Maude slapped the dough with the flat of her palm, picked up a bit more flour, dusted the air, grasped the fleshy greyness and dropped it onto the counter. Then she put her hands on her hips and looked out the kitchen window. Why I have to do everything myself, I do not know, she said under her breath as if the house had not been empty of men since morning. It was four o'clock now. Four o'clock and she was only kneading the bread. Four o'clock, and no tidy motor buzzing cutting the lawn with her husband sitting atop of it like any God-fearing country man. How was she going to cook the dinner? Maude dusted off her hands, shaking her head and pulling at her eyebrows. She gave the dough a tidy slap and walked across the kitchen, drawing off her apron to hang on the wood peg by the door. She grasped the chipped banister and walked up her hallway stairs slapping her palms against each other. Maude was not some nagging cow, and if her husband brought her home a bundle of field mint, as he always did when he had been shirking, well, he could just set it on the porch and have it with his dinner. She raised the wooden sash.
Henryyyyy, she shouted. Her voice pealed over the shushing yellow wheat fields. Henryyyyy. Wiiiiilt! With her head out in the sky she could feel the gathering evening on the sides of her neck and the backs of her hands. The air felt wet, and the flat gold land seemed to cut the distance into two shifting bolts of cloth, bright yellow and shining, murkish grey. A bullfrog chirruped down at the creek, under the stand of crack willows and osiers, and then another bullfrog, and then all of the bullfrogs chimed roundly together. Maude kept her head out of the window, feeling the plangent weight and moisture like palms on her cheeks. Heyy-en! The bullfrogs clangored. She picked her palms up off the sill and looked at them. They were caked with chips of white paint.
Maude pulled her head in the window and looked at her bedroom. She had made the bed, and she had dusted and straightened all of the picture frames that day before she went to go get the new auracana's eggs from the coop. The doily made for her by her mother was resting on the back of the yellow chair that she sat in when she had some time to read. Her husband's fancy boots were propped up on the hope chest, where she had set them. He would be wearing his gaiters today, and his overalls. His flannel would be red. Or was it the blue one? She couldn't recall. I can't recall, she said, although I dressed the man, and she faced again to the window.
Maude leaned with her arms preceding her over the sill, slapping off the flecks of paint. They stuck to her skin stubbornly. With her head and shoulders pressing toward the sky, Maude felt like she was leaning into the bottom of a lake. The air hung like a mud veil over the fields, and though she strained her eyes for a grain of color that would mean a tractor or a hired boy from town, she could see nothing. She brought her head back into the room, then turned her body away from the window without shifting her gaze. She pulled her hands in from the thick air and put them in her pockets. Then she turned her head and strode back into the hall.
She reached up with both hands to the china bead on the end of the string to the attic stair, and pulled it. The stair unfolded like an accordion, and she used one hand to pick up the hem of her skirt and the other to steady herself on the upper steps as she climbed. The steps groaned with her weight, the bottom board striking the wood of the hallway floor with a clud. Maude hunched through the four-foot door that her father had put into the attic wall in case of floods and stepped onto the rooftop.
Her house looked small from here, the guttered borders of the roof not seeming to stretch more than ten feet in any direction. The wheat fields spread all around, magnificently yellow, and the sky lowered beyond, surrounding and dim. Which wall was her bedroom window? She craned her neck over the gutters and could not place herself among the distant spaces of her home. The ringing of the bullfrogs gained in pitch and the rushing of the crack willows joined that of the crops under a wind that lifted Maude's skirt and made her bend to press it to her knees. The shingles of the roof radiated heat that warmed her legs. In the distance, she saw the sheets of yellow and grey blur as the sky fell to water and the water fell to the field. It is about to rain and I am on the damn rooftop looking for you, Henry, she said.
She turned back to the roof door and a red speck in the distance caught her eye, moving towards the house under the blackness of the falling sky. The bead of color gained in size and she stepped unsteadily over the shingles, straining to see it more clearly. It had a white head, and hands, and then it was her son, bounding over the wheat field where he was never supposed to go, wearing her husband's red flannel and his own green rubber galoshes. Ma! he shouted as he ran. Ma! Ma! Ma! The ringing of the bullfrogs drowned his voice.
Wilt! Maude shouted. You stop running!, but he kept bounding through the high sheaves, a path of broken stalks flattening behind him like a road. She saw his face now, strained, white, shining with sweat. His eyes jittered wildly, like the eyes of a colt that she had once seen whose mother had been shot for a lame leg right in front of him, the farmer an ignorant man who had only dealt before with stupid cows. She put her hand to her heart and clutched the fabric there.
Wilt! she cried again, and he heard her this time and stopped dead at the border of the field and the green lawn and looked up at her, his white chest heaving and slick under her husband's shirt, his face stricken and blank, and the rain reaching the boundaries of the house hushed the bullfrogs and the noise of the trees as she fell to her knees at the edge of the roof.
