Chapter 14
The rooms Sam’d rented, they opened onto the alley behind a block of businesses downtown. There was Karlsson’s dry goods, then there was an empty storefront that used to be a millinery before the lady died that had it, and then there was a creamery. On the corner was a livery and auto repair shop. In Obsidian you’d see a dozen automobiles during the course of a day if you was out on the street. I say street, but it was just a wide dirt road.
We had three rooms—a front room and two little bedrooms—on the ground floor. There was “a path” in the alley, like we said in them days, meaning a path to the backhouse, and there was a pump. We shared both of them with the stores. Our rooms used to be storage, evidently—the windows was high up near the ceiling. We had three windows, and sure enough, Opal made up three sets of ruffled curtains, a child her age. And matching dishtowels, which she called “tea towels.” Learned that from a book, I reckon.
It was different, being in town. Noisy compared to the farm, and you run into people a lot more. Everbody scurried around, seemed like. Reminded me of a saying of Mama’s—“Ain’t nobody happy where they’re at.”
Now that things was settled, Sam went back to fiddling for dances ever little bit. He was a caller, too—all the square dancers knowed him. It’s hard to find a good caller like Sam.
Seemed like whenever he had a minute, he was making music or thinking about music or talking about music or listening to music. He purely loved it, and he was good at it. He had a strong singing voice—gravelly, though he could bring it down soft in certain parts. It was hard not to like his singing, and you sure felt the lack of it whenever he finished a song. You wanted him to start another one soon’s he got his breath. It wasn’t just me, everbody loved to hear him, and he loved playing and singing, especially if there was people there to listen. He wanted you to sing with him. He’d say the words before each line so you could join in. He wanted you to laugh, and he wanted your heart to get lifted up. Even sad songs made him smile all over his face like he done. It was a wonder.
He knowed ever song anybody’d ever heard of. He made them up, too, by the dozens. He liked silly songs about frogs and grasshoppers, and he liked serious songs about broken hearts and salvation. If you sung a tune, he could play it, first the melody and then the chords. He never could read wrote-down music.
Besides the fiddle, he played the mouth harp. He was passable on the ukulele and banjo, and whenever he was in a room with a piano, he’d play that, too. He could drum, in a pinch.
Of course, we didn’t have no radio nor electric yet, and at home it was just him playing for me and the girls, practicing like. Whenever Sam would get out his fiddle and start in, it give me that same feeling I had that first time at the dance. I always said, it felt like Sam’s music went right into my heart without even going through my ears. And him always smiling, and his strong voice. Having music in the house made it seem like someplace you wanted to be, not just someplace to eat and sleep. Someplace special. Before Sam, I never knowed that would happen, or could happen. One day I was doing up the dishes, humming a song, and I felt something flood me and the thought come to me, I’m happy. This is what it feels like. Then I pictured the twins, how much fun it would be if they was there, too, and next thing I knowed I felt a couple tears trickle down my chin.
* * *
It’s a wonder Sam had the breath to sing, he was working so hard. There was a lot of hauling to be done that summer, and he worked six days a week, sometimes seven. After while he sold the mules and got four draft horses and a spare, which he kept at the livery. He loved them horses, and he was partial to the work and there was plenty of it, but seemed like no matter how many hours he worked, he couldn’t hardly make out. We was running a bill at the store, for one thing, and it was hard to always keep up with it. And getting ready to put the girls in school, I was shocked how much clothes and shoes cost, even with Opal making over my old dresses for the two of them. And doctor bills. Dacia was plagued by sick headaches. I give her cinnamon in milk, and if that didn’t work I had her drink quinine salts—she hated the bitter taste—and if that didn’t work, I built a big fire and heated water as hot as she could stand it and put her in a hot bath. I also bought aspirin powder and had her to sniff it in through her nose. Sometimes nothing worked, and she shut herself in their room and had me to hang a quilt over the window to keep out the light. She set in the bed with a bowl in her lap to throw up in.
