by Rae Meadows
He took her elbow and they walked toward the car, their old Ford Tudor gone rusty along the running board, its fender dented, bought off Warren Graves before any inkling of the drought. Fred, a crow feather behind his ear, bounced rocks off the back tire.
As they neared the car, Jack Lily eased himself away from a group of farmers, his hand raised in greeting.
“Afternoon, Mayor,” Annie said. She tended to Fred, brushing dirt off his pants.
“Afternoon,” he said. The light caught her hair as she pushed it back with her wrist. Jack pulled his eyes away, down to his oxfords, lace-up city shoes that alone differentiated him from the farmers.
“I see our friend is about to hightail it,” Samuel said.
Jack glanced over his shoulder and shrugged. “I hope we’re proved wrong.”
“I didn’t see your man Styron out here today.” Styron was the deputy mayor, agreeable enough though often with more enthusiasm than sense. “This seems like something in his particular wheelhouse.”
Jack snorted. “He does like a big idea, that’s for sure. I sent him over to Herman. County meeting.” He flicked his eyes to Annie, who sipped water from a jar. “Okay, then. I guess I’ll see you all on Sunday.”
“If Pastor Hardy lets us back in after this display,” Samuel said.
The mayor nodded and waved as he ambled away, hands shoved deep into his pockets.
“Birdie’s coming,” Samuel said.
“Don’t say anything about the boy,” Annie said. “I’ll ask her about it when the time is right.”
He put up his hands in surrender. It hurt him, though, to think of his daughter now in a category somehow off limits to him.
“You’ll just get ahead of yourself,” she said.
“It always starts somewhere, doesn’t it?” he asked, smiling a bit at his wife.
“Flirtation doesn’t equal a wedding.” She turned her head and let the wind blow the hair from her face.
Sometimes at first light Annie could hear the wind roll over the plain and she could imagine it was the soft rustle of a sea of wheat. She remembered dew sliding down blades of buffalo grass and collecting in honeysuckle flowers and slippery under bare feet before dawn. Mornings like a juicy pear.
The man from Amarillo checked his watch again and his men lifted the last of the paraphernalia into the back of the truck and hopped on. The crowd had thinned, had given up on rain today, the sky again bright. The truck rolled through the center of the clearing, dust and feathers coating its tires. The man waved, a thin smile barely visible under his mustache, and, before she could think better of it, Annie smiled and waved back, a small fan of her hand, which she hoped her husband hadn’t seen.
She watched as the truck pulled out toward Route 287. She was a Kansas girl, and Texas had always seemed rough and large, dangerous even. Her heart rabbited as she thought of the man’s hands on her. Hands that didn’t hesitate. And that left her red in the face, blushing, disgusted. She shook her head to clear it. What she really wanted was something to wrest them from the heat and wind that bore down on them day after day. There seemed no end to the oppressive sameness.
She was certainly not her mother’s daughter. A woman who shrank from loud laughter, got agitated by crumbs on the table, seemed incapable of breaking a sweat. Her mother was a Presbyterian minister’s wife, prim, unquestioning, content within the church’s narrow hallways, those impermeable walls. Her placid bow mouth. “Are you doing good by God, Annie?” she would ask, if she caught her with an unpressed handkerchief or sneaking an extra cookie. Her mother believed she was doing good by God in serving her husband, no matter what he might have been up to.
Annie’s life would have been quiet and restrained had she married William Thurgood as her parents had expected. He was in seminary. He kept his shoes buffed.
William had taken her to the dance, she in her yellow crepe dress with roses around the collar and he in a black wool suit—a suit!—as if it weren’t July in Kansas. All she could think about was how hot his hand was on her back, a smoldering lump of coal, burning a hole through the fabric. He kept his hand there while they danced and even when the music stopped. Please move your hand, she thought, please move your hand or I will have to run away or scream. Sweat moistened his hairline and his lip. It was the approach of her father—he needed her help at the refreshment table—that finally made William drop his hand, leaving her lower back blessedly cool and damp.
She hadn’t noticed Samuel. He blended in with the other young farmers with their awkward postures and mud-covered boots.
“Lemonade?”
“You squeeze these lemons all by yourself?” Samuel asked.
