Authors: Reavis Z Wortham
Like I mentioned a ways back, Miss Becky always said some of us Parkers had what she called a Poisoned Gift, the ability to dream what was going to happen in the future. I always thought it was me, then one day Uncle Cody said that he dreamed about things that came true, too.
The problem is that the dreams aren't so clear that we know what's going to happen. Sometimes I have to see something and then it reminds me of the dream. I had nightmares about the Rock Hole for months before that night came true. The only thing that saved me and Pepper when it did was that I'd talked to Grandpa and Miss Becky about 'em.
Uncle Cody had nightmares about the Cotton Exchange until it happened, and after that night, they shut off like somebody had throwed a switch. Then he started dreaming about snowstorms and Mexico.
I couldn't get it out of my head that Miss Becky said Grandpa had The Poisoned Gift, too. He was always pretty close-mouthed about everything, especially law work. But she said when they were first married he dreamed of horses, Model A cars, and a little girl named Pickles, until it all came true. She quit talking about it after that one time. I knew better than to ask Grandpa, so all I could do was keep rolling it around in my head.
That's what Miss Becky called “borrowing trouble.” There were a lot of folks in Center Springs who worried all the time about things that didn't need worrying on, but they went right ahead, spinning these gray ideas over and over in their minds until it about drove 'em crazy.
I tried not to do the same, but then my own dreams started again, and it was the same one, might-near once a week. I was sitting on the hub of a giant wagon wheel laying on the ground. The spokes stretched out in all directions, almost disappearing into the distance. One led up into Oklahoma and the thick grasslands there. Another one went west, through the yucca and prickly pear, until it disappeared in the desert full of cactus that looked like “The High Chaparral,” that new television show.
Then each one of them spokes became a road, and people I knew and people I didn't know were walking toward me. Some were laughing. Some were crying. Some were mad, and others looked like they had the weight of the world on their shoulders.
I told Miss Becky one Saturday morning after breakfast. She was sitting in her rocker beside the open window, sewing a rip in one knee of my jeans. She stopped, her sewing forgotten in her lap. “Do you recognize them people?”
I was laying on the cool linoleum floor with the funny papers open in front of me. Snoopy was on his doghouse again, chasing the Red Baron.
“No ma'am.”
“What else, besides the wagon wheel and roads?”
“Stars. Stars up in the sky that I see from Mama and Daddy's old house in Dallas. I'm standing in the yard, looking up and see 'em bright and clear. Then they start to swirl and get into formations, and then spaceships come across the sky and trumpets and angels and Mama's standing there with tears running down her face and she's normal.”
Miss Becky looked so sad then. “Your mama
is
normal now, because she's in Heaven with your daddy. Is what you see the Lord coming down and Gabriel blowing his horn?”
I flipped the page to see what was showing at the movies. “I don't know. I think it might be, but then the air is full of thunder and flashes and screams, and falling stars shoot down toward the house, like those tracer bullets in war movies.”
“That's in Revelations.”
Brother Ross at the Holiness church across the pasture liked to preach about once a month out of Revelations, and it always scared me to death. Sometimes, especially after church on Wednesday nights, I'd go to bed listening to the whippoorwills outside the house and wonder if the world was going to end before I got up the next morning.
“I don't think I'm dreaming of the Bible. I'm only dreaming. I remembered, sometimes there are three black birds that show up and land on top of the house, and there are three more circling in the distance, all high up in the sky and not much more than pinpricks.”
“You need to get right with the Lord about all that.”
“Yessum.” I figured I was as right as I was gonna get with Him, but I knew that short answers would get me out of the conversation I'd gotten myself into.
She went back to her sewing. “Well, you need to pray every night when you go to bed that you don't have any more of them dreams. I'll have them pray for you at church, too.”
We let it go, though I imagine she studied on it long and hard. Later that day, Uncle James brought Pepper by and she spent the night with us.
I was lazy that next morning and stayed in bed with a good book. Grandpa was up at the store and Miss Becky was humming a sacred song to herself in the kitchen because she didn't go to church on account of she didn't like the visiting preacher. Pepper was in there with her, talking about making cookies. I hoped they'd make chocolate chip.
Miss Becky and Grandpa always hit the floor at daylight, 'cause that's what farmers do. It was second nature to wake up at daylight, even on Sunday mornings.
Covered with nothing more than a sheet, I was propped with my head against the footboard, reading a good book called
Henry Reed's Journey
. We slept with our heads at the foot of the bed, to catch whatever breezes came through the screens.
