In the Kingdom of Men (3 page)

I didn’t know the words of famous men, only the verses of the Bible I had been raised on, but I believed everything that Mason told me, as though they were truths I had felt but never knew how
to say. All I could do was nod, take in the shock of light hair fallen across his forehead, those blue, blue eyes, his only flaw a small scar at the right corner of his mouth that folded in like a dimple. He hadn’t seen it coming, pitched by the boy picking rocks, the two of them sweating for ten cents an hour, clearing the Cooks’ field free of stones. Even that wound seemed worthy, a testament to work and withstanding.

“I should get you on home,” he said. He held my eyes for a moment, and when I didn’t look away, he brought my palm to his lips. And then it was easy enough to slide into his old sprung sedan, ride that road out of town, find that little stand of post oak. He ran his hand beneath my hair. “You smell just like ripe wheat,” he said, “just like honey from the hive.”

I should say I tried to stop him, but what reason would I have now to lie? Another few days and he would be gone back to the city, another world, but after we finished, he held me close like he feared I might slip away. When he lit a cigarette, I lifted my face.

“Can I have one?” It was the first thing I had asked of him, as though opening my body had loosened my tongue.

“I bet you don’t even know how,” he said.

I moved my hand to his, eased the cigarette from his fingers, and he crooked a smile. “You’re damned determined, aren’t you?”

Maybe just damned, I thought, but not a single cell of my body believed it was true.

After I told him to, he dropped me at Bowman’s Corner, and I walked the flat mile back home. I wanted to keep the night inside me a little while longer. All those stars. That piece of moon. “You only think you know what you want,” my grandfather once said to me, but this time, I was sure.

By Christmas, I couldn’t lie anymore—my grandfather had been watching my rags. He wasn’t crying when he whipped me but making sounds like he was dying. I couldn’t help but curl up, even though some part of me wanted to give him my belly, let
him beat the baby right out of me. Maybe he was more afraid than I was, and the truth is, I wasn’t afraid at all. I believed that I was done being afraid.

That night, I waited until he fell asleep in his cot, the strop still coiling his fist like a copperhead, before pulling on my mother’s old riding boots, soft and slick in the soles, and sliding out of my window. When my feet hit the ground, I was running, cutting straight across those open fields, leaping the ditches, falling over stones. By the time I reached Chester’s Drug, my knees were bleeding, my palms burning raw. I called from the pay phone at the corner, nickels dropping down, heard Christmas carols, men’s laughter in the background. When I told Mason, he didn’t even hesitate, just said he would do right by me. It was an honorable thing. I knew it then and I know it now. A right and honorable thing.

He drove in from Stillwater, picked me up at the corner, and took me to Oklahoma City, where we lied about my age to the justice of the peace. A thin band from the pawnshop, a little bit of gold, and I was Mrs. Mason McPhee. There was nothing my grandfather could do but what he did—he shunned me, wouldn’t even speak my name.

Mason’s parents offered that I could live with them while he went back to college, but he said he wanted to do this on his own, it was his responsibility, and I knew he meant me. He told his coach he’d lay out for a while, get a job and save up, return in the fall, but when a slicker came up from Texas, recruiting for Zapata Off-Shore, fanning money and mouthing promises of plenty, Mason didn’t hesitate, signed on as a roughneck, and said we were headed to Houston. I wish now I had talked whatever sense I had left, insisted that he go back to school, but I believed that, as a wife, I had only two choices: follow his lead, or leave.

We packed up everything we owned, made the trip in a day, and found a little rental behind Basta’s Funeral Parlor, peach-colored
stucco with a redbud out front. I kept the back curtains closed against the hearse pulling away, the parade of cars with their lights on. But the parking lot had a basketball hoop, the mortician watered the lawn green, and the tulip trees lining the lane filled the evening air with their sweet perfume. Sometimes I wish we had stayed right there, making our way dollar by dollar, but Mason never let the grass grow under his feet. The only way he knew how to move was up.

