“He’ll be fine.”

“Jo!”

“Do you want me to send Peter, then?” Pa says coolly.

“Oh, Jo. He can’t. You know that.” Ma chews at her lip, Louma-like.

Something is going wrong with my brother. He’s not reliable. A few weeks ago, when the clouds dispersed again without releasing one drop of rain, he disappeared for three days; when he rode home his hands were wet. “Not my blood,” he reassured Pa. Ma sent me on the four-mile walk to the well to haul for a bath, even though our washing day wasn’t until the following Wednesday, and we boys go last — after a draw for drinking and cooking, after a draw for the garden.

Peter is sixteen, but that night he let Ma sponge the black blood off him like a child, and I almost cried like a kid myself when he splashed clean water in waves over the sides of the trough.

I am a little afraid of my brother.

“I’ll go, then.” Pa’s whole body draws back like a viper in its gold burnoose. I close my eyes and see the shadow of his secret self throbbing along the wall of our sod barn: his head rolling to its own music and sloshing with poisons. Even in the quiet I can hear him rattling.

“Jo.”

“No, sweetheart, you’re right. Pete can’t go, we can’t spare Miles — who does that leave? I go or we forfeit our chance. We don’t prove up. We don’t own the land where our girls are buried.”

Ma leaves to get the Window.

We nightly pray for everyone in Hox to prove up, the titles from the Land Office framed on their walls. The purple and scarlet tongue of my mother’s bookmark used to move around the Bible chapters with the weather, but for the past year and a half it’s been stuck on Psalm 68:9. On that page, says Ma, it rains reliably.

Through the empty socket in our sod, I can see her hunched over in the deepest shadows. Dust whirls around the floor in little twisters, scraping her ankles raw. She bends over the glass, and a rail of vertebrae jumps out. My mother is thirty-one years old, but the land out here paints old age onto her. All day she travels this room, sweeping a floor that is already dirt, scrubbing the dinner plates into white ovals, shaking out rugs. Ma is humming a stubborn song and won’t look up from the Window on her lap. She polishes the glass by licking the end of her braid into a fine point and whisking it over the surface, like a watercolorist. Now the Window is the only clean thing in our house. It’s the size of a hanging painting, with an inch border of stained glass. Two channeled lead strips run orange and jewel-blue light around it. But the inner panels are the most beautiful, I think: perfectly transparent.

Ma wraps it in some scatter rugs and penny burlap. “Good-bye, Miles,” she says simply.

We fix my cargo to the horse’s flank, half a dozen ropes raveling to one knot at the saddle horn. Pa hitches my leg at a painful angle, warns me not to put weight anywhere near the Window. Already I’m eager for the crystal risk of riding at a gallop. Then he gives me an envelope and kisses up to my ear like he does Ma’s. “A little bribe,” he says. “Tell the Inspector there’s more waiting at the Zegner place.”

“Okay.” I frown. “Is there?”

Pa thumps Nore on the rump.

When we reach the fence line a very bad thought occurs to me: “Pa! What if they don’t give the Window back?” I call out. “The Sticksels — what if they try to keep it?”

“Then you’d better run fast, because those aren’t our neighbors. Those are monsters, pretending to be the Sticksels. But before you run, grab the Window.”

I might as well have asked him, What if Ma leaves us? What if Peter never gets better?

I don’t look back as I glide Nore around the oak — the only tree for miles of prairie. The wind blows us forward, sends the last leaves raining around us and the October clouds flashing like horseshoes. I duck underneath the branches and touch the lowermost one for luck. When I turn to salute my father, I see that he and Ma are swaying together in the stunted wheat like a dance, his big hands tight around the spindle of her waist and her face buried in his neck, her black hair waterfalling across the caked grime on his shirt. It’s only later that I realize Ma was sobbing.

THE FIRST FAMILY of landowners we met in Nebraska were the Henry Yotherses. Five years ago, a few weeks after our migration to the Hox River Settlement, we arrived at their July picnic “one hour shy of serendipity,” as Mrs. Yothers immediately announced — too late but only just to meet the Inspector. I was a pipsqueak then, and so I remember everything: the glowering sunset and an army of Turkey Red wheat mustered by the Yotherses to support their claim, the whaleback hump of the sod house rising above the grassy sea — and Mr. Henry Yothers himself, a new king in possession of his title.

“A proven man,” Pa whistled.

