Two weeks after they moved in, a high wind started up at six in the morning and continued all day. It was a deliberate, hurtful wind. By the next morning the blowing dust was so thick Mayme could not walk the two miles down the road to the dairy. Lines of dust came in under the doors. They stopped up the cracks in the windows with rags. The wind hooted at the chimney like someone blowing across the top of a bottle. The dust was carried on gusts from the northeast along with bits of dry grass and other debris from the fields, thrown against the windows. The blow lasted another night. By dawn Elizabeth was sitting beside the cold cookstove with a wet cloth in her hand. The surface of the old stove was streaked with red dust.
“We’ve got to think about this,” she said. “I don’t know if we can last this out.”
That night they gathered around the Emerson radio to listen to the evening news while the wind beat at the windows. Dust poured through the ceiling beside the chimney. Jeanine and Mayme swept it up on pieces of cardboard boxes and Bea kept the fire going in the cookstove. Jeanine saw Bea staring at the radio speaker, listening as if it mattered. Everything mattered to Bea. Bea’s heart was engaged with the world like a gear.
Elizabeth clicked off the radio and said they had to decide what they were to do in the coming months. The old house they had longed for all those years shunting around the oil camps, that they remembered as the good place of plenty and quiet, was in a mess. The peach orchard eaten by scale and unpruned. The roof was a leaking patchwork of composite shingles and fifty-year-old cedar shingles, the fields grown up with cedar seedlings, parasites that ate up all the good things from the soil. The south fireplace had been bricked up and its chimney blocked by leaves and birds’ nests. They needed chickens and a garden and money for seeds and the wallpaper should be stripped.
Bea got up and went to the bedroom she shared with her mother and came back with her book of famous poems. All the beautiful words in their sparse print telling of great events and shattering emotions. Her mother said, “Bea, you’d better listen to this.” Bea shut the book.
“We’ve got to move in town,” said Elizabeth. “We can live better if we move into town.”
“No, Mother,” said Jeanine. “No, let’s stay.”
“Jeanine, I don’t know if you have a vote here,” said her mother.
Mayme said, “We can all move in town with Aunt Lillian and Jeanine can stay out here by herself.”
“That’s mean,” said Bea. “But it’s dramatic.”
“Y’all still blame me about Daddy,” said Jeanine. “It wasn’t my fault what Daddy did.”
“No, you just covered up for him.”
“Mayme, hush,” said Elizabeth. “You girls have lived in towns all your lives. We can’t keep up with the work. We might be able to sell. And you girls need a social life.”
Jeanine said, “I don’t want a social life. We can fix all this, Mother.” Jeanine made vague circles in the air with both hands to indicate some completeness, some kind of culmination. “Nobody’s going to buy. And we’ll plant things. I’m going to move upstairs and set up the Singer.”
“You’ll freeze in the winter up there. There’s no heat,” Mayme said. She wore a white kerchief over her hair all the time now, she had made it from a sugar sack and hemmed it neatly. It made her look like a nun.
“I’ll find a kerosene stove somewhere. And by next fall Bea will have a going-to-high-school party.” Jeanine said this in an enthusiastic tone of voice. They were still mad at her. They were all still confused and damaged by Jack Stoddard’s death, and it seemed his long shadow remained on earth even though he was gone, and it had followed them across the country to perpetuate their conflicts and divisions.
Bea put her finger in her book to mark her place. “Can I cut my hair? When I have my high school party?”
Elizabeth said, “Jeanine stop that. Don’t make her believe those things.”
“We can’t move again,” said Jeanine.
“Then what?” said Elizabeth. She laid her hand on the table. “Then what?”
Mayme was the only one with a job. The winter was coming, and they needed wood for the kitchen range, which was $1.75 a rick or five dollars the cord and a cord would last them, say, about a month. And coal oil for the lamps would come to $3.50 a month if Bea didn’t stay up all night reading.
“Bea, make a list,” said Jeanine. “Of what all we have. Write all this down.” Bea flipped over the pages of her Big Chief notebook and ruled out columns. She doodled at the edges. A stick man sat on a block of ice, milk bottles rolled their eyes at one another. “Listen to me, this will look a lot better when there’s a list.”
