The Chaperone by Laura Moriarty Page A

likely that they’d both jumped in, as they often had, to tramp the clotted grain down. It was the gas, he said. From the grain. They must have thought enough time had passed. A quick death. And not painful. Another worker had already left to get the minister.
    Cora ran around the Norwegian and toward them, cutting through the field to the silo, her hands in tight fists with her nails digging into her palms, her boots hard and fast on the dirt and yellowed stalks, grasshoppers springing all around. The dogs ran alongside her, barking, thinking she meant to play. She smelled manure and turned earth, everything familiar holding fear. She kicked a dog out of her way. Her hair fell out of its bun, and by the time she lunged for the ladder, she was crazed, her blood hot in her throat. The workers held her back, and told her she couldn’t go in, and that she shouldn’t climb up. They would need time to safely get the bodies out. You couldn’t see or smell the gas, and if she went in, she would for certain die with them. She tried for the ladder again. It took two of them to get her back in the house.
    •   •   •
    The Lindquists came for her that night, their white-haired heads hovering over her bed, saying her name until she heard them. She shouldn’t be alone, they said. Their own children were grown; they had spare rooms. The Kaufmanns had been good neighbors, and it was the least they could do. They insisted. Just for a while, Mr. Lindquist said, until decisions were made about the farm. Even if Cora could function and keep the house running, it wouldn’t be right, a girl by herself. The Norwegian and another man were staying on to care for the livestock and fields.
    Later, Mrs. Lindquist would apologize for taking Cora from her home. “We didn’t know we were making it easier for them to turn you out with nothing,” she said, using a fork to slide the remainder of Cora’s lunch into the slop jar. She glared out her own window to the Kaufmann farm. “The sheriff would have had to put you out, but at least it would have been harder.”
    Mrs. Lindquist would also tell Cora, over and over, that the Kaufmanns had had no way of knowing they would be taken up so suddenly, or so relatively young. If they had, Mrs. Lindquist was certain, they would have made a will, or made Cora one of their legal heirs. Of course they would have. They had loved her as a daughter. Mrs. Lindquist had heard just that many times, straight from her neighbor’s mouth, and she would testify to it in any court. It was a shame, she said, the way the Kaufmann girl and her brothers were denying Cora any inheritance. The laws needed to be changed.
    The Kaufmann girl. Cora, too, looked through the window, over the autumn-cropped fields to her old home. When Mrs. Lindquist said the Kaufmann girl, she did not mean Cora but Mr. Kaufmann’s daughter in Kansas City, who had a lawyer, and who was adamant that Cora should not be considered an heir, as she was not related by blood or marriage. As the lawyer pointed out, her selection had been arbitrary. The Kaufmanns could have picked any child from the train. It was unfortunate if Cora had truly misinterpreted their kindness as the familial love she was so sadly lacking. But if they’d wanted her in the will, they would have put her in.
    Cora had no energy to be outraged. Her grief was a weight on her chest that she felt as soon as she woke. The Lindquists had gone back to get all her things, including her nightclothes, but at night, Cora couldn’t summon the energy to undress. She slept in her dress, and also lay awake in it, thinking about the Kaufmanns, how the Norwegian said they’d looked peaceful, but also that they had turned blue. At some point, she stopped combing her hair. Mrs. Lindquist, who’d had four daughters and lost only one to diphtheria, used bacon grease to get out the tangles. She’d warned Cora that next time, scissors would be required, and wouldn’t that be a shame,