“No,” I protested, “you need to save up so you can go out to Oregon and join Clarence.” She had insisted on paying three dollars a week for her board, though Papa had told her she should keep the money. Clarence had already been gone close to three years. His letters home still assured Ruby that they’d be together again as soon as it could be managed, but he no longer made predictions about when that might be. His paycheck was so small they were lucky to put away five dollars in a month. “You keep giving away your savings and you two will never be able to afford a place of your own,” I said.
“Well, seems like the Depression has already licked us,” Ruby said with resignation. “I won’t stand by and watch it beat you down, too. Not after all you’ve done for us. Besides, you’ve got to do something.”
She was right. I had to try something. Even the money Slim had sent wouldn’t last us forever, and I’d die before I’d write and ask him for more. I had to find a way out of this myself. Despite Papa’s faith that he’d get a good crop any time now, day after day the winds kept blowing and the dust piled against the house as though it intended to bury us all alive. The Depression stretched out in front of me like a road to the top of a hill. You couldn’t see what was on the other side, but you sensed it was simply more of the same.
I didn’t like the idea of giving up my other quilts. Wielding needle and thread like a soft sable brush, I created the world as I wished it to be and wrapped it around myself and those I loved like truth. It seemed wrong to put aside something that mattered so much to me. Those quilts were my voice, my heart. How was I to still my voice and turn out piecework, just for money? But I had a son, and he had to be housed and clothed and fed. That would be voice enough.
“All right,” I said. “I’ll give it a try. But I’m not taking your money, Ruby. You keep that for your trip.” She started arguing with me, reaching in her apron pocket to fish out a wad of dollar bills. I put my hand over hers. “No, I mean it. I have enough money on my own. If you want to help, you can do the cutting while I do the sewing. It’ll go faster that way.”
Ruby agreed, and Mama piped in that she could help, too. Papa started to say something, thought better of it, and walked to the window. He stared out to see if the dust was still flying, as though he could still the winds if he just concentrated hard enough. He frowned in frustration at the sky, still brown and blowing with wasted soil.
Ruby and Mama actually seemed excited over the idea of the new project and began discussing patterns and color choices, but I was too worn out to join in the conversation.
We would survive, all of us, in some condition or other, yet I couldn’t help but wonder what would be left of our souls when it was done. It was a decade of compromise.
I read in the paper that Slim and Anne and their new son, Jon, left the country to live in Europe, where the boy would be safe from kidnappers and the relentless pursuit of the press and public. The arrest and trial of Bruno Hauptmann, the alleged kidnapper of Baby Charles, had been an even bigger circus than the Paris flight. Day after day the newsprint beasts were fed a diet of Slim and Anne’s anguish, anguish that would have been devastating enough in private; illuminated by the macabre glow of flashbulbs it seemed to be eating them alive. Every photo showed them older, sadder, more distant from the world and one another. I couldn’t blame Slim for running away. Even so, I waited a week, then two, hoping for a letter from him or even just a note of farewell, though I wasn’t really surprised when none appeared. I didn’t expect good news on the doorstep anymore. Nobody did.
Not long after, a telegram came saying that Clarence had died. Ruby’s reaction was surprisingly resigned, more angry than grieved, not really shocked. It was as if she’d been expecting this all along. I couldn’t help but remember her premonition on the day he’d left. I tried my best to comfort her. She’d always known just what to say when I was grieving, but my efforts were clumsy, and only platitudes seemed to fall from my lips, heavy and false and tasteless as the cups of weak tea I urged her to drink.
The teacup was hot when I placed it in her empty hands; she didn’t seem to notice. “At least he didn’t suffer, Ruby. The telegram says the fall broke his neck and killed him instantly. He didn’t feel any pain.”
