The Mourning Hours

“Yeah,” I said again, suddenly ashamed of my dirty hands, my teeth sticky with the residue of Coke. “Why?”

She smiled and held out a hand, poised as any church greeter. “I’m Stacy Lemke.”

We shook hands. Nothing drastic happened, no fireworks or a sudden crack of thunder, but somehow the moment felt significant.

Stacy’s hands were cool, her nails painted the softest pink, like cotton candy. If she noticed that my nails were ringed with dirt, she didn’t say anything. “Kirsten. That’s such a pretty name,” she said.

I smiled. “Do you know my brother?”

She laughed. “Everyone knows Johnny Hammarstrom.”

This hadn’t really occurred to me until I heard it said that way, so boldly, like a biblical fact. During wrestling season, Johnny’s name was a regular appearance in the sports section of the Watankee Weekly; whenever I was in town with Dad, someone always approached him to ask about Johnny’s prospects for the fall.

“I go to school with him, but we don’t really know each other,” Stacy said, smiling a little sadly. “I mean, I don’t think he would ever notice someone like me.”

I looked at her more closely. Her tiny freckles glistened under small bubbles of sweat, but I didn’t see any kind of defect—no eyeteeth or harelip or deformed thumbs. If my brother hadn’t noticed Stacy Lemke, he was either blind or stupid or both. “Why not?” I asked, blushing. “I think you’re really pretty.”

“Oh, you’re so sweet!” She gave me a quick touch on the knee and stood up, brushing invisible dirt from her legs.

“I would have noticed you,” I said, swallowing hard.

“Aren’t you just the cutest thing in the world!” She laughed, tossing her head so that her red hair briefly covered her face and then swung free again. “Well—it was nice meeting you.”

She started to walk away. I watched her until she got to the edge of the bleachers, where she stopped and did a little rubbing thing with her shoes in the grass, to toe off the dust. I was still watching her when she turned back to me, and I looked down, embarrassed.

“You know, maybe you could tell Johnny that I said hi.”

“Sure.” I smiled. She could have asked me anything, and I wouldn’t have said no.

When she smiled back at me, I could see a little tooth in the back of her mouth that was turned sideways and slightly pointed—the only thing about Stacy Lemke that wasn’t absolutely perfect. It made me like her even more.

three

The crowd dispersed, and the Hammarstroms reassembled in the infield, half of us sweaty and all of us satisfied.

“Watch out, shorty!” Johnny yelled, appearing from the dugout. I pretended to dodge his grasp, but he caught me by the arms and hoisted me to his shoulders. I shrieked while he ran the bases, my hands grabbing on to his neck for dear life.

“Be careful!” Mom called from somewhere, her voice lost in the darkness.

I screamed as Johnny gained speed, heading for home plate. I squeezed my feet against his chest, too terrified to look until he eased up and carefully deposited me on the ground. That was Johnny—rough and gentle at the same time.

It wasn’t until later, when we were gathered around the kitchen table dunking chunks of apple pie into bowls of soupy vanilla ice cream, that I remembered about Stacy. For a moment I hesitated to say anything, wanting to hold Stacy’s existence close, like a treasure gathered in my fist.

Johnny had finished giving Grandpa the play-by-play, and Grandpa was just about finished pretending to be interested in his analysis of Sandy Maertz’s triple, when I managed to get a word in.

“A girl named Stacy Lemke says to tell you hi,” I said.

“Who’s that?” Johnny asked gruffly, looking down into his bowl. His cheeks suddenly flamed pink.

I shrugged, trying to be casual. “Stacy Lemke. She has red hair and freckles.” She has creamy skin, the softest handshake in the world. She said I was adorable.

“That must be Bill Lemke’s daughter. He played for the other team tonight. Is she in your class, Johnny?” Mom asked.

“I don’t know,” he said, shrugging.

“Sure you do,” Emilie piped up. “Stacy Lemke? She used to go out with what’s-his-name, the Ships quarterback.”

I smooshed my finger into a drop of ice cream. “She says she goes to school with you.”

“Well, I don’t know. Maybe I’ve seen her around,” Johnny said. He brought his bowl to his lips, trying to drain the last of his ice cream into his mouth. Mom cleared her throat pointedly, and Johnny set the bowl back on the table.

“Bill Lemke, the tax attorney?” Dad asked.

“O-o-o-h, someone’s got a crush on you,” Emilie teased.

