Broken Ground Read online

  “That’s not what I mean. I’m talking about your digestion.”

  He leans over and, playful as my cross-stitched lamb, nips at my ear. He pretends to chew and swallow, then pats his stomach, satisfied. “My digestion is fine.”

  Together, we go to the front porch. The sun shines brightly. Other birds are singing—black crows, brown thrashers, blue jays—but the mourning dove has fallen silent. It’ll be dusk before she sings again, and soon after that, Charlie will return home.

  We tell each other I love you. We hold each other for a long moment. Then what else can we do? We say good-bye.

  I’M KNEELING IN a skittering strip of the honey locust tree’s shade, scrubbing a pair of Charlie’s dungarees on the rub board while his shirts soak in a pot, when I hear the high, thin voice of one of my neighbors. “Two plus two equals five.”

  I smile down at Charlie’s dungarees, the knees worn paper-thin. My neighbor knows better. I’ve taught her better. She’s teasing me.

  “Very good, Edna Faye,” I tease her back.

  Surprised silence from behind me. I press my lips together to keep from laughing, then start scrubbing again. Almost, these dungarees hold the shape of Charlie. Almost, I can feel the curve of his bones when he kneels or bends.

  “Three plus three equals seven.”

  “Excellent.” Working at the frayed hems, briskly rubbing left hem against right, I tell Edna Faye that she is the brightest girl for miles around.

  At that, her bare feet patter against the dirt, and the late-morning glare softens. She’s standing behind me now, lending her skinny shadow to that of the honey locust. “You’re not listening, Mrs. Ruth.”

  From what I’ve seen, Edna Faye has spent most of her six years not being listened to by anyone—especially anyone in her family of nine. The one constant in the life of a roustabout’s child is change, and in the case of Edna Faye’s family, constant change has yielded constant chaos. As the middle child of the brood, she’s particularly lost in the shuffle. Maybe a month ago on a Monday, Edna Faye drifted over as I stepped outside. She hungrily eyed the pot I was carrying, seeming to think it might hold soup. It held only hot water and laundry. Still, when I smiled at her, she began prowling the yard in ever diminishing circles, evaluating the situation. Finally she sidled up and sat right down on the ground next to me. I asked what her name was and told her mine, and that was all it took. Edna Faye has barely stopped talking since.

  “Four plus four equals nine,” she says. Her voice breaks with temper or tears, I can’t tell which. I can’t bear the thought of her unhappy under my watch, so I turn around and take her small grubby hands in my wet ones.

  “Do we need to review your addition tables?” In spite of my best intentions, I sound stuffy and stern, a younger version of Mrs. Himmel. But if Mrs. Himmel’s methods worked for me, I guess they work for Edna Faye, too; at least they do today. She nods solemnly, blinking her round gray eyes. If she weren’t so thin—dangerously thin, her belly a taut ball bulging beneath her flour-sack shift—her pale face, framed by a milk-colored corona of hair, would resemble nothing so much as a full moon. As it is, the hollows at her cheeks and temples betray a very hungry child.

  “Well, then.” My voice gentles. “Let me hang up Mr. Charlie’s clean things, and we’ll get to work on your math.”

  Edna Faye smiles, exposing the crooked, gray nubbins of her teeth.

  I hang Charlie’s dungarees from the clothesline, along with several pairs of socks that have soaked long enough in a bucket of bleach and, on Thursday, Mend and Sew, must be mended and sewn. Then I take Edna Faye’s hand and lead her into the house. I set a piece of paper and a pencil on the kitchen table. “Addition. The ones. Do odds first and then evens, opposite of usual.” I stress this because Edna Faye likes variety. Or variety is all that is familiar to her, all she’s known over the course of her brief but ever-changing life.

  Edna Faye bows her head over her work. 1+1, she writes carefully on the paper’s top line, her tongue working inside her mouth, pushing her cheek to nearly full-moon full. I take a pitcher of milk from the icebox and peer down into it. I can spare a cup, at least. I pour milk into an empty canning jar, then cut a slice of bread and spread molasses on thick. I set all this before Edna Faye, and she breathes in deep. Smelling is the next best thing to eating, and she’s clearly learned to live on the scent of food alone. The smell of bread, molasses, and milk sustains her through the odds and well into the evens, too. It’s a good while before she takes her first bite, her first gulp. And then, like that, the plate is empty; the jar, drained. Edna Faye eats faster, even, than Charlie. Soon as I can afford to buy the ingredients to bake a pie, I’ll bake two and let this child and my husband battle it out in their own personal pie-eating contest.

