“She’s in shock,” some nurse had said. “She tore badly, and she lost a lot of blood.” They had added something to the tube in her hand, and she could not move her fingers. She felt a burning pain in the lower part of her spine. Where’s my baby? Is it really over? Why couldn’t I feel it? Dessie blinked into the light. An older, broad-faced woman in white looked into her eyes. “She’s waking up,” someone said. “How are you feeling, honey?” Dessie opened her mouth, but her tongue was so dry it was almost impossible to speak. “Cold,” she said finally.
LUX TURNED Dakota back toward home, and they slowly worked their way down the shadowy road. Despite his eagerness to return to the barn for feeding time, the colt placed each hoof carefully. Dakota took after his mother, sensible and surefooted on the steep, dirt and gravel road. Back at the paddock, Lux dismounted and led the horse through the fence and into the corral.
Bertram’s plan to raise a calf had not yet materialized, and Lux was secretly glad, even though Bertram was easy to work with and generous. A man needs his own land, Lux thought, and with the raise he was promised when he became a crew boss at the mill, Lux hoped that before long he’d have a down payment and be able to move his family up to the head of the Goshen Road. Once the dirt road was graded, ditched, and graveled, the trailer should be able to go right up, or maybe he could sell the trailer and use the money to build a small farmhouse. He’d found a nice level patch of ground to clear, a fine house site near a stand of sugar maples, not far from the apple orchard; there was a spring to develop for fresh water, topsoil for a garden, and the creek flowed all year long for livestock.
Steam rose off Dakota’s back as Lux removed the warm leather saddle and the Navajo-style saddle blanket. Dakota held still as Lux brushed him down, and in the waning light Lux lifted each hoof to pick out the bits of mud and small stones. After he was sure the colt had cooled down, Lux fed the colt, adding a little extra grain for the cold night. It was expensive, but Dakota had earned it. The sun was almost down, and across the field the full moon had begun to rise in the east, the bright October hunter’s moon, a cloudless sky, deep dark blue and clear. Lux’s fingertips stung in the cool air. Tonight would be the first frost, the killing frost. He headed back toward the trailer to see about supper. He would also need to find some old tarps and maybe a sheet or two to cover the long row of late tomatoes before the frost hit.
INSIDE THE stuffy trailer Lissy squirmed to get out of her grandmother Rose’s arms. She was hungry and fussing for her mother to feed her. Billie stood in the kitchen, barefoot in cutoff shorts and an oversized sweatshirt. She’d boiled up instant cereal in a small enamel saucepan and was cooling it down with milk. Another woman was in there with her, a friend of Rose’s, Olive, an aging country midwife who had delivered Dessie and Billie two decades earlier. Rose had called Olive and asked her to stop by and check on Dessie. As soon as Olive heard that this was Dessie’s second baby, she came as fast as her ancient green Studebaker Wagonaire could carry her. “Honey-girl, you best stay put and hunker down,” Olive insisted, as soon as she began to time Dessie’s cramps. Dessie could forget taking the drive to the hospital. “This baby’s a-comin’,’ hain’t a bit a’ time to dawdle.”
Olive sent Rose back to the passenger seat of the Studebaker for a basket with various supplies and a thick pile of towels and linen sheets. Bertram walked with Rose back to the trailer and stood in the doorway, but he would not set foot inside. He said he’d just make things worse for everyone when he passed out, and then they all would have to look after him instead of Dessie.
Dessie smiled from the couch as her mother pushed her father out the door. Almost immediately Dessie’s smile turned to a grimace; she could only concentrate on bits of the conversation between contractions. She had no time to panic; she just had one goal at a time, stand up, hold on, wait out the contraction. Stand up, hold on, try to make it to the bathroom. Stand up, hold on. One more strong contraction and her water broke. Hold on, ease back down to the couch, relax.
WHEN LUX walked in, Dessie, Lissy, Rose, Billie, and Olive were crowded into the small living room. The women circled Dessie, whose eyes were closed as she more leaned than sat on the edge of the couch, propped up with every pillow they owned. Billie sat on the rug and stroked Dessie’s feet, and Olive held her hand and cackled over old birth stories with Rose. Lissy stood barefooted on the couch between her mother and her grandmother, wiping Dessie’s wet face with her small fist full of tissues. “It’s amazing,” said Dessie, looking up into the wide brown eyes of her daughter. “We can feel our new baby coming.” Dessie placed Lissy’s small hand on the tightly stretched skin at base of her belly as the contraction began to hit. All of a sudden Lissy raised up her hand, jumped back. She looked up at her mom with a giggle.
