A Bridge Named Susan Read online

  Chapter 34

  Survival

  The end of January saw a huge dip in temperature. The old thermometer given to us on the Lame place registered ten below zero. Branches easily broke off in our hands, frozen solid. The challenge was keeping the animals warm. We tied two blankets on their backs with rope and hung the woodpile tarp across the front of the lean-to to shut out the wind. The cow no longer gave milk. The horse shivered constantly and gave us hopeless looks with his big brown eyes. We spent hours tearing away ice-crusted snow with the pick to break off grass for them. Thank God for the grain the folks had brought at Christmas.

  Temperatures slid to fifteen below by the end of February’s second week. We stacked wood inside, hoping it would dry quicker. Wet wood smolders and wheezes forever before catching fire. The woodpile dwindled, forcing us to hunt for old snags not buried in six feet of snow. We were surrounded by trees, but newly cut green wood doesn’t burn at all. Our tent home was never what you’d call warm. It was especially body-shaking at night. The grass in our tic mattress froze, crunching with every move. We clung to every bit of heat we could find, never changing clothes, just adding layers.

  One night, Tom, needing more body heat, reached over to wrap an arm around me. My cold body permeated even through layers of cloth. He touched my hands and face; they were frigid. “No. No. No!” he screamed, jumping out of bed. “I’ve killed my wife! She froze! She’s dead!” He shot out the tent flap and ran circles, yelling, “I’m sorry, God. I’m so stupid to think we could do this. Susie! Susie! You’re gone! It’s all my fault. She’s frozen. She’s frozen. No! No!”

  I woke with a start to the screaming. “Tom!” I yelled but he couldn’t hear. “Tom!” Reluctantly, I crawled out of bed and looked out the flap, “Tom! What in the world is going on? Have you lost your mind?”

  In the dawn light, I saw him stop and stare as if I were a ghost. He grabbed me and began to sob, “It’s you, it’s really you. I thought I’d lost you.”

  We lost reality in the next few weeks. Our Christmas gift food was gone except for a little flour. Snow, cold, hunger. It was getting easy to give in, quit the fight. In our survival stupor, we didn’t notice the rising temperatures.

  What now? I awoke to a strange sound on the tent. Rain! It was raining! “Tom, Tom, wake up! It’s raining!” Water falling from the sky never looked so good. In two days, it washed away most of the earth’s white blanket, letting green grass show its tiny head. Hope sprang up with the grass. We had survived. The problem of food still reared its ugly head. We led Blacky and Bessy out to the greenest spot we could find. They chowed down, picking the earth bare. We spent painstaking hours brushing their thick, matted winter coats.

  Tom set squirrel traps. We hadn’t seen any out of hibernation, but we wanted to be ready. Not my favorite food, but hunger changes preferences. I don’t think I could stoop so low as eating mice. Well, maybe.

  The top part of fallen trees not finished last fall were visible. Saw, chop, peel. Saw, chop, peel … one post finished, then needing a rest. Our weak bodies resisted work. We fell exhausted into bed each night. Winter took a toll on both of us. Shrunken bodies were revealed as layers of clothes came off in the warmth of the sun. I was swimming in my dresses. I weighed in at ninety-eight pounds on the grain scale when I made a trip to the folks’ farm in April.

  Friend hadn’t been through the area since the first big snow last fall. He was smart enough to store up for winter. It reminded me of the story “The Ant and the Grasshopper.” Guess who we were? As we finished up the last treetop, Friend rode up. He sat watching us, then slowly climbed down. With a grunt, he pointed to something in the clearing. He kneeled and began to dig with his knife. He pulled up a root, handed it to me, grunted and pointed to the bulb. “Can we eat this?” I made eating motions with my hand. He nodded and pointed to the pan I was using to gather the last of the snow. “Cook?” He nodded again, mounted and moved on down the hunting trail. We gathered more and boiled, what we later found out, were camas roots. Not too tasty but satisfying. Two days later, we found a hind quarter of a deer on our log bench. Our Indian friend continued to live up to his name.