“Christ in heaven, love must glue you to him every fortnight,” Ma joked to Mrs. Yothers — but in a hushed voice, surrounded as they were by what seemed like thousands of Yothers children. Ten thousand tiny mouths feeding on that quarter section of land, and dressed for the occasion like midget undertakers, in black trousers and bowties.

“That Inspector shook each of my children’s hands,” boasted Henry Yothers. “Congratulated each one of them on being ‘landed gentry.’ He’s a curious fellow, Johannes. Lost an eye in the war. He wears a patch of dark green silk over the socket. It’s no coincidence, I’m sure, that he’s obsessed with the Glass Requirement.”

And then we got our first look at the Hox River Window: that magical glass fusing their inner room to the outside world, gracing their home with light. Back in Blue Sink there were thousands of windows, but we only looked through them, never at them. We gasped.

Remembering this, I feel queasy all over again. Something about the big grins on everybody’s faces, and all that pomp: the Inspector’s checklist, the ten-dollar filing fee, the U.S. president’s counterfeit autograph in an inky loop. Through the glass we watched Mrs. Yothers slide the title into its birch frame and dutifully applauded. The general mood confused me. We were going to slave and starve and wait five years to get a piece of paper so thin? Why? To prove what? Who cares what Washington, D.C., thinks?

“Congratulations!” my mother beamed at Mrs. Yothers, with a girlishness I’d never seen before, and then embarrassed us all by bursting into tears. “Oh, boys, they proved it to them.”

“To who?”

“Who? Everybody, Miles! The people back East, who said they’d never make it a year on the frontier. The men in Washington. The Inspector will forward their papers on to the president himself. Now you come say a prayer with me—”

Back then, Ma never mentioned Pennsylvania except to say “good riddance.” We’d traveled west under juicy clouds that clustered like grapes. My sisters weren’t alive in her belly or dead under the thistle and sod. Our plow gleamed. Furniture from Blue Sink was still in boxes.

“Miles, if we’re to make this place our home, we need it official. Same as any claimant out here. You can’t understand that?”

With Pa out of earshot, I said, “No, ma’am. I really cannot.”

“The Yotherses survived the grasshoppers of 1868, got hailed out twice, burned corn for fuel. They took over from the Nune-makers. Did you know that, Miles? A bunch that fled. But the Henry Yothers family prevailed — they held on to their claim. Your heart’s so stingy you can’t celebrate that?”

But, Ma, I wanted to say. Because I guessed that a few hours earlier, before the Inspection, the Yotherses’ farm had looked no different from the proven place we’d leave — with the same children running barefoot around their cave, and in the distance the same wheat blowing. And the whole scene sliding through that Window, as real or as unreal as it had ever been.

WHAT WE DIDN’T know then, as we filed our own preempt in the white beehive of the Federal Land Office: the long droughts were coming. Since that July day, over half the Hox River homesteaders have forfeited their claims and left, dozens of families withdrawing back east. And the men and women who stayed, says Pa with teeth in his words, who sowed and abided, “We are the victors, Miles. Our roots reach deep. We Zegners were green when we came here, but now we’re dust brown, the color of Hox. Proving up means you stand your ground, you win your title — a hundred and sixty acres go from public to private. Clear and free, you hold it. Nobody can ever run you off. It’s home.”

Over the years, my father’s reasoning has been whittled to its core, like everything else out here. At times he wanders around our homestead shouting at random intervals, “I know a hunger stronger than thirst!” His voice booms like thunder in my brain as we light out. Nore digs into the dry earth, happy to be running.

“Nore?” Like Pa, I whisper into the pink cone of her ear. “We’ll get the Inspector, but I’ll tell you a secret: I don’t understand why they need that piece of paper. This place has been home for years.”

AT FIRST it is a fine morning. Nore strikes a square trot and I goose her to a canter. Pocket gophers and kangaroo rats scramble in front of our lunging shadow; the horned larks are singing in the grasses, plumping like vain old Minister Fudd back in Blue Sink. Soon nothing but crimson bluestem is blazing all around us. Coyotes go mousing in this meadow but today I count none. Twice I have seen eagles back here. Three miles of dead grass pass, tickling Nore’s hindquarters. Whenever she sneezes I let go of the reins and grab ahold of the Window’s wrought-iron frame, which feels as slender and bony as a deer’s leg through the burlap case. Pa could have a million sons and none would be a better steward.