They could lease the fields, maybe for as much as five dollars a month. Jeanine said she would clear fifty acres of cedar somehow. And what about the work in the house? Elizabeth said. All her life she had done nothing but keep house, she had hauled and boiled water and ran out the bedbugs with sulfur and stuffed newspapers in the cracks and wrung out clothes by hand and look where it got me. Her voice was rising. Look where it got me. Bea kept her head low and wrote it all down.
She said, “I am not going to do housework anymore. Y’all are big.”
“But what would you do, Mother?” Mayme bit her lip. She could not imagine what her mother would do other than keep house.
“I want to go into town, and spend time with Lillian and Vi,” she said. Bea’s pencil stopped in mid-milk bottle.
“Mother, you’re not leaving, are you?” Mayme was alarmed.
Bea said, “Mother? Are you going away?” She had a desperate expression on her face. Then she bent over the notebook again and drew drilling rigs.
“Y’all look like you been shot,” said Elizabeth. “I’m not leaving, but you had better think about the work this involves.”
“How much do we have left?”
“There’s a hundred and seventy-five and some change.”
“I’ll do the housework,” said Jeanine. “I’ll keep up the house and cooking. And Mayme’s making twenty a month.”
Mayme said, “All right. But I better see some wash hanging on the line when I come home.”
“And don’t leave it out to get covered in dust,” said Elizabeth. “If you buy chickens you’ll have to build a chicken house or you might just as well feed them to the coyotes. The minute you have hens, Jeanine, every hungry thing out there wants them or the eggs.”
“And you’ve got to keep Bea’s clothes ironed and starched,” said Mayme.
“And throw something down the old well,” said Bea. “Animals get thirsty, they get desperate for water and they’re liable to fall down in it.” She stroked Prince Albert. “We got to put out water in a pan.”
“And you have to learn to can,” said Elizabeth. “We need a pressure cooker and jars. You need to can whatever you can find at the farmers’ market on Saturdays in Mineral Wells.”
Mayme said, “I’ll hand you two dollars a week for groceries.”
“All right,” said Jeanine. “If we moved into town we’d end up in some crummy rent house again. Did we just sit around and talk about this place all those years for nothing?”
“It wasn’t what we expected,” said Mayme. She took off the kerchief and shook it out.
“Well what the hell did you expect?” said Jeanine. She knotted her fingers together in a tight clasp.
“Don’t use that language,” said her mother.
“Can I write ‘hell’?” said Bea.
“No.”
“Mayme, you can do better than that dairy,” said Jeanine.
“I know it,” Mayme said. “Just let me think.”
AND SO THEY decided to stay. They could imagine the old Tolliver place into being. The sisters could dream the unstinting dreams of young people at the edge of adult life where one makes assertions and declarations about the models of cars, the numbers of children, the colors of kitchens that one wants in this future life. Mayme wanted a telephone. It would emit friendly voices from the earpiece, m
aybe the young man named Robert Faringham would after all, against all odds, call her on this new modern telephone with a rotary dial, and with it would come a subscriber’s book and you could read down the columns of names and find your cousins and your friends. Her auburn hair shone in the lamplight. Mayme had the ability or gift of being happy, which is not all that common. She wanted a job with smart clothes and then a husband and then a home in Fort Worth and four children and herself a chatelaine like Snow White in a ruffled collar and high heels singing “Someday My Prince Will Come.” She had just turned twenty-two so he’d better show up fast. Bea wanted electricity so she could read until the late hours and write in her notebooks. She wanted a teacher who would understand what these notebooks meant to her, who would pick up the Big Chief and read in it, and say My goodness, look at this!
Jeanine wanted the house painted white, and an untroubled life. Spring would come and the fields would be the dark, dense green of new cotton plants and sweet corn. The peach orchard would bloom. She wanted a good mare to run with Smoky and then there would be increase and growth. Jeanine knew the bargain she had made with her mothers and sisters to stay here depended on her, that they did not care about it as much as she did but town life would drag them down into low-wage jobs and restlessness again, they would all scatter and lose their love of one another. This would be home with curtains at the windows and voices of friends come to visit speaking in low tones on the veranda in the evenings. She wanted knowledge about the soil and how windmills worked and the mysteries of hot-water heaters. She would step out of a bath of hot water and scented foam, into a summer suit of dark blue rayon with white polka dots, she would reach into an icebox for a pitcher of cool water. If she could have all this her heart would have been so full of gladness she would have spilled over. If only it would rain.