She laughed and handed him a small glass cup. “I had a little help from the church ladies.”
He had mournful eyes, brown as molasses. His hands were tough-skinned working hands.
“Samuel Bell,” he said. “Ready for lemon duty whenever you need my services.”
“Ann Stokes.”
“Nice to meet you, Annie.”
It was bold of him to be so familiar, particularly in her father’s church, but she liked it. Samuel had a quiet sureness about him, no matter his frayed collar. Standing next to him she felt as if she had time and space to breathe. She did not need the burning hands of William Thurgood, and this was a revelation, that she could choose something different.
Samuel was a more rough-hewn sort and, in those early days, his talk of homesteading made something rise up in her. She leapt for the wildness of the unknown, saw herself reborn as a farmer’s wife. And Samuel’s vision, his conviction, had been exciting, hadn’t it? Even then she’d known she was tough; she just hadn’t had a chance to prove it yet.
* * *
BIRDIE WALTZED UP and slid into the backseat with Fred. Her color was up, her eyes inward and dreamy. Do not marry that boy, Annie thought. Get yourself out of this place.
“Mama, Fred ripped his pants,” Birdie said. “All the way down the seam.”
Annie heard her, but didn’t respond, afraid of what her voice might give away.
“Ann?” Samuel said.
She walked around the car and got in the front seat next to her husband. Annie looked at her family in the dirty old Ford and she was grateful, then, for what she had. But rain or no rain, she couldn’t shake the sense that on this searing June afternoon, the man from Amarillo had changed her life, had left a little tear. Her faithlessness had been exposed, however briefly, and try as she might to forget it, it was there, held back by a few loops of thread.
Samuel reached for her hand but only got ahold of three fingers. She tried to readjust, but he thought she was pulling away, and then their hands returned to their laps as if they had not touched.
Samuel started the engine.
“Home,” he said.
CHAPTER 3
The Woodrows, all eight of them, left sometime in the night, two weeks after the man from Amarillo drove off leaving little more than sunshine in his rearview. Jack Lily went out to their place for some eggs and found the front door flapping against its post, a one-legged crow hopping from empty room to empty room. The Woodrows were not the first—the Morgantowns, the Nickelbaits before them—but he was surprised that Jonas Woodrow, beaten down so long by that spit of land, had the gumption to simply pack up and go.
Of course they hadn’t told anyone they were going. No one wanted to admit defeat, Jack thought. Just yesterday he had seen one of the boys digging out fence posts half-buried by sand drifts. Desperation, he knew, though, was not something you make a plan for.
He tilted his chair back onto two legs and looked out at the old farmers who were leaning against the post office, taking cover from the heat under the gutter’s thin stripe of shade. The rain gutter. A cruel irony these days. He used to see Jonas Woodrow out there biting his fingernails, rubbing the scar where his pinkie had been.
The light in Jack’s office held the dust like a snow globe, like the one he’d given Charlotte a life
time ago—Chicago seemed impossibly distant now—a sleigh covered in buttercream snow, made in Germany, bought in that little shop on Michigan Avenue. The chime of her laugh when she shook it in her slender hands. That clarion sound, beautiful, mirthless. Her upturned nose and perfect marcelled waves.
So unlike Annie. She had one lock of hair that fell onto her forehead no matter how many times she pushed it back. Her laugh, always surprisingly gruff, as if she was letting you in on a secret. She called him Mayor—true, he was the mayor, but—with a shimmer in her eye that he couldn’t quite read. Ever since he’d found himself momentarily alone with her at the church bazaar a year before, Annie had become something to him. He had only ever seen her with her family, an attractive woman, someone else’s wife. But there, sitting alone behind a sun-sprayed table, neatening her stacks of preserves, he was at once struck by the angles of her face, her bewitching half-smile, as if he were seeing her for the first time. Would you look at her, he thought.
“Let me guess,” she said. She closed her eyes and touched her temples. “Strawberry.”
He stood there dumbly smiling.
“I’m right, aren’t I?” she asked.