We sink into the tallgrass, happy to get swallowed and escape the midday sun. But when we emerge the sky is seamless and black, and the last yellow stitching goes dark. Something is shifting, I think. We reach a timber belt of cottonwood and Siberian elms — species not uncommon to Nebraska, yet I’ve never seen examples of such overpowering heights. Atmospheric salts spill through the air as birds scatter in fantastic numbers before us. The charge pucks the horse’s huge nostrils, causes her devil’s ears to cup around. A chill races down her bony shoulders and prickles up my neck. Between noon and one o’clock, the temperature must plummet some twenty degrees. A sound I barely recognize claps in the distance. “Oh, Nore,” I mumble into her ear, sick with hope. The black sky grows blacker still.

Rain?

I dig into her soft belly too meanly, as if the moons of my spurs could burst the clouds, and maybe they can: The miracle sounds again as if the sky’s been shot, and rain gushes all over us. Unstoppably, like blood from a body. I stick out my tongue to catch it. Over my scalp and Nore’s coarse hair it runs and glimmers, crystal clear and clean. Sheets of water hammer the tallgrass flat, and we go whooping on, Nore and I whinnying in a duet:

Rain! Rain! Rain!

Deeper into the storm I begin to get a picture in my mind of water flooding down the Hox glass. Rain shining the Window. “Oh, God, I want to see that, Nore,” I whisper to her. It’s a scene I’ve imagined a thousand times through all the dry years.

I slow her to a stop and dismount. The red stump I use as Nore’s hitching post is boiling with water; she stares at me, her great eyes running. I undo the knot, loosen the burlap. Rain soaks over my trembling hands; I move the scatter rugs and expose a triangle of the Hox glass. The first drop hits with a beautiful plink, and I feel like an artist. Soon this corner of the Window is jeweled with water, and I uncover the rest of the glass, floating the whole blurred world through it.

I close my eyes and see my mother and father drenched outside the soddy, still dancing but joyously now; Louma in the barn rolling her twinkling eyes at real lightning; the sod crumbling from our ceiling; the house turning into a mudslide. We’ll sleep outdoors and watch the wheat growing and leafing, heading out and reseeding. I angle the Window and funnel the cold rain onto my boot toes. Feelings billow and surge in me to a phenomenal height, a green joy that I wish I could share with my mother.

By now a whole river must have fallen out of heaven and into the sod, and I don’t know how long I’ve been standing here. Then I look up and see it’s not only rainfall sweeping over the prairie: a shape slips through the bluestem just ahead of us, disappears.

“Mr. Florissant?”

But the Florissant claim is still an hour from us at a gallop. And if that shape belonged to Daniel Florissant, well, he has changed considerably since the Easter picnic.

Quickly I rebundle and rope up the Window and get astride Nore, wishing for Peter’s.22 rifle or even a pocketknife as I scan the ground for flat rocks, sticks.

“Hello?”

The black figure is moving through the switchgrass. I turn Nore around and try to give chase until I realize it’s not escaping through the rain at all but rather circling us, like a hawk or the hand of a clock.

“Mr. Florissant? Is that you?” I swallow. “Inspector …?”

I wheel inside the shadow’s wheeling, each of us moving against the rotation of the other like cogs, the stranger occasionally walking into sight and then vanishing again; and if he is the Inspector, he does not seem in any hurry to meet me. Perhaps this is part of some extra test — as if our patience requires further proof. Five years, three daughters, half an inch of rain, and no wheat crop last winter — even Cousin Bailey can sum those numbers. “Inspector!” I holler again over the thunder. Nore trembles, and I imagine that she, too, can feel the pull of this fellow’s gaze, the noose he’s drawing around us.

I realize that I’m shivering out of my clothes, my hands raw. Then a cold flake hits my nose. The rain is turning to snow.

Can a blizzard strike this early, in late October? Does that happen on the prairie? Immediately I regret putting the question to the sky, which seems eager to answer, suddenly very attentive to the questions of humans. “Run, Nore,” I tell her. We still have to pass the Yotherses’ place.

ONLY I KNOW where the Hox River Window really came from. Pa told me by accident after a pint of beer and made me pledge my silence. It’s a scary story: One December night, almost two years ago now, we believed the Inspector was coming to visit our farm. We were eighteen months short of the residency requirement, and we had no window. Frantic, Pa rode out to the Yotherses’ to beg for a square of glass and found their claim abandoned.

Tack was scattered all over the barn floor. Outside, three half-starved Sauceman hogs were masticating the pale red fibers of Mrs. Yothers’s dress; piles of clothing lay trampled into the sod — bouquets of children’s bow ties. The dugout was dark. A family of spotted black jackrabbits were licking their long feet under the table. A tarantula had closed around the bedpost like a small, gloved hand. The Window was still shining in the wall.

