Adventures in Writing

Bertie

“You missed the door, Bertie. Use those old towels.” Mama’s voice is shrill and skittish, frantic like the birds this morning, screeching their warnings, flapping through the trees that shed crisp leaves in the flurry of wings. When the birds tell us it’s coming, Mama flaps through the house, looking for cracks in our defenses.

I grab the frayed scraps of toweling and stuff them into the gap at the base of the kitchen door.

“Did you close all the bedroom windows?”

“Yes.”

“And the outhouse door? Is it latched?”

“Yeah, Mama, I told you.”

“Don’t sass me.”

“I wasn’t.” The house brims with unexplainable anger of late. “Why are you mad?”

Her face softens not to a smile, but to less of a frown, and she wipes sweat off her neck with her apron. “I’m not mad, Bertie. It’s just, sometimes, I don’t know, sometimes things pile on me until there’s one thing too many.”

Jo yells from the living room, “Here it comes.”

I join her at the window, and Marth presses against the back of my legs, her small fist clutching my skirt. We’re always drawn to it, to watching it come on us. First it rolls up over the line of scrub oak on the far side of the corn field, then it rises, red and thick like a blood storm, rises until the sky is one with the earth. Oaks, corn stalks, the Tuttle’s farmhouse across the road, all swallowed, all vanished. The windmill shrieks and clatters from somewhere unseen. Then we’re in it, vanished ourselves. We float under an invisible sun that gives off a muted dusky light, not on an Oklahoma farm, but in another place. I wonder if this time we’ll remain here between life and nothing, forever vanished.

Mama shoves rags into our hands, and we cover our noses and mouths. I help Marth with hers, and she plants her spread fingers on her face to hold the cloth in place. She looks up at me over the top of the mask, her pale eyebrows knit with worry. When the window glass shudders, and the screen door buffets the jamb, she cries.

“Shut up, Marth,” Jo says. “It’s just dust.”

I say, “You shut up. She’s little.”

Mama picks up Marth. “Shhhh, baby, it won’t hurt you. Everything gets dirty, then we clean it up. Like always.”

The air in the room thickens and smells like a fresh tilled field. Grains of red dust seep and creep through the seams of the house and float in shafts of dull light before they land on furniture and floors and us. Marth whimpers.

We watch until we see the dim silhouettes of familiar objects, the windmill, then the corn, then the scrub oak. “Not such a bad one. It’s thinning already,” Mama says. “Get the broom and dust rags. Let’s clean it up.”

“We clean it, and it comes back. Might as well leave it,” Jo says.

Mama grabs her arm, and Jo winces, for dramatic effect. “You want to live like a pig, Josephine? We might be poor, but that’s no reason to be dirty. Apologize for talking like trash.”

“Sorry.”

“Get the broom and start sweeping.”

I pump water into the kitchen basin and wet the towel scraps. After wiping down everything in the living room, I rinse out the rags, and the water clouds up into rusty slurry. After I clean the two bedrooms the best I can, I strip the beds and take the sheets outside to shake out the dust. A car stops on the road in front of the house, but before I can turn to see who drives it, the wind shifts and blows dust back into my face. I sputter and cough, “Damn dust.”

“Better not let your Mama hear you say that.” Cal Farrow catches the other side of the whipping sheet and helps me fold it. “She inside?”

“She’s busy.”

“I’m not such a bad guy, Bertie.” He cocks his head, lifts one corner of his mouth into his flirty smile, and combs his fingers through windblown blond hair. I glare at him to chase him away with the force of my ferocity, but he and the scent of his hair tonic follow on my heels into the kitchen. “Want me to help you with the sheets?”

“No.” In the front bedroom I throw the sheets on my bed and poke my head out the door. “Jo, come help make the beds.”

Jo slouches into the room. “Cal’s here,” she frowns. Rather than making a bed, she stands in front of the bureau mirror and brushes dust from her wavy red hair. It settles on the bureau.

“Stop that. I already cleaned it.”

Jo puts the brush down, arranges her hair, and puckers her lips in a kiss to the result. “He wants her to move into town. Said he’d help her pay for an apartment.”

“How do you know?”

“I listen. You should, too.” She turns and admires her profile’s curves.

“That’s eavesdropping.”

“If it gets around that he’s paying for her apartment, you know what everyone’ll say. She’d be a kept woman. That’s what they call it.”

“I don’t care. It’s Mama’s business.”

“You’re thirteen. Stop thinking like a baby. He’s married. She shouldn’t be doing what she’s doing. Makes all of us look bad.”

“I don’t care.” I do, but I throw a pillow case at Jo and run from the room and out the back door.