And of course on the sixth of the month Sam wrote Alta Bea a check for seven dollars and mailed it to her in care of Harold’s boardinghouse to pay back what we owed her. He never failed to make that payment. And there was feed and doctoring for the horses, a new axle or wheel for the wagon. Things added up.
Then the day come when I found out how come we was having such a hard time. Out on errands I run into a man we knowed, Abel Kressler, who Sam hauled with sometimes. Kressler was the kind of man that swung his hips when he walked like he owned the world.
When he seen me, he nodded. “Mrs. Frownfelter.”
We was standing in the doorway of the lumberyard. I caught the insect smell of sawdust. “How’s Orpha?”
“Tolerable.” He pulled a knife out of his pocket and started in paring the nail on his middle finger. A bit of nail come loose, and he blowed it away with his mouth.
A dog barked nearby, and Abel turned to look. “That Herman Doering’s dog? Sounds like her.” He looked at me like I knowed all the dogs in Obsidian, or ought to. “Queenie,” he said. “She does holler. Needs to be taught some manners.”
He took off his hat and run his fingers along the brim. “Say,” he said, “would you give your husband a message?” He put his hat back on. “Would you remind him he owes me near sixteen dollars?”
My face went red. “That’s your business. You can tell him yourself.”
“Oh, I beg your pardon,” he said in a false voice. “I never knowed you was so—”
“Excuse me,” I said, and I admit I flounced my skirt at him as I walked away.
“If he collected his own bills, he could pay what he owes.” His voice caught up to me, but I didn’t look back nor answer.
Now I’d knowed Abel Kressler for a while, and I knowed he would sooner jump up to tell a lie than stand on the ground to tell the truth. But soon’s he said this, I reckoned it was a fact. Sam was a soft-hearted man, and a lot of his customers was folks like us. If they couldn’t pay him what they owed, I was sure he wouldn’t hound them.
That night when he got home, I pulled him out into the alley and asked him was it true what Abel Kressler said.
“What’re you talking to Kressler for?”
It irked me he answered a question with a question. “Passing the time of day.”
He frowned. “You don’t have enough to do around here?”
I had it in my mind to answer him sharp, but I just said, “Good and plenty.”
“The man’s a born liar, and my business ain’t no business of his.”
“Bertie!” Opal called from inside the house. “Me and Dacia’s hungry!”
“There’s biscuits in the cupboard,” I called back. “Go ahead and eat one. We’ll be in there shortly. One, mind.” To Sam I said, “That’s what I told him—talk to you.”
“Son of a bitch beats his horses,” he said. “Ain’t got the sense he was born with.”
“Opal’s taking two!” come from inside the house.
“No, I’m not! She is!”
“I have to come in there, I’m gonna blister you both!” I hollered.
“Has this nice bay, sixteen hands,” Sam said. “Balky, but he don’t rest her like he ought to. So I’m hauling on contract with Lloyd Rice—bunch of skinners, ten or twelve wagons, Kressler’s the lead wagon—and we’re on the way to Milan, and I guess she balked. So he takes her out of harness and ties her to the wagon and starts beating on her with a board. Wagons go by, he says, ‘Help me teach this horse,’ and some of them’s got no better sense than to grab whatever they got—chain, rope, two-by-fours, I don’t know what-all. When I got there, her flanks was running red. I can’t abide a man beats a horse.”
This was a long speech for Sam. “You never told me this before,” I said.
“Never come up.”
One of the girls yelled something from inside the house.
“I better go feed the girls,” I said. “And then I got to run to the store.”
“Don’t be all day,” he said.
I looked at him to see was he smiling—Sam liked to tease me sometimes, and mostly I didn’t mind it—but he wasn’t. “I’ll be as long as need be,” I said sharp.
He set his mouth and looked away from me, down at the ground.
The look on his face give me a chill, like I didn’t know him at all. I swallowed. “Something you ain’t telling me.”
Now he spit in the dirt.
“Sam.” I reached out and tried to take aholt of his hand.
He pulled it away. “I told you before, I can’t stomach being in nobody’s debt.”
