We took turns telling our own stories too. Paul told us a lot about the twelve years he’d lived at the Missouri School for the Blind. The time he and another fellow rode the trolley all the way downtown on a steamy August day to buy the biggest catfish Soulard Market had on hand so they could bring it back to lay overnight in the desk drawer of a teacher they hated. How another teacher lied to Paul’s parents about a summer job two years in a row and let Paul live with her and her husband so that he wouldn’t have to go home. How most of the teachers were caring but some were downright mean, like they were set on punishing the students for their affliction. How some of the blind teachers were the worst about it.
And through all of it, Paul’s face told us nothing. When he was learning Braille, he said, he had a teacher who burned his hand on a flatiron when he made a mistake—and Paul told this as though it held no more weight than a comment on the weather.
He described being beaten up on the streets of St. Louis half a dozen times and joked, “Not once did I see it coming.”
Neither Henry nor I could manage a laugh.
Henry, for his part, told about how he could almost, but not quite, remember his mother and how some nights he woke up thinking she had just been there in the room like a wisp of smoke barely gone. He talked about how his father got serious about his drinking after his wife died and how he’d said, “You think I care?” when Ellen asked to take Henry into her own household. How his other two sisters and two brothers seemed like distant cousins because he only lived in the same house with them a few days whenever Ellen was having one of her babies. How his older brothers beat the living daylights out of him every day for sport until he was allowed back at Ellen’s. How they especially liked to jump him when he was asleep.
That explained how he could come out of a deep sleep into a fighter’s stance. He said he’d never had a pleasant dream in his life that he could remember.
I gambled to tell him he’d cried out for his mother and Ellen during the worst of his sickness, and it didn’t faze him at all.
He said, “I’ll tell you the honest truth. I even thought one of them was there with me for a while, keeping me warm and telling me I was going to be okay. I know it was the fever talking, but at least that made it seem worthwhile to fight my way back. I was pretty close to givin’ up there for a while.”
Neither Paul nor I said a word.
The other two asked me to tell my own story, but I found I hadn’t lived much of an interesting life. Only child until age twelve, doted on by my mother and father until sometime after Catherine came along and Mom was busy and tired all the time and I couldn’t do anything to suit Dad. I told them Mom said two men under the same roof were like two bulls in the same pasture, but Paul’s life and Henry’s had been so different from mine they couldn’t say they knew what I meant.
As we traveled on, one thing was becoming clear: even though we were way different from one another, each of us had something we were better at than the other two. We were rock, paper, scissors.
Paul was the smartest and the best educated. He knew more about the rest of the country away from home and how things worked than I ever would.
Henry—even the new Henry—was the toughest. If there was anything he was afraid of, we hadn’t come across it yet. He was also as strong as a bull when the Ford had to be pushed. And, boy, could he invent a convincing lie on the spot when one was needed to pave our passage.
As for me, I held everything together. I kept track of the map and how much gasoline we had in the car. I made sure we bought food before we needed it. I changed the flat tires we had every other day and replaced the spare in the next town we came to. I was the organized one, the practical one.
At least that’s what I thought.
Monday, June 20, was our fourth day of driving since we’d left the Williamsons’, and we hadn’t changed clothes or spent the night in a bed since. Around noon, I studied the map and decided we could make Goodland by nightfall. I told the other two we ought to find a room there and stay overnight.
They didn’t want to. Henry said he wanted to “get the hell out from under Carry Nation’s hatchet,” and Paul said he didn’t want to spend the money when it wasn’t necessary. I had to bargain with them the way I might bribe my little sister to leave me alone. And even after they agreed to go along, they pouted.
There had been another shift since Henry’s sickness that I didn’t understand even a little. When we’d first set out on the road, Henry thought Paul didn’t know anything. Now if Henry wanted to know how often the Model T’s spark plugs should be cleaned, or anything at all, he asked Paul and wouldn’t let me get a word in edgewise. Paul could’ve told him brown cows give chocolate milk and Henry would have believed him.
And Paul was so damn polite to Henry. Like when Henry said we should smear our faces with motor oil to keep from sunburning any more than we already had. I practically laughed out loud while I waited for Paul to shrivel him up like a slug under the saltshaker.
But Paul said, “Hmm. Interesting,” and I nearly pissed myself. “Well, the sun does dry out your skin, for sure, but it seems to me that dark clothes feel hotter on a summer day than light colors, so I wonder if the dark oil might just make things worse.”
“Not to mention the next wagon we pass might mistake us for traveling minstrels and make us sing and dance for ’em,” I added.
Neither of them even smiled.
“I guess that makes sense, Paul,” Henry said. “Now that I think about it, I’ve been burned with frying pan oil and just plain fire, both, and the oil was worse.”
“I think you’re right,” Paul said.
I wanted to puke. Or suggest they run off and get married to one another.
When we pulled into Goodland, with me driving, I meandered through town until I found a place called the Hotel Louise. It had wooden window boxes with pansies out front, and I figured a woman’s touch meant home cooking. The other two just shrugged, so I went in and got us a room.
