The Longest Road

by Jeanne Williams

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  The Longest Road

  A Novel

  Jeanne Williams

  For my mother, Louella, who died young but lives in my heart;

  for my father, Guy Kreie, who had a generous spirit

  and liked to laugh.

  For my brother, Lewis, my sister, Naomi, my Aunt Dorothy

  and Aunt Thelma and Uncle Lou, who remember the blowing

  dust and whose memories helped bring reality to this book.

  Author’s Note

  This book truly began on the western Kansas-Oklahoma border where my first memories were of drifted dust and tumbleweeds and dreams of the end of the world. The catalyst was listening, half a century later, to Woody Guthrie singing “So Long, It’s Been Good to Know You,” and discovering that it was not only a Dust Bowl song but an end-of-the-world song, too. On those marvelous Library of Congress tapes, recorded by Alan Lomax in 1940 (Rounder Records, Cambridge, MA), Woody not only sings of those days when so many people were forced on the road, but he tells of his own experiences. His songs fused with my memories and half-memories and I knew I had to write this story of my homeland and my people.

  As well as recording her own recollections, my sister, Naomi Zebrowski, did valuable research and gave many helpful suggestions. I cannot thank her enough for her interest and encouragement during the long months it took to write the story. My brother, Lewis Kreie, told me details he remembered, as did my aunt, Dorothy Thompson, and my “kissin’ cousin,” Alice Shook. My cousin, Jack Salmon, videotaped my aunt and uncle, Lou and Thelma Salmon, as they reminisced about their many years in Kansas. Also useful were written and taped interviews made thirty years ago with my father, Guy E. Kreie, and my grandmother, Susanna Salmon. John Wylie was my mentor on Model Ts and the oil fields.

  Gaydell Collier lent me a wonderful book from Oak Publications (New York, 1967) titled Hard-Hitting Songs for Hard-Hit People, compiled by Alan Lomax, music transcribed and edited by Pete Seeger, and with notes of the songs (many of them his) by Woody Guthrie. Woody’s autobiography of his earlier years, Bound for Glory, Dutton, New York, 1968, gives the flavor of the thirties as he rambled to California and composed some of the most “American” songs ever sung, “Pastures of Plenty,” “This Land Is Your Land,” and many others.

  Mary Magoffin lent her vintage collection of the Saturday Evening Post, Sally Spofford gave me her copy of Helen’s Babies, a book I remembered with fond nostalgia from my childhood and which is one of Laurie’s treasures.

  Works useful for oil-field background were Voices from the Oil Fields by Paul F. Lambert and Kenny Franks, University of Oklahoma Press, Norman, 1984; This Fascinating Oil Business by Max W. Ball, Bobbs-Merril, New York, 1940; Folklore of the Oil Industry by Mody C. Boatright, Southern Methodist University Press, Dallas, 1963.

  Help on the road came from The Harvest Gypsies by John Steinbeck, a collection of articles run in the San Francisco News in 1936 published by Heyday Books, Berkeley, CA, 1988; The WPA Guide to 1930s Oklahoma, compiled by Writers Project of WPA, University Press of Kansas, Lawrence, 1986; The WPA Guide to 1930s Arizona, compiled by Writers Project of the WPA, University of Arizona Press, Tucson, 1989; Texas, compiled by the Writers Project of the WPA, Hastings House, New York, 1940, and Route 66, a photographic essay by Quinta Scott with text by Susan Croce Kelly, University of Oklahoma Press, Norman, 1988.

  The Dust Bowl by R. Douglas Hurt, Nelson-Hall, Chicago, 1981, gives a stark picture of those days. More emphasis on the environment is given in Dust Bowl by Don Worster, Oxford University Press, New York, 1979. Also helpful were several volumes of This Fabulous Century by Time-Life Books, New York, 1969. “The Okies—Beyond the Dust Bowl” by Williams Howarth with photos by Chris Johns, National Geographic, September, 1984, Vol. 166, No. 3, has eloquent photos and useful maps.

  Many people told me their stories of the thirties. I hope that everyone who remembers those days will find echoes here to touch their hearts and memories.