Her mother wanted a guide or some book of advice. She was moving into a life that was lived by widows, a new, frightening place. It seemed a geography that was shrouded and without color and she was paused at the edge of it.
Bea opened her book again. Then she declaimed aloud, “‘Look down, fair moon, and bathe this scene; Pour softly down night’s nimbus floods, on faces ghastly. Swollen, purple; on the dead, on their backs-’”
Elizabeth said, “Stop, Bea.”
CHAPTER NINE
At Strawn’s store they received a message from Mineral Wells; their relatives were coming to visit. Mayme cleaned the lamp chimneys and Jeanine washed what clothes they had and ironed them with the sad iron, raising hot steam in the kitchen. Bea used an old piece of school chalk to whiten her tennis shoes, and they waited nervously for their relatives to arrive.
Aunt Lillian and her daughter Betty drove up in a Model A and stepped out and spread their arms. How glad they were to see them again, how good they looked! The aunt and the cousin glanced at each other and then turned back to Elizabeth and her daughters and smiled again. “Y’all are home!” they said.
Elizabeth smiled and hugged her sister-in-law. “Yes, here we are,” she said.
The sisters and their cousin walked out into the fields, through the gumdrop shapes of invading cedar. Betty was the same age as Jeanine and she had the dark Stoddard hair done in a series of close waves around her head. Her head was glossy with good shampoo and she liked to move it around on her neck in subtle head gestures.
“Why are we walking around in the field?” said Betty. “What are you going to do with all this land?”
“Well, when the cedar is cleared, it’ll be good.” Jeanine waved her hands. “Good land.”
Smoky stood at the far end of the field under a stand of live oak with his ears turned toward their neighbor’s barn. He was searching among all the dried grasses that still carried seed heads and several strands dangled from his mouth.
“What are you going to cut them down with?” said Betty.
“With a saw,” said Jeanine.
“Don’t men normally do that?” asked Betty. She stared at the three-foot cedars as if they were a fixed and eternal element of the world, which could only be altered by men. Large strong men who wielded huge tools.
“I can do it. Why not?” said Jeanine.
Betty took her arm and gave her a little shake. “You better get work in town,” she said. “I never heard of a girl turning into a farmer.”
“Then you ain’t heard much,” said Jeanine.
“And what are you going to do with that horse?”
“I don’t know yet,” said Jeanine. “But I’ll let you know first, all right?”
Mayme said, “Jeanine, hush.”
They turned back toward the house, walking up the slope through stands of Indian grass and Johnson grass. Betty’s Cuban heels turned and she said she was going to break both ankles if they kept on stomping around in the fields.
“Did Mother tell you I got engaged?” she said. “His name is Si. That’s for Silas but I think Silas is so old-fashioned. It’s a redneck name.” They sat on the edge of the concrete tank, under the windmill. It stood braced and thick and cool water poured out of the pipe. “What are y’all doing for men?”
“We left them all behind,” said Jeanine. Mayme stared down at the ground.
“Y’all better come into town and come out to the China Moon here one of these days. The China Moon dance palace. Si steps on my feet a lot.”
“We will,” said Mayme. “We will, before long.”
“Well, you all need to get out socially,” said Betty. “There’s a farmer world and then there’s a social world.” She put out a foot shod in dark red leather. “I get shoes at cost, there where I work. These here you are looking at are dancing shoes. I don’t normally wear them walking around in the fields, but if you want dancing shoes, I got them.”
“We’ll come in town and see,” said Mayme. Bea sat on the edge of the tank and stared at Betty’s dancing shoes.
“What I am talking about is men,” said Betty. “You got to hunt them down, and never let them know you’re sort of stalking them, and you got to do it in really good-looking shoes.”
