JEANINE SLEPT ON
the floor to keep cool. It was much cooler on
the boards than on the bed next to Mayme. She walked through intense dreams each night and she remembered them every morning before dawn. She dreamed of her father in a shining new truck and his eyes were as red as rubies. He was holding his head aloft so that everyone would look at him and he could look at them out of the crude scarlet of his eyes. He was saying
eye eye oh eye
or maybe it was
I I oh I.
Ross Everett sat unmoved in a burning building with an onion in his hand. Smoky Joe stood in the middle of a pasture of brown grasses, his ragged tail flying in the wind, and he was speaking to her. She woke up. It was near midnight and the air had turned cool.
Mayme said, “What are you doing, Jenny?” And then rolled over and went back to sleep.
Jeanine pulled on her striped dress and went to the window. She saw smoke rising in the chilled moonlight. It was coming from the shed. The shed was on fire.
She took up the hosiery rug from the kitchen floor and ran down across the wet grass. At the entrance to the shed she came upon her father. He was sitting on a nail keg with a dangling oily rag in his hand setting fire to it with matches. A heap of straw was on fire but it wasn’t burning well, since the straw was old and moldy and wet with the dew. She called out to him and threw the hosiery rug onto the sparkling straw and stamped on it. She kicked a smoking wad onto the gravel and ground it out.
“Well, daughter,” he said. Smoke rose around him. He dropped his arms on his thighs, flapped his hands. “Jeanine,” he said.
“What are you doing?” She stamped on flying sparks. She took a stick and lifted the glowing oily rag into the grass.
“Setting the shed on fire,” he said. He stood up. “I wanted to get your mother’s attention. I want her to know that I am crazy and dangerous.”
“I’ll call the sheriff,” she said. “I’ll run over to the neighbors’ and call the sheriff. They have a telephone.” They faced each other.
“Good for them.” He walked in a circle and hummed a popular tune. Down on the Colorado River there was a burst of laughter. Jeanine could see the reflection of a fire on the high branches of the live oaks that drooped over the water. He had the cardboard suitcase beside him.
“Dad, come in the house and go to sleep.” She made shoving motions at him. “Please. Please.”
He said he would go away if that was what they all wanted. Thrown out of his own home. He said for her to find for him those few little things that were still his own. His voice was that of an orphan abandoned by the roadside.
He took out a cigarette, a package of Old Golds. The smell of cigarette smoke and his Clubman’s aftershave brought back memories of the good times of match racing and the awful times of moving and misery, and also the time when he had been the handsome father who had loved her. Her throat hurt it was so tight.
“Well, daughter.” He smoked and looked around himself. “Jeanine. You were always my favorite.” He nodded. “You were. What the hell is that piece of crap you got on? A tiger-striped prom dress or something.”
“I’ll be awake all night for the rest of my life, wondering if you’re going to set the house on fire.”
“Good.” He slowly turned his head to her and regarded her. “I think I’ll leave, Jeanine.”
“Dad, you’re not well. You can’t just leave.”
“Give me a picture of you girls.”
He crushed out his cigarette on the ground. He patted her arm and she knocked his hand away. He said all he wanted was some pictures from the old album, to take with him wherever it was he was going which he didn’t really know where it was. But Jeanine ought to quit living like a Wild Man out of Borneo. If she would fix herself up she might get a man. If not, not.
“Dad, you and Mother have got to settle things. Please.”
“Jeanine, Jeanine,” he said. “Don’t take sides. I was a man never meant to be married, I’m a rambler and a gambler and a long way from home. Some men can’t be tied down. We’ve got to be free. I might come back. I might not.”
“Why did you get married, then?” She pawed at her eyes.
He said, “Wisdom comes with age. When you’re young you don’t think about consequences. You meet somebody and get married and then you girls came along.”
“We just came along. You just found us wandering down the road.”
“Now. Ask me anything.”
“Ask you what?”
“Anything. Ask me anything.”
Jeanine thought of him only as a father but he had been a child once himself and he knew all children were confused by the mysteries of their lives, and he was offering her the answers, inside information. Where certain songs came from and the names of lost dogs, what your grandparents were like when they were young. Here at the time of parting when he would leave his favorite child with her long gray eyes and his own square jaw and the name of Stoddard. The sour gas had ruined some synapses in his brain and oddly joined others. He fought his way through the fierce thorns of his own cynicism, trying to reach somewhere else, but he did not know where that somewhere else might be. What was the alternative. “Give me a picture of you girls to take with me.”
