“I know! Just give me a chance,” she spit back.
She tried several more times until her arm cramped. She rocked back and shook it out, tears of frustration misting her eyes.
She heard another snuffle. “I don’t dare wait!” Then a sound following it from the other direction, unmistakable: pine needles being crushed underfoot. Not like twigs snapping. A softer sound. Almost a whish. The needles whispering against each other. It came again.
“Shhh!” Hetty looked around but couldn’t see anything. She heard Smack slide back into the truck and pull the door almost shut with a groan.
She held on to the handle of the crank and didn’t move a muscle. Only her eyes roamed through the murk. She couldn’t see anything moving, even though the swishing sounds approached very close, then stopped. Hetty began to tremble inside, realizing what a spot she’d put herself into. Terror sent absurd notions spiraling through her mind. I’ve been caught red-handed, she thought, laughing darkly at the literalness of her fingers turning the color of blood over the flashlight. I’m sitting here with a tank half filled with oil, my hand on a crank, and a trucker waiting for me to turn on the pump. What more evidence do they need? She shuddered. Will I be able to take Pierce to prison with me?
Her hand holding the crank disappeared as something warm and dark covered it.
“Why are you milking my well without me, Hetty?”
Her lungs sucked in air again. “Pick! You scared me to death.”
“Smells like that motor flooded.”
“I was afraid of that.” She slipped her hand out from under his, straining to make out his dusky face as he knelt beside her. “I thought you were off looking for work?”
“Ain’t none. Anywhere. I been up to Longview and over to Tyler. What you doing here in the middle of the night?”
She told what she’d learned about Lamar and the Rule of Capture. “That’s why I need to get this pump going. Smack’s waiting.”
“How come Mac ain’t doing this?”
“He left this morning. He quit on me, Pick.”
“That ain’t like Garret. What’s going on?”
“I’m not sure. All I know is, I can’t let my sister and brother-in-law steal my oil right from under my feet. Would you help me, Pick?”
“I could sure use the work.”
“You got to pump oil for me again. I’m desperate. They won’t catch you. You’re invisible at night.”
“Not anymore. I been seen.”
“By who?”
“I rode a freight car back here from Tyler and was heading down Commerce Street. I was trying to stay in the shadows, but a Ranger spotted me. Gets down off his horse, wants to see my hands.”
“Your hands?”
“That’s how they tell if you’re a worker or a pimp. He asks me where I been working. I say on the Ada Hillyer. He asks me what I’m doing in town. I say just looking for work. He say, ‘There ain’t no work for white men much less niggers, so you better get out of town, boy.’ I say, ‘Yes, sir.’ He say, ‘I mean it. I don’t want to see your coon face again.’ He had the coldest eyes I’ve ever seen on a man.”
“Uh-oh. That was Poke Pritchett.”
“That’s when I walk out here. I got to hide.”
“I’m sorry he called you those names.”
“You can’t protect me from that, Hetty.”
“Maybe not, but I don’t want you ending up on Lone Wolf’s trotline.”
“It don’t worry me.”
“It’s not much fun, from what I hear.”
“That’s all right,” he said, standing up. “My mother always taught me, son, your home’s in glory with God, and life on this earth is filled with trials and tests. Just bear them patiently and you’re sure to be called home someday. She used to sing, ‘We’ll run and never tire, we’ll run and never tire, Jesus set poor sinners free.’” Pick’s hands came together in prayer as he sang in his fervent baritone.
Hetty stood. “We’re all being tested right now, that’s for sure.”
“Lone Wolf ain’t no test for me. It’s the other man I’m scared of.”
Hetty heard the truck door grinding on its hinges again and knew that Smack was going to leave if they didn’t start pumping some oil soon. She covered Pick’s hands in hers, shielding them and at the same time feeling their strength.
“You need to do this for Addie, Ollie, Minnie, and Lewis. How else are you going to keep them alive?”
“I reckon there be no other way.”
“All right, my man, get this goddamn pump going for me. And pray to Jesus your soul to keep.”
