The Longest Road (38 page)

“You—you're our Way!” Buddy hunkered down. “We hunted for you all over Texas and the Oklahoma lawmen tried to arrest Marilys for kidnapping and—and she could go to the 'lectric chair! You—you
got
to take care of us!”

Way tried to shake his head, winced, and growled, “I'm not fit to be around you.”

“We want you!” Laurie cried.

He turned away his face, spoke in a dull, low tone. “I traded my brushes for some bootleg last night—never did that before. I'm lower'n a shake's belly. I 'preciate you lookin' for me and all but you'd better rustle on out of here.”

All this time he hadn't really looked at Marilys. She gave him a shake, heedless of his startled howl, and demanded, “What did Dub tell you to make you go off? What?”

He did look at her then. Something blazed from his eyes. “It don't matter.”

“But it's why you won't go with us now.” She got to her feet, looking tired and frail, brushed dark hair back from her forehead. “All right. I'll go on alone somewhere. But you, Wayburn Kirkendall, you get up your hind legs and take charge of these kids. The truck's full of gas and parked right over there by the café.” She turned. “I'll go pay your fine—drunk and disorderly, is it?—and we'll head off in different directions.”

“Marilys!” Laurie and Buddy cried, jumping up and blocking her path.

Way couldn't stand but he hitched himself to one knee. “Marilys, it don't matter, what Dub said. And—well, what you think mattered, never did.”

Marilys stopped in her tracks. “Then why—?”

“I left on account of he got me drunk. Figgered if he could anyways do that I wasn't any use to you or the kiddos—that you'd do better without me, girl, 'specially when he was ready to give the kids everything, even send them to college.”

“You see how much they wanted what Dub could give them.”

Way's head dropped. After a moment, he raised it. “I reckon what matters is that you're here.”

“'Course we are,” said Buddy. “You're our family—and so's Marilys.”

Laurie nodded, too full of tears and hope to speak. Way said, still on his knee, “Marilys, I don't have any right to ask you now—but if I stay sober—if I prove I'm fit to be a family man, would you—”

“Marry you?” She bent and kissed him, though he tried to turn his whiskered face away. “Yes, and we'll do it first chance we get. You won't have time to booze it up, Way. You've got a family to look after.”

A deputy had come out of the little jail to see what was going on and let the prisoners loose except for the huge man who had to spend two more days on the chain for breaking a café table and window in a fight. Marilys paid Way's fine. He got his bundle from the jail office and they piled into the Studebaker's cab. Buddy recounted their adventures and how they'd kept trading vehicles.

“I'm sure glad you didn't take a loss on that Chevy truck at Cross Trails,” Way said. “Just like that skunk, Redwine, to accuse me of stealin' from his hardware store.” He looked like his head hurt. He hadn't argued when Marilys offered to drive.

“We're not too likely to get stopped now that we look like a regular family,” she said. “But it's safer to stay out of Texas, and probably Oklahoma, too, since I'm wanted for resisting arrest and wounding two officers.”

Way slanted her a grin. “And you look like such a sweet lady!”

“It was their fault,” Laurie said. “They could tell we weren't kidnapped!”

Way touched her cheek. “We'll have to get you another guitar.”

They stopped at the next town early that afternoon and took a tourist cabin with two rooms. Marilys and Laurie went downtown to buy Way some new clothes. They had baths, put on clean things, and then, with Way all shaved and neat, his hair trimmed by Marilys, they got a marriage license and located a justice of the peace. Marilys had her mother's wedding ring and that was what Way slipped on her finger. It was risky but they got married under their right names. The four of them had supper in the town's fanciest restaurant.

When they got back to the cabin, feeling strange and a little bit sad though she was entirely grateful and glad that Way was with them, Laurie started to shoo Buddy into their room and close the door. It was going to be different now that Marilys and Way were married. Laurie was glad, of course, but she didn't feel as close to either of them as she had.

Then Marilys smiled and said, “Why don't we have some music, a party just for the family?”

She got out Cracker Jacks and salted nuts, ginger ale, and tiny chocolate squares with green peppermint fillings. They ate and drank and sang and played till Buddy fell asleep and Laurie's eyelids kept drooping shut.

