Chapter 15
When me and Sam come rolling into Wiley, Kansas—east-southeast of Augusta and pretty much straight east of Rose Hill—the sun was low, and there was dry clouds spread out along the edge of the world like wavy threads, stripes of pink and orange and purple. The last of the light flared behind the clouds, giving each one a white halo. The prairie grass took on a green-yellow glow, and the bark turned gray on the few little trees that was scattered around. The grass give off a dry, crackly smell.
A light wind come up out of the south and stirred everthing—the grass, our clothes, our hair—and I shivered inside and out. It felt like something big was about to start, like this was what my life’d been leading up to.
In the afterglow I looked over the town. There was a wide road down the middle, and to the south there was a store, a hotel, and a bank. A livery stable fronted the railroad tracks to the east. On the northeast side across the tracks was a pen with cattle, along with a small, flat building we found out later was John Naab’s sorghum mill. Roads took off both ways, and I reckon there was fifteen-twenty houses. A ways off, half a mile or less, you could see farmhouses, with barns, horses and cows, some pigs and chickens. To the north and east was the Flint Hills—wave after wave of smooth-topped, flattened bumps of earth as if a giant had spilled globs of porridge. You never seen the like.
Everwhere else was flat. You could see futher than you could in Missouri, way futher than you could in Kentucky. Miles and miles. The prairie was flatter than it had looked from the train window when we run off to Oklahoma. I never knowed there was no place so flat. I thought, how am I going to make them believe, back home, how flat this is?
A handful of horses was tied up next to the buildings, and there was a few teams and wagons, a couple motor trucks, and a half a dozen automobiles. A woman was walking along the main road, carrying a round box. Two men was setting in the back of a motor truck with a dog. They stared at us for a second and then went back to visiting.
We rolled up next to the hotel, the tallest building in town, three stories. Sam clucked, and the horses come to a stop. “Reckon this is it,” he said.
I stretched my back real hard till it popped.
He put his hand on my leg. “You’ll like it here, Bertie, I bet.”
“Nice-looking store.” The last of the sunlight slipped away.
“See there?” He grinned with his whole face, like he done, and he hopped off the wagon and put his hand up to help me. Softly he sung, just like it was a real song, “Three bucks a day, sweetheart, three bucks a day.” Seemed like Sam could always make me smile.
He got us a room on the second floor, hardly bigger than a broom closet but with a nice window overlooking the street. It had a spring bed, and when I laid down I felt like the Queen of Sheba. Me and Sam’d been on the road for two weeks, and my back was mighty tired.
The girls, we’d left them with William and Dora. We was going to send for them once we got settled.
* * *
Next thing I knowed, Sam was leaning over me, whispering. “Don’t get up. I got hired on by a man at the livery. Gonna help ’em haul a boiler to Oil Hill.”
“A what?” I hardly knowed where I was at. It was still dark.
“You can get breakfast downstairs if you don’t sleep all day. Dinner too. I reckon I’ll be back by suppertime.” He leaned over, put some coins in my hand, and kissed my forehead.
When I woken up again, the only way I knowed it wasn’t a dream was them two quarter-dollars in my hand. I laid there for a minute just to feel how good my back felt. Then I washed my face in the bowl and got dressed. I was awful hungry.
“Eggs and coffee is ten cents,” the woman said to me when I set down at the table downstairs. “Fifteen if you want the ham.” She was a stout woman with a mouth that sagged down. I felt sorry for her, though I couldn’t think how come.
“Eggs and coffee.” I dug into my pocket for the money.
“We’ll put it on the room.” She turned and headed out the doorway to the back.
“Put it on the room” didn’t make no sense to me, but it was her dime.
When she brought it out, it was two fried eggs and potatoes and red-eye gravy. I hadn’t never saw so much food for one person, or anyhow one woman, but I eat ever bite.
After breakfast I set out walking to look around town. In the bright sunlight I seen there was more buildings than I thought, and I noticed that the livery had a sign said AUTO REPAIRING. Ever block had at least one path.
