The hum of Rudy Bartles’s crop duster made us look up over the geek tent into the barren blue of the northern sky. I-R-E-N-E in paraffin vapor, trailing behind the plane like a breath of hope. But something wrong with the “R.” Rudy didn’t swing out far enough on the top curve, drew the leg too low, so it came out looking like I-L-E-N-E.
More humming and then to the east over the elephant cars, H-E-S-S. We figured next would be “I-L-O-V-E-Y-O-U” or “M-A-R-R-Y-M-E” but when the plane turned south over the parking lot it spelled “M-I-S-S-I-N-G.” Then it buzzed off, leaving us, to the annoyance of the barkers, gossiping in the dust instead of buying tickets to see the trapeze act. To be fair, the trapeze lady was fully 42 and more than usually plain, so we didn’t feel too bad loitering there in the trodden pasture between the big tent and the fun house, talking about Ilene Hess, she’s the school secretary over in Pawnee Falls. No, that’s Irene Hess. Ilene is the organist at that Pentecostal church over by Billtown. Aren’t there a bunch of Hesses live over by McReddy? Well look over there, there’s Pete Hess standing by the tigers, let’s ask him.
But Pete Hess in his pressed denim overall was already in his cups and couldn’t bring to mind which of his female relatives might be missing, the Hesses being well-stocked in both Irenes and Ilenes. “Could be Fred’s wife, she goes out catfishing and forgets to leave him a note sometimes,” he hiccupped. But then someone saw Fred’s wife Ilene going into the big tent in a skirt so starched that it stood out in a triangle on both sides of her scrawny legs, so it wasn’t her.
In the absence of ready answers, the barker, a wrinkled outsider, finally succeeded in getting our attention and we started to buy our tickets to see the trapeze act, but then a tornado came up and tore the place to pieces so there was nothing to do but for those of us left alive to go home.
That night, as on every Saturday, I got a letter from Leavenworth. They were always the same, but I opened them anyway. “One week,” this one said. The first one, four years, eleven months, and three weeks ago, had said “Five years.”
Next day being church, those of us in that denomination took a good look at such Hesses as made an appearance. But it was hard to tell, the Hesses being so numerous and more or less all exactly alike, which is that none of them has a chin to speak of, and they all have round, hunted eyes with long lashes. Seeing them together is like watching a flock of wild turkey picking its way across a dirt road.
Anyway, I don’t belong to that denomination but my friend Sadie Bartles does, and she asked me over to Sunday dinner. I brought my iron and after dinner we did the linens while her husband Bruce watched the game. She said that she couldn’t tell.
“I thought,” she said, “Irene Hess, Harvey’s wife, wasn’t there but turned out she was just behind Mary Bartles’s hat. Ilene Hess too, the one that does the paper route, but she was just leaning over in the pew to smack a kid.”
“Any of them look wrought up?” I asked, flipping a napkin and spraying starch.
“Like they just lost kin? No. But you can’t tell with the Hesses. They always look wrought up.”
“You think Rudy Bartles knows?”
“Myeh well, Don Bartles buttonholed him after the service. But he didn’t know anything.” She folded the tablecloth in half and ironed the crease. Then folded it again and ironed that crease. “He got the order off his fax, checked the money was wired, went out and did the job.”
“No name or anything.”
“Nope, just the wire and what to write.”
“Did he at least say whether it’s Irene or Ilene?”
“He fudged it on purpose. His fax machine is screwy with the ‘Rs’ and ‘Ls.’ Wants to get it fixed but no one services dot matrix anymore.”
There was a holler from the living room and we both nudged our iron settings higher, but it was just a touchdown.
“Frank send you a letter yesterday?” she said.
“Yep,” I said.
The Monday paper, second column on the third page, right under the tornado listings, said, “Missing Woman Baffles Officials.” Sheriff Bartles was quoted as stating that the Sheriff’s department had received a missing persons report but, when he tried to pull the paperwork, a tornado had destroyed the filing room so he was not able to provide any detail.
Sadie and I and our friend Milly Bartles made a list and started counting. I only knew four or five but Milly Bartles knew 26 and what’s more, she could check, because Milly’s job as the Itinerant School Nurse took her all over the county so she could check off Irene Hesses and Ilene Hesses as she went.
Sadie said she thought there was an Ilene Hess, or maybe it was Irene, who used to work at the Gas-N-Go who she didn’t see there anymore but we couldn’t tell anything from that because no one ever lasted more than six weeks at the Gas-N-Go.
Also on Monday I got two letters from Leavenworth. One said, “Six days.” The other one said, “Five days.” This made sense because they don’t carry mail on Sunday. So whatever Frank wrote from Leavenworth would wait on Sunday for the Monday mail. This hadn’t happened before because Frank usually only wrote weekly, but I guess he was getting pretty excited about getting out of Leavenworth.
Tuesday, while I packed up the house, I tried to remember any Irene or Ilene I’d gone to school with. There were two in my class and one in the class that graduated before mine. In the class after mine there were none but in the next class there were four. Or maybe there were two Irenes and two Ilenes, or three Irenes and one Ilene, or three Ilenes and one Irene, or maybe there were all four Ilenes or all four Irenes. Maybe I could have thought of some other permutations, but I found our wedding album and decided to iron it.
I took it out to the barn where I keep the outdoor iron for grubby tasks. I laid the wedding album on the incinerator grate and ironed the photos in their plastic covers until they dripped through. Any place where Frank’s face didn’t get totally burned up, I pulled it back up out of the ashes and ironed it until it was gone. The smell was like atrazine dusting low out of Rudy’s plane mixed with the smell of a car when someone forgets to take off the parking brake.
