Chapter 16

The day Alta Bea and them come was a hot one, and there wasn’t no shade to stand in by the tracks, and the train made an awful racket slowing to a stop. Soon’s I seen Opal wave from the window, I started up bawling. Till that moment I hadn’t let myself miss them two, especially Opal, and now it hit me. Them, the twins, Mama, my brothers, even the kin back in Kentucky, even Daddy. I missed them all. Then I reminded myself I was lucky to have my sisters, and I swallowed back my tears.

The first one down the steps was Dacia, and I was surprised—it looked like she’d growed half a foot since we’d saw her last, though it had only been a couple months. She was just eleven, and here she was getting bosoms and hips, and her face sharpening up.

She said to me, “Well, I hope you’re happy, making us come all this way.” The words of a girl, but her manner and voice seemed like a woman, or soon-to-be one.

Alta Bea was close behind. “Dacia!”

“I’m so glad you come,” I said to Alta Bea. “You too, Dacia.” I tried to touch her on the cheek, but she pulled her face away with a frown.

“Harold,” I said, nodding to him.

“Bertie.” He looked around. “Where’s Sam?”

“Hauling to Wichita. Back tomorrow, most likely.”

He looked disappointed. To Alta Bea he said, “I’ll see that the bags get to the hotel.”

“Ain’t you staying with us?” I said, but secretly I was relieved they wasn’t.

Alta Bea just shrugged and pointed her head toward Harold, like it was his idea.

Now Opal come down the steps, and I grabbed her up. “How was your trip?”

“Got a lot of mending done,” she said, serious.

“The poor thing,” Alta Bea said. “She couldn’t keep anything down, the whole way.”

I looked at Opal, alarmed. “You all right?”

She smiled. “Just hungry a little bit, is all.”

“Is it always this hot?” Alta Bea said. “Let’s go inside.” She started for the little depot.

“I hate this place!” As soon as this was out of her mouth, Dacia took off running. I seen her duck behind a tree.

“I’ll get her,” Alta Bea said.

“Let her go,” I said. “Ain’t no place she can go.” But Alta Bea was already after her.

I took Opal’s hand. “Nice clean sheets tonight, won’t that be nice?”

Harold come back, slipping his wallet into his jacket pocket. “Where’d they get to?”

“I expect they’ll be along,” I said, and then there they was.

I’d borrowed the Whitesides’ wagon, and now I climbed up on the spring seat and took the reins. Alta Bea set beside me.

“We’re off, like a dirty shirt,” I said. One of Mama’s sayings.

As we rode along, Alta Bea remarked how pretty the Flint Hills was.

“Mrs. Whiteside, our landlady?” I said. “Her son David, he has a book says there’s rocks under the ground that go back to before there was people. You think that’s true?”

She wiped off her neck with her hankie. “Rocks and oil both.”

“Just imagine what-all them rocks has saw.”

Alta Bea nodded. “It’s a wonder.” She got out a cigarette and lit it.

“Ugliest rocks I ever seen,” Dacia said.

* * *

The minute we pulled up to the house, Dacia said, “If you think I’m living in that shack, you got another think coming.”

“It ain’t so bad,” I said. “You’ll get used to it, I expect.”

“Bigger than the home place,” Opal said.

Everbody jumped down off the wagon, and we each stopped and dipped us a drink out of the graniteware pot on the front porch. Then the girls, they lit out to have a look around. I told them to watch out for snakes if they was going up to the barn.

I had the chicken and noodles already cooked—my best company meal—and I’d set the table with what was left of Mama’s white plates and cups, along with the silverware with the shell design. I also had out her big serving bowl with the hand-painted pink roses. Before we left I’d give Dora the matching platter, and though it was chipped she’d gotten misty-eyed.

“Let’s go ahead and eat,” I said to Alta Bea and Harold. “No telling when the girls’ll get back.”

“Pretty table,” Alta Bea said. She got out her flask and poured some whiskey in her and Harold’s teacups.

All Harold wanted to talk about was the oil business. “The Whitesides, they’ve got themself a well,” I told him. “Got a wildcatter already spudded it.”

