“It’s only faded a little!” Jeanine was yelling as well. They were yelling because they were afraid of taxes and drought, afraid of being reduced to taking relief in town, of being alone without their father to help them and it had come upon them suddenly, like a little hot dust devil full of field debris, stinging them. Jeanine’s hands shook. “They wouldn’t hire you if you walked in there stark naked with your hair on fire so shut up about it!” She wadded the dress into a tight ball and threw it back at Mayme and it hit the sugar canister and knocked the canister over. Sugar spilled out onto the floor, a rare and precious treasure pouring through the cracks of the floorboards.
“Stop it!” Elizabeth stood up and banged the hairbrush on the table. “Clean that up.”
Mayme and Jeanine got down on their knees with a spatula and a box top and began to scoop up the sugar. They were rigidly, furiously polite with each other. Jeanine knew she should say she would hang out the colored clothes overnight from now on. She should say
Sorry
. But she was too mad and also hurt and so she didn’t. Sugar clung to her fingers.
MAYME CAUGHT A
ride on Gareau’s milk truck to the high school library in Tarrant and returned with an instruction book on typing. She made herself a piece of cardboard covered with rows of circles that said QWERTYUIOP and ASDFGHJKL and ZXCVBNM and she pressed these imaginary keys with her eyes on the ceiling with great fervor for hour after hour while Jeanine brought in wood and bleached out the tea towels and Bea sat with her homework, her small cat on her lap. The lithograph of the small girl in the forest turned in the rising heat from the stove and the glass flashed and it seemed to Bea the bird’s song had turned into fragments of light to enchant the solitary child. Then she sighed and forced herself back to the gray printed page and facts about the produce of the state of Texas. Cotton. Cattle. Oil. Peanuts.
“Try to stay friends with Mr. Gareau,” said Elizabeth. “We are going to need rides to town in the milk truck to save gas.”
Jeanine heard Smoky calling down in the field. It was a kind of scream. She pulled on her jacket and ran with the halter in her hand across the graveyard, through the peach orchard, then into the field with the seedling cedar. Smoky stood on one side of the fence line and old Mr. Crowser’s Jo-Jo on the other. Smoky was trying to paw the fence down to get at him. He wanted to kill him and then he would have the lovely Sheba all to himself. Sheba stood off to one side. She was a dark half-Percheron and very elderly and at this moment, coy. Jeanine saw old Mr. Crowser coming down in a stiff and jerky run. He was also carrying a halter and lead rope.
“Get away, Miss Stoddard,” he said. “You’re going to get hurt. Don’t get between them.” He put the halter on Jo-Jo to lead him away. Smoky shifted with tense, small movements, darting back and forth, his two front legs stiff as fence posts and squatting on his hind legs. He wanted to go over the fence and couldn’t make up his mind whether he would or not.
“I can handle him,” she said. But she was afraid of him. She held the halter in her left hand and put her right hand on his neck. His neck muscles were so tense they had the feel of warm iron. She slipped the halter over his nose and buckled it and jerked at the lead rope. “Pay attention to me,” she said. “Here, look here.” Her hair flew into her eyes.
“I’ll repair this fence line,” Mr. Crowser said. “But you’ve got to do something with that stallion.”
“Yes, sir,” she said. She took the slack of the lead rope in her left hand and lifted it. “He’ll mind me.”
Smoky flung his head against the lead rope and suddenly darted his head at her with all his teeth exposed. She struck him across the nose with the end of the lead rope and he reared. She held on and pulled him down.
“Young woman, you are going to get yourself killed,” said Mr. Crowser. He turned back to the barn with Jo-Jo following. “Keep him in the barn for a couple of days while I repair this fence.”
It took a long time to get Smoky back to the old sugar barn. It was like fighting with a tornado on the end of a rope. He circled her and once stood very still, watching her, as if he would charge. He was thinking about it. By the time Jeanine coaxed him into the barn she was sweating and shaking.
She rested for a while and then got up and warmed water to wash out the juniper green silk. She had to do something about Smoky Joe. When he got near a mare he became some other creature. He became volcanic. He was no longer her friend. He was nobody’s friend. She plunged the silk into lukewarm water and chipped soap into the tub. She handled it very carefully. She would make a pretty dress for Mayme from it and then they wouldn’t be mad at each other anymore. When she was done it hung on the line with the sun behind it sinking into a dust haze, and the material lifted and sank like a pale flag.
Mayme put on her faded good dress and the shiny gabardine coat, and drove the Ford truck with its balding tires into Tarrant to apply at the oil field office. They hired her.
I
t was as if he were pulling the calf out of a cave and some great force that had nothing to do with the cow had hold of the other end of it, and would not let it go.
