The Longest Road (40 page)

“Yes, and the granary beside it was buried, too, with some seed wheat,” added Buddy. “Little Joe and Babe found the pipe of the tractor stickin' out and their daddy thought he'd plant the wheat and maybe get a crop but he couldn't borrow the money for gas so he got caught tryin' to steal some. By the time he got out of jail, the old bootlegger neighbor had bought gas and plowed and planted!”

Put that way, it didn't sound so edifying but Laurie could scarcely lecture Buddy for a story she had read to him. “Anyhow, it began to rain,” she finished. “It finally did rain.” She pointed at a blistered gray shack that stared at them from paneless windows. “I'm sure that's the house where the family was just starting out for California, after the bank foreclosed on them,” she said. “We filled our water jars at their well. I wonder what happened to them.” What happened to everyone who lived in these houses, who most likely never could come back to a home place?

“FDR's New Deal helped a lot of farmers hang on,” Way remarked. “But of course, most of 'em bought tractors with the aid money and got rid of their tenants. Guess if it wasn't for those AAA checks, there wouldn't be any farmers left out here, 'cept for the Mennonites. They never took any government aid but they got along on account of they never did plant all their land to wheat. They planted big gardens and all kinds of crops, kept dairy cows and chickens—they could always eat.”

“What's AAA?” asked Buddy.

Way scratched his ear. “Agricultural Adjustment Administration? Think that's it. There's such a passel of alphabet-soup outfits you can't keep 'em straight. The DRS—Drought Relief Service—bought up starvin' cattle in the worst years. Killed and buried some but shipped the rest to packing plants. Then the FSRC—Federal Surplus Relief Corporation—gave the beef away to poor families all over the country. Then there's the Farm Security Administration, FSA, that loans farmers money for seed, fertilizer, stock feed, and other such. There's the Farm Credit Administration, the Civil Works Administration, the Rural Rehabilitation Corporation and—”

“We saw cattle being killed and burned down in Texas,” Marilys said. “Didn't the AAA and Soil Conservation Service buy a lot of ‘blow land'?”

Laurie had talked about that in Current Events her last year in school. “They did and hired men to furrow it to catch the blowing dust and hold the rain and snow,” she said. “They sowed it to cane and Sudan grass so the roots would hold the soil. They planted worn-out rangeland, too.”

So pulverized, dead particles that had howled through the air, never resting long enough to bond with the earth, would be held together by living roots till at last they became nourishing soil. She doubted, though, that the plains would ever again look like the Little Prairie, with gayfeather, black-eyed Susans, and Indian blanket shining out of bluestem and buffalo grass. And the people that had blown away, blasted from their land like shriveled crops, where were they now? How many could ever take root?

“FDR's done things for the whole country, not just farmers and ranchers,” put in Marilys. “There's the WPA and CCC to make jobs and the National Recovery Administration to help all kinds of businesses and industries. Lots of folks way out in the country got electricity because of the Rural Electrification Act. There's Social Security so most workers can pay in for their old age as they go along, there's a minimum wage for most workers, and John L. Lewis's made the CIO strong enough to make big companies like General Motors and U.S. Steel bargain with workers instead of just firing them.”

“And there's Charlie McCarthy!” added Buddy. He loved to watch the apple-cheeked marionette sit on Edgar Bergen's knee almost as much as he'd been entranced with the funny little men in
Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs
. He'd sat through the movie three times and for weeks had gone around singing, “Whistle While You Work.”

“Yeah, son,” laughed Way. “There's old Charlie and Fibber McGee and Jack Benny. None of 'em will ever be a patch on Will Rogers, though. He was funny but he told the truth about things. He'd have liked what that British Parliament feller said at the World's Fair in New York this year—that there won't be any peace till Franco's widow tells Stalin on his deathbed that Hitler's been assassinated at Moos—moos-olini's funeral. Just about the time the country's gettin' over the Dust Bowl and the Depression, doggoned if it don't look worse and worse across the pond. If you ask me, England and France should have jumped on that old Hitler the minute he invaded Austria last year.”

“At least he got his comeuppance at the Berlin Olympics when our Negro track star, Jesse Owens, left all the Master Race in the dust,” Marilys remembered.