Jeanine clenched her hands together as if they were lips and nodded with an interested expression.
They took their aunt and cousin on a tour of the old house. It had been built in 1883 with lumber and glass hauled from Mineral Wells, a crowd of neighbors shouting to one another, lifting the beams. They set the foundation with red sandstones and raised chimneys at either end and the two stories filled with talk and music and disputes and children running down the staircase with a racket like falling barrels. At the age of ten Elizabeth had screamed with excitement when her cousins roped and broke in new horses in the corrals, and the big sugar-grinding stones in the barn roared as they turned on one another and juice bubbled from the spout and splashed into the boiling pans. Grandpa Tolliver’s two plow horses, Shorty and George, called in loud quivering whinnies every morning for their feed and banged their buckets to wake everyone up. Every evening Elizabeth’s father sat on this very veranda in a striped shirt and galluses and a vast black hat and sang cowboy songs to himself, songs about thundering stampedes. And now all was still.
They stood in the parlor with its nine-foot windows and cracked, shimmering glass and the Virginia creeper swarming over the panes so that the parlor seemed to be underwater. They peered down into the well where the old centurion cedar stood guard twisted in spirals by the daily journey of the sun. They went out to the graveyard to contemplate their mutual relatives. The graves had not been tended properly. They were grown up with agarita and cactus. The cast-iron fence was leaning in sections. Jeanine tried to straighten it and her sisters and mother said to leave it alone. Her grandfather’s grave spelled out his name in ornate letters, Samuel V. Tolliver, 1860-1932 and beside him Nannie Allen Neumann Tolliver, 1862-1932. Two unnamed babies that had lived only a few months; her mother’s forgotten brother and sister.
Betty said, “I just feel so bad for y’all losing Uncle Jack but I remember when my daddy picked up and left.”
“Hush up, Betty,” said her mother.
They went on, leading their aunt and cousin slowly and uneasily around this inherited property as if it were not really their own, as if they were squatters. Elizabeth and Lillian, the accidental sisters-in-law, sat on the front veranda and drank iced tea without ice, without sugar, and with hardly any tea in it. Lillian sipped at her glass and carefully put it down. She stared around at the weedy yard and the cardboard in the windows. She put her heavy hand on Elizabeth’s arm and said, “Liz, I want you to come into town. Me and Violet have something I want you to look into.”
“What?” Elizabeth said.
“Y’all got to do something. Y’all are going to starve out here.”
“Well, we decided to try for a while.”
“How much money do you have on hand right now?”
Elizabeth squinted her eyes against the late fall sunlight and thought. “I’ve got enough to buy chickens and garden seed and a few other things. Then something for an emergency.”
“What for an emergency?”
“An uncollected note. It was in Jack’s tally book. A man owed him money for hauling a boiler up to Jacksboro.”
“You come into Mineral Wells and visit with me and Violet Keener. We got something we want to talk to you about.”
SO THEY BEGAN to make their lives there, throughout the fall and winter of 1937. They tried to piece their lives together the way people draw maps of remembered places; they get things wrong and out of proportion, they erase and redraw again. From the radio they heard of people dying in the dust storms just to the north of them, in Oklahoma and the Panhandle. That Gloria Vanderbilt was reduced to dressmaking for a living. Of the faraway rich with more money than there ever was in the world while men starved and had no work and women starved and worked both, of strikes at the textile mills in Rhode Island and all the people going to California to pick peas or whatever there was to pick. But the Hamilton clock seemed to tell only of their own long hours of labor against the dust and the drought. They were in the midst of the Dirty Thirties, and that decade’s modish obsession with important people in far places, with gangsters and movie stars and oil barons and swing bands. It was easy to feel themselves invisible and empty of significance, to forget that behind every human life is an immense chain of happenstance that includes the gravest concerns; murder and theft and betrayal, great love; lives spent in burning spiritual devotion and others in miserly denial; that despite the supposed conformity of country places there might be an oil field worker who kept a trunk of fossil fish or a man with a desperate stutter who dreamed of being a radio announcer, a dwarf with a rivet gun or an old maid on a rooftop with a telescope, spending her finest hours observing the harmonics of the planetary dance.
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