At the farmers’ market four children and a young mother sat on the curb with a basket of shelled pecans. They had built themselves a fire in a small sheet-iron stove. Two of the children were girls and they were barefoot and sat cross-legged with their cotton skirts pulled over their knees to keep warm and played the slap-hands game. Down in the valley where the green grass grows sat little Edna as sweet as a rose. A thin black man made hand-carved wooden puppets jump around on top of an orange crate. Farm women sat on the bumpers of trucks and sold eggs and very yellow butter that smelled of wild onions and a boy stood with a calf ’s lead-rope in his hand holding up five fingers. A blind man sang a song about waiting around a water tank for a train to take him to California, his face lifted to the daytime moon and one hand out in a dramatic stage gesture.
Jeanine bent her head and pressed past all these people until she found a man in a buckboard wagon who was selling old clothes. In the jumbled heap Jeanine found a dress of garnet twilled silk that must have belonged to somebody that weighed three hundred pounds and then either died or lost weight and didn’t need it anymore. She also found something for Mayme; a dirty remnant from a bolt of juniper green tabby-weave silk, and some sheer curtains that could be used for linings. Then she paid ten cents for an old squirrel fur coat. They would use it somehow. Winter was coming.
A crazy man called Oilfield Willie stood at one end of the market calling out the demonic names of Hitler and preached on the deep strata of oil and salt water.
“I am Ozymandias, king of kings!” he shouted. His ragged suit hung on him in folds. “I have brought my sword to bear on the Oil Kings of the netherworld and upon the arteries and the hearts of coal, and I declare war on the trains of Russia and the underwater torpedoes at sea, for the devil and his soldiers are marching as to war! My children, gird up your harps and bagpipes and play the music of the great conflicts and the great strivings or the angels of iniquity will take you all down into the places where the dead hide and are turned as dark as low-grade crude! Mussolini and Hitler are waiting with skeleton rockets. Rise up! Listen! Take heart! Be not afraid! Lift up your hearts and be not dismayed, my children. I am the oil and the truth and the nitroglycerin and none can stand before me, my children.” People dropped a nickel or a dime into his hat, which sat turned up on the pavement.
Ross Everett walked up with a young boy following him. He wore a dark three-piece tweed suit and a good gray Stetson. He had a can of Arbuckle’s coffee under his arm. The boy went to stand in front of the dancing puppets and as he stood there the thin black man made a Red Ryder puppet wring both arms around and around on their pivot.
“Jeanine Stoddard,” Ross said. He lifted his hat and replaced it. “Son, this is Miss Stoddard.”
The boy turned to her and lifted his own hat and turned back to the puppets. Now Little Annie Roonie was jigging across the orange crate. The square was crowded with people selling, and the sky over Mineral Wells was reddish with dust blown down from the Panhandle. A wind snaked around through the streets and the hotels and fluttered the skirts of the girls.
“How do you do, Mr. Everett,” she said. She was surprised to see him, she had forgotten he lived somewhere close to Mineral Wells. She wadded the sheer curtains into a ball and then snatched up the squirrel fur coat and the stained crepe and mashed it all together with frantic motions. She did not want Ross Everett to see her pawing around among old used clothing. “How good to see you again.” Jeanine felt strangely formal and reserved toward him now that she was grown up and all of twenty years old.
He smiled as she tucked the wad under one arm. “I heard y’all had moved back,” he said. “I’m sorry to hear your dad passed away.”
“Well, how did you hear that?”
“Race people,” he said. He stood aslant with one hand in his coat pocket. His suit coat was worn. He looked like he hadn’t bought a new suit since about 1920.
“Race people. Well.” She didn’t want to talk to him for some reason. Or she did but some other time when the world had been better to her and her sisters and her mother, when they were not so desperate for money, when she didn’t have a bundle of rags under her arm. “Yes, we did, we moved back to our grandparents’ old farm.”
“You still have that horse?”
“Smoky Joe? Yes, we have him.”
“Are you selling?” He glanced down at the material in her hands and then he turned to the boy and said for him to buy one of the puppets if he wanted. The boy reached for the Red Ryder cowboy figure.
“No,” said Jeanine. “I reckon we’re going to race him one of these days.” She smiled as if she were very confident.
Everett nodded. He reached into his pocket for a nickel and handed it to the boy. Then the boy said he wanted a soda and Everett handed him another nickel. “I could buy myself a beer for that,” he said. He turned back to Jeanine. “Good luck trying to get a match,” he said. “Nobody’s going to match up against a girl.”
“No, they’ll match up against the horse,” said Jeanine. “Hope y’all are doing well.”
