The Longest Road (8 page)

“Why, sure I can.” He got down his guitar. The Fields got out to stretch while they listened. Standing there, Morrigan played and sang, grinning at the passersby who stopped to hear. He wound up with a rousing sweep of the strings, put his guitar in its case, and reached into his bundle. “You keep this harmonica, Laurie,” he said, giving it to her. “It's a good friend. You can always tell it exactly how you feel.”

Her fingers caressed the silver whorls even as she protested. “But you'll need it!”

“Got my guitar. And I can buy another harmonica. Rather you had this one.” He touched her cheek before he shook hands with Buddy and again with Daddy. “So long.” He picked up his bundle and guitar. “It really has been good to know you.”

They waved till, with a last salute, he passed out of sight behind some warehouses. Slowly, the Fields got into the Model T. Daddy tried to make a joke. “Hope we don't have any more flats.”

Too choked to answer, Laurie nodded.

“Let me see that harmonica,” Buddy wheedled.

Laurie started to refuse—it was all she had of Morrigan now—but you can't be selfish with what's been given you, especially by a sort of angel.

Rutted wheel tracks turned in at the tarpaper-covered shack with its windmill and rickety outbuildings, while other ruts ran on toward endless fields of young green plants that Laurie knew must be cotton and corn because that was mostly what Grandpa Field grew for his landlord. This was far enough east to have missed the worst of the storm and besides, the rolling hills and valleys to the west made farming difficult so that land had been left for grazing and was held down by matted, interlocking grass roots.

It was the plowed prairie, long broken to wheat, that had swirled into the sky all the way from the Texas Panhandle to southern Nebraska, from eastern New Mexico and Colorado to the edge of the Oklahoma Panhandle. Morrigan had drawn a map in the dust for them, traced the Dust Bowl in the shape of what looked like an animal's skull, cranium in Nebraska, jaw gaping open just above Lubbock, Texas. It was as if the spirit of the ruined prairie was in turn devouring its destroyers and all their works.

A pack of skinny greyhounds ran out barking, and surrounded the car. There were really only four of them but though Laurie loved dogs and it was one of the sorrows of her life that her parents said they couldn't afford to feed one, these sharp-muzzled, prominent-ribbed, narrow-flanked creatures frightened her. It wasn't just their din or their color of sullen gray twilight. They looked like starvation made flesh, death's hounds in some of the Irish legends, that could never sate their hunger.

Grandpa came out, cursing and kicking the dogs. Daddy's lips tightened at the profanity. Maybe Grandpa would cuss so bad that Daddy would decide he couldn't leave Laurie and Buddy. This hope died as Daddy opened the car door and said, “Well, Pa, like I wrote you, I've brought the kids till I can get set in California.”

A stream of tobacco juice hit a tire. Bald head gleaming in the sun, Grandpa folded his arms and appraised the children, his good eye, a piercing blue, probing to make up for the sightless one that was sort of a bleary white. “Reckon they're big enough to earn their keep,” he grunted. “Rosalie's always whinin' that she don't have enough help what with Belle only six. But these kids better not take after that woman of yourn. She was always sickly.”

Daddy went dull red. “Rachel couldn't help that.”

Children peeked from the door and windows. Several trailed Rosalie as she hurried out, brown legs flashing beneath a dress that didn't much more than cover her knees and had several buttons missing in front. Rosalie was slim in the waist but her bosom swelled out of the faded, short-sleeved garment. She wore gold hoop earrings and her lips were redder than could be natural but in spite of all these sins, her arms were outstretched and Laurie went into them.

“There, there, sweetie,” Rosalie soothed.

Her warm body smelled good, like vanilla and cinnamon and roses and she was soft with firm muscle and bone beneath. You couldn't imagine her being sick; couldn't imagine her dying.… The comparison made Laurie feel disloyal.

Reluctantly, Laurie straightened, took her own weight back, though it would have been a relief to let go and sob in those comforting arms. Laurie didn't want to break down in front of Grandpa, not now, not ever, or let him know she was scared of him. With his hooked nose and bald head, he reminded her of a chicken hawk—and he made her feel mighty like a pullet addled at looking up to discover swooping talons.

