That night when he got home, I pulled him out into the alley and asked him was it true what Abel Kressler said.
“What’re you talking to Kressler for?”
It irked me he answered a question with a question. “Passing the time of day.”
He frowned. “You don’t have enough to do around here?”
I had it in my mind to answer him sharp, but I just said, “Good and plenty.”
“The man’s a born liar, and my business ain’t no business of his.”
“Bertie!” Opal called from inside the house. “Me and Dacia’s hungry!”
“There’s biscuits in the cupboard,” I called back. “Go ahead and eat one. We’ll be in there shortly. One, mind.” To Sam I said, “That’s what I told him—talk to you.”
“Son of a bitch beats his horses,” he said. “Ain’t got the sense he was born with.”
“Opal’s taking two!” come from inside the house.
“No, I’m not! She is!”
“I have to come in there, I’m gonna blister you both!” I hollered.
“Has this nice bay, sixteen hands,” Sam said. “Balky, but he don’t rest her like he ought to. So I’m hauling on contract with Lloyd Rice—bunch of skinners, ten or twelve wagons, Kressler’s the lead wagon—and we’re on the way to Milan, and I guess she balked. So he takes her out of harness and ties her to the wagon and starts beating on her with a board. Wagons go by, he says, ‘Help me teach this horse,’ and some of them’s got no better sense than to grab whatever they got—chain, rope, two-by-fours, I don’t know what-all. When I got there, her flanks was running red. I can’t abide a man beats a horse.”
This was a long speech for Sam. “You never told me this before,” I said.
“Never come up.”
One of the girls yelled something from inside the house.
“I better go feed the girls,” I said. “And then I got to run to the store.”
“Don’t be all day,” he said.
I looked at him to see was he smiling—Sam liked to tease me sometimes, and mostly I didn’t mind it—but he wasn’t. “I’ll be as long as need be,” I said sharp.
He set his mouth and looked away from me, down at the ground.
The look on his face give me a chill, like I didn’t know him at all. I swallowed. “Something you ain’t telling me.”
Now he spit in the dirt.
“Sam.” I reached out and tried to take aholt of his hand.
He pulled it away. “I told you before, I can’t stomach being in nobody’s debt.”
“And I told you, we’ll get it all paid off.” These was tones of voice we hadn’t used with each other—almost hateful. I gritted my teeth and said to myself, Stop talking this way. Find some other way to talk.
He said, “You think so, but that don’t make it so.”
This got my dander up even more, but for once in my life I never said the angry words that come to my mind. Instead, I said, “I think you’re wroth with me, and I don’t know how come.”
He pulled out a cigarette and held it in his fingers. Almost breathless, he said, “We was on the county, off and on, when I was coming up.”
For a few seconds I was too shocked to say nothing. Then I said, “Ain’t no shame in that.”
“Right,” he said, sarcastic. “Your kin, you was on it, too.”
“No, we wasn’t.” This come too fast, just like the other had come too slow.
He shrugged. “Well, now you know.”
“Daddy’d sooner let us starve,” I said.
“That’s the point, ain’t it?”
“You know him. Pride, he’s got—for all the good it ever did a one of us.”
It was getting on twilight, and Sam’s face was in a shadow. “At school—well, you know how children is,” he said.
I nodded.
He puffed out his cheeks. “Well, we had these chickens, couple dozen, maybe three weeks old. Chicks. Had their first feathers. Size of your fist, I reckon, but bony. We’d already eat the hens. Then something happened—I don’t know what—and there wasn’t no money. Daddy said they was too little to eat and they cost too much to feed.” He lit the cigarette and sucked in the smoke. “He told me, ‘Come sundown, shut ’em out of the coop, let the possums get ’em. Coyotes.’”
I winced.
“I started up bawling,” he went on. “I must’ve been six, seven. ‘They’s half-starved already—now do as you was told.’” He shook his head and then laughed a little bit. “No six-year-old boy has feelings for a goldarn chicken. But Christ.”