So Pa took it. He rode home and told Ma that he’d bartered for the Window from a man moving back to ranch West Texas.

What a whopper! I thought, and almost laughed out loud, guessing that Pa must be teasing us. Straightaway I’d recognized our neighbors’ glass.

I waited for Ma to dispute the story, yet she surprised me by breathing, “Oh, thank you—” in a little girl’s voice and reaching out to the Window with dreamy eyes. Peter, too, chuckled softly and touched the glass like it was a piece of new luck, and no one ever mentioned our friends the Yotherses again. As we carried the Window down to our dugout in a Zegner parade — Ma singing and Peter’s smile lighting even his eyes — those thousand kids were everywhere in my imagination, asking me why I kept quiet, asking why I was trying with all my might to forget them.

To me only, Pa confessed to coveting their title, still posted on the dirt wall — but he took the Window instead, not wanting to risk our own claim by squatting on another man’s haunted land. This scared me worse than anything else: Who would leave 160 acres to which they held title? What happened to them? “What’s the difference, Miles?” My father had drunk himself into a moon-squint, his eyes glowing crescents. “Dead is gone.”

Now whenever he mentions “West Texas,” he winks at me, and I think of my sisters under the sod, silently winking back.

“What puzzles me, Miles,” he slurred at the end of the night, “is that before he left, Mr. Yothers had drilled in a new crop. At first I saw the rows behind the wheat and thought, Ah, Henry knows how starved we are for timber, he’s planted trees—dozens of queer little trees, shaped like crosses. Just a single branch right through their middles. Saplings, sure. Only one grew about a foot and a half, and the rest were much smaller. The thin trunks were the funniest shade of milky white, my son, like no tree’s wood I’ve ever seen; and there wasn’t a leaf in that bleached grove. And who plants anything in the dead of winter, in frozen ground? On my knees I discovered that each horizontal branch was roped to its base by a hitching knot, and these white branches were knobby at the ends, almost like animal — or even human …”

But Pa saw my face and trailed off, and soon he began to snore, and I was left alone to fret over his riddle. Now I think we must be very near to this milky white grove, and I am grateful for the dark sky and the snowflakes on Nore’s reins — because there is no time for me to dismount and wander into the rows, to prove my guess right or wrong.

Forgive us, forgive us, I think as I race Nore past the Yotherses’ bleak dugout, where the empty window frame leers on, and snow swirls in lovely patterns.

We detour five miles around a carmine streambed filled with ice, where dozens of black snakes draw S shapes like a slow, strange current, spooking Nore; and afterward I’m no longer sure of our direction. Like us, the sun is lost. The temperature continues to fall. We come upon a dam I’ve never seen, the Window rattling like a saber against Nore’s belly.

“Oh, God, where are we, Nore?” I coax her up a low hill, and it’s around then that the blizzard hits.

The wind attacks our naked skin like knives; I can nearly hear Ma’s voice in it, calling me home. But I’m too brave to turn the horse around, and anyhow I wouldn’t know which way to go. White octaves of snow shriek from the tallgrass to the great descending blank of the heavens. “Go, go, go,” I moan into Nore’s ear, wanting her to decide. A part of me is already at the Florissants’, warming up by the fire, sharing a meal of drumsticks and cider and biscuits with the Inspector. Their title drying on the kitchen table. “Well, sir,” I tell him, “we did have a little trouble getting here, but it was certainly worth the risk …” A choke-cherry branch cuts my left eyelid, and the eye fills with blood. The more I rub at it the denser the red gel gets. Outside of my mind I can barely see. We go flickering through the snow, until it becomes difficult to say which colors and temperatures are inner or outer weather, where one leaves off and the other picks up. I tighten my knee’s grip on the Window frame. When Nore breaks into a gallop I drop the reins and grab her neck. Snow is eating our tracks: when I look back, it’s as if we no longer exist.

She shoots through the tempest like an arrow for its target, and I think, Thank God, she must smell a barn—but when her jaw jerks around, I see that ice coats her eyes. She’s been galloping completely blind.

I am sure we’re being punished — I should never have unwrapped the Window, not even for one second. Snow pummels us with its million knuckles. “Oh, my darling, oh, poor darling,” I tell Nore — I don’t recognize my own voice anymore; Peter would caw with laughter if he could hear my tone, my father would be sickened—“Nore, my sweet one, my love …” Tender words pour out of me, my grandmother Aura’s words, the kind I haven’t heard since she spoke them on the cousins’ rose sofa in Blue Sink, and I wish I could use them like a compass needle to lead me back.