Sadie Bartles came by in the afternoon after her stint at the Pawnee Falls Public Library.
“Remember Irene Hess the cheerleader? She was a junior when we were freshmen?”
“The one that got knocked up?”
“No that was Ilene. This was Irene. She went to K-State for a semester.”
“Oh the one that burned an iron mark in all her skirts in Home Ec.”
“No that was the other Irene. She was a freshman when we were juniors.”
“Oh wait, I remember,” I said. I did not remember, but I said it so that Sadie would get to the point.
“Well she’s the one who works at the hardware store over in Remington now? Ellie Bartles says she hasn’t been there since Thursday.”
“You want this iron?” I asked. It was a spare. It was one of those safety ones that turns off if you forget it, which is why it was a spare. I handed it to her to inspect. “Maybe give it to little Gladys,” I said. “She’s old enough to start learning.”
Sadie started crying. “I could lend you some money,” she said, “You could move to Lawrence.”
“That’ll be the first place he looks,” I said.
“OK, then London.”
“I don’t have a passport. And anyway you and I and Milly don’t have that much money combined. Here’s a box for you.”
I handed her the box I’d packed for her on which I’d written “SADIE” in black magic marker. That really got her going until I said, “Bruce is going to be home soon,” and she skittered off to get her ironing started.
Wednesday was tornadoes so I just ironed in the basement most of the evening.
Thursday was Kiwanis. Or maybe it was Jaycees, or the AA meeting, I can’t remember. They had all moved to the Remington Community Center because everyplace else was blown down. Anyway, I baked cupcakes and put some boxes in the back of my car. When I got to the Remington Community Center, Artie Bartles was saying that some of the Hesses over by the town of McReddy used to live in a corncrib they were so poor, and he was pretty sure the wife’s name was Ilene because she used to sell chicken and duck eggs at a table by Highway 16. He said he hadn’t seen the egg stand all week. But then Mel Bartles said, “Oh that was because she’d moved over to the intersection where Highway 92 breaks off toward Leavenworth.”
At the word “Leavenworth,” everyone looked at me sideways but I just kept on walking to the cupcake table, put my cupcakes next to Milly Bartles’s cupcakes.
“I got those cassette tapes for you,” I said, “in my trunk. And I brought Elly my bundt pan.”
Milly started to cry. “We could hide you,” she said.
“Where?”
We set up our ironing boards at the back of the room so the meeting could get started. Don and Elly Bartles got into a shouting match over the budget as usual, and he was just yelling “PUT DOWN THAT IRON, WOMAN—” when a tornado came so we all got under the cupcake tables and, after it was gone, those of us left alive went back home.
Friday morning I was up in the attic before sunrise. From the attic windows I had a good view of the fields burning across the county, lines of red leaping up into their smoke clouds along the horizon, grids of red intersecting and stopping each other at the edges of the sections. The men riding herd along the edges to keep the burns in the fields. In the attic I found the wedding dress. I thought about taking it down to the barn for a good iron, but then I remembered my vows so I took it out of its plastic and hung it up on a rafter. I shook out its frills and watched it swinging there.
It looked just like the time we found Ilene Hess, one of the Hesses that live up by Highway 4, swinging in her wedding dress from the bars of the jungle gym down at the school. Principal Bartles cut her down. Joe Bartles wrote it up in the paper as a suicide, based on the statements of Pastor Bartles and Sheriff Bartles that she’d always been troubled, but we all knew that her iron had shorted out and she didn’t have a spare.
Outside the sun began to rise against the smoke of the field burns, casting a ghoulish light on the white of the dress, so I took it downstairs and hung it up next to the pantry where I could get at it quick. Frank’s letter that day said, “32 hours.”
Saturday was a revival and everyone from every denomination went because there wasn’t anything else to do. Same pasture as the circus was the week before. There was a tent with lemonade and meringues on the east side of the pasture, and another tent on the west side for the revival, and on the north side there was a horse tank filled up for the baptisms. It was clear that the evangelist had brought support because there were a lot of wrinkly clothes in the crowd. A tornado rolled by, clipping the north edge of the section, but it only took out a couple hats and hymnals so the revival went on as planned.
The evangelist said the Godless believed in climate change when the real cause of the tornadoes is our Sin. He said that Sin was all the women working outside of the home and wearing jeans. He said that we had been infected by Godlessness and the only way to stop the tornadoes was to get baptized. So we stepped up to the horse tank because it was worth a try.
As we stood in line to get washed in the blood, a hum came over the top of the lemonade tent, and we looked into the brassy blue. I-L-E-N-E. Or maybe I-R-E-N-E. Then over the horse tank, H-E-S-S.
Then over the revival tent, F-O-U-N-D.
Wayland Bartles kicked a dirt clod, then kicked it again, and went on kicking it right to the edge of the pasture. Didn’t even get back in line. The rest of us got baptized anyway, just in case, but the thrill was gone.
Shaking hands to go home, Milly sniffled. Sadie’s mouth bobbled up and down at the corners. Even some of the men looked sorry.
“I’m baptized now,” I said, reassuring them, “I’m clean.”
“Amen,” they said.
When I got home I put on the wedding dress, which was loose from all the years. I sat down between my two best irons and turned them all the way up to “cotton.” One for Frank and the other for the tornado.
