The Collected Stories of William Humphrey (30 page)

“I heard the crash on the highway.

I knew what it was from the start.

I rushed to the scene of destruction.

The picture was stamped on my heart.

I didn't hear nobody pray, dear brethren,

I didn't hear nobody pray.

The blood lay thick on the highway,

But I didn't hear nobody pray.”

For it was bad enough already, him being landless. If on top of that he had come around strumming and crooning ballads and ditties old Bull Childress would have shooed him out of the yard like a stray dog. Bull would think, any fellow that played all that well, not just chords but notes, must have spent a lot of time sitting in the shade learning to pick them out, and that was not the kind a man wanted for a son-in-law. The truth was, Jesse had spent very little time learning; it just came naturally. But of course he could not say that. The pious wail of “The Crash on the Highway” was meant to overcome a prospective father-in-law's misgivings.

And Jesse was not shiftless. He was a most unusual combination of music and prudence. His music meant a little extra money. He liked to play and sing, and in fact his foot was always tapping to some tune running in his head; but he liked to be paid for it too. He was ambitious. He meant to get ahead. He was already thinking of a family of his own, thinking of it with a passion beyond his years, and notwithstanding her blushes, he broached the subject very early to Naomi. He spoke of it with such earnestness that she had to say at last, she hoped he was not thinking of quite as big a one as his own. It had not occurred to her that, however many there were, he meant to bring them up in a very different way from the way he and his brothers and sisters had been brought up.

Though it might be hard to understand why a young fellow should want to follow in his father's footsteps when his father's only followed in those of a mule, and why he should want to do it in order to own something which the wind blew away in clouds of red dust before your very eyes, Jesse Neighbours meant to own land of his own one day. Not that he couldn't wait. Not that his longing made him discontent with what he was starting out with. But stumbling along behind the plow among the blocks of dirt like chunks of concrete paving, straining against the handles, grunting, his face caked with dust, he would let himself think of the future. He was of an age and a seriousness to have a place in the councils of family men, farmers, and on the corner of the street in town on Saturday afternoon Jesse had heard it said time and time again that this land was cottoned out. Well, he meant to rotate his crops. He would have a margin of land over what he needed in order to just get by, enough to quarter his acreage and leave one quarter to lie fallow by turns each year. Then there was the weather. A man might have a good year, but then one of drought could wipe out all that he had saved. The weather, they said, was one thing you could do nothing about. But there was one thing you could do. You could grow one crop that did not depend so heavily on the weather. Jesse had heard those same men say that this land, once the range of the buffalo, was best suited to grazing. He meant to have a little herd of beef cattle one day. He knew already what breed. Bramers. Funny-looking things, they were, with that white hide like a scalded hog, that hump on the back like a camel, and those great flopping ears. And mean! But they were from India and could stand this Oklahoma heat and dryness like no others, and fever ticks never bothered them. Jesse didn't fool himself: he would never own any big herd. That was for men with capital, not for the likes of him. He would always be a dirt fanner. But a few he would have; then in a year when there came a drought or a hailstorm, or worst of all, when the crop was so good the bottom fell out of the market price, then you wouldn't have to go crawling to the bank and lick spit and put yourself in hock right up to your very eyeballs.

And though he would be a clodhopper all his days, if he started a little herd his sons wouldn't have to slave like this, daylight to dark, seven days a week, just to keep body and soul together; they could be cattlemen, breeders. Patience, he would need patience to save and then save more, until he could buy good stock, blooded, purebred, pedigreed—it paid off in the long run. And, sweat pouring from his face like rainwater off a hat-brim as he hunched himself, he drove the plowshare back into the stony ground and swore at the wheezing mule, thinking as he lurched down the row, if a man started out with one heifer, bred her and was lucky and she had twins and they were both heifers, and each of them had a heifer … So that he never heard his little sister until she was at his back, though all the way down from the house she had been screaming at the top of her lungs that they'd struck oil on the Childress place.