I grab ahold of the bridle and tug Nore forward with the wind at our backs, blowing more snow in on gales. I think of trying to guide her by the reins, but the snow’s banked too deep to walk. Nore’s sides heave, covered in freezing lather. Her eyelashes are stiff. I can’t feel my toes inside my boots.

The horse keeps going blind, and I can’t stop it — the ice coating the dark circles of her purply-black eyes. She moans whenever I attempt to pry and crack them clear. The reins wriggle snakily down her back and she jumps sideways. Hatred shivers along her spine; I’ve got one eyelid in a pinch when she peels back her lips and tries to bite me but misses and rears. As if in slow motion I watch the Window coming loose, thumping against her side in the snow-furred burlap; I feel myself rolling, falling out of the saddle and somehow beneath her churning hooves, reaching up as the Window slides slantwise, one point angled at my chest — and then I’m lying in the snow with the Window in my arms, stunned, watching as Nore disappears.

Now I understand: this is a nightmare. She flies into the white heart of the storm while I pant all raggedy in the drifts with the Window hard against my chest, sucking my frozen thumb. Screaming turns out to be an agility I’ve taken for granted; “Nore,” I try to shout, but hear nothing. For one moment more I can see her running: a black match head tearing against a wall of snow. It’s a wonder the gales don’t catch alight and burn.

Mr. Inspector, sir, I hope you’re stuck in the weather, too. And, Mrs. Florissant, do not let us hold you up for dinner, please eat, and should you spy a man through the open socket in your wall, won’t you tell him that I’m lost …

Suddenly I realize what I’m holding on to — did I shatter it? I’m terrified to look. (What I see instead is Louma’s skeleton in dust, my fingers threading through the open sockets in her skull.) As I pry at the burlap I learn something surprising about my future, something I hadn’t guessed: If the Hox glass is in pieces, I won’t ever go back home. I’d rather die here than return to our dugout without it.

Oh, Father, thank you—it’s intact. I push my palms down the smooth length of it twice before sealing the burlap, then roll onto my back. High above me the black sky withdraws forever into an upside-down horizon — not a blue prairie line but a cone of snows. Wind wolves go on howling. Each of my eyelids feels heavier than iron, but sleep isn’t what’s beckoning me; the snow is teaching me a deeper way to breathe: long spaces open up behind each inhalation, followed by a very colorful spell of coughing. There’s blood on the back of my hand — I knocked loose several teeth when I fell. One is lying near my left eye in its own smeary puddle. Snow falls and falls. Tomorrow, I think, the thirsty sod will drink this storm up, guzzle the red runoff from my chin. Acres of gold wheat wave at me from the future: March, April.

Hold on to your claim, Pa hisses, and I wipe my eyes.

What am I supposed to be doing out here again? Where am I taking the glass? And wasn’t there a horse? For the life of me I cannot remember the horse’s name.

More than anything I want to get the Window through the storm. I crouch over the burlap like something feeding — my skin becoming one more layer of protection for the glass. Soon my clothes are soaked through. The elements seal my eyes, so that I have to keep watch over the Window blindly with my arms. I clutch at it like a raft as the prairie pitches in icy waves. Images swirl through my mind of animals freezing in their stalls, black fingers lost to doctors’ saws. Think of a Bible verse, a hymn! What enters my head instead is my mother’s humming, a weedy drone that has no tune. Hours pass, or maybe minutes or whole days; the clock of my body breaks down. The world is pitch-black.

WHEN I WAKE, water is running in spring rivers down my face; my eyelids unravel and crack open. The temperature has risen, and a sunbeam fixes an X on my hand, which burns when I flex it. The hard pillow of the Window comes into focus under my cheek. I turn my head and find I’m surrounded by leafless skeletons of trees and the sapphire ice — and a man, watching me.

I sit up. Fifty yards ahead, a willowy man takes one sideways step through the golden haze and is somehow suddenly upon me. I’m saved! I think — but just as quickly my cry for help dissolves. This man looks even worse off than me. His gaunt face is entirely black except for the wet cracks of his eyes and mouth and pink lesions on his cheeks, as if he has just survived some kind of explosion. At first I think the skin is charred, but then the light gives it a riverbed glow and I realize he’s covered in mud — soil, sod. His shirt and trousers are stiff with the same black filth, and the dirt on his collar isn’t dried at all, but oozing. A dim saucer at each knee shows he’s been genuflecting in the fields. Only, what sort of man is out farming in a blizzard? Not even my father is that crazy. What would drive a person into this weather?

