One Sweet Quarrel (Nancy Pearl’s Book Lust Rediscoveries)

by Deirdre McNamer

  “Some of those boys were just sick with Christmas grief,” he said. Christmas grief, as if it were a term everybody knew. “They wanted new socks and their mamas.”

  Some murmurs, some quiet bracing for the worst of it.

  “I was in the forward trench. Not a hundred yards from the German forwards. We had two fires going, it was so cold. Two fires because that wool always seemed to be damp and lousy and if you stood close you felt you were driving out the water and the bugs and maybe even your own putrid smell. That was the idea.” His voice was cheerful.

  “Suddenly, straight ahead, a white flag pops up. It was a bright night with a big icy moon, and up pops this flag. Then up pops this soldier beneath it, and he’s holding some kind of tree in the other hand. Well, a bush. But they’d put some kind of little flames on it. Twigs, maybe, or paper that they’d lit. And this fellow walks forward a few steps, flag flying, and if it had been a few more he would have been a goner, but he stopped and planted that thing. Already it was half burned out.

  “Then he just stood there, arms at his sides, and sang that ‘Tannenbaum’ song. He sounded about fifteen years old.

  “So it turns out this fellow Walter in my trench became moved to sing. In German, if you can believe that. Would have brought the home guard down on him back home, you can bet. And then some other fellows sang it too. ‘Oh Tannenbaum.’”

  He paused, squinting at a grease mark on the tablecloth.

  “And when Walter and the other boys stopped at the end of a verse, you could hear that they were singing over there too, more than just the one fellow out in the open.

  “By this time the Christmas bush, or whatever you want to call it, was out, all the lights on it. So all you could see was the bare outline of that German and the white flag kind of fluttering as he moved away. And then it just dropped into the earth like a dead moth.”

  No one said anything.

  Maybe they all just listened for a few moments until the sounds of the present world came in. A murmur of a child in the next room, a slam of a shed door, frozen snow breaking loose to slide down the roof, the oceanic wind.

  And, closer in, the clink of silver. The feel of the warm stove and the air full of sugar and tea. Cards on a green tablecloth. Teacups with garlands of baby roses around the rims.

  “That would have been two Christmases ago?” Suzanne finally asked solicitously.

  “Yes, 1917,” he said. “We had quite a march ahead of us.” The children were roused and bundled in their coats and hats to walk home. The adults were all a little agitated, a little brisk.

  The soldier seemed a stray person again, on the outside of things. He sat quietly, making no move to go, hands folded on his lap.

  Vivian and Alice seemed to be taking a long time with the children, so Jerry, to lighten the night again, handed his teacup to Suzanne.

  It would, of course, be a happy fortune. Her happiest. The minister passed the candy again. Suzanne swished the leaves eagerly.

  “Ah,” she said. “Real details!” Six or seven of the leaves clumped on the dish. A small line of stray ones stretched out from the clump.

  Francis came over to peer sleepily at the dish, scan the faces of the adults quizzically. “What’s she doing?” he asked.

  “Telling the future,” Jerry said noncommittally.

  “From those?” Francis’s voice was loud with sleepiness. “Looks like a lump of something to me, and two, three little lumps of the same thing. Looks like spit tobacco!”

  “I see,” said Suzanne, “I see that your luck is all ahead of you. It’s dazzling luck. Perhaps a lucky guess, a fortunate hunch. What could it be? It’s the mother lode. Your peers will hold you in the highest esteem. Does this mean a run for public office? Does this mean fortune and fame?”

  Vivian broke in. “No fortunes to be had in the Malone household, I’m afraid. Bad fortune if we keep these children up too long.” And they moved out into the night with thanks and Merry Christmases and went off into the whiteness, the preacher and his wife waving from the warm window, the soldier aiming toward his lean-to by the depot.

  “What were the other fortunes?” Francis asked. Maudie whimpered sleepily in her father’s arms.

  “Mounds of luck,” Vivian said softly. “Mountains of it.”