I seen a big sign hanging sideways that said ARBOGOST STORE, and I walked toward it. The grass was beaten down where people had tread, but as I walked I scared up a grasshopper now and then. Off they flew with a whizzing sound. There was a little breeze and the smell of horse droppings. You could hear the tick of heat flies—what some people call cicadas, or some people call locusts—getting ready to start buzzing soon’s it got hot enough. When I got there, I realized it was the same store I seen the night before.
I was surprised how dark it was in the store after the sunlight.
“Hot out yet?” a woman said, and I like to jumped out of my skin. “Didn’t mean to spook you.”
Now I seen her standing behind a glass counter. “Tolerable.”
I looked around the store. My eyes was drawn to a big metal can that said SWEET PICKLES, and there was bushel baskets and bins of onions, potatoes, and beans. The back wall had a couple shelves of can goods (store-boughten tin cans, not fruit jars), and there was a big box on the counter that had cookies, of all things.
The floor creaked as I wandered around, and I smelled dust in the air. I felt the woman looking at me. After while I come over to the glass case where she was standing. Close up, I seen she had a fine head of curly gray hair and a long, thin face.
“You passing through?” she said.
I leaned over and pointed in the case. “How much is the blue calico?” It come out raspy, which surprised me. Didn’t sound like what I was used to.
“You look peaked,” she said.
Now I seen the floorboards coming up to hit me in the face, and I thought what an odd thing that was. It felt like the world was going cockeyed.
When I come to, there she was with a flour sack towel, wiping my neck. She poured me a cup of water out of a pitcher, and I swallered it down.
“Here’s a bucket if you need it,” she said, and sure enough I bent my head down and throwed up my breakfast. I scooted away from the slop bucket and pushed it under a table with the toe of my shoe. The smell was fixing to make me retch again.
She poured another cup and handed it to me. “Drink it slow this time.”
While I sipped, she told me the pump was west half a block, on the alley, if me or my animals needed water. After while she said, “Your cheeks are pinking back up.”
She helped me get up off the floor, and she pulled out a rocking chair from the corner. I lowered myself into it.
She set down in a chair next to the table. “Whereabout’s your husband?”
I told her.
“Did he say where they was taking the boiler?” she said.
“Don’t recollect. Someplace where they’re digging for oil.”
“Oil Hill, maybe?”
“That’s it.”
“Dry as it is, he may be back by suppertime if he don’t run into trouble,” she said.
That word trouble lingered in my mind.
“They don’t dig—they pound,” she went on. “They take a giant post and pound a hole in the ground. The boiler makes steam, which is what they use to pound the post with. God-awful racket.”
I tried to picture what she meant, but I couldn’t. In my mind’s eye I seen Sam, scrawny as he was, how he might be driving by in the wagon and get pounded into the ground by a giant post. Next thing I knowed, I pulled out the bucket and vomited again.
She come over and rubbed me on the back. She told me her name was Tillie Arbogost and she had six grown children and five grandchildren so far. Her husband’d up and left two years before on the train to California.
I felt like I needed to go back to the room and lay down. I rose up slowly from the chair, told her my name, and thanked her for her kindness, and then I stepped out again into the sunshine.
I was walking along the road toward the hotel when a man whispered, right next to me, “Are you saved, little mother?”
I looked up. His beard hung halfway down to his waist, and his clothes was wrinkled and raggedy. His skin was burnt brown. He wasn’t much taller than me, and real thin. His eyes was pale blue.
“Excuse me.” I took aholt of my skirt to pass him by.
“It ain’t what you expect,” he said.
I kept walking.
“You will need the strength of ten thousand angels,” he said.
He was ten foot behind me, but it felt like he was still whispering in my ear. There was a chill along my arms. I recollected how people back home would say if you got a chill, it meant a rabbit just run over your grave. I wondered where would my grave end up. Would they bury me on the Sweets’ property like Timmy, or next to Mama in Missouri, neither one with a marker? Or around here? Or someplace I’d never been to yet?
About that time I remembered I left my mess back in the store for Tillie Arbogost to clean up, but I didn’t have the heart to go back.
* * *
Even with the window open, our room at the hotel was ungodly hot. I couldn’t hardly get my breath, the air was so close. I took off my clothes but for my slip and washed my face and arms in the washbowl. Then I laid down on the bed.