Johnny clanked his spoon against his bowl. “Shut up, that’s not true.”

Dad said, “He’s the guy who helped Jerry hold on to some of that land after Karl died. Decent guy.”

Emilie sang, “Johnny’s got a girlfriend.... Johnny’s got—”

“I said shut up, already.” Johnny stood up and Mom sent Emilie a warning look sharp as any elbow. I had to hand it to Emilie; she wasn’t a coward. She was a master at pushing Johnny right to his very edge.

“Look, she’s just some girl.” Johnny turned away from us. His bowl and spoon landed in the sink with a clang, and the back door slammed a few seconds later.

Mom called, “Johnny! You get back here!” but Johnny was already gone.

“What’s got into him?” Dad demanded, his voice caught between annoyance and amusement.

Mom shrugged, getting up to rinse out Johnny’s bowl.

Dad stood then and stretched, the same stretch he did every night when the day was just about over. “I guess it’s time for me to make the rounds one last time,” he announced. “I could use a bit of company, though.”

This was my cue. I stood, following Dad to the door for our nighttime ritual. Kennel trotted behind us to the barn, where I dumped out some cat food for our half-dozen strays and Dad walked up and down the calf pens, whistling and cooing to the youngest, reassuring them. “Hey, now, baby,” I heard him say, and the calves responded by tottering forward in their pens, all awkward legs and clunky hooves.

I waited for Dad in the doorway of the barn with Kennel rubbing against my legs. From this perspective, slightly elevated from the rest of our property, it seemed as if all we needed was a moat and we would have our own little kingdom. Our land, all one hundred-and-sixty acres of it, stretched away farther than I could see into the deepening darkness. On the north side of the property the corn grew fiercely, shooting inches upward in a single day. Beyond the rows of corn was our neighbor Mel Wegner, beloved because he let me feed apples to his two retired quarter horses, King Henry and Queen Anne. In the opposite direction, our cow pasture joined up with what had been the Warczaks’ property, until Jerry had had to sell most of it to cover legal and medical expenses. These days, the bank rented him part of the property for a chicken farm. Sometimes, when the wind carried just right, I could hear the confusion of a thousand chickens pushing against each other. Other times, days in a row might pass without us seeing any of our human neighbors.

Our house, beaming now with yellow rectangles of light from almost every window, was set back from the road by a rolling green lawn that Grandpa Hammarstrom tended faithfully. Peeking behind it, closer to the road, was Grandpa’s house, newly remodeled to be in every way more efficient than ours. On the east end, our property ended in a thick patch of trees that started just about at one end of the county and ended at the other, a green ribbon of forest that more or less tended to itself. In the middle of it all was our barn, which Johnny had been painstakingly repainting, plus our towering blue silo, the sleek white milk tank.

“Ready, kiddo?” Dad asked, appearing behind me. He cupped his hand around the back of my head, and my silky, tangled blond hair fell through his fingers.

“Race you,” I said, suddenly filled with the night’s unspent energy, and started back. Dad was a superior racing companion, pushing me to go faster and farther, but never getting more than a step ahead of me. We arrived breathless at the back door. Mom was alone at the sink now, and she turned to grin at us.

“Another tie,” Dad announced.

When I thought about this day later, I wished I could have scooped up the whole scene in one of Mom’s canning jars, so I could keep all of us there forever. I knew it wouldn’t last for that long, though—the fireflies I captured on summer nights had to be set free or else they were nothing more than curled-up husks by morning. But I had always loved the way they buzzed frantically in the jar, their winged, beetlelike bodies going into a tizzy with even the slightest shake. If I could have done it somehow, I would have captured my own family in the same way, all of us safe and together, if only for a moment.

four

Suddenly, I was seeing Stacy Lemke everywhere. A few days after that first softball game, I saw her at Dewy’s, where I was sucking down a chocolate shake while I waited for Mom to place an order next door at Gaub’s Meats. The instant Stacy stepped through the door with two other girls, my heart performed this funny extra beat.

“Hey, Kirsten!” she called loudly, and everyone in the whole café turned for a second to look at me.

I beamed back at her. She put her arm around me in a quick hug, as if we had always known each other. She was wearing a yellow T-shirt, a denim skirt and sandals, and her reddish hair, hanging loose around her shoulders, smelled like gardenias.

She gestured behind her. “These are my sisters, Joanie and Heather.”

