PRAISE FOR
BELVA PLAIN
and EVERGREEN
“SWEEPING IN ITS SCOPE, YET INTENSELY PERSONAL.” —Nashville Banner
“An epic of people you know. Once you know Anna, you won’t want to put the book down.”
—The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
“A MAGNIFICENT STORY … This beautifully written book will be treasured and reread for many years to come.” —Library Journal
“Plain doesn’t know how not to write a bestseller.”
—Newsday
“Reading a novel by Belva Plain is like resuming a conversation with an old friend—a comfortable … encounter that leaves us feeling good.”
—The Pittsburgh Press
“AN ACCOMPLISHED STORYTELLER.”
—The Washington Post
“Belva Plain writes with authority and integrity.”
—San Francisco Chronicle
“THE QUEEN OF FAMILY-SAGA WRITERS.”
—The New York Times
BOOKS BY BELVA PLAIN
FORTUNE’S HAND
LEGACY OF SILENCE
HOMECOMING
SECRECY
PROMISES
THE CAROUSEL
DAYBREAK
WHISPERS
TREASURES
HARVEST
BLESSINGS
TAPESTRY
THE GOLDEN CUP
CRESCENT CITY
EDEN BURNING
RANDOM WINDS
EVERGREEN
Lines from “Renascence”
by Edna St. Vincent Millay from Collected Poems,
Harper & Row, Publishers, Inc.
Copyright 1917, 1945 by Edna St. Vincent Millay
Published by
Dell Publishing
a division of
Random House, Inc.
1540 Broadway
New York, New York 10036
Copyright © 1978 by Belva Plain
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced
or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or
mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any
information storage and retrieval system, without the written
permission of the Publisher, except where permitted by law.
For information address: Delacorte Press,
New York, New York.
The trademark Dell® is registered in the U.S. Patent and
Trademark Office.
eISBN: 978-0-307-57462-6
Reprinted by arrangement with Delacorte Press
Two Previous Editions
v3.1_r1
To my husband,
companion of a lifetime
One generation passeth away, and another generation cometh: but the earth abideth forever.
ECCLESIASTES
CONTENTS
Cover
Other Books by This Author
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Acknowledgement
BOOK 1
Rugged Roads
BOOK 2
Random Winds
BOOK 3
Meadows
BOOK 4
Thunder
BOOK 5
“All the rivers run into the sea …”
About the Author
BOOK
1
RUGGED
ROADS
1
In the beginning there was a warm room with a table, a black iron stove and old red-flowered wallpaper. The child lay on a cot feeling the good heat while the mother moved peacefully from the table to the stove. When the mother sang her small voice quavered over the lulling nonsense-words; the song was meant to be gay but the child felt sadness in it.
“Don’t sing,” she commanded and the mother stopped. She was amused.
“Imagine,” she told her husband, “Anna doesn’t like my voice! She made me stop singing today!”
The father laughed and picked Anna up. He had a sandy beard and dim blue eyes. He was slow and tender, especially when he touched the mother; the child was comforted when he put his arms around the mother.
“Kiss Mama!” she said.
They laughed again and the child understood that they were laughing at her and that they loved her.
For a long time the days and the years were all the same. In the house the mother moved between the stove and the table. The father hammered boots and cut leather for harness in his front-room shop. On the big bed in the room back of the kitchen the mother brought new babies to birth; one year there were twin boys, red-haired like Anna and Papa.
On Friday nights there was a linen cloth on the table; there was sugar in the tea, and white bread. Papa brought beggars home from the synagogue; the beggars were dirty and had a nasty smell. They were given the best food in the house, the plum jam and the breast of chicken. The room was shadowed; the white light of the candles burned through Mama’s hands as they moved in blessing and flickered on the pearls in her ears. There was a lovely and lofty mystery in her words and on her face.
It seemed to the child that the world had always been and would always be like this. She could not imagine any other way for people to live. The road through the village was dusty in the summer, muddy and icy in the winter; it stretched to the river where there was a bridge and went on for miles, it was said, to other villages like this one. The houses were strung along the road or clustered around the wooden synagogue, the market and the school. All of the people who lived here knew you and called you by name.
The ones who did not know you—the Others—lived on the far side of the little river where the church steeple rose over the trees. Beyond there cattle grazed, and farther still you could see the wind make tunnels through the growing wheat. The milkman came every day from that direction, two heavy wooden buckets swinging from his yoke. People seldom went there. There was no reason to go unless you were a peddler or a milkman, although sometimes you did go with Mama to buy vegetables or extra eggs.
The days were measured and ordered by the father’s morning, afternoon and evening prayers; by the brothers in their black coats and visored caps going to and coming from school. The weeks ran from Friday night to Friday night. The year ran from winter to winter, when silent snow fell and voices rang like chimes in the silence. The snow turned to rain, drenching the lilacs in the yard, strewing petals over the mud. Then before the return of the cold came the short, hot summer.
