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Dorothy Garlock - [Dolan Brothers] (4 page)

BOOK: Dorothy Garlock - [Dolan Brothers]
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“Daddy, you were sick when I left to go up to the city! Why didn’t you tell me?”
“Babe—” His eyes, clouded with pain, sought hers. “If somethin’ happens—”
“Nothing’s going to happen, Daddy,” she said quickly. “I’m getting you to the doctor and taking you on down to the hos . . . pital in Wichita Fa . . . lls.” Her voice broke. She was choked with dread.
“Babe, listen.” He panted and rolled his head. “Let me rest a minute.”
Henry Ann knelt beside the bed.
“What can I do, Daddy? Is it your stomach?”
“Nothin’ you can do, babe. There’s somethin’ you need to know. I’ve got money hidden away. Good thing too. I’m thinkin’ the dang bank’s goin’ busted.” He grabbed her arm, pulled her closer and whispered. “In an old rusty milk can in the weeds by the cow lot. The can’s got a spot of black paint on it. Don’t let anybody see ya gettin’ it. Not the girl . . . not Johnny.”
“You’re scaring me.”
“Ya hear me, girl?”
“I hear you, Daddy.”
“Babe, you’ve been my life—” His hand moved down her arm to her hand, and he fell back on the bed.
“I know. And you’re the best daddy anyone ever had.”
Tears flooded her eyes. Ed’s lids drooped. She smoothed the hair back from his forehead. He had always been thin. But heavens! Why hadn’t she noticed his hollow cheeks, bony forehead, and sunken eyes?
“What’s the matter with him?” Isabel had come silently into the room.
“He’s awful sick.” Henry Ann resented the intrusion. She wanted to be alone with her daddy.
“What was he whisperin’ about?”
“Nothing important.”
“He was whisperin’ ’cause he didn’t want me to hear it.”
“Were you listening?”
“No . . .”
You’re lying. I heard the bedsprings when you got up. I heard the floor creak when you left the room, and came to the door. How much did you hear?
“Get dressed. We’ve got to do the chores while he’s resting. Then I’ll write a note for you to take to the doctor.”
“In town? How’ll I get there?”
“You can walk! You’ve got two legs, haven’t you?” Henry Ann’s voice was impatient. She looked down at the man who had loved her and had made a home for her after her mother deserted them.
As soon as she was sure her father was sleeping, Henry Ann dressed, washed, and went out to milk. The night before she had shown Isabel how to feed the chickens and had left her to do it. She was leaving the cow lot and taking the pail of milk to the porch when she heard a motorcar. She dropped the pail in the yard and hurried out to the road as the car approached. She waved both arms, and the black coupe she’d ridden in the night before stopped. She hurried to the driver’s side of the car.
“Mr. Dolan, my father is awfully sick. Will you stop by and tell Doctor Hendricks to come out right away?”
“I’ll be glad to, ma’am—”
“We’re not going through Red Rock.” Mrs. Dolan leaned forward to speak. She was small, had light blond hair and large blue eyes. A little dark-eyed boy stood between the couple, leaning heavily on his father’s shoulder. “We’re going to Wichita Falls and on to Conroy. My mother is expecting us for dinner.”
“Well, in that case—” Henry Ann’s face flushed darkly.
“You’ll have to find someone else to run your errands.” Mrs. Dolan sat back and waved her hand for her husband to drive on.
“We’ll fetch the doctor.” Dolan ignored the protest from his wife. “Shall I tell him it’s urgent?”
“Tell him Daddy’s in terrible pain.”
“Thomas, we haven’t time to go to Red Rock. Mama wants us to be there by noon. And . . . Jay wants to see his granny. Don't you, Jay?” Her voice rose shrilly. Her hand grasped the boy’s shoulder and shook him. “Say you do, Jay!”
The man showed no visible emotion at his wife’s outburst. He moved the child to sit on his lap. The little boy’s eyes brightened. He flashed a smile at Henry Ann as his tiny hands grasped the steering wheel and moved it from side to side as if he were driving.