“No,” I said. “Yes.”
He blowed out some smoke. “Well, so, I never shut the gate. Nightfall, here they come, cheep-cheep-cheep, and one by one I wrung their necks. Dug a hole and buried them in it.”
It was quiet for a long time. I pictured him, a little boy, digging a hole as night come on. How black that hole must’ve been. I wanted to ask him, But can’t you collect from your customers that owe you? I almost did.
“Dad said to me, ‘Don’t never go in debt. They kill you with the interest. You can’t never get ahead of it,’” he said. “Kind of a thing you don’t forget.”
“I reckon so.”
“You better get to the store,” he said. “I’ll feed the girls.” He turned and walked toward the door.
A couple days later, he come home and said he’d paid Abel Kressler his sixteen dollars and would I kindly not mind his business again. I never asked him where he got the money, though I fretted about it. I knowed how come he felt like he done, but I was worried his pride would bring a cloud over what we had and make it shrivel up and die.
* * *
Wasn’t long after that, Sam come home with a big grin on his face, but he wouldn’t talk about it till after the girls was in bed. By that time I was near wore out. I pulled out the bag of mending I kept under the bed and carried it into the front room. I got out a shirt of Sam’s that was missing a cuff button, and I fished through the button box for a match.
Sam had his fiddle out, buffing it with a rag. “Remember when we went through Kansas on the wedding trip?”
“I reckon I can remember something for three months,” I said.
Either he never noticed I was mocking him, or he ignored it. He set the fiddle down and eyed the bow along the horsehair. “Seemed like a nice place.”
“You know somebody lives there?” I found a white button the right size, and I lined it up where it needed to go, spearing it with a pin.
“Can’t think of nobody offhand.” He loosened the bow and put it in the case.
“But . . . ?” I threaded a needle and tied the knot.
“But what?”
I dropped my arms on my lap and just set there. Who brought up this subject anyhow? He was talking sideways, is what. He had a habit of it—trying to make you carry the conversation where he wanted it to go. Talking sideways.
He picked up the fiddle and run his hand over the fingerboard, holding it up close to his ear. “May need redone. Starting to buzz.”
I never said nothing. I was tempted to sew the button on tight just to aggravate him, but a tight button’s more like to pop off. Mama all the time told me, said, “Don’t cut off your nose to spite your face.” A lot of women’s work is like that.
Next thing I knowed, Sam laid a newspaper on my lap. I seen it was from El Dorado, Kansas, but I didn’t look at what it said. I moved my legs till it fell on the floor. “You’re in my light,” I said. He sighed. “They found oil in Kansas, Bertie. Year ago. Big strike.”
“I know. Harold told us. On the train.”
He set down next to me and put his hands on top of mine. “Teamsters is making three dollars a day there, more if you got your own rig.”
“Doing what?”
“Hauling! Machinery, spare parts, pipe. Ten-, twelve-horse teams.”
“Is that a fact.”
“Oil hands is working round-the-clock, three shifts,” he said. “They’s got more hau
ling than they can get hauled.”
I looked on the floor. “Where’d you get that paper?”
He let go of me and pulled back. “Three dollars a day! They’s begging for men.”
“Who’s putting you up to this? Harold Satterfield?”
Sam got up and started pacing. “You like chasing the bills ever damn month? You like scrimping and scraping?”
“Never knowed nothing different.”
“Well, me, I’m sick to death of it,” he said. “I keep working twelve hours a day hauling for dirt farmers and grocery stores, ten years from now we’ll still be living in these three rooms.” His arms flew up from his sides. “It’s oil, Bertie. Steam’s over and done with. Ever machine you ever heard of—cars and trucks, tractors—”
“We’ve got kin here,” I said. “William, Dora, Buck, the twins. And there’s the baby.” I had my hand on my belly.
“I’m thinking of the baby,” he said. “We can’t get ahead here, I’m telling you.”
Get ahead—that was Harold Satterfield talking. I never heard “get ahead” before in my life.
