Uncertain Ground (2 page)

Even though we were both twenty Emmett seemed younger, in part because he was generally in trouble just as my brother Kenyon was, and in part because he’d never left Texas except for brief forays across the border from Laredo to Nueva Laredo. Despite settling in Leon, I ‘d seen a wider world. Like most army brats, I’d lived in a different places—in Tennessee, Florida, and Texas—and I’d gone away to summer schools in Colorado and Mexico.

To me, Emmett was so rooted in one place he couldn’t find his way out, nor did he particularly want to be anywhere else. I grew restless when I had to stay in Leon long. There wasn’t enough there, not enough to do, not even enough to look at. In search of distraction I read a lot and sometimes picked up
Life
magazine. As if waiting for me, I found among the coverage of national news, a report on the Texas drought with full-page pictures of dead cattle laying on bare soil. The train was carrying us through that same kind of pasture land now mixed at times with fields of oats, corn, and maize, all shriveled to dust-colored tan, all stunted by the long drought. I opened the book I’d brought with me.
Turning back toward me from the window, he asked, “You know why Mama wanted me to go to Galveston so much, don’t you?”

I put the book aside. “I can guess.”

“Yeah. Doris.”

“Again?”

“Again.”

Both of us knew he’d already been required to spend the month of June in the country near Laredo. He’d had a great time working at Uncle Blanton’s ranch all week and making the bars on the weekends. Although he had no gift for languages, he swore his Spanish had improved. Emmett’s version of Spanish was a sort of pidgin make-do. “You savvy?” he would ask, and I’d always think of corny cowboys wearing white hats in western serials I’d seen on Saturday afternoons when I was younger. If I corrected him, I’d only be corrected in turn for speaking school Spanish. It was an old and fruitless argument for the truth was, as my father had pointed out, Emmett didn’t believe he’d ever need anything but bad Spanish, an assumption my father laughed about while I could see nothing but arrogance. His fight with his mother over Doris Lacey was different.

She was, in Earlene’s eyes, a sexual threat, the country high school beauty who might lure Emmett into marriage too young, the appealing daughter of a dirt farmer who, in Earlene’s eyes, was only angling for a part of the largest ranch in the area. Emmett, his mother believed, was meant for a better match, so he was being shipped off for the second time that summer before he got Doris pregnant. None of this hysteria had been discussed openly in the family. My father had said, “Emmett could get that girl in trouble,” and meant it. But no one ever said the question of Emmett’s marriage was the key part of his mother’s plan for his future social standing.

Instead they insisted Uncle Estes wanted to keep him away from rodeos. Though no one in the family had seen him do it, Emmett had been riding saddle broncs in the smaller rodeos around Mullin. Estes, I guessed, probably really didn’t
mind much. He’d grown up on a ranch, had broken his share of horses.

“Are they sending you away from somebody?” Emmett asked.

“Not exactly.” It was true I’d been unhappy ever since I got home from summer school in Colorado, and my parents had probably guessed it had to do with Tony Gregory. I’d told them little about him except his name and the fact I’d spent most of my free time with him. Staying there for the second six weeks proved to be an impossibility since I’d promised to be a bridesmaid in a friend’s July wedding in Leon. Flying back and forth to Boulder was a frivolity my parents wouldn’t pay for, especially since they had also guessed correctly that I was more interested in Tony than I was in school. After the wedding there were few distractions in Leon. Two of my other high school friends had married and left. The rest, like me, helped their mothers at home and met in the late afternoons at the municipal swimming pool. Early one morning I tried riding horseback with a friend, but the road was so dusty and the country so dry, we were home in two hours. On weekends we dated whoever was in town, no one much.

Could anyone have believed a trip would cure me of longing, that a change of scene would make that much difference? I doubted it though I knew my parents held onto some old saws, and what if they did? Nearly anything would be better than finishing the summer in Leon.

“I don’t mind going. I haven’t been down there in years. I like the beach, don’t you?”

“No.”

“What do you plan to do then?”

“Celia, I don’t plan. Come on. Let’s go find out if this train has a diner. I’m hungry.”