I smiled shyly into the whipped cream residue of my shake. Heather was in the sixth grade at Watankee Elementary, and I’d seen her on the playground, walloping a tetherball over her victims’ heads. She was basically a giant. Joanie, strawberry-blonde and shorter, was what Stacy would look like if she went through the wash a few times. We smiled our hellos.

“When’s the next softball game?” Stacy asked as her sisters stepped up to the counter to order.

“Next Tuesday, I think.”

She smiled that Stacy smile, wide and white. “Well, maybe I’ll see you then.”

My eyes tracked her as she placed her order, produced a folded bill from her skirt pocket to pay and made small talk with the girl behind the counter. I remembered what Emilie had said the other night, that Stacy used to date the quarterback of the mighty Lincoln High Shipbuilders. Even though what I knew about football was limited to helmets and “hut-hut” and touchdowns, I knew that the quarterback was a big deal. Everyone in all of Wisconsin knew who Brett Favre was, after all.

I saw Stacy only a few days later at the library, while Dad was down the street at the feed store. I was curled up in a bean bag, leafing through an encyclopedia and wondering for the millionth time why reference books couldn’t be checked out like anything else. It hardly seemed fair.

Suddenly, Stacy was squatting beside me, a book in her hand. “Oh, hey! I keep bumping into you!”

I beamed. It would be fair to say that by this time I was already half in love with Stacy Lemke. She looked happier to see me than the members of my own family did, even the ones I saw rarely. Only this morning Emilie had thrown a hairbrush across the room at me for losing her butterfly hair clip. Stacy would never throw a hairbrush at her sisters—you could tell a thing like that just by looking at her. I wondered if there was some way I could trade Emilie for Stacy, as if they were playing cards.

“So,” she said as she smiled, “how’s your family doing?”

I thought about mentioning that Emilie was in trouble for cutting five inches off the hem of one of her skirts, but figured that probably wasn’t what Stacy wanted to hear. I took a deep breath and said, “I forgot to tell you last time. Johnny said I should say hi if I saw you.” It was surprising how easily the lie had come to me, and how smoothly the next one followed on its heels. “He said he would see you at the game on Tuesday.”

“He did? Really?” She rocked backward on her heels and then straightened up, until she was standing at her full height. Her cheeks suddenly looked more pink, her tiny freckles like scattered grains of sand. I remembered what she had said: I don’t think he would notice a girl like me.

“Really,” I said. It wasn’t a lie if it was said for the sake of politeness, right? Didn’t we always compliment Mom’s casseroles, even as we shifted the food around on our plates without eating it? Besides, to repeat the truth would be rude: She’s just some girl.

Stacy grinned at me. “Well, tell him hi back.”

“I will,” I promised.

After she returned her book and left, smiling at me over her shoulder, I went to the checkout counter where Miss Elise, the librarian, was stamping books with a firm thud. “Can I check out that book?” I asked, pointing to the one Stacy had just returned.

“What, this one?” Miss Elise said, holding up Pride and Prejudice. “Are you sure? Might be a little hard for you.”

“I think I’m ready for it,” I said.

She smiled, handing the book over, but she was right. I wasn’t ready for it; I gave up after the first page. But I liked knowing that Stacy had held this very book in her hands, that her fingers with the perfectly painted nails had turned these very pages.

And, of course, I saw Stacy in the stands at every softball game for the rest of the Haybalers’ short season. At our second game, Stacy walked right up to where Mom and I were sitting, and I said, “Mom, this is Stacy Lemke. Remember, I was telling you about her?”

“Of course,” Mom said smoothly, standing. They shook hands politely.

“I go to school with Johnny,” Stacy explained.

The Haybalers took the field just then, and there was a general roar from the hundred or so of us in the stands.

“Well, I should probably find my seat,” Stacy said.

“Good to meet you,” Mom said a little dismissively. She turned her attention to the game, and Stacy winked at me. I winked right back, glad I had perfected the technique during a particularly long sermon last winter. It felt as if we were secret agents with the same mission: to get Johnny to fall in love with her.

With Stacy for me to watch, softball was much more interesting. She sat next to a friend or two, girls who seemed boring compared to her. I couldn’t help but notice how Stacy watched Johnny while she pretended not to, distributing her gaze equally among all the players, and then homing in again and again on Johnny at shortstop. When he was up to bat, she joined the crowd in chanting, “John-ny! John-ny!” She cheered when he broke up a double play at second and whooped with pleasure when he crossed home plate.

