Chasing Ghosts

November 23, 1930. Three days before Ed’s twenty sixth birthday. This was Lillie’s water day. She woke to a cold, miserable day--looking like snow. It might be a tough winter. She’d been responsible for watering the livestock for almost eighteen years. Up until a couple of years ago, they didn’t have a well or spring--their own source of water--so she’d hauled two fifty-five gallon barrels of water every other day. She’d developed a system: harnessing the team, rolling the barrels into the back of the wagon, tying the two cows on behind, and with the team pulling the wagon, trailing the livestock seven miles down east, past the little hamlet called Vida to the spring in the creek bank. There she dipped water into the barrels with a bucket while the team and the cows were drinking. With her barrels and livestock full, she drove the wagon up to the Vida post office, to Bud Nefzger’s well, where she filled up a ten gallon cream can with well water for the house--drinking and dishwater. Back at home the next day, she watered the livestock out of the barrels, so she could skip a day of hauling water. The first spring on the homestead, in 1913, Gus had built a little dam that made a water reservoir for the livestock, but it was usually dry. Sometimes in the winter, she let the animals eat snow, but other times when the snow didn’t come, she had to take an axe along to the spring and break the ice to get her water. She was a small woman, and since coming to the homestead, she had become so thin she thought she looked scrawny. She weighed a little over 100 pounds, and her hair had turned completely gray in the last few years. But then, she had turned forty-five her last birthday, so it was to be expected. She and Gus had been married for nearly twenty seven years. She’d been spending a lot of time lately thinking about their relationship, the way it had been so stormy, before she had left him and moved in with Ed. Apparently, Lillie coming to him for sanctuary after she left Gus was just what Ed had been wanting. After she and Gus split the homestead Ed had harvested his crop and let his rented farm go. He and Lillie moved a one-room shack onto her half of the homestead. Ed was only too eager to help her. They were starting all over again, but this time there was no money to fix up the house or dig a well. She hated being in debt, but she’d had to go to the lumber yard and buy a few things on credit—a few boards, siding and shingles--to make the shack livable. She had hoped that they would get a couple of good crops and pay it off, but the last two years’ crops had been failures, and she could only make small payments. Then, last fall, in October, 1929, the stock market crashed back east and the banks began to fail. Just a couple of weeks ago, on November 8, she had received another blow. The lumber yard filed a materials lien against her property for the things she’d bought to fix up her shack; and last year’s taxes on her half of the land had only been partially paid. This was all so painful and embarrassing. She sure didn’t want Gus to find out about her problems. Ed knew most of it--he’d had to read the letters to her when they came, but he didn’t say much. Since they had moved in together, Ed had been more of a help-mate to her than his dad ever had. But now that might be getting out of hand. Sometimes she really wished Ed would get a woman. As far as Lillie knew, Ed had never had a girl-friend. One of the reasons this was troubling was that Ed was way too involved in things that went on between her and his dad, Gus. That didn’t seem fitting. He and his dad had always had a violent relationship, and when he was a kid Ed had been on the receiving end of severe beatings from his dad. Lillie thought that Gus was way too hard on Ed. One time when Ed was only about ten, Gus laid his finger wide open during a whipping with a buggy whip. Lillie had to soak the finger and then dig dirt out of the cut before she bandaged it, while the boy squirmed and tried not to cry. She saw the hatred in his eyes when he looked at his dad. Ed and his little brother Frank fought bitterly, and Gus had always thought it was funny to stick up for Frank just to make Ed mad. It had really caused a lot of trouble in the family. Things had started to change for the worse as Ed got older and grew bigger and stronger than his dad. Lillie remembered a fight a few years ago when Ed, aged twenty- two, had fifty-year-old Gus down on the floor beating him senseless. Lillie had jumped into the fight and stopped him. “You just remember! That’s your dad you’ve got down there!” When she’d moved into the little shack onto her half of the land, Lillie had had to start hauling water again with the wagon and the barrels. Now, though, she went down to Gus’s well for water. She only traveled half a mile from the shack where she lived with Ed. The chore became so much easier than the fourteen mile round-trip to Vida. It left her plenty of time to sit with Gus and visit. They were getting along better now than they had for years. Things had not improved between Ed and his dad since she and Gus had split, and maybe even worse. It seemed like Ed thought that now she and Gus were separated, she shouldn’t have anything to do with Gus. She could tell he stewed about it when she came back from Gus’s place with her load of water every other day. Well, she wasn’t going to answer to Ed or anybody else about how much time she spent with her own husband, she decided. And she wasn’t going to divorce Gus, no matter what. She wasn’t going to be like her mother or the rest of her family. No, the next time Ed started complaining about her “hanging around Gus,” she intended to have a talk with him. It was one thing for him to live there and help her on the homestead, and something else entirely to be treating her like his own private property. How could a guy be jealous of his own dad? She had to straighten him out on that. It was high time Ed got himself a woman, and quit worrying about her and Gus.