A Cup of Dust

by Susie Finkbeiner

  “Well, one time when Jed Bozell’s traveling show rolled through town, he had this lady with him. A lady like none of us had ever seen before. She had on a beautiful dress, and she wore her hair all piled up on top of her head.”

  “What did her face look like?” I asked.

  “That’s the thing nobody knew. She had this mask she wore all the time. I imagine she even slept with it on. It looked like the face of a porcelain doll, all painted and shiny.” He knocked a bit of ash off into the dust. “All the young fellas in town fell all over themselves to meet her and get a peek under that mask. They were just sure she was the world’s most beautiful woman.”

  “What did she do in the show?”

  “That’s another thing nobody knew. Not until they went into her tent and paid her their nickel.” He leaned in close and half whispered. “Turns out she was the Incredible Cussing Woman.”

  I giggled, covering my mouth with a hand to catch it. Daddy laughed out his nose and smoke puffed out behind it.

  “A fella would pay, and then she’d say all kinds of cuss words. Enough to make even a cowboy blush.” He finished off his cigarette and tossed the still-burning end into the yard. “Now, I was too young and curious for my own good. I got myself a nickel. Told Meemaw that I wanted to see the stinky pig or something like that. Then I waited for my turn in the tent.”

  “Did Meemaw ever find out?”

  “No. And she isn’t going to, right?”

  I nodded, and Daddy winked.

  “Before that woman started cussing,” Daddy continued, “I asked if she wouldn’t mind taking off the mask. She said if I could hear all her cussing without blushing or getting mad or crying, she’d let me see her real face. We shook on it and she started in on the most foul words I had ever heard.”

  “What did she say?”

  “Well, darlin’, if I repeated any of those words, Meemaw would wash my mouth with soap. Even now.”

  I tried my hardest to keep my giggle from turning into a big old laugh.

  “Anyhow, she kept cussing, and I breathed in deep and didn’t let one of them words get me worked up. Turns out I’ve got myself a good poker face.” Daddy made his face blank and blinked twice. “When she was finished, she was stuttering, trying to think of more dirty words to say.”

  “Then what happened?

  “I’m getting there, darlin’.” Daddy grinned at me. “She agreed to make good on her end of the handshake promise and reached behind her head to unfasten the mask. She pulled it off, and I about fell out of my chair.”

  “What did she look like?”

  “Under that mask and all the golden hair piled on top of her head was the face of a goat. She even worked her jaw around, chewing the cud.”

  “What did you do?”

  “The only thing I could do. I ran fast as I could.” He made a face like he was terrified. “She was the second scariest person I had ever seen.”

  “Who was the first?”

  “What’s that?”

  “Who was the first scariest?”

  “Oh, I don’t know, darlin’.” His smile fell, and his face turned serious, the way it did when something bothered him. He started to roll another cigarette. “It was just an old story.”

  “Was it Jimmy DuPre?”

  Daddy didn’t answer. He focused on rolling.

  “I saw a newspaper with Jimmy DuPre in it.” I rubbed my eye, working out a grain of dirt. “It was the story about him and you.”

  “That so?”

  “Was he the scariest person?” I asked, knowing that if I asked enough Daddy would tell me eventually.

  “I reckon so.” His deep voice was just above a whisper. “Don’t mind if I never meet another man like him.”

  “You shot him, though,” I said. “You won.”

  “I had to shoot him, Pearl. Hated to do it. He was real young. Maybe all of twenty years old. That’s still a boy, really.” Daddy tipped his hat to the back of his head and rubbed at his forehead. “He was just a boy who never worked out how to be a man. Never got a chance, either.”

  Daddy lit his cigarette and smoked for a bit without saying anything else. A baby cried somewhere from the direction of the Hooverville. Daddy looked over that way but didn’t seem worried about it.

  “I tell you, the way that boy Jimmy looked at me, like I wasn’t even there, I knew he’d kill me without thinking twice about it. It wouldn’t have bothered him one bit.” The calluses on the palm of his hand scratched against his stubbly face. “Killing him brought me no satisfaction. It wasn’t justice. It never feels good to shoot a boy in the chest.”