They were still in the car when I came out. “Well, come on and help carry stuff,” I yelled.
They slouched out with all the cheer and cooperation of a couple of tomcats.
They were like that all night. We ate in the hotel dining room, and there was as much conversation at our table as you’d encounter in a graveyard.
“What’s wrong with you two?” I finally asked.
After a minute Paul said, “You tell us.”
Henry seconded. “Yeah.”
I figured I’d give them a talking-to if they didn’t come around by morning.
But everybody felt better after a bath and a night’s sleep in real bunks. While Paul was packing up, he started singing something with words I didn’t understand.
“What is that?” I said.
“Opera.”
I didn’t ask what that was. Just then, I’d rather have him believe I knew.
Henry started the day driving, and Paul rode shotgun, singing French or Mexican or whatever it was. At least they were both pitching in.
About twenty miles outside of Goodland, we saw three white clouds billowing toward us way too low in the sky. There wasn’t anything else to see but dirt behind us clear to the horizon and more dirt trying to turn to desert in front of us, so the clouds were an eerie sight. They kept growing bigger until they were close enough we could make out covered wagons and the people driving them.
Even from a distance, it felt like three big clouds of despair coming toward us. The air was thick with it.
Henry stopped and killed the engine when they were still a hundred yards away. That right there was a sign of how much had changed. Before he got sick, he would have sped up just to scare their horses into bolting.
When they got closer, we saw that each wagon held a family. By the looks of them, they were all related. Their long, thin faces looked like they were pulled that way by the weight of the world.
Two boys, about eleven and thirteen, walked along behind the w
agons, barefoot and as sullen as Henry and Paul had been the night before. Little heads popped out the front of the prairie schooner canopies, and eyes grew to saucers at the sight of the Model T.
The first wagon came up even and stopped.
“Mornin’,” Henry said.
The man nodded.
His wife looked ahead like it was her job to hold the horizon in place.
“Where you all headed?” Henry asked.
“Back to Indiana.”
The wagons had stopped, but the two boys kept walking. They circled the Model T without a word, their faces empty even of curiosity.
“We’re travelin’ out here from Missouri, goin’ to Yellowstone Park,” I offered. “You been out west long?”
“Too long,” the man said. Then he touched the brim of his hat and clucked, and the wagon train was moving past. Second wagon, eyes forward. Third wagon, the same. The two boys fell in behind as before.
We sat there until their canopies looked like wisps of smoke. Then I jumped out to crank the car, and we went on.
Half an hour down the road, Henry said, “Look.” He stopped and cut the engine.
“What is it?” Paul asked.
“A wood cross.”
“There’s a little pile of rocks in front of it,” I added. I looked all around. “They were here some time. Look over there, Henry, where they had their fire.” There was enough ash and char to account for three or four days.
A circle of ground fifty feet across was packed down by shoe leather, and off a ways from that was evidence of where the six horses had been tied up.
“They stopped for the child to get well,” Paul said.
I said, “And they just left this morning, a little before we came across them. No wonder they looked like the end of the world.”
“Mighta been you buryin’ me, just as easy,” Henry said.
A shiver went down my back like a goose had just walked across my grave.
“Seems like we oughta do something,” I said.
Henry and I stared at the cross and the pile of rocks not much bigger than a family Bible.
A gust of wind blew a swirl of sandy dirt at us, and we all spat and rubbed our eyes red.
Paul said something so low I missed the first few words before I caught on. “Now I lay me down to sleep” was what it was. “Pray the Lord my soul to keep.”
Henry joined in. “If I should die before I wake, I pray the Lord my soul to take.”
That gave me the willies same as it had when I was little.
After a couple seconds, Henry said, “Amen.”
Paul and I repeated it.
Henry finally spoke again. “Men?”
I said, “Let’s go,” and got out to crank the Model T. When I got back, Henry put it in gear, and we drove off.
My guess is we got lost in our thoughts about the family we’d just passed and what they’d left behind, because none of us said another word till I yelled, “Henry!”
Paul let out a yip.
Henry hadn’t noticed the dirty ditch we were coming up on, and I was damned near too late.
He got us stopped before we hit water and before the back wheels left land, but our front tires sank past the axle in wet quicksand as we quit moving forward.
Before the motor could take in more muck, I yelled, “Turn it off! Get out! Climb over the seat back here and take the weight off the front of the car. Come on. Move before we sink any deeper.” I seemed to be the only one able to think. “Come on! Grab the back axle and pull!”
One try proved the folly of that undertaking.
Paul said, “Now what?” calm as could be. He couldn’t see how close the Model T had come to turning into a submarine.
“Henry drove off in the goddamned creek, is now what,” I yelled. “What the hell were you thinkin’, Henry? You weren’t. That’s what! Didn’t I tell you to keep an eye on the railroad tracks?”
I couldn’t stop. I was scared and mad and shaking all over. “How long we been off the road? Do you know? Of course you don’t—you weren’t paying attention!”
He didn’t even look embarrassed. “Oh, shut up, Nelly.”