A layer of dust on the cracked earth explodes under my bare feet and clouds of it coat my shins. On the bank of the dry creek bed I sit in a brown patch of weeds that prick my legs. Before the drought I would nestle into beds of green under leafy cottonwoods and daydream. When the trees let loose their blizzard of white seed puffs, I gathered them into piles and pretended they were snowflakes. Now the cottonwoods are dead. Jim nuzzles my arm, and I pull him onto my lap. Dust powders his fur.

Jim barks a second before I hear a car pull up to the house and recognize the grind of his Model A’s transmission. I hunch down behind the brush, but he sees me. “Hey, Alberta, help me with these bags.” I shuffle to the car, my toes plowing through the warm layer of displaced soil. Gramps hauls two gunny sacks from the trunk. More peas. He nods toward one end of a sack, and I struggle to lift it, while Gramps lifts the other end as if it weighs an ounce. “Put your back into it, girl.” My back bends at the waist, and my knuckles almost scrape the ground.

After we’ve stacked both sacks in a corner, Gramps stands in the middle of the kitchen facing the closed door to the living room with his feet wide apart and his fists on his hips. “That Farrow’s car out there?” I don’t answer. He knows the answer. “Whole town’s talking about it. She’s shaming Jesse’s memory.”

I back away from the stink of a man just come in from the fields, soaked with sweat and stained with dirt. Daddy used to smell the same. Cal Farrow never does, being a different sort of man. I leave Gramps to stir up whatever agitation he plans and escape to the creek bank, where I pull Jim onto my lap and tell him of my dreams.

Their muffled voices percolate through the wall, but with my ear pressed against the dusty wallpaper I can hear. Gramps has come, while Cal Farrow’s with Mama. I expect a grand brawl and wish I could see as well as hear it.

“What’re you doing here, Farrow?” I imagine Gramps’s face red and distorted and his shoulders bunched into angry knots.

“I don’t answer to you, Edward.” Cal Farrow’s sleek baritone glides through the wall.

“My son’s children live in this house.”

“Stop it, Edward. Cal’s a friend, and I can use all of those I can get these days.” I know from her tone that Mama’s dark eyes fire up with spite.

“You have a family, Letitia.”

“Hah,” Mama shoots back. “Lot of good my so-called family’s done me.”

“I keep you and the girls fed.”

“A few sacks of black-eyed peas. The girls are starving on peas.”

“We’re hard up, too. Barely harvest enough in this drought to keep us going, but I share with you. And I let you stay in this house.”

“You gave the house to Jesse and me.”

“If he worked the farm.”

“Oh, you want me to work the farm?”

“Course not. The house is yours as long as you want it. I owe that to Jesse.”

“Wonder what Jesse would’ve thought, when I lost my job, and you were nowhere in sight.”

“What was I supposed to do about it?”

“Maybe speak up for me with your fancy business friends?”

“There’s no work to be found, and a man with a family needed that job.”

“And I don’t have a family to feed?”

“A woman can depend on men to help, like I help you.”

“Big help you are.”

“I’ll say it again. We’d be glad to take the girls. Let them live with us, and you can do whatever you like.”

I come so near to squealing I clap a hand over my mouth.

“Never, Edward. You can’t have my kids.”

“Be reasonable. Things won’t get better for a long time. Roosevelt said so on the radio. He said we all have to do the best we can. Do what’s best for the girls.”

“My kids belong with me.”

“They’re Jesse’s kids, too. They’d have a better life on my farm.”

“With you? Never.”

Gramps’s boots hammer the wood floor, and the screen door bangs. I sit on the bed and consider this unexpected piece of hope that’s fallen on me. Gramps is offering to pull me out of a well of poverty so deep I’d given up any hope of deliverance. Mama has to be convinced, of course, and it won’t be easy, but if Bertie helps, she might give in. Mama favors Bertie and will want to make her happy.

Bertie. How to convince Bertie?

I press my ear to the wall again. Cal Farrow says, “Don’t pay attention to him, Letty. Let me help you.”

“I need to think.”

“How about this? I’ll give you a job at the bank. If taking my money bothers you, call it a loan ‘til you get on your feet.”

I ease off the bed and tiptoe through the kitchen and out the door. I find Bertie where Bertie always goes when she wants to be alone, the creek. She’s on the bank with Jim in her lap. I sit next to her. “Why do you like it here? This dead grass is scratchy.”

“Go away.”

“We need to talk.”

“No. Go away.” Tear tracks streak her cheeks. Her dusty blond hair sparks pinkish in the sunlight.

“Gramps wants us to live with him and Gram.”

Bertie shifts her eyes sideways and squints at me. “You’re lying.”

“I heard him talking to Mama. And it wasn’t the first time he asked her. She’s been hiding it from us. We could live on his farm, and she won’t let us.”

“You’re making this up. He doesn’t even like us.”

“Course he does. He loves us.”

“He scares me.”