“Don’t be such a simpleton, Eva,” Ruby snapped, her voice sharp with irritation. “If he’d been in terrible pain and lingered for hours, you don’t suppose they’d tell me that, do you? Not in a telegram. It would take too many words. Think how much something like that would cost to send!” I was flabbergasted. I couldn’t think how to respond to her outburst. I shot a questioning look to Mama, thinking she would know what to say, but Ruby carried on with her tirade before anyone could get a word in.
“You don’t suppose I believe anything they say, do you? They didn’t even spend the money on a harness to secure him to the tree so he wouldn’t fall in the first place. He wrote me that he’d told the foreman to get some harnesses or someone would get hurt, and the man said, ‘Mind your own business, Parker. Equipment costs money, but you Okies come a dime to the dozen.’ You don’t guess a cheap chiseler like that’s gonna pay extra to tell me the truth about how my husband died, do you? “
For a moment I truly thought she’d lost her mind. It was such a crazy thing to say under the circumstances, and I’d never heard her use language like that. Mama shot me a look that said not to worry. She took the telegram from me and read it over herself, then spoke calmly to Ruby.
“You’re right, Ruby. Probably they’d never tell you a thing like that in a telegram, but I’m sure money didn’t enter into it. They’d want to spare you thinking of him in pain.” She pulled a chair up next to Ruby’s and looked at her thoughtfully, as though they were having a serious but completely normal conversation. I stood watching in confusion, uncertain what to make of the entire scene.
Mama continued in a low, even voice, “From how Clarence described his work, I’m inclined to believe the telegram. He must have fallen at least forty or fifty feet, maybe more. A fall like that would have killed him instantly. You can be sure of it.” She nodded confidently.
“Do you think so?” Ruby eyes searched Mama’s, and she hung on to every word as though they held a special importance only she and Mama could appreciate.
“Oh yes,” Mama affirmed confidently. “Old James Tetley, you remember him, he lived over in Hooker? Fell roofing his barn and was dead the second he hit the ground, and that barn wasn’t near as high as Clarence said these trees were. Really, he’d have never felt a thing.”
“Tell me more,” Ruby demanded, and so Mama did, recounting the stories of every man who’d fallen to his death from a height of more than fifteen feet for the previous twenty years. Down and down they tumbled, over and over, from grain elevators, ridgepoles, and church steeples, all of them meeting the ground stone dead and past their pain. The way Mama described it, it sounded like the way to meet your end. Ruby listened intently to each story until, seemingly satisfied, she said she’d better go pack if she was to make the westbound train.
When she left the room I whispered urgently to Mama, who was ironing a stack of handkerchiefs to include in Ruby’s luggage, “What in the world was that all about? Have you both lost your minds? Worrying about the price of telegrams and a bunch of farmers who were pitched to their deaths when it’s her husband who’s gone? What kind of questions were those?”
“Eva, people act strange in strange situations. There is really no way to predict what someone will do in a time of loss. Weak people become strong and strong people become weak. It doesn’t get any stranger than this; a man comes to the door and hands you a piece of paper, and because he does, your husband is dead. Now you tell me, how does your mind make room for something like that?”
I shrugged helplessly. It was impossible to understand. Clarence had been dead for hours? Days? And yet, until she read the telegram, he’d been alive for Ruby and for all of us. Shouldn’t we have known?
“I don’t know,” I admitted.
“How can you make any sense of it?”
“Well, unless you’re crazy as a bedbug, you hang on to whatever little shreds of good news you can salvage from the situation, like being absolutely certain that people who fall from great heights don’t suffer. It’s not much, but it’s something to hold on to. Ruby’s not crazy, she’s just trying to hang on to what little comfort is left to her. Under the circumstances, it may have been the only sane question for her to ask.”
The money Clarence had sent to Ruby over the years, hoarded in dollars and quarters and dimes, hidden in thick white envelopes of letters, was just enough to pay for Ruby’s fare to Oregon to bring the body home and for the funeral. The logging company offered to pay for a burial in Oregon, but Ruby refused.
“He went without new shoes and lunches to save up money so we could be together again someday,” Ruby said. “That’s what I’m going to use it for, to bring him home.”
