Jeanine put down the bottle of hot sauce and sat without eating, watching Bea writing and writing it all down.
“If a magazine were to pay me for something I wrote, would the check have my name on it like that?” Bea lifted a hopeful face to her mother.
“Yes, Bea darling,” said Elizabeth. “It would say your name, and the date, and the amount, and then somebody signs it. An authorizing person.”
“I could do it,” Bea said to herself. “Why not?” She lay in her cot beside the stove. Albert slept stretched out alongside her legs. “Why not?”
Nobody answered her. Beyond the back door they heard coyotes. One sang in a warbling soprano and the others barked in high yips; they were young coyote pups who had not yet learned to howl. It was a mother and her family. In the barn the hens flew up to the high beams because there had not yet been enough money to buy chicken wire until the check for seventy-five dollars was on the table. Everything had a family to feed, it was just a matter of who ate who and devil take the hindmost.
T
he day before Christmas, Abel Crowser appeared at the door with a fat cock turkey held upside down by its scaly feet. Bea cried out in her usual exclamation points that she would cook the turkey as her present to them all, but she was not allowed to, she was not even allowed on crutches. Jeanine set about roasting the bird with great care.
On Christmas morning they each woke up in their own beds and made silent promises to themselves to be cheerful. Their gifts to one another were things they could make; a tin star for the tree and the juniper green silk dress for Mayme, Lepp cookies for Elizabeth, and the promise of a new coat for Bea. They remembered the Christmas of ’29 in far West Texas, and of ’32 when they sang for their parents, and the worst one in ’35 when they had only exchanged promises. It seemed that Jack Stoddard was still alive in those places, driving nitro and saltwater pumpers, gambling in a back room, calling out for Red
Buck to win, drifting transparently over the vast distances of the Permian or through the snow that sifted over the gas flares that Christmas of ’32 in Kilgore. He had always been a shape changer who could talk the legs off an iron stove, and imagined worlds of beauty and chance and drink, and desired these worlds so ardently it seemed impossible he should not still be here in some glassy apparition carrying transparent jelly beans or throwing a pair of invisible dice with stars for dots. Jeanine missed him. They all missed him and nobody would say so. The sisters needed him to drive nails and change the tires and to tell them what kind of men to look for in life, to say
Don’t marry somebody like me
. To explain why Roosevelt had stored all the gold in Fort Knox. But he was so irrevocably gone.
That afternoon Jeanine cut up what was left of the turkey and put it in jars. She heard a car’s tires crackling on the gravel. It was the schoolteacher, Miss Callaway, a young woman with a pompadour hairdo. She called out
Hello! Hello!
and jumped out of the car with a paper sack full of handmade Christmas cards from Bea’s schoolmates, and all of Bea’s schoolbooks and lesson plans. Miss Callaway had only been paid in scrip from the county, those official and optimistic IOUs, but she somehow contrived to be nicely dressed, with a long wraparound coat. She had an eastern accent and very deep, round brown eyes. She wouldn’t have any coffee, she was in a hurry. Many more homes to visit.
“I’m from Pennsylvania,” said Miss Callaway. “The Keystone state!”
Elizabeth smiled. “I thought it was the Quaker state.” She put a cup of coffee in front of the teacher anyway and Miss Callaway lifted the cup and blew on it.
“Keystone!” shouted Bea, from the parlor. She eagerly read through all twenty-five of the crayoned Christmas cards.
“And don’t you tease me about being a Yankee,” said Miss Callaway. She had a very wide smile and good teeth. Jeanine cringed as the
teacher poured a great deal of sugar and Bea’s condensed milk into her cup. “You Texans wouldn’t ever have got a drop of oil if it hadn’t been for us Pennsylvanians, we came down here and taught you how to drill.” She put the cup down. “Bea is so talented,” she said. “Wonderful stories about horse races and nitroglycerin and hobo jungles. How does she make all that up? What an imagination.”
“I know,” said Elizabeth.
JEANINE WALKED THE
fields on Christmas Day from the seventy-five acres on the slope of the ridge, bristly with little cedars, to the heavy cedar brakes beyond the graveyard and then to the orchard. She came back and drew a map and thought about where to start.
Her Christmas present from Bea was a brochure from Texas A&M on the care of peach orchards. Peaches named Springold and Texstar. After a while she laid it down and fell asleep in the chair in front of the cookstove.
