Laurie’s heart stopped, then pounded. She leaned against the truck to keep from falling. It had seemed so safe. She had almost stopped worrying. Marilys touched her cheek. “At least the detective didn’t seem to know that we’re all with Way. But it shows Dub hasn’t given up. Change into your overalls, honey, and let’s see how far we can get tonight.”
Who would eat the good things from their garden, pick grapes from the arbor, plums and apples from the trees? Who would sit on the porch swing and hear the mockingbird when the honeysuckle and magnolia smelled so sweet that you ached with the beauty?
Buddy’s face screwed up. “Can I tell the guys so long?”
“Sorry, son.” Way dropped a hand on Buddy’s shoulder. “Better not.”
The back of the truck was heaped with bedding and belongings, though the only thing they were taking along of the makeshift pieces they’d acquired was the sewing machine.
“Reckon we’d better stick to the oil fields, maybe head for Louisiana for a spell,” Way said as they rattled south.
Laurie got out the harmonica. As always, when starting for a new place, she wondered, Would Morrigan be there?
She launched into “Tumbling Tumbleweed,” using her fingers to make a rustle like the wind, and in a minute, the others were singing. How lucky that no matter how light you had to travel, you could always carry songs!
21
The family moved around Louisiana for the next two years with occasional job forays into East Texas, living in tents, tarpaper shacks, lean-tos. They didn’t want Way endangering himself by working as a roughneck or roustabout but he hauled pipe and other supplies, and helped build tanks and rigs. Painted signs, too, about the time they were fixing to leave a camp. That was when Laurie and Buddy would entertain in cafés while Marilys played the piano or guitar wherever she could briefly make “a star appearance.” She did dressmaking, too, and gave piano lessons wherever there was enough of a permanent town for richer, settled folks to have pianos.
During the school year, they tried to stay a semester in the same town so Buddy’s schooling wouldn’t be too broken up. With Laurie coaching him, he managed to pass. “But you don’t go anymore!” he protested when she marched him down to register for seventh grade.
“I finished ninth grade in Splitlog,” she reminded him. “When you get that far, you can decide if you want to go on so you can maybe go to college and be an engineer or something like that.” She knew he admired the engineers, who, like drillers, always wore the very best boots and Stetsons, though most were careful never to be seen in new-looking hats. They got them oily and spanked them in some dust. Laurie let that temptation sink in and continued, “You’re staying in school till you’re through ninth if it takes ten years so you might as well buckle down and study.”
He glowered at her triumphantly. “In ten years, I’ll be twenty! You won’t be the boss of me after I’m eighteen—not even that long if I run away.”
“Run if you want to,” she said, knowing he wouldn’t, not for worlds. “But as long as you’re home, you’re going to finish at least ninth grade.”
She hadn’t felt right about being a burden on Marilys and Way while she finished high school. Besides, though she loved to learn, she was tired of always being an outsider, fearing to make friends she’d lose in a few months. She had another guitar and knew she could make a living from music. Marilys had taught her to sew and Laurie now made her own clothes. She liked cooking a lot better and she and Marilys took turns preparing meals. Several times, she and Marilys hired on to cook in boomtown restaurants. Laurie learned from Marilys how to banter with the oil-field workers while making it clear that none of them were walking her home. It was seldom necessary for Marilys to give an importunate roughneck or toolie his marching orders, but when it was, her tongue was so scathing that the man slunk away among the hoots of his companions—who, at that point, would have made sure he let the women alone.
These workers, many of them from ruined farms or ranches, ranged from one field to the next, Texas, Oklahoma, Louisiana, Kansas, working twelve-hour “towers,” cleaning up, eating, then looking for some fun, which was usually a fight, before collapsing on a cot that was often warm from the previous occupant. Laurie saw so many tanned, joking, oil-stained men that it seemed Morrigan should have turned up amongst them.
“That driller, Jim Hartford, seems real nice,” Marilys remarked one day as she put a row of pies in the oven and Laurie washed dishes in the open-sided tent restaurant where they were working. “And I’ve heard that movie he asked you to, Algiers, is really good—with Charles Boyer, it has to be!”
