by Dale Bailey
Overton laughed without looking at him. “No. Picking peas maybe.”
Tom was silent after that. He moved closer to the dying fire. He wanted to lay down, but he was afraid to. The moon hove up out of the trees and climbed the ladder of the sky. Finally, Tom stretched out. Overton didn’t say anything.
Tom lay awake for a long time, staring into the flames and thinking of Pap, wondering if he too was sleepless on this first night with his son walked away into the blazing afternoon, wondering too when he would give up on the farm—or if he ever would—and drift west, another ripple in that relentless tide sweeping across the prairies. Somewhere in the night he drifted off, and Frank Overton threw a rough woolen blanket over him. Curled up against the fire like that, Tom looked like a child, not the man he was striving to become.
Overton prodded Tom awake with a boot in the gray dawn. He surfaced out of a dream of his mother: her voice a soft contrast to her work-roughened hands, nothing more. Not much of a dream at all really, he thought as he sipped a cup of strong coffee Mrs. Overton had boiled and strained—still clattering with unspoken fury—over the fire. That was it for breakfast, coffee—even Charlie had some. As for Tom, Overton had passed him a cup without expression, as though he had done so a thousand times in the past.
Camps broke gradually around them. People packed up, huddling to horse trade a bag of dried beans here, a sack of flour there, whatever could best be spared for whatever was most needed. Children once again chased through the chaos, but Charlie clung to his mother, staring at Tom, always watchful. One by one the families departed, bouncing through the trees into the field beyond and finally into the narrow path that passed for a road.
Overton seemed to be in no hurry, though. He drank a second cup of the thick coffee and smoked in silence while his wife packed up the camp, slamming pots, rattling spoons. Then, he set about stowing their gear in the bed of the truck. Tom lugged boxes to him. Overton secured each one among the furniture and cartons that he’d roped there long ago—the boy couldn’t guess how long—when wind and dust and drought had stolen away his livelihood, compelling him on this quixotic odyssey across the continent, where talk of work and angels drifted listlessly, forever unfulfilled.
“Thank you,” Tom told them, the work done. “I’m sorry if I scared you. I never aimed to steal nothing.”
“I reckon we could spare a bowl of beans,” Overton said.
That was all.
Tom turned away and hiked back to the road. He could feel Charlie staring after him until he turned west. The sun bludgeoned him, and it not yet ten o’clock. Overton’s truck rumbled to life, its springs complaining as it lurched over the field into the road. Tom moved aside to let it pass. It jounced to a stop beside him.
“You know how to drive?” Overton said, his elbow cocked on the window ledge. Tom met Lily Overton’s eyes. They were a pale blue in the sunlight. She turned away and stared straight ahead, pressing her lips into a thin white line. Charlie leaned forward from his place between his parents to stare at the boy.
“Yes, sir,” Tom said.
Frank Overton nodded at the truck bed. “Climb aboard,” he said.
The rhythms of the road never changed. The creak of the worn suspension as the truck rocked over each new hummock. The stink of sweat in the cab as the sun mounted the sky and set fire to the stained cloth interior. Charlie’s everyday litany of complaint: It’s hot and I’m thirsty and most of all Are we there yet?, as though there were anywhere to get to except another stretch of featureless prairie or the next stand of cottonwood trees.
What for Tom had the allure of novelty had for Overton passed beyond tedium into something close to despair. Every mile of road the same road, every town the same town: a handful of buildings blasted clean of paint by three years of wind-blown grit, where he stopped to refuel the truck from his hoard of ever-diminishing cash and cast about for work where a hundred men had in the last week or so cast about before him. Occasionally, Overton was lucky: a storekeeper needed an extra hand organizing the back room or a widow needed fire wood chopped and stacked by the door. More often, he was not. The little work he did find mostly paid barter. Money—when it could be had—was a rare and precious thing.
The talk around the campfires never changed either—if you could call it talk at all. It was mostly silence, the strangled, inarticulate silence of men who had no words to convey their anguish, who had neither the gift for tears nor the grace of hope. Deft hands rolled cigarettes when tobacco was to be had. Grimy handbills passed from man to man, advertisements for peach pickers in the orchards of California, or pea pickers, or apple pickers, menial farm work for men who had once owned farms themselves, foreclosed, barren, snowed under by dust—seasonal work and even that a chance. But nothing permanent, nothing where a man could sink roots, build a house, raise a family. Only the eternal road before them.
