<div>Set in the Midwest in 1952, Faith Sullivan&#8217;s novel follows the interconnected lives of three women of three generations: Bess, 17, Harriet, 39, and Kate, 59. All have been affected by the death of Bess&#8217;s parents in a car accident. As Bess prepares for college, and Harriet for marriage, Great Aunt Kate holds the trio together. In writing knowingly and appreciatively of small-town life, Sullivan, winner of the Milkweed Editions' National Fiction Prize, addresses the universal themes of family, love, and loyalty. &#147;What a Woman Must Do draws the reader in.&#8221; &#151; Washington Post Book World</div>

What a Woman Must Do

By Faith Sullivan

Milkweed Editions

Copyright © 2002 Faith Sullivan
All right reserved.
ISBN: 9781571310378

Excerpt

KATHERINE DREW

The old elms, planted double and triple so that the trunks were as broad as thefront end of a car, cast flickering patterns that promised, but did not deliver,relief from the August heat. Drooping limbs bowed indolently, ushering into thescreen porch a shadow or possibly a shade.

Her cane hooked over the head of the daybed, Kate Drew lay like a sheaf ofgnarled, dry twigs gathered into a blue chambray housedress. Her arms and legswere tinder ready to burst into flame, her joints throbbing coals. Turning overin bed raised sweat on her brow and brought stifled cries to her throat.

At the foot of the bed, where she'd flung it down, was the StandardLedger. The piece about her niece Celia and Celia's husband, Archer, hadleft Kate weak, and she'd lain down to catch her breath.

But what about Bess?the "daughter, Elizabeth Katherine" and Kate's grandniece?Before Bess came home from work, Kate would have to hide the paper.

Still, she supposed that the girl would have read it somewhere. Or someone wouldhave told her about it. And she'd know that Kate had read it. Kate always readthe paper. All of it.

Well, a person had to, out of self-protection. In Harvester everybody kneweverything about everybody, whether it was their business or not. In that way,it was different from the Cities or Chicago. Too different for Bess. Though Bessflounced around town pretending not to care what people thought (cursing andcriticizing and smoking cigarettes), she was as sensitive as a tuberous begonia.She had to shock, and she had to be loved, and she didn't see that it wasimpossible to have it both ways.

When she was Bess's age, Kate had never needed to shock. Well, she hadn't hadanyone she needed to punish the way that Bess did. As for love, she hadn't givenit much thought. It simply was, like water from a spring, pouring out of a cleftsomeplace in the universe. You held out your cup. You didn't worry about it.

My God, had she been that young, that ignorant?

At Bess's age (younger, actually), Kate had graduated at the head of her highschool class, armed with a plan for getting back to the country. Her father hadlost his farm to the bank after years of hard times and, despite ten-year-oldKate's wild tears and threats to throw herself from the hayloft, he had movedthe family to town, where he'd worked as a carpenter for the rest of his life.

After graduation Kate caught a train to St. Cloud and teachers' college. Inreturn for room and board with her father's married niece, Elsie, she helpedwith the cooking and housework and looked after Elsie's three children. Despiteall this, she managed to do well in her courses and have a good time. Elsie wasyoung and dark and quiet, but full of little jokes and mysteries, and the twowomen got on well.

It was Elsie who had taught Kate to read the tea leaves and the cards. Shecalled it "forecasting." "Forecasting" sounded practical, not like somethingthat only gypsies did. Women friends came to have Elsie lay the cards out inmysterious arrangements on the kitchen table or swirl tea leaves in the cup.They didn't tell their husbands, nor did Elsie tell hers.

The first time that Elsie read Kate's tea leaves, she'd bent over the cup,intent as a biologist hunched over a microscope, then held the cup away from herto gain perspective and catch the light from the kerosene lantern.

Studying Kate's face, she murmured, "Yes. . ." and turned the cup this way, thenthat. If such a thing could be said, Elsie was scientific about the leaves: seenfrom different angles, patterns of leaves looked different and meant differentthings.

When she was at last satisfied that she understood the messages in the cup,Elsie tipped it toward Kate, saying, "Here is a man, tall and ... fair, and abarn and ... here is a ring, do you see it?" She held out the cup, pointing tothe ring. "That means a wedding." She threw Kate a conspirator's grin. "Iforecast that you're going to marry a farmer." She moved the lantern so thatKate could better see. "And the man, see here, is holding ... a child's hand ...a little girl's hand."

"And what is all this over here?" Kate wanted to know.

Elsie rose, carrying the cup to the sink. "That's ... clouds ... bringing rainto the farm."

Despite the warmth of the kitchen, Kate shivered. She'd never mentioned to Elsiewanting to live on a farm.

At the end of a year, Kate had a certificate entitling her to teach in a countryschool, and she hurried home to find one, laying aside the forecasting. She wasseventeen when she began teaching eight pupils at a rural school north ofHarvester. When she thought of it now, she shook her head with wonder.

Boarding at a farm a two-mile trek from school, Kate thought herself in heaven.Walking to school on a pitch-dark winter morning, with snow above her knees andthe temperature minus twenty, wasn't punishment enough to curb her euphoria. Shewas living in the country.

During the second year of teaching, Kate met Martin Drew at a dance in thetownship hall, and life fell into place. They were married late the next summer--August of 1912?and she settled onto his farm with such ease that it all seemedordained. Joyful years spun off, like a reel of satiny ribbon.

That farm, that blessed farm. Kate gave her head an impatient twist, thenrued it for the pain it cost her. She would have to conjure the farm in order toblock it out. This conjuring she hadn't learned from Elsie. It was arecent talent and she'd grown clever at it. In forecasting you looked forward.In conjuring, you looked back. No, you took yourself back. She hadlearned, for example, to call forth the farm in every detail as it had been?touch, smell, sound. Traveling through years and Miles, she returned to it. Shewas there. Not in imagination, but in conjuration.

Once she has scythed the long, soft grass in the yard, Kate lies down on thestraw between rows of tomatoes and stares up through the branches of nearbycottonwoods. Whenever she can, she steals a moment to lie here between thegarden rows. But she has little time today; she must head down to the pond andhaul water for the garden, then hoe weeds in the sweet corn.

Cleaning house and washing clothes are duties, but gardening is a madness and arapture. She is the farmer of a one-hundred-by-one-hundred-foot plot, harvestingkale and cosmos, horseradish and hyssop.

The garden is by turns lover, child, and course of study?very nearly a secondlife lying parallel to the life she has with Martin and the old folks and BabyCelia, her niece, whom she and Martin have adopted.

Kate is sure that Martin feels this passion toward the larger farm, the stubbornyet yielding fields, though he does not speak of it. Best not to temptProvidence, best not to mention aloud that which might be wrested away in anhour, pillaged by hail or winds or locusts, or bled dry in a season of drought.If you didn't admit the farm's vulnerability, if you pretended not to care,perhaps it and you would be safe.

Kate is more rash, more profligate in her passion. She surrenders herself to thefarm, allows herself to be as vulnerable as it is. That is the way to love.

And she doesn't expect her garden to be easy. One morning she comes outto find a tomato plant mysteriously dying, wilted overnight. Grimly she pulls itfrom the ground, its roots sighing little protesting death gasps as she wrenchesthem from their bed. Death tunnels beneath the earth or crawls along it or fliesfrom the sky to threaten...