During the game, Johnny was all focus, an athlete’s athlete. He had always been a competitor, no matter what the sport. It was clear, watching him, that he had a natural talent—he could hit farther, run faster, field better, throw harder than anyone else. He also took failures more personally than anyone else, cursing when Dad dropped a throw to first, kicking divots in the dirt to shake off a bad swing. If he noticed Stacy Lemke watching him, it didn’t show.

It was Stacy who approached him first after that second game. I know because I was watching, holding my breath, clutching my fists to my side like the freak Emilie always said I was. If asked, I couldn’t have explained why their meeting was so important to me, but maybe it had something to do with ownership. In a way, I owned a part of Johnny Hammarstrom, who was star athlete for the Lincoln High Shipbuilders, but my own brother, too. And since I’d met Stacy first, since she’d sought me out under the bleachers that day, I felt I owned a part of her, too.

Stacy had walked right down the bleachers, not on the steps but on the seats, confident. She moved with purpose around the chain-link fence and out onto the field, her legs creamy white in her short shorts, a checked shirt pushed up past her elbows. She was headed right for him, and Johnny must have realized that at some point, too, because he froze, his cheeks flushed with sweat, his jeans filthy along the left side from a slide into third base.

I don’t know what she said to him and what he said back to her, but my mind filled with a million possibilities, talk of baseball and school and plans for the rest of the summer and deep dark secrets. Well, maybe not that—it was hard for me to imagine that Johnny, who most of the time seemed as complicated as a June bug, could keep any kind of secret. But something was being said, and something was happening between them. At one point Stacy gestured to the stands—to me?—and Johnny followed her gaze, scanning the crowd. Before she walked away, Stacy reached out her hand and touched him on the arm, just lightly, such a small and insignificant touch, but I reeled, gasping. This was flirting. This was something.

“What’s wrong with you?” Emilie asked, joining me in the stands.

I shook my head. Nothing. Everything. The way I was sweating, it might have been me out there, falling in love.

Mom turned from the conversation she’d been having with an internist from the hospital and studied me. “I think you’ve been having too much sugar, Kirsten.”

“No, I haven’t—” I protested, and by the time I looked back, Stacy was gone and Johnny was standing with the guys in the dugout.

It was like this at every game for the rest of the tournament. Bud Hirsch led the team in a cheer for the competitors, and the men worked their way through the line slapping sweaty hands: “Good game”...“good game”...“good game.” Then Stacy and Johnny began a slow, purposeful wandering toward each other while I held my breath. Even Mom had started to notice, and the two of us would watch them together, Mom shaking her head, and me grinning like an idiot.

With everyone else packing coolers and blankets and finding rides home, Johnny and Stacy stood in a little bubble of quiet, whatever words they said meant for each other alone.

“Don’t stare, shrimp,” Emilie nudged me once when I was lost in their romance. “Isn’t it past your bedtime, anyway?”

I followed her to the car, kicking against the grass with the toes of my tennis shoes. When I looked back, Johnny and Stacy were still talking, and his truck didn’t pull into our driveway until we’d been home for twenty minutes.

five

It was a hot, lazy Wisconsin summer. In the barn, flies descended by the thousands onto the backs of our cows, but it was too warm for them to protest with even the simplest flick of a tail. It was too warm in our house, too—upstairs, Emilie and I opened our bedroom window one day in June and didn’t bother to close it for weeks. We woke up sticky in the mornings, the humidity coating our bodies like fur. It seemed to me that the whole world was taking a break, holding its breath, waiting for Johnny and Stacy to fall in love.

Aunt Julia rescued us on weekday afternoons, inviting us to cool off in her aboveground pool. Emilie and I traipsed the half mile down Rural Route 4 to her house, our beach towels draped over our shoulders. I lagged behind, pulling at fuzzy cattails and listening to mosquitoes swarm over the stagnant water in the ditch. Toss a stone through their midst and they would part like the Red Sea letting Moses and his people cross, then swarm back in a rush. Emilie marched ahead, preening for the service vehicles that lumbered past on the road.

Aunt Julia, older than Dad by almost twelve years, was my favorite aunt. Her husband, Uncle Paul, was a general manager for John Deere in Manitowoc, and their son, Brent, only a few years older than Johnny, was training to be a firefighter in Milwaukee. Emilie and I were the girls she’d never had. Uncle Paul had built them a fancy deck around a four-foot Doughboy, and she loved to serve us Popsicles and sugary glasses of lemonade and lay her wrinkly, too-tan body on the deck while we swam. Sometimes she smoked cigarettes, too, although about this we were sworn to secrecy. “I’m supposed to be quitting,” she had explained, although she never seemed to try all that hard.

