The Longest Road (4 page)

One morning while they were eating the oatmeal Laurie had scorched only a little bit, Daddy said, “Kiddies, I'm in debt to the undertaker and the doctor and for the cemetery lot. I've got to find something that pays better than drivin' another fellow's truck.”

They stared at him. His eyes were red and swollen and he hadn't shaved. There were little black bristles on his jaws and some white strands in the brown hair that curled over his forehead, since he hadn't slicked it down and combed it. “This dust took your Mama,” he went on with a gulp. “I promised her it wouldn't take you. I'm going out to California and find a good job, one that'll pay off these bills and let me take care of you right, the way I promised Rachel.”

“California!” Bud's eyes sparkled. “Why, we can eat oranges every day and sleep outside all winter and—”

Daddy shook his head. Not looking at them, he stirred the Postum Mama had fussed him into drinking because coffee made him nervous. “I hear tell it's not always easy to get work out there. Thousands of folks have gone out there from here and Texas and Oklahoma, even Tennessee and suchlike places. I'm a hard worker. Given time, I'll find a good job, but I don't want to have to worry about you kiddies goin' hungry or not havin' a roof over your heads while I'm getting settled.”

Laurie put down her spoon. She felt sicker than she had at the funeral dinner, like she was bleeding inside, thick and muddy as if dust had worked through her skin and stuck in her arteries. “I'm going to leave you with your grandpa,” Daddy said.

Bud's eyes went round and he put down his spoon.

“No!” Laurie choked. “You can't leave us there, Daddy! The kids wet the bed and I don't like the way Grandpa cusses and yells, and his wife's lazy and—”

Daddy slapped her across the face. Laurie gasped, knocked nearly out of her chair. He never had hit her before. He had spanked Bud and Mama had spanked her, though that hadn't happened for a couple of years.

“Shut up!” Daddy's face was red now as his eyes. “I'm doin' the best I can for you! You'd ought to help, not bellyache! Soon as we're packed up, I'm takin' you to your grandpa's and that's all there is to it.”

Bud clamped his hand over his mouth and ran out the back door. They could hear him throwing up. Laurie's stomach heaved, too, but she swallowed the bile and got out of her father's reach.

“Please, Daddy! Take us with you! We can sleep in the car! I'll work—we can do anything, anything in the world, just so we stay together!”

“You'll do what I say!”

“I can cook and do the washing and ironing and take care of Buddy,” she begged. “Oh, Daddy, don't—”

“One more word and I'll take my belt to you, girl. Start gettin' our things together. I want to pull out of here day after tomorrow before sunup.”

“But our furniture—”

“I've talked to Gus Rounds.” Rounds had a room of used furniture behind his main showroom. “He'll pay enough so I can put a few dollars down on all the bills and still buy gas to get to your grandpa's and out to California.”

The broken-springed sofa had come from the dump, like two of the straight chairs, but the proudly burnished carved rocker and round oak table with clawed legs spreading out from the central pedestal had belonged to Mama's mother and been brought out from Iowa by her parents, who had homesteaded here while Indians still roamed the plains. Bud and Laurie had been rocked in that chair; so had Mama and her mother, Grandma Phares, whom Laurie faintly remembered as a small, silver-haired woman who smelled of lilacs and once gave the children a whole package of gum each, not a stick snapped in half.

“Can't we fasten the rocker on top of the car?” Laurie begged.

“It'll bring a couple of dollars. Your mother would want me to pay our honest debts. Don't go blubberin' and makin' it worse.”

Honest debts. Laurie had always wondered what other kinds there were and how you could tell the difference. More gently, Daddy, said, “I want your mother's Bible and you can keep anything you want out of her trunk. We'll have to leave it. Pile all the bedding in the back of the flivver to make a bed so you kiddies can sleep on the road. If you want to keep that ruby-glass sugar bowl and pitcher and such, wrap 'em in sheets or blankets. I'll tie the suitcase on top of the car along with a tarp to hold anything that won't fit inside.” He pondered. “I'll need the frying pan and dutch oven and a few dishes. And we'll take all the canned stuff we can manage—eat it on the way and give the rest to Rosalie to help out a little with feedin' you till I can send some money.”

