Maud's Line (2 page)

Maud and Lovely went to bed not long after the others departed, and Lovely was asleep on his back when Maud, half awake and listening to the wolves howl in the wild, heard her father's car stop at their first cattle guard and then at their second one. She was on her side pretending to sleep when Mustard opened the door and tripped on the threshold. He fell loudly on the floor. After that, he gave out a groan. When Maud determined he wasn't going to stir, she got up, put a pillow under his head, and then settled into deep sleep.

She awoke in early morning light, looked at her father still on the floor, and decided he didn't seem that worse for the wear. He'd managed to get home without visible bruises or swollen eyes, and he wasn't drooling. His left arm seemed a little crooked, but she could tell from her cot that it was just thrown at an odd angle. She glanced at her brother's cot, determined he was still asleep, softly set her feet on a plank, and stood up. She stepped behind a sheet hung on a wire that blocked off a corner for privacy, pulled her housedress off of a peg, and drew it over her head. She checked the rag around her wound and saw a patch of blood dried in the shape of a hammer's head. She decided to leave the bandage in place, slipped out from behind the sheet, and stepped to the kitchen. She plucked her toothbrush from a cup, lifted the dipping pan from the counter, and went out the kitchen door, closing it softly.

When she returned, Mustard was still on the floor, but Lovely was up. Maud had set the kindling the night before, so she fiddled the fire to life and was frying fatback when her brother came in from his morning time alone. She nodded toward the other room. Lovely whispered, “Eggs,” and held up three fingers. He sat down in a chair at the table and took up a newspaper that was two days old.

Maud usually waited to eat until her father and brother were fed. But Mustard hadn't shown signs of stirring, so she ate with her brother. The two were finishing off their second biscuits when they heard a faint “Goddamn” from somewhere near the floor beyond the kitchen door. Maud got up with her plate in her hand, set it in the dishpan, and laid another dish on the table.

Mustard made more noise than he did most mornings. The grunts and groans came first from the front room and then from out in the yard. Maud thought they were for effect rather than an indication of any particular distress. Her father acted badly with the same regularity as the rooster crowed at dawn. But he had a conscience to him, so remorse usually followed soon after the ache of alcohol or the burn of temper had cleared out and gone.

When Mustard finally got into the kitchen, he placed both hands flat on the table and eased into his chair. “You should've seen Charlie Pankins when I left him. Goddamn, he were a mess.”

Maud held up the coffee kettle. “You want some before your eggs?”

“I believe I do.”

Lovely shoved a saucer toward his father without lifting his eyes from reading.

Mustard scratched the back of his head. “We got our hooch offin a Choctaw who was packing his load in a feed sack.”

Maud picked up the saucer, held it about four inches from the table, and poured coffee into it. She set it down slowly next to her father's right fist.

Mustard said, “You might have to pick that up for me. I'm a little shaky.”

Maud turned back to the stove, settled the kettle, and picked up the saucer in both hands as carefully as if she were cradling the back of a baby's head. Mustard slurped his coffee, wiped his mouth with the palm of his hand, and said, “Yer the best.”

Maud held the saucer until Mustard drained it and poured him another he was able to hold on his own. She knew she was her father's favorite, and this was even with her oldest sister looking more like him than his face in a pond. She said, “Daddy, we've got some bad news for you. Betty broke her leg in the pasture. Lovely had to put her down.”

“Say that again,” said Mustard.

Lovely looked up from his paper. “Had to shoot Betty in her head, Dad. She was bawling as high as the moon.”

“You shot the goddamn cow?” Mustard's face was turning red.

“He had to, Daddy. I saw her myself. She was lying on the ground, unable to get up. It was a pitiful sight. Lovely put her out of her misery.”

Mustard wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. He shook his head. He sat there in silence until Maud slid eggs onto his plate and picked out some fatback from a platter under a sugar sack. Mustard ate with a smacking noise until Lovely turned a page of the paper, and then he said, “One shot?”

“Two. She was tough.”

“Whatchya do with her?”

Lovely laid his paper down. “Took her to Hector.”