  —Jeanne Williams

  Cave Creek Canyon

  The Chiricahua Mountains

  May 1991

  1

  April warmth had opened the buds of the little cherry tree to lovely pink blossoms and its smooth bark was a deep wine color. The sapling had looked dead when Daddy brought the tree home in February from one of his trucking hauls out of eastern Kansas, but Laurie watered it faithfully and hopefully with water saved from rinsing dishes. Now, Laurie thought, its glory drew the eye from the weathered privy at the back of the lot and the boxlike little house with its blistering yellow paint.

  Maybe this spring would be different. Maybe the winds and dust wouldn’t blow and the tree would flourish, grow big and strong as the black locust in the front yard, the only other tree in this straggle of houses near the edge of town.

  Suddenly, as she stroked the red bark and tried to imagine that the blossoms smelled as sweet as they looked, the light changed. She turned. Her heart stopped, then plunged and began to pound.

  Black, towering in the sky, a shadow thickened in front of the sun before obscuring it completely. The sky wasn’t really black but brown like a black horse left out in the weather—a darkness not shadowy and soft like night but thick and weighted, roiling in billows churned up from the soil as if the earth had spewed up its center, as if its navel cord had been ripped, and the insides were erupting.

  The gleaming galvanized top of the grain elevator vanished first, the second story of the bank, the emblem at the top of the Masonic hall, then the tall steeple of the Methodist church lording it over the white cross of the tabernacle across from the Fields’ house.

  Jackrabbits streaked by, trying to outrun the stinging blast. Birds flew ahead of it, hawks and great horned owls as frantic to escape as the larks, sparrows, buntings, and curlews that were usually their prey. The poor prairie chickens! Any of them surviving in bits of unplowed grassland would hunker down and suffocate like the flying birds would when their wings could no longer carry them.

  Darkness at noonday. Rivers of blood. One shall be taken and the other left.… Terror froze Laurie. It was the end of the world, the way Brother Crawford was always preaching. Mama and Daddy would be swept away in the rapture and she’d be left with the wicked to pray for the mountains to fall on them while the angels poured out the vials of wrath. Only there weren’t any mountains here.

  But there was a tree, a blooming cherry tree. Laurie ran inside the screened porch and grabbed a sheet out of the laundry basket. Biting grit slashed at Laurie’s face and fingers as she struggled to knot the ends of the sheet so the tree wore a lopsided hood. Her eyes watered from fear and grief as much as from the stinging dust.

  Covering her head with her skirt, she ran inside and took the wet towel Mama gave her to hold over her face while she helped stuff rags under the door and along the crack where it opened. They didn’t need to talk; they had done this all too often. The windows were already sealed with tape and Daddy had puttied every crack he could find. Last year, after the blowing season, the family had stayed at Floyd and Margie’s while Daddy cleaned dust out of the attic, half a ton of it, and then carefully sealed the walls and roof. Not everyone had bothered, and ceilings had caved in all over the west parts of Kansas, Oklahoma, and Texas.

  Dust storms weren’t like the tornado that touched down last year, whirled up Slim Ellis’s barn and wagon, and dropped them in shattered boards over in the next county. That great twisting funnel roared down like a freight train, swooped, and was gone in a few minutes. Laurie was used to spring dust storms just as she was to winter blizzards, but this day’s
storm was different, and worse, partly because of the cherry tree.

  Daddy came in and shut the door as fast as he could. Laurie couldn’t see his face but she knew it was him from his height. He was the tallest man in town—six feet two in his stocking feet—the best-looking man, too, with waving brown hair and sunny blue eyes. He had a dimpled groove in his chin and liked to joke a lot and talk to folks. Mama said he’d gotten his easy way of visiting with even total strangers from his father, Harry Field, who was such a horse trader that he’d been able to persuade seasoned buyers that Indian ponies brought down from Montana’s Wind River Range were fine horses that just needed a little handling.

  Even before Daddy reached her, Mama cried, “Ed! Isn’t Buddy with you?”

  Daddy stopped, looming in the murk as if he’d been turned to stone. “He’s not here?”

  “No. He took his .22 and started for Point of Rocks.”

  That jutting butte from which Indians had watched travelers along the Cimarron and sometimes preyed on them was a favorite picnic spot for townfolks. Grandpa Field, who was sixty-two, remembered—or claimed he did—when Custer was killed at the Little Bighorn in 1876 and he vowed he’d seen Geronimo when the train carrying the Chiricahua Apaches to prison in Florida stopped in St. Louis in 1886. That was a long time ago, even before World War I.