  II

  AFTERNOON

  July 10, 1973

  JERRY HAD two armchairs angled at the television. T.T. Wilkins sat in one of them, finishing a little speech about fuel shortages and the state of the world. Arabs. Cartels. Oil about to climb sky-high. And on, in a voice gravelly and aggrieved.

  Jerry had the sense that he had been responding, nodding at least, but he wasn’t sure. It seemed to him that something was happening to his mental arrangement of time. Often, these days, he felt doubled back on himself, scrambled. He seemed sometimes to hear his whole life at once, and it sounded like the anarchy of an orchestra tuning up—all the individual voices shooting off on their own, pirouetting, refusing to take part in the whole.

  And then someone like T.T. Wilkins will be sitting across from him—an old man with a dipping white head—and he will think for a moment that Wilkins is his father or even a figure from a childhood Bible story. It will take a moment to place him in the lineup. And while he does it, he feels a flutter of panic, the mad scramble.

  It is similar to the frozen panic he felt when he left college to sit at home in his room and time had seemed nothing but a many-stranded knot.

  In going west, he had unraveled it, made it linear again, a series of events reaching out like a long string of boxcars to the horizon. Comprehensible and in motion. His diaries were reminders, verifications of that vision. One thing and then another. Year-end recapitulations. This happened and then this happened and I stand at the forward end, the engine.

  This happens. The two of them are out of the weather in a long room that smells of pine and lamp oil and gravy; also the smell of the coal in the crevices of the skin of the railroad men who have wet-combed their hair and come in for a bachelors’ Christmas Eve.

  She is wearing a good winter dress and not a nightgown at all, as he had thought at first when it fluttered into his sight on the edges of the room. A medieval kind of gown, it had looked, with black jewels on it that flashed colors. And then she walked fully into the light and the gown was now a modest red wool, a port-colored wool, and the buttons winking in the lamplight were jet. Rainbow black.

  The wind batters the windows. They have just arrived, he and Vivian, and their clothes and hair smell like the snow-combed wind.

  Her arm in his as they leaned happily into it and made their way along the tracks and the small hunched buildings of town, the lights widely spaced and small in the moving dark.

  The railroad hotel and its oilcloth tabletops, the jet buttons flashing and her laugh so beautiful and strong the bachelors lower their voices to hear it.

  Someone has fetched a tree, brought one from the mountains, and it leans candlelit in a corner, swathed in paper chains, hung with butcher-paper angels and a collection of fancy silver spoons that float lazily and blink. The cook sings and coughs in the kitchen and delivers the plates himself, everything under gravy and a sprig of evergreen on the edge. A tumbler with a finger of port for everyone and it glows and is the color of her dress.

  They each get a whole orange on a small plate that is placed ceremoniously on the oilcloth. The No. 44 pounds and shrieks past them on the windowless side of the building and they mouth laughing words and the oranges rock. And then the quiet again, like a still face beneath long flying hair.

  They exchange gifts, quietly so the bachelors won’t watch and feel hungry. She gives him a silver letter opener engraved with their full names and tomorrow’s date, Dec. 25, 1911. And he gives her a small book of Shakespeare’s sonnets, covered in red leather and inscribed in India ink with their names and the date and the place.

  She takes him to a midnight mass in a small piney building behind the livery. Calcimined walls,
raw wooden pews and kneelers; the warmth of her against his arm; the room all flickers and small bells and the smoke of the pope.

  The silver bell rings one last time, and it is no louder than a fork on crystal. The tiny sound wavers up through the heat. And then the dark arm is hoisted to the sky, lifted like an animal just dead, and the Blackfeet cry once again, this time for the champion, that long warbling war cry that can make the hairs on your neck stand up, whether it is real war or a Wild West show or the boxing championship of the world.

  Sweat down the face, down the ribs. The smell of vaporized pine sap lifting faintly from the new boards. Then the dark arm held another time against the sky, and cheers, and some boos, and a bottle landing on the edge of the ring to roll slowly toward the feet of the referee.

  The movie men like buzzards on the parapets, small in the distance. Gargoyles making film, a record, to send down the ages, to send down to now. They don’t want the edges. They don’t turn their cameras around to the empty prairie or move them slowly across all those empty seats. They want only the two men down there on the white square. A killer with a high voice and pimples on his legs. His true-hearted and gritty challenger. Just two men panting after a fight that no one suspected could ever last so long.

