“One, two, three …” Ray counted the cars.
A handful of men jumped off the last box cars. They shifted knapsacks on shoulders or pushed hats on top of their heads. Once the train was past, most all of them crossed the tracks and went off to one of the old, dried-up fields.
One of them didn’t follow the rest. He stood right where he’d landed and stared at me. He was a small man, short and skinny. And even though it was a hot day, he wore a black coat. His eyes never left me as he walked toward us, taking his sweet time.
I could tell from the smirk on his face that he was the kind of man looking for trouble. It wasn’t that he was ugly or mean looking, exactly. The way he stared me down made me all kinds of uncomfortable. That man was up to no good. I was sure Daddy would have thought the same thing.
Ray and I stood still, like our feet had sunk in the ground, held fast by the dirt. The up-to-no-good hobo stopped in front of us. His smirk curled into a smile that didn’t look one bit sincere. Mama would have asked what he was selling.
“Pearl?” he asked, peering down at me with his blue eyes. “Pearl Spence, right?”
I didn’t answer. I doubted I would have found my voice even if I’d tried.
“You the welcome wagon round these parts?”
I shrugged, not knowing if I was supposed to answer that question.
“Well, I guess I’ll be seeing you around,” he said.
He winked at me before turning to walk away, slow and like he owned the place.
“Who’s that?” Ray asked.
“I don’t know,” I answered, watching the man, afraid to take my eyes off him.
The day was hot enough, but my blood felt icy cold.
CHAPTER THREE
I had one dress that wasn’t made out of a sack. Mama had paid good money at Mr. Smalley’s grocery store for the fabric. She’d even spent a little extra for brand-new buttons that all matched. Mr. Smalley’d had to order them and, when we picked them up, he’d stood behind the counter and smiled at me, telling me what a lucky girl I was.
That dress was my birthday present and I’d done my very best to keep it from getting stained or ripped. That was why I only wore it on Sundays. On Sundays I went to church, then sat around the house all day, reading books. It hardly had a chance to get dirty.
Besides, I felt bad wearing my best dress all around town. Most of the girls in Red River had ratty dresses, dingy and falling apart. It didn’t seem right that I had one as yellow and crisp as sunshine with buttons that shimmered. I wondered if my dress didn’t make them all feel poorer.
I smoothed the dress over my legs when I sat on the davenport after church, my fairy-tale book next to me. Pulling my long braid over my shoulder, I felt of its thickness and tried to pretend I was Rapunzel.
Flipping through the pages, I fingered half-a-dozen birthday cards I’d used as bookmarks for as long as I could remember. One of the cards had a prairie girl on the front. Another had Raggedy Ann. One was Mickey Mouse, and the last one had a bird in a top hat.
Daddy had delivered all of those cards on my birthday over the years with a warning to keep them a secret from Mama. Not a single one of the cards had been signed. When I’d asked Daddy who had sent them, he just lifted his eyebrows. I imagined I had a fairy godmother somewhere. It made about as much sense to me as anything else.
I turned to the story of Rapunzel and examined the watercolor picture on the first page. Rapunzel’s parents handed her over to the ugly, big-nosed witch. Rapunzel was nothing more than a little bundle of a baby in the picture. I’d read that story so many times I didn’t even have to look at the words to know what happened to her.
She never knew her true parents. Not even after she escaped the tower. She never learned that the witch wasn’t her mother.
I took my hands off my braid and put one finger on the picture of the baby, the one who would never be with the folks who really loved her. I wondered if she ever feared that she’d become as ugly and big-nosed as the witch who raised her.
The only reason I was even close to good was because I’d gotten it from Mama and Daddy. Everything good inside of me was from them.
The clunking of Mama’s heels on the steps pulled my attention. She rushed into the living room, her eyebrows bunched together in the middle. “Pearl, have you seen Beanie?” she asked.
“No, ma’am,” I answered, closing my book.
She leaned forward, looking out the big front window. “Where could she have got off to?”
Mama shook her head and climbed back up the stairs, calling my sister’s name.