“What’s new, girls?” she asked from beneath a broad sun hat.

“Unfortunately, nothing is ever new around here,” Emilie said, splashing dramatically onto her back. “That’s the problem.”

“Well,” I said, staying close to the deck, “I think Johnny has a girlfriend.” Suddenly Johnny had been asking to use the phone every night after dinner. On weekends, he showered after the last milking and disappeared in his truck.

Aunt Julia’s eyebrows rose over the tops of her sunglasses. “I think I’ve heard that myself.”

“Really? From Mom?” I asked.

“From everyone in Watankee, more like it,” Emilie scoffed. “He took her on the youth group rafting trip last weekend, and they’re going to a movie tonight. In Watankee terms, they are officially a couple.” She lifted her hands out of the water to put air quotes around the word.

Aunt Julia laughed. “So what do you think? Do you like her?”

Emilie made a sound like “ehh.” She wobbled her hand in the air in a so-so motion.

“I like her! She’s really nice,” I said. In Stacy’s defense, I splashed in Emilie’s direction, but the water landed a foot short of its mark.

Emilie laughed. “You don’t even know her.”

“I do, too! You don’t know who I know.” I did know Stacy. She had visited our house twice now, and each time she’d asked me about what I was reading, what I liked to do during the summer. She and Johnny and I had walked out to the barn, and I’d convinced her to let a calf suckle two of her outstretched fingers. She’d squealed at first and then got used to it and started stroking the calf behind its ears with her free hand. This felt like the most essential thing to know about a person.

There was a familiar hissing sound as Aunt Julia struck a match to light her cigarette. “What don’t you like about her, Emilie?”

Emilie considered for a moment. “She’s just so clingy, you know? She hangs all over him.”

Aunt Julia blew some smoke out of the side of her mouth and gave a little chuckle. “Seems like she’s the kind of girl who likes to have a boyfriend. Plenty of girls like that.”

“I think it’s pathetic,” Emilie pronounced. “She spent the whole past month just trying to catch his eye—”

“She did not!” I sputtered defensively. Of course she hadn’t. She’d only been at that softball game because her Dad was playing; she’d only talked to Johnny in the first place because I’d passed on her message. “You’re just jealous because you don’t have a boyfriend.”

Emilie shrieked with laughter. She tipped her head backward into the water and came up again, her hair lying sleek against her head. “Oh, puh-lease. Plus, ask anyone at school. She was dating this guy last year and she just about drove him insane, she was so needy.”

I flopped onto my back, kicking my legs angrily in her direction. She skimmed her arms across the surface of the pool in response, serving up an impressive wall of water that splashed onto the deck.

“All right, girls.” Aunt Julia sighed, a gray strand of smoke curling out of her mouth.

“I’m only saying,” Emilie smirked.

“Well I like her,” I announced.

“I do, too, sweetie,” Aunt Julia said. “And I bet Johnny’s big enough to handle himself.”

Emilie rolled her eyes but let it go. “I’m going to start a whirlpool,” she announced, kicking off from the edge of the pool.

Aunt Julia laid her head back, closing her eyes, and I flopped back onto an inner tube, letting the momentum from Emilie’s vigorous one-person whirlpool spin me in lazy circles. Every now and then I splashed water onto the inner tube to cool off my legs. The sunscreen that had been slathered on me only an hour before had melted away with the heat, and I could feel my skin pinking from head to toe.

That night, with barely any warning, a thunderstorm rolled through on dark, menacing clouds that hung low on the horizon over our still-fragile cornstalks. It was still blazing hot, eighty degrees but dripping with humidity so thick that the air seemed to splinter and shape itself around us as we moved. Dad and I were coming back from the barn when the first bolt of lightning split the sky in two. We were drenched by the time we made it to the back door. Upstairs, Emilie and I sat on her bed, watching while rain swept the fields and battered the house. Suddenly, there was a crack; the oak tree on the front lawn had been hit by lightning. I screamed when a large branch hit the ground, shaking the house and all of us inside it. In the morning, Dad and Johnny dragged the limb across the grass to the side of our shed, where it lay like a carcass, its sad branches splayed to the side.