out of those pits.
Mom had laid out my clothes the night before the funeral—a hand-me-down navy wool jumper that seemed to itch its way right through my turtleneck, thick white tights and a pair of too-big Mary Janes with a tissue wadded into the toes. She’d always been optimistic that I would grow into things soon. During the service I’d sat sandwiched between Mom and Emilie, willing myself not to look directly at the coffin. The whole ashes-to-ashes, dust-to-dust thing made me feel a little sick to my stomach once I really thought about it, and so did Mom’s whisper that the funeral home had done “such a good job” with Mr. Warczak. It was incredible that he was really dead, that he had been here one minute and was gone the next, that he would never again pat me on the head with his dirt-encrusted fingers. There had been such a solemn strangeness to the whole affair, with the organ music and the fussy bouquets of flowers, the men in their dark suits and the women in navy dresses, their nude pantyhose swishing importantly against their long slips.
“It is not for us to question God’s perfect timing,” Pastor Ziegler had intoned from the pulpit, but I remember thinking that the timing wasn’t so great—not if you were Mr. Warczak, who thought he could fix the problem with the manure pump and then head inside for lunch, and not for his son, Jerry, who had been about to graduate from Lincoln High School and head off to a veterinary training program. The rumor had been that Mrs. Warczak’s cancer was back, too, and this time it was inoperable. “That boy’s going to need our help,” Dad had told us when we were back in the car, riding with the windows open. “It’s a damn shame.”
“Why did it happen?” I’d asked from my perch on top of a stack of old phone books in the backseat. I could just see out the window from that height—the miles of plowed and planted and fenced land that I would know blindfolded. “Why did he die?”
“It was an accident. Just a tragic accident,” Mom had said, blotting her eyes with a wad of tissue. She’d been up all morning, helping in the church kitchen with the ham and cheese sandwiches that were somehow a salve for grief. When we’d parked in our driveway, she’d gathered up a handful of soggy tissues and shut the door behind her.
“Oh, pumpkin,” Dad had said as he sighed when I’d lingered in the backseat, arms folded across my jumper, waiting for a better answer. He’d promised to head over to the Warczaks’ house later, to help Jerry out. “It’s just how things go. It’s the way things are.” He’d reached over, giving my shoulder a quick squeeze in his no-nonsense, farmer-knows-best way.
Somehow, despite all the years that passed, I never forgot this conversation, the way Dad’s eyes had glanced directly into mine, the way his mustache had ridden gently on top of his lips as he’d delivered the message. He couldn’t have known the tragedies that were even then growing in our soil, waiting to come to harvest.
All he could do was tell me to prepare myself, to buck up, to be ready—because the way the world worked, you never could see what was coming.
two
I would always remember the summer of 1994 as an unbroken string of humid days, the air thick and sticky late into the evening. It was the summer of the Fifth Annual Watankee Softball Tournament, and a summer I’d never forget. Mom had seen the announcement in the St. John’s Evangelical Lutheran Church bulletin on a Sunday morning and, looking for an activity to keep us from uninterrupted hours in front of the television, had signed us up by that night.
“It’ll be fun,” Mom said, urging us into action. “I can see it now—The Hammarstrom Hitters.”
Emilie rolled her eyes. “More like The Hammarstrom Quitters.”
We practiced on our front lawn, using tree trunks as bases and chasing Johnny’s powerful home runs until they disappeared into our cornfield. Johnny had been dying for action all spring, ever since he’d dislocated his elbow during wrestling semifinals and had been forced to sit in the bleachers at State, his left arm swaddled from shoulder to wrist. By June, Johnny’s arm had healed and he was ready to resume his status as a local hero.
We piled out of Mom’s Caprice Classic an hour before our first game at Fireman’s Field, Johnny leading the charge. Dad followed him, whistling, tossing a ball and catching it in his glove. Emilie slumped behind Dad, her hands in her jeans pockets. “This is going to be so boring,” she’d protested on the way over. “Almost as boring as staying home.”
Mom waited for me to free myself from my roost in the middle of the backseat and leaned over, shutting the door behind me. She pointed to the encyclopedia-sized book I carried, Myths and Half-True Tales. “You’re bringing that with you?”
I considered. I was too small for softball, too small for most things—I needed a boost from the top rung to reach the monkey bars and a step stool to see the top of my head in the bathroom mirror. It went without saying that I couldn’t swing a bat by myself, and that a fly ball would probably knock me down.
“What if I get bored?” I replied.
Mom and I walked toward the infield, where Bud Hirsch, captain of Hirsch’s Haybalers, waited with his clipboard. He took one look at me and, with his massive gut thrust forward, said, “You here to watch, shorty?” He chuckled as I sidled away, offended, and turned away to bark orders at the rest of the team. Johnny was going to start out in left field, Dad at first base.
Mom leaned down to me. “Never mind him. You can share my position with me if you want.”
“No, thanks,” I said. “I’ll just watch.”
During the warm-up, I sat cross-legged on the bench in the dugout, leaning back against the chain-link fence. Bud Hirsch’s son, Raymond, was pitching slow arcing lobs to Sandy Maertz, a member of our church. Dad, Johnny and the rest of the men in the infield passed the ball back and forth, rolling grounders and tossing fly balls. Mom stood awkwardly in right field, waiting to be included.
The other team, Loetze’s Lions, was starting to arrive, and the bleachers on both sides were beginning to fill up. Someone unlocked the concessions stand, flipped the wooden door down, and raised the Watankee Elementary Academic Boosters Club banner. The money raised tonight would finance our school field trips to the Wisconsin Maritime Museum in Manitowoc and our less academic but equally inspiring annual visits to Lambeau Field in Green Bay.
I tracked Emilie as she made her way up to the top row of the bleachers, her honey-blond hair swinging behind her. It amazed me how she moved, how much confidence she had. A year ago she’d been a clumsy eighth grader. Now she was ready to take Lincoln High School by storm. “I’m going to join pep band,” she’d announced to me proudly when we were lying side by side in our twin beds one night. A shard of moonlight had fallen through the curtains and cut her slim body in half—her hipbones and long legs on one side, the small buds of her breasts, like plum halves, on the other.
“Why do you want to be in pep band?” I’d asked, thinking of the few football games I’d attended in my life. The pep band was a group of shivering kids who took the field at halftime after the cheerleading routine, right about when half the stands decided they needed a hot dog or a trip to the bathroom. “Those kids never get to watch the game.”
“I don’t care about the stupid game,” Emilie had said, sighing dramatically. “I want people to watch me.”
Bud Hirsch called my attention back to the game with two toots on his whistle. “All right! Switch it up!” Our team started a slow jog through the infield to our dugout, and Loetze’s Lions took a turn at their warm-ups.
Panting as he came off the diamond, Dad gave me a high five—as if by staying out of the way, I’d performed some huge feat.
I slid from the bench. “Can I have a dollar?”
“Sure.” Dad dug in his pocket and came up with a handful of change.
“Stay close,” Mom said.
I could feel her eyes on me as I walked behind the batter’s box, my feet kicking up little swirls of dust that instantly coated my tennis