Maud's Line (21 page)

After a while, she reached inside her dress, undid a safety pin, and fastened the envelope to her slip over her heart. She sat under the tree until a wagon and three more cars passed, all from the direction of Muskogee. Booker had gone over there to pick up more wares on more than one occasion, and Maud began telling herself that was where he'd gone again. She got up from the root, walked the road to the edge of the bridge, and looked at the planks stretching to the far side. She stayed there until another car came onto the bridge, and then she crossed the road quickly before it went by. She walked a path down to where an old ferry had been.

Maud had ridden the ferry as a child and knew that Mr. Singer had hired her grandfather to steer it when he'd first arrived in Indian Territory. She envisaged those days as she walked deeper into the bottoms, forcing her thoughts away from the letter by using her imagination as she always had to carry her away from her father's drinking, her mother's death, and the dust and hard work.

She hadn't walked the path from the river to her mother's allotment very often but she knew the way. When she finally came through the field behind the chicken house, she was weary and her feet hurt to her shins. Lovely was sitting on the edge of the porch. When she got to him, he said, “Where the dickens have you been?”

“You lay out. Can't I do the same?”

“You can, if you are of a mind. I was just thinking about supper. You weren't here when I came in for dinner.”

“I wish men would learn to cook.”

“I had some biscuits and side meat. That's all I was getting anyway.”

“Did you take the mule back to Mr. Singer's?”

“She's in the pasture over there.” Lovely pointed with his thumb.

“Was Booker's wagon at the potato barn when you got her this morning?”

Lovely's brow furrowed. “I don't reckon it was. Has he gone off somewhere?”

Maud sat down on a step close to Lovely's leg. “Seems that he has.”

“Well, he'll be back. What's for supper?”

“Have you picked anything from the garden?”

“Not yet.”

“Do that, and I'll cook it up. You're lucky I'm hungry myself.”

Maud watched Lovely's back as he walked away from the porch. When he got to the garden gate, she unpinned the envelope from her slip and held it in her hand. Her name was written in ink; her sweat had smeared it some. She placed her thumb over the smear. If she opened the letter, she would know her fate. She felt as certain of that as she was of the cock crowing at dawn. She turned the envelope over, moved her thumb to the fold. Both the thumb and the hand holding the envelope trembled. She bit her lip. A cow mooed in the distance. A small toad hopped out from under the house. Maud got up, opened the screen, and went inside. The curtains were drawn, the room dark. She went to the chest and opened her drawer. Her little handbag was in there. She undid its clasp and tucked the letter inside.

Maud was limp from her walk and from lack of sleep. She followed the sun to bed, slept soundly through the night, and awoke at the first crow in gray morning light. She was again cutting lard into flour when nausea hit her. She got as far as the yard and threw up there. She washed out her mouth at the pump and cupped her breasts in her palms. They felt tender. Her visitor should be on her.

She walked back to the house. She kept track of her cycle, the dates of plantings, and the numbers of eggs with notes on the calendar on the front room wall. She took the calendar off its nail, flipped to the previous month, and counted. Forty-one days. She was late, but she wasn't that regular; and Booker always pulled out, had never not. She bit her lower lip.

The door banged. Lovely sank to a chair at the table. Maud went back to making biscuits. They talked a little and eventually ate. Then Lovely took off to the pasture to get the mule. Maud let out the chickens, milked the cow, and did her inside chores. By that time, the heat was too high to work in the garden, and thoughts of Booker were filling her head until she felt like it was busting. She was afraid of the letter he'd left her and wanted out of the house and away from it. She picked her rifle out of the corner and decided to see if her uncle Ryde had escaped the sheriff.

She found Nan in her side yard at her kettles, washing clothes. Ryde was back at home in the cornfield with Morgan and Renee. She pitched in to help Nan, and by the time the clothes were flapping in the wind with a noise that sounded like they were being paddled, she felt better than she had in a couple of days. They went to the porch to rest. Andy was asleep in a wagon in the shade. Sanders was building a stick fort on the side of the house away from the wind. They positioned their chairs so they wouldn't be covered by blown-up dust, shelled beans, and talked. Eventually, like Maud had hoped, Nan asked about Booker. She told her the full story, holding back only the counting of her days.