I
n late January Milton left a telephone message for Jeanine at Strawn’s store. She said thank you to Mrs. Joplin and read the words printed on the back of a wanted poster as the tall woman wrote up the beans and cornmeal and half a pound of salt pork and garden seeds. He was coming to visit her. Jeanine was pleased and cautiously happy. She felt she had become a permanent farm girl who drove tractors and hewed down cedar, and that personage had little to do with being attractive for young men.
Jeanine carefully counted out the coins. Maybe she should buy something else, something to present to Milton when he came. The cold display case held thick steaks and liverwurst; in the back, cages of chickens talked to one another. There was a steel barrel full of rakes and hoes but it seemed very few people were buying any of these things. What about gingersnaps? She turned a box of Mrs. Baird’s gingersnaps over in her hand in the grip of indecision and
then with a sudden gesture laid them on top of the beans. There went another dime.
She paid Mrs. Joplin an extra nickel for the message and walked home into the fist of the glassy, hard wind. The haze at the edge of the world was yellow with Kansas dust. She pulled down her hat and held her purchases against her chest and bent her head. If the wind got under the brim of her little fedora it would throw it into the fields and she would be climbing through barbed wire to run after it. She might drop the gingersnaps.
She passed the Crowsers’. She could smell bread baking. In the distance Abel called out to his team. The hills were brown from drought, and even though they were approaching spring, some of the smaller live oaks were yellowing. The tabled tops of the far hills were held up against the sky like great sere altars.
As she came around the curve she could see the Spanish oaks beside the house that held on to only their topmost rusty leaves, the ones that would not give up or be torn loose. The repaired roof with its tin patches gave her a good feeling. Milton’s message had said he would drive up this afternoon in the newspaper’s car. And there he was, pulling a rooster tail of dust after him in a Model A. She ran into her own driveway.
“Why are you here now?” she said. “I was going to straighten the house, I was going to have coffee on the stove!” She held the packages against her plaid jacket.
He slammed the car door behind him and held on to the brim of his hat with one hand and her elbow with the other. Something live was leaping up and down in the backseat of the Model A. It was ripping up paper and flinging it around the backseat of the Ford.
“Let’s get in the house. It’s like being b-b-beat up,” he said. He had a newspaper rolled up in his hand.
Bea was singing along with the radio in the parlor across the hall. It was Bob Wills and the Light Crust Doughboys on WBAP. They
were broadcasting out of a furniture store in Fort Worth and Bea knew the lemon oil commercial by heart.
Lemon fresh, lemon bright, try Dickson’s Lemon Oyuuuuuul.
“Hello, Bea!” Milton shouted. He threw his hat across the room and it landed on a chair back. “Are you decent? Are you presentable for receiving g-g-guests? A handsome and dashing rep-p-porter?” He crossed the hall and stuck his head in Bea’s open bedroom door. “Crushed at the bottom of a well,” he said. “Left for dead.”
Bea pushed herself upright. “Don’t you take Jeanine anywhere,” she said. “Don’t run off and get married. She’s got to stay here until I can walk.”
“Oh, sweetpea Bea,” he said and sat down on her bed. She pulled at her feed-sack dress and tried to smooth down her fuzzy braid. “You look like you’ve combed your hair with a skillet, girl.” The hair on either side of her scar stuck up in bristles. Her cast lay on the bed like a section of pipeline and her toes stuck out of the end. She didn’t feel dressed without her sock over the toes but what could she do. “Look here what I brought for you.
Grit
newspaper. Look here. They pay two dollars for a poem. Feast on this, my wounded butterfly.”
Jeanine put the kettle on and hid their hosiery in the cornmeal bin and snatched up a brassiere and a pair of underpants that were drying in front of the stove and shoved them into the woodbox and put kindling over them. She wiped the table off in one long swipe, scattering loose beans and corn bread crumbs onto the floor and swept it all under the cookstove. There were wavy lines of dust in front of the door but she would have to leave that. Sweeping it would only fill the air of the kitchen with Kansas topsoil. She slammed down a fruit jar and stuck one of the yellow paper roses in it. Then she took off her coat and the fedora and ran a brush through her hair. She set out two cups and took a handful of ground coffee from the bin in the grinder. She dropped it into the coffeepot and poured boiling water over it.
