“No.”
“All right. I’ll see what I can do.”
He saw headlights in the distance turning off on the farm-to-market road. It would probably be her sister in a car full of revelers, all reveled out. He laid his arm along her shoulder, on the back of her chair, and turned his face up to stare at the sky. Several long moments passed.
“And now what?”
She said, “I wish I could drive nitro like my dad used to.”
He nodded. “I see.”
“I think I could get to like driving nitro.”
“You probably could. But you need to be fashionable and have a career as a secretary. Then you can find a man and get married.”
“My dad told me I’d never get a man.”
“What a goddamned shitty thing to say.”
“Excuse your language.”
“Thank you.”
“It gets worse.”
“Worse how?”
Jeanine hesitated. Then she said, “My mother has invested everything we had in some phony oil-well scheme. Everything left over from when Dad died. And we owe a lot in county taxes and there’s no money for milk and malt tablets for Bea. A horrible county nurse comes and brings us relief supplies and she is a hateful witch and she insults everybody. She’s always checking Bea’s hair for lice.” Jeanine took in a sobbing breath. “I keep thinking about killing her.”
“Really.”
“Yes.”
“Which oil well?”
“It’s a wildcat company called Beatty-Orviel up there in Jacksboro. I forgot the promoter’s name. Anyway I’ll think of it later. I can’t think right now.”
Ross drummed his fingers on the chair back. “We can never get our parents to act right, Jeanine. I know. I’ve tried. So has my boy.”
This was lost on Jeanine. She was lost in inebriated thoughts of her difficulties. “They all blame me for covering up for Dad all those years,” she said, and hiccuped.
“Yes, well, as I remember, you did. In fact.”
Jeanine started to say something. Probably something in her own defense but he laid his blunt forefinger on her mouth and said, “You were caught between them.” He put his hand back into his lap. “Do you miss him?”
“We all do but nobody will say it.”
“How is Bea?”
She fell back into the crook of his arm. Might as well. He was big and he loomed and she had known him forever. It was cold. She slipped her hand into his coat pocket and pressed against the warmth of his body.
“Jeanine, you are messing with me.”
She smiled up at him. “I know it.”
“I asked you about Bea.”
“Good. She’s doing everything the doctor says. And that hound Winifred. The county nurse.”
He smiled. “I know her. Tough it out.”
She realized she was not going to throw up after all and she could say something about food.
“You know what? I’ve never been out to dinner in my life.”
He turned to her and thought about it for a minute. He pushed his hat to the back of his head. “You mean with a waiter standing around. Dressed up. At the Baker Hotel. Wine in an ice bucket. And so on. A string quartet.”
“Yes. I’ve never been. I’m an oil field child, raised on bread heels and beans. I’ve heard they give you two forks. You could take me.”
He smiled and said, “You know, somewhere under that hard varnish, Jeanine, you are a really awful person.”
“I do my best,” she said.
He said, “Other than a string quartet and nitro, is there anything you need?”
“We need tires. I wish I knew where I could find good used ones.”
Ross thought for a moment. “All right. I can do that.”
They sat in silence for so long that Jeanine fell asleep. Ross held her with one arm until his shoulder joint began to ache and at last he woke her up and said good night. She managed to make it up the stairs and fell asleep with her clothes on.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
Martha Jane Armstrong was twenty years old with bright red hair and freckles. She was an only child and had a room by herself and that room was littered with letters from Tim Joplin, who was having a great time out with the CCC boys in Big Spring. Jeanine drove to the Armstrong house with her measuring tape and her suit and Bea’s coat. The Armstrongs were kidding out. Two minute Angora goat babies just born into a harsh world of coyotes and neglectful mothers lay beside the kitchen stove, folded in straw-filled washtubs making the kitchen a hell of noise and goat odor.