It's funny, the book covered Henry's travel from California to New Jersey, and the parts where they followed Route 66 reminded me of a trip I took with Mama and Daddy a year before she started losing her mind. While we were on that trip, Daddy stopped a couple of times to visit museums. I was fascinated by the dusty old Indian stuff in the glass cases.
The book got me to thinking I might find some artifacts like those in Center Springs. I especially remembered one dusty case full of baskets, moccasins, arrowheads, and a little baby Indian mummy. I guess that started me wanting to be an archaeologist, especially after Pepper and I found some arrowheads and spear points down on Center Springs Branch. I found a stone knife the night we ran into The Skinner.
Uncle Cody stopped us once when we were headed toward what we thought was a burial mound with shovels in hand. When we told him where we were going, he explained how we'd be digging up our kinfolk, so we gave up on that idea, but I never gave up on finding Indian stuff.
Up at the store, I overheard a couple of men talking about a new house that was going up on the far west side of Center Springs. They were hauling fill dirt for the foundation from a deep draw south of Forest Chapel, down near where the new lake would be. Back in the olden days, the draw was fed by a spring, and one of the workers said they'd found Indian burial mounds full of tools, skeletons, and artifacts.
They were finished with the foundation and didn't need any more sand. I had an idea me and Pepper could talk Mr. John Washington into taking us with him the next time he visited Miss Rachel. The draw was across the pasture behind her house and I hoped there might be a few relics left.
Artifacts and relics. I liked those words and decided right there in bed to be an archaeologist when I grew up. Someday, after I dug up all the artifacts and relics in Lamar County, I'd head out on Route 66 and dig for dinosaurs in the desert.
The screen door slammed and through the bedroom window I saw Miss Becky and Pepper walk across the yard toward the barn. Hootie followed, walking slow and sticking his nose into every clump of grass.
I'd tell Pepper my idea when they got back. I knew she'd figure out a way to get us to Miss Rachel's. The phone rang and I answered. Minutes later I dressed, grabbed the .22, and rode my bike to finish the wild dog problem for good.
Miss Becky slowly eased herself down until she rested on a small stool beside Mary. Every milk cow she'd ever owned was named Mary. She set a galvanized bucket of warm water under the cow's teats and washed them one by one.
Pepper draped herself like a lazy cat across the hay barn's pipe gate. Hootie sniffed around a mound of dusty 'toe sacks. Satisfied by whatever he smelled, he turned around three times and laid down with a sigh, keeping an eye on Miss Becky.
“Girl, I expected you to be off somewhere with Top by now.”
Pepper studied her grandmother's Fundamentalist bun tightly wrapped on the back of her head. She knew that when it was free from all the bobby pins and net, Miss Becky's hair reached to the old woman's waist. “He's being lazy. I 'spect that when he gets up, he'll go off killing dogs again.”
The Jersey shifted restlessly while eating sweet creep feed from a metal trough. Miss Becky grunted. “I hope not. It's bad enough we didn't go to church this morning. I wish he'd be done with killin'.”
Pepper frowned. “He's a drag. Hootie's all right, so I don't know why he thinks he has to kill every stray in the county.”
Finished washing, Miss Becky poured the water through the litter of hay on the floor and traded for a large bucket.
The barn immediately filled with the metallic, almost musical sound of milk shooting into the bottom of the empty bucket. “He ain't after 'em all. Just the ones that hurt Hootie. The truth is, he's probably doing most of 'em a favor. They'll starve come winter, or someone else will shoot them later on after they kill a calf. I'd have your grandpa shoot one if it came around the chicken house. I can't stand an egg-sucking dog.”
“But is it right for him to go off killing like that? Y'all always said that we only kill what we eat.”
The tinny sound of milk softened as the bucket filled. Soon each squirt was deeper and thick as the warm stream shot through foam. “Sometimes right and wrong can be confusing. I believe in this case, though, it ain't right, or wrong, it just is.”
“That don't make no sense.”
“It will one of these days.”
“When Uncle Wilbert gave him that rifle, he said âvengeance is mine.' That's from the Bible.”
“It sure is. But the good Lord means that He'll settle up in his own way when the time comes.”
Pepper snickered. “Uncle Cody told me the same thing, but then he said the Lord let us invent rifles, so we could settle up ourselves and He wouldn't have to bother with all the little bitty things.”
“My lands. That boy. He shouldn't be making fun of the Lord's Word like that. You hear me, the Lord will take care of what we need. Sometimes he settles up for us and we don't even need to be there for it. All we need to do is pray about it.”
