“Yeah? How do we get there?”
“Next Sunday—when we go to church—Jessica can sneak off and meet you at the depot!”
“I could,” said Jessica. “We could go down to your folks—”
“What if your Pa was to catch us?” said Tom.
“He won’t,” said Mathy. “He’ll be singing in the choir.”
“He sure would be mad when he found out.”
“He’d only holler a lot. What do you care—you won’t be here.”
Tom looked at Jessica in terror.
“Could we, Tom?” she said.
“Gosh, I don’t know—”
“Well, make up your minds!” said Mathy. “I’ve got to let Leonie out of the toilet.”
Tom wiped the sweat off his forehead. “Oh boy,” he said.
“Please, Tom!” Mathy cried. “We love you so much!”
He stood with his back against the tree, facing his loving adversaries—both of them soft and young and sweet, the one earnest and determined, the other shy and adoring, and both of them as deadly in intention as a shotgun. A slow, defeated grin came over his face. “Well,” he said, looking at Jessica, “I reckon I’m game if you are.”
“I’m game! Oh, Tom—” she cried and stopped short. “Really and truly, Tom?”
“Yeah.”
“You’ll meet me Sunday at the depot?”
“Yeah.”
“You promise?”
He nodded soberly. “I promise.”
“Well, good!” said Mathy. “Now come on, Jessica, before they catch us.”
11
If Jessica had not been obsessed with first love, if she had not been so smitten with guilt, she might never have believed Mathy’s assurances; she might never have left home that Sunday morning with her heart in her mouth and the egg money in her pocketbook.
If Tom had had a temperament less easy and affable, and, above all, if he had made any other plans, he might never have met her at the depot.
But she was, and he hadn’t, and they caught the noon train.
About the same moment, the family was coming out of church. Mathy conveniently lost herself in the crowd until she heard the whistle far down the track, at which point she produced the letter which Jessica left. They were standing by the car, waiting for Jessica to appear. Matthew didn’t finish the first page even. “Get in,” he said, and they drove off lickety-split to the depot.
“Was that yore daughter?” said the stationmaster with a faint trace of a smile.
Matthew jumped back in the car and killed the engine. He had to get out and crank. Sweat poured from his face, and his shirt stuck to his back. On the way home, the engine died again and he had to clean a sparkplug. No one uttered a word. Callie cried all the way.
They never did find out how Tom and Jessica met. Mathy swore innocence. But she had her punishment. Papa wouldn’t let them come home any more.
In spite of him, Callie sent Jessica’s clothes. “I don’t care what she’s done, I’ll not have her going around in somebody else’s old rags.” She packed dresses and underwear and pretty ribbons, all of them salted down with tears and exasperation. “I can’t hardly stand it! Her goin’ off down there with those hillbillies! I wanted her to have someone nice.”
“Water seeks its own level,” said Matthew.
He could not forgive her the degradation. She had wrecked his standing in the community. And why? In his good Protestant manner, he would have accepted the blame and made a virtue of acceptance. But he could not for the life of him see where the blame lay. He had given her an easy life, a good home, an education. Sitting one day in the timber in a fine August rain, he cried out to the Lord, “You know how hard I work, winter and summer! You know how I have tried! What could I do that I haven’t done?”
But no bush burned and there was no answer. Only the soft sibilance of the rain in the oak leaves.
12
Tom and Jessica spent the winter with his family, a hilarious brood who simply moved over and made a place for her at the table. They were a trout-fishing, squirrel-hunting, hill-farm family who lived happily from hand to mouth. They nipped a little home brew when it came handy. On Saturday night they dressed up in the best they had and clapped and sang at play-parties. On Sunday morning they put on the same clothes and clapped and sang in church. Piety was pleasure and vice-versa, and Jessica was shocked and delighted by them.
There was very little these days that did not shock and delight her. She lived in perpetual astonishment, finding herself there and with Tom. She liked him more and more as they got acquainted. Even his illnesses—colds, fever, the attacks of weakness which he seemed prone to—even these endeared him to her. She lavished affection all over and around him, and the two of them lived in that warm radiant bath like a pair of goldfish in a bowl. Everyone around stared in and smiled indulgently.