  “You had to, Daddy.”

  “Maybe. But killing Jimmy didn’t make things right. It didn’t fix what he’d done.” Daddy smoked that second cigarette down to a stub. “He had his pistol pointed right at my head. If I’d waited, he would have ended my life. That wasn’t my day to die.”

  “I’m glad you did it. I’m glad it’s him that’s dead and not you.”

  He turned toward me, his eyelids closing and a long, deep sigh pushing out his mouth. He reached his arm around my shoulders, pulling me close. “I shouldn’t be filling your head with nightmares. Your mama would holler at me if she knew I was telling you about that man.”

  “Can I tell you something?” I whispered from the safety of tight-in-his-arms. “There was a man who scared me, too.”

  “Who was it?”

  “A man who jumped off the train.”

  “Fella got here just the other day? Blue eyes and shorter than me? Little guy?”

  I nodded. “He killed a jackrabbit.”

  The words to describe what had happened were out of my reach, and I stumbled over the sounds in my mouth.

  “At the rabbit drive?” Daddy asked. “You seen him there?”

  “Yes, sir.” Swallowing, I closed my eyes, remembering how bad it felt when he touched my face. “He hit it so hard.”

  “Darlin’, all the folks there were doing that. Killing jackrabbits is what those drives are for.”

  “But, Daddy—”

  “Don’t you worry about him,” he said. “I’ve already talked to him. He’s just here looking for a little make-work so he can move along to California. He’s all right, if you ask me.”

  “But—”

  “Nah, darlin’. Don’t give him a second thought.” He let go of me. “He won’t bother you.”

  I opened my mouth to tell him that the man had known my name and that he’d looked at me in a strange way. But no sound came out.

  “Now, don’t you tell your mama we’ve been talking about old Jimmy. She’d be sore at me for a week.”

  I nodded.

  “I hope you never have to be so scared of a man like that in your life.” He helped me to my feet. “I’d give my life to make sure of it.”

  Daddy scooped me up and carried me inside, all the way up to my room.

  He left his boots on the front steps.

  Jimmy DuPre visited my dreams that night.

  He pointed his gun right at my head and said every cuss word he knew. His rat face was held in a tight grimace, and he worked his jaw around, chewing on something.

  Blood gushed from a hole in his chest. Still, he aimed the pistol right at me.

  “You don’t know how close I got to you, Pearl,” he growled. “You nearly were mine.”

  His cornflower-blue eyes pierced right through me.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Mama made good on her promise to take food to the Hooverville. She packed up loaves of bread and lots of gold-brown biscuits and jars of baked beans in every basket and box she could find around the house. We helped her load the flatbed of Daddy’s work truck.

  “It won’t be enough,” she worried to Meemaw. “I wish I had more to take.”

  “Mary, you can’t starve your own kids to feed them folks.” Meemaw patted her hand. “It’s more than they’ve got now.”

  Mama took one more trip around the kitchen to see what else she
could pack while Meemaw and Daddy waited in the truck. She collected a few extra linens and blankets we didn’t use.

  “Just in case,” she said.

  She tapped her fingers against her chin, making sure she wasn’t forgetting anything. Her hands were bare. So was her head.

  Mama always wore her gloves and hat when she went calling. She wore them to church, too. It seemed funny to me that she would have forgotten them that day.

  “Do you want me to get your gloves and hat?” I asked.

  “No thank you, darlin’,” she said. “I’ll go without today.”

  Then I noticed she was still wearing her flour-sack dress with a faded apron over top, and her everyday shoes. Those shoes of hers were so worn they couldn’t come to a shine no matter how hard she rubbed at them.

  Mama was dressed in her normal, work-around-the-house clothes like the women she was going to meet.

  I thought Mama was about the best lady in all of Cimarron County.

  “Can I go with you?” I asked, following her all the way to the front door. “I’ll help.”