His eyes lit up. “It prove out?”

“He has this oil book,” Alta Bea said. “All he did on the train was read, read, read.”

“Big pool north of the ridge, evidently,” I said.

“Oil, oil, oil,” Alta Bea said.

“And a Mr. Fox, he already put up a couple dozen wells near where the Whitesides’ is, and there’s a big outfit from back east has put some in.”

“Let’s go see it, want to?” Harold said.

“Please,” Alta Bea said, rolling her eyes. She gestured with her forkful of noodles.

The girls come back after while. Opal, after she eat, begged off going to the oil field, saying she needed a nap. Dacia said she would go, she needed fresh air. The house stunk, in her opinion.

It wasn’t but half a mile to the Whitesides’ north pasture. Walking through alfalfa gets tangly, but it does give off a sweet, grassy smell. Harold and Dacia, they run ahead up and over the ridge, and me and Alta Bea lagged behind. I asked her how her and Harold got along with the girls during the long trip from Obsidian.

“Dacia’s a headstrong girl,” she said.

“She’ll be fine once she gets used to the place, I reckon.”

“Getting used to isn’t in her way of thinking.”

“She’s mouthy, don’t I know it, but she’s a good girl in her heart,” I said. “She don’t scare me none.” I was saying what I hoped was true. But soon as I’d seen Dacia at the depot, and how grown-up she was getting, my old dread had came back to me. Didn’t seem like I had no way of keeping her under control—and what might she take it into her head to do, once she realized that? She’d been on a bad road for as far back as I could remember. And now even Alta Bea seen it.

“William told me she talked about running away,” Alta Bea said. “More than once.”

“Dora wrote me. I said, where-at’s she going to go? Said, she’s got no place to go, and that’s where she’s going—no place.” Whistling past the graveyard, is what we used to call it when you was pretending you wasn’t scared.

Alta Bea stopped. “Times are changing, Bertie. Girls just take off by themselves, heading west to California and Oregon. They think they’ll be in the pictures or strike gold.”

This shook me, though I shrugged. “Likes to hear herself talk, is all.”

She put her hand on my arm. “Terrible things happen to them. Read the newspapers.”

I pulled away and looked to the top of the ridge, where Dacia and Harold had disappeared. “I tell you what, she sure has growed since I last seen her. Don’t seem like it’s been long enough for her to have growed so much.”

“Maybe it’s been a long time since you took a good look at her,” Alta Bea said. “Maybe you aren’t seeing what’s there in front of you.”

“I see good enough.” I heard the sand in my voice.

Neither one of us said nothing for a little bit. The air felt thick.

Finally, Alta Bea said, “Come on, let’s go look at that oil well. Harold’s liable to buy it before we get there.”

* * *

The Fox-Whiteside field was little compared to the El Dorado field, which we was told covered more than thirty square mile. But for all that, Whiteside was plenty big. When me and Alta Bea made it to the top of the ridge, we stopped and looked. Besides the derricks, there was machines and outbuildings of all kinds, wagons, trucks, stacks of pipe and parts, men running around carrying things, hammering, climbing up and down, talking and hollering. And everwhere clouds of soot, smoke, and steam.

“Men,” she said. “Seems like they can build anything as long as it’s big and noisy.”

“These is modern times, sure enough,” I said.

Alta Bea blinked and nodded.

I seen Harold and Dacia down there standing by the Whiteside derrick, and me and Alta Bea walked down the slope.

“What is that smell?” she said.

“Dead things from deep in the ground don’t smell good.”

When we got there, Harold was standing just inside a little shack next to the derrick. There was a man with him, black-faced with dirt. He started up a piece of the machinery, which made a terrific racket. I couldn’t hardly bear it.

Dust rose in billows all around us.

Harold pointed to a big wooden part of the derrick that looked like a ladder. “Walking beam!” he hollered. “Pull the cable up, boom! Drop the bit! Boom! Big hole!”

“I can’t abide the noise!” I hollered.

Harold nodded to the man, and the three of us headed back to the alfalfa pasture. Only when we got there did I notice I’d been holding tight on to my belly.