Everett had a piggin string wrapped around the calf ’s front feet for a handhold. He tore the calf out of its mother with all the strength of his back and arm muscles. The cow struggled to get up, her tongue thrust out of her mouth. His boots made crackling sounds as he slid around in the crisp, dusty soil. His horse stood tied to a little persimmon tree and the dog lay at his feet, both of them staring at this difficult birth with a kind of dread interest.
The calf slid out in a rush of fluid and with it came the entire uterus, flowing out of the cow and turning inside out, prolapsing, a sliding sack of flesh the size of a sleeping bag, shedding its red lining. The cow made a gasping noise and she lay in a great mound, lifting her head again and again.
He tied the umbilical cord in two places, four inches apart, with twine. He cut between the knots with his penknife. He threw his slicker over the calf and pegged it down around it with rocks. It was a bull calf. He fished around for the roll of gauze bandage in his saddlebags and found it. He knelt down and began to wind it around and around the prolapsed uterus, now stuck all over with twigs and the small leaves of the Texas persimmon. There was blood all over his coat. He was smeared with fluids. Every predator within miles would be lifting its head, opening nostrils, licking its muzzle.
The bovine uterus was a great unwieldy bag that weighed more than thirty pounds. It began to take on a manageable shape as he wound the gauze bandage around it until it was the shape of a column. His hands seemed very old, older than the rest of him. They were spotted with white scars. They were difficult to operate. He got to his feet.
“Get up,” he said. She made a mawing, blatting sound. “Get up, goddamn it.” Her big hooves scrabbled and made grooves in the dust and ripping up the shiny, elastic stems of the leather plant. He knelt at her head and held her muzzle in one hand, clamping her mouth shut and with his other hand shut her nostrils and cut off her wind.
She fought with the last of her strength against suffocation and suddenly plunged to her feet, back end up first and then the front and Ross jumped to get out of her way. She swung her head and knocked his hat off. He kicked it aside and kept one hand on her. She was swaying. “Good girl,” he said.
The prolapsed uterus, bound into a long column, hung from her rear end. He pushed it back into her, unwinding the bandage as he fed the internal organ back into the cave of her body. The smell of birth and its detritus all around him in the crisp and burning drought lands. He put his hat back on after he wiped his bloody fingers on his shirt. He stripped the slicker from the newborn bull calf, and got it on its feet, and milked the cow of some of the birth milk. He opened the
calf ’s mouth and thrust it in. He stroked his hard fingers over the calf ’s eyes and dug matter out of its nostrils and wiped the matter on his cracked chaps.
“Come on, baby.” He held the calf between his legs, and pressed the teat at his mouth. “Come on, sport, I been waiting for you a long time.”
The calf sucked one suck and turned his head up to the empty blue sky as the heavy cream rolled down its throat. It opened its perfectly fitted mouth and closed it again and sucked again, and the stuff of the new world poured into its body and with a sort of finality it sucked again and was committed.
He waited for a while. Then he untied his horse and held the rein with one hand and picked up the calf with the other. He threw the off-rein over the horse’s neck and stepped up into the saddle. It was a clumsy thing to do with the little brush carbine sticking up out of the scabbard and the loose-limbed bull calf slipping under his arm.
The horse took in a deep breath of the wind to see what information might be riding down on it. Then he turned his head quickly to a clump of little live oaks and cedar. His ears were stiff as buckram. Something had come along already, probably a coyote or a fox, but nothing to challenge a man on a horse. The dog started off across the stony ground toward whatever it was, but Ross whistled him back. Then he lifted the reins and they moved off, downhill, the cow trailing after, bawling for her calf. He wanted her to walk very slowly or she would come apart again. They passed by the ravine where the government men had buried his shot cattle. Some of the skulls and bones were exposed, scoured by the dry wind.
AT THE BARN
he put the cow into a stall and the calf in the straw beside her. His son helped to hold the cow while he took a jerrican and poured five gallons of water down into her uterus. The weight of
the water would settle it and hold it in place until the tissues reattached themselves. He led the bay gelding into the fairway and shucked off the saddle and the rifle scabbard and the blankets and carried it all into the tack room and shoved it onto a saddle tree. He hung the bridle over the horn and turned the bay out into the lot. The bay had had a hard ride with double weight and wouldn’t be worth a crying dime for two days. He put his hand on the boy’s shoulder and they turned toward the house, where it drowsed under the bare limbs of the mesquite and the pinwheel of the windmill fan sailing stationary with its long blades. His gray stud Kat Tracks ran down the fence line and lifted his muzzle in the air with a feline curiosity to take in the smell of the new calf.
