The Beet Queen

Mary is disappointed that she has gone back to being just “an ordinary girl” after the attention surrounding her “miracle” dies down (65). In fact, she is self-aware enough to know that she is perhaps even more than ordinary, that she is “maybe something worse than that, in the town’s eye, as years went by” (65). She knows she is stubborn and blunt and that she makes people uncomfortable. But she also believes she is special—the story of her miracle grows truer in her head over time. She thinks her traumatic childhood gives her “perspective,” but really, she likes to look down on Argus, both literally and figuratively, from the window of her bedroom. She also finds her short stature disappointing: “[A]s long as I ran the shop I would have to look through, not over, the lighted case at customers” (67). She wants to look down on the townspeople as well as the town itself.

She is also aware that her chances at romance, much less marriage, are slim. While Mary harbors some sadness about this, her attitude is mostly straightforward, blunt, and practical; she has accepted worse. Indeed, the one man with whom she even considers romantic possibilities, Russell Kashpaw, has been wounded, physically and psychologically, from years of war: “Marriage would not have been a comfort with Russell Kashpaw, or likely even possible,” Mary understands. Moreover, she adds, “He was not the type to marry, even in the years he was able” (69). She finds this is true enough shortly after she tries to hint at her interest in him and makes a firm decision: “One thought was clear. I would never go out of my way for romance again. Romance would have to go out of its way for me” (75). Her stubbornness ensures that she will almost certainly never marry.

However, she will continue to engender what look like miracles, and she becomes consumed with premonitions, predictions, and the supernatural (see Symbols & Motifs). For example, before Sita moves away, Mary manifests glowing blue hands in the middle of the night. They are likely the result of an “odd batch” of “the strong milky cleaning solvent” she used to clean the steel tables at the butcher shop (76), but the incident terrifies Sita. Continuing the novel’s exploration of Religious Belief, Doubt, and Guilt, it appears as if Mary can conjure supernatural events at will. The rift between them grows, and contact between them halts altogether for a while.

Karl himself has moved away from the church in a significant way. He has left the priesthood and returned to prove his disgrace to the seminary priests: “The truth was he’d turned out worse than their wildest dreams” (80). He takes pride in how far his life has deviated from the one they prescribed for him. He has cast off their authority and refused the guilt they tried to make him feel, and his return to the Orphans’ Picnic is a journey of revenge: He wants to make them see that they have failed with him. The mission is sweetened by the discovery that the young acolyte is his brother. Karl had always been jealous of the infant, not wanting to share any of his mother’s attention, and he uses the opportunity not to reveal the truth of Jude’s identity but to make the young man question it: “Karl leaned right into the boy’s face and said, ‘Do you know who you are?’” (82). When Jude answers “I’m crap,” following Karl’s earlier comment about his holy card prize, Karl answers, “Just you’re your mother” (82). When he asks Jude to say who he is, Jude answers, “You’re the devil” (82). Presumably, Karl was ousted from the seminary for his sexual activities with transient, unhoused men, and he remembers the same words coming from Father Mullen’s lips. He embraces the identity.

Sita has also experienced a kind of secular fall from grace: She has reached 30 without finding a suitable man to marry, she has had an affair with a married man, and she has failed to carve out a successful career. Timidity is at the root of her problems: When she tries to buy a dress in Minneapolis, she is intimidated by the more current fashion and overwhelmed by the price. Fear is the reason she keeps Catherine Miller’s letter a secret from Mary, and it’s also the reason she decides to attend Jude’s ordination. She recognizes an opportunity to gain the upper hand, to use cruelty to avoid feeling powerless: “I realized that I could spoil Jude Miller’s future” (92). When the presiding priest reads out the rules about who is allowed to enter the priesthood, Sita’s eye “kept seeing illegitimate” (93). She could speak out, but she instead decides to take her revenge by retrieving Adelaide’s pawned jewelry. Her revenge is more about provoking Mary than sabotaging Jude.

A new character, Wallace Pfef, also enters the picture: He becomes another of Karl’s conquests, both in the personal and the professional arenas. When Karl learns that Wallace is from Argus, his thoughts immediately turn to his long-lost sister: “I wondered if someday I’d read my sister’s name in these accounts [of Argus happenings], and I knew that it wouldn’t matter if I did. I’d never call, visit, even write a letter. It had simply been too long. Yet I had a fascination” (102). This fascination bubbles over when Karl hurts himself; vulnerable, he blurts out Mary’s name to Wallace. Karl has not relinquished his entire soul yet. Wallace himself is a vulnerable, lonely soul—Karl notes, “I knew if I wanted I could have him for life” (107)—and the two are mirror images of each other. Karl’s loneliness and vulnerability make him weak, mean-spirited, and helpless, while those same emotional conditions make Wallace ambitious and kind, if somewhat hapless. In any event, it is Wallace who will usher in the future of Argus: He will plant the sugar beets that will put the town on the map, not to mention give the novel its name.