“We’re doing fine,” he said. “Just in on a monthly trip into town. Good day, Jeanine.” The boy came after him as he stepped up on the curb and they went on with their coffee and their puppet.
Jeanine saw schoolchildren running past. It must have got to three-thirty and school was out. She wanted to go into the Oil King Drugstore and buy herself something. A Dr Pepper, an ice cream, a shaker of talcum powder shaped like a champagne glass. But she would not. The holes in her shoes were like the holes in everybody’s shoes but still she was ashamed of them. She seemed to be walking on dirt. She stepped by the little girls and the tin stove with its wavering column of smoke, up onto the sidewalk and walked on past the drugstore. A man in a porkpie hat came toward her and suddenly seized her by both shoulders.
“Jeanine Stoddard!” he shouted.
“What?” She started backward.
“It’s me! M-m-milton Brown!” He was a short young man in a pair of spectator shoes, flagrant wingtips, and a wide tie with his hair sticking up in front and glasses so thick they magnified his eyes into unsteady blue marbles. They were round as half-dollars. “Oh Jeanine, Jeanine, look at this face!” He stood back and threw his hands wide to present himself and his pinwheel cowlick to her. He tipped his hat and then took the wad of clothes from her arms in order to see her entire form there before him. “Do you remember me? Have you not read my n-n-newspaper columns?”
“Give that back,” she said and took the clothes from him. “No. Well, I did when I was cleaning the windows. But I don’t remember you.”
“Yes you do yes you d-do!” He stuttered terribly. Then she remembered the boy and his hammering voice that seemed to leap into a kind of dit-dit-dah-dit Morse code when he talked, turning the knob of the radio at her grandparents’ funeral so many years ago; ten years ago.
“All right, yes I do,” she said. They were walking down the street with his hand on her elbow crashing through the Saturday crowds in the torrent of his enthusiasm and goodwill.
“Of course you do! We went to school together in Ranger! And then y’all left for Mexia. All I did”-he pulled her to one side to let a woman carrying a baby go past-“was listen to your grandp-p-parents’ radio. The world spoke to me! All I ever wanted to do was to talk back!”
“I remember,” she said.
“Dang, girl, your father has died. I know, I am a n-newspaperman, dammit, what a thing. I am the investigator of all that is odd and anomalous. Where are you, where are you, in short, where are you living?” He shoved his hat to the back of his head.
“We came back to the old Tolliver place,” she said. They swept past a hardware store where there was a tallest cornstalk contest, the winner to receive fifty cents. Desperate farmers had stood up their best cornstalk with their names tagged to them. “That’s where we’re living.”
“All of you? Anybody else dead?”
“No, no, me and Mother and Mayme and Bea.” She laughed. “Stop making me laugh,” she said.
“Your father has died. Your life is in shambles. You are starving on the old farm. You are in the midst of dust explosions and your potatoes have the Irish rot and the mules have all died and their bones are white-white-whitening in the sun. When can I come and see you?”
“Oh put a cork in it, Milton.” She couldn’t stop laughing. “What are you doing? When did I see you last?”
“When your grandparents died. I was out there at the graveyard because my aunt is B-Baylor Joplin and she’s related to the old lady at the Strawn store, you s-s-s-see all things are tied together. Ah Jeanine, your cloudy gray eyes, your sultry voice. How are y’all staying alive?”
He drew her to the benches in front of the post office. They sat down along with farmers and ranchers who were waiting for their wives to finish shopping.
“We’re doing fine,” she said. “Mayme has a job at the dairy and I’m keeping house, Bea is in school.” She lifted the wad of secondhand clothes. “And I’m making dresses for everybody. I’m the little housekeeper. We got out of the oil fields.”
The wind was pouring through the streets. It raised dust on the pavement and along the gravel roads leading up to the mountain above. The courthouse flag stood out its full length and then the confused wind backed and doubled it so that the stripes checkered themselves against the forty-eight stars. People walked with their heads down, skirt hems scalloped and rolled. In the north a solid bank of dark blue cloud was bearing down on them, with pallid, running sails of smaller clouds beneath. He gazed at her with a happy smile.
“Jeanine, you look so good. Ah, your daddy was a man I admired. Handsome devil. Rakish. They said it was sour gas. A workingman’s fate. I wanted to kill myself when y’all left for Mexia, slash my wrists with a shattered radio t-t-tube.” Jeanine bent over laughing. He lowered his voice. “It was your eyes, Jeanine. You could sing ‘I Wanna Be Loved by You’ all the way through and you had a yellow dress and a yellow sunbonnet to match. And then you went away. All of you. Off on the road of l-life. I think the papers all say trundling. You trundled off. What the hell is a t-t-trundle?”