  Daddy gasped. “Buddy’s out in this?”

  “Maybe he’s at Tom Harris’s,” Mama said. Tom was Buddy’s best friend. “Or when the storm came up, maybe he went in the nearest house.”

  “And maybe he’s out by Point of Rocks,” Daddy cut in. “I’ve got to find him!”

  “Ed! You’ll just get lost yourself! More than likely, he’s fine. And if—if this is the end of the world, Jesus will take him.”

  “Well, I’m his daddy. If the world’s ending I don’t want the poor little guy to be by himself.”

  “Jesus will—”

  “Rachel, that boy don’t know Jesus like he knows me.”

  “Wait! Let me get you a wet towel to put over your face.” Mama vanished into the dust.

  The light bulb hanging from the middle of the ceiling glimmered like a smoky lantern. Mama’s shadow merged for an instant with Daddy’s. Then he was swallowed in the darkness that rushed in thicker as he opened the door. As it slammed shut, Laurie started after him.

  “You come back here!” Mama caught her, drew her so close it hurt. “No use you running out there like a chicken with its head cut off!”

  Laurie buried her face against Mama’s warm, soft neck where the two small brown moles were. They held each other. It terrified Laurie that her mother sobbed, too. “I—I put an old sheet around the cherry tree, Mama. Maybe it’ll be all right.”

  It wouldn’t. She knew it wouldn’t. Ever since Laurie could remember, the winds blew ferociously from February till May, the month’s crops were planted and started to grow. That happened every year. What was different these last years was that there was little or no rain to bring up plants that would bind the soil with their roots. Sprouts that managed to get a few inches above the soil were blasted right out of the furrows. Any that lived were buried by powdery dust driven from whatever fields it came from to wherever it could settle till the wind swept it up again into the skies.

  The scarred old black locust could stand the winds but the cherry was only a little taller than Laurie. The storm must have already snapped off the blossoms, razored the bark, smothered the limbs.

  It was wicked to grieve about a tree when her brother might be lost or when the world might be ending, but Laurie couldn’t believe Buddy would come to much harm. He hadn’t broken his neck when he’d jumped off the neighbor’s garage, or drowned when he’d fallen in the river when it was flooding, or got but one scar from the chicken pox he’d given her. She still had a dozen tiny indentations on her forehead and chin.

  As for the world ending—the sky would roll up like a scroll, the moon would turn as red as blood—she had dreamed of it ever since she could remember. Now that it might be really happening she wasn’t as scared as she’d been at first, or even as she had often been before. Many nights, when that awful moon fell toward her, growing larger and larger, she woke up screaming her throat raw. Mama always hurried in, never too tired or sick to comfort Laurie and pray with her. “If you were saved, honey,” she’d say, “you’d be glad the Lord was coming—be glad this wicked old world was ending.”

  Laurie didn’t argue about that but she didn’t believe it. She loved the world, the fresh bright, leaves of spring, the white and yellow breasts of meadowlarks soaring upward, the mockingbird’s song, snapdragons and pansies and sweet-smelling four-o’clocks that Mama cherished till wind and dust got them. People might be sinful but it didn’t seem fair that along with them, and because of them, God would destroy all the other creatures, turn rivers to blood, make oceans boil so the great whales died, destroy the forests and mountains Laurie had never seen but which must be so beautiful.

  “The heavens declare the glory of God, the firmament sheweth His handiwork.” If people were the problem, why didn’t He just get rid of them and leave the earth to the birds and animals?

  Nothing made sense, though, when the ground that was supposed to stay under your feet and nourish flowers and trees and crops churned up in a wild, suffocating force that scoured the soil down to hardpan and when at last the wind died, what had been soil once settled in shifting, pulverized drifts where nothing could grow. It was a chaos of destruction, not creation.

  What scared Laurie most was that Daddy and Bud were out there someplace in the howling dark and Mama was coughing so bad. She’d nearly died two years ago from dust pneumonia and that was when she’d lost the baby sister Laurie had wanted so much.