  “No, darlin’. Not this time. I need you here with Beanie.” She smoothed my hair, messy from the morning of working in the kitchen with her. “You know we can’t leave her alone. She’s like to go off wandering.”

  “We could make her go with us.”

  “Well, it’s best that she stays in bed.” Mama leaned near me and whispered. “It’s her time.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Oh, you’ll understand one of these days.” Mama kissed my cheek before standing straight. “Soon enough you’ll get your time, too.”

  I decided that I needed to figure out what my time would be and when it would come so I could do whatever it took to avoid it. If Beanie had it, I sure as heck didn’t want it.

  Ray would know. He knew about all the things adults liked to keep secret. I decided to ask him next chance I got.

  “Mrs. Jones should be stopping by soon to pick up the laundry.” She turned the knob on the front door. “You make sure she takes the lye on the kitchen counter, hear?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Tell her that I’ll be by later to pay.” She smiled before walking out the door and closing it behind her.

  I listened to Mama’s heavy shoes on the porch steps and watched out the window as she climbed in the truck and Daddy drove away. Meemaw waved at me. I raised my hand to her, but they were gone before she saw me.

  Shuffling around the living-room floor in my bare feet, I looked at all the pictures on the wall. One of me and Beanie from a few years before, our faces close together. Somehow whoever had taken the picture had got her to look right into the camera. If I hadn’t known better, to look at the photo I wouldn’t have thought anything was wrong with her at all.

  Next I stood in front of the old, wooden cross that Mama had hanging in the middle of the wall. It had been there ever since I could remember. Millard kept a cross on the wall in his office too, but his had Jesus still on it with a white cloth around His middle and His head tipped to one side and a red gash across His belly. I asked Mama why we didn’t have one like that. She said it was on account we were Baptists.

  I was glad we were Baptists. I couldn’t stand looking at Jesus hanging like that. It would have broke my heart every single day.

  Right next to the cross, Mama had put a picture of President Roosevelt. I studied that portrait of good old FDR and told God a thank-you prayer for letting him be our president. Then I asked if He couldn’t make the man hurry up with fixing Oklahoma.

  In Jesus’s precious name, amen.

  On the table next to the radio sat a black telephone. I picked up what Mama had told me was the receiver and held it against my face. It didn’t make a sound, and I knew it wasn’t connected to anything.

  All the telephone poles in our county had been broken in half over the years by dust storms.

  Useless as it was, Mama liked to keep it out. She said it was pretty. I thought it was just one more thing to gather dust.

  Even though Mama had told me not to play with that telephone at least a dozen times, I still put my finger in the hole of the dial and moved it all the way around. It clicked as it turned and then sped back to place when I pulled my finger out.

  Jutting out my hip, I put my hand at my waist like Mama had done when the calls did go through.

  “Yes, hello,” I said into the silent receiver, making believe there was a person on the other end. “This is Ms. Spence calling for—”

  Hard knocking on the back door made me jump and hold the receiver to my chest. Whoever was back there rapped against the glass over and over, shaking the door in its frame. I hung up the telephone, my hand shaking.

  I knew Mrs. Jones would have gone to the back door, I just hadn’t expected her to knock so hard.

  The pounding grew louder, more impatient.

  “Anybody home?”

  The voice was low. A man’s voice thick with insistence.

  “Hello?” he called.

  I couldn’t place that voice, but something about it made my stomach sour with dread.

  The knocking went on and on, only getting louder and louder.

  “Anybody in there?”

  Curiosity always did get the better of me and I made my way to the back door. The closer I got, the more my heart thudded along with the knocking. I stood flat against the wall, hoping not to be seen. More and more fear set in where my stomach wobbled. Still, I couldn’t stop myself from looking.

  Mama had a lacy curtain that covered the top part of the glass in the back door. Through it I saw the outline of the man, fedora on his head. Lifting his hand, he knocked yet again. I thought he looked shorter than Daddy and a good deal slimmer, too.