Nan told stories about various men in the family laying out, and she told them with such good humor that Maud felt reassured. But after that, Nan said, “Do you remember yer first cousin, Able?”

“Sort of. He's not around much anymore.”

“He ain't around at all. He's up in Vinita.”

Able was, Maud believed, her aunt Sarah's next to oldest child. Sarah had married at thirteen and started having children a year later. Some of her ten kids were a good bit older than Maud, and Sarah had lived in Muskogee since before she and Lovely were born. Maud didn't know those cousins as well as she did her others. But she did know that the ones she'd seen recently had cars and went to college, facts that gave her hope. She said, “Is there a college up there?”

“Don't know about that. There's a hospital fer people who are tetched in the head.”

Maud sucked her breath in and looked toward the side of the porch. She could see the top of Sanders' head. She looked back down to her hands. “Why are you telling me this?”

“Figured you didn't know it. Happened 'bout the time Lila died. You was little and grieving. And nobody talks about it much now. But it nearly broke yer aunt Sarah's heart. She can't get over it.”

“Why'd she do it then?”

“His daddy did it. Sarah fought it. But I believe Carter waz right. Hadn't been right about much in my book, but right about that. Able got to acting wild. Not jist the usual wild. But talking to people who weren't there and seeing things. He got hard to handle. He was already big. Eighteen or nineteen and well over six foot. And he got one of his little sisters by the head. I can't remember now which one. But he wouldn't let go, and he nearly broke her neck before the rest of them boys got him off her. That did it for Carter. You know, he's a successful man. He always ran around on Sarah, and then up and left her for good. But he's taken care of his kids. Is sending little Early and Buddy to college. Gonna send them to law school. But he sent Able to Vinita. I 'spect he had to.”

“Does it run in families?”

“Don't know. Don't know what it is, neither. But it's peculiar.”

After that, Nan moved to talking about a bull her uncle Coop had had that wouldn't mount any cow. Maud wasn't sure what the bull had to do with Lovely or Able, and she was trying to figure out if anything more than peculiarity linked the stories together when Lovely and his mule came toward them on the line. Ryde and his older kids came in shortly after that. They all ate together, and when the meal was over, the wind died down, and Ryde and Lovely went to the porch and the children to the yard while Nan and Maud cleaned up. After that, the two women settled with their legs dangling over the edge of the porch. That was when Ryde said, “Heard anything from Mustard?”

Maud looked to Lovely to answer. But Lovely looked to her. She said to her uncle, “No. Have you?”

Ryde was cleaning his fingernails with his knife. He scraped under the nail on his thumb. “He might need to stay away. The sheriff's looking fer something on him. So far, his only clue is the burnt quilt.” Ryde arched his eyebrow at Maud.

“That was stupid. I wasn't thinking.”

“You happen to mention it to anyone?”

“Not outside the family.” She recalled her conversation with Booker. Her mind had gone to his letter when her uncle said, “We didn't kill John. Claude did.”

Lovely said, “Why would he kill his own brother?”

“Accident. Trying to kill yer daddy. Missed. Shot John instead.”

Maud licked her lips. She wanted to hear the story, but she was also pulled in the opposite direction. Renee was sitting in a wheelbarrow, reading a book. Morgan was pitching rocks toward a mark in the dirt. Sanders was picking the rocks up and bringing them back to Morgan. Any of them might be listening. It was Lovely who asked, “How'd Claude get killed?”

Ryde pulled a hand-rolled cigarette from his pocket. He pinched one end and put the cigarette in his mouth. He picked his lighter up from the porch, lit up, took a deep draw, and leaned forward in his chair. He spoke softly. “I'm not saying we didn't go down there to kill 'em both. We did. They both did the deed with the dog. We got that from a reliable source. But Mustard wanted 'em to know who waz killing 'em and why.

“We laid out at a distance and saw John going into his outhouse. When he come out, yer daddy showed hisself. He told John he waz gonna kill him fer giving Lovely the rabies, and held his gun up. When he did, a shot rang out, and John jist stood there wide eyed. A red patch appeared on his shirt, jist like somebody had throwed a ripe tomato at him. He waz completely stunned. So waz we. We jumped back in the trees. I stayed there shouting insults to distract the shooter, and yer daddy took off 'round about. John waz still standing, and he started walking. To tell ya the truth, I thought about shooting him again. But I got all these kids, and, anyway, he waz leaning and sorta crisscrossing. I could tell he waz gonna sink to his knees. Meanwhile, Mustard cut up the rise, went back down again, and took Claude by surprise. Mustard said he waz jist standing at the corner of the house looking toward John, still as a tree, strickenlike.