Mustard wiped his mouth with the back of his hand again. “I believe I need a cigarette.”

Lovely's chair scraped. He went to the main room and slid back into his seat at the table with a cigar box. “Want me to roll and light it?”

Mustard nodded and patted his breast pocket and then his pants pockets. “My Banjo's somewhere. Probably the other room.”

Maud said, “There's fire in the stove.”

When Lovely finished rolling, he opened the oven door and lit the cigarette on the wood. After Mustard had puffed it to a wet butt, Maud sat down at the table, buttered a biscuit, and spooned some plum jelly onto it. She held it out to her daddy. He said, “Don't mind if I do.”

Two mornings later, after Mustard and Lovely had gone off to their jobs, and the dishes were done and the beds made, Maud took a bucket to the pump, primed it, pumped fresh water, and sat down on the platform over the well. She had a clean rag and some Mercurochrome, and she was dabbing the purple medicine onto her wound and wondering if it would leave a scar that would mar the looks of her leg when she heard the sound of a team in the distance. She looked out toward the section line. Coming down it were a pair of horses and a wagon covered with a bright blue canvas. The team was driven by a man she didn't recognize at a distance. Maud forgot about the possibility of permanent disfigurement; she even forgot about the tendency of Mercurochrome to drip off the dipping stick. She sat there on the wood of the well watching the blue canvas jog along until it stopped at her uncle Gourd's house. Maud knew her uncle wasn't at home, but the man called out. He called again. Then he turned the horses toward her and snapped his reins. She hastily put the cap on the Mercurochrome, tore the rag in two, and wrapped her leg with a bandage smaller than the one she'd been using. She stood, threw an arm around the pump, and watched the team, the wagon, and the blue canvas grow bigger and bigger in the bright sun.

The driver was a man she'd never seen before. And with her father at the feed store in Muskogee and her brother in their neighbor's field, and meanness fairly common, Maud wondered if she should, out of precaution, go into the house, where the guns were. But then she recalled Betty's bellowing and felt fairly certain that unless the stranger shot her dead at a distance she could holler loud enough that Lovely would hear her over at Mr. Singer's, jump on his mule, and be to her pretty fast. Then, too, there was something about the blue of the canvas that prevented her from moving. She found it reassuring or, really, more than reassuring, because it was a pretty blue, deeper than the color of the sky and brighter than a heron, a better blue, something new. She couldn't fathom anyone choosing such a blue for any reason other than to please or to draw attention.

The man driving the team was wearing a bowler. That in itself set him apart in Maud's experience. She'd seen bowlers only on undertakers and in magazine pictures of men who were dancing lickety-split with girls who were flappers. Below the hat, he had a clean-shaven face and wore red suspenders and a light-colored shirt. After he closed the second cattle guard, he took off his bowler, waved it in the air over his head, and flashed a smile that glistened like water hit by sunlight. Maud was drawn to the smile like a jay to a piece of foil, but she was a little taken aback by the wave. Was she supposed to wave in return? To a stranger? That would seem forward. But she didn't want to look country and backward, so she raised her right hand and waved her fingers. She kept her left arm slung around the pump.

The man pulled the horses up to the hitching rail about thirty feet away from Maud. By then, his bowler was back on his head, but not so as the brim hid his hair. It was deep brown, thick and wavy. His skin was dark from the sun, but not, Maud thought, Indian. He was definitely a white man; his forearms below his rolled sleeves were hairy. He said in a voice that wasn't a holler, but carried perfectly well, “Looks like you might have some water to spare.” Canteens were hanging on the side of the wagon.

Maud nodded. “You can fill up if you care to.”

“Just a cup for me, if you don't mind. But Arlene and Evelyn would mightily appreciate a drink.”

Maud cocked her head.

“My horses. I named them after my aunts.”

Maud laughed. By the time she'd stopped, he'd jumped off the wagon and was walking toward her. He said, “Couldn't call them Sir Barton and Exterminator. They're ladies.”

“I can see that.”

“And not too fast, either.” He took his hat off and scratched his head.

“How did your aunts take to being honored?”