“And I told you, we’ll get it all paid off.” These was tones of voice we hadn’t used with each other—almost hateful. I gritted my teeth and said to myself, Stop talking this way. Find some other way to talk.
He said, “You think so, but that don’t make it so.”
This got my dander up even more, but for once in my life I never said the angry words that come to my mind. Instead, I said, “I think you’re wroth with me, and I don’t know how come.”
He pulled out a cigarette and held it in his fingers. Almost breathless, he said, “We was on the county, off and on, when I was coming up.”
For a few seconds I was too shocked to say nothing. Then I said, “Ain’t no shame in that.”
“Right,” he said, sarcastic. “Your kin, you was on it, too.”
“No, we wasn’t.” This come too fast, just like the other had come too slow.
He shrugged. “Well, now you know.”
“Daddy’d sooner let us starve,” I said.
“That’s the point, ain’t it?”
“You know him. Pride, he’s got—for all the good it ever did a one of us.”
It was getting on twilight, and Sam’s face was in a shadow. “At school—well, you know how children is,” he said.
I nodded.
He puffed out his cheeks. “Well, we had these chickens, couple dozen, maybe three weeks old. Chicks. Had their first feathers. Size of your fist, I reckon, but bony. We’d already eat the hens. Then something happened—I don’t know what—and there wasn’t no money. Daddy said they was too little to eat and they cost too much to feed.” He lit the cigarette and sucked in the smoke. “He told me, ‘Come sundown, shut ’em out of the coop, let the possums get ’em. Coyotes.’”
I winced.
“I started up bawling,” he went on. “I must’ve been six, seven. ‘They’s half-starved already—now do as you was told.’” He shook his head and then laughed a little bit. “No six-year-old boy has feelings for a goldarn chicken. But Christ.”
“No,” I said. “Yes.”
He blowed out some smoke. “Well, so, I never shut the gate. Nightfall, here they come, cheep-cheep-cheep, and one by one I wrung their necks. Dug a hole and buried them in it.”
It was quiet for a long time. I pictured him, a little boy, digging a hole as night come on. How black that hole must’ve been. I wanted to ask him, But can’t you collect from your customers that owe you? I almost did.
“Dad said to me, ‘Don’t never go in debt. They kill you with the interest. You can’t never get ahead of it,’” he said. “Kind of a thing you don’t forget.”
“I reckon so.”
“You better get to the store,” he said. “I’ll feed the girls.” He turned and walked toward the door.
A couple days later, he come home and said he’d paid Abel Kressler his sixteen dollars and would I kindly not mind his business again. I never asked him where he got the money, though I fretted about it. I knowed how come he felt like he done, but I was worried his pride would bring a cloud over what we had and make it shrivel up and die.
* * *
Wasn’t long after that, Sam come home with a big grin on his face, but he wouldn’t talk about it till after the girls was in bed. By that time I was near wore out. I pulled out the bag of mending I kept under the bed and carried it into the front room. I got out a shirt of Sam’s that was missing a cuff button, and I fished through the button box for a match.
Sam had his fiddle out, buffing it with a rag. “Remember when we went through Kansas on the wedding trip?”
“I reckon I can remember something for three months,” I said.
Either he never noticed I was mocking him, or he ignored it. He set the fiddle down and eyed the bow along the horsehair. “Seemed like a nice place.”
“You know somebody lives there?” I found a white button the right size, and I lined it up where it needed to go, spearing it with a pin.
“Can’t think of nobody offhand.” He loosened the bow and put it in the case.
“But . . . ?” I threaded a needle and tied the knot.
“But what?”
I dropped my arms on my lap and just set there. Who brought up this subject anyhow? He was talking sideways, is what. He had a habit of it—trying to make you carry the conversation where he wanted it to go. Talking sideways.
He picked up the fiddle and run his hand over the fingerboard, holding it up close to his ear. “May need redone. Starting to buzz.”