After a week, Smack rewarded Hetty with fifty dollars in cash. At six cents a barrel, that was all she could expect to make. Enough to stay alive, buy some groceries, and have a few dollars to spread around to all the people she owed. It would keep her operating during martial law, but Hetty wondered if it was worth the toll it was taking on her nerves. She was edgy during the day and woke up at four every morning listening for the sputter of the pump. She lay there in complete darkness, sprawled across the bed, still smelling Stacomb on Garret’s pillow. She wanted to choke the pillow till her nails split and beat it on the headboard until all the feathers ruptured like pestilence across the floor. How could you leave me! A ragged pulse beat in her ears; her guts went hot. She couldn’t fall asleep again until Smack’s truck had rumbled back up the hill and off into the dawn. She fantasized the sound of Pick’s screams as he was dragged off by the Rangers in chains. But none ever broke the silence. He did his job flawlessly, in secret, in quiet, in utter darkness.
With Smack’s fifty dollars in hand, she paid Pick and took Pearl and the baby into town. Hetty didn’t want anybody to know she had money to spend, so sent Pearl into the Great Atlantic & Pacific Tea Company and then into Brown’s Drugs for hamburgers and milk shakes. She lifted the rebozo over her head to hood her face and tossed the long fringes off her shoulders.
“I never thought a chocolate shake would be my idea of a good time,” she told Pearl, relishing the savor of the meat after endless suppers of purple peas and cabbage.
“One of Odell’s favorites,” Pearl said.
“How is he? Any more letters?”
“Not this week.”
“Sure wish he were here. ’Specially now that Garret left.”
“Look at us,” Pearl said, taking the last bite of her hamburger and shaking her head. “Both without our menfolk.”
“Amen,” said Hetty.
Pierce fell asleep as they drove home through the dusk. Pearl unpacked the groceries while Hetty put the baby to bed. She held him in the crook of one arm while she pulled back the clean white sheets and the light cotton blanket he slept under at night. She laid him down in the darkness, cradling his head on the pillow. He burbled as she drew the sheet up and tucked it under his arms. Then his breathing fell into the gentle tides of infant slumber. She cloistered herself at his cradle for a moment, holding his tiny hand, envying the deep peace of his untroubled sleep.
She was lifting the cotton blanket when her fingers froze in midair. A gunshot split the night in two. Three more followed it in quick succession. The air ripped apart to let the sounds through, then closed back into an unnatural quiet. She drew her hand out of the crib and stepped into the kitchen. Pearl’s eyes glittered at her in the dim lamplight, knowing what Hetty knew—Pick would have slipped down to the derrick as darkness had fallen, opening the valve on the well so the tank could fill in the night. They both ran for the door.
A ghostly halo of light hung over Caney Creek.
“Oh no!” Hetty gasped, pulling the shawl closer about her. Pearl took her hand and led her slowly down the hill.
The whole derrick was luminous from the acetylene flame of the carbide lamp someone had lit. As it sat in one corner, its powerful white light flashed off the reflector plate and blazed through the twilight. Poke Pritchett stood in front of the lamp, which made the shadow he cast colossal as it stretched over the pine
planks and fell down into the creek bed. He had a rifle crooked in his hands. Hetty could smell gunpowder. She made out other figures holding rifles in the shadows: Lone Wolf Gonzaullas, a few state troopers. She heard a horse whinny behind them. They had come over the Caddo mound, she could see, slipping soundlessly through the pine forests behind it. They were all looking at something, but the carbide was so blinding, she couldn’t see much. She shielded her eyes, and that was when she saw it: A body was lying at the foot of the Christmas tree. The one they’d just shot. She didn’t dare give it a name.
Pearl tried to steer her away, but she broke free and shinned her way up onto the derrick floor. The pine planks moaned as she walked on them, the light etching every detail into startling clarity. Pick lay crumpled like a dirty rag doll ahead of her. One arm was flung toward her, his head turned away. Everything was so black and white in the intense light of the acetylene gas, but Pick was blackest of all as he lay there unmoving in the shadow cast by the Christmas tree. It wasn’t until she stood right over him that she saw the other color: red. She could make out four gunshot wounds splattered across his torso and saw in her mind the headline she’d read in the paper last week: Wolters Tells Guards to Shoot at the Waistline.