I fell asleep quick, and I dreamed I was looking at my mama dead in her bed, but when I looked at her face, it was me. I woken up soaked in sweat. The room smelled rank.
I rose from the bed and walked to the window. The sun was almost straight overhead, so I figured it was about noon. Down below I seen some people walking by, but the man with the white beard wasn’t nowhere in sight. I wondered, did I imagine him, like Daddy and his brothers imagined their dead uncle Seth riding up to the house on a mule named Jackie. I hoped so. I looked out beyond the town to the Flint Hills. Seemed like the sun was so fierce it washed out all the colors to white and shades of brown. I wondered, did the sun burn down like that ever day?
* * *
When Sam got back to the hotel, he was flushed with excitement. He’d met up with a man name of David Whiteside, who told him about a place for rent five miles from town. It had a barn and an orchard, and you could have the use of two or three acres for garden. The house, which belonged to the man’s folks, was the original place they’d homesteaded in the seventies before they built the big house north of it a ways. Sam took it sight unseen and give Whiteside the four dollars cash he’d made that day. We was the luckiest two people in Kansas, was Sam’s opinion. He treated me to a fried chicken dinner to celebrate. I didn’t eat a whole lot, but it wasn’t very good cooking anyhow. Seemed like they never done it like they done it back home, so that the goody stuck to the skin and got crisp. This breading tasted floury.
Sam asked me about my day. I told him I met Tillie Arbogost and she seemed nice.
I was tired when we went to bed, too tired to sleep. It was a long time before my mind quieted down.
* * *
We drove out to the house early the next morning. You couldn’t hardly see the house from the road. It was set back a ways, partway up a slope, and there was trees clear around it.
“Nice shade,” Sam said.
He found the gate and brung the horses to a stop. Wasn’t no proper gate. You just pulled loose a wire loop that held two posts together, and then you drug the section of fence till there was room to drive through, which he done.
Then he looked around on the ground for a while. “Guess we’ll make our own road.” There must’ve been a road up to the house at one time, but evidently it was growed over.
Sam led the horses through the fence, closed it back, and then led them up toward the house. Now pasture ground is awful bumpy, and at the first jolt, I said, “Let me get down and walk.”
“Better not,” he said. “Whiteside says the Indians used to call this Rattlesnake Hill.”
“Lord Amighty.” I grabbed aholt of the springboard and hung on, though it rocked awful hard.
When we got to the house, my heart sunk. Hadn’t nobody lived there for years, from the looks of it. Bushes and trees had growed theirselves up through the siding on the south and west sides, and branches had broke through the roof in several places. Wasn’t no window that still had all its glass. You could see daylight where the front porch had got loose from the house, and there wasn’t no way to step up to the front door.
Me and Sam walked through waist-high weeds to the back, where there was a lean-to nailed to the siding. Looked like they’d used it for a summer kitchen at one time. We walked through the lean-to to the back door, which was stuck open.
I turned to Sam. “I expect animals been living in there.”
“I reckon.” He looked scared, tell the truth. Scared of me.
“Find the well,” I said. “If the pump don’t work, fix it. We’ve got to have water first thing.”
“Don’t you want to see inside?”
“No need to.” I turned and walked out front to the wagon to get my bucket and my broom.
Long about noon, why, I was sweeping cobwebs in the north-west corner of the bigger bedroom when I heard knocking on the back doorjamb. “Anybody to home?” come a reedy little voice.
The white-haired lady at the door was bent over so bad she had to crane her neck to see in front of her. I seen she had a fruit jar of water and a bundle wrapped up in brown paper. There was wet spots, so I reckoned it was food. Looked like she was about to drop them.
“You must be Mrs. Whiteside,” I said. “Here, let me get these things.”
“Mrs. Frownfelter.”
“Call me Bertie.” I looked around for someplace for her to set, but we hadn’t unloaded no furniture.
“Let’s go sit on the wall,” she said.
“The wall?”
