Midnight at the Electric Read online

  “No,” I whispered. “I don’t want him. Please, Mama, no.”

  But I knew she’d have pity on him, like the little birds the cats are always after, and the little newborn calves I’ve seen her puff back to life with her own breath.

  “Well,” Mama said, after we stood there in front of him for a few minutes. “Come with us.”

  The first thing I said to him, once we were in the truck—him sitting in the back and still not wrapping his arms around himself—was “We wanted a girl.”

  He had the good nature to look sorry. I’ve been in love with him ever since.

  Now he loves Canaan more than maybe even Mama does. He says the day he got off the train in this town was the luckiest day of his life.

  MAY 28, 1934

  I only have a moment to write this. I’ve asked Mama about the postcard.

  It was late yesterday afternoon. We’d just finished gumming clean sheets over the windows after four days of dusters. The best time to talk to her about anything is when her hands are busy, when she sometimes lets her thoughts run free.

  “Mama,” I asked. “Who is Lenore?”

  Her hands paused on the windowsill, and then she resumed her work. “She was an old friend.” And then, as if she’d thought better of leaving it open-ended, she added, “She died.”

  “A close friend?” I asked.

  She sat back on her heels and studied me. “No,” she said. “No, not really. I knew her in England, when I was very little. We drifted apart after that.”

  “Oh,” I said.

  She squeezed me on the shoulder then went back to work. Squeezing me and Beezie is her way of telling us how much she loves us because she’s not the kind of person who says it.

  And that was it. She made a show of being done, left the room, washed up her brush and bucket, and went upstairs to her room. Like I said, talking to her can be like talking to a stone. At least she didn’t ask where I got the name in the first place.

  But last night, when I went down for some milk after bed, I heard something shuffling in the pantry. At first I thought it was a mouse, but then I heard someone sniffing. The walls are thin, and to avoid waking us upstairs, she’d closed herself in there to cry.

  The wind is back again. I’ve come to hate the sound of it.

  JUNE 5, 1934

  I’m sitting here at the edge of the mudhole pond, perched on a rock, putting off cleaning the chicken coop. There’s only a slight breeze drying the sweat on my skin; the sun is blazing. The windmill across the yard is spinning, but where it used to churn up water it just creaks and spins the dust. Still, our home is beautiful even now. You can see all the way to the edge of the earth, it feels like.

  I’ve been reading Jane Eyre but finished it too fast. I’m so desperate for excitement I’ve committed to reading every one of Mama’s books in the library, but at this rate I’ll be through them in a few months. We’ll never be able to afford another book after that, and then I’ll just have to stare at the walls.

  In front of me, Galapagos and Sheepie are bickering like an old married couple. We don’t let Sheepie run free anymore because last week the Chiltons next door lost their dog, Blinkers, in a storm, so to pass the time he’s started trying to herd Galapagos. Right now she’s gazing at him with what could only be called amused disgust. Nobody can get Galapagos to do anything she doesn’t want to do.

  I wonder about her now, after the postcard. Over the years, Mama’s made her several little wooden overhangs for shade on the best side of the pond. And though we’ve had to cut back on so many things—only have three chickens left and one sad cow—she brings the turtle buckets of water to drink and cool her feet. She shares with her our meager tomato crop, blackberries she’s managed to find or buy, or anemic lettuce leaves she’s clawed out of the spindly garden.

  “She’s just a teenager,” she says. “She needs her food.”

  And it’s as if Galapagos knows she’s royalty. She likes to sun herself and forage around in the morning, bask for a bit in the sun, and then head for shade and watch us work, craning her neck like she’s watching an interesting play.

  Still, I’m not writing because of Galapagos, but because of what Mrs. Chilton said this morning when she came over. She was standing there in our kitchen, scuttling her two youngest children away from Beezie—who was extravagantly coughing on all her dolls to make sure they wouldn’t play with them. (Beezie’s had the cough for weeks, and often uses it to evil purpose.)