“After they both waz down, Mustard put another bullet in each one of 'em so they wouldn't suffer, and we moved 'em together, tried to cover our tracks, and got out of there. If we'd been smart, we would've let the hogs out on 'em ourselves. But by the time we got to thinking straight, we couldn't risk going back.”

Maud was a little stunned by the story, but it wasn't far off from what she'd imagined, and she felt thankful it wasn't any worse. She didn't want her cousins going hungry because their daddy was in jail, and she was glad to hear that her uncle had some thought for his family. As for her father, well, maybe he was off in the oil fields or in No Man's Land getting rich. She hoped so. She was only worried that she'd said too much to the sheriff. She should have sent him in another direction. “Do you know where Daddy is now?”

“Said he waz headed toward his sister's. But the sheriff didn't find him, so I told him he went to the Osage Hills.” Ryde chuckled and coughed at the same time. “Talley don't know how much Mustard hates them particular Indians.”

By the time Maud and Lovely rode home, stars
blanketed the sky. Maud, swaying on the mule, felt dozy. When they stopped at the cattle guard, she jerked full awake and grabbed Lovely's arm to slide off. She opened and closed the gate and walked in front of the mule to the next one. But even had she been alert, her thoughts were too tumbled to sort. When she got to the house, she fell straight to bed.

She woke the next morning feeling sick. And three days in a row were too unusual not to arouse her suspicion. She told Lovely to cook and went to the garden to avoid the smells of breakfast. She felt both happy and panicked while plucking weeds. She filled almost half of a bushel basket. Then she moved to picking cherry tomatoes. She was tempted to eat one but was afraid it would make her sick. She picked a passel of them and set them on top of the weeds.

After Lovely rode off, Maud quit working and looked toward the house. It hadn't felt empty to her with her father gone, and staring at its gray boards and tin roof, she realized that was because Booker had taken his place. She placed a hand on the front of her dress. Under it and her slip could be a little seed that held her and Booker together. The breeze whipped her skirt against her legs. She wished the wind would lift her off her feet and carry her high enough to see the entire bottoms and the Arkansas River, to see the water cut beneath the foothills, coil to the Mississippi, and flow to the sea. Maud stood, her hand on her stomach, held by her vision. She walked toward the house, her basket on her hip, feeling eternity inside her.

In the kitchen, she discovered that Lovely hadn't washed the dishes. Every bowl they had was dirty. She smelled coffee. It nauseated her. She went back out to the porch, plucked the tomatoes out of the basket, and set them in rows against the wall. Then she walked to the chicken house and dumped the weeds behind it. She came back, went in the main room door, and set the basket on the floor. She opened her drawer in the chest, pulled out her little handbag, unsnapped the clasp, and drew out Booker's letter. Before she closed the drawer, she took out a handkerchief, too.

She chose the rocker that always stayed on the porch. But as soon as she sat, she felt the wind getting gustier. It hadn't rained in a while, and the gusts picked up the dust into brown swivels that danced like dirty little ghosts in the yard. Grit hit her face; dust hit her eye. She squinted and realized the wind was rolling the little tomatoes across the porch like they were being pushed from behind. She set her handkerchief and envelope down by her chair and put her handbag on top of them. She went inside for the basket.

She came back out and began scooping up the tomatoes. They'd scattered in such a disorganized fashion that she recalled the baby toads that lived under the house and around the troughs. One tomato rolled over the side of the porch, bounced on the ground, and burst open. A chicken ran and made a grab at it. Maud said, “Take it.” She picked up a tomato with a little brown spot and tossed it to the hen. The wind lifted her dress. Her skirt hit her in the face. She batted it down and sniffed. The wind was carrying more than dust. She looked to the sky. Dark clouds were rolling over. She felt thankful for them and scooped up more tomatoes that were rolling toward the edge of the porch. She turned to pick up her letter, but her handbag had fallen over. The handkerchief was lodged against a rocker. The letter wasn't there.