I looked around. “You seen Dacia?”

Alta Bea and Harold looked at each other.

I said, “She’ll be along directly, I expect.”

Dacia showed up at the house about an hour after we got home. When I asked her where she went, she said nowheres.

* * *

That evening Harold went into town to the hotel, but Alta Bea wanted to stay up and talk, so I asked her to spend the night at our house. After the girls was in bed, me and Alta Bea set out on the porch. The evening was cooling down, not a lot but a little.

“I hate the thought of Harold coming home and dripping oily dirt all over my house,” was the first thing she said after she took a big drag off of her cigarette. She wasn’t smoking just for the look of it, like some women done. She sucked it hard into her lungs.

“He ain’t getting a boss’s job?” I said. “Suit and collar?”

She rolled her eyes. “He wants to learn the business from the ground up, he says, so he’s starting by working in the field.” She shuddered. “I can just picture his clothes, stiff with oil.”

I never said nothing.

She smoked for a while, and then she said, “You know, on the train, when the girls were sleeping and Harold was reading his oil book, I had some time to myself. I enjoyed that.”

I nodded.

“I love how you can look out the window and watch the world go by.” She had a dreamy look on her face. “I was so conscious of how far we were traveling.”

“It’s a long trip.”

“Children would wave, and I wondered what they thought about us. I wanted to jump off the train and go look inside their houses.”

“You did?” I felt my mouth twitch. She was a strange one, sure enough.

“I wondered, what do they eat, what’s in their closets, what do they read, what do they talk about at meals.”

I cleared my throat. “You must be wore out.”

“It was like the train window was a picture frame,” she went on, “and suddenly I could see—I only have one lifetime, and I’ll never know what’s just outside the frame.” She give a big sigh and pulled her flask out of her pocket.

It give me a sick feeling. I hadn’t said nothing at dinner since Harold was there, but now I felt like I had to. “I thought maybe you wasn’t drinking no more. In your letter—”

“Helps me sleep.” She took a sip.

Neither one of us said nothing for a while.

“I hope the girls didn’t give you no trouble,” I said.

She laughed through her nose. “That Dacia, she pitched a fit when we left. ‘My daddy! My brothers! My mama’s grave!’” She said this sarcastic, like she thought Dacia’d been faking.

I wondered. I myself had felt those same feelings. Maybe in this new place, me and Dacia would get along better, maybe she wouldn’t be so hardhearted, maybe . . . I hardly dared to think what it might be like if me and her got along—for all of us. Life would be different for me, for sure. Dacia hung over me like a cloud about to bust open.

“And when we got here today and I went after her?” Alta Bea went on. “I found her stuck barefoot in the middle of a sand burr patch. By the time we got them all out, her feet were specked with blood. But she didn’t say a word.”

“She is contrary.” I wilted a little bit.

“But Opal, she was so sweet. She never complained about her motion sickness, and she helped us pass the time. ‘Let’s play poor pussy, let’s play poor pussy,’ which I’d never heard of.”

I smiled. “Opal always liked that game.” You try to make people laugh by acting like a cat.

“It took two seconds for Dacia to make Opal laugh, and me too. Dacia does have a gift for mimicry.” She took another drink. “She does you, did you know that? ‘Now, you childern, you remember how Mama was all the time a-callin’ us a buncha heathens? Well, you know she never meant nothin’ by it, now quit actin’ like a buncha heathens.’”

I felt my face go red.

Alta Bea chattered on. “And Harold, he kept repeating things from his oil book—the driller this, the roughnecks that, the tool-dresser, the pumper, and so on and so forth. But what he’s aiming for is brokering leases. That’s where the big money is, he says.”

“I imagine so.”

“Funny thing is, they’re called lease-grafters, did you know that? But it doesn’t mean they’re crooked, supposedly. They have to be ‘good talkers’ and ‘have nerve,’ the book says. So Harold says, ‘That’s me! That’s me all over!’” Now she rolled her eyes and laughed.

I yawned. “It’s awful late.”

“You go on. I want to smoke another cigarette. I’ll be in soon.”

“Good night, then.”

