Four Freedoms

by John Crowley

  were smarter than the cattle and stayed away from the garlicky smell

  of the bad-earth weed, but there was no way now for them to earn

  their keep. Without them the ranch seemed to her to be, and always

  to have really been, a hostile stretch of nowhere, no friend to her.

  Her father was planning (if you could call it a plan) to hole up with

  the government payment till his two sons came home and they could

  start again, fence off the bad earth. Vi wouldn’t stay just to keep his

  house for him and wait. She thought—she knew—she could have

  done what was necessary to get going again, the bank loans, the

  inspections, meat prices were soaring, but she wasn’t going to talk

  him into letting her. Wouldn’t and couldn’t. Even a woman could

  make $2,600 a year as a welder, and she planned to send most of her

  pay home.

  He’d driven her out to the county road where the bus stopped once

  a day and never said a word. She wondered if he’d go home and put a

  shotgun to his head the way his uncle had done in the dust-storm days.

  Just when the bus appeared far off raising its own cloud he took a

  crushed roll of bills from his pocket and peeled off a ten and some

  ones, and she thanked him meekly, but she’d already taken more than

  that out of the bank, where she’d had an account ever since she turned

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  twenty, three years before. She hadn’t told him or anyone, not knowing

  then what the money was for. It was for this.

  “Bye, Daddy. Take care of yourself.”

  “So long, Vi.”

  “I’ll see you when the war’s over,” she said, but he didn’t smile.

  The bus was filled with soldiers, only a few country people in among

  them, and they stirred as one when Vi climbed the stair; one leapt up to

  help her lift her bag into the netting overhead, a little ferrety fellow, she

  let him think he’d helped. She took the seat they competed to offer her,

  and for a time tried to make conversation, which she’d never been much

  good at, especially the kind that had no purpose, or rather had one

  hidden in the commonplaces. She gave them a word picture of the cattle

  dying and stinking in the sun, how she’d pulled the ropes to help the

  tractor drag them into the pits, sometimes pulling apart the longer-

  lying bodies, all the time followed by the crows: and they mostly fell

  silent, some because they knew what she meant and what it had been

  like, some because they didn’t. A day and a night passed.

  In the dark and the dawn she expected to be anxious and afraid.

  But her heart felt cool. She passed through towns she’d never seen, the

  trucks at the feed store, the tavern and the post office and the bank like

  the ones in her town, the school and the churches, but not the same

  ones, and beginning to grow different as she went west: why different

  she couldn’t say. She couldn’t sleep even when the darkness outside the

  window was so total she could see only the dim ghost of her own face,

  a person who’d left home to find war work. Now and then what she

  was doing came back to her in the middle of some bland string of

  thought and her heart seemed to collapse into her stomach and her

  breasts to shrink, the feeling of diving into water from a high rock. But

  it only lasted a second, and she wasn’t even sure it wasn’t a good feel-

  ing, in its way.

  By the next night Vi was done with bus travel. She was filthy, she

  felt limp and wound up at the same time, and the trip went on forever,

  since the bus was forbidden by company policy to go faster than thirty-

  five miles an hour to save gas and rubber, and even when the driver

  picked it up a little, it did no good, because the stops were calculated at

  the set speed, and you simply waited longer at stops. In any big town

  she could have got off and found the train station, but she had paid for

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  the trip, and anyway in the fusty odor and noise of the bus, amid the

  changeful crowd, she felt cocooned, waiting to come forth but not yet

  ready.

  That night they came to a broad crossroads, two great stripes of

  highway at right angles, that had collected gas stations and bars and a

  long diner around itself. Vi could see, as the bus downshifted and

  slowed, a line of military vehicles, two-ton trucks, bigger trucks,

  smaller ones, strung out just off the road, thirty or forty or more. When

  the bus turned in to let out its passengers to eat and drink and use the

  toilets, it passed a crowd, apparently the drivers of the vehicles, going

  to or coming from the diner, gathering to talk or smoke a cigarette

  before starting out again west where the vehicles were pointed—that’s

  the thought that occurred to Vi. Over at the big garage behind the

  diner, which came into view as the bus drew up to park, two of the

  hulking brown trucks had their hoods open and were being worked on

  under lights on tall poles. It was also clear now in the lights of the

  parking lot that all the drivers in their jackets and caps were women.

  Not soldiers but women, some in skirts, most in trousers. Vi getting off

  heard their laughter.

  There were several in the diner, waiting maybe for the disabled

  vehicles to be fixed, crowded into the booths or seated on the stools.

  They were all ages, some as young as Vi, some as old as her mother had

  been, some as old as her mother would now be. The soldiers from the

  bus who banged into the diner looked around in awe, no place they’d

  expected to find themselves, an army of the opposing sex. They couldn’t

  help but engage one another, though some of the boys were over-

  whelmed and some of the women shy, maybe about the bandannas

  turbanning their heads or their lipstick worn away or not even applied

  that day, the ends of their dungarees rolled high.