That was silly! He was her grandfather, after all, Daddy's own father! But Daddy had hit her, Daddy was deserting her and Buddy. So maybe the father she'd loved, the one she'd known—maybe he'd been that way because of Mama and now she was gone, he was different.

“Come along in!” Rosalie hustled Laurie and Buddy toward the house. It didn't have a proper foundation but sat on concrete blocks with sand blown away from them. The greyhounds must have lived under the house, for there were bones and the remains of a rabbit with long, delicate ears and an eye lolling out of the chewed head.

A spindly rambling rosebush with a few tight buds clung to a strip of old hogwire stretched from the single step to the roof, a brave try for beauty against ragged lengths of black tarpaper nailed over the board walls to seal cracks and help turn rain. Grandpa strode in ahead of them, not holding the screen door open. He wasn't a big man but there was a kind of explosiveness to his movements and he shook the floor when he walked.

“You can unload after dinner,” Rosalie said, “but right now you pull up to the table while the biscuits and gravy are hot. Ed, you look like you could use some coffee. Belle, fetch the pie plates and some forks and knives. Ev'rett, get some milk out of the cellar. Ernie, Billy, get a couple of crates for your—” She burst into laughter that began deep in her belly. “Almost said cousins! Well, Laurie and Bud, I think that's what we'll call you anyway. Plumb ridiculous for you to call kids younger'n you are ‘aunt' and ‘uncle'!”

Swept through a rickety screen door fringed with oilcloth to scare off flies, a device that didn't seem to affect the population, Laurie didn't dare say she and Buddy should wash their hands first. She didn't want to hurt Rosalie's feelings or provoke her grandfather's wrath with what he'd call her mother's persnickety qualms. He was likely to point out that washing her hands and brushing her teeth hadn't kept his daughter-in-law from dying young.

Sitting on an apple crate, Laurie, beneath the table, wiped her hands as carefully as she could on her underskirt, which was cleaner than her dress. Would Daddy say grace?

He didn't. Just like a heathen, he took a big helping of pinto beans, a hunk of fat side meat with the hog's skin cooked soft enough to chew, thanked Rosalie for the coffee she poured him, and took three golden-brown biscuits.

Everett, who must be about ten, came in with a jar of milk. Hair and eyebrows bleached white as cotton, he had deep blue eyes that looked strange with his sun-browned skin. Like all the children, he was barefoot. Two-year-old Babe, angelically blond and earthily dirty—the one Rosalie had been pregnant with last time Grandpa visited, was kilted in a low-slung diaper over which her belly button protruded. The other children wore ragged bib overalls without shirts, including Belle.

There uniformity ended, except for skins tanned wherever the overalls didn't cover. Pug-nosed Ernie, eight, had straight brown hair and hazel eyes. Billy, a year older, had sandy curls and gray eyes. Skinny little Belle, who darted around like a hummingbird, was dark of hair and eye like her mother. Laurie hoped she'd stopped wetting beds because most likely they'd share one. Babe's odiferous, stained diaper testified that she was a long way from housebroken.

When Rosalie was so nice, it was a shame she wasn't more particular. Mama used to excuse her by saying she'd grown up the sixth of nine children in a cabin over in the Kiamichi Mountains, with a part-Choctaw father who didn't do much but drink and hunt and a mother who died birthing the last baby when Rosalie was five so that the brood more or less raised themselves. Grandpa liked to joke that he'd had to chase Rosalie down and put shoes on her before they could get married.

She was a mighty good cook, though. After plates and pie pans were cleaned with morsels of biscuit, she took a big pan from the warming oven and wedged it among the emptied bowls and kettles. Melted sugar left caramelly streaks where juice had oozed through artistic slits on the good-smelling crust of the plum cobbler.

Spooning out big helpings, Rosalie said, “This is the last of the plums I put up last year. Ever picked plums, Laurie?”

When Laurie shook her head, Belle bounced on her crate. “It's fun! We go to the river and have a picnic and eat all the plums we want!”

“Yeah, and you get a bellyache and throw up!” jeered Ernie, who was closest in age to her. “Bellyache Belle! Bellyache Belle!

He was sitting next to Belle. She grabbed as much of his brown hair as she could and gave it a wrench. He yelped and dragged her fingers loose, giving them a yank backwards that made her shriek and duck her head to bite him.