Jeanine tiptoed into the house and went to the tin trunk where the old photograph album lay and began flipping through the pages. All a child wants to know is if their parents love them and wanted them to come into the world. That’s all.
Ask him anything. Jeanine wanted to ask him, Why was I born? But instead she walked back out into the humid dark and handed him a photograph of the three sisters sitting in the back of the old Reo
Speed Wagon.
“Who was it took this picture?” he said.
“I don’t know,” said Jeanine. She wanted to ask him, when was
he
born, and when did Grandfather Tolliver buy the land in Palo Pinto, and why did they leave? She wanted to ask him when he had first seen her mother and why he fell in love with her and what magic had brought herself and Bea and Mayme into the world as whole and entire people. It could not have been so ordinary. A dove must have appeared overhead. Or rather a redbird for Mayme and a white-wing for Bea and for herself the scrub jay who was so talkative and flashy in blue and rust. But she didn’t.
He shook his head. “You weren’t brought up right, Jeanine. Dragged around from town to town. Was nothing I could do about it. Your mother was never satisfied. Always had to go someplace new. Had to have a radio.”
Of course it wasn’t her mother who had wanted to move all the time. What was the point of arguing? It could have been
Life with Father
or
One Man’s Family
but he loved his dark unspoken life more than radio scripts, didn’t he.
He smiled down at the photograph. He pressed it against his coat with one hand. He was having secret thoughts. He loved having secret thoughts that nobody could see or penetrate or think about but himself. It made him inflate and grow very important and very large. Since he had swum up out of the deep underwater world of H
2
S some kind of barrier had given way and he could think anything he wanted. The banisters on some internal stairs had broken with his weight. It was very good to have secret thoughts that nobody else knew about. Jack Stoddard smiled at the night and loved his own silence.
Jeanine clasped her hands together and tried to think of something good to say. Tried to make some gesture toward him.
“We had some adventures together, didn’t we? At the races.”
He said, “Yes. We did. I wanted to tell you, I learned about horses
from Ab Blocker’s old foreman. A black man. Best cowboy on earth. He used to run down mustangs himself alone. He used to go visit the grave of Nigger Britt Johnson. Now there’s a story if anybody would care to tell it which they don’t as people are too caught up with stories of Bonnie Parker and the Vanderbilts and Ava Gardner. Went off alone to the Comanche and got back the women and children.” He glanced at her with a childish expression of anticipation. From inside the house she could hear the old Hamilton clock bong out the midnight hour. “But people like reading about the Vanderbilts.”
“Okay,” said Jeanine.
“And…” He thought about what more he could tell her. He motioned with his hand and then the hand fell into his lap. He had grown up on the land that was now Camp Wolters in Central Texas, near Mineral Wells. He had grown up there when it was open country covered with the wind-torn pelt of native grasses. Once he had come upon the skull of a Comanche with a bullet hole in the cheekbone and after some exploration he had found the thighbones and ribs and tangles of buckskin fringe. During high school in Mineral Wells he had memorized Travis’s last letter from the Alamo and declaimed it at graduation. He used to ride the Mineral Wells street railway to Elmhurst Park where there was a racetrack and a casino and the wind made women’s long dresses fly up so you could see the black stocking garters with the red marks they made and it moved him in inexplicable ways so that he laughed and elbowed Chigger Bates. He had seen Yellow Jacket run the 880. He shifted his feet and smoked and said that we all want our parents to be better parents. We want them to be heroic even if we are cowardly, and well dressed even if we go around looking like Ma Kettle in a homemade dress and they should all be steady and true to one another.
He said, “I bet you remember the song about the three little babes.” He wrapped up the photo of his three daughters sitting and smiling in the bed of the old Reo Speed Wagon in his handkerchief.
He put it in the overcoat pocket. “You girls sang it for us at Christmas that year. Jeanine, you were so pretty, people just turned to look at you on the wagon seat, you were full of life, and you were a gutsy little kid.” He stepped on his cigarette butt. “Tell Bea and Mayme I sure do love them.”