“Haven't told them yet. Aunt Arlene got married and moved all the way to Nashville. Aunt Evelyn is up in Springfield, Missouri. I was going to visit her last year, but then the floods came. I had to stay put and hang on by my fingers.”

“Did you lose much? Or were you lucky?”

“Lucky. I live on high ground in Fayetteville. But it sure looked like the end of the world. I bet it was bad around here.” He looked away from Maud. “I see the watermarks there on the house.”

Maud glanced at the house, too. “If Grandpa hadn't built her on stones, we would've lost her. When the river started overcoming us, we moved the beds and chest into the barn. Hung the beds by hooks from the rafters, put the chest and the drawers on top of the stalls, and slept on the hay in the loft. Lost eleven cows, though. Some of them drowned before we could rustle them up. Ran the others up to the foothills, and they either got lost or somebody stole them. The pigs we ran into the schoolhouse with everybody else's. The chickens roosted with us. Our dog drowned.”

The rains had started in the fall of 1926 and continued through the winter. By April of 1927, it was pouring morning and night, sometimes ten inches a day. The water had covered eastern Oklahoma and had run almost all of Maud's family out of their homes. But according to the papers, it had also covered every state from Kansas to Pennsylvania, killed hundreds of people, and swollen the Mississippi to a sixty-mile span at Memphis. The disaster had united the whole country and survivors became friends in minutes. So it was not unusual for Maud and the stranger to settle into a conversation about a mutual experience while he was sipping on a dipper of water and the horses were drinking from the trough.

Maud was gathering bits of information about the stranger like a wind rustles leaves into a pile and was sorting those leaves in her head before she realized she didn't yet have his name or know why he had driven his bright blue covered wagon down their lane. She was thinking about how to ask and not seem like she really cared when he said, “By the way, my name is Booker Wakefield. Please call me Booker.” He smiled. There were little creases in the corners of his eyes. The eyes themselves were green, flecked with gold. Maud couldn't tell if those gold flecks were pure color or sparkles of sunshine.

She said, “I'm Maud,” but didn't give her last name. It embarrassed her. Her mother's family name, Vann, sounded better to the ear, and she'd always lived among her mother's people. But instead of lying about her last name, she added, “What are you doing around here?”

“I thought you'd never ask,” he said. “I'm a peddler. At least in the summertime. Gives me a way to see the world.”

“You don't peddle from town to town?”

“The stores in towns have gotten so big and fancy I can't compete. But not everybody can get to a store when they need one. A lot of people still appreciate their goods coming to them. Would you like to see what I'm carrying?” The peddler smiled wide, handed the dipper back to Maud, and walked to his wagon.

He set his hat on the seat and drew the canvas up by pulling on a rope strung across the top of the hull. His wares were secured in place by netting, and he rolled the netting up just as he had the canvas. The goods were stacked on shelves that receded like the steps of a pyramid. On them sat bolts of denim and other cloth in colors pleasing to the eye. There were pots and pans and skillets of every size, suspenders, handkerchiefs, straw hats and fedoras, Woodbury soap, rolls of toilet paper, toothpaste, shaving cream, razors and straps, toothbrushes and pencils, coal-oil lamps, kerosene, and crystal radio sets.

Maud's eyes got wide. And the peddler stretched his arm so that his hand disappeared below the wagon seat. He brought out, between his thumb and forefinger, a spool of red thread. He said, “This is for the water. I think red may be your color.”

Maud was wearing a faded green dress, but red was, indeed, the color she pictured herself in. It looked best next to her skin. She ducked her head, but looked up and smiled when he dropped the spool into her hand. He said, “Take your time looking around.”

At that moment, Maud didn't have a cent to her name. There was some household money hidden away from Mustard in a baking-powder tin behind the match holder in the cabinet in the kitchen. But that money was family money for flour and sugar and an occasional treat from a store in Ft. Gibson. Maud was too upright to take family money and spend it on herself alone or without talking it over. Her daddy operated that way and it'd caused, over the years, hardship on the rest of the family. She said, “I'll just be looking. I went into town yesterday. Got all my goods there. But thank you for the thread.”