“Guess I'd better carry Buddy to bed,” Way said.

“Let me take off his shoes,” said Marilys.

“I'll wash the chocolate off his face.” Laurie hurried for a wet washcloth. The three of them got Buddy snuggled into his pillows. Laurie turned to Marilys, hugged her and then Way, then both of them, while their arms went around her and each other. It was tangled up and hard to tell where one person's arms left and the other's began, but it was the warmest, safest, and happiest Laurie had felt since—well, she couldn't remember exactly but she hadn't been so glad and grateful since that terrible Black Sunday when Buddy and Daddy walked alive out of the lingering dust.

“Oh, please,” she breathed against the shoulders of the two grown-ups, “Please be happy!”

Way chuckled softly. Laurie could hear it rumbling beneath her ear. “I'm the luckiest man alive!” He turned solemn, watching Marilys. “Anyone with good sense would have let me go, but I'm mighty glad you girls are both a little daffy.”

“We're buying you some paintbrushes tomorrow so you can start supporting us,” Marilys teased.

They left the room, laughing. Laurie could hear the sound of their voices, though not the words, as she got ready for bed. That was how it used to be with Mama and Daddy. She'd always believed as long as they were awake, nothing bad could happen, the world couldn't end. With the comforting murmur in her ears, she drifted off to sleep.

East of MacAlester—wasn't that the town Morrigan's mother lived close to?—through what had been Choctaw country on sometimes paved, sometimes graveled roads. The gentle Winding Stair Mountains were greening up, tree buds swelling, grass spearing through dead leaves. Farmers were plowing and planting. Many appeared to be Indian but there were some with fairer skin and black eyes Laurie took for Italian and others who looked just plain old mixed-up American, Scotch, Irish, German, English, what have you.

Over in the Arkansas Ozarks, they felt safer from Dub and the Oklahoma law. No one was watching for a family. Marilys wanted to get the children in school so they settled in Splitlog, a little town on the White River. They rented a big old house so embraced by honeysuckle and trumpetvine that the flaking white paint hardly showed. As spring came on, the yard was fragrant with lilacs and brilliant with orange and vermilion tiger lilies. Birds Laurie had never seen before flashed through the hickory, oak, and walnut trees shading the front yard. She looked them up in a bird book she found in the school library: scarlet tanager, pileated woodpecker, a dozen kinds of warblers, the wood thrush and yellow-throated vireo. Her old prairie friend, the mockingbird, sang sweetly here from the magnolias that shielded the long porch where, as the evenings warmed, the family sat after supper, Laurie and Buddy in the creaking swing, Way and Marilys in spraddled old wicker chairs rescued from further dereliction in the backyard.

Buddy soon made friends and played outside till dark, but Laurie was so glad to have both Way and Marilys and be off the road, that she didn't mind much that the girls in her class already had best friends. She felt worlds older than any of them. They had their parents, grandparents, too, mostly, living in this town where all of them had been born and where the gravestones in the cemetery were engraved with the same family names going back before the Civil War. Laurie hadn't belonged in Prairieville because her family went to the tabernacle, were poor, and she had to wear those ugly long stockings and couldn't go to movies. She hadn't belonged in Black Spring but she and Catharine had sustained each other—poor Catharine! Had she found another friend? Laurie still wore overalls after school but Marilys had bought an old Singer sewing machine for a few dollars and made Laurie three pretty school dresses, a green plaid with ruffled sleeves; gold-brown sateen trimmed with yellow rickrack; and a blue-green paisley with a white eyelet collar. Anklets to match, new shoes. No one could laugh at the new girl's clothes. Marilys had trimmed her hair into a stylish bob that looked nicer than the haircuts most of the girls had.

“Laurie, your hair's growing out to where it's starting to curl,” Marilys said, as she deftly scissored around Laurie's ears.

“It's darkening up,” observed Way. “Doggoned if you aren't going to wind up pretty close to a redhead.”

“Auburn,” reproved Marilys. “Her hair's going to be a lovely dark auburn. My goodness, Laurie! You're almost tall as me.”

