Chapter 1 — The Dry Autumn
The windmill had been turning since before Erik woke, which meant the wind had not stopped in the night, which meant the day would be dry again. He lay a moment in the dark of the sod house and listened to it — the slow iron creak, the tick of the tail vane swinging, the pump rod rising and falling in its patient rhythm — and he thought, as he thought every morning now, that water was a sound before it was anything else. In the valley that autumn, it was the only sound that mattered.
He rose and lit the lamp. The sod house was one room and a lean-to, thick-walled, cool even at noon, and it held its smells the way it held its heat: coffee, lamp oil, leather, the faint sweet rot of the sod itself. He dressed in the dark out of habit — shirt, trousers, boots worn soft as gloves — and went out with the bucket while the sky was still the color of deep water in the east.
The well stood twenty paces from the door, under the windmill he and Nils had raised in the spring of '76 with pine hauled forty miles and iron shipped up the river. He had dug that well himself, thirty-one feet through gumbo and gravel, cribbing it with cottonwood as he went down, and men in the valley called him stubborn for going so deep when their own wells gave out at twenty. This year the shallow wells were giving out everywhere. The Halvorsen well held. The windmill drew, and the trough filled, and the stock came up out of the gray light to drink, blowing softly through their nostrils. Erik stood with his hands on the trough's rim and watched the water shiver under the wind, and he was grateful, and the gratitude had an edge of loneliness to it, the way everything did now.
"You talk to it," Nils said from the doorway, "the way other men talk to a wife."
Nils was nineteen, broad and sunburned, with Ingrid's fair hair — no. Not Ingrid's. Erik corrected himself the way he corrected a furrow, without anger. Nils had their mother's hair, that was all. His brother stood barefoot in the doorway with his shirt half-buttoned, grinning the grin that had gotten him out of thrashings all his life.
"I talk to what works," Erik said. "Eat. The north fence wants mending before the ground gets too hard to dig postholes, if that day is not already here."
They ate standing, bread and salt pork and coffee black as tar, and then went out into the hard white light of the driest autumn Erik had known in Dakota. The creek at the bottom of his land had shrunk to a chain of green pools. The hay meadow he had cut in August was a stubbled scalp. His wheat had come up thin and headed small, and the corn stood fired to the ear. All over the valley it was the same story or worse: the Red Willow people, camped up the creek on their bottom land, had watched their grazing parch the same as anyone's, and there was talk in town that the band would be moved to the agency before the snow whether they willed it or not. Land did not care whose name was on it. Drought was the one honest thing left.
After the fence work he walked up the hill behind the sod house, as he did most days, to the grave.
It was a small plot fenced with cedar rails he had split himself, on the only rise of ground the farm owned, where the wind always moved the grass. Ingrid Halvorsen, the stone said, in letters he had cut with a cold chisel and a patience he no longer possessed. Born 1852 in Bergen. Died 1876 in Dakota Territory. She had crossed an ocean with him in the spring of '75, twenty-three years old and laughing at the size of the sky, and she had died the first winter, in childbirth, in this same sod house, with the snow banked to the eaves and the nearest doctor sixty miles of drifted prairie away. The child had died with her. Erik stood with his hat in his hands and said nothing, which was his whole conversation with her now, three years of it, and then he went down the hill to his work because work was the shape grief took when it had to be carried every day.
In the evening, when the stock was watered and the lamps lit, he sat at the table with his journal and his letters. The journal was a plain account: rain, none. Wind, west. Fence, forty rods mended. Well, holding. He wrote it in English, carefully, because a man should practice the language of the country he had chosen. The letters were another matter. He wrote them in Norwegian, to his mother in Bergen, and they were full of things he could not say to any living person in Dakota — the size of the loneliness, the fear that he had brought Ingrid to her death as surely as if he had held the lantern, the price of wheat. He sealed none of them. Postage to Norway was money, and money this year was seed and salt and lamp oil; and so the letters went into the tin box under his bed, one upon another, three years of them, a whole unsent life.
"Write shorter letters," Nils said, watching him. "Then you could afford to send them."
"Write your own," Erik said, "and I will pay for yours too, when you have something to say to Bergen."
Nils laughed and went out to check the horses. Erik closed the journal. Outside, the windmill turned and turned over the darkening farm, drawing up water from thirty-one feet down, patient as prayer; and the prairie lay all around him in the dry autumn dusk, enormous and empty and waiting for whatever the weather meant to do next.