Living in Grandpa and Rosalie's house, eating their food, with Mama dead and Daddy far away? Unless the kids were housebroken now, the beds would stink. Defeated, Laurie hoped she and Buddy could have pallets on the floor, maybe sleep outside through the summer.

“Daddy, you'll send for us quick as you can?” she mumbled through stiff lips.

“Sure I will, honey,” he said more kindly. “But I got to find a steady job first so you won't have to live in the car like lots of folks are doin' out there. Bud, you help your sister, and remember, we can't carry a lot of junk. You go to school this afternoon and tell your teachers you'll need your report cards and notes to your new school.”

Go in the classroom and have all the kids watch her with pity or curiosity? And Mrs. Morse would be angry that they were leaving before school was out. Laurie dreaded it but she dreaded even more making Daddy mad enough to hit her again. Unable to finish her breakfast, she got up and started sorting out things in the kitchen. As soon as her father was gone, she ran back to her parents' bedroom, fell beside the bed, and buried her face in her mother's pillow, which still had a faint, sweet, sad smell of Mama's lilacs. The tabernacle ladies had given Mama's few clothes to a needy, godly, and deserving woman. There wasn't much in the wood-reinforced metal trunk—Buddy and Laurie's schoolwork and report cards; scraps saved from the good parts of worn-out clothes for quilting and patching, a beaded belt and watch fob Daddy had bought from the Sioux Indians when he worked on a ranch up in South Dakota; Grandmother Phares's tortoiseshell combs; some embroidered pillowcases and tea towels and several dozen fancy handkerchiefs, embroidered or appliquéd, that had been presents.

Not sure of what they'd need to enter another school, Laurie put the report cards in Mama's little cedar chest where she kept her New Testament and the amethyst lavaliere that she couldn't wear because it was jewelry, added the belt, fob, Grandma's combs, and the nicest handkerchiefs. This she wrapped in the best pillowcases with Mama's red-letter Bible—it had all of Christ's words in red and some beautiful pictures and interesting maps of the Holy Land—and rolled the bundle up in the bird quilt Mama had made her. The quilt had blue backing and strips between the squares that were each embroidered with a different bird—familiar ones like the meadowlark, chickadee, barn swallow, oriole, mockingbird, and bluebird and others never glimpsed here, like the cardinal and blue jay.

What had happened, Laurie wondered, to the mockingbird who had been singing so melodiously the morning of the storm? Covering the floorboard with a rag rug, Laurie stuffed the quilt bundle behind the front seat of the car and began to pack the bedding around jars of watermelon pickles, chow-chow, sandhill plums, tomatoes, and peaches and peach preserves made from those bruised by the trucking haul from Grand Junction.

Mother would have wanted them to start clean on their journey. Laurie pumped a tub of water and scrubbed out Buddy's other overalls and shirt, her other dress, and Daddy's shirt and socks. She started to wash her darned stockings, hesitated, and then crammed them to the bottom of the sack of discarded school papers. Of all the girls at school, she was the only who had to wear those ugly brown long cotton things, who didn't get to wear anklets. Mama thought it was sinful to show your naked legs. Would she know?

Seized by guilt, Laurie started to retrieve the hated stockings but then she stopped. If Mama knew how they were having to move and get rid of the rocker and table and how Laurie and Buddy would have to stay at Grandpa's till Daddy got work—well, alongside all that, the stockings couldn't matter much.

At afternoon recess time when the kids would be on the playground in back, Laurie and Buddy went in through the front of the school and got their report cards. To Laurie's relief, neither teacher argued or scolded. They just said they were sorry Mama had died and how it was up to Laurie to make sure she and Buddy both finished school so they could amount to something.

“Laurie,” said Mrs. Morse solemnly, “there's two weeks of school left, but I'll make your final grades what you've earned so far—
As
in everything except a
B
in Deportment, if you promise to finish the work in all your books, and if you'll see that Buddy does the same, I'll ask Miss Reed to give him marks for the full year, too.”

Laurie promised. She was finishing sixth grade this year and Buddy was in second. Mama had hoped they could go to high school but Laurie, with a wrenching of her insides, was afraid she'd never go to school again. Grandpa Field kept his kids out to work in the crops so they only got to go about four months in the winter. He didn't think girls needed to go past sixth grade, in fact he didn't think girls needed to know more than how to read and write and cipher a little.

