Maud's Line (24 page)

The two of them, locked together, rocked back and forth and up and down for quite a while. When Billy's relief came, Maud's did, too. And they were so breathless they gasped together and heaved for air until Billy inhaled, turned away from Maud, and let out a whoop that was so loud it lingered. “Damnation, Maud, I love you more than all the stars in the sky.”

It was then that Maud came to her senses. She pressed the front of her dress down, ran a hand through her hair, and pulled up her underwear. “We shouldn't have done that, Billy.”

“Why not?” Billy tucked himself in and started on his buttons. “I sure wish I had a cigarette.”

Maud wanted a cigarette, too. “Don't you have any?”

“No, I'm completely out.”

“I don't think there're any here. Daddy's gone. I'm sure he took his with him.”

“Can you check?”

Maud wanted to do more than check for cigarettes. She wanted to clean herself up. “I'll look in his drawer. Hold on.” She climbed the steps, went in, and in a few minutes came back with a hand-rolled cigarette and a wooden match. She sat down in a rocker and Billy sat down in the one next to her. “I can't believe he missed this one,” Maud said.

“Where's he gone?”

“To the oil fields, I guess.”

After that, they talked until the moon came up, round and bright, but they didn't talk about what they'd done. Maud's mind was too jumbled to say anything definite; she didn't know what her feelings were, let alone how to explain them to Billy. And Billy talked mostly about world events—Amelia Earhart crossing the Atlantic, the Hoover-Smith race, reports of polio. Billy said visiting Tulsa had made him want to see other places. He confided to Maud that he wanted to change his name to Walker, go someplace where people had never seen an Indian, and make something of himself. He liked airplanes more than tractors, and he wanted to fly in one. They talked about flying off into the sky and seeing the bottoms and the river from the air. That talk lasted until they heard the sound of a horse coming their way.

Maud's first thought was that the horse carried Booker. She jumped up from her chair and stepped to the edge of the porch, feeling panicked. But she could see by the light of the moon that the horse carried two people, and she realized with a mixture of relief and disappointment that Early and Lovely were the most likely combination. When the rider on the back of the horse fell off trying to dismount at the guard and then crumpled to the ground, her guess was confirmed. She and Billy walked to them. Lovely was so drunk he was either playing possum or really couldn't get up. Early wasn't completely sober himself. But he and Billy each took an arm and lugged Lovely to the porch. They brought out his cot and settled him on it. Then they brought out Maud's for Early to sleep on. Maud told Billy he better get home; she had cooking to do come morning. When he left, she was suddenly tired to the bone. She went inside to her father's bed and slept without turning.

When she awoke, she expected to feel ailing. She lay on her back looking up at the ceiling, waiting for the nausea to hit. She tracked the crack, pretending it was a road on a map that led to Tulsa and on to Oklahoma City. She did that for several minutes, her mind wandering to the previous evening until she determined she might not get sick. She got up slowly, went to the door, and looked out on the porch. Lovely's face was covered with his arm. Early was asleep with his hat over his eyes. She decided that if she was going to throw up, she best to do it before they woke up. So after her morning business, she pulled some side meat out of the ice chest and sniffed it. The sniff didn't turn her stomach or even make it uneasy. She wondered if she wasn't really pregnant, or if wine was the ticket to feeling good. She slapped the meat into a skillet and started making biscuits, figuring on how to get a private word with Lucy later in the day.

Maud didn't know much about pregnancy beyond what she'd observed watching animals and a little she'd heard from her aunts. Her mama had lost a baby. But she hadn't realized her mother was pregnant until she had going-down pains, and when that happened, her grandfather had taken her, Lovely, and her sisters out of the house all the way to Ft. Gibson. He'd bought them ice cream. Maud got to thinking about how good that ice cream had tasted, and she was half finished preparing breakfast before she realized she still didn't feel sick at all. She went out on the porch and shook the men awake.