I never said nothing. I was tempted to sew the button on tight just to aggravate him, but a tight button’s more like to pop off. Mama all the time told me, said, “Don’t cut off your nose to spite your face.” A lot of women’s work is like that.
Next thing I knowed, Sam laid a newspaper on my lap. I seen it was from El Dorado, Kansas, but I didn’t look at what it said. I moved my legs till it fell on the floor. “You’re in my light,” I said. He sighed. “They found oil in Kansas, Bertie. Year ago. Big strike.”
“I know. Harold told us. On the train.”
He set down next to me and put his hands on top of mine. “Teamsters is making three dollars a day there, more if you got your own rig.”
“Doing what?”
“Hauling! Machinery, spare parts, pipe. Ten-, twelve-horse teams.”
“Is that a fact.”
“Oil hands is working round-the-clock, three shifts,” he said. “They’s got more hauling than they can get hauled.”
I looked on the floor. “Where’d you get that paper?”
He let go of me and pulled back. “Three dollars a day! They’s begging for men.”
“Who’s putting you up to this? Harold Satterfield?”
Sam got up and started pacing. “You like chasing the bills ever damn month? You like scrimping and scraping?”
“Never knowed nothing different.”
“Well, me, I’m sick to death of it,” he said. “I keep working twelve hours a day hauling for dirt farmers and grocery stores, ten years from now we’ll still be living in these three rooms.” His arms flew up from his sides. “It’s oil, Bertie. Steam’s over and done with. Ever machine you ever heard of—cars and trucks, tractors—”
“We’ve got kin here,” I said. “William, Dora, Buck, the twins. And there’s the baby.” I had my hand on my belly.
“I’m thinking of the baby,” he said. “We can’t get ahead here, I’m telling you.”
Get ahead—that was Harold Satterfield talking. I never heard “get ahead” before in my life.
He was standing over me now. “And if we stay for this one, next thing you know there’s a houseful, and you’re stuck.”
“Stuck? That’s what children is to you—being stuck?”
He scowled. “No, hell no.” He jerked out a chair and set at the table with his head in his hands.
“We don’t know nobody there,” I said.
“People’s people, wherever you’re at. Ain’t no different than us.” He was talking to the table, seemed like. “Think about the money. We could get ahead there. Think what that would be like.”
If I was honest, I’d knowed something was coming ever since me and him talked that night in the alley and he told me about killing them chicks. I knowed something was coming, and this was it. I pictured the towering derricks I’d saw through the train window, how they seemed like a dark forest in a bad dream. And just now I recollected the smell that had filled the train car, a smell I hadn’t even noticed at the time, seemed like. Now it come to me, an odor of death, long buried, forced out into the living earth from deep in the ground, a terrible stink, worse than when Buck found an old dog of ours dead under the granary and Daddy dragged it out, in pieces, and it was boiling with maggots.
Now I jumped up and run to the washbowl and throwed up. I retched till it felt like I was turned inside out. When I was done I broke the string of drool with my fingers and stood there hunched over and panting.
Seemed to me it was stark—Sam’s fears, and his pride, they come from a deep place, sure enough. But so did mine. I understood how come he needed to feel like he could make money, but I dreaded the idea of leaving everthing I knowed, only to go someplace strange, where it wasn’t no sure thing we would even make out. Dacia’s words come to me—you can’t make me—and my insides ached like I’d been kicked by a mule. I felt a groan go through me. I laid my head in my hands.
Then I felt the air move a little as Sam walked by. He got down a pan off the shelf and left it on the table, and he took the bowl of vomit outside. I heard him rinse it under the pump. He come back with it filled, and he had me to set down at the table, and he took a rag and dipped it in the cool water and wiped off my mouth and then my whole face. He rinsed out the rag and squeezed it and patted my neck with it. I must’ve had some pieces in my hair—he took a lock of it and run the rag along it and shook out the rag and done it again.
Now it’s true I hadn’t knowed very many men, but for sure I’d never knowed a man that knowed what to do when there was vomit or blood or them kind of things in the house and just went and took care of it without you saying nothing. Women, they knowed, but not men, as a rule. Sam, he just done it without one word. I wasn’t used to nobody looking after me.