And sometimes, late at night, when the women had bedded down the children and were themselves drifting off, sometimes a bottle would make the rounds and the talk turn strange. They say angels have been seen to the west, a man would say, and another scoffing, There are no angels.
North and west of here, another man would say, I had it from my brother who had it from a man in Littleton who had it from a man he’d worked with as a ranch hand, as though this chain of whispers across the middle west constituted some kind of evidence or truth.
There never were no angels anyway.
Aggrieved: I had it from a man from Texas who’d had it from a preacher hisself, and why would he lie?
They say, they say, they say. The news came third hand, fourth, or fifth, or more; no one could testify to the evidence of his own eyes. Great winged monsters, they say, and they never stay for long and the more devout among them messengers from the Lord and this required no abjuration, for God had perished in the dust, in the wind-torn wheat and in those smudged handbills that fluttered across the prairie. God? God had perished in their hearts. As for Overton, he held his counsel and when the bottle came round he took his sip and lit another cigarette, his face expressionless as a slab of stone. Tom, who had no voice in these deliberations, hovered on the periphery of the circle, and listened with a kind of wonder to the men and their cramped debate.
Talked out, the bottle empty, the men drifted back to their own camps. Tom followed Overton to their fire. Overton seemed to need no sleep. He was leaning against the truck smoking when the boy nodded off; he was awake when the boy awakened.
“You find what you were looking for yet?” he asked one night from his place against the fender, and when Tom didn’t—couldn’t—answer, he said, “Maybe it’s the walking that matters.” Tom had realized that much anyway, that he wasn’t walking away from anything and maybe never had been: he loved Pap in the only way the old man had allowed, a constricted, stunted kind of love, but love all the same. Not a night went by that the boy didn’t think of the old man grieving, sitting at the kitchen table maybe, tracing out by oil light the names in the family Bible that neither he nor the boy had the words to read. Not a night went by that he did not wonder where his feet had deposited him, and where they might yet lead him still. Not a night that he didn’t wonder what future it was he was walking into, what hungers he had still to assuage, what thirsts to slake. Not a night that he didn’t blink back tears.
If he noticed, Frank Overton never let on.
“My brother seen an angel once,” Overton one night volunteered. “The beauty of it killed him.”
But it was late by then, and maybe Tom only dreamed it.
The rutted path spilled into a narrow road. Overton took the wheel most afternoons, relegating Tom to the canopied bed, where he reclined in the yellow heat, rocked to sleep by the swaying of the ancient truck. More and more often Charlie joined him there, that tarnished silver chain clutched in his fist.
“What is it?” Tom asked one afternoon.
“Mama’s necklace,” the boy said, unfolding his grubby fist to reveal the locket secr
eted there. “She gave it to me so she’d always be with me.” He pried it open and handed it to Tom. In the dim light under the tarp, the photo inside was hard to see: the shadow of a woman’s face, featureless and gray. Tom returned the locket and closed the boy’s fist around it.
“It’s beautiful,” he said, laying back, and the boy lay back with him, burrowing his head into the crook of Tom’s shoulder, the both of them dozing the afternoon away.
Lily didn’t like it—Overton could read it in the set of her mouth (Tom could, too)—but Charlie wouldn’t have it any other way. “Why’d you leave home, Tom?” he would ask sleepily, and Tom, not knowing why, too drowsy to answer, could only murmur, “I don’t know,” but Pap hove up in his dreams, and he felt grief like a fist squeeze his heart. He woke to hunker down at the tailgate, steady himself with one hand around the nearest spar, and stare back at all the long miles he’d come. And for what? He knew only an aching sorrow. The body had its own imperatives, the soul its discontents.
Gas grew harder to find, work harder still. Sometimes they were stranded for days before they could move on. The camps doubled in size, and Tom, used to life on the farm, felt cramped and uneasy. He wasn’t the only one: he could see the tension in Lily Overton’s face. The lines bracketing her mouth deepened. Her rare smile (and there had been none for him) grew rarer still. Tom, sensing that the Overtons were hard up against it now, began to think of moving on. He didn’t want to be a burden.
