“He doesn’t get to say who stays.”
They walked across the littered yard to the barn, and the gate open to the pasture beyond. The dead fire of the windmill crew was a pile of blackened stubs covered lightly with snow like some aboriginal tartan in whites and blacks.
“Don’t bawl,” he said.
“All right.”
Jeanine watched the dark brown stallion as he trotted among the cattle. Everett was holding some calves and their mothers in a fifty-acre trap and Smoky Joe was trotting among them very like a great landowner checking on his herds. He had a dashing little pouffe of snow on his forelock. He lifted his boxy head. His frizzy forelock stood out like a broom, spangled with snowflakes. He came to see what she had in her hand and then tried to take her hat from her head.
“Give that back,” she said in a quavering voice. She patted him. “Ain’t you a rocket?”
JEANINE DROVE OUT of Comanche County into headwinds and snow. When she pulled out of the drive she saw Everett’s son standing at the mailbox to wait for the bus, thrown out into the snow, his hands in his pockets and his feet shifting. As she came onto the gravel she heard a heavy chunk and realized the boy had hit the trailer fender with something, probably a slug of double O buck from his slingshot.
But she had two hundred dollars from Smoky and a hundred in winnings and so let him do whatever he wanted. She drove on. The trailer no longer lugged heavily at the scissors hitch, she could feel it bouncing along the uneven blacktop surface with no horse in it, no nothing. She had only sixty miles to go.
She crossed the spidery steel bridges over the Leon River and then Jim Ned Creek. The water ran between snowy banks, the flakes pouring onto the disturbed surfaces of the current. Just past the highway bridge over Jim Ned Creek, in a misted, snow-clouded pasture she saw four old horses. They were like ghosts, ancient and drawn, standing under a live oak, coated with white. Maybe it was Maisie and Jeff and Big Man and Little Man with their heads together, comforting one another in their old age. The last of the snow skittered in small waves down the black surface of the Bankhead highway.
CHAPTER TWENTY
Bea dreamed that they were sawing her leg off. Her new leg would be made of a large metal spring from a Model T with a round plate like a waffle iron for a foot so she would be able to print tracks like a tennis racket wherever she walked. She asked them not to. Nobody listened. Bea could hear the grating noise as they sawed and sawed. The surgeon raised his head and said afterward he would get to her arms. He would trade her arms and her leg for eternal life and a bushel of peaches. Bea felt that all her blood had drained out and that she was transparent and full of sunlight. She sat up and asked what they had done with her leg. She was in a beautiful white room with a knocking radiator and white curtains. The nurse said her leg was where it always was, and here were her mother and sisters.
Bea looked at her sisters. They seemed so coarse and normal but then she became transparent again when her mother laid her hand on Bea’s forehead and said the surgeon was very happy with the operation. Bea wanted to see her leg in its white bandages and then she drank a cup of smoking broth and ate cherry Jell-O and fell asleep again.
WINIFRED CAME AND organized Bea’s sickroom in the parlor, and opened the windows for fresh air. She recommended that Jeanine wear a dust mask whenever she was working outside and could see haze in the air, especially if another dust storm came at them from Oklahoma. This was to prevent dust pneumonia. They did not need more sickness if Bea was to be taken care of and recover the use of her leg after that very, very expensive operation.
Bea was in intense pain, and the pain was dulled only by the bottle of brown liquid at her bedside. Winifred brought a package of yellow crepe paper and pipe cleaners for Bea to make yellow roses with, so she could contribute to the celebration for Texas Independence Day at the Old Valley Road schoolhouse and forget that her shinbone was a rod of intensely painful fire. Winifred sat down to look at what food they normally ate and wrote out, in a small square hand, recipes for nutritious meals that could be made from white beans and soup bones and a jelly from agarita berries, and admonitions about prudent spending.