Those first weeks, he’d come home from the oil rig black as a coal miner, all the shininess of his life gone. We lived on stew meat, sacks of beans, thought an onion was a special thing. I’d get up each morning, pull on his old jeans and long-tailed shirt, sweep the floor, sew a little, then fry spuds for dinner just like my mother did, the baby in me heavy and kicking, already wanting out. Mason, he’d eat the food right down to the plate, tell me how good it was, then go to bed, asleep before his head hit the pillow. I’d start scrubbing his clothes because they were the only ones he had, hang them by the stove to dry, iron them in the morning. Only when I tucked into our single bed, borax still burning my knuckles, did he wake, just long enough to kiss my neck, make love in that tired, sweet way, and then we would sleep.

Mason believed in giving his all no matter what, never complained, just did his job better than the next guy, kept the muscle moving the metal that pumped the oil that kept the profit and every man’s paycheck coming in. Some of the drillers were Okies like us, others Creoles trucked in off the bayous, Czechs just off the boat—to Mason, all the same. I’d never known a white man to step aside for a black, but that’s what Mason did. Like me, he sometimes forgot to even think of color, and I loved him more for it, but I knew what some of the other men were thinking as they watched him, gauging his sympathies, their mouths twisting with the names they called him behind his back. If I had first been drawn to the vision of him sitting high in that convertible Chevrolet,
what I came to cherish was his fairness, his compassion and belief that he could change things, make the world a better place, so different from what I had been taught: that man had fallen so far, there was no way to pick him up again.

When a Chickasaw running a cable got sliced clean through and his pregnant widow lay in the dirt at the base of the rig for two days until her family came to carry her away, I wrote her a letter, and Mason sealed in what money we’d saved. “She’s lucky they found him at all. Sometimes there isn’t much left,” he said, and I remembered a woman in Shawnee whose husband had disappeared in the oil patch, vanished without a trace, she told my grandfather, like he’d been caught up in the Rapture. She’d come to our shack for assurance that she hadn’t been left behind, and I watched the two of them kneel in the kitchen, my grandfather’s hands on her shoulders, her lips quivering in prayer. The next day they found her husband, who had fallen through the floor of the platform and been impaled on a rod, thigh to throat. “Just like a scarecrow,” the crew boss said. “Even his hat was still on.” I learned early that people can disappear just like that—the wink of an eye and they’re gone.

Houston seemed like the center of the world back then, people coming in from all over, derrickhands, engineers, toolpushers, and boilermen—Mason’s friends, every one. Weekends meant cocktail parties, pinochle parties, jamborees at the Bill Mraz Dance Hall, where Mason taught me to polka, my maternity smock billowing as we twirled. I watched the other women smoke their cigarettes, drink whiskey sours, cross their legs, nylons swishing. They belonged to that world that my grandfather had feared would find me. I didn’t know how to talk to them, what to say, but Mason, he fit right in. That smile, quick and easy. Sometimes, when he grew quiet, refilled his whiskey again, I feared he was thinking about the way things might have been if he hadn’t married me but Sally Richardson, his prom queen, blond hair, narrow waist, a daddy who owned the Buick dealership. No man wanted a ruined
woman—wasn’t that what I’d been told? Yet there I was, dancing the night away with Mason McPhee, having the time of my life.

We bought a white bassinet, a pale yellow blanket with satin trim, set up the extra bedroom as a nursery, and I spent my days washing walls, sewing curtains, until all I had to do was sit and wait, even as the near-spring air perked the robins into frenzies and the redbuds swelled fat. When I told Mason I wanted to learn how to drive, have some way to get out when he was gone, he veed his forehead. “Streets are too busy around here,” he said. “I’ll take you to the country one of these days, let you bust around where nothing can get in your way.” I bided my time, beat him out of bed one Saturday before dawn, climbed behind the wheel of his old sedan, and eased it around the block. I thought I could steal those minutes, the sky just beginning to pink, teach myself all that I needed to know, but when Mason stepped out later that morning to find the car bumped up onto the curb, he lit a cigarette, looked at me with one eye squinted shut, but didn’t say a word. He got in, drove away, and I thought he was angry, but he returned an hour later from the used-car lot in a pretty little two-tone Fairlane. “Best to go along with whatever you set your mind to,” he said, grinning as he moved to the passenger seat. “Telling you no is like pouring gas on a fire.”