Yet something held him back: Charlie too had developed wandering feet. It scared his mother, Tom could tell. It scared her to be alone while Overton foraged the camp for beans and ham and gasoline and maybe a caged chicken or two—whatever could be had in trade to make it for another day. It scared her when Charlie slipped away, swept up by the packs of half-feral children that roamed the camps.
“I’ll find him,” Tom said, “I’ll keep an eye on him.”
A hot, dry afternoon, that was, and Tom had been out gathering wood when the boy disappeared. When he returned, dumping a load of kindling by the truck, Lily was in a panic, teary eyed, her mending dangling forgotten from one hand. She looked up in surprise when he said it and a fleeting expression—what it was, he couldn’t say—passed across her face. Tom fetched the boy, and so, without a word between them, it was decided: he would stay. After that, Tom spent his days in camp with the boy, improvising games or contriving rollicking yarns about their fellow refugees (who knew he had so many words bottled up inside him?) while Lily went about her chores. They ate at dusk. Soon afterward, Charlie would doze off, locket in his fist. Lily, exhausted, most nights fell asleep beside him.
After dark, the camp grew tense with frustration. Pressure hung in the air, palpable as smoke. Men drank with purpose now—somebody always seemed to have a bottle—and conversations had a way of turning ugly. There were always rumors of work. And there were always fleeting glimpses of angels on the road, men dead of beauty and despair. More than once, when the talk grew heated, Frank Overton laid a hand across Tom’s shoulder and steered him back to camp. Tom laid himself by the dying embers, and Overton took up his accustomed place against the fender of the truck and smoked.
“Tell me about your brother’s angel,” Tom said one night.
“It was an angel of death that took him,” Overton responded, and after that Tom didn’t ask any more.
On the day that followed they made it another sixty miles. In the dark, over a spare meal of pinto beans and jugged water, Charlie said, “Don’t you have no mother, Tom?”
“Hush. You shouldn’t ask such questions, Charles,” Lily Overton said.
“Tom doesn’t have to answer if he doesn’t want to, Lil,” Overton said. He set aside his bowl and began methodically to roll a cigarette, creasing the paper, spilling in a wisp of tobacco, and twisting it, thumb and forefinger, into a cylinder. He moistened the gum and sealed the cigarette and put it behind his ear. His eyes glinted in the firelight.
“No, I don’t mind,” Tom said. He was silent for a long moment. “I had a mother, Charlie. It was a long time ago. I don’t remember her very well.”
“What was she like?”
“Well,” Tom said. He could feel the blood pulsing at his temple. He summoned to mind what he could of her: that arc of cheekbone, the touch of her hand, the sound of her voice as she read him Bible stories before bed—
And here was something new. Bible stories. Her ringing schoolteacher’s voice (that much he knew; she’d been a schoolteacher once) reciting the words to him as he huddled under a pile of quilts, his breath steaming in the prairie winter night. The oil lamp threw looming shadows around the room. Her voice was steady in the black cold. And recalling (or imagining) it, Tom thought of the elaborate tales he unwound for Charlie—was this her gift to him, this spendthrift flow of words?—and wondered where recollections ended and imagination began, and how to draw the line between.
“Well,” he said, “she was very beautiful, my mother. She was tall and she had blonde hair, and blue eyes—just the color of your mother’s eyes,” he said, and across the campfire, for reasons he didn’t fully understand, he sought those eyes.
Lily Overton regarded him without expression.
Now, warming to his subject: “She used to read me stories at night.”
“What kind of stories, Tom?”
“Bible stories.” He cast about in his memory. “Remember the story about the angel coming to announce the birth of our Lord?”
“Mama says there are no angels.”
“Maybe there were a long time ago.”
Again he flicked his gaze at Lily Overton.
“Well, I never saw one,” Charlie announced. And then: “What was your mother’s name?”
“Olivia,” Tom said. “But everybody called her Livy.”
“Where is she?”
Lily tousled Charlie’s hair. “I think that’s enough for tonight, little man.”