Was she flirting with him? He used to have an easy time of it back in Chicago. Before he had set his sights on Charlotte, there had been other city girls trying out their newfound independence. Flamboyant Helen with her trousers and dark curls who had, for a short time, set his heart ablaze. But out here was different. Early on he’d courted a sweet substitute schoolteacher named Laura for a few months, but his feelings had fallen flat. It had been so long since he had felt that uptick of his pulse, the charge of a small interaction, the warmth of a body close to his.
“Indeed you are, Mrs. Bell,” he said.
“Lucky for you there’s a two-for-one mayoral special,” she’d said.
He’d bought six and lined them up along his windowsill.
“A giant ball of string,” Styron said, slapping the desk and startling Jack. Styron, wiry and ruddy-cheeked, took to his duties with the energy and fervor of a missionary. They were trying to figure out a way to shore up the badly listing local economy, lure people to Mulehead, a place where apparently they couldn’t even get people to stay. “Make it as big as a house.”
“Who gives a mole’s whisker about string?” Jack said.
“We make it a tourist destination. Tell people it’s something to see. You know, like those faces they’re carving in that mountain in South Dakota. Now that’s inspired. I wish I had thought of that.”
Styron was only a pretend frontiersman, his family trust a not-so-secret secret. At twenty-two, he’d come out here after Dartmouth College, on a whim, to start a newspaper although he didn’t even know how to set type. After meeting Jack, who had been a real newspaperman back in Chicago, Styron saw that out here, he could think bigger. He could be mayor. He could be the one to single-handedly transform Mulehead into a thriving town. All before the age of thirty.
“The land of blowing dust,” Jack said. “How about that?”
Styron ignored him.
“Get a sign up on the highway. Get someone to declare it official. The World’s Largest Ball of String. I’d stop the car for that. Just to say I’d seen it, you know?”
“Good Lord.” Jack laughed despite his weariness. It was a good thing he liked this kid. “I was thinking more along the lines of a manufacturing plant.”
Styron winced a little, chafed by his boss’s lack of vision. He would keep thinking. Great men had ambition, optimism, and opportunity. Styron believed big ideas were the way to redemption. He likened the strategy to football. A rushing game was tedious—he’d take the risk and rapture of the long pass any day.
“What about some kind of event? Like a yearly festival. Or a carnival?” Styron drew a circle in the air with his finger. “An enormous Ferris wheel lighting up the plains.”
Jack stood and ruffled Styron’s hair, a gesture both avuncular and condescending. Everyone had either come here looking for something, or, like him, was running from something else.
Styron scowled and dragged his finger through the dust on his desk.
“Come on,” Jack said. “Coffee at Ruth’s. Didn’t you want to talk about the rabbits?”
* * *
A FEW MERCIFUL clouds took the edge off the heat as Birdie walked along the edge of the east field, through the gulch and over the rise to the Woodrow place. She wanted to see if it was true. Birdie had ridden the school bus—a truck outfitted with crude plank seats—with Maggie Woodrow, thirteen, redheaded and shy, one leg slightly shorter than the other. Her father had fastened a piece of tire rubber to the bottom of her shoe to lessen the hitch of her gait. Maybe they would be happier somewhere west. Maybe Maggie Woodrow had finally gotten herself some luck.
The house appeared to slant, or maybe it was just that the dune of windblown dirt under the parlor window made it look off kilter. Up close, the paint was scratched away, and broken clapboards were roughly patched with aluminum scraps and tarpaper. The multiple sets of tire grooves in the dusty driveway would soon be smoothed away by the wind. Birdie knocked, just to be sure, before testing the door with her fingertips. It gave with little resistance, one of its hinges loose. Inside, it was surprisingly bright, as if, freed of its burden, the house was giving itself back to the elements. The kitchen window was broken out, a corona of glass on the floor below. Birdie leapt as a crow landed on the sharded sill, its black beak open and expectant, before it took off again with a papery swoosh. The Woodrows had left their kitchen table but they’d taken all the chairs.
She repositioned a bobby pin to hold back the wisps around her face. Cy had found her green ribbon, but he now kept it pressed in his Bible and that was even better. Birdie opened a cupboard. A patchwork towel. A rose-colored teacup missing its handle. An empty coffee tin. She felt as if she was snooping on ghosts. By now, maybe poor, short-legged Maggie had seen the sea.