Prince Albert watched her from the top of the old Hamilton safe and yawned and rolled over.
“What poems?” Bea flipped over the pages of the newspaper. “What kind do they want? Two dollars?”
Milton bent over the paper with her. His magnified blue eyes shifted unsteadily behind his thick spectacles. “There,” he said. “There’s one, d-d-dripping with unctuous sentiments and garbled rhymes.” He stood up. “Read it and weep.”
“Thanks, Mr. Milton.” She smiled up at him. “Maybe I’ll try. If I can figure out what they want.”
“Milt,” he said. “M-m-milt to you, cruel charmer. They want your abject obedience and total conformity. What else do you need before I go into the kitchen and sweep your sister off her worn-out shoes?”
“Would you put my sock on my cast?” She held the sock up to him.
“Darling toes,” he said. “There.”
Bea settled down with the newspaper poems as if they were a puzzle that needed decoding, and when she had discovered their secret the reward would be two dollars. Her name written out on a check.
Here, Jeanine, go and buy us cocoa and sugar and butter and liver for my minion
. She heard a loud thud. Albert had gone to sleep on top of the safe and had fallen off. He did it all the time. The wind hooted and blew at the edges of the parlor windows, and the dancing orange pig curtains in the kitchen fluttered.
“Ah, the old hand-c-c-c-colored lithograph of the lost child in the forest,” said Milton. He stood before the framed picture and nodded. “The b-b-bird is singing to her, the bird is symbolic of a hernia truss, which is symbolic, Jeanine, of dread, which is symbolic—”
“Oh, Milton.” Jeanine poured coffee.
“Of feet. Bea looks wonderful, rosy cheeks,” he said.
“How did you know about Bea?” Jeanine said. She set out a plate with gingersnaps on it. She had carefully counted out three for each of them and the rest were for her sisters and her mother.
“Reporters are sick and twisted people,” he said. “We haunt emergency wards, we always have hopes somebody might, might have been, ah, dismembered by a passenger t-train, preferably the Sunset Limited carrying a politician, po-police reports, Baker Hotel, famous or desperate cinema stars drying out in the Crazy Water baaaths. Drying out in a bath.” He laboriously slapped his knee. “That’s the kind of sophisticated reporter jokes we make in the newsroom. Beautiful Jeanine. What are these?”
“My seed packages.” She managed to stop laughing.
They sat down with the Burke’s seed packages. Enormous vegetables in violent colors glowed on the stiff paper. Sexual-looking beets and radishes, poisonous rutabagas, sweet potatoes and lettuces swarming in swamp greens.
“Are you going to raise this stuff?” He pulled off his topcoat. A threadbare Chesterfield, a formal evening coat, that was about fifteen years old with worn velvet on the collar and threads netted and loose around each cuff. “These things look like they could crawl out of the g-g-garden at night and f-f-fasten themselves on your faces.” He clawed his hand over his face. “Ahhhhhhhh, Ma! Ma! Get it off me!”
Jeanine grasped his hand and pulled it away from his face. “This is food,” she said. “I’m Jolly Jeanine the Texas farmer girl.”
“Don’t bend over in the garden, Grandma, you know them taters got eyes.” He slammed his hand on the tabletop and made the coffee cups jump. “By God, there’s a poem for Bea. That’ll get her t-t-ten dollars. What rhymes with eyes? Lots of things rhyme with eyes.” He poured some of Bea’s condensed milk into his coffee. “I regard coffee as a food,” he said. Jeanine handed him the sugar and watched as he shoveled two heaping teaspoons full into the cup and stirred it. “Come with me,” he said. For the first time since he had walked into the house he looked at her. Her short flyaway brown hair and deep gray eyes, her thin shoulders, her hands around the coffee cup for warmth and the worn plaid jacket over her shoulders. “Come with me to Glen
Rose. They have let me loose with the newspaper automobile. You could sit in the p-passenger seat and be whisked along Texas highways, paved with taxpayer dollars.”
“Why are you going to Glen Rose?” Jeanine smiled and wished she had put on her gold clip earrings.
“I must commune with a concrete dinosaur. It looms over the courthouse. Ponder, darling, these busted statues. I must solicit advertisements for Dr. T-Tabler’s Buckeye Pile Cure. This is the life I am leading.” He lifted the smoking coffee cup to his mouth, blew on it and drank. “Jeanine, it’s cold in here. Let me throw on some k-kindling for you to prove my manliness.”
