I remembered Cassie and our child and my own father, who yesterday was out baling hay somewhere, just as he was during the Dutch Festival in town that summer I became a father myself. We’d had a New Holland baler for four years already and developed a list of farmer-customers long enough to call ourselves the Dirks’ family custom balers--my two older brothers, Andy and Darrell, and myself. The three of us usually set things up and took turns working in the mow or in the field; then there was the boss, my father, of course, who always finished the milking at home before getting out to join us; and my little brother Jesse, eleven-years-old maybe, who usually drove the wagons back and forth and loaded bales on the elevator. Three cuts we made some years; some years only two.
Nothing remarkable happened the afternoon Cassie and I told my parents about her being pregnant. Cassie’s mother was there too, the collar of her lavender blouse lying open, tastefully, over her tanned chest. When I remember now how strange that woman looked in our farm house--with all our fans churning up the air--I can see in the collar of that silk blouse what it was that determined, finally, my father’s nodding silence: he didn’t know how to talk to a woman who looked like she’d just stepped from a television screen. My mother, in her kitchen smock, smiled the way good women can when they have to; but my father sat and listened, his hands folded in his lap as if he were in church.
Cassie controlled the conversation. It was her style to talk, to reason out what must be done, and she did, with such coolness that she disarmed my mother’s usually hair-triggered emotions. She explained how she knew it was Easton tradition to marry a couple of kids at a time like this, but how that would be foolish, neither of us even seventeen and neither of us really seriously in love. She told my mother how she was going to move back to Chicago and have the baby there, and how she didn’t blame me for the baby because it wasn’t my fault alone any more than it was hers. It was, simply, what had happened, she said.
At that point my mother reached for her handkerchief.
“Of course, we expect to be able to cover the entire financial picture,” her mother threw in, as if it were the line that Cassie had allowed her to say.
At five, my father, taking his cue from the tolling of the clock in the family room, went out to the barn, sensing, I’m sure, that nothing more could be said anyway.
If I’d scour my high school annual I could come up with two or three other Easton girls who got pregnant that summer, but the story that unfolded in those cases would have been completely different. Once the news was out, Cassie packed her bags quickly for Chicago; as a result, the elders from my church never did visit with us together, as was the custom with the other shotgunned couples who’d violated the seventh commandment. Since she was already gone, they visited me alone, three of them, all men; and once they had nudged the word sin into and out of the conversation, we spent the rest of the night talking about football, my senior year upcoming.
I never saw Cassie again, nor the child--wherever he or she may be--if, in fact, that child exits. Cassie had money like I’d never seen. That was 1970, before Roe vs. Wade, but the Mikklesons had the kind of money that could pay for illegality.
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