The stores and offices on the main streets of Tarrant were bright with posters declaring we must all work together to bring America out of the economic emergency. At the MacComber House soup kitchen Jeanine made coffee and cut up donated, stringy beef for the soup. She washed her hands and sat down at a table with five other girls and threaded a needle. It was hard to hold all the material down with pieces of scrap iron and cut pipe rings but they could not do without the fan blowing on them. The streets outside wavered with heat distortion. They were piecing together dust masks to be sent to other Red Cross centers. Most would go up to the Panhandle hospitals, to Lubbock and Amarillo, where the dust storms were the worst. The streets were filled with train noises and crowds. Martha Jane Armstrong showed up to help make decorations for the Fourth of July benefit dance and Betty came with a box of linen scraps. Uncertain, ragged families strung themselves one by one through the door and stood silently, waiting to be told, to be offered something and too proud to ask.
Jeanine told Martha about the drive chain on the cultivator grabbing her scarf and Martha said she’d better carry a knife, she didn’t know how many people had caught their clothes in machinery and got killed. You need to cut yourself loose and if all else fails you can jam the blade in the gears.
A stout woman named Bricey was the democratically elected head of the Mineral Wells Relief Committee and she had a voice like a sawmill whistle. Jeanine remembered her from the Valentine’s Day dance, where she had sat behind a table and took in the boxes, gray as cast iron and completely unmoved by the traveling light-spots that rained on her pie-tin hat, sorting the small gifts for poor people given by other poor people.
Now Bricey cut sandwiches with a big carving knife, and laid them out in stacks. A family of four sat down on the unsprung couch and the mother handed the sandwiches to her husband and two small children. Jeanine glanced at them and away again. Like we used to be, she thought. On their way to something better.
“You girls just think I am a stodgy old lady,” said Bricey. She turned the key on another can of Spam. “But I have a secret life.”
“Well, tell us,” said Betty. “Don’t hold back.”
“I am an astronomer.”
They all said, No! Bricey smiled.
“Does that mean stars?” somebody asked in a whisper.
“Tell us,” said Martha Jane.
So Bricey told them about the telescope on the roof of her house and how she went out on clear nights to see the rings of Saturn, and the canals of Mars, light-years from this town, so slack and depressed. The stillness afflicted her. The rising dust storms. So she went up to her roof and gazed out into the limitless Great Otherwise and worlds upon worlds.
“So there. My secret life.”
Jeanine smiled at Bricey, surprised. Bricey sat up on the roof and drank in the light of the stars like a little old nocturnal hummingbird. She had her own secret life there. And she dressed in dumpy dresses and her awful gray hat in the daytime. Jeanine realized she knew so little about people; that she and her family had moved around so much they had always depended only on each other and she in truth knew as little about the world as a nun. Jeanine’s big stitches galloped across a square of layered gauze.
Bricey had a small round mouth and never wore lipstick and when she smiled it showed her gold tooth.
“And I knew your mother, Jeanine. I think it’s marvelous that she bought into that oil well.”
“You knew my mother?”
“You were born here, Jeanine. Y’all weren’t brought up on a desert island.” Bricey took her hairbrush from her purse and brushed back Jeanine’s hair. “You should let your hair grow out, honey, and do it in one of those pompadours. It would make you look older.”
Jeanine sat carefully still while Bricey drew her short hair back and thought about the effect and then let it spring back to its brief waves.
“How did you know my mother?”
“Why, we went to high school together! She was a freshman and I was graduating. Oh she was so pretty. She’s still pretty. And that oil well is just the thing for her. She can busy herself to death with that thing and it’ll never come in and so she can buy into another one. She should have done something like that years ago.” She smiled and ruffled Jeanine’s flyaway hair. “I’m glad y’all are back, Jeanine,” she said. “Y’all have had your troubles but I’m glad you’re back.”
“Thank you,” said Jeanine, and wished she knew how to say more; something more of the sudden rush of gratitude for such simple words.
“And how is Bea?”
“She’s going to have that cast off pretty soon.”
“Is Mrs. Beasley taking good care of her?”
“Yes,” said Jeanine, and her good feelings evaporated at the image of Winifred Beasley and her bird’s-nest hat. She went to stand in front of the electric fan. “But if she keeps on ordering us around she isn’t going to live out the summer. I swear I’ll throw her down the well.”
“Jeanine!” Bricey jammed the hairbrush back into her purse and shut it up hard. “I didn’t know you were like that.” She closed her mouth over the gold tooth. “Winifred has dedicated her life to rural nursing. She is selfless. She has worked without cease.”
Betty stared at her cousin and put a finger to her lips.
“Well excuse me,” said Jeanine. “I didn’t know you knew her.” Jeanine sat down and started stitching quickly.
Bricey sat down with pinking shears and began cutting out linen squares. “Absolutely selfless,” she said. Jeanine felt like she ought to leave but Ross was supposed to come in on the afternoon train and she wanted to meet him and hear if he got a contract or not. She wondered if they would remain friends if Milton Brown presented her with an engagement ring and declared his undying love and set a date to m-m-marry her and they would stroll among the dinosaur tracks and kiss beside the drying bed of the Brazos where catfish swam in circles in the shrinking holes of water. Then they would get on a train to Chicago with everybody throwing shoes and rice and then herself and Milton in a Pullman bed. She turned toward the door as the Old Valley Road teacher, Miss Callaway, hurried inside with a box containing jars of red, white, and blue poster paint and a tube of sparkles. She wore a light pink printed cotton dress and she was crying. She stopped and put the box down and shook out a handkerchief and wiped her eyes.
“Why, Lou-Ann!” said Bricey. “What is it?”
Lou-Ann Callaway motioned toward the back room and Bricey got up and followed her. They all listened intently; they heard the kind of pressured noise people make when they are whispering at top volume. It was something about a young man. Martha raised her eyebrows and kept sewing. Who was seeing someone else, she had just discovered. Betty thumped her heart with a fist and rolled her eyes. Martha Jane placed her wrist against her forehead and pretended to faint. Jeanine heard the faraway noise of the train whistle as it crossed the Brazos River Bridge coming into Mineral Wells, and said she would be back later. She knew that sooner or later Bricey was going to have a long chat with Winifred Beasley and that something would come of it; something unpleasant.
THROUGH THE HEAT waves and engine steam she saw Ross Everett stepping off the westbound passenger train. He took off his hat and came walking toward her. “I figured I would find you here. This is one of your days at the Red Cross.”
She came to him and took his coat sleeve in her hand. He laid his hand over hers and bent down to kiss her hot face. The smell of his body and skin was very intimate; tobacco, train, sweat, himself. He said they would go somewhere cool, the drugstore, and have something cold, and he would tell her about his contract if she were interested, and then he would drive her home when the temperature had cooled down. He told her about the rain he had seen in the East. Sheets of it. The feel and air of the world when it was drenched and running with water. One beautiful rain after another.
They drove back out to the Tolliver farm in the blue evening, listening to his car radio. She bent forward and turned it up when she heard the first strains of “Stormy Weather.”