While they were taking their time getting up and going about their business, Maud ate her breakfast without any queasiness. But she found she'd lost her taste for coffee. She finished quickly and made trips to the garden and cellar to get the fixings for the dinner. After she fed the men, she asked Early to build a fire under the kettle outside, and she sat Lovely down on a little stool next to it and made him stir the pot with a long-handled wooden spoon. Early squatted with Lovely to remind him to stir. Maud walked to Gourd's to raid his dishes.

The first person to arrive was Blue, and he sat out by the pot with Early and Lovely. Maud could see them talking and hoped they were gossiping about Saturday night in town. She feared they might be gossiping about Billy and her or Booker and her. But she didn't have time to do anything about that, and she sure didn't want to get into a conversation with them or get any ribbing. She shied away from the pot until the entire family arrived and naturally split into groups of men, women, and children. The women commanded the kitchen and porch, the men the pot of stew, and the children the yard and the live oak tree.

The men ate first, the children next, and then, after washing two rounds of dishes, the women ate. While they did, the men set cigarette butts on the tops of the fence posts against the wild and took turns shooting them off. The sound of gunshots and children laughing felt so reassuring to Maud that she, for most of the afternoon, forgot about wanting to go anywhere else and was perfectly content with her family around her, as country and as dark as they were. She only wished that her mother was sitting at the table with them, that her father was taking his turn with the gun, that her sisters, Rebecca and Peggy, lived closer by. Her mind didn't return to her troubles until Lucy said, “I wish this baby would hurry itself up.”

Nan snorted. “It'll be a pile more trouble when it comes.”

“I'm tired of peeing ever' fifteen minutes,” Lucy replied.

Maud thought about her own peeing. It seemed normal. “Remind me when it's due?”

“Gonna be a Virgo.”

“You'll have an easy time. Mark my words. Easy delivery, easy tempered,” Viola said.

“Renee's a Virgo,” Nan said. “She's gitting as high tempered as Ryde.” She rolled her eyes.

“Well, the daddy figures into it, that's fer shore,” Viola said.

Nan put a golly rag to her lips. She cut her eyes at Maud. They twinkled.

Maud knew Nan was hiding a grin. She felt a blush down to her toes. There wasn't such a thing as privacy in the bottoms. As gossipy as her family was, the likelihood that Viola hadn't spread that she'd had the morning sickness was as remote as a breakfast without biscuits. They might not say they knew it, but that was just so they could giggle and make fun behind her back. Maud felt her temper rise. “Can't anybody have anything to themselves around here?”

Nan drew her chin into her neck. Viola looked down at the table. But Lucy, bolder than either of the other two when her husband wasn't around, cackled and said, “Well, if ya parade up and down the section line, ya could be seen.”

“I can't get to my house without going down the line!”

“Yeah, that's unfortunate,” Lucy replied. “I'm shore glad Daddy moved us up closer to the highway.”

Nan said, “I sorta like Booker.” She looked out the door.

Maud felt her heart pounding. She hadn't begun to sort her feelings, and they were being laid out on the kitchen table and fingered like knives and forks. “I like him, too, but he's taken a powder.”

“He'll be back, I 'spect,” Lucy said. “Men do that all the time.”

“Uncle Cole doesn't,” Maud replied.

“No, Cole, he stays as close as a tick on a dog. But he's an exception.”

Nan said, “Where you think Booker went to?”

Once Maud gave into the conversation, she did so with relief. “I don't know. He left me a letter, but it melted in the rain.” She told them the full story of the letter and what Mr. Singer had said. When she was finished, Lucy shook her head. “I don't know how you put off reading it. I couldn't've stood the suspense.”

“I won't again,” said Maud.

Outside, one of the children yelled. That drew only the slightest turn of heads, as it was a scream of playing wild, not of distress. But the yell focused Maud's attention on the rest of her circumstance, and she blurted out, “How do you tell for sure if you're in a family way?”

All three women pulled their eyes away onto spots somewhere in the distance. Maud waited them out, letting them pretend they didn't already know. Lucy finally answered, “Different fer different babies. This one, I got to feeling like a stuffed hen the next morning. The first one, I didn't even know he was in me until I noticed I wasn't on the rag.”