I peeked in on the girls in the little bedroom, and they was sleeping real hard. Wore out. I thought about the two of them, how different they was. Opal sick as a dog and never complaining, and Dacia acting like she hated the world, me especially, for no good reason.

I leaned on the doorway and watched as they slept. How come my raising of them didn’t take with Dacia—and Opal sweet as could be? How come Dacia, my own blood, to hate me after all I done for her, all I suffered? I recalled when I slapped her on the day of Mama’s funeral. Did my jealousy infect her somehow? Is that how come she was so hateful? I wanted to banish that notion. I couldn’t hardly bear it.

I leaned my head back against the doorjamb and reached under my blouse and run my fingertips over my belly like I’d done a thousand times, in circles, and circles within circles, as lightly and gently as I could and still touch the skin.

* * *

Before too long Harold got on with Cities Service, and him and Alta Bea moved into one of the company houses in Oil Hill. These houses stood all in a line not far from the oil field, ever one of them painted gray. People called them shotgun shacks because they was long and narrow, with the rooms in a row and a door at each end. Four rooms, and free gas piped in. The neighbor ladies brought food the first day, but Alta Bea wasn’t much for making friends. She’d ruther travel the eight miles to our house as neighbor with them. I don’t know if she thought she was above them—stuck-up, our mothers called it—or if she had turned back to being shy like she used to be. With Alta Bea, it was hard to tell.

One morning, with the men working and the girls off to school, here come Alta Bea in their car they’d bought. She never opened the gate, just set out on the road and beeped her horn till I went outside. She hollered for me to come for a ride, so I grabbed my sweater and off we went. Pretty soon I folded up my sweater and set on it, but, little like I was, I still had to stretch my neck to see out the windows. Cow pasture, creek, alfalfa field, wheat field, cow pasture, a tractor pulling a disc. A field of oil derricks and pumpjacks.

“That smell,” Alta Bea said, and it was like I woken up from a dream. “I don’t see how a person can ever get used to it.”

I just shrugged.

We must have gone six or seven miles when she jerked the steering wheel, sending the car into a skid. I braced my hands, and we come to a stop by the side of the road. Dust rose up all around us.

“What in the Sam Hill.” I put my hand on my belly. It hit me—one thing I hated about riding in cars was, you was at the driver’s mercy.

She laughed and scooted back against her window frame. She pulled out a cigarette and blowed out smoke, and then she started pulling out pins till her hair fell in loose waves. She was growing it out again, I seen.

“Don’t you just love cars?” she said, her eyes closed. Now she squinted against the smoke. “You’ve gained weight around the middle.”

“Oh.” I felt myself blush.

“You aren’t, are you?”

This wasn’t the way I planned on telling her. She’d caught me by surprise. I just nodded.

“Damn.” She looked at me sideways. “I told you before, there are ways.”

“Too late for that.” I used a smart-alecky tone that made it sound like me and Sam never meant to have a baby so soon, that we wasn’t careful, and now I had to go through with it—though none of that was true. Alta Bea brought out the worst in me, seemed like. Made me say things I didn’t feel, act like somebody I wasn’t, which wasn’t something I done except when I was with her. Now I felt so bad about what I said, I never noticed she wasn’t happy for me like I thought she would be.

“When are you due?” She reached under her seat and pulled out a glass candy dish and stubbed out her cigarette.

“Soon after the first of the year, looks like.”

She never said nothing, just looked past me out the window.

I felt bad. I felt like I had tempted bad luck, just to go along with her. I wanted her to know how I really felt. “Me and Sam, we’re excited. It’s what we want, tell the truth.”

She turned to the front and pushed the button to start the car. She gunned the engine. “I’d have thought you’d had enough of babies.”

“We’re excited,” I said again.

“If you say so.” She cranked the steering wheel and turned around, headed toward home.

“I do,” I said. “I’m the happiest I ever been.”

She sighed. “I’m glad for you, then. Good for you.”

Pretty soon I turned a little away from her and petted my belly. I told my baby, I can’t hardly wait to meet you. You got the happiest mama and daddy there ever was.