I don’t reckon there was nothing I wouldn’t do for him after that. I told myself, After all, it ain’t Russia, it’s just Kansas.
“Do people live in the oil fields?” I said.
“Single men mostly,” he said. “Ain’t enough rooms, and some of them’s doubling up or sleeping outside in bedrolls.”
“Outside?”
“Not us—not you, in your condition. We’ll get us a place, don’t worry. There’s a little town I’ve got my eye on. Wiley, they have a hotel there.” He took up patting me with the rag again.
“You been planning,” I said.
“Well—in case. You know.” He give me a big smile.
I sighed. “Reckon it wouldn’t hurt to go down there and see if we like it. If we don’t, we can come back.”
He let out his breath and laid the rag in the bowl. “You’ll like it, I bet you will.” He smiled his big smile. “My dad used to say, ‘All’s fish that comes to the net.’” He laughed, and then he stood up and danced around the room. “Three dollars a day! Three dollars a day! We won’t know how to spend it all! Three dollars a day!”
Wasn’t till I got ready for bed that it hit me—today it was a year since we’d buried Mama. No wonder my thoughts had went to such a dark place. I reminded myself, Daddy always said, us Winslows could fall into an outhouse and come out smelling like a rose. I hoped he was right for once in his life.
I couldn’t get to sleep that night, so I got up and lit a candle and read the El Dorado paper. That’s the first time I ever heard of a thing called a tarpaper shack. It was a little house built on a wooden frame, but for siding they used thick paper coated in black tar. It didn’t do a whole lot to keep out the wind, the cold, the heat, nor the rain, the paper said, but it was cheap and lightweight and quick to build. They built some of these shacks on skids, so when one field petered out, why, they just hooked up a team of horses and drug the house to the next one. Tarpaper shacks was for people that was lucky. Otherwise you slept outside, like Sam had said.
Then I wrote a note to Alta Bea, could I come calling on Tuesday morning. There was something I wanted to talk to her about. Seemed like she always helped me think things through.
* * *
When I got to the boardinghouse where Alta Bea and Harold lived, I wasn’t surprised he’d give the impression he was living higher than he was—Harold was like to puff things up. The house was at the end of a treeless, dusty street. There was boxes of trash scattered in the weeds, and a possum hissed and run off when I walked up the steps. Kind of a place where me or my kin might live, but Alta Bea, she was used to a lot better than this. I wondered what did she do all day.
The front porch had two doors on it. I knocked at the one had Satterfield wrote on a piece of paper in the window. Alta Bea come to the door directly.
“Where are the girls?” she said.
“At the barbershop with Buck and Daddy,” I said. “They like to play like they’re cutting each other’s hair.” I unpinned my hat. It was awful hot in that house.
She motioned for me to set on a cushion chair under the front window, and then she poured a glass of water from a pitcher on the table. It felt dark in the room, and I realized all the curtains was closed. I seen the ones on the window behind me was fastened with straight pins up and down.
I remembered the letter her mama’d give me for her, and I fished it out of my pocket.
At first she just looked at it in my hand while she poured herself a glass of water and gulped it standing up. Then she poured another glass and set down with it. She took the letter, glanced at the handwriting, and put it in her pocket. We neither one said a word about it. I was curious, but it didn’t feel like it was none of my business.
“You look tired,” I said. There was big circles under her eyes and a greasy shine to her face. Her hair was combed, but the waves was frizzy.
“How’s Harold?” I said, to be polite.
“Work,” she said. “Work work work.” Her voice was breathy. She gulped more water.
It hit me, she was hung over. I seen it many times with Daddy. I felt a chill.
“We had so much fun on the train, Harold and I, remember?” She glanced around the room like she was looking for something. “He wants to get married, but I don’t know. It’s not what I expected. I don’t know.” She got up, poured herself another glass of water, and set back down.