  Chapter 35

  Johnny’s News

  A surprise visitor drove up in the middle of May—my brother. Mama had sent him to deliver some canned beans, peas, and carrots. Yum! Vegetables to go with the deer. It’s almost a complete meal. All we needed were potatoes. Johnny handed me carefully marked envelopes of seeds—a gift as good as gold. I had great plans for those jewels. The frozen ground was still too hard to dig up, but I determined not to be a grasshopper another winter.

  “Looks like you’ve been working hard.” Johnny shuffled his feet, not looking me in the eye. “You sure picked a dad-burned time to be pioneers. Not me. I don’t even want to be a farmer.”

  “Don’t say that, Johnny. Papa’s counting on you taking over the place,” I scolded.

  “Can’t do it. Want to be a salesman. Fuller Brush. Papa’s buying the inventory for me to get started.”

  “How can you possibly make a living selling brushes?” Unbelievable, I thought. He’d already tried selling McNess, newspapers, and who knows what else. He borrowed money from Papa to get supplies; got tired of pushing flavors, drinks, and papers; quit and never paid it back. That had been crop money needed for the next year. Now he’s borrowing against this year’s crop. Whatever Johnny wants, Johnny gets, no matter whom he hurts. I felt the old jealous anger begin to boil.

  “I’m moving to Lewiston. Can’t sell nothing out here in no man’s land.” He still wouldn’t look at me. “There’s something else I want to tell you …” I waited. “Alice and I are getting married.”

  “What? Johnny, you can’t do that! Alice is our cousin! You can’t marry your cousin!” He had capsized my mind in the short fifteen minutes he’d been there.

  “We’re getting married in Pomeroy next Saturday. It’s far enough away, nobody will know. Don’t you want to know why?” He finally focused his tear-filled eyes on me.

  The deep hurt I saw brought my rant to a halt. “Yes,” I almost whispered. “Why?”

  “She needs to get out of that house.” He sat on our log. “Awful things have been happening to her …”

  We’d grown up around Alice. Their family always came to Kole doings. Never noticed any problems. Tom, feeling awkward in this private brother-sister conversation, went back to work. “Tell me.” I sat by Johnny.

  “In April, I lived with Aunt Maggie, Uncle Earl, and the girls in Clarkston while I looked for work. Slept on the floor. Didn’t get much sleep. Didn’t find a job.

  “Something strange happened one night. A guy came knocking on the door after we’d gone to bed. Earl had been drinking as usual. He stumbled to open the door and almost stepped on me.

  “This guy said, ‘Half an hour,’ and Uncle Earl answered with ‘Two dollars.’ Then the guy countered with, ‘She’s not worth two dollars. I’ll give you one twenty-five.’

  “I thought, What’s going on? Uncle Earl got real huffy and told him it was one-fifty or leave. They argued back and forth till Earl told him to hand it over or get out. The man grumbled. I heard money clink and boots walk past me and down the hall.”

  “To where?” I asked, but my churning stomach already told me the answer.

  “To Alice’s room. He didn’t even knock. Just walked in and shut the door. Muffled sounds came from the room. Then it got real quiet. Uncle Earl’s chair scraped the kitchen floor. He walked down the hall, knocked, and said, ‘Time’s up.’ The guy left without a word.”

  “Oh, Johnny. I never knew. She never said in any of her letters …” Earl worked construction so the family moved a lot: southern Idaho, back to Reubens, Oregon, back to Reubens, western Washington, back to Reubens, and now Clarkston. She wrote regularly, always sounding like she was having the time of her life.

  Johnny continued, “I t
ook her on a picnic the next day, had to get her alone. I point-blank asked her, ‘Who was that guy last night?’ She wouldn’t answer. I insisted. Finally, she said it was one of her father’s business partners. I kept pushing till she broke down crying and told me the whole story. Earl’s been prostituting her to his friends since she was eight years old to get money for his booze.” It was my turn to cry. “Now you see, Susie, why I have to marry her. It’s her only way to escape.”