  They were drivers for a plant building military vehicles, in convoy

  to deliver the trucks to the port where they’d be put aboard ships (the

  women assumed) and sent out. Why not put them on flatcars, send

  them by train? The women laughed, asked each other why not, but no

  one knew for sure, maybe the trains were so busy now and the trucks

  were needed quick.

  They moved aside, pushed over, let the newcomers share their

  booths, take their places at the counters, sit with them at their burdened

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  tables that two harried waiters and a colored busboy tried to manage.

  Vi sat down next to a woman with her hair in a swept-up Betty Hutton

  do, a cap perched on it so small and far back as to announce its useless-

  ness, point out that its wearer wasn’t really a cap-wearer at all. But her

  nails were short and darkened at the moons.

  “Where you headed?”

  Vi named the city on the sea, the same to which the convoy was

  going.

  “Whatcha doing there? That’s a long ways from home. Trying for a

  job?”

  “Right. Welding. I read about it.”

  The woman, whose name was Shirley, looked Vi over in some admi-

  ration. Vi thought to drop her gaze, thought she ought to, but S
hirley

  held it. Vi wondered how old she was: ten years older than she? “You’ll

  do all right,” she said. “You going alone?”

  “Yep.”

  “You ever do anything like that? Welding?”

  “Well on the ranch. A little acetylene torch, fixing hay rakes and

  things. My brother was better.”

  “This’ll be different,” Shirley said. She laughed. “When I got a job at

  this plant, I was working in the yard, they came and asked, You ever

  drive a truck? And I said Sure. I mean I’d driven a pickup, you know, how

  hard could it be? So I was signed up. They took me out and showed me

  this thing. I couldn’t even see how to get into it. Then there’s four forward

  gears and an overdrive. Two reverse. I said Huh? They said Oh there’s a

  chart right there on the floor. All the slots are numbered. Easy.”

  “Was it?”

  “Well let’s see. It took me a half an hour to get the motor running

  without stalling. Another half an hour to figure out how to back up

  without stalling.”

  “How much training did you get?”

  “Training? That was the training. We left next morning.”

  Shirley enjoyed Vi’s face for a moment, then put out her wet-lipped

  cigarette in the dregs of her coffee. “Listen,” she said. “Long as we’re

  headed for the same place, why don’t you ride along with me?”

  Vi, who’d told herself to be ready for anything, wasn’t ready for

  this, didn’t have a name for the feeling the offer wakened in her.

  F O U R F R E E D O M S / 83

  “I paid for a bus ticket all the way,” she said.

  “So what?” Shirley said laughing. “I’m not going to charge you. And

  I’ll get you there faster.” She bent toward Vi. “I’d like the company,” she

  said. “Gets lonely in the dark. You can keep me from falling asleep too.”

  So Vi went and woke the bus driver asleep in his seat and told him

  she wasn’t going any farther; he looked at her like he’d not heard, then

  nodded slowly without speaking. She got her bag from the overhead

  rack and dragged it away down the bus steps and only then heard the

  driver call after her, but not what he said. Shirley was waiting for her

  and they went together out to where the trucks were starting their

  engines, turning on their great lights.

  “So this isn’t against the rules?” Vi asked. “What if they kick me

  off?”

  “There’s no they,” Shirley said. “There’s just us.”

  It was hard to get into, no running board, only a sort of rung, you

  stood on that and pulled the door open, then took a jump to another

  step and in.

  And it was hard to get the big thing going. Shirley pulled the choke,

  feathered the clutch, worked the long gearshifter into the wrong then

  the right slots, all the while letting out what in an old book Vi’d read

  was called “a string of oaths” and then doing better after she calmed

  herself, and crossed herself.

  The trucks moved out into the empty night highway. Vi could see the

  vehicles far ahead pulling one by one into line like a great glittering snake

  whipping sidewise very slowly. Then Shirley’s, with a judder and a roar. Vi

  was on the move now for sure: later she would remember it as the moment

  when she was put into motion not away but for the first time toward,

  toward whatever the world was bringing into being, everything ahead.

  They picked up speed. High up off the road Vi bounced in her hard

  seat as though she might lose it and end up on the floor—she thought

  of the miles ahead and wondered if she would regret her impulse to

  climb in with Shirley, who was gripping the steering wheel hard but at

  least no longer bent forward as though impelling the 10-ton all by her-

  self. Vi’s job was to help keep an eye on the truck ahead, watch for its

  dim brake lights. If something happened far up the line, if the lead

  truck had to stop, then the following trucks would have to stop in turn,

  but the gap between a braking truck and the still-moving truck behind

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  it would shorten as the stop went down the line, till the trucks far back

  would have to stop fast, so you needed all the time you could get.