She sounded so downhearted, I never said nothing. I wondered was it a mistake, coming here. Things seemed off here, just like they was at her folks’ house. I felt an ache start up in my jaw. I couldn’t think of nothing to do or say to make things right for her.
“Now he’s got it into his head he wants to be in the oil business.” She took out a cigarette and stuck it between her lips. “He’s like all salesmen—believes his own line of blarney.”
“I know. Sam, he—”
“And move to Kansas,” she said. “The middle of the desert.” She lit the cigarette and sucked in three deep swallows, blowing the smoke in a stream out of her nose, looking up at the ceiling.
“That’s what I come to talk to you about,” I said. “Sam wants to go, too. I told him I’d go, but now—I’m worried the girls’ll get homesick. Dacia like to had a fit when we moved off the farm.”
Alta Bea brought her head back down and stared at the wall just past my head like she was reading something in the wallpaper. Her mouth went down at the corners, and her lips took on a swole-up, ragged look.
“And most all my family I got left is here.” I took a long drink out of my glass. The water was warm, and I seen the glass had a film of something in the bottom.
She made a sound through her nose. “I guess neither one of us wants to go.”
“It’s like when the folks moved us here from back home,” I said. “You pull up roots, you feel like—Mama, she—”
“You and I would never have met, though.” She stubbed out her cigarette, but a little curl of bitter smoke trailed upward. “I hate to think . . .”
We neither one said nothing for a while.
“Sam, he’s bound and determined,” I said finally. “Says he can’t get ahead if we stay here. I expect he’s right.”
She leaned forward in her chair. “Me, I don’t have anyone to stay for.”
“Not even your mama?”
She frowned and shook her head. “It’s hard for her. She’s used to things—a certain way.” Again she looked around the room. “She could just as easily write to me in Kansas as here.”
I felt a stab for her. I knowed what it felt like not to have your mama.
She said, “Harold . . .” but didn’t finish.
I said, “If a man thinks he can make money, seems like won’t nothing stop him.”
Alta Bea got out another cigarette and lit it. “Oh, I could stop him all right, but I have a feeling I’d live to regret it.” She give a bitter laugh. “ ‘Live to regret it’—that’s Mother’s voice in my mouth.” Now she set down her cigarette and looked me in the eye. “I think we should go. All of us. Get a fresh start.” She blinked and rubbed her eyes with her two pointer fingers.
A fresh start—that notion appealed to me.
She took up her cigarette again. “And if I marry Harold, who knows. Maybe even Dad will overlook my indiscretion, especially if I’m far away.”
We visited for a little while longer, wondering what Kansas was like, though Alta Bea never said for sure if she would go or not. When I walked out on the porch, I took deep breaths. Hot and dusty as it was, it felt good to be out of that dark and smoky house.
I climbed up into the buggy and clucked to the horse. I wondered, if Alta Bea moved to Kansas, too, would it be sort of like having kin there? Would I keep from being lonesome? Strange as she was and much as she aggravated me sometimes, there was something about her, I didn’t know what, that beguiled me, too. Always had been.
After while the clop-clop, clop-clop of the horse on the sand road made me drowsy, and I nodded off. I had a vision I was asleep on the ground underneath of an oil derrick, and Sam was hollering at me, trying to wake me up. I turned my head and seen a bear was lunging for me, a black bear with big yellow eyeteeth and its mouth full of maggots, and then I woken up for real. Startled, I took the reins and looked around. For a moment I never knowed where I was at, but then I seen I was on the road to Obsidian, and there was a girl walking toward me hollering at me to watch out where I was going. When I come upon her, I said, “Good thing he knows the way home,” meaning the horse. The girl scowled and pulled her skirts to the side as we passed.
The thought come to me—much as I dreaded moving, even if Alta Bea never come, at least I was going with a man I loved and wanted to be with. Sam, he was my kin now, him and the girls and the new baby to come. If other people lived in tarpaper shacks, I reckoned we could, too. I thought about Alta Bea in that dark room, and I couldn’t help but feel a surge of thankfulness for my great good luck.