He shuffles toward me, removing his hat.

“Inspector?”

We shout this at the exact same moment. Then we’re left to gape at each other. White frogs of breath leap from my mouth. He doesn’t seem to breathe at all.

“Hello, sir,” I manage, and hold out a numb hand. The feeling returns to my stiff arm, and I bite down as pain rips along the bone — the polite smile, by some miracle, still on my face. “I guess we are both mistaken, sir.” (“Etiquette will take possession of you at the oddest times, won’t it, Miles?” Ma murmured once, when I caught her apologizing to a cupful of grasshoppers before drowning them in kerosene.)

Well, the stranger doesn’t return any of my friendliness. I’m Miles Zegner, I was about to offer, but I swallow it back. And I don’t ask for his name, either; a queasiness stirring in my gut warns me that I might not want to know it.

I’m certain that I’ve never seen this man on any homestead around here — but he’s dressed for the work, with his cuffs pushed to the elbows like any man in Hox; and like Pa he has the settler’s scar from the moldboard plow. He’s a southpaw. A sodbuster. One of us. A newcomer to the Hox River Settlement? (No, no, a little voice in me whispers, not new.) His eyes have the half-moon markings of a pronghorn antelope. He looks like he’s been awake for generations.

“You did not see a horse come through here, sir?”

“No horses. No Inspectors on horseback. No bats hanging from Inspectors’ noses.” He giggles.

“Are you all right, sir? Are you lost, too?”

Then the man says something in a jangly tone that I can barely understand, it’s so reedy and high. His voice is almost female, or animal, and the words make no sense whatsoever.

“Green me that wheel!”

“Pardon, sir?”

“Grease me that doe!”

I swallow hard.

“Sir, I am not understanding you.”

He draws a rectangle in the snow-dotted air and laughs; I swear I see a nugget of earth tumble out of his mouth. His lips are plush and smeared.

“But we need to wake up now, don’t we, boy? This is quite a day! It sounds like you and I are on the hunt for the same fellow. The Inspector is coming shortly, you see. Yes. I believe that he will be coming very soon.”

A fine gray ash is blowing from his curly hair, which looks like it is or once might have been yellow. The wind shifts and my nose wrinkles — there’s a smell, a putrescence, a mix of silage and marrow and a hideous sweetness, like the time a family of rats suffocated in our sod walls. One hand keeps fussing with his trousers, which he’s belted with a double loop of rope — his rib cage is almost impossibly narrow. If he were any thinner I swear he’d disappear. My mother’s voice drifts into my ear: “He’s a rumor, he’s smoke …” But his eyes are solid marbles, and his fingernails are real enough to be broken. His left hand closes on the handle of a hay knife.

“That’s a beautiful knife.”

He smiles at me.

“And you say you are also”—I cough—“waiting on the Inspector? You’ve been here for the five years, then?”

The handle of the knife is some kind of clover-toned wood. The blade looks like a long tooth.

“Oh!” The man laughs. “Even longer. Long enough to lose track of the days and seasons entirely. Suns, moons, droughts, famines — who’s counting?” He laughs again. The sun is stronger now. It shifts above us but never seems to settle anywhere on him.

“Where is your quarter section?”

“You’re standing on it.”

“Oh.” But where are we? “Is anyone else here? Don’t you have a family?”

“I may have.” He frowns and licks his black lips, as if he truly cannot remember. “Yes! I did have a family. Parents, certainly. They are buried back east. And a wife … yes!” He beams at me. “I did have one. A wife, but she wasn’t worth much. Women can be so impatient, Miles. And children — I believe we had several of them.”

He begins to shake his thin shoulders in the silvery h-yuk, h-yuk, h-yuk of a coyote. His tongue surprises me — I guess part of me thought he was a ghost, a creature like my sisters. But his tongue is as red as sunrise in his dark face. He is alive, no question. I feel relieved, then scared for fresh reasons.

“Ah, children—that was a wash.” This time when he opens his mouth, his voice is all throat.

“You shouldn’t laugh at that.”

“What’s the matter?” He grins, trying to rib me with his elbow. “Out here we need a sense of humor, isn’t that so?”

The violence of his laughter sprays dirt into the air; I cough again and think with horror that I’m breathing a powder from his body.