A field of red swam in front of me, and I charged like a bull. My chin ran right square into Henry’s fist, and my ass hit the ground so hard my teeth hurt.
“I think you should shut up too,” Paul said. “Are you going to take a run at me next?”
I rubbed my jaw and looked back and forth between them. They looked more mad than worried. “You wanna tell me what the hell’s going on with you two?”
“You tell us. You’re the expert,” Henry answered, and they both started laughing.
“I have no idea what you’re talking about.” I was still on the ground.
“Really?” Paul’s turn. “Usually it’s us who don’t know what we’re talking about.” That was hilarious to both of them too.
Not much makes you feel as small as being laughed at. I climbed to my feet so at least I could stop looking up at them. “All right, start with Nelly. What the hell’s that about?”
Henry spoke in a fake high voice like a girl’s. “Stop actin’ like a baby, and I’ll stop treatin’ you like one. What were you thinkin’? You weren’t thinkin’. That’s what!”
“I never said that.”
“You said it to me not three minutes ago!” Henry crowed.
“Well, yeah, but—”
“And you said it to me back in Lexington,” Paul chimed in. “Did I think we were going to drive all the way to Yellowstone and back without having any car trouble? Well, then, I wasn’t thinking!”
“Well, I was just tryin’ to help.”
Goddamn if that didn’t set them off again. Stuck in the middle of nowhere with a bona fide dilemma is what we were, and they saw fit to laugh.
I was about ready to blow a gasket. “What? Why are you doing this?”
Henry spat to the side. “Ever since we left home, you’ve done everything but tell us how to pick our teeth after a meal. You even told me to go use the shitter this morning before we left Goodland.”
I had told Henry that, but only because he’d become famous for making us stop right after we got underway while he looked for a place to squat.
“But—”
“You’ve decided when we stop and when we go, John,” Paul said in a quiet voice.
Henry dropped his voice to match. “And what we’ll eat and when we’ll eat it.”
“And when to buy gasoline. And God knows nobody but you could possibly change a tire—”
“Okay, okay! I get the point! It’s just . . . somebody needs to be in charge and—”
They jumped on that.
“Why?”
“Says who?”
“Okay, fine. Nobody’s in charge.” Let’s see how fast you come begging for help is what I was thinking.
I nodded toward the Model T. It looked like a horse bending to take a drink from the stream. “What do you wanna do about the car?” I realized I had my hands on my hips like a fishwife and dropped them to the sides.
“Help me out here, Henry,” Paul said. “How bad is it?”
Henry scratched his head. “Pretty bad.”
“No chance of using our two boards behind the front wheels?”
Henry looked again. “I’d say that’s a no chance in hell there.”
Especially since we burned them for firewood two nights ago. I was too mad to say it.
Paul said, “We haven’t crossed any railroad tracks since we left Goodland this morning, have we?”
Henry said, “No.”
“Well, then, we know the tracks are still south of us. If we walk in that direction, we’ll come to a bridge or the line itself, and either one will lead to help.”
Damn it, he made sense.
“No need in all of us going,” Henry weighed in. “Won’t take three to bring back help. Somebody prob’ly oughta stay near the auto anyway.”
“I’ll go.” I wanted as far away from the
m as possible. I found Paul’s hat, jammed it on my head, and stalked away in a line with the creek.
Henry yelled at my back. “Because you just want to help!”
Goddamn them to hell, they were laughing again.
The heat I felt rising had little to do with the sun climbing higher in the sky. My thoughts ran along the line of the horrible ways they should both die and how right now wouldn’t be too soon. After I had them good and dead, I started picturing how I’d keep walking and never come back and their poor rotten carcasses would spend eternity feeling sorry for what they’d said to me.
How could they? Hell, they wouldn’t remember anything if I didn’t remind them. They were practically helpless if I didn’t tell them what needed to be done, useless until I decided what to do next. I wasn’t being bossy. I was just . . . just . . .
I stopped in my tracks, stunned.
I was just like my dad. Holy mother of God.
How many times had my mom explained him to me by saying he was just trying to help? How many times had I chafed because he predicted my mistakes and named my shortcomings before I did anything wrong?
Thinking about it like that, I guessed I could understand Paul and Henry. But what I’d done was only to take care of them. Only because I worried about them. Because I was afraid . . .
Jesus Horatio Christ. My dad was afraid?
“Evvabody’s sunzabitches ’cept me and Jimmenently, and I ain’t sure about Jim.” I was singing and swinging my arms by the time I got to the railroad tracks. The sun was hot, and I was hungry enough to feel lightheaded, but this was more than that. I had taken on a weight of responsibility at the beginning of the trip, and now my friends had cut me loose.
It felt good just to be alone. We’d been gone three weeks, and I’d been by myself no longer than it took to use the outhouse. No wonder we were at one another’s throats. Why, maybe the other two didn’t really mean what they’d said.
I interrupted myself with another original tune before that thought could take root: “Gonna climb right up in the tallest tree and show my butt to the world—”
Seeing America Page 13