  “There must be some other way,” I pleaded. “Doesn’t she have friends? Couldn’t she just run off with one of them?”

  “No one.” We sat in silence a long time. “I’ve got to get going. Wanted to tell you so you could help the folks understand. I already told Papa. Don’t know how I’m going to tell Mama. Think I’ll wait until after the fact. She’ll be upset, but can’t do anything about it.”

  He got up and headed to the car. “Oh, by the way, don’t worry about our children. There won’t be any. Some guy gave her a disease that took care of that.” Trudging back to his little coupe, he climbed in and started up the hill to the farm.

  I had just seen a whole different side of my brother.

  Chapter 36

  The Garden

  Martha Zhalber sent her two oldest boys walking two miles uphill to our place with shovels and a note. “Susie, I heard you’re wanting to make a garden. These boys will help you dig up a spot. Make sure they work hard.” We’d already staked out where it would be. There was bear grass and some wild flowers but no stumps. I dreaded starting, remembering how rocky the ground had been, digging for the cabin. How nice of Martha, or, rather, her sons, to help. That’s how it was then. If someone needed help, you send what help you could. Children were often the only commodity available during the Depression. With renewed excitement from the two big boys, I grabbed my shovel and announced, “It’s out this way.”

  Clint put his shovel next to the stake and shoved down with his huge foot. Expecting to hear a grinding against rocks, I was amazed to see the curved metal slide cleanly into the dirt. “That can’t be! It took us two months to dig the foundation for the cabin.” I pushed my own shovel in. Not as smooth, but then, I only weighed ninety-eight pounds. If we had put the cabin on the east side of the hill instead of the west, digging would have been a breeze.

  By noon, they turned over heaping shovels of rich black soil. I chose to follow along behind, knocking out the grass and picking out small stuff. We stopped for a drink, and they each pulled a sandwich out of their pockets. Martha had thought of everything.

  “How’s your folks doing?” I asked.

  Clint swallowed, “Good, good. Pop’s been hired at the granary this summer. It’ll be a good steady job until the baby comes.”

  “Baby?”

  “Yep,” Clarence cleared his throat. “Number five.”

  “I didn’t know that. How’s your mama feeling?”

  “Good, good,” they chorused.

  By mid-afternoon, they finished. “Thanks until you’re better paid.” It was embarrassing, not having anything to give them.

  “Our privilege,” Clarence said. “Hope we get to help out again. Uh, would you mind if I took some of those big worms out there? Would like to go fishing this afternoon in the creek.”

  I laughed, “Take all you want. Hope you catch enough for supper.”

  What nice boys. I hope Tom and I can raise children like that. I watched them head home, and my mind lingered on children. Two years and seven months we’d been married. When would we have our own? Tom wanted lots of babies. He was already an uncle to thirteen nieces and nephews who lived too far away to visit.

  Having raised my sister Edna, my heart ached for my own baby. I imagined what it must be like to “be with child.” At the same time, remembering how difficult giving birth was for Mama, it was scary. But she was old. In her forties. Goodness, she was old when she had me—thirty-eight. I’m not going to let that happen. We’ll have lots of “kiddos” by the time I’m thirty. I laughed to myself thinking about that new word everyone seemed to call them—kiddos.

  Tom returned from delivering fence posts around suppertime. “Only five more loads and we’ll have enough to take a tree to the sawmill.” He wore a grin. “Do you know what today is?”

  “I have no idea.” I’d long ago given up keeping track of days or dates. Time was measured by the sun, the moon, and the amount of work we accomplished.

  “Think.”

  “I give.”

  “It’s a day to celebrate.”

  “I know it’s not my birthday. It’s not warm enough yet.”

  “Nope. We’ve lived here one year!” He pulled a bouquet of wild flowers from behind his back and bowed as he gave them to me. “Congratulations to us.” Our laughter mixed with difficult memories. Some were buried, too hard to recall. The mind seals off those times too close to the incidents for the body to bear.

  With the flowers decorating our small supper table, our talk turned to children. “What do you think our children will look like?” I looked at my handsome husband.