It was early, only eleven-thirty, but I got up and swayed down the aisle after him, rocked with the train though all the dusty brown country, traveling as fast as it could take us toward the sea. I guessed Mother and my aunt had decided I could
look after Emmett, an idea I didn’t relish. My own life was so confused I’d been dreaming of the lulling calm of days sitting on the beach staring at the Gulf. Now it appeared that dream might evaporate. At a distance I got along with Emmett well enough. I even liked what I knew of Doris Lacey though she, too, was someone I didn’t know well. She was just finishing high school in Mullin. Like so many boys from small towns and large who went away to college, Emmett kept his serious girl friend at home. She was the one he saw the first night he came back and the last night before he left. I’d seen her in Leon at the movies with him once or twice. She didn’t cling, didn’t hang onto him as if she wanted to own him, nor did she seem to agree with him about everything. Doris had a toughness I admired, envied in a way. During rodeos she entered the barrel races, and they required superior riding. I wasn’t interested in riding figure eights around three barrels in a row, however I’d ridden enough horses to respect her skill. I’d only seen her race once. She did it the usual way, leaning almost out of the saddle on the turns, her right arm raised high as she whipped the horse’s flank on the last one. But hers was the best-trained horse—she wheeled him so close to the barrels they were almost touching—and the fastest that night.

“Do you really mind going?” I asked Emmett when we’d taken seats in the diner.

“No. Doris will be there when I get back. The funny thing is, Cousin, we’re on our way to Sin City.”

I laughed. He sounded so much like he’d just finished a long trail drive and was looking forward to liberty. Post Office Street in Galveston was well known as the biggest red light district in Texas. There you could buy mixed drinks across the bar when people in the rest of the state were carrying their whisky bottles around in obvious brown paper sacks and joining spurious private clubs in order to drink cocktails away from home. Gambling was another public pleasure. The whole state had evidently agreed that Galveston could be the one open city.

“They’ve got slot machines everywhere, and I’ve already got plenty of change,” said Emmett. He raised his glass of water. “Here’s to a fine time!”

I raised a glass to meet his but as I drank from it I could barely pretend to agree. It seemed entirely unlikely that I’d stand much of a chance of steering Emmett away from Post Office Street, bars, and slot machines. On the other hand, I didn’t want to believe I was altogether responsible for him since Emmett was, I felt, already beyond anyone’s control.

After lunch we spread out. Emmett was so big he could easily take up two seats. The Santa Fe carried wheat from Kansas, cotton from the high plains, and sulfur from towns on down the line, but only a few passengers that day. No one raised cotton around Leon or Temple any more, and not many people seemed to be on their way to the Gulf just then. Across the aisle from Emmett I watched him fall asleep calmed by the rhythm of the wheels clacking. I remained awake envying him his ease even if he was snoring. I’d taken the train back to Tennessee to visit my father’s relatives often in the summers. A book could usually overcome repetitious landscape, so I read my way through northeast Texas and most of Arkansas each time. Now I was headed southeast, and my accumulated worries, including how Emmett and I would get along, could be suspended by someone else’s story. But I let the book slide. The first time I went to Galveston kept coming to mind.

We’d almost floated in. The moment we crossed the causeway linking the island to the mainland and hit Broadway, water began rising in the car floor. Dumped by a storm that had just passed over the island, water rocked around the floorboard. Kenyon and I sat together on the back seat, both of us scared, our feet tucked beneath us. He poked me in the ribs as the water sloshed against the car’s doors. I poked him back. Neither one of us said a word, nor did our father. But he would. I could feel his temper rising like the water. Our mother smiled at us over the back of the seat.

“I thought you said there was a sea-wall here, Martha.” Our father’s voice, though terse, was clearly accusing.

“Don’t worry,” she said. “Galveston floods so easy. It’ll go down in a little while.”

I looked out the window to an old cemetery where graves, sheathed in stone, had been raised above ground. Gray water lapped against their marble sides so they seemed to rock like awkward boats in an uneasy harbor. All the world was asway. I nudged Kenyon who made an awful face by opening his mouth, turning his lips down on both sides, and widening his eyes. His pantomime terror mirrored our fears and mocked them. The graves, I noticed, sat higher than we did.

“I didn’t know it was going to rain. Did you, Will?” Our mother’s voice was patient yet firm. He could blame her if he pleased, but the weather was not her fault. After all the seawall was for seawater. This was plain old rain.