  The kitchen was full of the static that comes with the dust, and we were all trying to avoid rubbing against each other as we moved around the small kitchen so we wouldn’t get sparks. (In the worst storms, the charge in the air has been known to short cars.) Mrs. Chilton has seven children, so her hair always looks like she’s just been shocked anyway. She once said to Mama, “Cathy isn’t much to look at, but you won’t find someone who works harder,” but I don’t hold it against her because I know she’s too tired to think straight.

  “David’s talking about going west,” she said, and sipped at her tea, trying to pass it off as a casual statement. “He says he can’t take the poison air. He’s worried about little Lizzie.”

  “What’s that?” Mama asked evenly, as if she didn’t know what the west was. She was pounding the life out of a ball of dough. It had been quite a day already because Beezie had torn down the sheets we spent all day plastering and then blamed it on Sheepie. When we pointed out they were covered in her dirty handprints she knelt by Sheepie and lifted one of his paws and tried to convince me that paws look exactly like hands. The dog is her best friend, but it’s not the first time she’s tried to pin her crimes on him.

  “That’s what I said to him. Going west would be like jumping into a black hole. What do we have to live for out west? People hate us there.”

  Which I know is true. They call us Okies no matter what state we’re from. They make laws to keep us out.

  Mama wiped her hair out of her face with her wrists. “The weather will change soon.”

  “That’s what I told him, Beth,” Mrs. Chilton agreed. “Mark my words, we’ll never leave that house as long as I live. I may as well die as leave. This is home.”

  Mama went on silently with the dough. She’s always taking in information and rarely giving it, and this leads people to think she either agrees or disagrees with them, depending on their mood. But I know Mama is as likely to leave Canaan as she is to leave her own bones behind. Every time I’ve tried to bring up that we should cut our losses and go (before the dust drowns us), she’s conjured up a thousand reasons why we can’t: that we have no money and barely anything left to sell, that things are no better in the cities—no jobs, businessmen selling fruit on the street to live, influenza running rampant, and we don’t know a soul anywhere but here. All of this is true, but still I disagree.

  “This town used to be a paradise,” she has said many times, “and it will be a paradise again, if we can just hold on.” She shakes off the gloom, or tries to, with a toss of her head. “We’ve had so many bad years; the good ones are coming. God wouldn’t be mean enough to have it otherwise.

  “You’ve always been restless,” she adds.

  It’s been four years since it all started, since the rain dried up, first just a few dry weeks here and there and puffs of dust swirling around. It feels like yesterday that every farm was wheat all the way to the horizon.

  I remember I used to feel that we were the luckiest people on earth. Like that was just who we were, and it would never change. We’d see other people—dragging through town looking for work, people who couldn’t get hired on account of their background or prejudice toward their skin color or their threadbare clothes—and feel like we were two different kinds of human beings, the lucky and the unlucky, the people who were naturally happy and prosperous and the people who weren’t. We were fools.

  There was a time Mama would say she dreamt of going back to England, to see where she grew up, and I used to believe her. B
ut now I suspect—despite the terrible uncertainties beyond Canaan—that the main thing is she believes happiness is something behind her, to remember instead of to chase.

  I’d still consider leaving if it were just me alone. God knows I’d be a fool to stay for Ellis, who’ll marry Lyla someday and set up on his own.

  But we are like one person, the three of us: me as the brains and busy hands, and Beezie as the beating heart, and Mama as the soul we could never unwind from ourselves. We’ll probably die right here one day sweeping the front room together. We’ll just be skeletons with brooms in our hands. We—

  LATER—

  In bed now, thinking how I’d give anything for a piece of ice to hold against my cheeks. Sheepie is shivering and obsessing and trying to herd me out of the room. There must be a storm nearby because I just rubbed my stockings against the bedspread and there was a crackle and a pop.

  I had to stop writing because Ellis came walking up to help me with the coop.