  “Look like? Well, the boys will be handsome like me, and the girls will be as pretty as you.” Tom’s smile faded. “Seems strange we don’t have any yet, doesn’t it?”

  Silence.

  We continued to eat. I shouldn’t have brought up the subject. Haven’t you learned not to talk about things that make him look like a failure? I scolded myself. With seven children in his family, I’m sure he’s wondering if the heavy work he had to do as a child or maybe the beatings are keeping him from being a father. The mood of celebration turned to moody. “I’m sure we’ll have one soon,” I ventured.

  Silence.

  “I’ll tell you what—it’s a good thing we don’t have a baby yet. It wouldn’t have survived this last year.” At least Tom was thinking realistically.

  “I completely forgot my surprise.” I jumped up from the table, grabbed his hand, and pulled him to the newly spaded garden. “What do you think?”

  “No! You did that while I was gone?” His smile was back. I was pleased that I’d managed to pull him out of his silence. I was learning.

  “You didn’t know you married such a powerful woman, did you?” I teased. I couldn’t keep a straight face. “I must confess. I’m still just a weakling. Martha sent her two oldest boys to work it up. I paid them in worms.”

  Chapter 37

  Raising the Roof

  We fell into a summer routine. First thing in the morning, we’d cut down two trees. After dinner, I tended to the garden while Tom stripped branches and bark, then I helped cut them into posts. Some days, we’d do an extra tree. Around the first of August, Tom announced, “I think we’ve got enough saved to get the boards cut. I’m gonna ride to the mill and haggle with them.”

  Finally, I could see an end of tent living. Grabbing our little scythe, I mowed down the growth inside the house walls. We wouldn’t have a floor this winter, but the grass was thick and we’d use the tent on the floor under our bed and table to keep the cold out. We would use leftover roof pieces to make a door. It had to go into place before we could finish the wall above it. No windows. Just as well. Warmer without windows. My imagination was running wild about what my house was going to look like. So big, we could have a dance in here, if we had a floor. Maybe someday?

  “Susie! You here?” the mailman called. “Got a letter here from your mama.”

  I stepped out of the walls. “I was just cutting the floor,” I laughed.

  “Sure am proud of you kids sticking it out. Gonna have a real nice place to live this winter. Gotta get on home.”

  I tore open Mama’s letter.

  Dear Susie,

  I just wanted to let you know we had a little accident coming home from Lewiston last night. We’re all right. Edna has a few bumps and bruises. Papa hit his ribs on the steering wheel and I hit my head so I’ve
got a headache this morning. The car lights went out coming up the hill. We decided we could use a flashlight to see. It wasn’t very bright. Papa couldn’t see the edge of the road and went over the bank. Wasn’t very steep. We pushed the car back onto the road and waited till it got light to come on home. Didn’t want you to hear what happened from someone else.

  Love, Mama

  Life is uncertain. I looked at Mama’s signature, “Love, Mama.” It took so long to win that love. I could have lost her last night. I sat there for a while thanking God for keeping my family safe.

  I picked beans in the afternoon. Canned most of them, storing away for winter. Cooked a few for supper. We’d been enjoying lettuce, carrots, peas, beets, and beans. Papa had sent some seed potatoes, but they were just blooming, not ready to dig yet. My first garden was filled with life and hope.

  Tom arrived with a string of fish. Winchester has a lake. One end of the lake is used to float logs until they’re ready to cut. The other end is used for fishing. Five pan-sized trout dangled on the line in his hand. He cleaned them, I put some butter in a pan, and we feasted on the best fish I’d ever eaten.

  Tom finished off his plate. “Well, you want to hear the good news?”

  “The good news? What did they say?”

  “The mill will rip five trees into boards for two dollars each.”

  “Two dollars? I thought they said three dollars last spring. You must have done some good dickering.” I smiled. I could tell Tom wasn’t finished.

  “And—they will buy every tree we cut down, stripped, and debarked for a dollar apiece!”

  “All the trees we can cut down? This whole fifteen acres?” Unbelievable.