Free Loving Frank by Nancy Horan Page B

I would have to go out and catch one for dinner. I used a long piece of wire that I bent at the end and hooked around the chicken’s legs. It was a farm, and we could run free. We caught and skinned copperhead snakes—with my father’s help, of course. We weren’t afraid of wild things, you see, because we were wild ourselves. My father had a rule: Anything we found, we could raise. One night a mouse had babies—little pink things—and the mother ran off. So we fed them with an eyedropper and tried to keep them, but they ran off, too. My sister was fond of these big, horned tomato caterpillars—oh, they were ugly. But they were her babies. We had a skunk for a while and named her Petunia, but she didn’t make a very good pet.
    “There seemed to be a big event happening every half hour on that farm. Someone would call ‘Come see!’ and everyone would run over. Maybe a turtle was laying eggs, or a snake was shedding its skin, or someone had captured the biggest tadpole.”
    “What else?”
    “Well, a day or two before we left Boone, I put a note under a loose floorboard in my bedroom. It said, ‘My name is Mamah. I hope you are a girl.’ I signed my full name and my age.”
    “Do you think she found it?”
    “Oh, I don’t even know if there was a ‘she.’ But I surely hoped so. I wanted someone to know I had lived there. I was hoping a girl would look out the window at the path through the prairie grass and think,
Maybe Mamah went down that path.
And then perhaps she would follow it and find what I left there.”
    “What did you leave there?”
    “It’s a secret.”
    “No,” he groaned.
    Mamah laughed. “But I’ll tell you. I dragged a piece of old braided rug and a chair out in the field. We left in August, and the prairie was high—over my head. You wouldn’t have seen that rug and chair unless you went exploring. But if you did find it, and you sat down, you would discover a private little room there. When the grass got high, it made walls all around.”
    “Why did you do that?”
    “I don’t know. Why are children always making hiding places? You tell me.”
    John pondered it. “Because we like to have secret places that maybe only your best friend knows about.”
    “Of course,” she said. “I had almost forgotten that.”
             
    MAMAH COULDN’T RIDE a train without thinking of her father. He had spent forty years keeping the North Western’s rolling stock welded together, and moving its thousands of wheel pairs in unison over a vast web of tracks every day, all year round. When he died so suddenly, it took everyone by surprise. The whole company came to his funeral, from the president to the repairmen he oversaw to a half-dozen Pullman porters.
    From her earliest years, she had understood that her father was solid and reliable. He had prized those qualities and recognized them in Edwin when he came into the household. Ed and her father had been not just family but good friends. What would Marcus Borthwick think of all this trouble if he were alive?
    An image flashed in her mind just then of Lizzie and a bereft Edwin bumping around the empty house on East Avenue.
Will they eat together still?
    When she felt tears coming, she pushed her mind back to where it had been, to the place where she was twelve again, sprung from school and sitting next to a train window, the smell of wheat in her nostrils. A train whistle could make her pulse quicken in those days. It meant strangers with stories, and steak sizzling on heavy white china in the dining car. Now it was enough that the whistle could distract her from the mess she had left behind in Oak Park.
    She thought of the Rock Island Line advertisement that had leaped out at her the morning after Mattie’s letter had arrived. In the illustration, a young woman reposed thoughtfully, chin in hand, gazing out a train window at mountains and fat white clouds.
    Vacation upon the tableland of the continent,
the ad had read.
You will