  Edna Faye covers her mouth with her hand like I taught her before she burps. “Excuse me,” she says. I taught her that, too. She’s still hungry as a bear cub, so I pour more milk. “Take it slowly, now,” I say, and she does her best to obey while I review her sums.

  “Well done.” I smile. This time she deserves the compliment. “Perfect, in fact.”

  Edna Faye licks the milk mustache from her upper lip. “Subtraction now.”

  This is what I like most about Edna Faye. She wants to learn. She needs to.

  Time passes, the only sounds the ticktock of the clock and her pencil’s scratching, and I eat my own little lunch, the twin of Edna Faye’s.

  “Here,” she finally says, handing over her paper. And now I’m the one bowed over the smudged numbers, calculating differences.

  Edna Faye has made a few errors on her eights and nines, but really, she does a fine job for a child who’s only in the last handful of weeks learned methods for making things increase and decrease predictably. As a reward, I invite her into the front room to sit on the sagging sofa that Charlie and I found by the roadside. It must have fallen from some traveler’s overburdened truck; it threatened to fall from ours. But we got it here, and it’s become the lesser island in our lives.

  Here on the sofa—as the sun peaks in the sky, then begins to sink lower, and shirts soak too long in the pot, dungarees and socks dry on the line, and little shadows begin to gather in corners again, which means the minutes truly are ticking toward the time when the mourning dove coos and Charlie returns—I read a tale to Edna Faye from my copy of The Fairy Tales of the Brothers Grimm. We choose “Rapunzel,” her favorite and one of mine, too. “Why do you like this story so much?” I asked her once. “The tower,” Edna Faye answered. As if the greatest joy in any life would be to be locked away alone, all by oneself in a quiet place, with only hair to grow and a guard to deliver regular meals. I like the story for an entirely different reason: the escape. Edna Faye probably would be content if we never got to that part, but I always read on to the happily-ever-after end.

  I read on. The sun sinks. The shirts soak. The minutes tick-tock. The shadows gather, deepening, clinging to one another. I turn page after page.

  It hits me near the happily-ever-after end. My teaching got the best of me. I neglected to hitch a ride out to Charlie, bearing a jug of cold water and wet towels. It’s too late now. I will visit him on the rig tomorrow.

  I turn another page, listening for the mourning dove.

  Instead, there’s a sound like I’ve never heard before—a sound like trains colliding. Our little house shifts, the sofa lurches, the window rattles. The jar from which Edna Faye drank falls from the kitchen table and shatters on the floor.

  SILENCE FOLLOWS THE sound. The tornado that hit Alba in 1930 left in its wake such a silence. But this silence stretches even longer. This silence becomes its own kind of terrible noise.

  Something moves beside me, breaking whatever spell has kept me frozen in place. I look down. Edna Faye. Her gray eyes seem to swallow her hollow moon face. “What was that?” she asks.

  I shake my head, and once I start, I can’t stop. Shaking my head, I walk to the front door. I open it. Even now there
’s not a sound to be heard. No one stands in the silent road. Any birds in the trees—black crows, brown thrashers, blue jays—are stunned dumb. Our mourning dove . . . I hope she flew far away from here this morning. I tell myself she flew far away. She will return at nighttime, when Charlie returns, because Charlie was working in a new field today, a faraway field, a safe field, far away.

  I stand on the porch and watch for him, though it is not yet time for him to come home. In fact, time seems to have stopped, which no doubt will delay him all the longer.

  I look toward where the sun should be, fixed to a standstill on the horizon, and where the sun should be looms a black cloud of smoke rising, rising, enormous already and ballooning bigger. I smell it then. Burning oil. And something else—something like scorched meat and singed hair.

  I clap my hands over my nose and mouth to block the smell, to suppress the cry thickening in my throat, and time starts again. Neighbors spill from tents and homes like ours, women and children and men—men too old to be working or injured men unable to work—who are shouting. “Blowout!” Over and over I hear the word, but no matter how many times I hear it, I can’t think what it means.