“You tell them.”
“You got some lessons in life to learn, girl,” he said. “You better think about some serious changes in your attitude. You’ll never get a man. Men want somebody with a heart.” He jerked up the suitcase by the handle.
He said, “Bye, Pistol.”
And he turned his head toward his other, unfathomable life.
A
week passed. Jeanine’s mother waited up until late into the night. She sat at the table with the coal-oil lamp burning its amber oil until sign-off and the national anthem at eleven and then until midnight and beyond. She was waiting up for Jack, and if not for him, then the sheriff or the coroner.
Mayme complained in her sleep about the barbed-wire crisscross of her bobby pins. Bea slept against the wall with its faded paper of milkmaids and silvered wreaths, with the striped tomcat purring under her chin. In the distance thunder rolled over the lifting waves of the Gulf of Mexico. It was early October and the nights were cooler but there had been no more rain even here on the rainy coast and the entire country was shrinking in drought. Jeanine felt the rent house sailing into the untrustworthy night with themselves as passengers and no one at the helm. She pulled the quilts up tight around her neck and turned to lie against her older sister’s back.
Sometime in the late windy hours her mother blew out the lamp. The flame lit her face for the brief moment before it was extinguished and it made a fire of her hair and then it was dark.
The sheriff drove in at five-thirty in the morning.
Even in her crowded dreams Jeanine heard the car stopping in front of the house. Jeanine sat up in bed. Her hair drifted into her eyes and she felt trapped in the twisted flannel nightgown. She came up out of a dream in which she had been charged and overcharged with straightening everything out and she could feel her angry frustration from the dream tumbling inside her like sand grains in a current. Mayme sat up as well and turned to the window; she pulled aside the rice-sack curtain and tried to see into the dark.
The two older sisters and their mother got up and struck a match to the lamps and dressed themselves for whatever was going to happen. A black-and-white Ford pulled up at the front gate and then the motor shut off. On the door was the insignia of the Wharton County Sheriff ’s Department.
He knocked on the front door and when it was opened to him he stepped into the light of the coal-oil lamp and took his hat off. He was a tall thin man in khakis with red-rimmed eyes and a revolver.
He said, “Mrs. Stoddard?”
“Yes, I’m Mrs. Stoddard,” Elizabeth said. “Come in.”
She turned and walked into the kitchen and he followed her. The deputy sheriff glanced around the kitchen, at the stockings soaking in a basin and the oaken icebox dripping into a pan. Curtains made of feed sacks printed with dancing orange pigs. A flesh-colored rug on the floor made of braided discarded hosiery. Jeanine’s mother sat down at the table as if her knees had become disjointed.
She said, “Is my husband in jail?”
“He’s in custody.” He took a handkerchief from his back pocket and blew his nose. “Sorry. Came down with a cold.”
“Is he shot?”
The deputy hesitated and looked over at the girls. He said, “No, ma’am. I better speak to you alone.” He put the handkerchief back in his pocket.
“No,” said Jeanine’s mother. “Say what you have to say.”
“Your husband is charged with statutory rape. An underaged girl.” A long silence drew itself out and Jeanine saw her mother frown, as if she had been confronted with some unaccountable puzzle and then she put her hand to her mouth.
“Where is he?” Elizabeth Stoddard lifted her head.
“The county jail.”
“This can’t be true,” she said.
“Mrs. Stoddard, your husband has been accused by a young girl here in Wharton. She’s fourteen. She ought to be charged as a juvenile delinquent but they ain’t going to do it.” He turned away and cupped both hands over his nose and sneezed violently. “Sorry.” He took out the handkerchief again.
Jeanine crossed her arms and stalked to the window where the aged glass distorted the lamp reflections. She had pulled on the tiger-striped dress, the first thing that came to hand.
She said, “We’d be better off if he were dead.” She buttoned the neck of the dress. “Graveyard dead.”
“Jeanine, be quiet.” Elizabeth Stoddard wadded the tea towel in her hands. “Are you sure you have the right family?”
“I’m very sorry, Mrs. Stoddard.”
Bea came out of the girls’ room. Her mother said, “Bea, go back in the bedroom.”