“Jim is nice.” Laurie scrubbed at some hardened egg. “But—well, it doesn’t seem right to go out with him.”
“Whyever not? He can’t be more than twenty-three or -four. It’s true you’re only fifteen but you’re grown up.”
When she really was grown up—and when Buddy was eighteen, so Redwine’s custody order wouldn’t count—then they could settle down. Way could start a painting business, Marilys could teach piano, maybe play in a nice restaurant, and Laurie and Buddy could perform without worrying about getting caught.
They could go visit Rosalie, too, and collect the books and things Laurie hoped she was still saving. Through the years, Laurie had sent Rosalie money now and then and let her know they were fine, but she always mailed letters from some town they were just passing through, or gave them to a worker who was heading for another field to mail when he got there. There mustn’t be any way for Grandpa Field to track them and hand them over to Redwine. Of course he probably didn’t want her now, but he’d cause Marilys and Way plenty of grief, maybe even get them sent to the penitentiary. All this passed through Laurie’s head before she rinsed the last dishes and began drying them.
“Don’t think I’m crazy, Marilys, but I keep hoping that—well, that John Morrigan may turn up.”
“Good grief!” Marilys’s jaw dropped. She wiped her hands on her apron and sighed. “Laurie, baby, am I right that this man was with you for just a day while your daddy was driving you to your grandpa’s?”
Memories flooded back from those times she remembered no more than she had to, except for Morrigan. Leaving Prairieville and the brave little cherry tree, the desolate wasteland of the Oklahoma Panhandle, Buddy sick, Daddy wrestling with the flat tire, and Morrigan appearing, just when they all needed hope and comfort so much. As always, when she really allowed herself to think about him beyond being grateful daily for the harmonica and his songs, Laurie’s gratitude mingled with a silent wail from her heart. Morrigan, Morrigan, won’t I ever see you again, won’t I ever find you?
“He came along at noon the day we left home,” she said, blinking back tears. “He got Daddy to rest till it cooled off and made willow tea for Buddy. He helped Daddy drive and change flats and we let him off next morning so he could catch a train.”
“So he was really with you less than a day.”
“Yes, but you know how days are. Lots are just about the same. Some are real happy and others are pretty bad.” Laurie groped to explain. “Some days are like—hinges. They can swing either way and shut you on that side. Black Sunday was like that, when Daddy went after Buddy and we all thought the world was coming to an end. That was the day when everything changed.” Laurie could still hardly bear to think about her mother’s last illness and forged ahead. “It was a hinge day when Buddy and I ran away and met Way on the train. If he hadn’t been there—” She shivered even now to remember the jocker. “It was a hinge when we got in Redwine’s car for the first time. And when you decided to come away with us and hunt for Way.”
“But, honey, Morrigan only did what any decent man would have.”
Laurie shook her head. “He gave me music.”
“Yes, and that was wonderful—is wonderful.” Marilys gave Laurie a helpless, worried look. “Listen, dear, all I’m trying to say is that you’ve turned this Morrigan into a hero. With you dreaming over him all these years
, building him up, he seems smarter and handsomer and wiser and stronger than any man who’s going to walk in here and stretch his legs under the table. But they’re here.” She hesitated. “Laurie, I hate to say this, but you’ve got to face it. The oil fields’re dangerous and so’s a hobo’s life. He could be dead.”
“If he is, I don’t want to know it.” Laurie hugged the older woman and laughed. “Marilys, I’m only fifteen! The way you’re carrying on, anyone would think I was an old maid! I’ll bet if I wanted to marry Jim, you and Way would have fits.”
Marilys grinned reluctantly. Marriage agreed with her. She was prettier now she ever had been, not so frail and wispy, with good healthy color in her cheeks. “You are too young to get married, but you’re of an age when you ought to start getting acquainted with men, go out with some nice ones, fall in love a few times for practice.”
“I don’t think I’m going to do that.”
Marilys scanned her closely. “Oh, Laurie, baby! You sure can’t think you’re in love with John Morrigan!”