Anna sits on the step in the breathless night, watching the stars. Of what can they be made? Some say they are fire. Some say the earth is fire like them, and that if you could stand far off and look at the earth it would glitter like the stars. But how can that be?
Papa does not know; he does not care about such things. If it is not in the Bible he is not interested in it. Mama sighs and says that she does not know either. Surely it would be wonderful if a woman could be educated and learn about things like that. A rabbi’s wife in a far-off district runs a school for girls. There, very likely one could learn about the stars and how to speak other languages and much else besides. But it would be very expensive to go to such a school. And anyway, what would one do with that kind of knowledge in this village, this life?
“Although, of course,” Mama says, “everything need not be useful. Some things are beautiful for themselves alone.” Her eyes look into the distance and the dark. “Maybe it will be different after a while, who knows?”
Anna does not really care. The stars glow and spark. The air is like silk. Clouds foam up from the horizon and a little chill comes skimming on the wind. Across the road someone closes the shutters for the night with a clack! and click! She rises and goes back into the house.
Sometimes she listens to scraps of talk
, the parents’ evening murmur that repeats itself often enough to form a pattern. They talk about America. Anna has seen a map and knows that, if you were to travel for days, after a time you would come to the end of the land called Europe, which is where they live. And then there would be water, an ocean wider than the land over which you have come. You would sail for days across that water in a ship. It is both exciting and disturbing.
Of course, there are many people in the village whose relatives have gone to America. Mama has a second cousin in New York, Cousin Ruth, who has been there since before Anna was born. Tales arrive by mail: in America everyone is alike and it is wonderful because there is no difference between rich and poor. It is a place where there is equality and justice; every man is the same as every other. Also, America is a place where it is possible to become very rich and wear gold bracelets and have silver forks and spoons.
Papa and Mama have been talking for a long time about going, but there has always been some reason they cannot leave. First, there was Grandmother who had suffered a stroke. The people in America would not have let her in, and of course the family could not just have gone away and left her. Then Grandmother died, but Eli and Dan, the twins, were born. After them came Rachel. Then Celia. And Papa had to save more money. They would have to wait another year or two.
So they would never go, Anna knew. America was only something that they talked about in their bed at night, the way they talked about household things and their neighbors, about money and the children. They would stay here always. One day, a long, long time from now, Anna would be grown, a bride like Pretty Leah whose father had the chicken farm just past the bridge, led under the canopy to the dance of violins, with a white gauze veil over her face. Then she would be a mother, lying in the bed like Mama with a new baby. But still it would be the same life; Papa and Mama would be here, looking no different from the way they looked now.
Yes, and the sheltering house would be here, too. And Rachel stirring in the bed. The old dog jingling his chain in the yard. The blown curtain; summer nights of pine and hay and Mama’s bush of yellow roses at the gate. Rustle of night-birds, trill of frogs: I am alive, I am here, I am going to sleep.
2
Whenever Anna told or thought about the story of Pretty Leah she fell into the cadence and language of the twelve-year-old child she had been when it happened.
“Mama sent me to the farm to buy some eggs. Pretty Leah and I stood in the courtyard counting the eggs. Then I wanted to go into the barn to look at a newborn calf, and I was there when the men came, three of them on plow horses, cantering into the yard.
“I think Pretty Leah thought they wanted to buy some eggs because I saw her smile and look up at them. They jumped off the horses and one of them took her shoulders. They were laughing, but they were angry, too, I think; I didn’t know what they were, really, but Pretty Leah screamed and I ran up the ladder into the loft and hid.
“They dragged her inside and shut the barn door. Her screams, oh, her screams! They were drunk and saying dirty words in Polish; their eyes were all puckered in their flat cheeks. They pulled her skirt up over her face. Oh, they will smother her, I thought; I mustn’t look, and still I could not look away from the things they did.
“Like the bull and the cow, that time when Mama and I were out walking and Mama said, Don’t look and I asked, Why mustn’t I? And she answered, Because you are too young to understand. It will frighten you.
“But the bull and the cow had not frightened me at all. It seemed a simple thing, what they had done. Not like this awful thing. Pretty Leah twisted and kicked; her screams under the skirt had turned to weeping and pleading, soft, soft, like a baby animal. Two of the men pinned her arms and the third lay on top of her. Then they changed places until all three had lain on her. After a while she stopped moving and crying. I thought, My God, they have killed her!
“When the men left they flung the barn door wide. I could hear the hens clucking in the yard. The light came in and fell on Pretty Leah with the skirt over her face, her naked legs spread wide, blood sticky on her thighs. After a long time I came down the ladder. I was afraid to touch her but I made myself draw her skirt down. She was breathing; she had only fainted. There was a cut on her chin; her black hair had come unbraided. When she wakes up she will wish she were dead, I thought.