I left my book next to my seat and stepped out the front door. More likely than not, Beanie was wandering in some dust-buried field or rummaging through an abandoned cabin.
Nobody could hunt down Beanie like I could. I was fixing to find her and have her home before Mama knew I’d left. I even left my shoes on, I’d be back so quick.
The streets were empty of people except for me. All the men and boys were at the rabbit drive and everybody else was home. In Red River, most folks kept the Sabbath Day holy by tending to the land and their homes, not that it ever made much difference.
Daddy had told me once that he met God more in getting dirt under his fingernails and sweat on his brow than sitting in church getting hollered at.
I wanted to meet God like Daddy did, but Mama said it was just his way of getting out of holding down a pew most Sundays.
I walked across the bone-dry dust, remembering how Meemaw had told me once that the place where Jesus lived was just as dry and dirty and hot as Oklahoma. Meemaw said a lot of things about Bible times and some of them seemed a little strange to me. But the part about Jesus living in a drought sounded right.
When I thought on it, Jesus did work on the Sabbath. Plenty of it, as a matter of fact. I decided I would have to talk that over with Mama.
As I went along, I pretended I was Mary Magdalene, following behind in the dust of Jesus’s sandals, rubbing wheat heads between my fingers, humming a hymn or two. I wondered if they would have sung “Onward Christian Soldiers.” It seemed a good walking-around-the-desert song to me.
I quit humming, though, when I saw That Woman walking toward me on the same side of the street. I had never learned her name, but I reckoned she did have one. Mama just called her That Woman and said that I wasn’t to speak to her. Not ever. Mama’s rule was that if I met her on the street I was to cross over to the other side.
I took one step off the sidewalk to act in obedience but remembered that Pastor had talked about the Good Samaritan in church that morning. The only ones crossing to the other side of the street ended up being the bad guys. Besides, I didn’t know what was so wrong about living in a cat house like I’d heard That Woman did.
Mama wasn’t watching that day—only God was—so I decided to be the Good Samaritan and stay on the same side of the road as That Woman. If I’d had a donkey, I would have let her take a ride on it, even.
The closer I got to her, the lower she held her head and the farther to the edge of the sidewalk she stepped. I wondered if she would cross over to the other side of the street so she wouldn’t get too close to me.
She never did, though.
“Hi,” I said as soon as I got close enough.
She stopped and glanced at me, her head still hung low. I figured I’d surprised her by the way her eyes got wide. We stood like that for longer than felt comfortable, and I wished I hadn’t said “hi” to her at all. I knew I needed to say something else to make it less strange. I thought about telling her that she was pretty. Or that I’d never seen a woman wear as much color on her face as she did. It was as if she was painted. But I thought twice about that.
Instead, I settled for what I’d learned the first day of school. I smiled wide and looked her right in the eyes, and stuck out my hand.
“What’s your name?” I asked.
She didn’t say a word, just breathed in and out, her chest moving up and down. The way she loo
ked at my face was odd, like she was trying to find something there. I couldn’t figure out what it was she thought she would see.
“I best be going,” she said, rushing past me with her arms crossed over her stomach like she was going to get sick.
She looked over her shoulder for one last glimpse of me. She was sad, her whole face frowned. I guessed that if most of the town hated me as bad as they hated her, I would have been sad, too.
My heart feeling unsettled, I went on my way, trying to imagine how it felt to be That Woman. But I couldn’t think on it too much. It would have been plain awful to be her.
The closer I got to the sharecroppers’ cabins, the harder the ground became. Hard as cement. Dry and flakey and cracked. If ever it did rain, the drops wouldn’t know how to break through that scab of earth. Nothing was like to grow there again.
Ray’s mother stood outside their dugout, hunched over a big old basin, scrubbing clothes on the washboard. She always had something to scrub. I never saw her sitting idle. I wasn’t sure she knew how to be still.