The cook came into the kitchen in his rubber apron.
“Yo, Jugs,” said Ross.
Jugs said, “What is it?”
“Bull calf.” Ross picked up a scrap of paper from the kitchen table. It had columns of figures on it and he smeared the paper with cow blood.
“Is that it?”
Ross tried to wipe off the paper. “That’s it.”
“No branding crew this year.”
“Nope. We can do it ourselves. Me, you, and the boy.”
He laid down the paper and then went upstairs to Miriam’s room. He searched through the drawers of her vanity for a little three-minute sand glass he had given her years ago. Brought it back from a trip to San Antonio. He found it in the second drawer along with a hank of ribbon.
The Magic of Old San Antonio
, the glass said. He blew the dust from it and took it downstairs and sat it on the kerosene stove and lit a burner. He filled a shallow pan with milk from yesterday’s milking and then broke three eggs into the pan and turned over the three-minute glass.
He heard shots from the barn; a twenty-two. Innis was shooting
rats. They nested in the four-hundred-pound mohair bags, chewed holes in them and made themselves comfortable in the world’s most expensive fiber. There was at present no place to sell it except in the East. He turned to the kitchen table and again went over his figures. So much for the shearing crews and so much for the shipping and so much for a train ticket to Woonsocket, Rhode Island, where most of the mills were shut down by strikes. Several people had been shot dead by the police. He would keep taking whatever he could get and storing it if he could keep the rats from establishing entire rat cities and rat undernations in it. This was called betting on the come. He had lost all his cattle except seven breeding cows and out of them he had got the bull calf in the barn and four other heifer calves.
Someday the grass would come back, someday there would be a market for angora coats and sweaters, and the military would need mohair for uniforms and flight suits. If they got into a war the four-hundred-pound bags would move quickly. In the meantime he had a match for Kat Tracks and that should bring in some money. He smelled something burning and the cook ran in the door.
“Shit, boss, it’s boiled over and them’s the last eggs.”
Ross took the pan by the handle and walked to the back door and threw the smoking eggs and burnt milk into the hardpan dirt of the backyard. He said, “Well, at least I still got my whiskey.”
His son walked up with five rats by the tails. He stepped around the mess of burnt eggs and milk.
“Was that my breakfast?” he said.
“Yes.” Ross kicked the pan. “There’s grits.”
J
eanine sat in Abel and Alice Crowser’s kitchen and laid out the map she had drawn of the 150 acres of Tolliver land and where she would begin clearing scrub cedar, which acres she could rent. But he knew the fields as well as she did. He had been neighbors to the Tollivers all his life, and friends with her grandfather for many years and Jeanine understood that he had stood as guardian and steward to the lower fields all the years of their abandonment and kept them clear. He placed his square forefinger on the map and explained to her that all the properties along the Brazos River were in the main smaller acreages, for farming, while those away from the river and in the other parts of Palo Pinto and Comanche County were much larger and held for ranching. If there were some way to pump water to the fields from the river, and if people could afford it, why, they would snap their fingers at the drought.
He would lease the lower seventy-five acres from them for ten dollars
a month and she could drive their tractor. His own land would lie fallow and recover. It was an old John Deere and she couldn’t wait to get her hands on it. Alice said Abel wanted to plow with the horses anyway and if she could afford the gas for it then it was all right with her. Alice’s white hair sprang up in loops. She leaned over and patted Jeanine on top of her head.
“We never had a girl,” she said. “It’s a wonder I ain’t dead from the washing. Couldn’t get the boys to help. Your mother said you are a great hand to sew.”
“Yes, ma’am,” said Jeanine. “I can sew.” She folded up her map.
“Better go see Mrs. Joplin at the Strawn store. Her grandson is marrying Martha Jane Armstrong and they have some silk they need made into a wedding dress.”
Jeanine bit her lip. “That’s quite a job,” she said. “A wedding dress.”
“It was some old silk Martha Jane’s grandfather got in New Orleans,” said Alice. “When he went down there and shot somebody and went bankrupt. Now she’s getting married to Tim Joplin and they got a use for it. After all these years.”
The John Deere exploded in backfires and smoke when Abel started it up. Jeanine rode on the drawbar behind him, holding to the edge of the perforated seat until she could understand the gears and the line to the lever that lowered and raised the cultivator blades. The clutch was operated by hand and there were two brakes, one for each foot and each wheel. It was confusing. Then Jeanine climbed into the seat and started it up and jammed the gearshift down. The tractor charged forward into the Crowsers’ garden fence. She forgot where all the levers were and so roared on and churned up two plowed rows and took down the six-foot deer fence with the fender while nails shrieked as they were ripped out of the posts. Alice put a dishtowel up to her face and turned back into the house.