Martha Jane said they kept the silk upstairs in the loft because if they left it downstairs it would take up the smell of goats, as did everything else, including her hair and school clothes. It was the same heathen mess every year but her father and a lot of people were betting that the market would come back. When Daddy said he was quitting cattle and going to goats and sheep Martha Jane had about died. But the screwworms had driven them to this necessity and so the two newborn dogie goats with their strange horizontal pupils and soft, triangular cat mouths lay curled in washtubs and sobbed for attention.
Martha Jane and her mother and Jeanine went up a precarious set of stairs to see the silk there in the loft by the light of a kerosene lamp. Around them on the walls were varmint traps with carnivorous, rusty jaws. The silk shone like rare treasure in the lamplight, a faint eggshell color. It was brocaded with a shamrock or ace of clubs pattern that stood out when the material was tilted this way and that in the light. There were fifteen yards of it. No, it didn’t come from New Orleans, no matter what Alice Crowser told you, Mrs. Armstrong said. Their grandfather had brought it from New York in 1922, where he had also gone looking for somebody who not only owed him a great deal of money but who had also insulted him in ways no gentleman could endure. He saw it in some store and bought it to calm himself down. It has sat up here in the loft ever since.
Jeanine laid out Bea’s coat and her garnet silk dress and jacket to show them her work. She turned them inside out and held the careful seams and the linings and the windowpane pockets to the light. Martha Jane said she wished she could do work like that but when God was handing out patience and he said Martha Jane Armstrong! she must have been asleep. She was so sad to hear about Jeanine’s father. But wasn’t he in jail for something?
Jeanine said, “Malfeasance and walking disorderly. Homicide in a no-homicide zone.”
Martha Jane said Hmmmm and chewed gum. She said, “I kind of remember when y’all buried your grandparents there at the Tolliver place.”
“We came,” said her mother. “When they were laid in the all-enveloping grave.”
“Oh, you were the redheaded girl,” said Jeanine. “They kept you and Bea in the house and y’all got up on the table and ate all the bread and butter.”
“I know it.”
Then Mrs. Armstrong started telling Jeanine about the visions she’d been having about Tim, and Martha said Mother, be quiet. Martha Jane found the Vogue pattern in its envelope and they wrapped the material again in its old sheet. Mrs. Armstrong said a lot of people had visions. She herself had talked to Amelia Earhart on the Ouija board. Jeanine turned to her and wanted to hear what it was that Amelia Earhart said on the Ouija board but Martha said that Timmy was perfectly safe and he had not been bitten by a rattlesnake. Martha handed Jeanine the Vogue pattern and said, “Jeanine let us give you five dollars beforehand.”
“That would be fine,” said Jeanine. “Because I’ll have to buy thread and lining and buttons.”
On their way out Mr. Armstrong sat half asleep by the fireplace, exhausted and stained with blood and manure. He was short and balding; he struggled up out of the chair and said good evening to them.
“Y’all leasing your fields?”
“Yes, sir, to Abel Crowser.”
“Good, good.”
Jeanine said, “Well, are you finding a good market for your shear crop?”
“Oh Lord yes, fellow from Comanche Co
unty, Ross Everett, buying it all up. Has his own shear crews, electric shears, brings his own generator.” He sat back down again and folded his hands in his lap. They seemed to be made from wood and horsehide. “He’s a hard dealer, that man. Hard to bargain with.”
“But he’s good-looking,” said Martha Jane. “He’s got a cute butt.”
“Martha, you are headed for the lakes of fire,” said her mother. Mr. Armstrong ran a hand over his balding head and said he knew folks who were cedar choppers. In fact they lived on one of Ross Everett’s tenant farms. They’d do it for the posts. But stay away from them if they come. The way they cuss it would make your nose bleed.
JEANINE SAT DOWN to work at the Singer in her upstairs sewing room. It was late February; the shingles were in place on the roof so that dust would not leak in and stain the beautiful silk and sift into the machine gears. The room was dark because they had nailed cardboard over the missing panes but she would deal with that later. She laid out the silk and the tissues of the Vogue pattern and thought about where to make the first cut. She marked it with her chalk. Then she went downstairs to start the pinto beans and bread dough. With Mayme’s paycheck they could afford flour now, and the kitchen smelled of baking bread.