Laurie colored. “I don’t know what it is. He lives in the back of my mind, he’s always there, just like his songs.” She had never tried to pursue her feelings for Morrigan till she could put them into words. “He—he came to us when it was like the end of the world. Rosalie was nice to us, but if Morrigan hadn’t come, if he hadn’t left us his songs, I don’t know what would have happened to Buddy and me.”
“You’d have managed.”
“Maybe. But it’s like you would’ve managed without Way.”
Way just then drove up in front of the café and got out of the truck. They looked anxiously at each other as they heard him coughing. “That asthma gets worse all the time,” Marilys said soft enough for him not to hear. He got mad when they fussed over him. “I think it’s the mold and damp. It didn’t start till we moved to Louisiana.”
Laurie thought about that. “Maybe we need to move to where it’s dry.”
“Maybe. But we can’t get near the Panhandle in case Dub’s still got the law or his detectives after Way and us.”
“We could go to Oklahoma or central Texas.”
“May have to.” Marilys poured a mug of steaming coffee and handed it to Way as he sank down on a bench. Coffee helped relax his spasming chest muscles. By the time he swallowed a second mug, his skin had lost its pallor and he could speak.
“Sorry, gals,” he said, with a twisted grin. “You better take me out and shoot me.”
“Hush that!” Marilys studied him anxiously as she refilled the mug. “What we’d better do is move to where you can breathe!”
They had argued this before. It was a mark of how bad off Way was when he hunched his shoulders and then nodded. “Okay,” he wheezed. “Soon as Buddy finishes school. Can’t pull him out three weeks before the end of the term.”
“All right,” bargained Marilys, “as long as you’ll lay off work and take care of yourself.”
Three weeks and two days later, they picked Buddy up at school, stopped at the drugstore to celebrate with chocolate malts his passing sixth grade, and drove toward the setting sun.
They didn’t get into the worst part of the Dust Bowl, but the fringe that the Fields had driven through on their way to southwestern Oklahoma four years ago had changed past recognition. It had rained enough last year in 1938 to finally break the drought that had begun in 1931 and produce something of a wheat crop. This year’s rainfall was close to normal. Many farmhouses stood empty but around them, instead of oceans of fine, rippled dust, valiant spears of corn and wheat marched to the horizon and cattle grazed where buffalo grass had revived and ruffled softly in the wind, changing color like rose-gold velvet rubbed against the grain before it was smoothed again.
“Remember that story we read last year in The Saturday Evening Post?” Laurie asked. She loved the magazine for its good stories and usually managed a nickel for it. Because “It’s Gotta Rain Sometime” reminded her so powerfully of her home region, she’d read it several times and remembered the April 9, 1938, date, and the author, Ross Annett. “I wonder if that really happened to some farmer out here?”
“Let’s see,” mused Way. “The bank took back two of the feller’s tractors but another was buried so deep in dust it couldn’t be dug out.”
“Yes, and the granary beside it was buried, too, with some seed wheat,” added Buddy. “Little Joe and Babe found the pipe of the tractor stickin’ out and their daddy thought he’d plant the wheat and maybe get a crop but he couldn’t borrow the money for gas so he got caught tryin’ to steal some. By the time he got out of jail, the old bootlegger neighbor had bought gas and plowed and planted!”
Put that way, it didn’t sound so edifying but Laurie could scarcely lecture Buddy for a story she had read to him. “Anyhow, it began to rain,” she finished. “It finally did rain.” She pointed at a blistered gray shack that stared at them from paneless windows. “I’m sure that’s the house where the family was just starting out for California, after the bank foreclosed on them,” she said. “We filled our water jars at their well. I wonder what happened to them.” What happened to everyone who lived in these houses, who most likely never could come back to a home place?
“FDR’s New Deal helped a lot of farmers hang on,” Way remarked. “But of course, most of ’em bought tractors with the aid money and got rid of their tenants. Guess if it wasn’t for those AAA checks, there wouldn’t be any farmers left out here, ’cept for the Mennonites. They never took any government aid but they got along on account of they never did plant all their land to wheat. They planted big gardens and all kinds of crops, kept dairy cows and chickens—they could always eat.”