She never answered, just got herself turned around and limped away—she used a big black cane—and led me to a little rock wall maybe fifty foot behind the house. It was made out of light-colored stones I found out later was limestone, which the Flint Hills was full of. Besides walls, they used limestone for building foundations, and even fence posts. The stones, they’re awful pretty. Rough and chalky, ranging from browns to yellows to whites, all shades.
The little wall was maybe fifteen foot long and a couple foot tall, and there was a big hackberry tree giving shade there. Mrs. Whiteside, she eased herself down on it and rocked herself sideways a couple times to settle in, and she leaned her cane against her thigh. I set next to her.
She asked me where was my husband, and I told her he was in town getting supplies.
She nodded and then closed her eyes. Took me a few seconds to realize she was praying, and by the time I did, she opened them up again. “Egg salad,” she said.
I unwrapped the sandwiches and handed her one. When she reached for it, I seen her hands was gnarled. Her knuckles was swole up and red, and the fingers was all turned sideways. She took aholt of the sandwich between her two hands, using the first knuckles. It hurt to look at them hands. I tried not to stare, like Mama’d taught me.
Mrs. Whiteside took a bite of her sandwich, and I started eating, too. Truth to tell, I’d never tasted nothing so good as that sandwich, rich with cream or something—I couldn’t tell what—that I never knowed egg salad to have, and maybe sugar. I ate it like I craved it.
After while she turned her head and looked at the house. “Land, it’s gone to rack and ruin. I told David, we have to get some people in there, or tear it down. You tried the well?”
“Pump’s broke.”
She shook her head. “I’ll get Kenneth down here. If he can’t get it going, I’ll send water. He’s my other boy. You met David.”
“My husband did.”
“And the roof! And the windows! I didn’t know it’d gotten so bad. My stars.” She sighed. “Disgrace to humanity.” She brought her sandwich to her mouth and took another bite.
We both eat for a while. “Your husband ain’t well?” I said.
She frowned. “Stroke.”
“I’m sorry to hear that.”
“We’ve got ten, twelve men working for us now. Oil well.” She pointed her head to the north, and I heard her neck bones creak. “Worse comes to worst, they can sink you a new one—water well, I mean.”
She looked again at the house. “I grew up in that house. Disgrace to humanity.” I looked at the house, and when I looked back at her, I seen her lean forward with her weight on her knuckles and struggle to get up. I reached out to help her, but she frowned and pushed me away with one crippled hand. She scooted over the rough rocks and somehow got herself to stand up, and you could hear her hipbones as she rose. The sound of it—raw bones rubbing together—run a chill up my spine. I’d seen crippled people before, but nothing this bad. I pictured her up in the big house, with her husband sick and her boys growed up.
She stood there for a moment leaning on her cane, gasping. I rose and put my arm on her elbow, but she shook it off.
“You need anything,” she said, and she started off limping through the weeds, heading up the slope to the big house.
“Thank you for the sandwich,” I said, but she never turned around nor said nothing else.
I opened the jar and drunk down half of it, watching her. It was going to take her a long time to get to the big house, a long, painful trudge. I wondered, how come she didn’t have one of the men bring her down here in a buggy? How come was she putting herself through that? Then I remembered I meant to ask her what the limestone wall was for, but I never had the chance.
Wasn’t a couple hours later, her son Kenneth come down with two cream cans full of water in the back of his truck. He had the look of a schoolteacher, with spectacles and his hair greased and combed back, but he was wearing boots and overhauls like regular men done. He looked about thirty, younger than I expected from his mother’s age. Maybe she was younger than she looked.
Kenneth took one look down the well—it was in the lean-to on the back—and told me it was half-full of dead animals and they’d start digging a new one in the morning. Meanwhile, he’d bring water twice a day, and would I mind putting the empty cans out back.
Then he took out a notebook and pencil and walked over to the porch, and I followed him. He looked at the place where the porch had split off the house and wrote in the notebook. He never said nothing, so I asked him, “You and your brother, you take care of the folks’ place?”
“David’s in charge of the oil business, which I guess is what we’re in now. Don’t farm much anymore.” He took out a pocketknife and poked the sill of the house. “Me, I do what he tells me to, always have.” He laughed and moved along the foundation, where he poked the sill again. “No dry rot, that’s good.”