“Your kids all died?”

He shrugs.

“Sons or daughters?”

“Sons and daughters, yes. Sicklings. Weak ones. None lasted.”

“What happened to your wife?”

“She lost faith.” He lets out a theatrical sigh. “Lost her will to prosper. Became a madwoman, if you want to know. I had to make a break with her. Had to make a fresh start”—I wince; he’s talking just like Pa now—“drove her off. Or rather, plowed her under. The West is a land of infinite beginnings, isn’t that right, Miles Zegner? Pick up, embark again, file a preempt, stake a new claim”—Did I tell him my name? — “and after many lonely seasons, I have fulfilled each of the Act’s stipulations. See this?”

He’s holding something out to me — half a piece of paper. I take it with a trembling hand and recognize the text of the Homestead Act. I marvel at the document’s creamy white color, its ink-bleeding signature — if I didn’t know better I’d swear it was the original writ. How did this dirt-streaked stranger acquire such a thing — a law that looks like it was snatched from the president’s own desk?

SEC. 3. And be it further enacted, that the Register of the Land Office shall note all such applications on the tract books and plats of his office, and keep a register of all such entries, and make return thereof to the General Land Office, together with the proof upon which they have been founded …

The man trails a slushy finger down to the word glass. Every claim shanty or dugout must have a real glass window, a whimsical clause that has cost lives out here. I stare at the sod and the black ribbon of blood under his nail.

“So you see that I’m in real need here, Miles. All the other proof I have ready for this Register, the Inspector. The last thing I need is a window.” He contorts his mouth into a terrible smile.

My father’s instructions move my jaw, push out my breath: “Listen, sir. I have a Window. If the Inspector is coming, I can loan it to you. We can fix it so it looks like it belongs to your dugout. So you can prove up.”

“You would do that? For me?”

His eyes brighten fervidly in his grimy face, but not with happiness — it’s more like watching sickness take root and germinate, blazing into a wildfire fever.

I nod, thinking about Pa. For all his charity with the Hox glass, I’m the one who bears the risk of it.

Without my awareness, we have begun moving; and our march feels almost like a pleasant walk, just a normal trip to deliver the Window to a neighbor. I picture the Florissants’ claim swimming toward me out of the plains. The sun casts itself like a spell across the land — as if the blizzard never happened, as if Nore was not lost. The sky out west has so many tricks to make a person forget what he’s just lived through.

We enter a clearing. Shortgrass and green ash are planted in tiers as a windbreak, and I can see what must be his dugout.

There are no bones in his fingers. He is made of dust. If it ever rains again he will seep back into the earth.

Before us a wall of sod bulges and heaves — every inch of it covered with flies. Doorless and stolidly black, studded through with reddish roots; there is not one thing this heap of earth has in common with a home. The snow stops abruptly fifty yards in every direction from the structure’s foundation. No grass grows on it or near it; no birds sing; the smell of death makes my nostrils burn and my eyes stream.

Dear Bailey, I write in my mind, if you thought our sod house was difficult to understand, you’ll find it impossible to imagine this one. Bailey, I might not make it out of here alive.

“Gosh, sir” is all that squeaks out of me.

“Now, would you like to see my crops, Miles? The acres I have cultivated? They’re behind the house.”

“And what crops might those be, sir?”

I want his words to give me the familiar pictures. Say: corn. Say: wheat, milo, hay, lucerne. But he only smiles and replies, “Come take a look.”

I let the man lead me by my elbow, and when we turn a corner I shut my eyes. I wonder if he’ll pry them open — like I did Nore’s.

“Quite a harvest, eh?” he’s saying. “And I grew them without a drop of water.”

Sometimes I dream that dark rains fall and my sisters rise out of the sod, as tall as the ten-foot wheat, shaking the midges and the dust from their tangled hair. Like rain, they thunder and moan. Their pale mouths open and they hiss. Their faces aren’t like any faces I know. Stay in the ground, I plead. Oh, God, please let only wheat rise up.

Even when my eyes open, I can’t stop rubbing at them — I feel like I’m still held in that dream. The scene before me is familiar and terrifying: white crosses, hundreds or maybe thousands of them, rolling outward on the prairie sea. A shovel head glints in a freshly plowed furrow, where a yellowish knob the size of an onion sticks out of the sod. And I see now why Pa was so troubled by their milky hue, because these trees aren’t made of wood at all, but bone. My sisters go on hissing in my mind.