Her one worry was financial. They were not contributing. Seeing no way for Tom to earn much of a living, she got herself a job teaching the local school. She taught by ear, remembering what she could and revising the method where she thought permissible. It was a small country school with a small enrollment of jolly children. They adored her. They coasted together at recess and sang and played games. They put on frequent entertainments, and everyone in the neighborhood came. One night, at a pie-supper, Jessica won the box of candy for the Prettiest Girl. Tom was as proud as she was. “I told you I’d marry a schoolmom!” he said.
She had written home the moment she got the job, sure that Papa would be pleased. Papa did not answer. Leonie and Mathy wrote. Leonie’s letter dutifully conveyed her mother’s message of sympathy: What a shame that Jessica had to support her husband. Jessica was more than disappointed, she was indignant. Here she was as happy as a lark, and all Mama did was feel sorry.
As summer came on, Tom’s health improved, his worst affliction now a recurrence of wanderlust. He talked again of going west. Jessica encouraged him, thinking a change of climate might be beneficial. Only this time he was not to go alone, hopping freight trains. She had saved a little money through the winter, and both of them would go. They would put on their good clothes and ride decently in a coach. “Your uncle won’t mind if I come along, will he? I can help your aunt cook for threshers. I’ll work hard.” Tom allowed they’d be glad to have her, and so would he. They sent off a postcard, and late in June they packed their lunch in a shoebox and boarded a train.
Jessica had been to Oklahoma City once, to visit her rich Aunt Bertie (Matthew’s sister, whose husband had done well in the wholesale grocery business). The boxcars had carried Tom around the state a bit. But neither of them had made this long a journey, and Tom never in such style. They made friends with other passengers, ate fried chicken and cake out of the box, and picked cinders from each other’s eyes. They rode two days and a night and arrived in a small town in western Kansas to find that the uncle had moved away. No one knew just where. He had lost the wheat farm.
Tom was astounded. Hadn’t his oldest brother gone out to work for the uncle only three summers ago? No, they hadn’t heard from the uncle since then. But he had just always been there, taken for granted. Tom guessed there was nothing to do now but turn around and go home.
But it did seem a shame, said Jessica, now that they’d come all this way. There must be other wheat farms around; why couldn’t they work for someone else? It was worth a try. They had an ice cream soda at the drugstore to bolster their spirits, and began to ask round the town—a forlorn gritty little town huddled around the grain elevator, whose silvery towers rose in defiance of the plains. “Why don’t we ask there,” said Jessica, “at the elevator?” And that was how they found Mr. Olin.
He was a small sandy-haired man burnt to the color of the landscape, all but undistinguishable except for the bright blue eyes. He had a ferocious manner, a kind heart, and six hundred acres of wheatland mortgaged to the lightning rods on the barn. He also had a small tenant house where Tom and Jessica could live. They r
ode home with him delightedly in the big grain wagon.
Mr. Olin was a threshing machine by long association—busy and chuffing and full of noise, but purposeful noise; and he could separate the wheat from the chaff. They liked him, though he paid his help poorly (there was never enough left over from payments to the bank) and worked them hard. He asked no more of them than he did of himself, and he had a dry good humor.
They also liked his wife, and she and Jessica became good friends. Mrs. Olin, a flat weary little woman, had a winsome quality that seemed out of place in this stubborn country; a sweetness brought with her, like a pressed bouquet, from some green and juicy land. Jessica marveled that she should have kept it all these years, existing day after sunburnt day in that sandy acre that contained her life—her house, her yard, her piteous small garden.
It was a frightening acre. The house so tiny and wretched, the barn as huge and overbearing as a coffin in the parlor. There was no denying the import of that barn; this was a man’s farm run a man’s way, and the house and the woman got along in any way they could. Between house and barn stood the machine shed, spewing tractor parts, axle grease and tools; the water trough for the cattle; corrugated iron granaries flashing in the sunlight; the silo, a blind turret without a castle; and the windmill, creaking and complaining as it dragged up water from deep underground. Except for the great barn, everything looked flimsy and impermanent, like a child’s cardboard farm set up on a floor; nothing could put down roots in a ground so unyielding.