He circled the house, writing things down, and then he walked over to his truck.
“You know what that wall’s for?” I pointed to it. “Don’t seem to go noplace.”
He blinked like he’d forgot I was there. “That wall?”
I nodded. What other wall did he think?
“Huh.” He squinted at it. “When we were boys, she made us carry stones down here and build on it whenever we got in trouble.” He laughed. “Who-eee. Spent many an hour tromping up and down that hill, hauling rocks.” He climbed into his truck, nodded to me, and drove off.
* * *
One day in late August I got two letters in the same mail. I read the one from Dora first. It was easy to picture her when you read her letters, they sounded just like her. Wasn’t much news in this one, just that Dacia was growing fast, Opal was about the same, they was all well, hadn’t rained in two months, the twins was thriving, the neighbor had a new automobile, Dacia claimed she seen an aeroplane one day hanging the wash out, it was a sight, Buck’s barbershop was real busy, how was the house coming along, did we have water yet, and so forth. Write soon, we miss you both, we love to get your letters.
The other letter was from Alta Bea. She’d made her mind up, her and Harold was getting married in a couple weeks and settle near Oil Hill, had I heard of it? Was it decent? And they’d bring Dacia and Opal on the train with them, if we was ready for them.
She said she was sorry for how sick she was the last time we seen each other that day at the boardinghouse. “Sick” was what she wrote, and her hung over. She was feeling better, now that things was settled and she was going to be married. She reminded me she’d loaned me and Sam the money to elope—I knowed Sam had never missed a payment, she just wanted to remind me I owed her—and she said, “Do you remember that day at Turner Falls, when we went skinny dipping?” Which of course wasn’t true at all. We’d only waded in up to our ankles, and we’d kept all our clothes on.
She closed by saying she missed me something fierce and couldn’t hardly wait to see me again and to let her know about Dacia and Opal.
I read Alta Bea’s letter with trepidation. Her getting married and coming to Kansas, that was one thing when we was back in Missouri, but now it felt different. It felt like me and Sam was tangled up in something I never seen coming. I thought about how Alta Bea was turning into a drinker, and how she was marrying a man she wasn’t sure about and a sneaky one at that, and how after they got here we’d be the only people she knowed, and with us being beholden to her—it all give me a queasy feeling in my stomach. But I also remembered how Alta Bea and them, they’d been awful good to me and the children when we needed it.
When Sam got home, I met him in the lean-to—only strangers used the front door—and told him the news. “Is that right,” he said. “Well, good for him. About time.” He dipped his hands in the washbowl and rubbed them over his face.
“I reckon we’re ready,” I said. While the men was hammering on the house, I’d scrubbed and whitewashed the walls and floors till they was practically raw. Ever little bit I’d feel a pang of lonesomeness, but it never lingered because there was too much to do.
“Maybe we can get a band going, banjo player. Just need a second fiddle, maybe a piano. I reckon they dance around here, don’t you?”
Sam, he was always thinking way above me. Now he looked at me and said, “Everthing’s working out, ain’t it?”
“It’ll be good, having Alta Bea and Harold with the girls on the train,” I said. “I was worried about sending for them, all alone.”
He took me in his arms. “You’re the one always says, worry’s interest paid on trouble you ain’t had yet.”
“Let go, your arms is wet.”
Well, he wouldn’t let go. He said that old lean-to reminded him of when we used to meet in the cabin on the Snedeker property when we was courting, and how much he wanted then to take my virtue, and why didn’t we spend a little time in our bedroom we had all to ourselves while we still could. He always was a smooth talker, Sam was.
* * *
That night I wrote Alta Bea back and wished the two of them well. I teased her about changing her name from Snedeker to Satterfield. I wrote to her how Memaw used to say, “Change the name and not the letter, change for worse instead of better. Ha ha.” I caught her up on the house—besides the new well and the roof, the windows was done and the bushes was cut back, and the second bedroom was ready for the girls, though she and Harold was welcome to sleep in there till they found a place. And I told her we couldn’t hardly wait to see everbody.