Part 1
The Reverend Ambler did not say her name from the pulpit, but every head in the church turned toward Clara Kessler.
It was the second Sunday of January 1897, in Cedar Bend, Nebraska. The church stove stood cold because the coal car had not come up the Loup Valley line in nine days, and the congregation sat in their coats.
"There are some among us," the Reverend said, "who feed the Lord's harvest into their stoves."
Clara kept her eyes on the hymnal in her lap. Beside her, six children sat in a row from tallest to smallest, as she had lined them up at the door. Little Max, who was two, was chewing on the hymnal's corner. She let him.
"The good earth gave us the largest crop this valley has ever seen," the Reverend said. "And some of us have answered by setting it on fire."
Henry shifted on the pew. Her husband was a quiet man, and his ears went red when he was angry. They were red now.
Clara had never minded the cold in church. She minded her name being left out of a sermon so carefully that everybody heard it anyway.
The Reverend Josiah Ambler shook hands at the door after the service, as he always did. When Clara reached him, he held her hand a moment longer.
"Mrs. Kessler," he said. "I hope you understand I mean no unkindness."
"I understand you, Reverend."
"There are children in Omaha this winter eating one meal a day," he said, and his voice was low and tired, not angry at all. "When I see corn go into a stove, I see their supper burning."
Clara looked at him. He was a thin man with a cough he had brought from Ohio, and his own coat was patched at both elbows.
"Then I'll put my corn on a train to Omaha," she said, "if you'll tell me who pays the freight."
She heard Henry draw a breath behind her. She did not take it back. She walked her six children to the wagon and did not look at the church again.
On the ride home Henry said, "That was sharp, Clara."
"It was true."
"I'm only saying it was sharp."
The corn crib stood behind the house, built of slats, so the wind could dry the ears. Henry had measured it Saturday. Eighty-four bushels left.
The elevator in town was paying twelve cents a bushel, when it was buying at all. Coal cost seven dollars a ton at the lumberyard, plus fourteen miles of hauling each way. They had nine dollars in the coffee can, and the taxes were due.
Clara had done the sums at the kitchen table. Eight weeks to the first of March. A bushel and a half a day. Not one ear more.
She knelt at the cookstove and lit it the way her father had in Iowa, in the hard years of the seventies. Dry cobs first, from the bushel basket by the woodbox, because ears of corn would not catch from a match. When the cobs roared, she laid in three ears. Only three. Then she shut the damper almost all the way.
The kitchen filled with a smell like popcorn and warm bread.
Emil, who was fourteen, sat at the table watching her. "Pa says you could feed it faster."
"Your pa didn't crack a stove in 1878," Clara said.
She ran her thumb along the firebox door. Under the iron, the back plate still had a crack in it, mended with a strip of tin and two stove bolts. She had been twenty-four, with a new husband and a new stove, and she had stuffed the firebox full of ears on a January night to show him how warm she could make a house. The iron had glowed red. Then it had rung like a bell and split.
Corn burned hotter than anybody expected. That was the whole secret of it. Three ears at a time, the damper nearly closed, the ash bucket and the tongs always within reach.
On Wednesday, Emil came home from school with a split lip.
He would not say why at first. Then his sister Greta said it for him.
"The Haskell boys call our place the popcorn house," she said. "They say we're heathens."
Clara cleaned the lip with cold water from the pail and did not say a word against the Haskell boys. Her hands were not quite steady.
That night Henry sat at the table turning his cup around.
"We could buy a half ton," he said. "Get through to March on coal. Stop the talk."
"With the tax money?"
"I'm only saying."
"We burn the corn, Henry."
He turned the cup once more. Then he nodded and went out to check the stock. Clara stayed at the stove and fed in three ears, and the smell of popcorn filled the kitchen, and for the first time in her life she did not like it.
On Saturday, Henry drove the team to Loup City with a load of hogs. He would be back Monday.
Sunday, the seventeenth, Clara kept the children home from church. She told herself it was the cold.
By two in the afternoon, the sky in the northwest had gone the color of dishwater. By three, snow was coming sideways past the window. By four, she could not see the corn crib, and the wind was finding every crack in the north wall and whistling through it.
Clara hung a quilt over the bedroom door to keep the heat in one room. She moved the ash bucket and the tongs closer to the stove, the way she always did on a bad night.
Then she lit the lamp, set it in the window, and went out on the step into the white.
The iron triangle hung from the porch post. She rang it hard. Every quarter hour after that, she went out and rang it again. Her father had done the same on bad nights in Iowa, for anyone who might be out on the road.
At dusk, she heard something under the wind. Harness bells. Then a horse, blowing hard, close.
Then a fist on the door.
Clara opened it. The Reverend Josiah Ambler stood on her step with ice in his beard and his wife beside him, three children huddled against their legs.
His eyes went past her, to the stove, where three ears of corn were burning.