“So you see,” the man says, as brightly as any western noon, “as soon as the Inspector comes, I’ll own the land — a hundred and sixty acres, and not one yard less.”

No, you are mistaken, sir. The land owns you.

He takes my arm and guides me back toward the sod mound. “Now, if you’ll just kindly help me put the window in—”

“And when do you think the Inspector is coming?” I ask in a mild voice.

The man smiles and rakes at his black eyes.

As we unpeel the snowy burlap from the Window, I find myself thinking about my home: Once, when I was nearly sleeping, a fleecy tarantula with a torso as thick as a deck of cards crawled across my mouth, and Peter laughed so hard that I started laughing, too. My father took three months to finish a table and paint it lake blue, just because he thought the color would be a relief to Ma. My mother pieced a quilt for each of her daughters in the dark. Often, at night, I wake into the perfect blankness of the dugout and watch our dreams braid together along the low ceiling. It would take lifetimes to explain to this wretched creature why our Zegner soddy is a home, even without any Inspector’s stamp, while this place is a … tomb.

I step back and let him do the last work to widen the aperture meant to frame the Window. He grunts and scrapes at the pegs holding the shape of the breach and snows sod down all around us. He spits sootily on the glass and rubs in broad strokes with his sleeve.

“When the Inspector comes and sees my window—” he begins prattling, and a quagmire opens up in my chest, deep in its center — a terror like the suck of soft earth. And like a quagmire the terror won’t release me, because the man is speaking in the voice of my own father, and of every sodbuster in the Hox River Settlement — a voice that can live for eons on dust and thimblefuls of water, that can be plowed under, hailed out, and go on whispering madly forever about spring, about tomorrow, a voice of a hope beyond the reach of reason or exhaustion (oh, Ma, that’s going to be my voice soon) — a voice that will never let us quit the land.

“Give it back.”

“It’s too late for that, Miles.”

“I have money,” I say, remembering Pa’s envelope. “Give me the glass, take the money, and I’ll be on my way.”

The man looks down at me, amused; he fingers a dollar bill as if it were the feather of a foreign bird, and I think that he must be even older than our country, as old as the sod itself. “What use would I have for that? That isn’t the paper I require. And anyway, this window isn’t yours. You stole it.”

I reply in a daze: “You’re acquainted with the Yotherses?”

“I was, in a way, but only at the end.”

“I didn’t steal the Window.”

“No, but your father did.”

“You know my father?”

“Where do you think I was coming from when I happened upon you?”

My eyes swim and land on the clover glow of his hay knife.

“When the Inspector comes and sees my window—” he’s saying again, in the tone that sparkles. His back is to me, and I watch the knife bob on his hip. My legs tremble as I spread them to a wide base and get ready to lunge. In a moment, I’ll have to grab his knife and stab him in the back, then reclaim the Window from the wall of his tomb and run for the Florissants’ place. I can feel the nearness of these events — feel the tearing of his skin, the tug of his muscle tissue as the knife rips between his twitching shoulder blades — and I powerfully wish that I could crawl through the window of my Blue Sink bedroom, where such apprehensions would be unimaginable, and drift into a dreamless sleep in my childhood bed.

As I crouch stiffly into my soles, the stranger says gently, “I thought you said you weren’t a thief.”

“Excuse me?” I look up — and find my image reflected in the glass.

“That’s the thing with windows, isn’t it, Miles?” he says. “Sometimes we see things we don’t want to see.”

He turns to me then, and his eyes are bottomless.

MRS. STICKSEL PEERS through the hole in her wall at a tall shape coming on a long trot through the wheat — the complex moving silhouette of a horse and rider. She breaks into a smile, relieved, and moves to stand in the doorway, the children fluttering around her. It’s only then that she notices the soreness of her jaw, tense from all the anxious waiting. She waves a pale arm beneath the black night sky, beneath the still-falling snow, and thinks, That Zegner child sure did shoot up this year, as the rider’s profile grows. The face is still a blank mask.

“Well, look who made it!” she calls. “Oh praise God, lost lamb, we’ve been so worried about you. We had just about given you up—”

A slice of moonlight falls across the horse’s flank.

“Say, isn’t that the Florissants’ mare? What happened to Nore?”

When the Zegner boy doesn’t answer, she loosens the grip on her smile and tries a hot little laugh.

“That’s you, ain’t it, Miles? In this weather I can scarcely see out—”

And just as the children go rushing out to greet the rider, she has the dark feeling she should call them back.