Clean sheets and towels were draped over the furniture; to Lux their living room looked like something out of some kind of movie set or a hospital TV show. From the doorway he watched his round-bellied wife with amazement. Her hair was down, and all she wore was her old nightshirt and slippers. When Dessie saw Lux she tried to stand up on her own and walk over, but she wobbled back and forth like her legs would not support her weight.
He walked over to her, and she stretched her arms up, as if she was moving in slow motion. “You smell like warm horse and gunpowder,” she said, burying her head into his neck, clutching at his shirt collar. He stroked the beads of sweat on her forehead, and her fingers relaxed and she smiled. Then he could see the pain rise over her face like a wave, and she had to stop moving completely. They stood there together, her eyes shut tightly. “OOH,” Dessie moaned.
Lux wasn’t sure what to do. His brown eyes narrowed, and he scanned the room for an answer. He wanted to take his cap off and sit down to supper, but there wasn’t any food ready, and there wasn’t even a chair. His mother-in-law Rose, his sister-in-law Billie, some lady named Olive, and little Lissy stared back at him, and in return he focused his eyes down at his wife, her flushed cheeks, her damp forehead and brow. As she held onto him, Dessie swayed a little, tipping the two of them backward. Her eyes opened, but they could not seem to focus. To Lux she looked as drunk as she did on their wedding night.
Lux’s eyes found Dessie’s. “What have we here?” Lux asked when they stopped swaying and he could think of something to say.
“Hey, Lux,” Dessie said, as soon as she was able to breathe enough to speak. “The girls say it’s a birthday party, d’you want to stay?”
“Not really,” he said. “This here’s a hen party, and this rooster wants out.” He shuffled her over to the couch and eased her slowly down onto a clean sheet. Her nightshirt was soaked with sweat. Dessie settled back, breathing deeply as Lux let her go. So this is it, he thought. So this is it. Oh, Mother up in holy heaven, please protect the lot of us.
“Y’all holler if you need me,” he said, “Ring that bell, something.” He didn’t know what else to say. The longer he stood in the doorway, the more useless he felt. Then, remembering the tomatoes, he turned down the driveway to Bertram’s porch to get a tarp, or a few old sheets off their clothesline. Bertram waved, flashed the porch light, beckoned to him from the window.
A great flock of black starlings rose up out of the dark field as Lux headed to the garden to cover the tomato plants. Dakota trotted over to the corral fence, whinnying for some attention. In the moonlit garden, Lux reached between the foliage to pick some of the largest green tomatoes to bring into the house to ripen. He shook the folds out of the tarps and spread them over the tall tomato stakes and the bushy green peppers. Steam came out of Dakota’s nostrils as he watched from across the fence, his head shaking with each snap of the tarp in the air. After a bit the colt grew calm, and he moved along the fencerow, even with Lux.
Lux took his time, making sure that each staked tomato plant was covered down to the bare ground. When he finished, he reached down and pulled up a couple of the last remaining carrots. He started over to wait for news with Bertram at the farmhous
e, but then Lux turned back to the paddock, walked to the fence, and held out a carrot for the colt.
“It’s all right, Dakota, you’re a good boy,” he said when the horse reached his long nose over the fence. “We both miss her, don’t we,” he said. “It’s you and me from now on; we’ll be a good team, won’t we?”
While the horse chewed, Lux’s thoughts drifted past the garden, past their trailer, and past Bertram’s house, and over to the steep dark lane that led up the hillside toward the start of the old Goshen Road. The autumn constellations spread across the sky, Orion came sharply into focus in the east, and to Lux it seemed like the whole valley had become silent, not the hoot of an owl or even the chirp of a cricket. He snapped back and remembered what he’d been thinking about earlier. “Think we’ll have us a baby boy?” he asked the colt, his voice the only sound in the still autumn air.