“What’s AAA?” asked Buddy.
Way scratched his ear. “Agricultural Adjustment Administration? Think that’s it. There’s such a passel of alphabet-soup outfits you can’t keep ’em straight. The DRS—Drought Relief Service—bought up starvin’ cattle in the worst years. Killed and buried some but shipped the rest to packing plants. Then the FSRC—Federal Surplus Relief Corporation—gave the beef away to poor families all over the country. Then there’s the Farm Security Administration, FSA, that loans farmers money for seed, fertilizer, stock feed, and other such. There’s the Farm Credit Administration, the Civil Works Administration, the Rural Rehabilitation Corporation and—”
“We saw cattle being killed and burned down in Texas,” Marilys said. “Didn’t the AAA and Soil Conservation Service buy a lot of ‘blow land’?”
Laurie had talked about that in Current Events her last year in school. “They did and hired men to furrow it to catch the blowing dust and hold the rain and snow,” she said. “They sowed it to cane and Sudan grass so the roots would hold the soil. They planted worn-out rangeland, too.”
So pulverized, dead particles that had howled through the air, never resting long enough to bond with the earth, would be held together by living roots till at last they became nourishing soil. She doubted, though, that the plains would ever again look like the Little Prairie, with gayfeather, black-eyed Susans, and Indian blanket shining out of bluestem and buffalo grass. And the people that had blown away, blasted from their land like shriveled crops, where were they now? How many could ever take root?
“FDR’s done things for the whole country, not just farmers and ranchers,” put in Marilys. “There’s the WPA and CCC to make jobs and the National Recovery Administration to help all kinds of businesses and industries. Lots of folks way out in the country got electricity because of the Rural Electrification Act. There’s Social Security so most workers can pay in for their old age as they go along, there’s a minimum wage for most workers, and John L. Lewis’s made the CIO strong enough to make big companies like General Motors and U.S. Steel bargain with workers instead of just firing them.”
“And there’s Charlie McCarthy!” added Buddy. He loved to watch the apple-cheeked marionette sit on Edgar Bergen’s knee almost as much as he’d been entranced with the funny little men in Snow Whi
te and the Seven Dwarfs. He’d sat through the movie three times and for weeks had gone around singing, “Whistle While You Work.”
“Yeah, son,” laughed Way. “There’s old Charlie and Fibber McGee and Jack Benny. None of ’em will ever be a patch on Will Rogers, though. He was funny but he told the truth about things. He’d have liked what that British Parliament feller said at the World’s Fair in New York this year—that there won’t be any peace till Franco’s widow tells Stalin on his deathbed that Hitler’s been assassinated at Moos—moos-olini’s funeral. Just about the time the country’s gettin’ over the Dust Bowl and the Depression, doggoned if it don’t look worse and worse across the pond. If you ask me, England and France should have jumped on that old Hitler the minute he invaded Austria last year.”
“At least he got his comeuppance at the Berlin Olympics when our Negro track star, Jesse Owens, left all the Master Race in the dust,” Marilys remembered.
Way sniffed. “That didn’t slow Hitler down. I’ve read Jews can’t marry Germans anymore, or be citizens, or own businesses, and they’re getting shipped to concentration camps. Hitler’s grabbed Czechoslovakia. And now he and that Moos-o-lini who took over Ethiopia three years ago have signed up to help each other for the next ten years.” He whistled sadly between his teeth. “Nineteen forty-nine! There’s goin’ to be a lot grief before then.”
“If there’s another big war, it’ll be a lot worse than the last one,” said Marilys. “Airplanes just sort of dueled each other then. But look what happened in Guernica in the Basque country during their civil war a few years ago. No military excuse for Franco to get his Nazi friends to bomb it. It was the Basques’ old, old holy city where their freedom oak grew. That’s the first time civilians were heavily bombed on purpose.”
The Longest Road Page 30