  Someone tugs at my dress. “I have to find my ma.”

  Edna Faye’s high, thin voice is solemn with understanding. I drop to my knees. We are eye to eye, and she is the teacher. “What happened?”

  “Blowout,” she says.

  Something in my expression—impatience? anger?—makes Edna Faye wince. She is afraid. I don’t want to be another adult who makes her fearful. I should smile reassuringly and tell her to go find her ma. Instead, I grab her shoulders and yank her close so I can hear her every word through the noise of lamentation rising all around us.

  “What’s a blowout?”

  “A fire. A big fire. A bad fire.” She’s crying now. “Killed my uncle and my grandpa, too, up in Whizbang a while back.”

  Whizbang, Oklahoma, she means. The boomtown that sprang up almost overnight around one of the biggest gushers ever discovered—nearly as big as the gushers here. I heard about Whizbang. I heard about that fire. It destroyed everything in its path. It almost destroyed Whizbang.

  I look to the horizon again. The fire is in the west. Which way did Charlie drive this morning after he folded himself into our truck’s front seat? I watched him walk to the truck, his lunch pail swinging at his thigh. I watched him climb inside. I raised my hand and blew him a kiss. He blew a kiss back. Waving, he backed the truck toward the dirt road that took him in whichever direction he went. But I didn’t watch him drive away. Already, I’d turned back to the house. Because today is Monday. Monday, Wash. I had to get busy. And there are his shirts, soaking in the pot. There are his dungarees, hanging from the line, and his socks, clothespinned into place. The East Texas wind has dried them already. But I will wash them again—Monday, Wash—because look: faint tendrils of oily, black smoke, black as any dust storm’s blizzard, black as any mood, snaking around the dungarees and socks, and the shirts still soaking in the pot—clothes that Charlie will wear against his skin. My husband’s skin smells like Ivory soap, and beneath that, a hint of Lava. I can’t have him heading off to work smelling like something—oh, God—like someone burned.

  This is what I’m doing when a man comes and tells me that Charlie is dead, killed in the blowout. I’m scrubbing Charlie’s shirts, dungarees, and socks. The man talks to me. He talks to me. Talks to me. To the back of my bowed head he talks, to my rounded shoulders, my body heaving with effort. I hear “husband,” and I hear “dead,” and that is all I hear. That is all I need to hear. Now I must get busy. Never have I worked so hard at one simple task. Monday’s task. I work at it.

  But I cannot get Charlie’s clothes clean enough. I cannot wash them white as the snow that I have seen only a few times in my life. One time I was with Charlie. This was eight years ago. He was fourteen. I was thirteen. We were walking home from school late one January afternoon, when the moon already hung in the sky, as the moon must hang in the sky now, only that January moon was hidden by clouds and this March moon is hidden by smoke. Charlie and I were walking and talking, discussing a comment Mrs. Himmel had made about the sixth day and Adam and Eve. In a low voice, Charlie told me about something he’d read on the sly, tucked away in the corner of the Alba public library where one day I would work. Charlie had read bits and pieces from a book by a man named Darwin. This man Darwin thought seven days wasn’t all it took to make the world, and Charlie wondered what I thought about that. I was thinking on what I thought, and Charlie was waiting for my answer, when snow began to fall like manna from the sky. “Look!” Charlie said. And we raised our mittened hands like hallelujah, and the white flakes dusted the wool. Charlie’s hands were big. Mine were small. Charlie’s mittens were blue. Mine were red. I remember this. We gazed at our mittened hands, at the crystals sparkling against the wool, each as unique as a human soul, shining fiercely, swiftly extinguished. “It’s a miracle,” I said, and Charlie said yes. A miracle. Our first snow together, a miracle we shared, and we promised each other we’d share many more.

  Our first snow together was when Charlie and I fell in love, I realize as I wash his clothes all through the dark, smoky night. I wash holes into the knees of his dungarees and bigger holes into the heels of his socks. I wash the cuffs and collars of his shirts to shreds. I wash my hands raw. I wash my hands bloody.

  The day Charlie and I fell in love. The day of the one and only miracle in my life.

  TWO

  Mother’s scuffed brown lace-ups appear in my field of vision. “It’s time, Ruth.”