“No bitin',” Rosalie said, giving each child an absentminded cuff. “You're not wild critters. Anyhow, human bites swell up and get infected worse'n a dog's. You're not goin' to do one another like that.”

The two subsided and worked on their cobbler and milk. The milk tasted rich, though it had surely been skimmed. Laurie remembered Rosalie telling Mama that Grandpa let her use the butter and egg money for dressing the family and “extras” which, according to his lights, included sugar, cocoa, oilcloth for the table, dishes, cookware, and kerosene for the lamp.

“When it's too dark to see, it's time to be in bed,” he'd always said, during his visits, and had taken himself off to Mama and Daddy's room. They slept on the couch during these invasions but they couldn't get to bed till late because Rosalie liked to talk or read magazines after her children had fallen asleep wherever they wore out and she'd settled the boys on a pallet and put Belle in bed with a reluctant Laurie.

If I have to sleep with Belle, I'll make sure she goes to the toilet last thing before bed, Laurie thought, and wondered where everybody slept. This good-sized room that served as kitchen, dining room, and living room had a bed in one corner and the door was open to a smaller room with another bed and a dresser. As far as she could tell, there wasn't any other room, not even a porch.

All of a sudden, the cobbler didn't taste so delicious, though Laurie told herself she and Buddy had their own bedding and Rosalie might let them make down pallets. After dinner, while Daddy and the boys unloaded from the car what would be left here, Grandpa stretched out on the blanket-covered couch and was snoring long before Laurie, Rosalie, and Belle had cleared the table. Rosalie swabbed most of the scraps into the slop bucket for the hogs but she sent Ernie out with a pan for the chickens.

“Kind of encourages them,” she laughed and half-filled the dishpan with hot water dipped out of the reservoir of the cast-iron range.

The box beside it held “slack” coal, mostly dust, the kind that sold cheap at the railroad yard. Sudsing the water by rubbing a bar of yellowish homemade soap with a sour-smelling dish-rag, Rosalie washed faster than Laurie could rinse the dishes in a big kettle, dry some, and hand the others to Belle, who stood on a box.

The tea towels were smudged and full of holes. There were a few shelves for cups and pans and cooking supplies and a box to hold utensils but the dishes were just put back on the table. There were a lot. From the traces of dried egg and oatmeal on some of them, it was clear that Rosalie did breakfast dishes along with dinner ones. Laurie was beginning to understand why Rosalie didn't keep her children and house very clean. When every bucket of water had to be pumped and carried, a person would be tired before ever starting a wash. And what was the use of mopping a linoleum that was worn through to the black underside except around the edges and beneath the stove?

Rosalie tossed the greasy dishwater out the back door. “If the rinse water's cooled down, you can pour it on the rosebush,” she told Laurie. “Then we'll figure out where to put your things and rest a little while before we chop weeds out of the cotton.” She rubbed her back. “Sure wish cotton and corn grew as fast as crabgrass and careless weed.”

Daddy was repacking the suitcase and car now that he and the boys had carried in Buddy and Laurie's things, including their bedding, and most of the pickles and plums and peaches Mama had canned last year. “Buddy and the boys took the twenty-two and went to see if they can get some rabbits for supper,” Daddy said. “You put up his clothes and stuff, Laurie, so they don't get scattered around.”

Belle tagged them curiously as Rosalie, after a little thought, located two apple crates. “They can go right under the bed next to my kids' boxes,” she explained. “Be handy since Buddy'll be sleepin' with the boys in the bed. You'll be on the sofa with Belle, honey. Plenty of room if you each sleep with your head at a different end and don't kick much.”

“I kick like a Missoury mule, Pa says.” Belle sounded proud of it. She picked up the little cedar box with the brass plate engraved with Mama's first name. “What's, in here?”

“Handkerchiefs.” The child's hands, miraculously dirty again after having come clean from the rinsed dishes, left fingerprints on the metal and polished rosy wood. Laurie flinched, restraining an impulse to grab for the chest.

This wasn't her home. Rosalie wasn't even her grandmother, but was taking her and Buddy in out of kindness. Even though Laurie would much rather have gone with Daddy, even though she cringed from the thought of having to sleep on the sofa with Belle's feet in her face, Laurie had to remember that and behave the way Mama would expect.