Bea turned and they heard the door slam.
Elizabeth got up and went to the bedroom door. “I’ll get dressed,” she said. She came out again in her Sunday dress and hat and white gloves. Then she walked to the door and the deputy held it open for her and they left.
Everything had changed. It was as if they had been bombed and their hearts pierced by random splinters. Jeanine sat down and stared around the kitchen, so strangely intact. The water bucket and its dipper and the crashing noise of the clock’s ticking. She and Mayme stared at the fruit jar full of knives and forks and spoons, none of them matching to any other. Bea came back in dressed and she carried her Big Chief writing tablet with her.
“Did you hear?”
Bea stared at them. Tears were running down her face but she did not seem to notice them.
“Yes,” she said. “At first I thought it was a radio program. I thought Mother had the radio on.”
“Where was he?” said Jeanine. She hugged her faded plaid jacket around herself, the lines of the plaid seemed to vaporize in soft, blending lines. She wiped her eyes. “Where did all of this happen?”
“You’d be the one to know,” said Mayme. “You were always covering up for him. You were always lying for him.” She wiped her hands on her jeans. “Bea, stop crying.”
“You stop,” said Bea.
“Get ready for school.”
“I don’t want to go to school,” said Bea. “I don’t ever want to go again.”
“No, go on.”
“What good is school?” Bea gripped her writing tablet to her thin chest. She and Mayme were both weeping again. “Everybody will know. What good is going to school?”
“I never covered up anything,” said Jeanine. “This ain’t my fault.”
“Yes it is. You encouraged it.”
“I never did any such thing.” Jeanine wiped tears from her face. She put the two ends of the jacket zipper together and with a tearing noise she zipped it up. The kitchen had grown cold. The fire in the
cookstove had burnt down. The thought of her father laying hands on some young girl made her feel cold and diminished.
“Would you two quit bawling?” Mayme put the coffeepot on the kerosene stove to boil. “I should have left home when I turned eighteen.”
“And gone where?” said Jeanine.
“Just stayed in one place longer than y’all did.”
Bea’s lips were shaking. “This is going to be in the papers,” she said. “In the newspapers.”
Mayme wiped her eyes and started taking the hairpins from her hair. “Yes, and Jeanine’s going to testify at the trial. She’ll be in the newspapers. She’ll be famous. Like Bonnie Parker.”
Jeanine reached in her coat pocket for a brush and drew it furiously through her short, light brown hair.
“Stop it, Mayme.”
Bea said, “Mayme, don’t lay your bobby pins on the kitchen table. That’s disgusting.” Bea hugged her striped cat with the broken nose close to herself but he writhed out of her arms and dropped to the floor with a padded thud.
“Well excuse me, Your Holy Cleanliness.” Mayme put the hairpins in her jeans pocket. She wound up her long hair in French rolls on both sides of her head, which gave her head a square look. Her nose was red from crying. “Maybe she’s a liar.”
Bea said, “But who would lie about something like that?” She looked up wonderingly. “And how would she even know Daddy? And who is she?”
Mayme turned to Jeanine. “Got any answers?”
The wind danced through the faulty window frames in thin and merry whistles. The coffeepot gurgled with a laughing noise like some small kitchen spirit calling to them that it was going to be all right, everything was going to be all right and it puffed animated, tiny clouds from its nose.
Then Bea opened her diary or journal or whatever it was. The blank book in which she wrote down everything of note that happened. She took up her pencil.
Mayme said, “I was about to get engaged. Get married and get out of here.”
“I didn’t know he proposed,” said Jeanine. She watched Bea write down
Will Robert break the engagement?
And then lay down the pencil and put out her hands toward the kerosene stove with its odorous yellow flame. The flame reached up to the coffeepot on the stove lid and the Hamilton clock said it was six-thirty in the morning. Outside it was barely light. Whatever kind of life they had been able to cobble together despite the Depression and the oil fields and their father’s love of good times and gambling was collapsing all around them.
JACK STODDARD DIED
in his jail cell, sitting on his bunk with a copy of
Black Mask Detective
in his hands. It was October 17, 1937. Outside the windows of the county jail a parade filed past with several high school bands playing “Our Boys Will Shine Tonight”; his half-shut dead eyes were fixed on the window bars. A cleaning woman named Myra ran down to the office and said there was something wrong with a man in cell seventeen. The coroner said it was a brain hemorrhage brought on by the concussion and the sour gas. He couldn’t imagine how the man had lasted so long.
