The day before Christmas, Abel Crowser appeared at the door with a fat cock turkey held upside down by its scaly feet. Bea cried out in her usual exclamation points that she would cook the turkey as her present to them all, but she was not allowed to, she was not even allowed on crutches. Jeanine set about roasting the bird with great care.
On Christmas morning they each woke up in their own beds and made silent promises to themselves to be cheerful. Their gifts to one another were things they could make; a tin star for the tree and the juniper green silk dress for Mayme, Lepp cookies for Elizabeth, and the promise of a new coat for Bea. They remembered the Christmas of ’29 in far West Texas, and of ’32 when they sang for their parents, and the worst one in ’35 when they had only exchanged promises. It seemed that Jack Stoddard was still alive in those places, driving nitro and saltwater pumpers, gambling in a back room, calling out for Red Buck to win, drifting transparently over the vast distances of the Permian or through the snow that sifted over the gas flares that Christmas of ’32 in Kilgore. He had always been a shape changer who could talk the legs off an iron stove, and imagined worlds of beauty and chance and drink, and desired these worlds so ardently it seemed impossible he should not still be here in some glassy apparition carrying transparent jelly beans or throwing a pair of invisible dice with stars for dots. Jeanine missed him. They all missed him and nobody would say so. The sisters needed him to drive nails and change the tires and to tell them what kind of men to look for in life, to say Don’t marry somebody like me. To explain why Roosevelt had stored all the gold in Fort Knox. But he was so irrevocably gone.
That afternoon Jeanine cut up what was left of the turkey and put it in jars. She heard a car’s tires crackling on the gravel. It was the schoolteacher, Miss Callaway, a young woman with a pompadour hairdo. She called out Hello! Hello! and jumped out of the car with a paper sack full of handmade Christmas cards from Bea’s schoolmates, and all of Bea’s schoolbooks and lesson plans. Miss Callaway had only been paid in scrip from the county, those official and optimistic IOUs, but she somehow contrived to be nicely dressed, with a long wraparound coat. She had an eastern accent and very deep, round brown eyes. She wouldn’t have any coffee, she was in a hurry. Many more homes to visit.
“I’m from Pennsylvania,” said Miss Callaway. “The Keystone state!”
Elizabeth smiled. “I thought it was the Quaker state.” She put a cup of coffee in front of the teacher anyway and Miss Callaway lifted the cup and blew on it.
“Keystone!” shouted Bea, from the parlor. She eagerly read through all twenty-five of the crayoned Christmas cards.
“And don’t you tease me about being a Yankee,” said Miss Callaway. She had a very wide smile and good teeth. Jeanine cringed as the teacher poured a great deal of sugar and Bea’s condensed milk into her cup. “You Texans wouldn’t ever have got a drop of oil if it hadn’t been for us Pennsylvanians, we came down here and taught you how to drill.” She put the cup down. “Bea is so talented,” she said. “Wonderful stories about horse races and nitroglycerin and hobo jungles. How does she make all that up? What an imagination.”
“I know,” said Elizabeth.
JEANINE WALKED THE fields on Christmas Day from the seventy-five acres on the slope of the ridge, bristly with little cedars, to the heavy cedar brakes beyond the graveyard and then to the orchard. She came back and drew a map and thought about where to start.
Her Christmas present from Bea was a brochure from Texas A &M on the care of peach orchards. Peaches named Springold and Texstar. After a while she laid it down and fell asleep in the chair in front of the cookstove.