FIVE
JACKSON CHILDS (1970)
THE YEAR I TURNED EIGHTEEN I HAD THE TWO WORST experiences of my life. I went to jail and got married. Don’t get me wrong, it wasn’t Alan Ray Munn, who I did marry with all my heart and soul, for better or for worse. It was the wedding that was so wrong in every way. I swear it was all my mother’s fault, though she’d never admit it. I know she’d put it all on me. I guess she’d be hard-pressed to forgive me for what I done to her, too.
Jail wasn’t so bad. The food was take-out from the Washington Cafe, scrambled eggs, bacon, and toast in the morning, a cheeseburger with the works for dinner around two. It took them five days to lower down the bail, and my poor dad had to put his house up to the bondsman. Of course, he got it back. Alan Ray promised him that he’d take the bond fee out of his pay, a paycheck at a time. What was bad was how I got to jail, how I fell for a six-foot, long-armed, fast-talking, blond-haired, motorcycle-riding dreamboat named Jackson Childs.
Jackson Childs breezed into our yard on his Yamaha 650 one late summer day, stopping at the house to ask for directions. He had a pup tent slung over the sissy bar, a gas tank painted like a sunburst, and an army-issue backpack that was as gray as gravel on the road. He was going to be camping out, looking for a cheap piece of land to buy, somewhere he could settle his weary bones for a while, he said. Well, his bones didn’t look so weary to me in those cutoff blue jean shorts. In fact, they looked as fit as a fiddle.
Before I knew it, he drove through the creek, hopped down off the Yamaha, and had it setting on a kickstand alongside the dog box. “Where’s your folks?” he asked me, and I told him Daddy was off at work for Pennzoil and Mama’s TOPS meeting was way over at the First Apostolic in town. “What town?” he wanted to know, and I said, “Fairchance, of course,” and he thought a moment and said, “Oh, of course, Fairchance! I’ve been there! It’s halfway between good chance and no chance at all.”
At that I started laughing, and he smiled wide open and natural, like he was tickled with himself. You could tell he wasn’t from around here. No local guys like Lux or Alan Ray had the guts to laugh at their own jokes. They got insulted if I didn’t, but that was their problem.
I TOLD Jackson Childs where to pitch his pup tent in a peaceful spot behind the reservoir dam. He came by the house the next day to tell me that it was all he needed out of life, a place in the woods next to a lake, and a pretty girl like me holding onto his middle as he gunned it down the road. Also that he got a job working roustabout at the county fair at night on the midway. Then he kick-started the bike and took off, the engine roaring in a cloud of dust and gravel. Around two that morning, just as I was lying in bed awake, wondering whether I would ever see him again, I heard Jackson Childs drive his motorcycle up the road, past the front of the house, then head up to camp out behind the reservoir dam.
Nobody but me knew it was Jackson. My folks were asleep for one thing; for another, I recognized the sound. I was in bed, thinking about how to arrange to get to the fair to see Jackson, but also thinking about Alan Ray, which I sometimes did at night, wondering if Alan Ray was ever going to kiss me again or call me to go out again, wondering if he was going to admit that he really liked me, wondering what I would say if Alan Ray proposed to me, and thinking about our splendid wedding at the Katy Fire Hall with three bridesmaids and a two-tiered chocolate cake, and the two redheaded boys and two dark-haired girls we’d want to have someday.
It was the kind of hot night where a person could hardly get to sleep. All the upstairs windows were wide open, and the shadows of branches made spooky patterns on the window screen. Damn if I couldn’t hear something, coming closer, over the sound of the crickets, around the bend, slowing up, revving the motor, going past the footbridge. Vrooom, vroom, just like the song “Leader of the Pack.” The second night, my late-night thoughts of Alan Ray began to get crowded out by thoughts of Jackson Childs in his pup tent. I tiptoed to the window as soon as I heard the Yamaha coming. There he was, Lord have mercy, no helmet on, long blond hair blowing back from his face, slowing down at the bend, then heading up toward the dam. On the third night, I told Mom I was sleeping at Coral Hine’s house, and instead Coral Hine dropped me off at the fairgrounds right before closing time.