I slid behind the wheel, drove twice around the block, and felt right at home, as though I were meant to hit the road a little faster. Mason pointed to the highway, and we headed south, Dean Martin on the radio, past the new domed stadium, so big I couldn’t take it in, and on to where pumpjacks levered the horizon, the ranchland split open and paved into cul-de-sacs, fresh-built houses strung out like charms on a bracelet, NASA families in every one. I checked the rearview, saw the new high-rises, steel beams piercing the haze, and thought of our dead president’s call to put a man on the moon. Even then, some part of me understood we wanted to own it all, up, down, earth to sky.

When Mason pointed to the Mobil, I slowed and turned in,
afraid I’d dent the fender if I pulled too close, but the attendant motioned me forward. While Mason got out and helped clean the windshield, I focused on the flying red horse. Pegasus, I remembered. I had wanted to go to college and become an English teacher, but even if I hadn’t gotten in trouble, my grandfather wouldn’t have let me. Worldly education hardened your heart against God, he said, and filled your head with ideas.

I watched Mason walk back to the Fairlane, tipping a bottle of Dr Pepper still dripping ice, the heat shirring the air between us. His hair grown a little too long, a pack of cigarettes rolled in the sleeve of his white T-shirt, his jeans riding low on his hips—I felt a lick of lust mixed with guilt, that baby right there inside me.

“Hey, doll.” He slipped in, handed me the soda, and I drank in deep swallows. I toed the accelerator, directing the car away from the attendant, who stood in his billed cap like a soldier at attention.

My stomach pressed against the rub of the steering wheel brought me back to the road. I had been thinking about names and considered the constellations I’d memorized, library book and flashlight held beneath the covers so that my grandfather wouldn’t know that I was studying the stars like a necromancer.

“What about Cassie for a girl?” I asked. “Cassiopeia.”

Mason sucked his teeth. “Boy?”

“Percy? Perseus McPhee.” I signaled left, then changed my mind, kept going.

“Where are you coming up with these names, anyway?” Mason began drumming the car top, singing along with the radio, his voice an easy blend in the low keys as I guided us through the evening streets, taking the long way, air through the windows heavy with the smoke of backyard barbecues.

That night, I woke to the sheets slick and cooling beneath me, the pain gripping my back, the ache in my thighs. At the hospital,
while the doctor scraped and pulled then called for his ether, the nun held my shoulders. It was just as well, she said—something had been wrong for the baby to die like that, as though I should feel lucky. “Do you want him baptized?” she asked, but I turned my head away. I didn’t have the words for what I was feeling, raw and empty, nothing that I could name. When the doctor told me I could no longer bear children, I thought, This is the punishment my grandfather promised me. This is what I deserve.

When, a few days later, Mason drove me home from the hospital, he circled around, kept the tulip trees between us and the funeral home. He went in ahead, pulled shut the door to the nursery. I’d never see that room again. He set the blue ceramic baby bootie that the nun had given us on the kitchen sill, a small tangle of variegated ivy sprouting from its center.

I quit the cocktail parties, spent my days with the doors and windows closed. When the
Chronicle
landed on our porch with its stories of race riots, women burning their bras, men burning their draft cards, the flag, burning, I let it lay. When the evening news gave a tally of the weekly body count in Vietnam, I turned it off because I didn’t want to know. I focused on my chores, what I was made for. By the time Mason came home from work, I had the bed tucked tight, the floors scrubbed, the laundry on the line, a brambleberry pie bubbling in the oven. I’d once filled my diary with stories of romance, imagined I might someday be a writer, but what right did I have to dream? Only at night, Mason shooting baskets for hours, the sound of the ball hitting asphalt, bouncing, hitting again, did I allow myself to sit on the couch and read. The Texas sky clouding over, a storm moving in—those seemed the stillest of times, as though I were suspended, hovering outside my own life.

I looked up one evening to see Mason standing there and felt the old fear, my grandfather snatching the book from my hands. But Mason, he sat down beside me, touched my forehead as though
I were a child sick with fever, pushed the hair from my face. He smelled like the fields after spring burn. Out the window, I saw the sun not yet set, the days grown longer without me.

“You need more than this,” he said, and pulled me to him. “We got to get you better.”