  T.T. Wilkins, the T.T. Wilkins of now, sat in a chair talking about Nixon getting railroaded, about forty-dollar oil. And then he drifted into a small nap, chin on his hand. And then T.T. Wilkins’s brief and long ago wife, Daisy Lou aka Amelia Malone, knocked at the door and pushed it open.

  This happened. Then this happened. Mail call, she sang in her fluty cracking voice. T.T.’s head swiveled rustily and he held his eyes on her until she arranged herself in them, and then he greeted her—Hello, Madame Malone—as he always did.

  She left T.T. because of the pocket watch. Because of a pocket watch he had bought cheap, the summer of the big prizefight, and she found it in a drawer and left him. But why? Why was it the pocket watch that caused a divorce and, of course, a brief scandal because she’d been in town only three, maybe four years?

  The pocket watch and her injured eye. They went together, and Jerry knew the connection as well as he knew his own name. But now, for this moment, it was all gone. He couldn’t remember.

  He was talking normally to Amelia and T.T., he realized. He felt like his own impostor.

  He didn’t want to talk or remember. He had a job to do today and he wanted to get on with it. Amelia and T.T. suddenly seemed glacial to him, so slow to move. Amelia with her huge car running outside—one front wheel up on the curb, as usual—and T.T. sitting there as if he had come to stay the day, the week, a life.

  Jerry stood up, clapping his hands briskly. They hurt when he did it, the finger joints did. Off, he said to both of them. Out of my sight. Sayonara. See you later. I’ve got work.

  They looked at him, surprised. But he could see that the announcement cheered them too. Well, yes. They were people with things to do. The day was for the business of the day.

  T.T. wanted to go to the library and look something up. Amelia said she would give him a ride. They would all regroup at six to go to the banquet.

  And so they departed, leaving Jerry to his business, their heads small as children’s in the springless blue car.

  The plan was to lay a trap for that Sharleen. To get the goods, the proof.

  Sharleen Norgaard, granddaughter of his old enemy Skiff Norgaard, came to clean the house and make Jerry a hot meal twice a week. Did the same for Amelia. His children had hatched the arrangement over his objections, but he hadn’t raised a huge fuss because he knew it eased their minds, being so far away, to think of the old people fed and orderly.

  Then the helper turned out to be a Norgaard.

  She was a slack woman in her early twenties with flappy trousers and a slow, casual way of talking and moving. She kept a cigarette steadily lit in an ashtray as she moved around the house, stopping for puffs in a way that seemed an afterthought. Casual. But she didn’t fool Jerry. The Norgaards had always had that bovine slowness to them, white eyelashes blinking lazily while they ticked like Swiss watches underneath.

  The old man, Skiff. He had exactly that kind of way of moving and the same thin-lipped mouth and big-fingered hands. The pale eyes on the lookout for the main chance, always, and never mind if a friend happened to be in the way. Mow ’em down. Stab ’em in the back. That’s Skiff. Ask T.T. Ask Jerry. It had been a half century since either of them had given him the time of day.

  And now Skiff and his son, Tom, had fifteen thousand acres of strip-farmed wheat reaching in shallow waves to Canada and beyond. A couple Cadillacs. Cruises in the winter.

  Tom’s daughter, this Sharleen, was a black sheep. She had married some bad drifter for a few months and run with him until he rolled a car somewhere in Louisiana and got himself killed. And now she was back, of course, and lived in town with her divorced black-sheep sister, a teller at the bank, and cleaned houses and supposedly didn’t speak to her parents or vice versa.

  There was a look to her that was pure Norgaard, though, disowned or not. A look that said, I’m not always going to clean houses. I’m waiting. She thought she hid it behind those bleached eyes, but Jerry saw it the second she walked in the door. She was on the lookout for some way to weasel back into the good graces of her dad and grandpa. Back into their pockets, anyway.

