Chapter 10 - The Becker Line
Opal died on an afternoon in late November, right after the first hard freeze had turned the blackberry canes along the creek into stiff, purple wire.
She did not die in a hospital bed with tubes in her arms and a plastic bracelet around her wrist. She died in her own bed, in the downstairs room where she had been born eighty-nine years before, with the smell of woodsmoke from the kitchen stove in her hair and Arthur’s portrait on the dresser where she could see it whenever she opened her eyes.
Nate and I were with her.
She had been quiet all morning, her breathing growing shallower as the gray light shifted across the floorboards. Around two o'clock, she opened her eyes—they were cloudy now, the bright blue fading into the milky gray of an old marble—and reached out her hand until her fingers touched Nate’s wrist.
"Nathan," she whispered.
"I’m here, Gran," he said, leaning down until his forehead touched her knuckles.
"The notches," she said. Her voice was like dry paper rustling in a drawer. "Did you put the girl’s mark on the casing?"
Nate smiled, though his eyes were wet. He reached over with his other hand and touched my stomach, where our daughter was four months along, kicking faintly against my ribs beneath my wool apron.
"Not yet, Gran," he said softly. "We have to wait until she can stand up on her own two feet."
"Good," she murmured, her head sinking deeper into the goose-feather pillow Arthur’s mother had made for their wedding bed. "Make sure she stands straight. Becker women... they don't bow down to the weather."
She closed her eyes. Ten minutes later, her hand went limp in Nate’s fingers, and she slipped away as quietly as the water running under the ice in the lower willow swale.
The funeral was held on a Tuesday at the old church by the crossroads.
The pews were full—not with bank directors or town councilmen, but with farmers from six miles in every direction: the Gidleys, the Millers who had stayed on the county road, the men who drove the lime trucks, and the women who had baked bread with Opal during the war.
Ronald sat in the front pew on the left, with Judy beside him in a black veil that couldn't hide the dark hollows under her eyes. Jeff, Kim, and Stacy sat behind them like three strangers who had missed their train, looking at their polished shoes and avoiding the eyes of their cousins across the aisle.
Ronald did not speak to Nate. When the casket was carried out by Joe Gidley, Nate, and four of the older men from the valley, Ronald stayed in his seat until the church was nearly empty, his hands gripping the curved oak arm of the pew as if he were afraid he would fall if he stood.
We buried her on the lower slope of the cemetery, right beside Arthur, where the ground sloped down toward the creek. From her headstone, if the leaves were off the timber, you could look across the bottoms and see the cedar shingles of our roof showing through the walnut trees, and the thin blue thread of smoke rising from our chimney into the cold November sky.
When the last shovelful of yellow clay had been smoothed over the mound, the crowd drifted away toward the church basement for coffee and ham buns.
Nate and I stayed by the fence.
The wind was coming out of the north, cold and sharp with the promise of snow, smelling of the vast, frozen plains five hundred miles away. Nate had on his heavy wool coat, his hands bare, his cap pulled low over his eyes.
We watched Ronald’s blue truck crawl up the cemetery lane, reach the state road, and turn north toward the ridge. It moved slowly, hesitating at the intersection, before disappearing over the crest of the hill where the yellow brick house stood behind its dead lawn.
"He sold the west forty this morning," Nate said. His voice was quiet in the wind. "Joe Gidley told me at the grave. He sold it to a developer from town for eighty thousand dollars to pay off Jeff’s construction note."
"It won't be enough," I said, leaning my head against his shoulder.
"No," Nate said. "It won't. In three years, there’ll be asphalt where his corn used to stand, and the bank will have the rest of it."
He turned away from the road, looking down into the valley where our lane wound through the dry grass like a pale ribbon.
"Let’s go home, Emily," he said. "The cows are at the gate, and I need to split some more of that ash before the freeze sets in."
We walked down the cemetery path together, our boots crunching on the frozen gravel.
When we reached our kitchen, the house was warm. The wood-burning stove Nate had installed where Arthur’s had stood was humming with a steady, quiet draft, the cast iron ticking as it absorbed the heat. On the table sat the two leather ledgers, clean and dry, resting beside the tin of grease Nate used for his harnesses.
I took off my coat and hung it on the hook behind the door. I walked over to the pantry casing, resting my palm against the smooth, varnished pine.
The house was ours.
Not because we had twenty thousand dollars to put under a plate, and not because Dobbs had brought his hammer down on the courthouse steps. It was ours because forty-one thousand five hundred dollars of sweat, four cracked thumbs, and seventy-five years of memory had been mortared into the stone with Arthur Becker’s lime and sand.
Nate came in through the back door, carrying an armload of split ash. He dumped the wood into the box beside the stove with a loud, satisfying crash that set the dust dancing in the late light.
He looked at me across the yellow floorboards, his face smeared with chimney soot, his gray eyes clear and deep as the limestone well.
"We need to get some more potatoes out of that cellar tomorrow," he said, taking off his cap and dropping it on the nail keg. "Before the ground freezes hard."
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"I'll help you," I told him, stepping over to the stove to put the kettle on. "I'm capable."
Nate didn't laugh. He just walked over, put his big, grease-stained hands on either side of my waist, and kissed my forehead, right where the hair met the skin, his breath smelling of the cold wind and the sweet, dry timber of the homeplace.