Oil-well derricks on those Oklahoma plains were a commoner sight than trees. New ones sprang up, old ones were drilled deeper, with every fresh discovery of oil anywhere within a hundred miles. Bad times and bad soil bred them like weeds, where no edible plant would grow. The lucky ones struck water, and the derrick was converted into a windmill. Even Bull Childress had long since given up hope of anything from that one down behind his house. Jesse had forgotten it so completely that for a moment he hardly knew what his little sister was talking about.

“They claim it's a real gusher, Jess,” she said. “The Childresses are rich! Naomi's going to be one of them millionairesses, like you read about in the newspapers.”

Even as she spoke her voice ran down like a phonograph, seeing the look in her brother's eyes, blank holes in the terra-cotta mask of his face. Her mouth gaped, snaggle-toothed, as it dawned on her that the news she had brought might not be good news, after all.

Jesse leaned for a moment on the plow handles, breathing hard, his head sagging between his shoulder blades, sweat dripping from the tip of his nose. He spat thinly and of the color of blood and wiped the back of his gritty hand across his lips. Then he straightened, and settling the reins about his neck, grasping the handles and pointing the plowshare downward again, he said in a dry husky voice, “Come up, mule.”

The story told was that the well blew in while old Bull was in the outhouse looking at the pictures in the unused pages of the mail-order catalogue, and that when she let go he shot off the hole and out the door with his flap hanging open and his britches down around his knees, tripped and sprawled flat on his face, rolled over, looked up, and then lay there moaning with joy and letting the slimy, thick, foul-smelling black rain spatter in his face and into his open mouth like sweet California wine. The roar was a steady explosion and the stink enough to make you gag. Air to breathe there was none and the sky turned black as in a dust storm. And as he lay there Bull's moaning turned insensibly into a whimper, a sob, as he thought of the years of his life that had gone into that hard, unyielding soil, the sweat from his hanging brow that had watered every inch of it, of the furrows he had broken, the cotton sacks he had dragged across it, bent double beneath the broiling sun, the seed he had sown in it and which had rotted there, never sprouting. Of this dry red dirt he had eaten his allotted peck, and more. His head was bent to it like an ear on an undernourished stalk; his skin had taken on its very color like a stain. And all this while deep underground lay this black treasure. And rolling over he commenced to beat the earth with his fists for having hidden its riches from him all his life until now. Then when he had exhausted himself beating it, he flung his arms wide in an embrace and kissed the ground again and again.

In the house he found his daughter trying to pull down the windows and his wife cursing over her wash that had been hanging on the line and that now looked like a heap of mechanic's rags. Aghast at her blasphemous complaints, Bull roared, “You'll wear silks and laces from now on, you old fool! Shut your mouth and thank the good Lord! Don't let Him hear you grumbling!” And grabbing up the laundry he flung it to the floor and danced on it with his bare black feet, bellowing jubilantly.

All afternoon it rained down and Bull hopped from one window to the next, crowing, “Spew, baby, spew! Oh, honey, don't never stop! Flood us! Drown us in it! Oh, Godawmighty, blow her sky high! Let it come down for forty days and forty nights!” Three times in the course of the afternoon he dashed outdoors like a boy in a summer shower and baptized himself anew, letting it dance in his open palms and blacken his upturned face, and in that state he would return, tracking up the floors, and demand a hug and kiss from each of his women, chasing them screaming through the house.

All night long it fell like a spring rain on the noisy sheet-iron roof, and the stench grew hellish. But Bull lay unsleeping in his bed, smacking his old woman's flat bony behind whenever he suspected her of dozing off, listening to the patter overhead and crooning, “Oh, keep it up, sweet Jesus. Oh, pour it down. Don't never stop till I tell you.”

Towards daybreak the next morning the crew succeeded in capping the well, and they ventured out to have a look around. The world looked burnt, smelled burnt too. From the eaves of buildings, from the handles of tools long abandoned about the yard, from the limp leaves of trees and plants the black syrup hung in long slow-swelling drops. From the sagging fence wires they were strung in ropes like beads and amid the leaves of bushes they resembled small poisonous black berries. From every blade of grass, like a viscous black dew, hung a single unfailing drop. A dying songbird staggered about the yard, his wings heavy and useless. Upon the pool in the bottom of the cast-iron washpot lay insects in a thick, still crust.