Way sniffed. “That didn't slow Hitler down. I've read Jews can't marry Germans anymore, or be citizens, or own businesses, and they're getting shipped to concentration camps. Hitler's grabbed Czechoslovakia. And now he and that Moos-o-lini who took over Ethiopia three years ago have signed up to help each other for the next ten years.” He whistled sadly between his teeth. “Nineteen forty-nine! There's goin' to be a lot grief before then.”

“If there's another big war, it'll be a lot worse than the last one,” said Marilys. “Airplanes just sort of dueled each other then. But look what happened in Guernica in the Basque country during their civil war a few years ago. No military excuse for Franco to get his Nazi friends to bomb it. It was the Basques' old, old holy city where their freedom oak grew. That's the first time civilians were heavily bombed on purpose.”

“It won't be the last,” Way said gloomily.

Thinking about the wars across the ocean knotted Laurie's stomach. She remembered that in Revelations the Beast, the Antichrist, rose from the banks of the Tiber. Couldn't that mean Rome and Mussolini? Guilt and fear flooded her. The family still had a chapter from The New Testament and silent prayer on Sunday, but none of them were saved, much less sanctified. Laurie wasn't sure what she believed. She felt guilty and disloyal to question Mama's teachings, yet frightened though she was, something at the core of her could not embrace what was preached at the tabernacle. Whatever her punishment, that was the way it was.

Derricks sprouted in the distance, dwarfing a sprawl of tents and shacks. Way turned off the highway on a rut-gouged dirt road with a pointing sign that read
TO LUCKY
. “Ought to be some work, with a name like that,” he chuckled. “This dry air's already cleaning out my lungs.”

He helped build derricks all summer, seldom missing a day because of asthma, though if he got too tired or worked up about something, he would start wheezing and had to breathe vapor from steaming water till he was better. Laurie and Marilys worked in a tent restaurant, and Buddy stocked shelves in the Lucky Mart and delivered groceries. There wasn't a school, though, so late in August, they moved to Reynolds, southwest of Oklahoma City. On September 1, 1939, the day that Hitler invaded Poland in a “blitzkrieg” lightning war, the family rented a trailer from a driller who had decided to build a house and stay in the area.

Buddy enrolled in seventh grade September 3, when Great Britain and France declared war on Germany. That evening President Roosevelt talked to the nation by radio as he had done so often in his Fireside Chats. He said the nation would remain neutral but that “even a neutral cannot be asked to close his mind or his conscience.”

“Huh!” Way snorted. “If England falls, Hitler'll be over here. We better fight while there's still someone else left to help. If I was a little younger and didn't have this blamed asthma—”

“Helping produce oil is good as being a soldier,” Marilys assured him. “But, oh, I hope someone stops that lunatic before he takes over all of Europe! Those poor people, never any peace!”

With such terrible things happening, it seemed strange that everyday life could go on pretty much as usual. Way got a job as a pumper on a forty-acre tract with four wells. He went around every two or three hours to check the gas engines and start them or shut them off, gauge the tanks, and keep track of production. He worked a twelve-hour day but it wasn't as hard and dirty as most oil-field jobs.

Marilys and Laurie got work in a hotel run by a shrewd but kind couple, Ross and Shirley Marriott. Marilys cooked and Laurie waited tables. While fending off what seemed to be all the single men in town and some of the married ones, Laurie wished she could play the guitar or harmonica instead. When she turned sixteen in October, she hugged Marilys and said, “Only two more years! Then Redwine can't bother me though he might still try to control me through taking charge of Buddy.”

“He better not try!” Buddy's freckled face was getting thinner and sometimes gave a hint of the man he would be, with Daddy's chin and smile and widow's peak to his sun-streaked hair. “I'm going to be a soldier if the war lasts till I'm old enough!”

“Well, don't sound so happy about it,” Laurie snapped. Surely no war could last that long but her heart contracted with fear for him and all the boys everywhere who might die in battle before they had even lived.

In a few weeks, Russia invaded Poland from the east. They divided Poland with Germany. Early in November, the neutrality act was changed to let Great Britain and France buy arms from the United States. For the first time in Laurie's memory, there were jobs for any worker willing to move near a, defense plant. Nazi submarines sank ships twice as fast as U. S. and British shipyards could build them.

