Our Little Bertha

Abstract

58 OUR LITTLE BERTHA MICHELLE HOOVER T he light in the doorway, the long unfinished homecoming, the old men on their haunches and the smell of manure in the wind, the smell of the inside of my hand . . . Everything is muted in this place—even the beginning. Iowa: A slow grinding of continents and now the soil is merely the remains of glacial drift, a lucky convergence of minerals and terrain. Still, I wonder how this place came into existence. It rolls as you watch it, like the sea. It goes on forever but it never begins. There is a low feeling to living here, of being pushed to the earth and rubbing your hands in the dirt. You think of weather. You can see far enough off. You predict snow, rain, and wind, but after the heavy threat of winter, the remaining seasons are a steady run of nothing much. Cobwebs lace the ears of corn, grasshoppers stick to your shoes. Just before harvest , the land is a little bit greater, more golden, and the cicadas so loud the heat seems to be rubbing its legs. The cows take a slow lick from a puddle. A flick of an ear, and they lope their way home. This is the place of simple appetites and small wonders . Of never drawing attention to yourself and keeping your hands in your pockets, your eyes sharp on the horizon. It is the place where I was born. Decades ago, it would have been the rest of my life, but it’s been years now since I’ve returned. There were many things that came up to discourage us, my great-grandmother wrote a year before her death. But we refused to be very discouraged. It is January in Boston, the winter after I turn thirty, and I suppose that’s how long it takes to get a good look at things. In the late afternoon, the sun sets with alarming efficiency and already my windows are dark. A snowstorm is set for the night. Even now I can feel its weight. I am locked inside, sitting at the windows with a notebook and pencil in my lap, and the sky up 59 Hoover 59 here from my top-floor apartment is full of wind. Beneath my window, voices of passersby remind me there are better ways to spend a Sunday afternoon, but I am beginning at least. In my new situation, newly alone, with a job at last at the university to sustain me, my mother has become a nervous woman again and has decided to visit me in Boston. Though she puzzles over dependent women, the sudden and freeing divorce of her youngest has left her afraid of my rootlessness. It is a cold day, my mother tired of walking. We sit in a café with two cups of hot chocolate, and she takes a stack of papers out of her purse. “Look here,” she says. “This is your great-grandmother’s. You might want to learn something about your family now, don’t you think?” I squint at the pages but do not touch them. There are fifteen in all, poorly typed, with my great-grandmother’s name and date of birth—Melva Current, 1880—at the top. Perhaps my life, she wrote, and that of my dear husband has meant little or nothing to anyone except to us and our immediate family. Turned at the corners, the pages seem weightless, though her account covers more than seventy-one years. I stop reading. All I have are questions, but my mother has eased herself out of her chair and pulled her cardigan straight. “I think I’ll buy one of those praline things,” she says, pointing at the display. “Do you want one?” As if she hasn’t just handed me an entire life. I have my great-grandmother’s pages for a month before I begin to make sense of them. In all the years I’ve been gone, the empty bowl of Iowa has become entirely something else. My mother says I should see it now. All sorts of newcomers, companies sprouting in the fields, a wave of technology...