Hetty stood there unable to move, unable to draw her eyes away. The blood soaked into his clothes and trickled through the cracks in the pine boards. She wanted to take her shawl off and stanch the wounds before it was too late, but she couldn’t move. What she saw was turning her to stone. Feeling faint, Hetty realized she hadn’t been breathing. She gasped for some air, but choked on the smell of gun smoke.
Reaching toward her friend, she tried to shout, “Help him!” but her voice only came out as a scratch. Lone Wolf wasn’t listening anyway. She could hear him behind her talking to Pearl, explaining how this man was found illegally operating the well after being told to leave town. “But he works for us,” she said, again in a scratch that nobody heard.
Hetty had to do something. She knelt beside Pick and unwound the wedding shawl from her shoulders. She hefted his body up and worked the shawl underneath him, then drew it as tight as she could across his chest to stop the flow of blood. Red splotches like poppies fanned out across the white silk. She hoped she wasn’t too late. She didn’t like the way his head lolled back so lifelessly. If only he’d wake up and talk to her. She tried to hold his body upright while she wound the shawl around and around him, but he was so heavy. He kept sagging back.
Somehow, by lifting first his shoulders, then his hips, she got the last wound covered and tied the rebozo in a knot. She kept tying and retying the knot to get it tight enough to stop the flow of blood and save his life.
A shadow fell over her hands. She looked up and saw the boots with the silver spurs. “He’s dead, ma’am,” Lone Wolf told her in a gentle voice.
She crawled around and cradled his head in her lap, stroking his cheeks that she always thought were like the smoothest onyx. “Are you sure?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
Poke added in an icy tone: “We can’t let a goddamn nigger break the law and get away with it.”
Touching Pick’s face all over, Hetty brushed his still warm lips and noticed that his eyes were open a crack. She closed them for the last time, holding his head to her breast and rocking him, back and forth, back and forth, in her arms.
The sheriff came in a truck to take the body. “Do you want your shawl back?” he asked her.
“No, I want him buried in it,” she said. Two troopers lifted the body out of her arms and rolled it off the derrick. She heard it hit the ground with a lifeless thud. They heaved it into the back of the truck like a sack of feed.
When everyone had left, Pearl helped her down off the derrick and turned to douse the carbide lamp. “Wait,” Hetty said, walking along the sandy banks. She took off her bloody pearls and tossed them into the willow trees, where they snagged on a high branch and hung there glistening like a string of stars, like seeds. As she watched them sway, she remembered the final words from Pick’s favorite hymn, the one where the angels always hung their harps in a willow grove:
Go down angels to the flood
Blow out the sun, turn the moon into blood.
Come back angels, bolt the door
The time that’s been will be no more.
The thick heat of deep August burned on, but Hetty didn’t feel it. She didn’t feel anything. She lay under a damp sheet on the chaise lounge and forgot to flick on the circulating fan even in the steamiest part of the day. While Pierce played at her feet, she pulled the sheet over her head and tried to sleep. When it was too hot to sleep, she gazed into the white blankness inside the sheet and counted the trickles of sweat running down her face. If Pearl brought her food, she mashed it up and fed it to Pierce. She lived on iced tea and Lucky Strikes. She wouldn’t talk to anyone. People came and went, hovering over the chaise, but they were like shadows catching at the corner of her eye.
One evening, Ada’s weathered face appeared in Hetty’s line of vision, above a steaming plate. “I brought you something special from my garden. It’ll strengthen your blood.”
Hetty looked down. The plate was piled with gashes of beets, oozing with red juice and butter. She hardly made it to the bathroom in time.