“Never mind, I’ll fix it,” said Abel. “Back her up.”
Jeanine wrapped her scarf carefully around her neck and shoved the left-hand stick shift backward. There were two stick shifts. She had to remember which was the reverse and what foot went with it. She stared at her feet for a minute as to fix in her mind which was on the right brake and the left brake. She backed up. Abel attached the cultivator to the drawbar and she made it out to the road.
She drove it at ten miles an hour from the Crowsers’ place to their own, the cultivator on behind, carried six inches above the road. The great steel wheels banged along on their rigid cleats. She wanted to wave at people passing by, to be jaunty and lighthearted and important, a slight girl in charge of a huge machine, but then they might want to stop and give her advice. So she ignored passing cars and gripped the bucking wheel and crashed through the front yard, through the gate at the sugar barn and then started up the hill toward the orchard.
The brochures from Texas A&M said the grass and weeds would drink up all the nutrients from the soil and she would have nothing but sour peaches the size of marbles if she didn’t rip them up and that was what she was going to do, starting today. Big sweet lamps of fruit would shine from the limbs in August. Wasn’t that what they had longed for all those years in the oil field towns?
She let go the line that dropped the cultivator blades but it was hung up on something she couldn’t see. She got down, climbing over all the levers and gears. She bent over the square links of the chain drive. The engine was still running and she suddenly found she couldn’t move her head. Both ends of her wool scarf were caught in the chain drive.
She fought with the scarf with both hands and the John Deere started to move forward into the peach trees. Jeanine was dragged along with it. The square links drew the woolen fabric in their teeth in a slow, regular progression as if it were something very good to eat and they were going to eat it all and her head along with it. The tractor
lumbered forward and caught one wheel on a twisted small peach tree and tore the limbs with a shrieking sound. It spun around to the left and stopped and then tore on again. Jeanine began to choke and her head was drawn farther down until it looked as if she were bowing to the cultivator blades and she realized she was going to die in the most horrible way right here in the peach orchard, or at least lose some portion of her face or her scalp. With the cold noise of the gears in her face she came to the edge of a bottomless knowledge of how people could be torn into pieces. The chain chewed and spun and finally ripped the scarf in half. She tore loose and flung herself backward with all her strength.
Bright round spots drifted through the black peach trees. They blanked out her vision wherever she turned, but she reached with one hand to where she knew the spark lever was and she turned it down and the engine died.
Jeanine waited until the luminous round spots diminished into red sparks and faded. She sat for a long time on the steel seat with her hands around her throbbing neck. Water trembled in minute drops on the points of the graveyard fence and on the bayonets of the sotol. She felt very small under the awning of the universe; her life was a pale and insignificant spark, easily extinguished. She swallowed over and over again, trying to open her throat. I must have something to do in life, she thought.
And the Lord said, Jeanine, build me a peach orchard ten cubits by fifteen cubits
. Then she wiped the cold sweat from her eyes and turned the spark lever until the engine started up again and shook all the metal of the engine block and the tall exhaust pipe. She was taken unaware by an overwhelming feeling of gratitude. It was like a warm flood and it flushed the blood into her face and limbs again. Jeanine slowly began to drag the clawed cultivator through the beautiful bare trees even though her hands were shaking. She must never let her mother know this had happened.
That night she ran through the cold hall with the torn woolen
muffler in her hands. She could see the marks on her neck in the old mirror with the beveled edges that took up the light in strange prisms all along its edges, as if saying that beyond the ordinary light of day there were other worlds. Behind her, the front double doors shut tight against the weather leaked a suffused gray luminosity into the hall. Her Tolliver grandparents sat beside each other in their ornate frame and stared down into her very thoughts.
It’s all right,
they said,
we’ve seen worse
.
ELIZABETH, LILLIAN, AND
Violet stood wrapped in their winter coats, in their worn and carefully polished shoes, among the crowd of people who came to watch the driller and his machine arrive. They were in a hayfield that had been sheared off to stubble on a farm north of Mineral Wells. They were at the edge of the Jacksboro field. Elizabeth kicked at the stubble. The farmer hadn’t got much in the haying. He and his wife stood on their back porch, looking down the gravel road as if they were watching for mounted enemies or the Second Coming.
The three women stood close together against the wind. Elizabeth felt very widowed, like something unshelled. But inside her there must be some small riverine pearl, however misshapen. She was comforted, standing close to Lillian and Violet. They could all throw their money away together. It was something to keep her mind off things.
