The Longest Road (2 page)

“Ed! You'll just get lost yourself! More than likely, he's fine. And if—if this is the end of the world, Jesus will take him.”

“Well, I'm his daddy. If the world's ending I don't want the poor little guy to be by himself.”

“Jesus will—”

“Rachel, that boy don't know Jesus like he knows me.”

“Wait! Let me get you a wet towel to put over your face.” Mama vanished into the dust.

The light bulb hanging from the middle of the ceiling glimmered like a smoky lantern. Mama's shadow merged for an instant with Daddy's. Then he was swallowed in the darkness that rushed in thicker as he opened the door. As it slammed shut, Laurie started after him.

“You come back here!” Mama caught her, drew her so close it hurt. “No use you running out there like a chicken with its head cut off!”

Laurie buried her face against Mama's warm, soft neck where the two small brown moles were. They held each other. It terrified Laurie that her mother sobbed, too. “I—I put an old sheet around the cherry tree, Mama. Maybe it'll be all right.”

It wouldn't. She knew it wouldn't. Ever since Laurie could remember, the winds blew ferociously from February till May, the month's crops were planted and started to grow. That happened every year. What was different these last years was that there was little or no rain to bring up plants that would bind the soil with their roots. Sprouts that managed to get a few inches above the soil were blasted right out of the furrows. Any that lived were buried by powdery dust driven from whatever fields it came from to wherever it could settle till the wind swept it up again into the skies.

The scarred old black locust could stand the winds but the cherry was only a little taller than Laurie. The storm must have already snapped off the blossoms, razored the bark, smothered the limbs.

It was wicked to grieve about a tree when her brother might be lost or when the world might be ending, but Laurie couldn't believe Buddy would come to much harm. He hadn't broken his neck when he'd jumped off the neighbor's garage, or drowned when he'd fallen in the river when it was flooding, or got but one scar from the chicken pox he'd given her. She still had a dozen tiny indentations on her forehead and chin.

As for the world ending—the sky would roll up like a scroll, the moon would turn as red as blood—she had dreamed of it ever since she could remember. Now that it might be really happening she wasn't as scared as she'd been at first, or even as she had often been before. Many nights, when that awful moon fell toward her, growing larger and larger, she woke up screaming her throat raw. Mama always hurried in, never too tired or sick to comfort Laurie and pray with her. “If you were saved, honey,” she'd say, “you'd be glad the Lord was coming—be glad this wicked old world was ending.”

Laurie didn't argue about that but she didn't believe it. She loved the world, the fresh bright, leaves of spring, the white and yellow breasts of meadowlarks soaring upward, the mockingbird's song, snapdragons and pansies and sweet-smelling four-o'clocks that Mama cherished till wind and dust got them. People might be sinful but it didn't seem fair that along with them, and because of them, God would destroy all the other creatures, turn rivers to blood, make oceans boil so the great whales died, destroy the forests and mountains Laurie had never seen but which must be so beautiful.

“The heavens declare the glory of God, the firmament sheweth His handiwork.” If people were the problem, why didn't He just get rid of them and leave the earth to the birds and animals?

Nothing made sense, though, when the ground that was supposed to stay under your feet and nourish flowers and trees and crops churned up in a wild, suffocating force that scoured the soil down to hardpan and when at last the wind died, what had been soil once settled in shifting, pulverized drifts where nothing could grow. It was a chaos of destruction, not creation.

What scared Laurie most was that Daddy and Bud were out there someplace in the howling dark and Mama was coughing so bad. She'd nearly died two years ago from dust pneumonia and that was when she'd lost the baby sister Laurie had wanted so much.

Bud had been fun to take care of when he was a baby but since he started school, he was always off with the Harris boy, Tom, or out hunting, or hiding out in that pitiful little hole he called his room. He kept the door shut with a rusty old padlock—as if anyone would want to go in there! Laurie could peek through a crack in the wall and see that all he had of any possible interest were some Big Little Books, thick cardboard-bound volumes about three by five inches printed on cheap paper, and the G-Man badge, decoder, and ring he'd sent off for with some cereal boxtops. These, along with arrowheads garnered from Point of Rocks and a huddle of snake rattles and shed skins, occupied a shelf above the cot spread with an old Navajo blanket. A coyote skull was nailed over the shelf, its moth-eaten tawny hide made a rug, and a few nails held Buddy's clothes except for socks and underwear. These Mama neatly arranged in an apple crate when she entered once a week to change the sheets while Bud stood guard to make sure Laurie didn't intrude.