It was the red she was trying to forget. Didn’t they know that? Red running through black. That’s why she slept so much. She had almost succeeded in numbing her mind into amnesia when Pearl made the mistake of showing her the front page of the Kilgore News Herald dated August 31, 1931. She held it up right in front of Hetty’s eyes so she had to look at it. There was Henry Picktown Waller, laid out on a platform somewhere, her white wedding shawl still wrapped around him, stained with its poppies of blood. The huge headline read: A WARNING TO ALL. That set Hetty back for days. She would just lie there on the chaise and stare off into space, lighting cigarettes and forgetting to smoke them. She had no idea how much time passed in this manner.
Then one night, cool air wafted through the window. An early September norther. It soothed her feverish brow, and Hetty felt herself falling into an endless, dreamless sleep where she realized that oblivion was the deepest blessing of them all. Eons passed, and then she saw light, pure white light with blue pine shadows flickering through it as she opened her eyes and gazed at the wall above the chaise. Someone had thrown a blanket over the sheet in the night. The rich fumes of strong coffee teased her nose. She felt hungry. A rocking chair rolled to and fro on the wooden floor, and the words of a lullaby floated on the morning air:
Golden slumbers kiss your eyes,
Smiles awake you when you rise,
Sleep, pretty baby,
Do not cry,
And I will sing a lullaby.
Hetty stirred. Her head emerged from the thicket of bedclothes to see Pearl rocking Pierce, still wrapped in his blanket and half asleep. She staggered off the chaise, yearning for her baby so much she almost snatched him away. Pearl handed Pierce over and vacated the rocker. Hetty took her place, falling into the same swaying rhythm but unable to sing. She looked at her baby’s face and thought about the words of the lullaby. Hetty glanced at her friend, sitting in a smolder at the kitchen table. She looked more spectral than ever from the ordeal they’d been through. “I don’t know what I’d do without you. You’ve been keeping watch over both of us.”
“Somebody had to.” Hetty could hear the censure in Pearl’s voice.
“Don’t judge me too harshly, Pearl.”
“I leave that to God, hon.” She threw Hetty a wan smile.
“Right now, it’s all I can do not to duck back under the sheet.”
“I know.”
“I could feel that newspaper sitting there on the table. That’s why I couldn’t get up. I heard the pages crinkling as you and Ada read about Pick when you thought I was asleep. You tried to cry quietly so I wouldn’t hear, but I did. I knew what waited for me out here, and I couldn’t face it.”
Pearl lit a cigarette and too
k little quick puffs off it. “I just can’t believe it come to this.”
“You think it’s my fault, don’t you?”
Pearl didn’t say anything, just lifted her cigarette to her mouth.
“Well, it is my fault.”
“Hon, you can’t—”
“Oh, yes, I can. I was the one who sent him out there in the night to break the law. That’s what you’re thinking. And I can’t blame you for reproaching me. How could I do such a thing? I was so blinded by my—my rage at having my oil stolen. I should have made him go home. Garret was right—we should have all left days ago. He reached his hand out to me, and I couldn’t take it. Now I don’t even know where my husband is.” Hetty’s buried grief suddenly surfaced, trembling in the room.
“I know where mine is. In prison.”
“I’m sorry, Pearl.” Hetty felt tears falling down her cheeks.
“Don’t you start in. You’ll get me to crying, too. Heartache’s catching, don’t you know that?” She rose and showed Hetty some packages of Diamond Dyes that had been sitting on the kitchen table, along with a tin of Polyshine. “I’ve been cleaning out Pick’s room. I found these. They’re black.”
Hetty gazed at the objects quivering in her friend’s thin fingers. The shock started wringing all the blackness out of her mind as she understood what Pick had been doing with the dye, how his onyx skin disappeared into the shadows so she sent him out there night after night to be invisible and save her oil. He’d dipped his clothes in Diamond Dyes for her sake. “He was trying to make himself disappear,” she said.
Hetty and Pearl stood looking at the Wichita flatbed truck, its orange paint splattered with splinters of mud. “Think you can drive this bus?” Pearl asked.
“I sure hope so.”
Hetty opened the demi-door and pulled herself up. Pearl came in the other side, Pierce wiggling in her embrace. Hetty had to stretch her leg to reach the clutch. She pushed it in, turned the key, and hit the starter button. The cold motor churned.
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