A week passed. Jeanine’s mother waited up until late into the night. She sat at the table with the coal-oil lamp burning its amber oil until sign-off and the national anthem at eleven and then until midnight and beyond. She was waiting up for Jack, and if not for him, then the sheriff or the coroner.
Mayme complained in her sleep about the barbed-wire crisscross of her bobby pins. Bea slept against the wall with its faded paper of milkmaids and silvered wreaths, with the striped tomcat purring under her chin. In the distance thunder rolled over the lifting waves of the Gulf of Mexico. It was early October and the nights were cooler but there had been no more rain even here on the rainy coast and the entire country was shrinking in drought. Jeanine felt the rent house sailing into the untrustworthy night with themselves as passengers and no one at the helm. She pulled the quilts up tight around her neck and turned to lie against her older sister’s back.
Sometime in the late windy hours her mother blew out the lamp. The flame lit her face for the brief moment before it was extinguished and it made a fire of her hair and then it was dark.
The sheriff drove in at five-thirty in the morning.
Even in her crowded dreams Jeanine heard the car stopping in front of the house. Jeanine sat up in bed. Her hair drifted into her eyes and she felt trapped in the twisted flannel nightgown. She came up out of a dream in which she had been charged and overcharged with straightening everything out and she could feel her angry frustration from the dream tumbling inside her like sand grains in a current. Mayme sat up as well and turned to the window; she pulled aside the rice-sack curtain and tried to see into the dark.
The two older sisters and their mother got up and struck a match to the lamps and dressed themselves for whatever was going to happen. A black-and-white Ford pulled up at the front gate and then the motor shut off. On the door was the insignia of the Wharton County Sheriff ’s Department.
He knocked on the front door and when it was opened to him he stepped into the light of the coal-oil lamp and took his hat off. He was a tall thin man in khakis with red-rimmed eyes and a revolver.
He said, “Mrs. Stoddard?”
“Yes, I’m Mrs. Stoddard,” Elizabeth said. “Come in.”
She turned and walked into the kitchen and he followed her. The deputy sheriff glanced around the kitchen, at the stockings soaking in a basin and the oaken icebox dripping into a pan. Curtains made of feed sacks printed with dancing orange pigs. A flesh-colored rug on the floor made of braided discarded hosiery. Jeanine’s mother sat down at the table as if her knees had become disjointed.
She said, “Is my husband in jail?”
“He’s in custody.” He took a handkerchief from his back pocket and blew his nose. “Sorry. Came down with a cold.”
“Is he shot?”
The deputy hesitated and looked over at the girls. He said, “No, ma’am. I better speak to you alone.” He put the handkerchief back in his pocket.
“No,” said Jeanine’s mother. “Say what you have to say.”
“Your husband is charged with statutory rape. An underaged girl.” A long silence drew itself out and Jeanine saw her mother frown, as if she had been confronted with some unaccountable puzzle and then she put her hand to her mouth.
“Where is he?” Elizabeth Stoddard lifted her head.
“The county jail.”
“This can’t be true,” she said.
“Mrs. Stoddard, your husband has been accused by a young girl here in Wharton. She’s fourteen. She ought to be charged as a juvenile delinquent but they ain’t going to do it.” He turned away and cupped both hands over his nose and sneezed violently. “Sorry.” He took out the handkerchief again.
Jeanine crossed her arms and stalked to the window where the aged glass distorted the lamp reflections. She had pulled on the tiger-striped dress, the first thing that came to hand.
She said, “We’d be better off if he were dead.” She buttoned the neck of the dress. “Graveyard dead.”
“Jeanine, be quiet.” Elizabeth Stoddard wadded the tea towel in her hands. “Are you sure you have the right family?”
“I’m very sorry, Mrs. Stoddard.”
Bea came out of the girls’ room. Her mother said, “Bea, go back in the bedroom.”
Bea turned and they heard the door slam.
Elizabeth got up and went to the bedroom door. “I’ll get dressed,” she said. She came out again in her Sunday dress and hat and white gloves. Then she walked to the door and the deputy held it open for her and they left.
Everything had changed. It was as if they had been bombed and their hearts pierced by random splinters. Jeanine sat down and stared around the kitchen, so strangely intact. The water bucket and its dipper and the crashing noise of the clock’s ticking. She and Mayme stared at the fruit jar full of knives and forks and spoons, none of them matching to any other. Bea came back in dressed and she carried her Big Chief writing tablet with her.
“Did you hear?”
Bea stared at them. Tears were running down her face but she did not seem to notice them.
“Yes,” she said. “At first I thought it was a radio program. I thought Mother had the radio on.”
“Where was he?” said Jeanine. She hugged her faded plaid jacket around herself, the lines of the plaid seemed to vaporize in soft, blending lines. She wiped her eyes. “Where did all of this happen?”