On Saturdays and Sundays, Buddy helped Way with the pumping. A week before Christmas, he came running into the hotel kitchen, where Laurie was picking up a tray with two plates of grits, ham, and eggs.

“Some—some detectives and Mr. Redwine drove up while Way was reading a gauge,” Buddy panted. “They took him down to the jail!”

Marilys turned pale and leaned on the sink. Laurie set down the tray and gripped Buddy's shoulders. “Did Redwine see you?”

Buddy nodded, gulping convulsively. “Yes, but I don't think he recognized me.”

Entirely possible. Redwine had never seemed to really
see
Buddy and that had been three years ago. “I—I've got to go down there.” Marilys fumbled at her apron strings.

“No! Redwine's accused you of kidnapping. That's a lot worse than stealing. He may not know you're here.”

They stared at each other. Laurie dreaded confronting Redwine but it seemed the only hope. “I'll go to the jail,” she said. “Maybe Redwine will drop his charges if we pay him for his detectives and whatever he claims Way took.”

“We don't have that kind of money.”

“We can borrow against the trailer and truck and we do have a couple of hundred dollars saved.” They kept it under the mattress. None of them trusted banks after the way so many of them had closed.

The tiny lines in Marilys's face seemed to have deepened. “This isn't about money. It's Dub getting even with Way.”

“I know that. But if I beg Redwine and offer the money besides—We have to do something, Marilys!”

“What if he wants to make you and Buddy live with him?”

Laurie froze inside at the very notion. “I—I guess we'd have to. But he wanted a son. He can see now that I'm not that.”

“He knew you were a girl.”

“Yes, but now I'm almost a woman.” Laurie tried to smile. “I don't think he'll want me.”

“What if he does?”

Laurie shrugged. “I'll go with him and get away the first chance I get.” She took off her apron and lapped it around Buddy. “You wait tables while I'm gone. I'll be back as soon as I can.”

She pulled on her coat, more because it would shield her from Redwine's eyes than because the wind blew chill outside. The jail, she knew, was at the back of the courthouse next to the sheriff's office. Go with Redwine? Every fiber shrank. She remembered the women he'd had at his Truck-Inns and shivered. Maybe he'd be satisfied if she pleaded hard and offered the money. At the courthouse, she summoned her courage, turned the heavy brass doorknob, and stepped inside.

A dark-haired man stood arguing with Redwine and a thin, narrow man with a hatchet face. The dark one turned at the sound of the door and she looked into gray eyes with a shimmer of green. She forgot why she was there, forgot everything. It was Morrigan.

22

He stood there, black hair winging across his forehead, the cleft in his chin a little deeper like the sun lines at the corners of his eyes. But it
was
him, like a prayer, looking taller than he was because of the way muscle and bone fitted smooth and easy so that every move he made was graceful as if he'd practiced it yet was careless as his smile.

“Morrigan!” she breathed. “Johnny Morrigan!”

He tilted his head. His brow furrowed. “You have the advantage of me, ma'am.” He smiled. “Not for long, I hope.”

His voice filled her, spread into every nerve, every part, warming her, calming her fear. Then she knew, in the depths of her that were becoming a woman's, that it wasn't because he'd come to her at the end of one world and help her start in another that she hadn't forgotten him, that she hadn't been interested in any of the men who tried to get her attention. His voice and smile and image were sealed up in her heart. Only he could unlock it. Foolishly, desperately, she wanted him to remember her, at least just a little.

“Laurie!” Turning from a deputy whose pale brown moustache looked like a shaving brush, W. S. Redwine bulked larger than ever but he still had the same squashed nose above a jaw broader than cheekbones and forehead. Gray dirtied his straw-colored hair. His yellow eyes flickered like a cat's in a dark room with only a blink of light. “Damned if it's not Larry-Laurie of the Field Brothers, alias the Tumbleweeds and Roadsters!” Square white teeth showed as his lips peeled back. “I couldn't track you after you half-killed those deputies close to Duncan three years ago but I guess this means you kids and that slut managed to find old Wayburn and dry him out.”