Yes, a sister would have been nice, especially since Mama wouldn't let Laurie play with children whose families were worldly and that included just about all the Prairieville girls Laurie's age except Mary Harkness, who wasn't any fun, and Beulah Martin, who lived out on a farm and rarely got to town. Mary knew all manner of interesting things and when they were beyond earshot of adults, playing in the houses they built of tumbleweeds, she used words that Laurie knew were dirty and forbidden, though she didn't understand what they meant and wouldn't ask for fear of being laughed at,
Shit
must mean the same as
fuck
, and that had something to do with what men did to women, though Laurie couldn't imagine how the little nubbin she'd seen on Bud when she changed his diapers could possibly turn into anything that would do the scary and fascinating things Mary said it could. Once when the girls had seen two dogs hooked together, Mary said that was what grown-ups did to make babies. Laurie wouldn't, couldn't, think Mama and Daddy had done that.

If the world ended now, she'd go to hell because she'd listened to Mary talk nasty, hadn't repented for throwing hot oatmeal on Bud when he wouldn't dry the dishes, and wasn't saved, let alone sanctified. She prayed nights with Mama when she was scared but she'd never “prayed through.” That was why she'd never gone to the altar during revivals even when she was sure she'd die that night for committing the unpardonable sin, which, like the age of accountability, was hard to figure out exactly, though it had to do with hardening your heart against God. Mama had been sanctified years ago—that meant she couldn't sin or backslide—but Daddy was only saved. He backslid so often that he never kept saved long enough to reach that next state of permanent righteousness.

“Oh, God,” prayed Mama through racking coughs that shook Laurie, too, since they still had their arms around each other. “If you're coming to judge us, have mercy on Ed! Forgive anything he's done wrong since the last time he got saved. He's a good man, Lord, though he's had to battle his temper, but when you think how his dad put him out to work for neighbors when he was eight years old, and how hard he's had it, maybe you'll give him credit for tithing ten percent even when there's holes in his shoes.”

Laurie's thoughts veered after Grandpa, Harry Field, who farmed on the shares down in southwestern Oklahoma. He was a tough, stocky, bald-headed, hook-nosed man who had lost one eye in a saloon brawl when he was a soldier in the Spanish-American War. His tight slit of a mouth was profane with tobacco, whiskey, and foul language. He and Mama couldn't stand each other so it was lucky he lived three hundred miles away. Just to aggravate Mama, he rattled up in an old truck every few years with his invariably pregnant young third wife, Rosalie, and stair-step kids who took possession of Laurie's small room and Buddy's tiny nook partitioned off the back porch. These
aunts
and
uncles
—yes, that's what they were—jumped on the beds and sofa with dirty feet, always had snot running down their faces, and, worst of all, wet the beds so that the mattresses were streaked and had a faint stink for weeks no matter how hard and soapily they were scrubbed or how long they were left out in the sun.

Mama, tight-lipped, adjured Laurie to be polite and show respect to her grandfather but Laurie detested him till her insides twisted. He made her ashamed, ashamed that he was her kin. In spite of his wife's slovenliness, Laurie couldn't help liking Rosalie, who was pretty, good-natured, smelled good, and shared the gum and pop she bought for her kids. She could also tell spine-tingling ghost stories. Enduring these visits was like living through a small war, and when the truck rumbled off, Mama always said under her breath, “Thank you, Lord, for my good husband, who doesn't take after his father except for never meeting a stranger and liking to tell jokes and being too friendly with women brassy enough to roll down their stockings.”

Now, in the terrible storm, Mama was still praying for her husband. “You know, Lord, he gave his good sheepskin coat to a tramp last winter, and he's always ready to help anyone who needs it.” Mama paused as coughs doubled her over and went on breathlessly, hugging Laurie close. “Nevertheless, Lord, if you can't spare Ed, let me stay with him. I don't want to go to heaven if he can't.”