“No no!” She jumped up and stood between him and the woodbox and the hidden wet underpants and brassiere; she threw out both arms. “I’ll get some splits from outside. We have to save the kindling.”
“Y’all are st-st-starving out here and perishing of the cold,” he said. She came back in from the back porch where they had stacked the day’s wood. Her breath smoked.
“I can’t go to Glen Rose with you, I can’t leave Bea,” she said. She threw in two splits of live oak and slammed the cookstove door shut. “I would love to see the concrete dinosaur. My mother said I had to have a social life, and a concrete dinosaur would be just the thing. Would it?”
“No, the better thing would be to come to that benefit d-d-dance they’re having on Valentine’s Day. It’s for poor p-p-people. I mean it’s for
the
poor people.” He fanned himself with the seed catalog as if he were fanning air toward her. “Can you smell my new aftershave? I was hoping you would swoon.”
Jeanine closed her eyes and took a deep breath. “No. Yes. It’s Clubman’s, isn’t it?”
“In exchange for an aaaad, ahem, ad, from Horton’s Men’s Store.”
“And so the dance is for poor people. And?” She opened both hands and raised her colorless eyebrows.
“Yes. That doesn’t include you-all because you-all are wearing clothes. The really poor people are up in the Panhandle b-b-buried stark naked in dust storms. They have shoes made out of bark and gravel. They eat asphalt.”
“Fill me in, Milt,” she said. “Are you asking me to the dance?” She leaned close to him and took the Chesterfield from the back of his chair. “I should turn these cuffs for you. Then you wouldn’t look like you’re selling apples on a street corner. Where did you get this coat?” Jeanine’s life had been a chain that had come unlinked and left connections broken and scattered and she had a pleased, sort of loose feeling of comfort that here was somebody who remembered her from second grade when she wore a yellow bonnet. She wanted to fix whatever was wrong with him. His buttons, for instance. They were of three different kinds all down his shirt.
“The mortuary supply.” He put another spoonful of sugar into his cup. “Ask you to the d-d-dance!” He turned up his coffee cup and drained it of the last sugary drops. “I am haaaaard to get, Jeanine. I am not somebody who thu-throws myself at the first girl that asks me to a poor-people dance. I am not desperate for flattery and attention. No, no indeed.” He stood up and took the coat from her. “It’s the Red C-c-cross and the Tarrant County Relief Committee. You bring a box of something. Food somethings, any old lumpy foodish articles you happen to have, on the theory that giving to charity makes people feel less poverty-stricken.” He put on the coat and took off his glasses. He pulled out his shirttail and wiped them and then put them back on and smiled at her. “Grinding. That’s what poverty always is. Grinding.”
Jeanine said, “Why are you telling me this, Milt?” She crossed her arms.
“Because I have to be there and write about it. And if you’re there too, well,
voilà
, girl, I take you in my arms and we d-d-d-dance. And if your mother wants you to get a social life, tell her social lives aren’t
laying around on the street like hamburger papers. You’re too old for the high school crowd and you’re not going to college and the CCC won’t take you because of your g-g-gender and so the answer is…” He held up a forefinger.
“Good works!” said Jeanine.
“Ding!”
He went out to the car and threw open the door and a black-and-tan rat terrier left off tearing a magazine into pieces and sprang out as if it had been shot from a popgun. Jeanine put her arms in the sleeves of the plaid jacket and squinted in the glaring hard sun. Cold and rainless, every day was the same, blue and dry and a perfectly clear sky. It was weatherless weather in which nothing ever happened from one month to the next. She peered into the window of the Model A.
“This,” said Milton, “is Biggety the rat killer. The chicken protector, the security alarm. Go get ’em, Rats.” The dog darted from the Spanish oak to the flower beds to the veranda. He seemed to be operating on a different level of time. He was in a speeded-up dimension where entire days went by in minutes. By the time Jeanine said she didn’t know if they really needed a dog, Biggety, or Rats, had shot into the house through the half-open door and was pursuing Albert from one room to another. They seemed to cover every room in the downstairs within a minute and a half. Bea screamed. She tried to get out of bed. Albert tore up the stairs with Biggety immediately behind. Jeanine laid hold of the garden mattock with its short handle and went after them. She decided to brain the dog.