Baby Rosie sat up all by herself like a big girl at her mother’s feet. She owned Ray’s heart, that baby did. I rushed over to the porch and made silly faces for Rosie to get a good old baby smile on her face. She didn’t giggle, though. She was too busy slobbering away on an old toy truck that used to belong to Ray.
“She’s working on getting a tooth,” Mrs. Jones said, not turning to me or taking a break in her scrubbing. “What are you doing out?”
“Looking for Beanie.” I reached for Baby Rosie’s foot. “You seen her?”
Mrs. Jones looked up and out over the fields but didn’t stop working. Steam gathered around her arms as she worked the lye against the fabric.
“I ain’t.” Tilting her head in my direction, she raised one thin eyebrow. “You think she would have gone down to that rabbit drive?”
I shrugged and tickled Rosie’s knee.
“You ain’t fixing to go down there, are you?” Turning her face back to the work, she lifted the clothing, wringing it so hard my throat felt the strangle. “That ain’t no place for a girl like you. Beanie neither.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“I know you think you’re half boy, but you ain’t.”
She pulled a dress from the basket on the ground next to her. Powder blue with purple flowers and a thick, white collar. It had a baked bean stain on the front. I’d worn that dress just two days before and spilled on myself at dinner. Mama had puckered her lips and shook her head, fretting that I’d never be able to eat like a lady.
That dress in Ray’s mother’s hand was mine. She caught me looking and plunged it into the water, sloshing and scrubbing again. The place between my heart and my stomach swelled.
Baby Rosie dropped the toy truck and it landed just out of her reach. She whimpered until I grabbed it and, wiping off the dirt, handed it back to her. Into her mouth it went.
“If I see your sister, I’ll make sure she gets home,” Mrs. Jones said, the hard edge of her voice softened.
“Thanks, Mrs. Jones.”
“All right, then.” She worked at the stain with her thumb nail.
“Bye, Rosie,” I whispered.
I walked away from the centipede-infested dugout and Mrs. Jones’s empty eyes and Baby Rosie’s too-skinny-body and my stained dress.
Beanie had me stumped. I couldn’t find her any place, and I’d searched about everywhere. The old homestead where she could hide in the empty silo. The alley behind the post office and Mr. Smalley’s grocery store. I checked every one of the empty cabins.
The last place I could think to look was at the Watsons’ ranch, where the men were herding the rabbits. I headed that way, knowing Daddy would be there—he could help me. And I wished so hard that I’d get the chance to watch a little of the drive.
Back when I was younger and the ranches were full of fat cattle, Daddy would take me to watch the cowboys drive the herd from one stubbled pasture to the next. Not much grass grew even then, but the ranchers fed them the Russian thistles that would otherwise blow all about the streets.
Those days of cowboys and cattle were like magic to me. Watching the dogs dart around, nipping at the heels of the cows, I’d listen to the ranchers holler back and forth, letting hard words shoot from their mouths. Words Mama would have washed my mouth out for. Sometimes, in alone moments, I’d try letting those same words come from my lips. It felt like power when the tough sounds spilled out in my whispered voice.
I couldn’t imagine a rabbit drive being much different, apart from the stock being moved was much smaller. But the same cussing and spitting and chewing tobacco, the nipping and barking dogs. I didn’t know why Daddy had wanted me to stay away.
The closer I got to the ranch, the more I could hear of the men and boys and their rough, wild voices full of rocks and gravel and sharp edges. The sound of them excited me, made me run faster. Pulled on me to come see, hear, smell, and touch.
Oh, how I wanted to touch a rabbit.
Slowing to a walk when I’d about reached the drive, I watched the men corral the rabbits into a circle-shaped pen made out of chicken wire. They hooted and hollered at the animals, waving their arms and trying to get the zigzagging creatures to turn toward the pen. The closer they got to the wire, the tighter the line of men became. Frenzied rabbits tried to jump up and over the chicken wire. They tried to break their way through.
I forced my eyes off the rabbits to see if I couldn’t find Beanie’s face among the ladies and girls standing or sitting in the shade of an old barn. It made me sore that all those girls got to watch the drive and I wasn’t supposed to.