  “It’s why we’re driving through the night,” Shirley said. “We got a

  truck this afternoon had to go off the road to keep from hitting the one

  ahead. Just like a train derailing. The one truck turned out so’s not to

  hit the one ahead, and the one behind that one had to turn out not to

  hit her and got bent and went into the slough there, and altogether it

  took some hours to get us all out and going again.”

  Night went on. Vi tried to watch the truck in front, hypnotized by

  its swaying. She only realized she’d fallen asleep when she felt a sharp

  smack on her arm.

  “Hey,” Shirley said. “You’re supposed to be keeping me awake.”

  “Oh,” Vi said. “Oh sorry.”

  “So talk to me,” Shirley said, turning back to the road. “Tell me

  your story. What do you love, what do you want, what makes you

  laugh, who’d you leave behind. All like that. Make it exciting.”

  Vi laughed and suddenly wished she could do that, but the story she

  could tell—all that she was willing to tell—was more likely to put a

  hearer to sleep than keep one awake. She told Shirley about how her

  mother had died when Vi was eighteen, a cancer, and her father had

  moved his kids out to the ranch where his own mother still lived alone.

  Vi’d just graduated from high school in the town they lived in then—not

  a big town, not a real city, but it had had a picture show and a couple of

  restaurants and a normal school that Vi had enrolled in, hoping she could

  figure a way to get to the state college—she was smart and knew it, and

  had done well in school, her favorite teacher was working to help her. She

  spent a year attending the normal school, but in the end she’d gone out to

  the ranch with her father and brothers. “The boys were young,” she said.

  “I couldn’t let Daddy go it alone. Grandma wasn’t well either.”

  “Sure,” said Shirley.

  “Anyway,” Vi said, and then no more.

  “So this was what, four, five years ago?”

  “Yes.”

  “Great time to go ranching. Or farming. Around there where you

  were.”

  “Yeah well. We didn’t do so hot.”

  There came a pause then in the cab, a brief mournful or memorial

  F O U R F R E E D O M S / 85

  moment: everybody remembered, times on the farm that had been so

  bad you didn’t need to say anything, only a fool would feel the need to

  say something, and the worst was all over now—but you didn’t say

  that either, it wasn’t good luck or good sense to say so. But Vi had to at

  least finish the story, which in her own case or her family’s didn’t get

  better. Bad earth, failure, war and her brothers enlisting, things stay-

  ing so bad it was almost laughable, like some pileup of disasters in a

  comedy picture.

  “So no regrets about leaving,” Shirley said, reaching for the pack of

  smokes on the truck’s dash. “That’s good.�
�

  Vi wouldn’t say yes or no.

  “A fella you left behind? Not even that?”

  “No,” Vi said, looking ahead. “No fella.”

  “No cowboy serenading you with a git-tar?”

  Vi laughed. Another reason to leave town and school and go out to

  the empty places: that’s what her father thought, and Vi for her own

  reasons, but concerning the same matters, had guessed it was advis-

  able: what she went away from, which didn’t count now, not right now

  anyway, beside Shirley in the truck. “I got a nice smile from Gene

  Autry once when he came to the opera house in the next town,” she

  said. “But he didn’t follow up.”

  They laughed together, and went on into the night, which was at

  last beginning to pass, the ragged edge of the mountains that they were

  to cross now distinguishable from the greening sky; they sang some of

  Gene’s hit songs, everybody knew them.

  “Sometimes I live in the country

  And sometimes I live in the town

  Sometimes I take a great notion

  To jump in the river and drown.”

  Somehow, all the next day after she climbed at last down from the

  10-ton in the port district where the trucks lined up to be loaded onto

  ships, and she and Shirley’d said good-bye amid the stink of the

  exhausts and the shouts of the dispatchers, after they’d hugged and

  laughed at their momentary friendship, Vi kept thinking of Shirley. She

  86 / J O H N C R O W L E Y

  imagined Shirley observing her, observing her behavior in the street

  and in the employment offices and out onto the street again, Shirley

  noting how Vi did things that she’ d do in a different and maybe a

  better way, and Vi explaining to Shirley why she did what she did.

  Shirley would remain in Vi’s brain or spirit for a long time, listening to

  her, approving her, surprised by her, commenting on her, as though

  those hours beside her in the truck had been enough to pass something

  of Shirley and her cool bravery into Vi, to see her through: like Virgil

  and Dante.

  The women’s hotel, when she reached it, had no room for her, and by

  the look of the white-haired pince-nez ladies who ran it never would—

  one glance at Vi and her shabby suitcase was all it took. They were

  delighted to direct her to the YWCA, a wonderful place they were sure

  would suit her. Vi set out for this place, and reached it feeling wearier