She brought more books for Bea and some pamphlets about chickens for Elizabeth on raising productive layers. She read Bea’s journal when Bea was asleep. She went through Elizabeth’s reports on the oil-well investment when Elizabeth was not in the house and read some of her other papers-Jack Stoddard’s death certificate and the lawyer’s report on the charges. She was interested in the charges. It was too late to do anything about removing the child from the home but you never knew. There was so much in the world a wonderful child like Bea had a right to. Music lessons and a plentitude of good books and new shoes. Stimulating friends, art museums. Winifred rolled up Savage Western Tales to shove the magazine into the cookstove fire but changed her mind. They probably needed it for toilet paper.
MAYME AND JEANINE climbed up on the roof with hammers and tin cans that had been sheared open and flattened out with bricks. It was the Sunday before Christmas. They tore up shingles looking for the leak and their breath smoked out in front of them and their hands were bent and white with cold. They could see down the slope to the river.
“Here the damn thing is, Jeanine. Help me with this.”
They crawled forward on hands and knees to the chimney to tear out the shingles. Next to the brick they found the rotted laths and ripped them out and replaced them with the slats from a set of wooden window blinds. Nothing but old composite shingles tacked over cedar shakes stood between them and the dust and the wind. The grit ground into their knees as they worked side by side. They nailed the flattened tin cans over the hole and watched more dust-haze come up over Shinnery Mountain. Mayme lifted her head and stared out across the valley when she heard the sound of hen turkeys yelping, anxious after their broods that all came shifting and hurrying in curious gliding motions far down the slope, at the edge of the Brazos.
“I wish we had one of those for Christmas dinner,” said Mayme. Her head was wrapped in the white kerchief and she was working bare-handed. There was only one pair of gloves and she let Jeanine have them.
“Maybe I could shoot us one,” said Jeanine.
“You need to let both barrels go on that damn nurse. Winifred the Almighty.”
“Too bad we covered the well over with hog wire. They’d never find her body.” Jeanine mentally threw Winifred off the Brazos River Bridge and watched her float away, screaming, amid tangles of driftwood.
Mayme sat back and wiped her nose with her sleeve. She turned up her collar against the wind.
“Why do we let that witch talk to us like that?”
“Because we need the relief food, that’s why,” said Jeanine. “We’re letting ourselves be insulted for food. When are you getting paid?”
“They say it’s a month. Two weeks’ probation and then another two weeks and I get my paycheck.”
“Do they pay you for the probation?”
“Yes, but only half.” Mayme placed another set of shingles with her bare hands, which had become raw with the asphalted grit. “And so when is Ross Everett going to be out here looking for you with a bouquet of roses?”
Jeanine laughed. “Mayme, you should see how they live. Him and that boy. It’s a mess. And the kid is as mean…” She searched for the right sort of thing he was as mean as, but couldn’t think of a comparison.
“He’s hunting for a wife to clean the place up. You can bet on that.”
“He better not be hunting for me.” Jeanine tapped in finishing nails to hold the laths in place. She sat back and regarded the horizon of hills, a column of smoke from the Crowsers’ cookstove beyond the Spanish oak. “Sometimes I wish Dad could know we were doing all right here. That we’re getting by on our own.”
Mayme paused with her hammer in the air. Then she laid it down and put both arms around her sister’s neck and held her for a moment and then picked up the hammer again.
“If we’
d have lost Bea too,” she said. “Well, I don’t know what.”
“But we didn’t,” said Jeanine.
“I remember one time he said I had Orphan Annie hair. I don’t have Orphan Annie hair but at least he said something to me.” She fished around in her coat pocket for a nail. “He only talked to you and Mother.”
“I know it.”
Mayme laid her hammer down and sat back to rest. “How much is left over?”
“From the surgery? About fifty dollars.”
“Hide it, Jeanine. Don’t let Mother know you have it.”
“Because she’ll buy more shares in that well.”
“Yes.”
“All right. It’s got to go for the tax bill anyway.”
They laid their thin fingers crisscross over the old shingles to hold them there, over the heads of their mother and their little sister to protect them from the crawling dust and whatever else might come upon them from the four corners of the world. Jeanine positioned a nail.
“Sock it in, Mayme,” she said. “Don’t smash my finger.”