No grass grew anywhere. In the distance a grove of catalpas drew a dusty green line along the edge of the wheatfield. But in Mrs. Olin’s one acre, nothing grew except pithy vegetables, the hoodlum sunflowers, and a cottonwood or two—rough, gray trees that filled the yard with their useless cotton. The wind made a death rattle in the leaves.
Often Jessica stood at the door of the tenant house and stared across the fields, thinking of home. Green grass and roses in the yard, and Little Tebo flowing cool and gentle; the whispering green orchard, Mathy wading in the branch. When she and Tom sat on the doorstep after dark, she thought of those evenings on the porch last summer and could almost smell the honeysuckle. Sometimes Tom played his harmonica and sang “The Butcher Boy,” and sometimes she cried. But they were comfortable tears, soon spent.
Many evenings Tom went straight to bed, too exhausted to sit up. He was so pale, even with his sunburn; there were blue hollows under his eyes, and he steadily lost weight. The Olins worried, urged food on him and made him take it easy. Tom grew thinner and wearier. One night he collapsed. No one thought too much about it, since that was the night the wheat stubble caught fire. In the heat and frenzy men frequently collapsed. Tom was driving the wagon with the water tank. At one point he climbed down to help beat the creeping blaze with wet gunny sacks. That was when he fell. One of the men dragged him back to the wagon. After a few days in bed, when he had gained strength, they took him to the doctor. The doctor peered and prodded, mumbled vaguely, and prescribed a tonic. As they were leaving, however, he called them back, and in his tentative manner, suggested a hospital forty miles away. Jessica was terrified. “Sweetheart, I ain’t goin’ to no hospital,” Tom said. “Ain’t nothin’ the matter with me but the heat and orneriness.”
“You stay in bed awhile,” Mr. Olin said, “and take that tonic. We’ll feed you up good and get you back on your feet.”
But Jessica was not convinced. Something was wrong, and she linked it in her mind with this brimstone country. Tom needed rain. And she thought of the rain that comes in August in Missouri, sweeping away the fevers of midsummer. She thought of the farm—her father’s farm—where the yard was green, the house white and orderly, and her father the Almighty. In her mind she turned again to him. “We’re going home,” she said.
Nothing else would do for her. On a blistering July morning Mr. Olin drove them to the train. Tom lay in the wagon on a canvas cot, Jessica shielding him with a ruffled parasol (exhumed from the trunk where Mrs. Olin had buried her girlhood). All the way in, Tom kept up a brave banter. But when the train arrived he sagged between them, barely able to stand. The little plainsman, cursing with sympathy, hustled them down the platform to the baggage car.
“This man’s too sick to set up,” he said. “Let him lay back here on a cot—I got a cot in the wagon.”
The conductor said, “You can’t do that, mister.”
“Sufferin’ Jesus!” said Mr. Olin, throwing the cot through the big door. “Can’t you see the boy’s sick?”
“He’s got to set up front. It’s regulations.”
Mr. Olin bruised the air with his outrage. “What’s he goin’ to hurt, I’d like to know? If folks can take part of their baggage up front, I reckon part of the folks can take the place of the baggage.”
“I can’t let you do it.”
“Well, I’m doin’ it, and they’ve paid their fare and you can’t put ’em off.”
He dragged Tom into the baggage car, Jessica pushing from behind. Tom lay back on the cot, among the crates and boxes, too exhausted to care where they put him. The bell clanged. Jessica put her arms around Mr. Olin and cried.
“You’ll be all right,” he said. “He won’t put you off. You can ride right here clear to Kansas City. They’ll meet you there, I guess?” Jessica shook her head. “Didn’t you write and tell ’em?” he said in dismay.
“I didn’t think I should.”
“Tarnation, girl!”
“I’ll call when we get to Renfro—they’ll come and get us.”