“Which isn't real tall,” grinned Way. “Five foot three. Laurie'll be looking down at you in another year.”

The textbooks were different, but Laurie quickly caught up with her eighth-grade class and drilled Buddy with homemade flash cards for arithmetic and reading till he was even with most of the boys in his class, which was as far as he could be pushed.

The depression had hit some parts of Arkansas hard, but farms around Splitlog produced thousands of broilers every year, stuffing the cooped chicks from the day they hatched till the day they were slaughtered at the chicken plant, picked, gutted, and sent to market.

In April, white apple blossoms covered the slopes. Some apples would be shipped away, but most would go to the vinegar plant, which ran all year, night and day, grinding fruit for several months starting in August, fermenting and oxidizing the juice into cider and then making vinegar. Way got a job there as soon as he'd painted signs for most of Splitlog's merchants. There was a sawmill, a silica plant, and a milk cannery, enough jobs for all of Splitlog's inhabitants who wanted them, though the work was hard, dirty, and low-paying. Rent was cheap in Splitlog, though. Families had died out or moved away and a half-dozen old homes, in varying states of dereliction, peered through broken windows at waist-high grass and pigweed.

Everyone except the two doctors, three lawyers, a dentist, and a banker had gardens, a few fruit trees, maybe a grape arbor, and a chicken house and pen. Way borrowed a hand-plow and they planted as soon as they moved in. Well before school was out, Marilys was making Way's favorite dish, fresh lettuce wilted with hot oil and vinegar served with heaps of fluffy scrambled eggs along with a plate of crisp radishes and green onions. They bought eggs from their next door neighbor, an old widow lady who clucked and talked as she fed her several dozen industriously pecking snowy white Wyandottes. Twice a week, Way picked up a gallon jar of milk from the dairy at the edge of town. Even after Marilys skimmed off the cream to make butter, the milk was rich and sweet from the lush pastures the cows grazed in.

Such a different world, such a different life, from Prairieville or Black Spring.

Three churches sat on three small hills, steeples vying to be the highest point in town. There was the limestone Baptist church, the red brick Methodist, and the mortared rock Presbyterian. Laurie's conscience goaded her into dragging Buddy to each Sunday school in turn, but it was such a struggle to make him dress up and come and Laurie felt so out of place herself that she gave up and just insisted that they read out of Mama's New Testament every Sunday morning.

This hilly region had never been part of the plantation South, though a statue of a Confederate soldier stood in the courthouse square with the names of southern dead engraved on all four sides of the pedestal. There were no Negroes in town and white people did all the work that farther south or east would have been shared by what were locally known as colored folks.

That summer, Laurie picked strawberries for two cents a quart, stooping or kneeling along the rows of low-growing plants to search beneath the leaves for the succulent red fruits. The wooden carrier held twelve quarts and when she took it to the shed, Bobby Jay Ballard, the farmer's son who was a junior and captain of the high school basketball team, grinned at her each time he marked down her quarts. He had dark-lashed blue eyes, black hair, and was a lean, strong-muscled six feet tall. He picked, too, and she was flustered to realize that he was working on the row beside hers.

She wore a shirt under her overalls so he couldn't see her breasts, which had swelled in the past months, though they were still firm and didn't jiggle when she walked the way a few of the plumper girls' did. That was when some boys rolled their eyes and murmured things like “Shake 'em, don't break 'em!” and “Hey, one of them's hanging lower'n than the other one!”

Bobby Jay didn't whisper anything like that but she knew he was watching
her
, although several girls from high school giggled when they passed and one of the cheerleaders, Linda Merritt, swerved a hip against him. He gave it a pat, but kept picking next to Laurie.

When she finished her crates, no one was close. He straightened. Smiling, he held out a beautiful big red fruit. “Can I buy your love with strawberries?”

His eyes were bright and blue as the summer sky. He slipped the berry between her parted lips. Involuntarily, her teeth crushed it. Sweet, tart juice filled her mouth. Startled, lured, yet frightened, she gazed up at him.

“Meet me at the creek tonight,” he said softly. “It'll still be warm enough to swim.”

“I—I don't have a swimsuit,” she stammered and immediately knew that was foolish.