She traveled alone because no one could afford to make the trip with her. At the train station in Portland, Oregon, she was met by two men from the logging company who took her to a room where a rough pine coffin was waiting. One of the men lifted the lid so Ruby could confirm that the man inside was her husband, though she told me later that the body inside didn’t look anything like the Clarence she remembered. “I only recognized him by the scar just under his right ear where he got cut on some barbed-wire when he was little, a jagged white mark, like a lightning bolt. We were married close to six years, and I loved him, but that’s the only part of him I knew by sight. How could that be?”
After the coffin was closed, some porters helped load it into the baggage car of the train that had just brought Ruby west. The men from the logging company tipped the porters a quarter each, shook hands with Ruby, and said they were real sorry about Clarence, that he was a good worker and a good man. “The taller man, I guess he was the boss,” Ruby said later, “he handed me an envelope with the last of Clay’s pay plus some money he said the fellows had collected to give me. Forty-two dollars and thirty-five cents. Then they said they had to be getting back up the mountain to the job site.
“I went and sat in the coffee shop and waited for six hours while they got the train ready to turn around and head east. I spent the thirty-five cents on coffee and a ham sandwich, but I wasn’t really hungry. Just figured I had to buy something so I could sit in the restaurant and kill time before it was time to leave. That’s all I ever saw of Oregon, the coffee shop in Union Station.”
Papa and I hitched Ranger up to the old hay wagon, and we all went to meet Ruby’s train, which had actually come in a few minutes early. Ruby was calmly supervising the unloading of the coffin when we arrived. We loaded the casket into the wagonbed and drove directly to the cemetery. Papa had arranged everything while Ruby was gone. Pastor Wilder met us there to say a short service next to the open grave. After he was done, the coffin was lowered into the ground while Ruby stood by, tearless and steady, to make sure the hole was filled in properly. The next day she asked Papa to drive her into town to order a marker.
Papa told me she spent almost the whole forty-two dollars on the headstone. “Nothing fancy, but she insisted that it be granite. ‘The best you can get,’ she told the stonemason, ‘and engrave the letters extra deep. I want it to last.’”
I was amazed by her strength. We sat on the porch steps after supper that night, Ruby watching fireflies and me watching Ruby smoke cigarettes one after another. “How can you be holding up so well?” I wondered. “It’s all right to grieve, you know. No one will think the worse of you.”
She looked at me sadly and said, “I grieved when he left, remember? Something told me then he wasn’t coming back, even though I tried to pretend I was wrong. Sometimes I even came near to believing it, but deep down the truth was always there.”
She twined a lock of hair absentmindedly around her finger and stared off in the distance, remembering that day so long ago. “When he walked down the road, I cried and waited to die, but nothing happened, so I got up and went on with life. Funny, that’s what people always say you should do when someone you love dies, that the dear departed wouldn’t want you to grieve, and then, when you take their advice, they look at you like you’ve lost your mind.”
“Oh no, Ruby!” I cried putting my arm around her, “I didn’t mean it like that.”
“I know. You’re worried about me, that’s all. It’s just that I think it makes good sense. Clarence wouldn’t want me to sit around pining and sobbing.” She tossed her cigarette butt into the dirt and ground it out with the toe of her shoe, then leaned forward and hugged her legs with both arms, resting her chin on her knees and staring out at evening sky. It was such an unconscious and childlike pose, I was suddenly reminded of how young she really was; we both were. “Besides,” she continued, “I don’t think I have any tears left; I used them up so long ago. It must look odd to you.”
“No,” I assured her. “Not at all. I’ve never had a husband. How could I pretend to know how you should feel? I just want to make sure you’re not trying to be tough and hold it all in. You don’t have to go around being brave on my account.”