“Won't nothing ever grow here ever again,” Mrs. Childress wailed, seeing her dead peonies and the earth around them that looked as if it had been tarred and asphalted.

“I hope to God not!” cried Bull. “I done raised all the crops I ever aim to off of it!”

Breakfast (oily biscuits, coffee that tested like it had been drained from a crankcase) was hardly over when Bull said, “Well, gals, yawl take off your aprons and paint your faces. The Childresses are headed for the big city. Don't bother packing nothing. We won't need none of this trash”—the sweep of his arm comprehended the sum of their previous life—“never no more.”

So they piled into the cab of the truck (a pickup, cut down from a La Salle sedan) and took off. In town they stopped just long enough for Bull to go to the bank, from which he returned carrying two bulging canvas sacks, and after that they never even slowed down for Idabel, nor even Paris, but drove straight to Dallas, with old Bull sitting on that horn all the way. And when they got there they drove straight to the Adolphus, pulled up out front, and though they had not brought one piece of luggage with them, sat there honking until the whole corps of bellhops and porters had been sent out to receive them. When they got out, so did the broody hen who had made the trip with them unbeknownst. She staggered off her nest among the corn shucks and croaker sacks in the truck bed, and out into the street, and there she died, in a shower of feathers and with a bloodcurdling squawk, underneath the wheels of a new red Ford V-8, right on the corner of Commerce and Akard.

Without turning his head, jerking his thumb over his shoulder at the old jitney, Bull said to the head greeter, “Get shut of that for me, will you? Maybe you know some poor devil that can use it.”

They were not turned away. They were welcomed like royalty. After Corsicana, after Spindletop, after Kilgore, Dallas had developed a keen collective nose for crude oil, and rolled out the red carpet for their kind of barefoot millionaire. Bull drew his
X
on the register as big as a level-crossing sign.

And at Neiman-Marcus that same afternoon they seemed to have been expecting Naomi. To her request for a permanent wave and “a beauty treatment,” they smiled, and showed her in. She was undressed and popped into a box with her head sticking out like a turkey's at a turkey shoot, parboiled, removed feeling as if she had been peeled and her quick exposed, stretched out on a white table and kneaded like dough until her bones jellied and her brains melted and ran. She was put into a white gown and whisked into a second chamber, seated in a dentist's chair, and mud, or what certainly seemed like mud, piled on her face. To soft music wafted sourcelessly in, a bevy of sibilant attendants busied themselves about her, one to each foot, one to each hand, plying, chafing, clipping. The mud was removed, then came lotions icy and astringent, a brisk facial massage, a shampoo. The head beautician materialized, a gorgeous young sorcerer of intermediate sex with bangs and plucked brows, a pout, fluttering hands smaller and whiter and far softer than Naomi's own, a voice like molasses in January and a pettish toss of the head. From a palette of rosy tints he chose, and with brushes and swabs applied them to Naomi's cheeks, frowning, standing back from time to time to squint at her like an artist before his easel. Her head was anointed with the contents of various vials, her hair cut and curled.

At last it was finished and she was permitted to look. One glimpse and she looked about for confirmation. They nodded. She looked again, sidelong, scared. She reached out a hand (once, or rather always, red and cracked from lye soap, cold water, broom handles, the bails of buckets—now white, soft, a row of small pointed flames burning at the fingertips) and shyly touched the vision in the glass. Her lips parted in wonder, her lips that had blossomed, sweetly sullen, moist, quivering. Wonder, not self-infatuation, was what she felt, for that was not her, it was a creature from another world, out of the pages of
Silver Screen
, beautiful as a dummy in a store window. Her hair was a platinum cloud. Her eyes had doubled in size. Beneath lids elongated and shaded with blue, the whites sparkled, the pupils swooned within themselves, liquid with promise and cruel caprice. Her brows had been resettled; they arched of themselves. Sophistication had been shadowed into her hitherto round and girlish cheeks.