“I’ll get the message to the doctor.” Mr. Dolan spoke calmly.
“Thank you.” Henry Ann stepped back.
Mrs. Dolan turned on her husband the instant the car began to move. Her voice was loud, shrill, and angry.
“We are not going to Red Rock!”
“Calm down, Emmajean. It’ll not take but a few minutes—”
“We’re going straight to Mama’s. You promised. But you never keep your promises. Do you? You’d rather please an ignorant farmer than me. Have you got an itch for that bang-tail?”
Henry Ann watched the car disappear in a cloud of dust. The woman was the most selfish person she’d ever met. Her second encounter with Mrs. Dolan had been no more pleasant then the first.
It was no wonder Mr. Dolan was sour as a dill pickle.
Henry Ann had walked across the field to call on the new neighbors a week or two after they moved in. It was a hot May day. She had not been invited into the house or offered a drink of water. Mrs. Dolan, dressed in a pretty pink-organdy dress with a white-satin ribbon around her waist and one in her hair, had come out onto the porch and informed her that she only received callers on Sunday afternoon. Henry Ann had taken her leave feeling puzzled and terribly embarrassed.
She stood, now, in the road and watched the car carrying the strange couple until it rounded the bend in the road.
* * *
Tom Dolan thought that he’d gotten over being embarrassed by anything his wife said or did. But seeing the stricken look on Miss Henry’s face when Emmajean had so cruelly refused to fetch the doctor had not only embarrassed him, but had made him so angry that he wanted to strangle her.
Godamighty! Was he going to have to pay for the rest of his life for one foolish night when he’d had the urge for sex and white lightning had addled his brain? He had taken it when it was so blatantly offered, and one hour had changed his life forever. The only good thing to come out of that night was Jay. During the last few years he had come to believe that he could tolerate Emmajean and her family for the sake of his son, because leaving Emmajean meant leaving the child. His in-laws had made that perfectly clear.
Tom was one of six children raised on a farm outside Dunlap, Nebraska. They had been known as “those wild Dolans.” Wild and sinful! “Drinking, playing cards, and dancing their way to hell” is how a crazy old Holy Roller preacher described them. Of course, the old preacher thought all Catholics were heathens and doomed to the fiery furnace.
Heathens they might have been, but the Dolans were a happy family. Mike, one of the older boys, had gone to war, lived through it, and returned to search for and find Letty Pringle, the daughter the old preacher had thrown out when he discovered she was pregnant with Mike’s child. Duncan, older than Mike, had been killed in a train wreck in Montana. One of his sisters had died during the influenza outbreak when she was small. Another sister had married a railroad man and moved to Lincoln. Hod, a year younger than Tom, was a Federal agent working out of Kansas City the last Tom heard. Tom’s mother and father were gone now, and their offspring had scattered.
Tom’s skill with motors of any kind had brought him to the oil boomtown of Healdton, Oklahoma. He found work near Wirt, commonly known as Rag Town, a hastily constructed tent city created by the massive influx of oil-field workers. Rag Town was a haven for bootleggers, gamblers, and prostitutes, ever willing to separate the oil-field worker from his pay.
Tom’s job had been to keep the motors running at the gas- and oil-well drilling sites. When the drilling activities slowed, he drifted south, where he worked on cars, raced his motorcycle, and salted away his winnings in hopes of someday having his own dealership. It was a streak of bad luck, he thought now, that had brought him to Wichita Falls, where he’d met Emmajean. She was from Conroy, a town named for her grandfather, Judge Jason P. Conroy.
“And that’s not all. Daddy won’t like it a’tall that I’m living in that shack without electric lights. You just wait until I tell him that the Henrys down the road have electricity. It’s not fair—”
“Mr. Henry paid to have the poles set and the wires run. It took everything I could scrape up just to get the farm.” After that comment, Tom let Emmajean rant on. He had learned to turn off the sound of her voice when there was no reasoning with her.