“You’d be the one to know,” said Mayme. “You were always covering up for him. You were always lying for him.” She wiped her hands on her jeans. “Bea, stop crying.”
“You stop,” said Bea.
“Get ready for school.”
“I don’t want to go to school,” said Bea. “I don’t ever want to go again.”
“No, go on.”
“What good is school?” Bea gripped her writing tablet to her thin chest. She and Mayme were both weeping again. “Everybody will know. What good is going to school?”
“I never covered up anything,” said Jeanine. “This ain’t my fault.”
“Yes it is. You encouraged it.”
“I never did any such thing.” Jeanine wiped tears from her face. She put the two ends of the jacket zipper together and with a tearing noise she zipped it up. The kitchen had grown cold. The fire in the cookstove had burnt down. The thought of her father laying hands on some young girl made her feel cold and diminished.
“Would you two quit bawling?” Mayme put the coffeepot on the kerosene stove to boil. “I should have left home when I turned eighteen.”
“And gone where?” said Jeanine.
“Just stayed in one place longer than y’all did.”
Bea’s lips were shaking. “This is going to be in the papers,” she said. “In the newspapers.”
Mayme wiped her eyes and started taking the hairpins from her hair. “Yes, and Jeanine’s going to testify at the trial. She’ll be in the newspapers. She’ll be famous. Like Bonnie Parker.”
Jeanine reached in her coat pocket for a brush and drew it furiously through her short, light brown hair.
“Stop it, Mayme.”
Bea said, “Mayme, don’t lay your bobby pins on the kitchen table. That’s disgusting.” Bea hugged her striped cat with the broken nose close to herself but he writhed out of her arms and dropped to the floor with a padded thud.
“Well excuse me, Your Holy Cleanliness.” Mayme put the hairpins in her jeans pocket. She wound up her long hair in French rolls on both sides of her head, which gave her head a square look. Her nose was red from crying. “Maybe she’s a liar.”
Bea said, “But who would lie about something like that?” She looked up wonderingly. “And how would she even know Daddy? And who is she?”
Mayme turned to Jeanine. “Got any answers?”
The wind danced through the faulty window frames in thin and merry whistles. The coffeepot gurgled with a laughing noise like some small kitchen spirit calling to them that it was going to be all right, everything was going to be all right and it puffed animated, tiny clouds from its nose.
Then Bea opened her diary or journal or whatever it was. The blank book in which she wrote down everything of note that happened. She took up her pencil.
Mayme said, “I was about to get engaged. Get married and get out of here.”
“I didn’t know he proposed,” said Jeanine. She watched Bea write down Will Robert break the engagement? And then lay down the pencil and put out her hands toward the kerosene stove with its odorous yellow flame. The flame reached up to the coffeepot on the stove lid and the Hamilton clock said it was six-thirty in the morning. Outside it was barely light. Whatever kind of life they had been able to cobble together despite the Depression and the oil fields and their father’s love of good times and gambling was collapsing all around them.
JACK STODDARD DIED in his jail cell, sitting on his bunk with a copy of Black Mask Detective in his hands. It was October 17, 1937. Outside the windows of the county jail a parade filed past with several high school bands playing “Our Boys Will Shine Tonight”; his half-shut dead eyes were fixed on the window bars. A cleaning woman named Myra ran down to the office and said there was something wrong with a man in cell seventeen. The coroner said it was a brain hemorrhage brought on by the concussion and the sour gas. He couldn’t imagine how the man had lasted so long.
Jack was buried in the Wharton city cemetery. It was a bright sunny day. Jeanine saw her mother upright and calm. Then Elizabeth began to shake, as if she had been stricken with convulsions. I can’t stop shaking, Elizabeth said, what’s happening to me? Mayme took hold of her mother with both hands. Jeanine ran to the truck and sat there for a while, crying so hard she could not lift her head from the steering wheel. It was pity as well as grief, pity that her handsome father should be confined in the cold and the dark beyond the sound of human voices. She dried her face on her skirt hem and started the truck engine. They drove away and left him to both the apparent and the invisible world.
THE LANDLORD CAME to their door and knocked lightly. He rapped his knuckles like a man who wanted his money but on the other hand the women were recently bereaved and he was fat and what he was doing appeared to be a scene from a Charlie Chaplin movie, or something from The Perils of Pauline, orphans being thrown out into the snow by an overweight rich landlord, which he was. The streets of Wharton were dusty. The Spanish moss that hung from the live oaks was dusty. He was throwing them out into a drought, into bank failures, into the national economic emergency. He wore white and carried a cane. He rapped again with the cane and cleared his throat of the dust and spat.
Mrs. Stoddard opened the door. She wore a clean print dress with a red belt. Behind her in the kitchen he could hear the radio. Maybe she would offer him the radio in lieu of the rent. He wouldn’t accept it.