“Don’t be stupid. He’s our Gramps, and he’s got money.” I shift on the grass in search of relief, but find no comfort. “Cal’s in there right now trying to get her to move us into town. Bertie, we can’t let that happen. We gotta talk her into letting us live with Gramps.”

“You’re crazy. Why would we do that?”

“Because we’d have enough food and clothes and all the stuff Gramps would give us. Mama’s just too proud to take it. She hates him, so we do without.”

Bertie pushes Jim off her lap and stands, her fists clenched at her sides, her thin body so stiffened she quivers like a fence wire strung too tight. “Stop it, Jo. You’re hateful, talking about Mama that way.”

We hear a car engine. “Cal’s leaving,” I say. “Let’s go talk to her now, while she’s all upset. It’ll be easier to talk her into it.”

“I don’t want to talk her into it. I don’t want to leave her.”

“Come on, Bertie. We’d just be at Gramps’s farm, not the moon. You’d still see her all the time.”

Bertie starts crying again, always crying useless tears, instead of doing something to help herself. “Don’t you understand? Daddy left her. We can’t. We can’t leave her all alone, not like Daddy.”

“Daddy didn’t leave. Daddy died. We all lost him, not just her.”

“Why are you so mean?”

“Why are you so childish? Look around. Our life is hell. If we can make things better, why shouldn’t we?”

She runs across the dry creek bed and into the neighboring field with Jim behind her. I lose sight of her when she plunges into a stand of bedraggled corn stalks. “Damn it, Bertie, you’re an idiot.” I stand up and brush dust and dead grass off my legs and skirt. My world is dust. Grit crunches between my teeth. With each dust storm, the landscape disintegrates a piece at a time, and the pace of the destruction tries my patience. I wish the whole state of Oklahoma would churn into the skies on the swirling winds and be done with it. Much of it already has.

Letitia

The clock tells me the girls’ stomachs, seldom satisfied, will growl at me soon, so I light the burner under yesterday’s pot of peas and wish I had more for them. One slice of bacon remains from the pound Cal brought last week. I cut it up into the pot and sit down at the table. Jo and Bertie are outside, and Marth’s still napping, so I settle back into the chair and try to think it through.

“Goddamned you for dying, Jesse. Tell me what to do. Somebody tell me what to do.”

Of course, nobody will. All I have are three skinny girls in tattered dresses and worn-through shoes, always hungry, always needy, always pulling at my skirts with expectations that I’ll provide. Cal, on one side, offers limited love and scandalous support. Edward, on the other, doles out meager support and dangles dangerous temptation in front of me. And Jesse. He claws at me from his grave with demands that I stick to the promise.

“You bastard, Jesse, why’d you tell me? I need his help. I can’t do this alone. I don’t know how.”

The wind moans around corners and rattles trees. The windmill blades clunk and stutter in uneven rhythms. They’ll fall off soon, and the water will flow no more, but who’ll fix them? Cal with the hands of a banker? No, it’ll be Edward, eager to make one more mark in his ledger of debt.

Jo slips through the door and starts, when she sees me. Her cotton dress with frayed hem and near transparent cloth strains to contain her. She’s almost a woman.

“I’ve put some peas on. Supper’s soon. Where’s Bertie?”

“She ran off into the cornfield. Mad about something.”

“What’s she got to be mad about?”

“Maybe Cal Farrow.”

“Cut it out, Jo. He’s an old friend, and the only friend I have.”

“You asked me what Bertie’s mad about. I’m telling you. It bothers me, too.”

“Oh, it does, does it?” From the bedroom Marth cries for me. “Go get her, please.”

Jo ambles from the kitchen in the sly, cunning way she has. Her gibe about Cal is probably the first shot in a campaign, but I have no inclination to puzzle it out. The girl harbors grudges and secrets in some dark center of her. She inherited too much of Edward, kindness and joy absent in equal measure. Edward’s own dark center prompted Jesse to demand my promise. Don’t let them have the girls, Letty. Never let them have my girls. Promise me, Letty, promise me.

Fever burned him, the bed soaked in sweat, chills quaking through him. Promise me. His lips already blue, eyes shimmering, his hot hand clenched on my arm. Promise me. No words of love or consolation, just the plea for my promise, and once I made it, he spoke no more. His last thought wasn’t for me and the kids. It was for Edward’s sins. I fooled myself into believing my love saved him and delivered him into a better life. But at the end Edward won. He took Jesse’s final moments from me.

“Don’t worry, my darling, he won’t have them. I won’t let him.”

Bertie stands outside the screen door watching me with her eyes so deep and wise. I wave her inside.

“You were talking to Daddy, weren’t you?”

I nod.

“About Gramps?”

“How did you know that?”

“Jo heard him say he wanted us to live with him. Don’t do it, Mama.”