“Or you for me, Eva,” she said, looking at me pointedly. “Husband or no, we’ve been in the same boat for a long time, two women who loved their men and got left behind with just a few mementos to remind us that any of it was real in the first place. You’ve got a son with a face like his father’s, and that seems pretty concrete, but all I’ve got is a shoebox full of letters and a ring I can see whenever I look down at my hands.” She was quiet for a long moment, studying the plain gold band on her left hand as though trying to remember just what it had to do with her.
“Eva,” she asked, finally breaking the silence, “do you even remember what it was like when Slim was here? Doesn’t it all seem like a dream sometimes? He was here for a day or two and everything changed. It must have been like blinking in daylight and opening your eyes to find that the sun had set. Now we’re both alone. Clarence has gone to his reward, and Slim’s gone to Europe. That’s an awful long way,” she murmured thoughtfully. “Did he ever write to say good-bye?”
I shook my head no. Ruby exhaled a cloud of disgust. “And you’re worried about how I’m holding up? I might ask you the same question.”
I shrugged at her concern. “I’m fine. Nothing has really changed. He left me behind a long time ago. Europe is just geography. If he lived in the next county, we’d be just as far apart. When you think about it, this shouldn’t bother me any more than the rest of it.”
Ruby searched my face, and without meaning to, I shifted my gaze away from hers. “But it does,” she said.
“Yes,” I admitted. “For all the difference it makes.”
Ruby sighed. “We are some sorry pair, aren’t we? Guess that’s what makes us such good friends.” She laughed sarcastically. “Wouldn’t it be awful to be this miserable all by yourself?”
Chapter 12
It was ironic that the only faint ray of hope we had that year came while Ruby had gone to bring home Clarence’s body.
Papa got a job. He was hired by an absent landowner to list his fields for him, cutting deep furrows that were theoretically supposed to keep the soil from blowing away, though I couldn’t see that they helped much. The pay was poor and the work was hard, but it was a job. At the time, it seemed like Papa’s salvation had come just in the nick of time.
Before Papa got work, the wind seemed to be sucking away slivers of his spirit day by day every bit as ferociously as it consumed our fields, steadily and methodically, as though it wouldn’t be satisfied until Papa was eroded completely, powdered fine and scattered across the plains. His shoulders stooped, and he never whistled anymore. He’d stopped reading to Morgan in the evenings and spent more time alone in the barn. He said he was working, but he just puttered, honing the blade of his scythe over and over again, making it sharper than ever before and every day a bit thinner and smaller, just like Papa himself. It was hard to
mark the difference from one day to the next; you sensed rather than saw a gradual diminishing.
Then he got work. Overnight he was one of the luckiest men in town, and he looked it. I could hear him padding around the kitchen before dawn, humming to himself as he ground coffee and clanked the lid of the donut jar optimistically. Though he coughed more than before, I didn’t worry. He was actually plowing those drought-stricken fields, stirring up the dust and swallowing it in every breath, but he looked so well and beamed with such purpose that I never questioned what it might be doing to him. None of us did.
Things were going so well, no one wanted to speculate on how long it would last. Every Saturday for two months, Papa brought home a plain manila envelope containing his pay minus whatever he’d spent to bring home a few groceries from Dwyer’s. It wasn’t much, but it meant everything to Papa, and we were all thrilled to see him acting like himself again. When he brought home something extra one Saturday, it seemed like the clock was actually turning backward and Papa was younger than ever.
A section of the land Papa was working had some old train cars sitting abandoned on the property. Mr. Ashton, the bank manager who was serving as trustee for the owner, wanted them moved off and gave Papa permission to have them hauled over to our place, anywhere as long as they weren’t on his client’s property. Before the week was out they were parked out next to our barn, a rusted freight car and a caboose scoured so hard by the winds and dust that the paint had been stripped off as clean as if somebody had used sandpaper.
“And just what do you think we need with some old, filthy train cars?” Mama asked, obviously less than pleased with Papa’s new acquisitions. “Look at them cluttering up the yard! People will think we’re living on a scrap heap.”
Fields Of Gold Page 14