  He watched her as he knew he had to, though he pretended indifference. Left the house for walks so she’d get the idea he was absolutely unconcerned.

  Her first ten visits, he walked for exactly a half hour. The eleventh time he came back after ten minutes, and there she was, going through his records. She was lifting a big pile of papers—papers that just happened to include the manila folder with his latest calculations and maps, the ones he planned to show to the oilman, that Henderson, when they met for a business lunch next week.

  Henderson was sinking test wells right and left and had come up with a good producer just ten miles south of town. No one knew much about him except that he apparently had the money to explore. He wouldn’t talk to the newspaper or much of anyone else. He was, the newspaper said, “hunting for something.”

  Jerry knew what he was up to. He knew Henderson was playing out a hunch that Jerry shared—a hunch that the big deposits were along a horizon where no one had thought to look. The top of the Madison Lime.

  Henderson would follow the Madison Lime up north into the Sweetgrass Arch. That was what he was sure to do. He would want the mineral rights on some parcels Jerry just happened to own.

  And he would pay a pretty penny for them.

  And Jerry would reserve a hefty percentage.

  And Henderson would drill. And hit. And they’d both be rolling in the dough. Rich in a day!

  She said she was dusting; was moving the papers just to get at some dust. Bald-faced. Said no, she didn’t know the Arabs would be pushing oil to forty dollars a barrel, maybe higher. Acted as if she had no idea what he was talking about.

  She said Amelia had told her to do the whole house, not just the parts Jerry pointed at, and so that’s what she was doing. Bald-faced.

  Forty dollars a barrel.

  He has studied this oil field for half a century. He has kept track of discoveries, year by year; plotted countless versions of the structure and done it scientifically because he learned the ropes from the earliest and best geologists in the field. Not the doodlebug men. The real scientists.

  A person could argue that, on the whole, it turned out to be a factory field—a fair number of dependable, modestly producing wells spread out over many miles. Steady. Low drama. For many years, Jerry, too, believed that to be its nature.

  Now, though, he has a strong hunch that everyone has been wrong, including himself. That the field still hides its best secrets. That a few of those secrets are spectacular. And that any of them, in a summer when the entire country is wailing for fuel, are worth pursuing.

  He tried to read Sharleen’s face for evidence that
she had been poking through his files; knew his best guesses. It was flat. She shrugged. Put out her cigarette and moved with her duster to the other room.

  She was a perfect spy. She was the one who had told him she didn’t speak to her parents or grandparents. Made a point of telling him that, now that he thought about it. Perfect. He had her number. The knowledge gave him a little thrill.

  Tom Norgaard came back from the second war and told a poker group at the Elks that he had run into Jerry’s brother, Carlton, in a bar off Times Square. Struck up a conversation with an old boozer in a tweed coat, and the guy turns out to have a Shelby connection. The old boy told Tom how he had been to Montana during the oil boom in ’21, how he had sent two sons to Dartmouth, how he was the author of a book and had owned a number of fancy cars. What a rummy wreck. You had to feel sorry for him.

  No you didn’t, said Jerry, who had walked in and overheard. Everything Carlton said was true. It was also true that he was a drinker, Carlton was. Lost everything to financial misadventure and then the Crash. But he wasn’t a liar and he wasn’t a particularly pitiful creature. There were more pitiful creatures anywhere you might want to look, he said straight to Tom’s face.

  He would booby-trap that Sharleen. He would rig up some kind of detection system that would confirm her spying. He would plant false information and see if she grabbed the bait.

  The system might involve marking old maps in a misleading manner. Or concocting false notes to himself for her to find. Perhaps the use of something nearly invisible—thread or fishing line—to measure whether particular documents had been disturbed. Disturbed and copied by Sharleen the spy.

  He got out some paper and pencils and began to jot down a few ideas, a few diagrams. He saw soon enough that a good plan would take him the rest of the afternoon.

  9

  IT IS thirty-eight degrees below zero, the kind of cold that wants your breath and runs away with it. Hinges shriek. Leather saddles become iron. A hidden bottle of hooch turns to slush. Ping! A jar of preserves in the back room of the mercantile shatters of its own accord.