Maud's thoughts went to her calendar. She could go in the main room, get it, and figure the days again with her aunts. But that would be a public reckoning she wasn't quite ready to make. She looked out the screen door. Three of Nan's children were playing tag in the dirt. Lucy's baby was waddling after a chicken. It suddenly occurred to Maud that she didn't really care for children. That realization hit her in the face so hard, she gulped. As she did, Lucy said, “When'd yer visitor last call?”

Maud brought her mind back to the table. “I'm not sure.” She looked at each of her aunts in turn. Viola had a dip in her lip; so did Lucy. Nan was picking a bit of pie crust out of a pan. None of them seemed anything but calm. While Maud was struggling for a way out of the conversation without having to get the calendar, Viola said, “A lot can happen to a baby this early on.”

After that, Nan and Viola got up from the table and started in on the dishes again, and Lucy told Maud about a snake she'd recently found in a hen's nest. Maud felt thankful for that particular snake, and the talk dribbled away from what was on her mind to the daily hazards of living, the hope for a break in the heat, and the antics of people they all knew and mostly were related to. After the dishes were done, the women went to the front porch, and the men left off shooting and got to looking under the hood of Ame's car. The older children climbed in the tree. The younger ones napped on a cot on the porch. The day melted into evening before they all went home.

Maud was tired and went to bed early. But she was as far from sleep as she was from the Mississippi River. She lay on her back, listening to Lovely's chair creak on the porch. Her mind rushed ahead like water rolling to the sea. If Booker didn't return, a baby would tie her to the bottoms, the heat, the dirt, and the hardship, for the rest of her life. Even if she told Billy it was his and married him, it would tie them both down. And the baby, if there was one, could turn out to be light rather than dark. Billy would be able to see every day that it wasn't his.

Maud woke to the cock's crow and looked at the crack in the ceiling. The curl at the closest end seemed to be a snake dipping its head, trying to hold her with its eye. Maud ran her hand down her belly. It was flat. She was circling her stomach with her palm when she realized she didn't hear any sign of Lovely. She glanced to his cot. He hadn't been on it. She swung her feet to the floor and rose. He wasn't on the cot on the porch. She went to the outhouse and to the pump. There were no signs anyone had washed up. While she was brushing her teeth, she realized for the second day in a row that the only pang in her stomach was hunger.

Maud studied the calendar through her meal. By her calculations, she'd missed one visitor entirely and was due for another one. She felt her breasts. They were tender and a little larger than usual. She went about her chores wondering where Lovely had gone off to and trying to settle into the idea of being a mother. While she was doing that, she visited a red hen she had setting in a little brooder house next to the chicken coop. Trying to hold the hen's attention by clucking, she stuck her hand under her feathers. The hen flashed a peck at her arm. It drew blood. Maud said, “Hussy!” But she knew she didn't have any business bothering the hen; she'd done it on an impulse to see how the chicken would react. And the hen's temper wasn't too far off from what she had expected. Or from what she felt herself. She didn't want to be sitting on an egg if Booker had up and left her for good. The irritation she might have otherwise felt at being pecked she directed toward the whole male race.

Lovely didn't come in for dinner. Maud thought about walking up to the swale to see if he was working, but decided he couldn't be without either breakfast or a noon meal. So she spent her afternoon reading, perched on a little stool in the shade under the limbs of the live oak tree. She'd read the Sherlock Holmes and the Henry VIII, and her attention was on the second section of Mooney's book,
The Sacred Formulas of the Cherokees
. Formulas existed for all sorts of things, many for curing, some for hunting, a few for love. Maud was studying the love formulas when she caught the beat of hooves in the distance. She looked out from the cave of branches. She saw Billy riding her way.

She hadn't thought of him all day. She looked to the trunk of the tree. Boards were nailed there. They'd held Morgan and Renee only yesterday. Maud laid her book on the ground and grabbed a board. She pulled herself up, squirmed onto the largest low branch of the tree, and stuffed her skirt under her legs. She made her breathing shallow and looked out from between the leaves.