  Bud had been fun to take care of when he was a baby but since he started school, he was always off with the Harris boy, Tom, or out hunting, or hiding out in that pitiful little hole he called his room. He kept the door shut with a rusty old padlock—as if anyone would want to go in there! Laurie could peek through a crack in the wall and see that all he had of any possible interest were some Big Little Books, thick cardboard-bound volumes about three by five inches printed on cheap paper, and the G-Man badge, decoder, and ring he’d sent off for with some cereal boxtops. These, along with arrowheads garnered from Point of Rocks and a huddle of snake rattles and shed skins, occupied a shelf above the cot spread with an old Navajo blanket. A coyote skull was nailed over the shelf, its moth-eaten tawny hide made a rug, and a few nails held Buddy’s clothes except for socks and underwear. These Mama neatly arranged in an apple crate when she entered once a week to change the sheets while Bud stood guard to make sure Laurie didn’t intrude.

  Yes, a sister would have been nice, especially since Mama wouldn’t let Laurie play with children whose families were worldly and that included just about all the Prairieville girls Laurie’s age except Mary Harkness, who wasn’t any fun, and Beulah Martin, who lived out on a farm and rarely got to town. Mary knew all manner of interesting things and when they were beyond earshot of adults, playing in the houses they built of tumbleweeds, she used words that Laurie knew were dirty and forbidden, though she didn’t understand what they meant and wouldn’t ask for fear of being laughed at, Shit must mean the same as fuck, and that had something to do with what men did to women, though Laurie couldn’t imagine how the little nubbin she’d seen on Bud when she changed his diapers could possibly turn into anything that would do the scary and fascinating things Mary said it could. Once when the girls had seen two dogs hooked together, Mary said that was what grown-ups did to make babies. Laurie wouldn’t, couldn’t, think Mama and Daddy had done that.

  If the world ended now, she’d go to hell because she’d listened to Mary talk nasty, hadn’t repented for throwing hot oatmeal on Bud when he wouldn’t dry the dishes, and wasn’t saved, let alone sanctified. She prayed nights with Mama when she was scared but she’d never “prayed through.” That was why she’d never gone to the altar during revi
vals even when she was sure she’d die that night for committing the unpardonable sin, which, like the age of accountability, was hard to figure out exactly, though it had to do with hardening your heart against God. Mama had been sanctified years ago—that meant she couldn’t sin or backslide—but Daddy was only saved. He backslid so often that he never kept saved long enough to reach that next state of permanent righteousness.

  “Oh, God,” prayed Mama through racking coughs that shook Laurie, too, since they still had their arms around each other. “If you’re coming to judge us, have mercy on Ed! Forgive anything he’s done wrong since the last time he got saved. He’s a good man, Lord, though he’s had to battle his temper, but when you think how his dad put him out to work for neighbors when he was eight years old, and how hard he’s had it, maybe you’ll give him credit for tithing ten percent even when there’s holes in his shoes.”

  Laurie’s thoughts veered after Grandpa, Harry Field, who farmed on the shares down in southwestern Oklahoma. He was a tough, stocky, bald-headed, hook-nosed man who had lost one eye in a saloon brawl when he was a soldier in the Spanish-American War. His tight slit of a mouth was profane with tobacco, whiskey, and foul language. He and Mama couldn’t stand each other so it was lucky he lived three hundred miles away. Just to aggravate Mama, he rattled up in an old truck every few years with his invariably pregnant young third wife, Rosalie, and stair-step kids who took possession of Laurie’s small room and Buddy’s tiny nook partitioned off the back porch. These aunts and uncles—yes, that’s what they were—jumped on the beds and sofa with dirty feet, always had snot running down their faces, and, worst of all, wet the beds so that the mattresses were streaked and had a faint stink for weeks no matter how hard and soapily they were scrubbed or how long they were left out in the sun.

  Mama, tight-lipped, adjured Laurie to be polite and show respect to her grandfather but Laurie detested him till her insides twisted. He made her ashamed, ashamed that he was her kin. In spite of his wife’s slovenliness, Laurie couldn’t help liking Rosalie, who was pretty, good-natured, smelled good, and shared the gum and pop she bought for her kids. She could also tell spine-tingling ghost stories. Enduring these visits was like living through a small war, and when the truck rumbled off, Mama always said under her breath, “Thank you, Lord, for my good husband, who doesn’t take after his father except for never meeting a stranger and liking to tell jokes and being too friendly with women brassy enough to roll down their stockings.”