“ ’Board!” sang the conductor. Mr. Olin jumped down and ran beside them, shouting encouragements as the train heaved itself out of the station. He waited till it disappeared on the hot windy reaches of the plain, then hurrying back to the wagon, he drove directly to the telephone office and placed a long-distance call. He waited more than an hour, draining cup after cup of water from the big glass jug, while women’s voices ran along the wires, through Salina, Abilene, Topeka, into the snarl of Kansas City and out again through the Missouri woods, till at last the phone rang in the dining room of the farm near Renfro.
Mr. Olin roared his message over the interference. “I put ’em on the Union Pacific this morning,” he shouted. “Mister, I got an idea they ain’t goin’ to be very welcome back there. But you won’t have to put up with him very long. It’s none of my business, but I’ve got to say one more thing—whatever they done, they’ve had enough trouble. They don’t deserve more. That’s all I got to say. Except that I hope there’s somebody to meet ’em when they get to Kansas City.”
The connection went dead before he finished. But Matthew had heard enough to know that Jessica was coming home and Tom Purdy was dying. He stood for a moment with his forehead against the mouthpiece, trying to arrange his feelings. The Lord’s judgment, he thought grimly—and with some pity, too. Poor girl. But then, she had to learn.
The train crawled and shuddered through the long afternoon. Jessica sat on a crate, fanning Tom and wiping his face with a wet handkerchief. She tried to feed him from the lunch Mrs. Olin sent with them, but he had no appetite.
Once he looked up in weak distress. “I’ll make it up to you, Jessica,” he said.
“There’s nothing to make up.”
“All this trouble,” he murmured and closed his eyes. “I’m goin’ to get well and I’ll make it up to you.”
“I know you will, honey.”
After a while he said, “I’m glad we got married.”
“So am I.”
“Are you?”
“Oh yes, Tom!”
He looked up with a bright smile. “Reckon we never would have had the nerve if that little Mathy hadn’ta egged us on.” Jessica laughed. “She’s a caution,” he said.
“She sure is.”
“I’m thankful to her…. We did right, didn’t we, sweetheart?”
“Yes, we did.”
He smiled peacefully and closed his eyes. He slept for several miles. Presently he awoke
, murmuring, rolling his head from side to side. She bent over him. “So thirsty,” he said. Then, helplessly, looking up at her with pleading in his eyes like a small sick animal, he died.
The hot wind blew cinders through the door of the baggage car. Jessica stood up, wondering what to do. She sat down again and began to fan him. Then she stopped and put both hands over her mouth, while the train whistle screamed and screamed at a crossing.
13
Matthew had another call that day, from the town where they took Tom’s body off the train. He caught the next train out. Jessica had not cried until she saw him.
They took Tom back to his own people and buried him in a country churchyard. But the grass there was brown and brittle; and grasshoppers rose out of it, whirring. Already the leaves, yellowed by the dry summer, had begun to fall, and the locusts scraped and droned, crying wearily that all, all was lost. Jessica stood bewildered. She had forgotten the dry seasons and remembered only greenness and deep shade, cool water, and ripe fruit on the trees. What had happened to make the summer like this? And where was Tom?
Dazed and docile, she went home to the farm, and as she went about the old tasks and visited with her sisters, the hurt slowly mended. Grieving was no pleasure to her, and she let it go. The weather broke, too, at the same time. After the long dry spell, the August rainstorm arrived. The grass turned green again, the days flowed cool and blue and golden and the nights cold and white. The house lost its hush and filled with noise again, laughter and singing and screen doors slamming. The rhythm changed, the tempo increased. Since the time was near when they must move back to town, Callie rushed to put into jars anything that survived the drought. Her runners plied back and forth between house and garden, grapevines and orchard, and the kitchen steamed with rich smells.
It was a happy convalescence. Everyone was kind. Papa held her on his lap; Mama kissed her good night. They had taken her back, opened their arms and received her like the prodigal son, all love and forgiveness and forgetting. Jessica was miserable. For no matter how good they were, no matter how much she loved them, she was going away again. And she didn’t know how to tell them.
The Moonflower Vine Page 12