ABEL SANK THE nose of his sulky plow into the dry soil to terrace the field against the slope. The two workhorses bent into the job until the back band stood up off their spines and the muscles of their thighs were knotted and coiled. The sharp edge of the turning plow threw the earth to one side with a ripping noise. The layer of root matt was torn loose and turned over. He went over the field three times and then he would let it lie until early April to take in rain, which had not come for seven years but maybe it would come this year.
MAYME BROUGHT IN the mail. Church bulletins from the First Baptist and Third Presbyterian and a postcard from Vernon Galbraith, who was in the Army Air Corps and had danced with her the night of the Valentine’s Day dance to “You Are My Lucky Star” and had fallen in love with her auburn hair, and her unsinkable good cheer, and her kind heart that stood open to the world like a door painted in Chinese red.
ON A MONDAY in the first week of March Jeanine put the John Deere into gear and made her way up the slope with long divots flying up off the wheel cleats like birds made of dirt. It was midmorning on a late March day, and cool, and foggy. She could barely see Abel Crowser on the sulky plow with the rein ends thrown across his left shoulder; Jo-Jo and Sheba bent nearly to the ground, trying to haul the blade through the dry red soil. The fog rose up out of the Brazos River bottoms to the trees below Jeanine and then she watched Abel and the team disappear into it. It was a very still mist without wind, it seemed to develop of its own accord and suddenly she was in the middle of it and the air was heavy and wet.
She shut off the engine. The tall exhaust pipe was hot and steam curled around it. She heard something overhead like a freight train passing but it was a sustained sound that reverberated in millisecond waves, like immensely amplified radio static, so loud she could not think. It was the strangest thunder she had ever heard. It was hostile and full of incoherent buzzes and it went on and on and on. She sat stock-still on the John Deere, listening.
Ross walked across the field to her, with long strides across turned earth. He appeared out of the dense fog, indistinct at first and then solid, with edges. She lifted one hand to him with the other resting on the metal steering wheel. He touched his hat brim and then lifted a hand in return. And then as he walked he bent down and picked up something from the ground and then came on.
He came up to her and shoved his hands in his canvas coat pockets. He regarded the tractor. “What are you paying for gas for that thing?”
She smiled at him and tipped her floppy hat. “Thirteen cents a gallon, just like everybody.”
“You need to go fill out forms for an agricultural exemption.” He handed her an envelope. “Ten percent of a match race.”
“Hey!” She opened the envelope and took out three twenty-dollar bills. “Sixty dollars!” She stared at it for a moment and with a feeling of great joy realized they could pay off this year’s taxes entirely. She waved the bills in the wet air. “Ross, I am a betting fool. Who did he run against?”
“Little Badger. After this he’s going to qualify on the official tracks.” He watched her count the money over twice, and then stuff it into her jacket pocket and turn her face to him with a wide smile. “Let’s get this tractor into the barn,” he said. “It’s looking strange. The weather looks strange.” He reached for her hand. “Let me drive.”
Jeanine rode behind him on the drawbar and held to his waist as they banged over the rocky ground, through the fog. She turned her head to one side and laid her cheek on his back, her arms around him. He drove uphill in the general direction of the house; they could not see far through the fog and things came at them in blurs and then with details out of the circumscribed world. Then small bits of ice began to fall through the mist and ping on the metal surfaces of the tractor. They were no bigger than a pinhead and perfectly square. The strange thunder sounded again. She felt as if the hair were rising on her arms.
“Damn, what is this?” he said.
“I don’t know,” said Jeanine.
“You should have had sense enough to get in, Jeanine,” he said.