“Then I went outside and vomited in the grass. I picked up the basket of eggs and went home.”
That was the way she remembered it, all the years of her life, the way she would often think of a man with a woman, although she would not want to think of them like that.
In the evening after the dishes had been put away Mama said, “Come, Anna, well sit outside on the steps and talk awhile.”
But it was dark blue dusk. There were shadows and movement of Things behind the trees, and someone was walking in the distance, rapping on the road, the fast steps coming closer.
“I don’t want to go outside,” Anna said.
“Very well, then, I will ask Papa and the children to sit in the yard and we can talk by ourselves.”
The mother lay down on the bed beside the daughter and took her hand; the mother’s hand was hot and rough.
“Listen to me,” she said softly. “I would give anything if you hadn’t seen what you saw today. Such an ugly, ugly, evil thing!” She was trembling. The long quivering shook her body, shook her voice. “The world can be so frightful and human beings worse than beasts. Still, you must remember, Anna, that most people are good. You must try to put this out of your mind as soon as you can.”
“Will nobody punish those men?”
“In the first place, nobody could prove who did it. Nobody saw it.”
“I saw it. And I remember the faces. Especially the short thick one. He wears a red shirt and sometimes he goes into Krohn’s Inn to get drunk.”
The mother sat up. “Listen to me, Anna, do you hear? You are never, never to mention that to anybody, to anybody at all, do you understand? Terrible things would happen to you! To Papa, to me, to all of us! You must never, never—!”
The child was frightened. “I understand. But then, there is nothing that can be done about people like that?”
“Nothing.”
“Then how can we know it won’t happen again? Even to you, Mama?”
The mother was silent. And Anna pressed, “How can we know?”
“I suppose we can’t.”
“Then they can always do what they want to do. Kill us, even.”
“That, too. You’re old enough now to know.”
The child began to cry. The mother held her. After a while the father came in. He stood at the door. His face was crumpled and creased.
“I’ve made up my mind. Year after year we put it off. But this year, by spring, well manage it somehow! Well sell the furniture, your earrings, your mother’s silver candlesticks. We have got to get to America!”
“There are seven of us.”
“And if there were seventeen we would still have to manage it. This is no place to live! I want to lay my head down once without fear before I die.”
So all the time, in this home of theirs, they had been afraid. Mama so calmly and skillfully arranging things, Papa humming and smiling while his strong arms hammered and cut. The child thought wonderingly: I didn’t know, I never knew.
The winter of 1906 was strangely warm. Snow fell briefly and lay puddled in soggy gray slush. A damp wind blew; people perspired in their heavy coats, sneezed, shivered, ran fevers. Late in February the rain began, racing in long, even lines down the dark sky. The village street turned to sucking mud; the little river that curved at the bottom of the rise rushed over its banks and flooded all the yards along its length.
The sickness started down there at the river. In the middle of March a baby and a grandfather died in one house. On the other side of the river, where the peasants lived, a whole family died. Each day brought more sickness and some deaths. Sickness traveled north and south; people on farms
five miles away brought their dead to be buried in the churchyard. It was like the black rot that spreads some years in the potato fields, creeping down the rows. And there was no place to go, nothing that anyone knew how to do but wait.
Some said it was because the floods had brought filth into the drinking water. The village priest said it was because people had sinned. Hour after hour the church bells rang for funerals and masses of intercession, making a grave, bronze clamor in the rain. Whenever the rain stopped the processions formed: the priest, the altar boys holding candles, carrying banners and a bone relic in a glass box. Men lifted a statue of the Virgin on a swaying platform; women cried.
In Anna’s house the shutters were closed. “If this sickness doesn’t stop soon,” the father said, “they will start blaming us.”
The mother spoke sadly. “I don’t know which is worse, fear of the cholera or of them.”
“In America,” Anna said, “there is no cholera and nobody is afraid of anybody else.”
“And by summer well be there,” Papa said.
Perhaps at last they really would have gone that year. Who knows?
The father and the mother died at the end of March after an illness of just two days. Celia and Rachel died with them. Anna and the twins never fell sick at all.
They lived, the spindly red-haired girl and the ten-year-old boys, followed the four pine coffins to the cemetery, shook in the whipping wind while the prayers were chanted, saw the first clod of earth strike the wood. Hurry, hurry, it is so cold, Anna thought. And then she thought, I shall forget them. Close your eyes: Think of their faces, remember the sound of their voices calling your name.
They stood in the kitchen of what had been their home. Someone had aired and disinfected the house. Someone else had brought soup. The little room was crowded with neighbors in dark wraps and shawls.