  The man lowered his face and peeked into the window through the small gap under the lacy curtain. His eyes met mine, freezing my feet where they stood.

  Those eyes were the blue that haunted me in my sleep.

  “Pearl? That you in there?” His voice dropped the insisting. He talked like we were good pals. “Remember me?”

  Fear pulsed through me so thick, and I couldn’t even nod my head. In the days after I’d last seen him, I had pictured him as one of the savages in Daddy’s book about the Old West. The picture in my mind was of an Indian holding up the scalp of a white man, just the way the smirking man had held the rabbit.

  I couldn’t make out his whole face through the glass, just his eyes with the dark thickness of brows over the bright blue. Still, I was sure he had a wicked grin pulling up one side of his mouth, a wad of chaw stuck in his lip, and a shirt in his pack splattered with rabbit blood.

  “Aw, come on, Pearl. Don’t be like this. I ain’t fixing to hurt you.” He winked at me. “I’m just hungry. Out looking for a little grub. You wouldn’t send away a hungry man, would you?”

  Rubbing sweaty palms against the sides of my dress, I wondered if Mama would send him away if she was home. Then I remembered the goats and the sheep and how Jesus had scolded those who didn’t feed the hungry. The smirking man on the back porch was hungry, and if I didn’t give him something to eat, I’d be denying Jesus.

  Besides, he looked so different from the way I’d imagined him. His wink had been kind. Daddy had said he was okay, that he wouldn’t bother me.

  I took a step toward the door.

  “That’s it, Pearl. I ain’t a bad man. Come on and open the door for your old chum.”

  My shaking hand turned the lock. I reminded myself that I was only doing it for Jesus. The lock made a grinding sound of gears before the door creaked open.

  The man stood upright, grinning down at me. He turned and spit out a wad of chaw before smiling with his full mouth.

  “Well, howdy there, little missy.” He looked over my head. “Say, you here by yourself?”

  “No, sir.”

  “That’s good. Never know when a strange man’s liable to knock on the door.” His tongue moved across his lips, reminding me of a wolf lick
ing its chops. “Who’s here with you?”

  “My big sister.”

  “Big sister, eh?” He stepped past me into the house. “She pretty as you?”

  “I don’t know,” I answered. “I guess so.”

  “With two good-looking girls in a house, I’d think a man would take better care.” He touched the lye soap on the counter. “He’s the sheriff. Ain’t that right?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  He turned to me and got real close to my face. Sour milk and tobacco breath hung in the air between us, making me want to cough. “Ain’t he never told you that it’s dangerous to open the door for strangers?”

  A thin line of spit trickled out of the corner of his mouth. He wiped it off on the back of his hand.

  “Yes, sir,” I answered.

  “You don’t mind so good, do you?” Pulling back from me, he scratched himself in a way I’d been told wasn’t polite. “It’s all right. We ain’t strangers, are we? You and me’s thick as thieves. Pearl and Eddie. Eddie and Pearl. Gonna take over the world, you and me.”

  It made no sense to me, what he said, and I half wondered if he was loony as Mad Mabel. But at least I’d learned his name.

  “Where is that sheriff?” He took a few steps through the kitchen, running his fingertips over the counter. “Out shooting bad guys?”

  He turned to see my reaction. I didn’t give him one.

  “He does shoot bad guys. Right?” He tilted his head. “The sheriff’s the same one that shot down that DuPre boy, ain’t he? What’s his name?”

  “Tom Spence,” I answered.

  “No. I mean that DuPre boy.”

  “Jimmy DuPre.” The rat face sneered in my mind.

  “That’s the one.” Shaking his head, he crossed his arms and leaned against Mama’s counter. “Know what I heard? I heard little Jimmy DuPre never had no gun. Just put his hand in his pocket. Like this.”

  Eddie shoved his hand in his own pocket and pushed it up against the fabric, making it look like a pistol.

  “See what I’m saying? That’s all the DuPre boy done, and the sheriff shot him. Cold blood.” Eddie pulled his hand out and crossed his arms again. “What do you think about that?”