He drove straight into the barn fairway and turned off the engine and they both got down. Just beyond the barn entrance the fog turned and swirled, the tiny ice grains pinged. Far away Jeanine could hear a car on the farm-to-market road. They sat and watched out the opened bay doors to the draining sky and the fields in their long descending slopes to the Brazos River disappearing now in stacked planes. She watched a flight of pigeons tilting through the barn; they came to rest on a crossbeam and settled their wings with a clattering sound. The buzzing thunder sounded again and again. They listened with lifted faces.
“What is it?” she said.
“I don’t know. But you should have gotten out of the field.”
“I wanted to get it all cleared, Ross. For hay.” Jeanine spread her hands wide, as if a crop of coastal hay would grow up between them. “Abel could get a hay crop out of it if I cleared the seedlings.”
“You worry a lot, Jeanine.” He rested his forearms on his thighs. He was not much more than thirty years old and he was worn already by the nature of his work and all the work he had in front of him every day when the sun came up. The thought of clearing a field for a hay crop seemed to be too much at the moment. He smiled at her. “It will wear you out. That tractor is hard to drive.”
“There’s plenty to worry about,” she said. “Ain’t there?” They sat down on the old sugar-mill grinding stone and the fall of tiny ice grains stopped suddenly, and then the strange thunder faded away. “I wish there wasn’t.”
“What was the best time of your life, Jeanine?” Ross turned over a white object in his hand. “When you weren’t worrying. Or getting strangled.”
She pulled off the old hat and ran her fingers through her hair. “Well, let me see.” She could think about it, now that she had sixty dollars in her hands. She lifted her head to the path to the house where it turned through the gate, up to the well. She was six or seven, they had come on a visit to her grandparents. She walked down with her grandfather and her father and uncle to the barn lot in the evening, this very barn. The warm, breezy dark was full of the sound of chuckwill’s-widows calling over and over, the men leaned on the mesquite rails and talked about the plow team; she wanted to stay with them forever and hear their talk of horses. How they loved their animals. She was holding her father’s hand and the whole night sky and the air had a deep scent of horses and grass, of large warm animals and cedar. Back in the house her sisters and cousin cut out paper dolls from the catalog by the light of the coal-oil lamp but she was with the men in the beautiful darkness and it seemed to her then that the men were strong and harmless, they held the world of the Brazos valley in careful possession. This was some vanished fantasy w
orld that children inhabit the way remote stars inhabit the night sky and form mythic figures, so immortal, so primitive. So she told him about that evening, that brief moment, as best she could although she could hardly put into words why it was so deeply moving to her. He listened with a serious expression, without speaking.
Then he opened her hand and put into it a white porcelain doll’s head. “I found that in your field,” he said.
“Where did this come from?” Jeanine turned it over between her fingers; a face of exaggerated femininity with faded black hair and red lips, broken off at the neck.
“Ask your mother. Maybe she lost it. A doll’s head.” He stood up. Then he bent down and kissed her on the mouth, his hand on her neck. It felt very good to her, sitting there on the sugar-mill grinding stone with its scent of old sweetness and his body so close. He put the fedora on her head. “Are you done for the day?”
She looked up at him for a moment and then she said, “I guess I’d better wait and see what the weather does.”
“Good idea.” His hand slid down her cheek and he hesitated but then turned to the house. “I’ll be back to rig you a chain guard.”
She walked with him to his truck, and when he drove away she ran into the house with a feeling that very bad weather was coming. She hunted around for something to eat. She sat in her dusty jeans in the empty house and ate bread and beans. Her mother was in town with Bea for a doctor’s appointment. Soon Bea’s cast could come off. She took the doll’s head to her sewing room and set it on the windowsill thinking someday she would make a body and a dress for it. She brushed out her wet hair and thought about Ross, and then went to the hall mirror, and wished she had looked a little better when he drove up. Then she realized she had not asked Ross what was the best time of his own life. It would probably have been a time with Miriam, she thought. She had a hateful thought that she could end up in a competition with a dead woman and did not like herself for thinking it.
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