He was standing over me now. “And if we stay for this one, next thing you know there’s a houseful, and you’re stuck.”
“Stuck? That’s what children is to you—being stuck?”
He scowled. “No, hell no.” He jerked out a chair and set at the table with his head in his hands.
“We don’t know nobody there,” I said.
“People’s people, wherever you’re at. Ain’t no different than us.” He was talking to the table, seemed like. “Think about the money. We could get ahead there. Think what that would be like.”
If I was honest, I’d knowed something was coming ever since me and him talked that night in the alley and he told me about killing them chicks. I knowed something was coming, and this was it. I pictured the towering derricks I’d saw through the train window, how they seemed like a dark forest in a bad dream. And just now I recollected the smell that had filled the train car, a smell I hadn’t even noticed at the time, seemed like. Now it come to me, an odor of death, long buried, forced out into the living earth from deep in the ground, a terrible stink, worse than when Buck found an old dog of ours dead under the granary and Daddy dragged it out, in pieces, and it was boiling with maggots.
Now I jumped up and run to the washbowl and throwed up. I retched till it felt like I was turned inside out. When I was done I broke the string of drool with my fingers and stood there hunched over and panting.
Seemed to me it was stark—Sam’s fears, and his pride, they come from a deep place, sure enough. But so did mine. I understood how come he needed to feel like he could make money, but I dreaded the idea of leaving everthing I knowed, only to go someplace strange, where it wasn’t no sure thing we would even make out. Dacia’s words come to me—you can’t make me—and my insides ached like I’d been kicked by a mule. I felt a groan go through me. I laid my head in my hands.
Then I felt the air move a little as Sam walked by. He got down a pan off the shelf and left it on the table, and he took the bowl of vomit outside. I heard him rinse it under the pump. He come back with it filled, and he had me to set down at the table, and he took a rag and dipped it in the cool water and wiped off my mouth and then my whole face. He rinsed out the rag and squeezed it and patted my neck with it. I must’ve had some pieces in my hair—he took a lock of it and run the rag along it and shook out the rag and done it again.
Now it’s true I hadn’t knowed very many men, but for sure I’d never knowed a man that knowed what to do when there was vomit or blood or them kind of things in the house and just went and took care of it without you saying nothing. Women, they knowed, but not men, as a rule. Sam, he just done it without one word. I wasn’t used to nobody looking after me.
I don’t reckon there was nothing I wouldn’t do for him after that. I told myself, After all, it ain’t Russia, it’s just Kansas.
“Do people live in the oil fields?” I said.
“Single men mostly,” he said. “Ain’t enough rooms, and some of them’s doubling up or sleeping outside in bedrolls.”
“Outside?”
“Not us—not you, in your condition. We’ll get us a place, don’t worry. There’s a little town I’ve got my eye on. Wiley, they have a hotel there.” He took up patting me with the rag again.
“You been planning,” I said.
“Well—in case. You know.” He give me a big smile.
I sighed. “Reckon it wouldn’t hurt to go down there and see if we like it. If we don’t, we can come back.”
He let out his breath and laid the rag in the bowl. “You’ll like it, I bet you will.” He smiled his big smile. “My dad used to say, ‘All’s fish that comes to the net.’” He laughed, and then he stood up and danced around the room. “Three dollars a day! Three dollars a day! We won’t know how to spend it all! Three dollars a day!”
Wasn’t till I got ready for bed that it hit me—today it was a year since we’d buried Mama. No wonder my thoughts had went to such a dark place. I reminded myself, Daddy always said, us Winslows could fall into an outhouse and come out smelling like a rose. I hoped he was right for once in his life.
I couldn’t get to sleep that night, so I got up and lit a candle and read the El Dorado paper. That’s the first time I ever heard of a thing called a tarpaper shack. It was a little house built on a wooden frame, but for siding they used thick paper coated in black tar. It didn’t do a whole lot to keep out the wind, the cold, the heat, nor the rain, the paper said, but it was cheap and lightweight and quick to build. They built some of these shacks on skids, so when one field petered out, why, they just hooked up a team of horses and drug the house to the next one. Tarpaper shacks was for people that was lucky. Otherwise you slept outside, like Sam had said.
