I’d been feeling anxious about the future for a long while, but that was the first night my worries kept me awake until dawn. And I was right to worry. A few weeks later, when the election results were announced, we learned that 44 percent of Germans had voted for the Nazi party. Joining forces with the Workers’ Party, they easily formed a majority in the parliament.
The Nazis were no longer a fringe party, no longer hovering on the edge of the German political system. Now they were at the very center of it, and from there, they could shape it as they pleased.
11
Lizzie
Dallam County, Texas
1935
“Is Mother ready?” Henry called. “Let’s go!” He only saw Betsy at church now, and he didn’t want to waste a minute of his only chance to be with her.
“She’s over at the tree,” I muttered as I peered at myself in the hall mirror, turning this way and that to see myself from all angles. I’d lost some weight that year and my dresses hung on me like sacks, so Mother took in one of her old dresses for me to wear for my Sunday outfit. It was an older style, stiff cotton with little black buttons down the front of the bodice, leading to a heavy flared skirt.
“Go get her, sis,” Henry said, pleading. “You know I hate going over there.”
“So do I,” I said pointedly. There was something unnerving about the way Mother held herself on Sunday mornings when she visited that bench. She often sat slumped and melancholy, as if her grief were still fresh but she had to condense it down into a single hour each week. Elsie had been lost for more than twenty-five years. That Mother was still so sad after all that time never failed to confuse Henry and me.
Henry glanced down at his watch and then sighed impatiently and left the house. I heard movement from Mother and Daddy’s bedroom, so I walked quickly down the hall, knocked, and pushed the door open, holding my breath while I waited to see how Dad was that day. Ever since Henry borrowed that money, the pattern of his good days and bad days reversed. It was as if he’d suffered a terrible injury that left him with a permanent disability—only the injury wasn’t to his body, but to his pride.
Dad wasn’t dressed for church but there were some positive signs. He’d opened the drapes and was sitting up in bed, reading the newspaper we’d brought back from Oakden the previous Sunday. On very bad days, Dad barely seemed to realize I was there. Mother said it wasn’t his fault.
“It’s tiring trying to make sense of things that make no damned sense at all,” she told me. “Your daddy is a farmer to his very bones. When farming isn’t working as it should, he’s just a husk of his real self.”
The drought changed a lot of things and none of it made sense to me either. I still got out of bed and I still did my share. Mother, Henry, and I didn’t have a choice—we had to get used to a new way of operating because running the farm was a four-man operation. The price per bushel for wheat in the 1934 harvest was higher, and that might have been a relief had it not been our worst season ever, both in terms of the condition of the grain and the yield. We sold only six hundred bushels, each one fetching a miserable thirty-three cents.
We didn’t square the debt with Judge Nagle that year. We didn’t even manage to make regular repayments. Henry told me to “keep my chin up,” but I knew it was already too late. Even if we had buckets of rain, there would be no crop this year. I had no idea what we were going to do, other than to throw ourselves on the good graces of Judge Nagle and ask for more time.
“You look pretty as a picture,” Dad said, and if the shock on his face was any indication, he was as surprised by his remark as I was. I did a mock curtsy and mumbled something about it being Mother’s old dress. “Oh, I remember it well. She used to wear it back when we were courting. It suits you just as well as it suited her then.” He set the paper down on his lap and frowned at me. “Lizzie, you’re almost nineteen. When are you going to get yourself a boyfriend?”
“I don’t want a boyfriend,” I said, raising my chin.
“Your mother and I were married by the time she was your age.”
“Daddy.”
“What? You know it’s true.”
“Maybe I’m not cut out for all that,” I muttered, embarrassed.
“Nonsense. Don’t you want a farm of your own? Children?”
“I…” I didn’t want to waste a rare good day by telling him no. “Of course,” I lied, convincing myself that it was okay to lie on Sunday if it was only half a lie. After all, I did want a farm of my own. That I would likely need a husband to go with it was an inconvenient reality I was still trying to make peace with.