“Daddy said in his letter that Marty was home and was going to work with him. They’re goin’ to dig an oil well and make a lot of money. Marty went to a school that taught him all about minerals and things like that. You don’t know anything about how to make money. All you know is about greasy old motors and . . . being a dirt farmer—”
Emmajean’s words floated over Tom’s head. His thoughts were on Miss Henry. Nice woman from what he’d heard. She had the most beautiful soft brown eyes he’d ever looked into. There was not a whit of pretension or guile in them. Her hair, the color of polished pecan shells, hung in waves to her shoulders, natural-looking, unlike the short bob and spit curls Emmajean wore.
He’d not been in town long when he’d heard the tale about Dorene Henry, a member of the notorious Perry clan. Henry Ann’s trip to Oklahoma City had been to bury the woman and bring back another one of her offspring. The boy and the girl couldn’t be blamed for their mother’s sins. He guessed that was the way Miss Henry looked at it.
“—And . . . if you’re in there more than five minutes, I’m going to start screamin’ and honkin’ the horn—”
Tom pulled to the side of the house where the doctor had his office. He reached down, disconnected the horn, got out of the car, and reached for his son. He sat the boy astride his hip and went up the walk to the door.
Doctor Hendricks was a man in his early fifties with light hair and a friendly smile. He came out of his examining room when Tom opened the door.
“Morning, Tom.”
“Hi, Doc.”
“Hello there, Jay. You still mad at me for giving you that vaccination?” Jay hid his face against his father’s shoulder. “Don’t blame you a bit. It hurt, didn’t it? What’s his problem, Tom.”
“He’s all right, Doc. Miss Henry stopped me as I passed. She wanted me to tell you to come right out. Mr. Henry’s in terrible pain.”
“Uh-oh. I was afraid of that. I’ll get on out there and take some morphine.”
Doctor Hendricks began taking things from a cabinet and putting them in a bag. Tom could see from his expression that Mr. Henry was seriously ill.
“I’m sorry to hear he’s bad off. I met him only a few times, but he seemed a decent fellow.”
“He was . . . is. Ed’s the salt of the earth.” Doctor Hendricks broke off and turned to grab his coat off a hook.
“If there’s anything I can do, let me know.”
“Thanks for bringing the message, Tom. I’d better be getting on out there.”
* * *
Henry Ann had time to say no more than hello after the doctor arrived. He went into the bedroom and closed the door.
She waited now, sitting on a straight-backed chair in the parlor beside the library table staring blankly at the framed picture of herself on her first pony, with her daddy holding the reins. Her thoughts were not on the picture. They were focused on her father and what the doctor would tell her when he came from the room. Thank heaven, Mr. Dolan had gone straight to his office, despite the objections of his snippy wife.
Isabel was shelling peas on the back porch. Henry Ann wished that the girl weren’t here—wished that she had never brought her and Johnny to their home. She wished that she and her daddy were alone, here in their house as they had been for all those years that she was growing up.
Her daddy was dying. She had read it on the doctor’s face when he came in the door. Daddy had been sick, maybe for months, and hadn’t told her, wanting to spare her the worry. He’d carried the burden by himself as he’d always done—taking care of her without complaining or even making a derogatory comment about the woman who had abandoned them.
Whatever would she do without him!
The door opened. Doctor Hendricks moved the flatiron that served as a doorstop to hold it back so the air could circulate.
“He’s sleeping. Let’s go out into the yard.”
He opened the screen door and she passed through. With a heart heavy with dread, she went down the porch steps and out to lean against the trunk of the huge old pecan tree, where a piece of rope, what remained of her childhood swing, still dangled.
“He’s dying, isn’t he?” The words came from stiff lips.
“Yes. It won’t be long now.”
“Can’t you do . . . something?” There were tears in her voice, but she held her head up and looked him in the eye.
“All I can do is keep him from suffering. He has a cancer in his stomach. When he came to me two months ago, he told me he was spitting up blood. I thought it could be an ulcer. Later I came to realize he had a cancer. I gave him laudanum. It’s addictive, but I knew that he had only a short time left. Now he must have something stronger. I gave him morphine.”
BOOK: Dorothy Garlock - [Dolan Brothers]
11.05Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
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