  “I like doing it,” he said. “I have a technique.”

  “Your nostrils flare when you lie,” I said, picking up my shovel and digging into the smelly waste at the bottom of the coop. The truth is I’m terrible at tasks like this: tasks that involve patience—I’m impatient in body and soul. I’m always knocking my elbows against the walls as I turn corners because it takes too long to steer my way around.

  “You must watch me a lot to know something like that, kid,” he said, smirking. “Are you planning to declare your intentions toward me? Are they honorable?”

  “Don’t be stupid,” I said and dug in my shovel.

  For a long time we worked in silence, clearing the sawdust and muck, laying new sawdust.

  After a while Ellis spoke, as if picking up the thread of a conversation we were already having. “She must have other letters somewhere, if that girl was so important to her. She’s hiding something.”

  I’d told him about the postcard from Mama’s room and how I heard her crying. I tell him almost everything, and I’ve never told him a problem I had that he didn’t try to fix.

  “Maybe.” Preoccupied with other things, I hadn’t thought about it much since we’d talked. I stood straight to rest for a moment and rubbed my arm along my forehead.

  “That’s a good look for you,” Ellis teased, indicating with his finger that I’d swiped some muck across my forehead by mistake. He traced the line of it without touching his finger to my skin.

  I winced and turned my face away, embarrassed.

  He studied me, his brows drawn down over his eyes. “Sorry,” he said. “I’m not contagious, I swear.” His teasing, unfolding smile tugged a smile onto my own lips. Ellis has that effect on people. He recently pickled some tumbleweed and got us to eat it. He said we need the minerals. Anyone who can get you to eat pickled tumbleweed can get you to do anything.

  We finished up, and I looked at him for a moment, too tempted to keep silent anymore. “I don’t need to find some old letters. I need to find a way to make ten dollars,” I said.

  He studied me for a moment in confusion.

  “Why?”

  “I just do.”

  “That’s an impossible amount of money, Cathy. For any of us.”

  “I know,” I said hopefully.

  He stuck his hands in his pockets. “I’ll think about it,” he said. Simple as that.

  There are so many things I don’t like about Ellis. I don’t like the way he licks his lips when he concentrates. I don’t like how he won’t daydream with me about being millionaires or going away (“There’s no better place than here,” he says). Everyone would think out of the two of us, he’s the stronger one, but they’d be wrong. These are the things I tell myself when I feel most desperate to have him, when he is the most kind and tender and irresistible.

  But nothing works. I always know where he is without looking—my eyes track him even when I want them not to. I imagine that I stumble upon him by the cow pond, or in the clearing at the edge of the property, and in my dream he looks at me like it hurts too much not to touch me. And we kiss. We more than kiss. If there were a God who cared how much any of us want or need anything, he would make it rain and he’d make Ellis Parrish love me.

  Beezie is coughing in her sleep down the hall, and whatever storm was nearby must have passed because Sheepie is now happily chasing a fly around the room. In the moonlight the dying tree in the front yard looks like it’s wearing a halo.

  JUNE 16, 1934

  So many grasshoppers floating on the air today. I’m watching them through my bedroom window, and they fill me with dread. But I want to write this down while it’s vivid in my mind.

  Last night I went to the Electric.

  Yesterday began with three families missing from Sunday service. It’s no secret that they won’t be coming back. Too ashamed or sad or impatient to say good-bye, they’ve simply disappeared, leaving abandoned farms behind them. It happens more and more.

  Last night I lay awake thinking of them with a sharp, desperate feeling in my chest; I don’t know if it was worry or envy. I kept thinking, what if they don’t make it where they’re going? What if they do?

  Too hot and tortured to sleep, I slid out of bed.

  I didn’t intend to go to the Ragbag Fair at first. When I pulled on clothes and my shoes and tiptoed out the front door onto the porch a little before eleven, I was setting out toward Ellis.