There was a pounding on the door. “Sister Rachel!” That was the preacher, Brother Arlo. Laurie had heard him bellow often enough to recognize his voice even in the shrieking wind. “Let us in, sister! The roof's blown off the tabernacle!”

Mama let go of Laurie and groped toward the door. Laurie hurried to pull away the rag wadding. She couldn't make out people's faces as they poured in, driven by the wind, but she recognized the bulk of Mr. Echols who ran the feed store, the mousy odor of scrawny Annabel Howard, the square stockiness of Brother Arlo. There was a whiff of the lavender scent worn by Sylvia Palgraves, who played the piano and had a job at the bank that paid ten dollars a week, an unheard-of wage. Margie, Mama's closest friend, had suggested to Mama, only to be firmly, squelched, that Sylvia might be friendlier than she ought to be with her boss, Henry Tate, the banker.

Smelling cigarettes and oil on the skinny man behind Sylvia, Laurie guessed he was Jack Dakin, the town mechanic, who must have dashed into the tabernacle because it was the nearest shelter, since he didn't go to any church. The last person in was Barney Smith, the dairyman, whose broad shoulders narrowed to a slim waist and hips. He didn't go to church, either. When he shut the door, Laurie stuffed the cracks again.

“The roof plain lifted off,” gasped Annabel. “I looked up, expectin' to see the Lord in the sky, but there was just this awful dust. He's a-comin' though. Never saw anything like this in all my life.”

The hazy light from the bulb weakly lit Brother Arlo's ruddy, heavy-jowled face so that it and the other faces looked like masks peering out of the dark. “Brothers and sisters, anyone who's not right with God better get that way.”

Laurie fumbled for Mama's hand, expecting to see a gray-green statue descend, like the one of Moses she'd seen in a book, the one with his hair twisted into horns who was reaching under his throne for thunderbolts. But there was only thick darkness and the blurred glow from the bulb.

“World's got too wicked,” Brother Arlo went on. “God made it and now he's wroth. Goin' to end it.”

“Yeah.” Barney Smith nodded. “There's all the wars—Japan fightin' with China and Italy takin' over Abyssinia and purges in Russia and that Adolf Hitler over in Germany—can't keep up with all the troubles. And here in the United States there's folks robbin' each other with the banks the biggest thieves of at all. I'm glad I'm not Henry Tate to have to answer for fore-closin' on my neighbors and drivin' orphans and widows out in the cold.” He hesitated a minute. “Hey, Jack, maybe when I sold you that truck I should've said there was a little problem with the engine.”

Dakin chuckled. “That's okay, Barney. When I told you that cow I sold you had been tested for Bang's disease, I didn't mean she didn't have it.”

“Sylvia,” called Annabel Howard, her big nose and small chin emphasized by the shadows. “It was the sin of envy made me tell the ladies at sewing circle that your hair's not natural auburn. I hope you'll forgive me.”

“I suppose I have to,” grudged Sylvia. The spit curls over her ears had been blown out of place like the crimped waves of her hair. “I always knew you for a jealous cat, Annabel. Ever since I got to be pianist instead of you, you've run me down something scandalous. Don't think I haven't heard about it. I'm just too much of a Christian to take notice.”

“Or maybe you're too busy meeting the choir director when no one else is practicing,” Annabel jabbed.

“Ladies!” That was Brother Arlo. “You better give each other a kiss of peace and set your minds on eternity. Nothin' else matters.”

Like arch-backed cats, the women approached each other, muttered apologies beneath their breath, and kissed each other's cheeks without getting closer than they had to.

“If the Lord tarries,” ventured Barney Smith, “could be folks better start listing the fields and planting cover crops the way they did for a while before World War I. Remember how they talked the railroads into putting up some money—after all the railroads make their money haulin' crops and machinery and supplies—and they got soil conservation going? I listed for my dad—acres and acres with the furrows turned opposite so the earth wouldn't blow.” His head lowered. “We saved the farm that time but then along comes the war and the government wanted us to plant more wheat.”