A thump upstairs. Birdie was not alone. She stepped lightly through the empty sitting room toward the stairs.
“Hello?” she called. “Someone up there?”
Footsteps tumbled across the floor above her. She climbed slowly, her curiosity trumping her nerves.
Fred appeared at the top of the steps, with his scabbed knees and chipped-tooth grin.
“Dang it, Freddie,” she said, stomping the rest of the way up. “I thought you were catching bugs or whatever you do.” She pushed past him. “Find anything good?”
Fred ran ahead into a bedroom and came back beaming, a doll’s head in one hand and a Coca-Cola bottle in the other.
“I mean like money or a diary or something,” she said.
Fred was such a kid. He didn’t understand a thing.
She had had a sister once. Eleanor was born when Birdie was five. She didn’t remember much about her, but she did remember the hushed murmurs after the birth. She knew that something was wrong with the shriveled little body, her sister’s breath wet and whistling. Three months later she was buried in the small cemetery behind the church, her grave marked with a little pink stone. Birdie’s grandmother had come from Kansas—the first and last time Birdie had seen her—and had spoken in a low girlish whisper, as the heels of her shoes tapped against the wooden floorboards.
Birdie missed Eleanor in a teenaged way of wanting a sister to whom she could talk endlessly about everything. A mute little brother didn’t quite suffice.
She followed Fred into a bedroom, where there were an iron bed frame, a crude broomcorn broom wedged into a corner, a cheap empty armoire, its doors agape.
“How’d they take everything?” she asked.
Fred shrugged and ran off to the other room. He sat and wiped the smudges from the doll’s face. He did not want to think about the Woodrows. In two years, things had gone from good to broken for the Bells, too. They used to sit on the porch at the end of the day and he would dance like a chicken, his elbows out like wings, and Pop would laugh. Now at night all his father did
was look at the sky and look at his Bible and not talk and not talk some more. Fred had written his name in the dust on the windows and the kitchen table and Mama had gotten short and then said she was sorry because she was really just angry about the dust. He was mad about the dust, too, mad about leghorn number ten, too sad to eat her stringy meat at dinner the other night—and so he ate biscuits instead, about twenty, he thought, or maybe four.
Fred heard an engine outside. The wheeze of creaking metal car doors.
Birdie stood in the doorway of the other bedroom, which must have been where the children slept, the cradle left behind along with a torn mattress on the floor. She imagined being here with Cy, how they could pretend they were in a house of their own. It would be better than the barn, romantic and dangerous at the same time.
Fred raced back in and pulled her arm.
“What is it?”
From the window she saw two men she didn’t recognize in dirty clothes and leather gloves, one carrying a crowbar, the other a hacksaw.
“Hey, McGuiness. What about the tin up here?”
“Can you get an edge? Yeah, let’s pull it.”
Birdie held Fred’s shoulders, unsure whether to run or hide. Fred covered his ears against the terrible shriek of nails giving way as the men peeled a sheet of tin from the front of the house.
“Let’s go,” Birdie whispered.
McGuiness stepped inside just as they reached the bottom of the stairs. He laughed a little, and Birdie was close enough to smell his beery breath. He was missing half his front tooth.
“Well,” he said. “Looks like we was beaten to the punch.”
“We’re going,” Birdie said. She tried to walk around him, but he stood his ground, sucked his teeth at Birdie. She felt he could see through her pale pink dress and knew all that she and Cy had done together. Shame felt like thousands of tiny needles pressing on her skin.
With an exaggerated bow, McGuiness moved to let them pass, and Birdie and Fred ran, leaving the scavengers to take what they would.
* * *
BIRDIE DIDN’T WANT to go home—the run-in with that man too fresh—so she followed Fred, who tugged her hand. He seemed to have something he wanted her to see. They walked north on Gulliver Road into the land vacated by the suitcase farmers, men who used to show up once for planting, once for harvest. Rain follows the plow, everyone said so. Tractors ran all through the night, disk plows slicing through the prairie. But the rain had stopped, the fields left fallow, and now it was a wasteland of bitten topsoil and sand dunes, the road itself barely discernible. It was early in the day but the eroded earth was hot underfoot. Birdie ran to catch up with Fred, who had scampered down an embankment into an irrigation ditch.