  I sit on the floor in the spot where our bed used to be an island, but now I am lost at sea. The bed is gone, given to someone who needs a bed big enough for two. The room is empty. Our house is empty, and what’s left of my life.

  My parents and Charlie’s mother, Margaret, made the decisions about what to sell or give away. I saw them do so as if from a great distance while the black fog encroached from where it lurked at the corners of my eyes, the back of my mind, the outer limits of my heart that beats dully on and on. I heard the three of them talking, also as if from a great distance. Their voices rose and fell, pitched high and low with varying emotion, but their words remained indecipherable, distorted, like a gramophone played at the wrong speed.

  Days have passed since the blowout, possibly weeks—don’t know, don’t care—and all this endless, senseless time, I’ve been waiting for the black fog to cover me completely. I’ve been waiting to vanish, as Charlie did. Charlie was incinerated, Margaret told me, weeping as I have yet to weep. Tears fail me. Dry-eyed, I watched Margaret’s mouth move. “The flames consumed him.”

  Let the black fog consume me.

  Mother’s thin hand settles on my shoulder. She gives me a shake. “Your daddy has a meeting.”

  I slide down the length of her words into the back room off the sanctuary where Daddy and the other leaders of the Holy Church of the Redeemed hold their meetings. There is the cone of yellow light cast by the lamp that hangs over the table, and there are the men who keep the Covenant—Daddy and the others—heads thrust forward, shirtsleeves rolled up, fingers pointing.

  “Oh, for heaven’s sake!” Mother’s voice shrills to anxious. “Margaret left some time ago. She wanted to reach Alba before dusk. At this rate, we’ll arrive tomorrow. He’ll miss his meeting, Ruth, and you know we don’t want that.”

  With a strength that surprises me (Mother’s strength always surprises me), she grabs my arm and pulls me to my feet. Out the empty bedroom, down the empty hallway, past the empty kitchen and the empty front room, and across the threshold over which Charlie carried me, Mother drags me. Back to before, she drags me. Back to Alba.

  Shock of sunlight. Then someone says my name. “Mrs. Ruth.”

  For the first time since the blowout, a voice I want to hear. I wrench my arm from Mother’s grasp and turn to Edna Faye.

  She stands beneath the sagging laundry line, staring at
me. O, her mouth makes, and her gray eyes, big as they’ve ever been, brim with dismay. And there’s Edna Faye’s family—all but her father, who is now a name in the alphabetical list of names that precede Warren, Charles, a name etched on the black slab of granite laid down by the oil company beneath a tall sweet gum tree outside of camp. Edna Faye’s siblings have piled onto the mattress that lines the bed of the dilapidated wagon hooked up to their jalopy, tent poles strapped to its running board. Edna Faye’s mother, who seems to have aged twenty years in however long it’s been since the blowout, sits hunched behind the steering wheel. What unbelievable quiet for such noisy kids. They lean into their belongings—blankets, buckets, boxes, two battered bicycles, and an old cookstove—and keep the silence of the dead. Where are they going? West? I’ve heard about West on the radio, read about it in the papers and on the fliers distributed by the farm owners, which promise work and better weather. I’ve seen evidence of west-bound refugees on the road, too. So many fleeing their homes and farms, driven out by dust storms, drought, and dissolution, rattling on toward where the sun inevitably sets. Mother’s closest friend from her childhood back in Guthrie had to go west; Mother has told me so time and again, until the telling has distilled into a kind of refrain: “Alice Everly and her family were far better off than us. If they turned homeless, what are the odds we’ll do the same?”

  Take me with you, Edna Faye. Anywhere but Alba. Take me there. I wrench my arm from Mother’s grip and go to her. We clasp hands.

  “One plus one equals two,” she says.

  I nod. Take me.

  “Two minus one equals one,” she says.

  I close my eyes against this difference.

  “Don’t give up.” I hear my voice for the first time since the blowout. Really hear it—rough and thin as a piece of paper torn in half. “You hear me, bright girl? Keep learning.”

  Mother’s hand settles again on my shoulder. Edna Faye releases me, and Mother steers me toward Daddy’s car. Next thing I know, I’m in the backseat. I watch through the window as Edna Faye climbs onto the mattress in the truck’s bed and burrows down beside her brothers and sisters.