  I walked across the grass and stood outside his door. I was daring him. I stood there with my heart in my throat, the thought of him so close pounding in my head. I shuffled my feet in the dirt. I was thinking if he heard me and came outside, I’d do something brave.

  As the minutes passed, my nerves settled. He wasn’t going to come. I gazed down the drive. The full moon was up high above the trees, and the drive was lit so brightly it could have been a sandy beach.

  I turned my feet toward town and started walking.

  The first thing I saw, approaching the edge of the fair, was the tall, illuminated clock at the center of the grounds, surrounded by booths offering everything from piglet racing to candy apples to Shoot the Can. Organ music drifted out on the air. I made my way past a billboard painting of a man aiming a cannon upward. Experience the Wonder of the Rainmaker! it exclaimed. TNT will squeeze RAIN out of the Sky!

  Though it was close to midnight, the crowds were still lively. I gaped at one thing after the next, brushing past people devouring the food, chatting and laughing, trying their luck at games of chance. Many were trickling toward the back of the grounds and gathering near a tattered red tent.

  I faded into the noisy group as it pressed itself around the tent. A small, simple sign out front announced that this was what I’d come for. This was the Electric. All around me, people turned their faces to the clock at the center of the grounds.

  As the minute hand approached twelve, everyone went quiet. And then, exactly at the stroke of midnight, the flaps of the tent parted and a man—middle-aged, trustworthy looking—emerged, stepping up to a small wooden podium. He was not flashy, not handsome. He had no top hat or blinding white smile. He was bald, in a threadbare suit, stooped and tired looking, like so many of the men in the crowd. He cleared his throat and looked around at all of us with kind gravity.

  “It is a time of upheaval and uncertainty,” he began. “The world is changing beneath our feet. Death is around every corner. Fear and despair lurk in every house.” People around me murmured agreement. I crossed my arms to stave off a chill. “But it is possible to outrun it,” he went on, thrusting one finger slowly up in the air, “to outstrip it, to outsmart it.”

  He lifted something from behind the podium, covered in a velvet blanket. He sighed as if exhausted. “I have before you something rare in these lean, rational, and industrial times. A magical object. One that combines the best of both worlds . . . the old and the new. Developed by researchers in New York City, it is the perfect union of the Earth’s ancient power and man’s genius.”

  “
Now let’s see.” He lifted the blanket as if scared of burning himself, and he revealed a glass ball pulsing with light. The crowd around me gasped; I felt as if my own breath had been sucked out of me. It looked as if he’d captured lightning and put it in a fish bowl.

  “Electricity. It’s the substance at the heart of the universe. It’s the origin of the heartbeat. We, you see, are electrical creatures. Even the world’s most cool-headed scientists would tell you as much.” He squinted thoughtfully and licked his lips in concentration. His eyebrows drooped as if he were carrying the weight of the world.

  “Now you may ask, why have I gathered you at this late hour to see it? At midnight? Because midnight is the permeable hour. Yes.” He nodded, as if to himself. “Time matters. Time matters. In nature’s calendar, midnight is the breath between day and night. It’s only at this hour that neither the sun’s rays nor the moon’s great pull can interfere with the electrical currents.”

  He looked up at all of us, wiped sweat off his forehead with his sleeve, and then laid the ball of light down on a special stand beside the podium.

  “Touch this—Earth’s most powerful substance—but tempered by glass so it won’t kill you—for five seconds and it’ll cure your ailments. If you have a sore back, a trick knee that aches when it rains . . . you’ll feel better instantly. If you touch it for ten seconds, it will rejuvenate your organs. Lay your hands on it for a full minute, and it is entirely possible you could live for much longer than is thought to be humanly possible. Ladies and gentlemen, I believe this device just might help you live forever.”

  He paused, gazed around at us, looking exhausted. “I’ve made it my life’s work to deliver this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to everyone I can. I’m traveling the world in hopes of lighting up every dark corner with hope by dispelling the tyranny of death. And I’m here today to do that for you.