A DRY NORTHER boomed in and the temperature fell to eighteen. Cold dust surged up and hissed in wind-thrown horizontal lines. Jeanine fought through it and into the kitchen with armloads of wood. She built up the parlor fire; Bea could at least be kept warm. She was asleep when Jeanine came in, fragments of yellow crepe paper in her fingers. She was so pale.
Jeanine put on three splits and tiptoed out again. Her hair was gritty and she dreamed of a bath in a six-foot tub, with something foamy in it, big thick towels. She wanted the shiny look people had when they owned a house with a bathroom. And a good-looking man with a suit and a country estate held a bouquet of roses, waiting to take her to dinner at the Baker Hotel. She wished she knew something about hot-water heaters.
Tomorrow Abel Crowser was going to start bedding in with the sulky plow. The Tolliver farm had 150 acres according to the title. Fifteen was in orchard, twenty in a thick cedar brake with trunks the size of stovepipe. Fifty acres were completely clear. The rest was studded with cedar seedlings and sotol. She could cut that by hand. She would get hold of Ross Everett and ask when he was running Smoky Joe. If she owned 10 percent of him and he was 100 percent horse she hoped her part was that on the forward end, the square head with the toilet-brush forelock that would stretch out and win by a nose.
AND THE DAYS went on through the last week of December with a high-velocity wind that would not stop. There was no end to the flat sunshine and dry skies, and the wind, the endless river of sandpaper wind.
Winifred Beasley drove up and walked into the house without a word to anyone. She bent over the stack of tin cans and bags in front of the window, and brought out a notebook and wrote things down and checked off a list. Elizabeth came in from the parlor and screamed when she saw Winifred in her stout gray suit and bird’s-nest hat.
“Well! I didn’t even know you were here!”
“I like to surprise people,” said Winifred. “Test of character.” Then she went straight to Bea’s room and said, “Well, how is our patient today?”
“Good.” Bea stared at her with wide eyes. “Why don’t you knock?”
“Ha ha ha!” Winifred laughed and smiled her stiff rectangular smile. “Oh I like to surprise people.” She sat down on the chair beside Bea’s bed and checked her hair.
“I don’t have any lice,” Bea said. “None of us have ever had lice.”
“There’s an outbreak in the school here,” said Winifred. “The law requires that I check. When I go to the Buckner’s Home for Children in Dallas, we have lists of things we have to check.”
“Do you work for them?” said Bea.
“No no no! I work for the county!” Winifred was very cheerful. “But I have been associated with them formerly and I have the greatest respect for them. The children are happy and well cared for. They have an enormous library, Bea.”
Jeanine boiled water for the dishes and listened. She wondered if somehow Winifred Beasley were paid for every child she spirited off to the orphans’ home. Jeanine thought she would, in a few more moments, be tempted to pour scalding water on the county health nurse. She turned away and took a long breath when Winifred came back into the kitchen with a ticktock noise of her polished shoes.
She said, “Does the Buckner Home get money from the government for each child?”
“Of course,” said Winifred. “But in the main it is the generosity of the good people of Texas, churches and so on.” She waved one hand out toward the world, full of generous people. “And so you sold your horse. What a great sacrifice you made for your sister.”
“Yes,” said Jeanine. “Sold him to Ross Everett over in Comanche County. And paid for the surgery.” She pressed her front teeth together and told herself to shut up. It didn’t do her any good. “Everett’s going to run him on the official tracks. He’s very fast.”
Winifred raised her eyebrows to express surprise in a wooden, polite way. Then she said, “Come and help me bring in the supplies,” she said. “I have asked for twice the amount of canned milk. Make her drink it down. Condensed milk is not pleasant but a glass a day of condensed milk and the malt tablets are desperately needed.” She started toward the door where wavy lines of blown dust crossed the floorboards. “I know Ross Everett,” she said. “I used to be the county nurse for Comanche County. He killed his wife.”