I could remember only a little about that first trip. The rain did stop before we got to the Mcleans’ house. Sun broke through while we were still driving down Broadway where the center strip was covered with pink oleanders, glistening with water. We turned the corner by a white towered multidomed Catholic Church that looked, I first thought, like something out of the
Arabian Nights
. Once we were off the boulevard the rain subsided. Down the street a few blocks from the church was the Mclean house.

Dazzling white, two-story frame—the shingles were added later—its long green shutters covered the downstairs windows keeping the interior dark and cool, protecting those who lived there and keeping their secrets. One tall palm, that postcard emblem of sunny tropical places, stood on the corner. Sitting on top of low brick piers, the house was supported also by ships’ timbers, the concealed reminder of its builder, Mowrey Mclean’s father, a Scottish sea captain. It had weathered high winds, floods, hurricanes and the 1900 storm.

There was a one-story frame house in need of a coat of paint next door; it was so covered by oleanders that the need
wasn’t too evident. Across the street another much larger house with a set of four columns, also surrounded by shrubbery and palms, showed its weather worn boards more obviously. That was the way Galveston neighborhoods in the older part of town looked, a surface mixture of rich and poor, but just as often, I supposed, of enterprise and negligence, of diligence and procrastination. People could be careless about paint in Galveston, partially because salt air attacked everything indiscriminately, partially because individuality was understood in this seaport city in some way it wasn’t in a small town.

The first visit was brief, only a weekend. What I kept of it mainly was memories of the rain, the house, a few parts of its interior and the novelty of walking five blocks to the beach with Kenyon, Mother, and my aunt Bertha—fat, cheerful, middle-aged, her olive skin already quite wrinkled, not pretty but lively. Five years older than Mother, her good humor matched her inclination toward bossiness. Both she and Mother were wearing old saggy bathing suits, which they laughed about saying they belonged to “the rough stone ages.” They had both bought their suits years before the war began. That was the way everyone divided time then, before and after the war and no one asked which war.

We made that trip almost a year after we’d moved to Texas. Now, seven years later I was twenty, getting ready to begin my sophomore year in college. For a month I would be living with two people I didn’t really know. As for Emmett, I barely knew him either. Well, I’d become accustomed to living with strangers before. At school I’d had to get to know roommates, and of course, I wouldn’t be rooming with Emmett.

Since late afternoon, we’d been staring out at the flat green coastal plain, surrounding the tracks. Now and then we saw white egrets balanced on cattle backs or a lone heron fishing. Even before the train crossed the railroad bridge over the bay, before smelling salt air and glimpsing the undersides of gulls flying, before the porter came through our car almost singing Gal-ves-ton, I pictured the Mclean house waiting for us.

T
wo days after we arrived,
after I’d spent half a morning strolling around the neighborhood and an hour writing a long letter to Tony Gregory, I wandered into the living room of the Mclean house where no one ever seemed to go. On the dining room wall behind me were two separately framed birds’ nests where stuffed bluebirds hovered over tiny powdery white eggs in nests, one bird and three eggs per nest, a strange precision. Why would anyone want to arrest that particular moment under glass twice? There was nothing like those birds in any of the other family houses. My Grandmother Henderson’s living room in Nashville almost rattled with carved walnut leaves. There were some sort of birds’ talons on her bathtubs, but there were no stuffed birds. As far as I could tell, useless things appealed to Bertha. Out in the hall a hat rack and umbrella stand held five hats nobody wore, and although I’d been told it rained often in the afternoons, there were no umbrellas.

In the living room marble-topped tables and fat globular oil lamps, now converted to electricity, crowded the spaces between chairs, couch, and rectangular patches of oriental rugs. Against one wall stood a secretary with top shelves full of narrow leather-bound books behind glass. The spines were upright, their gilt letters unblemished; apparently neither Aunt Bertha nor Uncle Mowrey nor any of the Mcleans preceding them had ever touched a one. They were there obviously because they fit the shelves. The titles were familiar;
The Poetry of Robert Burns, Three Plays
, Wm. Shakespeare,
The Lady of the Lake
, Scott, the same kind of well respected unread books that everybody in their generation seemed to have. A figure of a dog of mystifying breed, something that could have been an ashtray shaped like a pair of hands with empty white palms uplifted, roses made of
paper and cotton somewhere in Mexico, and a cut-glass bowl of terribly fake red cherries were scattered about the room.