“I won’t.” She comes into my arms, like the child she will never be again, and I breathe in dust from her hair. “I won’t.”

“Jo wants to. Says we’d have more food and clothes and stuff. Can I tell you something? You won’t get mad?”

“You can tell me anything. I won’t get mad.”

She exhales hot breath with the words into my ear, “I don’t like Gramps. I’m kinda afraid of him.”

My heart twists, and I push her back so I can see her face. “Has he ever done anything to you? Hit you or anything?”

“No. But he scares me. There’s something mean in him.”

While Jo can delve into a soul and pull up whatever is vulnerable to her machinations, Bertie has the ability to sort through fakery and fathom the truth of character. “You’re right, sweetheart, there is something mean in him, and I won’t let him hurt you. Ever.” Promise me, Letty.

“Clear the table and sit down. I need to talk to you.” They carry the bowls and spoons to the sink. Another meal of peas lacking in all the things children need. “Marth, baby, you can go play with your doll.”

“What’s going on?” Jo’s features reveal a brain at work, weighing the possibilities.

“I’ve made a decision you won’t like, but I’ve thought about it, and this is the only way I can see. We’re moving into town.”

“With Cal Farrow’s money? You can’t do that. We won’t even be able to go to school. They’ll all laugh at us.”

“Maybe so, Jo. But I have to keep you fed, keep you safe, and this is the only way.”

“No, it’s not. We can live with Gramps. He wants us.”

“I can’t do that. I’m sorry, Jo, but I can’t.”

“Why?”

“Because she promised Daddy.”

Jo turns on Bertie. “What do you mean?”

“Daddy didn’t want us to live with Gramps, and Mama promised.”

“You’re making that up just cause you don’t like Gramps.” She turns back to me. “Isn’t she?”

“No, she’s not. It’s true. It was the last thing your daddy asked me, and I can’t break my promise.”

“Your stupid promise doesn’t mean anything. Daddy’s dead. He’s got no right to take this away from me.” She darts out the door and into the night.

“Do you want me to go after her?”

“No, let her be, Bertie. Let her be.”

When I run out of the field onto the road, I hear them, raised voices on the wind. I creep into the yard and close enough to the back door to see them through the screen, shadow figures against the dim light from the hall beyond the kitchen. I smell the mixed odors of sweat and whiskey.

“Woman, keep quiet. It’s none of your concern. She’s a whore, and Jesse’s kids deserve better.”

“And you’re better? Leave them alone, Edward.”

“Or what? What’ll you do?” Gramps raises a fist in the air and shakes it.

Gram backs up, but doesn’t back down. “Do you think Letty doesn’t know? Jesse would have told her. You know he would have. What do you think will happen, if you try to take the girls from her?”

“He’d never.”

“He hated you. Don’t think he didn’t. After he saw what you did, he couldn’t get away from here fast enough.”

“It was an accident. He knew I didn’t mean it.”

“You did murder, Edward Beck. That’s what Jesse knew.”

Gramps sinks into a kitchen chair, his massive shoulders fallen, his head tilted down onto his chest. “It was an accident.” He sobs more than speaks the words, slurred with drink. “She was my heart. I loved her.”

“Don’t call that love.”

“I wanted to show her how much I loved her, but she screamed. I only wanted to show her, and she screamed so loud, I had to make her stop, and she fell. I didn’t mean to hurt her, I didn’t mean it.”

“You stay away from those girls, or I swear to God, everyone will know what you did.”

I want to tear the words from my ears. I know the story, everyone knows the story, the story of the cleaning girl found broken and dead at the bottom of the stairs, and now I know the truth of it. He did murder. My own Gramps, the one who favors me, did murder. I try to breathe air from my world before the words, try to see the man I saw before the words.

Gramps rises from the chair, an enormous shape that consumes too much space. He’s a shadow monster falling across Gram and devouring her, fist raised, mouth agape, a snarl more animal than human rumbling up from the black heart of him. “I should kill you where you stand, woman. Should have done it years ago.”

I scream, “No,” and reach for the door handle. They turn toward me. Gramps flicks the light switch, and he recognizes me, pinned by a rectangle of light on the other side of the screen. He takes two steps in my direction. Gram catches hold of his arm to pull him back, but his strength drags her with him.

“Run, Jo. Don’t let him catch you. Run.”

Murder. He did murder. His eyes, flashing reflections, punch at me with blasts of hate, hate for me. The remains of my hope spill out. “But you love me, I’m your Jo, you love me.”

Unsteady on his feet, he stumbles closer to the door, filling the opening with his bulk. Gram’s white face, peering around his shoulder, pleads with me to go. His huge hand flattens against the screen door and pushes at it.

Gram cries, “Run, girl, run.”

He did murder. He loved her, she was his heart, but he did murder.

I flee into the moonless dark, down the dirt road and into the cornfield.