IT WAS eleven o’clock. The fair was supposed to close, but all the midway lights were still on. The night air was warm and steamy; each little light on the booths and the rides glowed with a fuzzy halo. A thunderstorm was rumbling somewhere; heat lightning behind the haze made bright flashes above the Tilt-A-Whirl. Under the covered part of the main stage, a gospel group was singing their old hearts out, working themselves up to a big finish. It was two men and two women, piped over the main loudspeakers, the female voices first, high and twangy, singing, “Be ready when He comes, Oh Lord, be ready when He comes,” then the male part, almost as high and twangy: “He’s comin’ again real soon”; then all together, chiming in: “Don’t let Him catch you on the barroom floor, laughing and dancing like you done before, be ready when He comes, Oh Lord, He’s coming again real soon.” The few folks left in the audience were singing along, swaying back and forth; some of them down front were actually on their knees on folding chairs.
As I passed the stage I began to pray too. First I prayed that I wouldn’t see Alan Ray, and I prayed that I would find Jackson Childs on the midway somewhere, then I prayed that I wouldn’t see my relatives, or none of the folks from my mother’s church circle in the assembly gathered round the stage, especially considering that I borrowed a tight blue sweater from Coral and her push-up bra, and I used her lip gloss and blue eyeliner, too.
Walking the midway I began thinking about a different song, the one where Mitch Ryder sings “Devil with the Blue Dress On.” The lights were still flashing, and folks were still milling about, and it was closing in on midnight. I saw a few kids from the high school, boys in white tees, black slacks, and high tops, their hair greased back and their pants too tight, with their girls’ hands on their hips. Other townies, too, people I didn’t hardly ever notice, but maybe knew from Cleve’s grocery or the laundromat. They think they knew me too, that they’ve known me since Sunday school. Like the stooped-over lady, her face as white as a china doll’s, with her little squeezed-together slits for eyes and pulled-back hair who was working at the wiener stand, and like the grizzled old-timers at the picnic tables chugging beer from cans in brown paper sacks right in public, waving and staring at me like they might have once worked on the Pennzoil crew with my dad.
I saw Jackson Childs at the far end of the midway. He wore a black T-shirt with white letters that said, “Eat the Rich,” and he paced back and forth inside the penny-pitch booth, just him and a big square table with a red-and-white checkerboard tablecloth and a goldfish swimming in a tall cider jug. This jug had a narrow hole on top, hardly wide enough to slip in the goldfish. Pennies and dimes lay all over the table, with only a couple of pennies and dimes in the jug. “Wanna get lucky?” he was calling to no one in particular. “Don’t gotta be strong, don’t gotta be good, just gotta be lucky.”
“Hey, Jackson, what do you win?”
I asked him. A big smile broke out all over his face to see me. And I felt myself grin back. “Billie girl, most everyone wins the fish, of course, but if you win, you get the granddaddy of all prizes.”
“What’s that?” I asked, rooting around in my purse, thinking, OK, I’ll pitch a couple of dimes; it will give me something to do, so I won’t look nervous.
Jackson cozied up next to me, leaning his long body over the rail and ducking his blond head down so he didn’t smack it into a big white giraffe that was hanging from the top of the booth, and he said, “Well, sweet thing, for you and for you alone, if you sink this here copper in that there jar, yessir, you get the extra special, the one an’ only.” And he took a quick jump up on top of the table, near upsetting the fish in its jug, and he bowed deep and low on one knee.
I was trying not to show how I knew he was acting so hokey on my account. I didn’t want to look overly surprised, either. “Good,” I said, “I didn’t want a fish, anyway.”
“Nobody does,” he said, “That’s why they throw all that money. They want to win, but they don’t give a rat’s ass if they get the fish. And a goldfish is a filthy little creature. You wouldn’t believe how it dirties the water in this jug. It takes a special kind of person to enjoy that kind of dirt.” He grinned.
“Well, that’s not why I don’t want a fish. I don’t want a fish because it’s just going to die, and that would be sad,” I said, showing him my sensitive side.
“You bet it will die,” he said, not the least bit sensitively. Then he leaped over the edge of the booth. “Come with me,” he said. “Anyways, I don’t work here. I work up at the stables cleaning stalls. I was just watching this booth for that lady over there.” He pointed over at a skinny lady in a red, white, and blue shirt with fringes on the arms and across the chest, and tight black Levi’s tucked down into her white boots. Even her boots had a row of fringes on them. I looked back up at Jackson.
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