“Nan.”
I startled. Behind me in the corner, Lee held up a hand. Since coming home from the war, Lee had grown thick about the middle, his cheeks soft, though he was little more than twenty. He sat in the shadows. I could only see his face.
“It’s strange,” he said.
“It’s more than that.”
He chewed his lip, mulling over the words — a slow man gone slow in his thinking. Lee was blond-haired, like Myrle, and now likewise as dreamy. People often left the room before he’d finished speaking. “You can see everything from this porch,” he started again. “Old Man Oak and Elliot’s horses. They must be a mile off.”
“Even more.”
“That’s the puzzle. You’d think we could have seen them leaving, but we didn’t. From here, you’d think we’d see them days off.” Lee scratched at his knee. Days, I considered, but that was impossible. Yet looking out, it didn’t seem so very much. I thought Lee was done with it, but his mouth still worked at whatever troubled him. “Do you think they could have tried it, Nan? Chicago, I mean.”
“I can’t imagine.”
“I’m going,” he said.
“But you can’t. It’s only a guess.”
“Next week, after the wheat is in. I have a little saved from the service. I don’t care what Ray thinks.”
“It’s not just Ray.”
“It doesn’t matter that I’m here. But you, if you left. ”
I turned to the fields with a shiver. I didn’t want to matter like that. The moon was going. The dark sunk into the earth, the horizon vanishing. That the girls could have walked into the night by their own choosing, that they had done so without a lantern to light the way and traveled by foot, when grown men have died of wandering in such blackness — it was impossible, but since the war, everything was.
“Nan, I know I can find them.” In the dimness, I couldn’t make out my brother’s expression.
When he was younger, Lee had come running from the barn and laid a creature on the porch’s wooden planks. “Ran smack into the tractor,” he said, worrying at it. He stretched out its wings.
“Why, Lee Herman, you can’t. ”
“Little bat nearly knocked herself out.” He ran his fingers down its stomach as if to feel the creature’s bones. “Don’t think she hurt herself. Doesn’t even mind me, she’s so scared. And look. ” He held his fingers for me to sniff.
“Lee!”
“Lost control of her insides.”
We watched the bat together as it woke and bared its teeth. It dragged itself off and climbed the closest rail with the claws on it wings, coming to rest on the banister. It seemed a dark tangle of fur breathing there.
“Why don’t you leave it alone,” I told Lee, but he didn’t. He fretted about the dogs getting it and the cold. He must have been sixteen, seventeen back then, and he sat on the porch through the night to make sure the creature didn’t fall from its perch. The next morning I found him asleep in the same chair and blanket, but the bat was gone.
I squinted to see my brother now, his fingers scratching at his knee. When the deputy came, Lee hadn’t said a word but sat near the door with his head turned, as if listening for something. Lee had always been sweet on Esther. “Straw head,” she called him. That bat had been an ugly thing with enough bite to hurt him, but how he worried over it. Esther had been his favorite, and he worried over her too. With someone like Esther, a man had to think hard not to go with whatever she told him, and Lee wasn’t used to thinking. He’d sat until that bat flew off and though he hadn’t seen it go, still he helped it to a high place where it could drop into the wind when no one was looking, easy as could be.
II
It is a strange thing to be a family of the missing. Deaths are commonplace. But a disappearance — it has the scent of murder in it, and there was little we could do to absolve ourselves. After Lee went, we continued our chores, but the work seemed dull without the promise of something new arriving to us. We canned our meats for the cellar, patched our woolens. We readied enough wood for the cold. There were repairs to be made and weeding to finish, plants going to seed and in need of pulling, the fields mulched with hay and manure. We had frosts by the end of October, a hard freeze that left a cake of ice on the sheep’s drinking water. Our brood cow gave birth to a starveling, and Ray believed she wouldn’t last the month. The summer crops were gone after that, save what we had already stored. With so few hands, Ray worked fourteen hours a day. Agnes grimaced at the layers of manure on her boots, and Patricia’s knuckles swelled. “I do hope that boy can find them,” she whispered in the kitchen. “I most certainly do.” Already a month the girls had been gone. no sign, Lee wrote in a telegram. still looking. He never sent an address. At night with my eyes closing, I went through the books with a pencil, tallying our earnings and costs — three fewer stomachs, six fewer hands. I marked the difference at the bottom of the page with a shaky line. Hope, it was a terrible expense. We couldn’t let anything go to waste. And we couldn’t risk the extra we might set aside only to spoil if Lee and the girls didn’t return soon, if the girls didn’t return at all — though I couldn’t let myself think it. Mother had said the same near the end. None for me, she’d said when I brought a plate to her bed. This war. You’re all thin as bones.
This is not a place where people easily vanish. It is good clean earth for miles, straight as a table, our acres bordered by the river on one end and a rat of fenceline on the others, the distance between a long walk of cropland that takes more than a day’s plowing. There is a low feeling to living here, the horizon far and wide with hardly a soul to break it, yet if you kick in your heel and wrench up a clot of dirt, how many thousands of creatures burrow through the earth beneath. In every direction our neighbors’ acres are the same — more than a mile of farmland between us and the Clarks to the west, the Elliots to the south. In winters we don’t lay eye on either family for weeks. The river between our acres and the Elliots’ swallows its banks, higher from one season to the next. Bottomland, they call it, but the water could very well drown us. Father said we should be thankful to have so much. “There’s nothing more honest than this,” he said. But I think honesty is different from emptiness.
nothing, Lee wrote in a second telegram. not yet.
One night in November, hours after I had gone to bed, I had a dream. Myrle walked across the yard in the dark with the door to the house open behind her, and I saw myself standing just inside, watching. She was drenched to the skin. Her nightgown was sheer and stuck to her, her hair running with water. With the distance between us, I could not see her face. Instead of calling to her, I closed the door and locked it fast with my key. Outside the window, I could see her. She was running back to the house, to me.
I woke. The sound of knocking. When I sat up, the sound was gone. I took my lantern out into the hall and checked the door, the window. Both were closed, locked. Outside, only darkness. I carried my lantern up the stairs. The door at the top was open, the room now empty. On the girls’ dresser, Myrle’s dove-colored comb was gone, but the cutout of the woman’s hand remained. Esther’s pillows stood against the headboard but the wrong way, her bedspread crushed, nearly pulled off. The broken chair had been taken, as if to banish any thought of it. Only Agnes’ drawings were the same — Mother with her pale hair, her eyes gray. If the girl had the chance, in forty years Myrle would be our mother’s twin.