“I don’t have the rent,” she said.
“I want to say how sorry I am about your husband,” he said. “But it’s just as well. We don’t need perverts here in Wharton.” He tipped his hat to her. Then her three daughters came to stand behind her. He tipped his hat to them as well. “Sorry about your father,” he said. “But the rent is ten dollars. I know Mr. Stoddard was a gambler and my bet is he has something hidden away somewhere.”
One girl stepped forward and put her hand on her mother’s shoulder.
She said, “We’re going back to where we have our own farm.”
“Where’s my ten dollars?” He banged the foot of the cane on the flat dirt of the yard. Down on the river some of the hoboes were calling to one another in raffish, joking shouts. “Pay up or you leave right now.”
“WE’RE GOING HOME,” said her mother. She sat at the kitchen table and moved the salt and pepper shakers around. “We’ve got to get packed up.”
“Yes, Mother,” said Jeanine. It was so hot she felt faint, as if she would melt and flatten out.
“You hid things for him,” said her mother. “I found two hundred and fifteen dollars in his toolbox. He always hid money.”
“I never hid that money,” Jeanine said. She sat with a cold cup of weak coffee in her hands and blinked repeatedly. Then she turned to her two sisters, but Mayme only stared back at her with her arms crossed and Bea turned the flatiron over on the stove. Mayme’s boyfriend from Conroe had sent a sympathy card and his signature and no more. Mayme held it in her hand.
“I guess that horse is yours, Jeanine,” her mother said. “We could try to sell him.”
“Not yet,” said Jeanine. “Not just yet.”
“Promise me you won’t gamble on the races again.”
“I won’t. I promise.”
JEANINE AND MAYME moved around the kitchen, packing up the lithograph of the little girl and the portrait of their Tolliver grandparents. They broke down the four-ten shotgun and stored the barrel and stock and shells behind the seat of the truck. They shut the lid on the Singer and they jammed blankets and quilts into tow sacks. They were going back to the old Tolliver farm because there was no place else to go. It was the only place where they didn’t have to pay rent. If they went back to Central Texas maybe nobody would know what had happened. Jeanine washed every dish and utensil they owned and handed them to Bea and when Bea had dried them Mayme packed them in newspaper, and laid them in boxes. The five Tolliver silver spoons went into their Johnnie Walker whiskey tin. Bea worked for hours at constructing a box for Albert; it was like a wooden cell from which he gazed out with his broken nose and his jailbird stripes. They would have to pull Smoky Joe behind the truck. They had a ’29 Ford ton-and-a-half now, Jack had sold the old Reo long ago.
It took them all day to make it from Wharton to Palo Pinto County, and all that day the countryside shifted and shape changed from the humid coast to the sharp, cracked red hills of north-central Texas. The windows on the truck were clouded and on the horizon was a haze of some distant dust storm. They passed men out in the fields, some with bedding plows and others with horse-drawn stalk knockers shattering the cornstalks into flying blond fragments and you could see the column of dust that they raised for miles. Sunset came as they were making their way through the limestone country of Glen Rose. Burma-Shave signs dotted the roadside; the wolf is shaved-so neat and trim-red riding hood-is chasing him. On Highway 80 they saw overloaded cars with mattresses and washboards tied to them, going west to the cotton harvest or to a new oil field, to the orchards of California. People searching for work, as if it were a thing, a metal in the ground or a place. They passed men walking silently with suitcases in one hand and a thumb stuck out. As they came into Central Texas the evening sky glowed with the red dust carried down from the eroding Panhandle on a northwest wind. Elizabeth drove without speaking.
By the time they got past Dallas it was dark and the headlights of other cars shone through the windshield on Elizabeth holding the steering wheel with both hands and Bea collapsed beside her asleep. Mayme and Jeanine rode in the truck bed wrapped in quilts. Smoky Joe shifted and stamped in the trailer, facing backward, with his tail flying up over his back. At midnight they drove up the driveway of the old house, gravel bursting from under the narrow tires.
The truck engine cooled down with minute pings sounding slower and slower and then there was only the night wind. They were on a ridge looking out over the heavy darkness of the Brazos River valley, the old Tolliver house adrift in a sea of starlight. They sat in silence. Something was tapping at one of the windows. One of the front double doors was off its hinges and it moved slightly with a raking sound. Far across the valley a cow bellowed in a long series of urgent calls after some lost calf gone astray in the night.
“Well here we are,” said Elizabeth.
There was a half moon up, and they could see that many windows were broken and the entire yard was grown up with plants that seemed willing to do anything to take over the front yard and the porch. A deer flagged its white tail and went bounding out of the barn. They got out cautiously.
Rather than walk into the deserted house in the dark they slept that first night in the truck. Smoky Joe was let go into the pasture, where he galloped from one fence line to another, calling out across the valley, asking if there were any other horses left in the world.