The Virgin of Small Plains by Nancy Pickard Page A

were willing to pay them. For most of his undergraduate years, he was more lonely and bitter than he had ever dreamed it was possible to be.
    When his mother sent him photographs of the baby boy they had adopted—“Jeffrey Allen,” she wrote—he knew whom they had chosen to believe. He didn’t know exactly what they thought he had done, but he knew he had been replaced, as if he had never lived in their house as their son, as if he had never been.

 

    Chapter Ten
    May 31, 2004
    On the Memorial Day after Nadine Newquist died, Verna Shellenberger went out early to visit the Virgin’s grave.
    Nadine had been dead four months by then, but that wasn’t what drew Rex’s mother to the cemetery. At that hour of the morning, just before 6:00 A.M ., mist lay on the prairie like a beautiful, graceful, dangerous gift that the chilly night had left behind for the morning. In the low places, the mist thickened to fog that swirled in her headlights like smoke from the pipes of a Pawnee ghost. Or Shawnee. Or Potawatomi. Verna could never remember which tribes had roamed these hunting grounds. Over the years of their childhood, her boys had collected a couple dozen arrowheads from high points in pastures, where warriors had lost them. But history wasn’t Verna’s strong suit, as she was the first to confess when watching the television show,
Jeopardy!
Her subjects were cooking, cleaning, raising boys, and putting up with husbands. Or, rather, husband. “I majored in family,” she liked to say when she felt inferior for her lack of a college degree. “You don’t need a fancy degree to get dinner on the table every night for forty years.”
    Privately, she wished she had somehow managed to take a few college courses.
    Just because she didn’t know any history didn’t mean she couldn’t learn it, she thought.
    Or repeat it,
she also thought, with a kind of gloomy optimism.
    She had to drive with great care to remain safely on her side of the highway, which only added to her rising anxiety. It was worry that had pulled her out of a restless sleep and put her in her car so early in the morning.
    There were long stretches where her headlights blinded her in the fog, and it was only the presence of the yellow line that pulled her along to the cemetery. She prayed no crazy rancher was trying to cross the highway with his cows in this weather. She’d known a few that crazy, but most of them had gone out of business—or died—by now. Still, cows and the men who herded them were unpredictable. She knew something about that, too, if she did say so. If a cowboy on a horse suddenly loomed in front of her in the fog, she wouldn’t be surprised. She’d be horrified, because she’d be bound to hit them with her van, but not all that surprised.
    With a feeling of relief for having survived the ride, Verna eventually pulled through the cemetery gate.
    Normally, she would never have come on a Memorial Day when half the county would show up with their bouquets of real or plastic flowers. Verna lived close enough so that if she wanted to visit graves, she could drop by anytime. It was only because she was feeling desperate that she was here on this day, out of all the days in the year. She had come early, for privacy, and hoped nobody saw her.
    Verna threaded her car halfway up the road that led to the top of the hill. There, she pulled over to the side, parked, and got out. She felt a little shaky and out of breath, and had to pause a moment, with her hand on the side of the car, to steady herself before going on.
    If she were a kid, she thought, as she started walking onto the grass, she’d feel spooked at being in a cemetery in a fog like this, where she couldn’t see three rows of tombstones ahead of her. But she figured she was too old to be scared by mere death. She had seen too much of it, between the animals and the friends.
    The grass smelled newly mown; the air was damp against her skin.
    Verna paused by a neat gravestone to say