Then I wrote a note to Alta Bea, could I come calling on Tuesday morning. There was something I wanted to talk to her about. Seemed like she always helped me think things through.
* * *
When I got to the boardinghouse where Alta Bea and Harold lived, I wasn’t surprised he’d give the impression he was living higher than he was—Harold was like to puff things up. The house was at the end of a treeless, dusty street. There was boxes of trash scattered in the weeds, and a possum hissed and run off when I walked up the steps. Kind of a place where me or my kin might live, but Alta Bea, she was used to a lot better than this. I wondered what did she do all day.
The front porch had two doors on it. I knocked at the one had Satterfield wrote on a piece of paper in the window. Alta Bea come to the door directly.
“Where are the girls?” she said.
“At the barbershop with Buck and Daddy,” I said. “They like to play like they’re cutting each other’s hair.” I unpinned my hat. It was awful hot in that house.
She motioned for me to set on a cushion chair under the front window, and then she poured a glass of water from a pitcher on the table. It felt dark in the room, and I realized all the curtains was closed. I seen the ones on the window behind me was fastened with straight pins up and down.
I remembered the letter her mama’d give me for her, and I fished it out of my pocket.
At first she just looked at it in my hand while she poured herself a glass of water and gulped it standing up. Then she poured another glass and set down with it. She took the letter, glanced at the handwriting, and put it in her pocket. We neither one said a word about it. I was curious, but it didn’t feel like it was none of my business.
“You look tired,” I said. There was big circles under her eyes and a greasy shine to her face. Her hair was combed, but the waves was frizzy.
“How’s Harold?” I said, to be polite.
“Work,” she said. “Work work work.” Her voice was breathy. She gulped more water.
It hit me, she was hung over. I seen it many times with Daddy. I felt a chill.
“We had so much fun on the train, Harold and I, remember?” She glanced ar
ound the room like she was looking for something. “He wants to get married, but I don’t know. It’s not what I expected. I don’t know.” She got up, poured herself another glass of water, and set back down.
She sounded so downhearted, I never said nothing. I wondered was it a mistake, coming here. Things seemed off here, just like they was at her folks’ house. I felt an ache start up in my jaw. I couldn’t think of nothing to do or say to make things right for her.
“Now he’s got it into his head he wants to be in the oil business.” She took out a cigarette and stuck it between her lips. “He’s like all salesmen—believes his own line of blarney.”
“I know. Sam, he—”
“And move to Kansas,” she said. “The middle of the desert.” She lit the cigarette and sucked in three deep swallows, blowing the smoke in a stream out of her nose, looking up at the ceiling.
“That’s what I come to talk to you about,” I said. “Sam wants to go, too. I told him I’d go, but now—I’m worried the girls’ll get homesick. Dacia like to had a fit when we moved off the farm.”
Alta Bea brought her head back down and stared at the wall just past my head like she was reading something in the wallpaper. Her mouth went down at the corners, and her lips took on a swole-up, ragged look.
“And most all my family I got left is here.” I took a long drink out of my glass. The water was warm, and I seen the glass had a film of something in the bottom.
She made a sound through her nose. “I guess neither one of us wants to go.”
“It’s like when the folks moved us here from back home,” I said. “You pull up roots, you feel like—Mama, she—”
“You and I would never have met, though.” She stubbed out her cigarette, but a little curl of bitter smoke trailed upward. “I hate to think . . .”
We neither one said nothing for a while.
“Sam, he’s bound and determined,” I said finally. “Says he can’t get ahead if we stay here. I expect he’s right.”
She leaned forward in her chair. “Me, I don’t have anyone to stay for.”
“Not even your mama?”
She frowned and shook her head. “It’s hard for her. She’s used to things—a certain way.” Again she looked around the room. “She could just as easily write to me in Kansas as here.”
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