Jeanine pulled on her coat. She followed Winifred out the door and across the flat dirt of their front yard. There was almost no grass, just the dead matts of Indian grass flattened into circles. She held out her arms for the canned beef and condensed milk. Finally she said, “Oh, he killed her.”
“He killed her with overwork. She was delicate. She had asthma. I told him she was not to get up from bed. A week later I came in and she was in the stock pens keeping up the branding fire. I did my best to point out the inadvisability of this. After she died I recommended his boy be moved somewhere for his education and his own health. Mr. Everett was rude.”
“She was helping with the branding fire?” Jeanine balanced a load of tinned goods. “And she had dust pneumonia?”
“I wish it weren’t true.”
MAYME CAME HOME a week later, riding in Gareau’s milk truck, with a paycheck from the Magnolia Oil Corporation offices in Tarrant and laid it on the table. Seventy-five dollars. Bea could now sit up at the kitchen table, and the pain had subsided. Bea held the check between her two hands and looked at it intently. Her leg in its cast stuck out straight with a sock over the toes.
Bea said, “I need some more western romance magazines. They have emotionally charged story lines.” She thought for a moment and her toes writhed at the end of the cast. “Women tied to stakes. Rattlers crawling down out of the attic. Dropping in the beans. Jeanine could be struck by lightning, Mayme could be kidnapped, Mother could drive off a cliff in the dark or end up in Mexico with the white slavers.” She reached for her notebook. “The road could disappear, it could turn into a great chasm in the desert. I was taken away, screaming, to the Buckner Children’s Home.” Bea knew that she said these things because she was inventing dramatic stories in her head and she couldn’t stop herself from saying them aloud as if they were true. “I thrust my arms out the window, screaming, ‘Mother! Mother!’”
Jeanine put down the bottle of hot sauce and sat without eating, watching Bea writing and writing it all down.
“If a magazine were to pay me for something I wrote, would the check have my name on it like that?” Bea lifted a hopeful face to her mother.
“Yes, Bea darling,” said Elizabeth. “It would say your name, and the date, and the amount, and then somebody signs it. An authorizing person.”
“I could do it,” Bea said to herself. “Why not?” She lay in her cot beside the stove. Albert slept stretched out alongside her legs. “Why not?”
Nobody answered her. Beyond the back door they heard coyotes. One sang in a warbling soprano and the others barked in high yips; they were
young coyote pups who had not yet learned to howl. It was a mother and her family. In the barn the hens flew up to the high beams because there had not yet been enough money to buy chicken wire until the check for seventy-five dollars was on the table. Everything had a family to feed, it was just a matter of who ate who and devil take the hindmost.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
The day before Christmas, Abel Crowser appeared at the door with a fat cock turkey held upside down by its scaly feet. Bea cried out in her usual exclamation points that she would cook the turkey as her present to them all, but she was not allowed to, she was not even allowed on crutches. Jeanine set about roasting the bird with great care.
On Christmas morning they each woke up in their own beds and made silent promises to themselves to be cheerful. Their gifts to one another were things they could make; a tin star for the tree and the juniper green silk dress for Mayme, Lepp cookies for Elizabeth, and the promise of a new coat for Bea. They remembered the Christmas of ’29 in far West Texas, and of ’32 when they sang for their parents, and the worst one in ’35 when they had only exchanged promises. It seemed that Jack Stoddard was still alive in those places, driving nitro and saltwater pumpers, gambling in a back room, calling out for Red Buck to win, drifting transparently over the vast distances of the Permian or through the snow that sifted over the gas flares that Christmas of ’32 in Kilgore. He had always been a shape changer who could talk the legs off an iron stove, and imagined worlds of beauty and chance and drink, and desired these worlds so ardently it seemed impossible he should not still be here in some glassy apparition carrying transparent jelly beans or throwing a pair of invisible dice with stars for dots. Jeanine missed him. They all missed him and nobody would say so. The sisters needed him to drive nails and change the tires and to tell them what kind of men to look for in life, to say Don’t marry somebody like me. To explain why Roosevelt had stored all the gold in Fort Knox. But he was so irrevocably gone.
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