A couple girls, close to Beanie’s age, sat at the base of a naked tree, pointing at the men and giggling. It made me feel bad, watching them, knowing that my sister would never have them for friends. She never had any friends at all, except for me. Those girls only would have made fun of Beanie, and that gave me a sad feeling. One of the girls caught me looking and rolled her eyes at me. I about stuck my tongue out at her, but she turned away before I had the chance.
I decided I needed to get higher up to try and see Beanie or Daddy, so I climbed the old wood fence. Standing as tall as I could and keeping my balance, I still didn’t see either of them. So I sat on the top rung to rest my legs a minute. Mama would have gotten after me for sure, risking my Sunday dress like that, but she wasn’t there to holler at me. I promised myself I’d be extra careful not to get a snag. I kicked off my shoes and pushed off the socks. Stretching out my toes, I wiggled them in the air.
As soon as I got settled on my perch I noticed that the men carried hammers and wagon spokes and baseball bats. The wind caught the bits of my hair that had gotten loose from my braid. Still watching the men, I let go of the fence and smoothed the wispy hair, but it didn’t help. It just kept right on moving with the wind.
“All right, fellas,” a man hollered over all the other noise. “Let ’em have it.”
The men lifted their clubs in the air, hovering over the rabbits. The looks on their faces made me have to grab hold of the fence again. Sneers and curled lips and flared noses, the mob of men rushed at the animals.
Rabbits jerked, their ears tugged up in the hands of the men. Blunt thuds fell down on them, crushing them. The sound of thwapping beat in my chest. The brown bodies swung from their ears after getting knocked with such force.
Frozen by fear, I couldn’t do so much as blink.
The rabbits screamed shrill. They sounded like babies being hurt. No matter how hard the men hit them, the rabbits wouldn’t die right away. The men had to hit them once. Twice. More. Then they tossed them on the ground, the bodies still jerking and twitching and hopping. Boys went through the pile, stilling them with smashing clubs and stomping feet.
Ray went around the edges of the pile with a plank of wood. He didn’t look my way, and I was glad for it. I hated for him to see me cry.
The heap of rabbits grew, widened. A plague on the hard dirt.
Pastor had told us over and over that the jackrabbits were a curse for our stubborn ways. Sure as the frogs and the bloody river were to the Pharaoh of Egypt, the dust was punishment for our black sin. We’d gotten the locust and darkness already. Punishment upon punishment. Plague stacked on top of itself.
One rabbit got loose from the chicken wire. It bolted right toward me, stopping under my feet. Its ears were so tall they could have touched my toes, but I pulled my knees up, pushing them into my shoulders.
For all the wishing to touch a rabbit, I couldn’t bring myself to pick that one up.
It screamed, the jackrabbit did. I imagined it begged me to save it. Loud and rough and savage, it called right to me.
All I could do was sit and stare and let the scared eyes of the animal work their way into haunting me.
A man from the line turned toward me. When he smirked right at me, I knew it was the same man who had jumped off the train and said my name. He strutted, making his way to me, and nodded in the direction of the rabbit. He didn’t hurry. He took his time, keeping his eyes fixed on mine.
His eyes were blue as the brightest, clear-day sky. Blue as a cornflower. Eyes that I thought could have been kind if he wanted to make them so. Instead, they cut through me, making me think that kindness wasn’t his way.
He sauntered so close to me I could smell the sharp stink of his skin. I breathed in and out real shallow, and my head ached.
Reaching down, he yanked the rabbit up by the ears like all the other men were doing. But he didn’t hit it. The animal kicked in the air, inches from my face. The man held it so tight, though, that all its fighting was worth nothing.
I could have grabbed hold of it. Could have taken it and run away with it. But it looked so big, and I didn’t think I had the strength to move my arms. Every muscle in my body had grown heavy.
The man moved the rabbit closer to me and right when I found the power to raise my hand to touch it, the man jerked it back away from me. The man laughed as the animal screamed louder.
A Cup of Dust Page 4