The ancient steam boiler sat waiting for the drilling rig. Its chimney rose twenty feet into the air and stared with a metallic hauteur out over the stubble. Nearby were three storage tanks and a separator and a string of used pipe stacked neatly with sawmill sidings as headers. The crowd waited like a theater audience. Cars were parked all around the windmill. Milton Brown scrambled up a pile of dirt to see better and began to scribble notes. He had a photographer with him, but the photographer did not open up his camera.
The promoter was a tall, square-shouldered man in a worn gabardine suit from the early 1930s. He wore a wide tie patterned with art deco zigzags. He had a thick head of curly hair and a broad white smile. He waved his hands at the crowd, he paced up and down on the uneven ground.
“You see!” he said. “I told you he would make it.”
In the distance a convoy of trucks approached, raising a cloud of pale dust. At the head of the convoy a flatbed truck carried the drilling rig. It seemed like something from the Iron Age. Its ancient wooden Sampson post waved back and forth as if it were poorly secured. The enormous bull wheel wobbled on its axle. It was made of wood and shod with steel. Most of the metal parts of the machine were rusted, and what was not rusted was covered with flaking darkred paint, and to power this unsteady rig they had the prehistoric steam boiler. Behind the flatbed was an overloaded 1918 Nash two-ton truck, and following the Nash was a Model A. In this manner apparently the rig and the trucks and the men had traveled all the way from Ruston, Louisiana, to Central Texas towing this parachute of dust behind them over every mile.
“But it’s made out of wood,” Violet said. Her voice was high and alarmed.
“I can see that,” said Lillian.
“It’s like it was from
Alley Oop
.” Violet wouldn’t quiet down. People glared at her and then turned back nervously to watching the machine arrive.
“They can still drill with it,” said Elizabeth. But it was worrisome. It was an old cable-tool rig, and what was needed was something better. A rotary. They had tried a cable-tool here before and nothing came of it but a dry hole.
Lillian shifted her cold feet and watched the outfit come crashing into the field. “I bet it was put together out of scrap,” she said.
They held their purses in front of them. Violet Keener’s coat was
tweed with a fox fur collar. Elizabeth’s was a worn, dark maroon tabby-weave with square wooden buttons that let the wind through. Her sister-in-law Lillian was wrapped in a man’s canvas chore coat and stood in her saddle shoes with a dismal expression and shifted her feet with crushing noises on the frozen rank pasture grasses.
“I don’t know what my husband will say when he finds out,” said Violet. “He’ll get that look on his face.” She took hold of the sleeve of Elizabeth’s coat. “Have you told the girls?”
“I told them,” said Elizabeth. “Jeanine screamed. Mayme sat down and said Oh, Mother. Bea ran off to the bedroom to write it all down.” Elizabeth lifted her chin. “I can decide can’t I?” But her heart was speeding up, now that the machine was here and it was an old cable-tool rig, with a wooden derrick, and she could see plainly before her a slow hole being driven for months and months with no return and Bea going to school in beat-up tennis shoes and more than two hundred dollars owed in back taxes. She suddenly found herself arguing in her head with Jack, who always said she could never handle money.
The crowd of fifty or so people stood with their eyes fixed on the approaching machine. They were farmers and farmwives, several more women without men who might be housewives from town, and clerks and a waiter from the Baker Hotel. People who should have known better.
Milton Brown came over and took off his hat. Elizabeth remembered him. She felt sorry for him with his stutter and his thick glasses. She had heard the Mineral Wells
Star
was paying their reporters in scrip or even produce that farmers brought in to pay for their subscriptions and the reporters and editor had the eggs and beans for dinner. Elizabeth smiled at him and said hello. Milton said he was coming out to visit them one of these better days if there were any better d-d-days now that we are all reduced to a b-b-barter economy like cavemen paying for ax heads with turnips and fish.
Elizabeth looked up at the farmhouse; smoke wavered out of a metal chimney and a long-eared dog lay curled up in the rocking chair while the farm couple stood on the steps. The flatbed bullied its way through the front yard and then through the gate into the pasture. It slewed to one side and took out one of the gateposts with a raw, splintering noise and then the convoy rumbled across the stubble. The men were leaning out of the windows of their vehicles shouting directions at one another.
The producer held up one hand and announced to the crowd the present circumstances. He cleared his throat.
He said his name was Albert Spanner. He said, You all know me, you all have trusted my vision here. And in the oil business, vision is what counts. He told them that another outfit had driven the first well here five years before because there was water in the pasture windmill nearby to make a slush pit and a promising formation below. He spoke in a loud voice so they could all hear; the first crew had shot the well in a spectacular explosion with 135 quarts of nitro and half a ton of ball bearings but it hadn’t shaken anything loose.