Karen Russell - Vampires in the Lemon Grove

“No, sweetheart, you’re right. Pete can’t go, we can’t spare Miles — who does that leave? I go or we forfeit our chance. We don’t prove up. We don’t own the land where our girls are buried.”

Ma leaves to get the Window.

We nightly pray for everyone in Hox to prove up, the titles from the Land Office framed on their walls. The purple and scarlet tongue of my mother’s bookmark used to move around the Bible chapters with the weather, but for the past year and a half it’s been stuck on Psalm 68:9. On that page, says Ma, it rains reliably.

Through the empty socket in our sod, I can see her hunched over in the deepest shadows. Dust whirls around the floor in little twisters, scraping her ankles raw. She bends over the glass, and a rail of vertebrae jumps out. My mother is thirty-one years old, but the land out here paints old age onto her. All day she travels this room, sweeping a floor that is already dirt, scrubbing the dinner plates into white ovals, shaking out rugs. Ma is humming a stubborn song and won’t look up from the Window on her lap. She polishes the glass by licking the end of her braid into a fine point and whisking it over the surface, like a watercolorist. Now the Window is the only clean thing in our house. It’s the size of a hanging painting, with an inch border of stained glass. Two channeled lead strips run orange and jewel-blue light around it. But the inner panels are the most beautiful, I think: perfectly transparent.

Ma wraps it in some scatter rugs and penny burlap. “Good-bye, Miles,” she says simply.

We fix my cargo to the horse’s flank, half a dozen ropes raveling to one knot at the saddle horn. Pa hitches my leg at a painful angle, warns me not to put weight anywhere near the Window. Already I’m eager for the crystal risk of riding at a gallop. Then he gives me an envelope and kisses up to my ear like he does Ma’s. “A little bribe,” he says. “Tell the Inspector there’s more waiting at the Zegner place.”

“Okay.” I frown. “Is there?”

Pa thumps Nore on the rump.

When we reach the fence line a very bad thought occurs to me: “Pa! What if they don’t give the Window back?” I call out. “The Sticksels — what if they try to keep it?”

“Then you’d better run fast, because those aren’t our neighbors. Those are monsters, pretending to be the Sticksels. But before you run, grab the Window.”

I might as well have asked him, What if Ma leaves us? What if Peter never gets better?

I don’t look back as I glide Nore around the oak — the only tree for miles of prairie. The wind blows us forward, sends the last leaves raining around us and the October clouds flashing like horseshoes. I duck underneath the branches and touch the lowermost one for luck. When I turn to salute my father, I see that he and Ma are swaying together in the stunted wheat like a dance, his big hands tight around the spindle of her waist and her face buried in his neck, her black hair waterfalling across the caked grime on his shirt. It’s only later that I realize Ma was sobbing.

THE FIRST FAMILY of landowners we met in Nebraska were the Henry Yotherses. Five years ago, a few weeks after our migration to the Hox River Settlement, we arrived at their July picnic “one hour shy of serendipity,” as Mrs. Yothers immediately announced — too late but only just to meet the Inspector. I was a pipsqueak then, and so I remember everything: the glowering sunset and an army of Turkey Red wheat mustered by the Yotherses to support their claim, the whaleback hump of the sod house rising above the grassy sea — and Mr. Henry Yothers himself, a new king in possession of his title.

“A proven man,” Pa whistled.

“Christ in heaven, love must glue you to him every fortnight,” Ma joked to Mrs. Yothers — but in a hushed voice, surrounded as they were by what seemed like thousands of Yothers children. Ten thousand tiny mouths feeding on that quarter section of land, and dressed for the occasion like midget undertakers, in black trousers and bowties.

“That Inspector shook each of my children’s hands,” boasted Henry Yothers. “Congratulated each one of them on being ‘landed gentry.’ He’s a curious fellow, Johannes. Lost an eye in the war. He wears a patch of dark green silk over the socket. It’s no coincidence, I’m sure, that he’s obsessed with the Glass Requirement.”

And then we got our first look at the Hox River Window: that magical glass fusing their inner room to the outside world, gracing their home with light. Back in Blue Sink there were thousands of windows, but we only looked through them, never at them. We gasped.

Remembering this, I feel queasy all over again. Something about the big grins on everybody’s faces, and all that pomp: the Inspector’s checklist, the ten-dollar filing fee, the U.S. president’s counterfeit autograph in an inky loop. Through the glass we watched Mrs. Yothers slide the title into its birch frame and dutifully applauded. The general mood confused me. We were going to slave and starve and wait five years to get a piece of paper so thin? Why? To prove what? Who cares what Washington, D.C., thinks?

“Congratulations!” my mother beamed at Mrs. Yothers, with a girlishness I’d never seen before, and then embarrassed us all by bursting into tears. “Oh, boys, they proved it to them.”

“To who?”

“Who? Everybody, Miles! The people back East, who said they’d never make it a year on the frontier. The men in Washington. The Inspector will forward their papers on to the president himself. Now you come say a prayer with me—”

Back then, Ma never mentioned Pennsylvania except to say “good riddance.” We’d traveled west under juicy clouds that clustered like grapes. My sisters weren’t alive in her belly or dead under the thistle and sod. Our plow gleamed. Furniture from Blue Sink was still in boxes.

“Miles, if we’re to make this place our home, we need it official. Same as any claimant out here. You can’t understand that?”

With Pa out of earshot, I said, “No, ma’am. I really cannot.”

“The Yotherses survived the grasshoppers of 1868, got hailed out twice, burned corn for fuel. They took over from the Nune-makers. Did you know that, Miles? A bunch that fled. But the Henry Yothers family prevailed — they held on to their claim. Your heart’s so stingy you can’t celebrate that?”

But, Ma , I wanted to say. Because I guessed that a few hours earlier, before the Inspection, the Yotherses’ farm had looked no different from the proven place we’d leave — with the same children running barefoot around their cave, and in the distance the same wheat blowing. And the whole scene sliding through that Window, as real or as unreal as it had ever been.

WHAT WE DIDN’T know then, as we filed our own preempt in the white beehive of the Federal Land Office: the long droughts were coming. Since that July day, over half the Hox River homesteaders have forfeited their claims and left, dozens of families withdrawing back east. And the men and women who stayed, says Pa with teeth in his words, who sowed and abided, “We are the victors, Miles. Our roots reach deep. We Zegners were green when we came here, but now we’re dust brown, the color of Hox. Proving up means you stand your ground, you win your title — a hundred and sixty acres go from public to private. Clear and free, you hold it. Nobody can ever run you off. It’s home.”

Over the years, my father’s reasoning has been whittled to its core, like everything else out here. At times he wanders around our homestead shouting at random intervals, “I know a hunger stronger than thirst!” His voice booms like thunder in my brain as we light out. Nore digs into the dry earth, happy to be running.