Daddy would send for them, though, she told herself, blinking at tears as she cleared out her desk. Everybody liked him and he was such a good worker that maybe it wouldn't be very long till he had a place for them—maybe that summer.

The tabernacle ladies had a farewell supper for them that night in the tabernacle basement where Sunday-school classes met and where the monthly socials were held. Laurie didn't want to go but her father insisted that she show appreciation. She ate a little potato salad and slipped home to pump water for the cherry tree. If she gave it a good, deep watering, nine or ten buckets, it ought to live till someone rented the house. Almost anyone would water a fruit tree.

That night, she didn't care if the world ended. Fitting her body to the familiar lumps of the mattress, which would be left to pay on their debts, she heard her father making peculiar sounds in the next room. It came to her in a lightning flash that he was crying. Daddy! Before he'd hit her, before he'd changed into this swollen-eyed stranger of uncertain temper, she'd have jumped out of bed and run to comfort him. Now she was afraid to try, and in a way she hated him for changing, for being lost, for making her and Buddy stay with his dirty, blaspheming, wicked old father. In this queer mix of feelings, she had some understanding of how awful it must be for Ed Field to sleep in the bed he'd shared with his wife, to come in the house and not find her.

No, probably he couldn't stand to stay here even if it hadn't been for their debts, but why, why wouldn't he take Laurie and Buddy with him? Maybe, like the house and bed, they reminded him too much of Mama. Though she had to believe he'd send for them, Laurie had a sick, miserable feeling that they'd never see him again, that he was leaving them as irrevocably as their mother had. I'll have to take care of Buddy, Laurie thought. All we've got now is each other.

Somehow the night passed. She must have dozed, for she jerked awake to Margie's voice in the kitchen. Dressing hastily, without the hated stockings, Laurie went to the privy, waking Buddy on her way. In the kitchen, she washed her hands and face in the washbasin, with soap, the way Mama had taught them—she'd have to remember real well how Mama did things so she could teach Buddy.

Laurie sat down to the bowl of oatmeal Daddy had ready. “I brought some fried rabbit and cole slaw for your trip,” Margie said. “And a dried apple pie.”

“Thank you, Margie. That's nice of you.”

“Wish I could do more. Hate to see you leave this way.”

“Hate to leave friends,” said Daddy. “But Margie, I've got to see if I can't do better for the kiddies. Hurry up, Bud. We need to get as far as we can before it heats up. That's a long old dusty road to your Grandpa's.”

Margie stood up. “I'll keep weeds off Rachel's grave like I promised,” she said. “And make sure the stone's lettered right and is pink marble like you paid for. Is there anything else I can do?”

“You could water the cherry tree,” Laurie said. “Mama was so proud of the way it bloomed this spring.”

Margie hugged her and Buddy, kissed them good-bye. Wash the dishes, stuff them in the back of the car with the sheets off the beds. Close the door of her bedroom for the last time, touch the rocker, the round table. Laurie ran out to the cherry tree, pressed her face to its storm-scarred bark and the few remaining withered blossoms.

Good-bye. Good-bye. Stay alive, little tree. Bloom for a lot of springtimes, bear your sweet fruit. Then she was in the long front seat with Buddy, feet poked in among bags and water jars. Daddy moved the left-hand lever coming off the steering column in order to retard the spark so he wouldn't get kicked by the crank. Then he set the throttle, a lever on the right-hand side of the column, for a fast idle and made sure the neutral lever was upright. Only then was he able to crank the car. It started the first time. He climbed in—there was no seat on the driver's side—advanced the spark to operating position, released the neutral lever, and at the same time, pushed on the low gear pedal. Once the Model T was moving, Daddy released the low gear pedal and set the throttle. It was all so complicated that Laurie didn't think she would ever learn to drive, but Buddy couldn't wait.

She gazed back at the tree, not the sad little house with its flaked paint and naked windows. Anyone could look in now. It wasn't their home anymore. She shut her eyes to hold the sight of the tree and didn't open them till they were a long way from town.