Overton scratched alight a match and put fire to his cigarette. “Let the boy talk, Lil.”
Tom hesitated. The fire crackled, shooting sparks into the dark sky. He looked at Lily, then at Charlie.
“She died.”
Charlie considered this soberly. “What did she die of?”
“Fever,” Tom said, but what he thought was, It was an angel of death that took her.
“Maybe my mama could be your mother,” Charlie said.
Lily Overton cleared her throat briskly. “And that really is enough.” She glared at her husband. “Take him to pee, Frank. Make sure we haven’t taken in any other stowaways.”
Overton pitched his cigarette into the fire. “C’mon, Charlie,” he said, climbing to his feet. Together, they disappeared into the shadows beside the truck, the boy already fumbling with his fly. Lily busied herself with the dishes. Porcelain rang against porcelain. The shards of a bowl rolled into the fire. Lily put down its surviving sister. Tom could see the divot carved in its lip. He looked up at her, her lips a gash in her narrow face.
“What did you have to go and tell him that for? Death and angels. What kind of notions are you trying to fill my boy’s head with?”
“I’m sorry—”
“Don’t you think he has enough to carry, and him just six years old, without having to worry about his parents dying?”
“I said—”
“I know what you said.”
Tom gazed at the broken bowl in the coals, already streaked with soot.
“He trusts you,” Lily said.
“I know. I didn’t mean—”
“I’m glad I’m not your mother,” Lily snapped, and then Charlie and his father came striding back into the little clearing where they had pitched their camp, and it was like she and the boy had never spoken—like he wasn’t there at all. She enfolded the child in her arms, and when he pointed at the broken bowl in the fire, she merely smiled. “Mama had an accident, didn’t she? Now come on, let’s get to bed.”
That night, Tom didn’t walk the camp with Overton.
He bedded down instead, and when tears came, he turned his back to the fire, his muscles taut with the effort of holding them in. As for Lily Overton, she watched him sleepless through the flames where the shards of the bowl slowly blackened. The rigid line of his shoulders bespoke his tears, but she did nothing to comfort him—could think of nothing to do and did not anyway wish to comfort him. Yet when her sleep came at last, it was fretful and uneasy.
None of them slept well that moonless night. Not Lily and not her boy, who dreamed his own mother’s death. Not Tom, who had never known the color of his mother’s eyes. And not Frank Overton either, who returned to camp late, propped himself against the truck for a final smoke before sleep, and studied the boy with his own deep thoughts, slow as silted rivers, and dreamed, when he dreamed at all, of the reckoning of angels.
It was dreams that drove the Overtons, as dreams had driven their forbears across the vast expanse of the continent—dreams of a better life, nightmares of the life they’d left behind. It had all crumbled in their hands, and if salvation glimmered before them like a mirage, always just beyond their grasp, the past forever ran them down. So much loss already behind them. So much terror of loss still to come that they closed their hearts against him. Overton tried not to love this boy he’d taken in, for better or worse, impulsively and against his wife’s objections. Lily would not let herself say his name. Even Charlie’s love had a fierce intensity, as if Tom might any moment disappear, evanescent as the air.
It was angels—their own better angels—that drew them on as far as they could go: to surrender up to Tom the warmth of their fire, a meager portion of their already paltry rations, a pittance of the affection that hammered upon the sealed valves of their attention. The future was a mystery they were always plunging into, back sore and weary in their sweat-darkened clothes, masked against the ever-present dust.
“Tell me more about your mother,” Charlie said, and so, as they sprawled together in the bed of the truck, perspiring in the heat, Tom told him—of the flowers his mother had cultivated in front of the house and the vegetable garden she had cultivated in back, of the way the earth bloomed underneath her fingers, bringing some rare beauty into the world. “Tell me the stories she told you,” Charlie said, clutching his chain, and so Tom summoned them to life in the dead air, mysterious tales gleaned not from those his mother had read at his bedside (there had been no tales, or if there had been he could not recall them) but, with more imagination than accuracy, from the color plates bound into the family Bible—the wave-pitched ark and David with his sling and the terrible angel come to announce the miraculous birth that would redeem the fallen world.