Pepper climbed off the fence and stood behind her grandmother's shoulder, watching the pail fill as her gnarled hands stripped the milk from the cow's teat.
“Can I do that?”
“Sure. Trade places with me.”
A moment later, Pepper was on the seat, her forehead against the cow's stomach. She gripped a teat in each hand and squeezed. Nothing came out. “What am I doing wrong?”
“You have to start by squeezing and stripping with your index finger, then the middle and on down to your little finger at the same time you pull.” She reached out. “Like this.”
Again, a thick stream shot into the foaming bucket. “Now you try.”
Pepper squeezed again. “That ain't much.”
“You'll get better with practice.”
“How long have you been milking?”
“Oh, sixty some-odd years, I reckon.”
Pepper concentrated on her job. The barn was silent for a long moment. “So, do you think what Top's doing is bad?”
“Top's doing what he has to do. He'll get done with it pretty soon. You can't stay mad forever, or it'll burn you up from the inside out. Parkers ain't like that, and neither were my folks. Good blood will win out. Besides, Parkers are tough.”
Pepper stopped. “I don't think I am.”
“What do you mean, Hon?”
The teenager kept her head against the cow's side. “I'm more and more afraid. I used to feel safe here, but it seems like there's always killings or people being hurt. I don't like living here anymore.”
Miss Becky reached out in reassurance. The youngster stiffened, and Miss Becky realized her hand was resting on the burn scar on Pepper's shoulder.
She let go and smoothed her apron, as if to wipe off something unclean. “Hon, we all get scared from time to time, and these are hard times for us all. It'll get better.”
“No it won't. People still cause problems over and over again, and then holler for help when it gets to be too much. Now it takes both Grandpa and Uncle Cody to keep the law.”
The distant crack of a light rifle caused them to look up. Hootie raised his head, listened for a moment, and then rested it on his paws, uninterested.
“I wish I lived somewhere else.”
“It'd be the same in town, hon.”
Pepper shook her head. “I don't mean in Chisum. There's a whole world out there and all we know is cow shit and dirt roads.”
Miss Becky ignored her anger. “This is where we live.”
Frustrated that her grandmother wasn't interested in the world outside of northeast Texas, Pepper went back to her milking. “Someday I'm going to live in California. They have beaches there, and the weather is nice all the time.” She thought of the Beach Boys and the music coming out of Los Angeles. “I was watching the news the other night and kids are running out there like ants. The guy on the radio said this year was the Summer of Love.” She stopped talking, startled at how it sounded in front of Miss Becky.
“We have love in this family, and it ain't just during the summertime.”
“They mean to love everyone, and to make love and not war.”
“I know what they mean, child. They're talking about lust, and that ain't the same. Decent folks have families, and love them and their neighbors, but they don't go crawling under the covers with whoever's closest.”
Miss Becky pondered the pasture beyond the barn, and the slope down to the gate. Fifty yards away, a wide red oak held Top's tree house. An unpainted chicken house sat an equal distance in the other direction, and straight ahead was their little farmhouse, surrounded by white sycamores and fragrant mimosa trees. In the distance, the top of the Lamar Lake dam was barely visible over the treetops to the south of their hill. She sighed, knowing that little patch of land would never be enough to hold her headstrong granddaughter.
“Hon, you need to know that these county roads nor no others will lead to golden cities. Roads only lead to the next place to live and work. That's what life is and it ain't nothin' else.” She paused to study the cow's flank. “When you graduate from high school and go to college or get married, maybe you can move out to California. You could stay with Bill and Ethyl, that's grandpa's brother's daughter and her husband. They have a farm in Pixley. That tee vee show you like, âPetticoat Junction' is about Pixley. Then you'd have the best of both worlds.”
“I don't
want
to farm. That's the point of going to California, to get away from all this.” Tears filled her eyes and dripped onto the hay. “I wish I could go to sleep tonight and wake up in San Francisco or Los Angeles, or maybe Hollywood. That's where the action is.” Frustrated with both the conversation and milking, Pepper stood. “My wrists are tired.”
“Okay, hon. You got a right smart in there. I'll finish up.”
Once again solid streams shot into the bucket, raising thick foam. Pepper sat cross-legged on a bale of alfalfa beside Hootie and rubbed his ears. “I love you, Grandma.”
Startled, Miss Becky stopped. “Why, I love you too, hon.”
Pepper wiped away the dried tears on her cheeks and frowned at a quick series of distant shots. “But I'd love living in California, too.”