Jack was buried in the Wharton city cemetery. It was a bright sunny day. Jeanine saw her mother upright and calm. Then Elizabeth began to shake, as if she had been stricken with convulsions.
I can’t stop shaking,
Elizabeth said,
what’s happening to me?
Mayme took hold of her mother with both hands. Jeanine ran to the truck and sat there for a while, crying so hard she could not lift her head from the steering wheel. It was pity as well as grief, pity that her handsome father should be confined in the cold and the dark beyond
the sound of human voices. She dried her face on her skirt hem and started the truck engine. They drove away and left him to both the apparent and the invisible world.
THE LANDLORD CAME
to their door and knocked lightly. He rapped his knuckles like a man who wanted his money but on the other hand the women were recently bereaved and he was fat and what he was doing appeared to be a scene from a Charlie Chaplin movie, or something from
The Perils of Pauline
, orphans being thrown out into the snow by an overweight rich landlord, which he was. The streets of Wharton were dusty. The Spanish moss that hung from the live oaks was dusty. He was throwing them out into a drought, into bank failures, into the national economic emergency. He wore white and carried a cane. He rapped again with the cane and cleared his throat of the dust and spat.
Mrs. Stoddard opened the door. She wore a clean print dress with a red belt. Behind her in the kitchen he could hear the radio. Maybe she would offer him the radio in lieu of the rent. He wouldn’t accept it.
“I don’t have the rent,” she said.
“I want to say how sorry I am about your husband,” he said. “But it’s just as well. We don’t need perverts here in Wharton.” He tipped his hat to her. Then her three daughters came to stand behind her. He tipped his hat to them as well. “Sorry about your father,” he said. “But the rent is ten dollars. I know Mr. Stoddard was a gambler and my bet is he has something hidden away somewhere.”
One girl stepped forward and put her hand on her mother’s shoulder.
She said, “We’re going back to where we have our own farm.”
“Where’s my ten dollars?” He banged the foot of the cane on the flat dirt of the yard. Down on the river some of the hoboes were
calling to one another in raffish, joking shouts. “Pay up or you leave right now.”
“WE’RE GOING HOME,”
said her mother. She sat at the kitchen table and moved the salt and pepper shakers around. “We’ve got to get packed up.”
“Yes, Mother,” said Jeanine. It was so hot she felt faint, as if she would melt and flatten out.
“You hid things for him,” said her mother. “I found two hundred and fifteen dollars in his toolbox. He always hid money.”
“I never hid that money,” Jeanine said. She sat with a cold cup of weak coffee in her hands and blinked repeatedly. Then she turned to her two sisters, but Mayme only stared back at her with her arms crossed and Bea turned the flatiron over on the stove. Mayme’s boyfriend from Conroe had sent a sympathy card and his signature and no more. Mayme held it in her hand.
“I guess that horse is yours, Jeanine,” her mother said. “We could try to sell him.”
“Not yet,” said Jeanine. “Not just yet.”
“Promise me you won’t gamble on the races again.”
“I won’t. I promise.”
JEANINE AND MAYME
moved around the kitchen, packing up the lithograph of the little girl and the portrait of their Tolliver grandparents. They broke down the four-ten shotgun and stored the barrel and stock and shells behind the seat of the truck. They shut the lid on the Singer and they jammed blankets and quilts into tow sacks. They were going back to the old Tolliver farm because there was no place else to go. It was the only place where they didn’t have to pay rent. If they went back to Central Texas maybe nobody would know what
had happened. Jeanine washed every dish and utensil they owned and handed them to Bea and when Bea had dried them Mayme packed them in newspaper, and laid them in boxes. The five Tolliver silver spoons went into their Johnnie Walker whiskey tin. Bea worked for hours at constructing a box for Albert; it was like a wooden cell from which he gazed out with his broken nose and his jailbird stripes. They would have to pull Smoky Joe behind the truck. They had a ’29 Ford ton-and-a-half now, Jack had sold the old Reo long ago.