The Legend of the Albino Farm. Steve Yates

family in permanent ways. He and Charlotte enrolled Hettienne in dressage courses for a summer term at Stephens College in Columbia, Missouri. Without Hettienne there at Emerald Park for June and July, and with grain prices roaming high and free, the Sheehys did not invite the Ormond children for the usual extended stay. That August, when wheat and oats were ready for the shock, Simon offered to hire Cousins David, Hal, and Brent as farmhands. He sent Aunt Margaret around with a handwritten note of inquiry and fair market terms.

      When Old Mike Sheehy had died in April of 1934, he had divided land to every son and daughter, but to Kate he had willed and devised the mere sum of $200. Now in answer to Simon’s offer to hire, Auntie Kate Sheehy Ormond sent her brother an old postcard—where had she come by it?—featuring the Headleys’ version of Emerald Park, on which in bright greens, blues, reds, yellows, and whites the visitor could see all the way from the limestone gate on Buffalo Road to the model barns and the stone silo and the mansion. Beckoning was the white gravel drive, all open, all welcoming, and of old, of the Headleys’ day. Back before any Sheehys owned the land, such postcards were sent by tourists and townspeople alike in pride, or preserved and cherished. Now those walls grew over with maypop, trumpet, and Virginia creeper. Bois d’arc, black locusts, and shaggy cedars rose and entangled to make a second, more forbidding barrier. On the reverse of the postcard Auntie Kate answered her brother Simon with one word: no.

      Denied his niece, James mailed her a letter.

      My Dearest and Onliest Hettienne,

       I hope you will forgive your Uncle James the occasional letter to one greatly missed. And you are greatly missed—without you here, this place is a 300-acre tomb. Did you know that Old Michael Sheehy, that surveyor/purveyor and progenitor of all of us and purchaser of this sepulchral spread, when he signed the warranty deed for $30,000 (a fortune in 1923), did not “sign” but made his mark x and the same of sound mind and body on his last will and testament. A witnessed mark x. For the genius spark of House Sheehy could not read or write an English sentence, and yet had a command of numbers and measures and formulae so sure that he would beat Simon and me about the ears and neck if we chose to cipher a sum on paper. Simon will often tell that story at table to inspire us. To what, I do not know. If you will, please ask your mother’s permission that we correspond on the condition that no one here at Emerald Park is to know. John will not understand. But I am willing to wager that your mother will be able to explain.

       Your Loving Uncle,

       James

      Showing her mother that note, she gained Charlotte’s encouragement to write back. “Your father,” Charlotte admitted, “holds on to many hurts I do not understand. Maybe James will tell us.”

      Hettienne wrote him back and on her mother’s advice posted her answer to Auntie Kate’s address, so close by at Route 10 one could walk, as James did, to fetch her letters. On white typing paper with margins three fingers from the top, bottom, and sides, Hettienne reported on horses she had ridden and academic courses in which she achieved, even some in which things went miserably. In a loving nod, she signed all her letters Your Ghosty, Hettienne. She knew she did not have words yet to match James’s in their revealing and frank qualities and knew she did not have much of real life to tell him, but she longed to keep his correspondence alive. After several summers passed, she began to ask her parents if just she could take the train and visit for a week or so, or maybe Uncle James could come here to Chicago as a relief to him. Her puzzled and much-annoyed father put it off gruffly. He could foresee no positive return on such a risk.

      Did you ever see a silage chopper and conveyer in operation, Dearest Hettienne? This is an end of harvest process. It is something to behold, in that by that action of a reel and cups along the conveyor and, down in the chopper, an impeller blade—a wheel wilder than Ezekiel’s—and its edges that mash and slice, the machine throws corn or sorghum stalks or what have you a full twenty feet in the air along a gutter-like trough bowed at its near final juncture. There is wastage and scattering, and I am in trouble again. With those fretful Hungarians together, we disassembled this mechanism and adapted all we could so that the Headleys’ foolish stone silo, with its outdated elevator that every other season fails, could be penetrated from below by the guttering rather than jamming silage all the way up that ancient lift to the silo top. Our new arrangement would also entrap the scatter and what would be wasted inside the silo. But—and herein comes the trouble—it likewise trapped the hot guttering within the silo as well, wedged tightly about by tons of vegetative matter, which I did not much think of as a possible result when my enthusiasm for this rearrangement was upon me, and I and Bakó and Bajusz were feeding the chopper like drunken krauts at Erntefest. Simon and I will be for a time, once more, not speaking.

      She kept all his letters in a leather-bound three-ring binder, and sometimes the hole punch vanquished part of what James wrote—he followed no margins, and though his lines were fine and straight, his block letters covered front and back. He wrote always upon 8½ by 11 typing paper folded down so that four surfaces were striped in his engineer’s hatch. One letter revealed that Simon had a cancer. With as much scandal as if he had declared himself to be a follower of Christian Science, Simon would not be seeking treatment. When her parents did not travel to comfort Simon, Hettienne recognized how wide the chasm had grown. Her mother insisted it was not Hettienne’s fault and, no, not James’s fault. After all, Hettienne had emerged unharmed from that crazy prank. Her father, Charlotte explained, was a different Sheehy. And the Ozarks and the Old Sheehy Place, they really were very far away. It saddened Hettienne that her mother said this with relief and even a contentment that Charlotte did not try to hide.

      I am floored at what I can be blamed for, Hettienne. It seems to carry on and on. No misfortune is too insignificant or removed to avoid being traced in Simon’s ouroboros logic back to the moment of you and me, arm in arm and covered in Roy Boy. Now in town, you and I, we, are “famous,” for I overheard, dining in that sad grill in the row of buildings Margaret owns on Commercial, the Old Sheehy Place referred to as an “Albino Farm” and a story related, badly and nonsensically, by the way, about a family of banished albinos who stalk the Sac River all night after being experimented upon by a mad scientist named Hadley. What did Lord Tennyson write? A savage race, a rugged people. ‘I am become a name.’ Must the Queen City of the Ozarks forever suffer to be made up of nothing but salesmen, evangelists, and greedmongers? Not one soul can tell a good story here. Why would anyone tromp in a sorry, slimy river like the Sac after being tortured by a mad scientist all day? Especially if one were a poor albino! Knotheads. Springfield.

      In the boardinghouse near Stephens College, where she now taught horsemanship and large animal husbandry, sometimes when she felt alone, especially on winter Sunday nights, she set the binder upon her lap. She opened it and pressed her palm and long fingers tight against the substantial, weighty manuscript there growing and felt of the indentations, his blocky engineer’s print. She marveled that a man could have said so much to her for so long, and so kindly and lovingly. And yet she could not picture his face, even when she closed her eyes and remembered him with all her heart. All she could bring to mind was his shining bulb of a nose, a snout like no other Sheehy’s on the farm.