“You don’t remember all that!” she said. “You’re making it up!”
“I am not.”
“I was ten when that song came out. We were in…” She paused to fetch up that year from her memory but she could not recall where they were. “Out in the Permian, in Monahans? I’ll have to ask Mayme. But what are you doing? How did you get on at the newspaper?”
Milton Brown took a pencil out of his jacket pocket and held the tip up in the air.
“I went to college until the old man couldn’t support me anymore and he said, ‘Sharpen your pencil and get d-d-d-down there to the newspaper and beg for a job, son.’ I was dying to get into radio. But I stutter. And I suffer from a T-T-T-Texas accent. I live in a rented room above the shoe store where people come in and try on rugged footwear to plod on through the economic emergency.” He stuck his foot in the air and she could see his wingtips were cracked and shiny with desperate applications of polish to cover the aged leather and thin soles. “I help out at the recording sessions at the Crazy Water Hotel, cut the acetate, then they run them into Dallas and b-b-broadcast them on WBAP. I’m being paid in scrip and cabbages and dozens of eggs. Do y’all need eggs?”
“Oh no!” Jeanine jumped to her feet. “I have to buy us a setting hen, I almost forgot.”
“Oh darling Jeanine, listen.” He stood up and took her elbow. “Move in town and live in luxury here where there are streetlights, get away from your country estate. Do y’all have enough cabbages and gruel to survive on?”
“Bye, Milton.” She held out her hand to him. He took hold of it.
“May I come and visit?”
“Yes. Leave a message at Strawn’s store.”
“I will. But you’ll break my heart, won’t you? You’ll lead me on and then c-c-c-crush my hopes.” He bent forward and kissed her cheek. “All of you will. You will toy with me, even little Bea. How old is Bea?”
“She’s thirteen.”
“And lethal, thirteen and lethal. I will be out your way because there is a huge dam going in on the Brazos just above you. WPA project. After the water is impounded Roosevelt will come out and walk on it. Prairie roses will bloom. What can I bring with me?”
“Oh…books for Bea.”
He swept off his hat and bowed. A man in coveralls sitting next to them on a bench chewed slowly and watched without expression.
“Before long, my cruel tormentor.”
JEANINE STOPPED IN at the E-Z Step shoe store to say hello to Betty.
Betty screamed, “Jeanine! Y’all are in town!” She made Jeanine sit down and try on shoes. So Jeanine tried on a new pair of oxfords made with manatee leather and a pair of canvas espadrilles just to look at her feet in them and imagine herself dancing in whole shoes. When Betty was putting them back in their boxes, her cousin said their mothers were over at Violet Keener’s house in a conspiracy about something, something dangerous.
“Dangerous how?” said Jeanine.
“I don’t know exactly but it’s about money.”
Then Betty walked Jeanine to the truck and said what Jeanine needed was shoes and lipstick and a date and a dance. Jeanine decided not to say anything more about learning to drive a tractor. She said good-bye and then found a farm wife with live chickens; she bought three brown hens in a cardboard box and started for home with five gallons of gas in the refilled jerrican. She left her mother to stay the night in Mineral Wells and whatever dangerous conspiracies she and Violet and Lillian might be hatching. She drove south on State Highway 281, past the fields of cotton now stripped down to a tangle of dried stems, as if the farmers had begun to grow fence wire. A pouring wave of sheep fled down a hillside, answering some unheard call, and the dense bank of cloud to the northeast told of a windstorm to come.
She climbed up on the roof carrying a brick on a rope, dropped it down the chimney on the south end of the house, and knocked out the birds’ nests and branches. She climbed down again swept up the parlor and lit a fire in it. There was nothing like a good fire. At least they had a fire.
She moved all her possessions into an upstairs room and when Mayme came home from work they carried the Singer upstairs as well. Jeanine liked the look of the bare room, uninhabited by furniture or pictures. Hers to own, a workplace. One window was covered in cardboard where they had pulled out the broken glass. Her own spare little room was next to it with a window where she could look out on the stacked blue lines of hills disappearing into the east. Jeanine took out the dress and the material and cut them into pieces. Scraps of cloth all over the floor. She cut out the sheer curtain for linings. But she knew clothes weren’t good enough. Pretty clothes wouldn’t get the cedar seedlings torn down or the peach orchard cultivated. She had to go over to the neighbors, the Crowsers, and get them to lend her their tractor. They had to fix the roof or the dust and the solitary, brief rains would drip down the chimney and they would wake up one morning to a cookstove full of water or dirt.