Broken Ground (2 page)

“You're as hungry as me.”

“Keep this up, mister, and I'll take my breakfast on the front porch.” I look at him in a manner most queenly. “Alone.”

Charlie shakes his head and laughs, egg cooling on his fork. But I see the resignation in his eyes. He knows I mean it.

For further emphasis, I snap my fingers. “
Tempus fugit!
”

Dutifully, Charlie slides the egg back onto his plate. “I had to go and marry the one gal who actually remembers her Latin.”

I shrug. “I liked Latin. The little we learned of it. Which is to say, if you'd paid attention, you'd remember your Latin, too.”

“You liked
geometry,
Ruth. Proofs and all that. Heck, you liked everything, from kindergarten to twelfth grade.”

What Charlie knows and doesn't say is that from the get-go, I've been hungrier for learning than I've ever been for food. In spite of Daddy. Because of him, maybe. Maybe that's the gift Daddy's given me. Take something away, or make it hard to get, or put limits around it—barriers of judgment that say
This is evil and so is that
and
The only good book is the Bible
—the desire only grows greater. Long before Charlie and I got married, I wanted to go to college and become a teacher, share knowledge and information even as I kept on learning myself. But then there was Charlie, who'd always been there, my best friend, only this time he had a ring and a promise:
We'll leave Alba. We'll move far away. We'll see this big old world.
I still want to go to college. But now I won't go alone. Charlie will come, too.

He cocks his head at me, grins. “You know very well why I didn't pay attention in school, Ruthie.”

The upturned corners of his mouth draw me closer. Our bed could still be an island.

“Because our teacher was stern and stuffy?” I know this is not the answer (though it is one aspect of the truth). But I want to hear him say it. And he does.

“I was too busy looking at you.”

With my fork, I pretend to wave his words away, though I cherish every last one of them. “We both know you paid more than enough attention in school during science. We were always different like that.”

Different from most of the other students, I mean, as Charlie well knows. Most of the other students were there because they had to be. Charlie and I were there because we wanted to be.

He shrugs and keeps eating. He wants to be a doctor someday, he's always said. Now that we're married, he's more likely to qualify: “If I can.”
If.
Depends on how long these hard times linger, and on how the money comes in, that's what he means. And there might be a baby first, if God wills and the money comes in. No, simply if God wills: a baby.

It's only sometimes, when the chores are all done and I'm alone, drifting a bit, that I let myself daydream about college first and teaching right after, before a baby or anything else. I'd be an
interesting
schoolteacher, unlike our teacher, Mrs. Himmel. Sometimes, I think we learned despite Mrs. Himmel, not because of her. Miss Berger, the librarian, was my real teacher. In fact, last August, right after Charlie and I got engaged, when he was working as a farmhand and I was working at the Alba public library, Miss Berger got Charlie and me to apply to college. “You
must,
” she said. “As an intellectual exercise. An experiment, if you'd rather put it that way.” I grabbed Charlie's hands like we were about to set off on a great lark. But then he said, “No money, no point in exercising or experimenting either one,” and I felt my shoulders sag. “Maybe someday,” he added quickly. “But we'll let you go first, Ruth. I don't need to go right away. There's only one thing I need right away. One person.” He put an arm around me, drew me close, and for some days, distracted by the question of money and the answer of each other, we forgot about any old college application.

But Miss Berger didn't give up. One September night, she sat Charlie and me down and slapped two manila envelopes on the library table between us. The envelopes each held an application to Union University in Pasadena, California. Miss Berger, way back when, considered attending this college. It's a good school, she told us, with strong programs for future teachers and doctors both. “Fill out the applications as a favor to
me
,” she pleaded.

So we filled them out, goaded by Miss Berger, and sent them off in the mail. And I usually only dwell on this—that our applications are out there somewhere, on someone's desk or file cabinet in faraway California, when I'm alone in the afternoon, chores all done, drifting and daydreaming.

I take hold of Charlie's shirt, pull him close, kiss him full on the mouth. We taste like biscuits and us. Who needs jam? Who needs college? Who needs anything but this? When I release him, yellow dirt dusts my fingertips. East Texas soil. So different from Oklahoma's red clay. He kept his promise. We did move—not far, far away from Alba, exactly, but far enough.

I wipe the dirt on my napkin. “I'll do laundry today. Promise.”

Charlie shrugs. “You don't have to if you don't want to. This pair of dungarees will make it to Wednesday before they stand up of their own accord.”

He's not kidding. After a few days' work in the field, his clothes are as stiff as can be, caked with oil, gasoline, dirt, and sweat. Thus, the necessary cake of Lava and the bar of Ivory soap for me.

“Monday is wash day,” I say firmly. I've almost finished cross-stitching a set of tea towels that testify to this fact and others:
Monday, Wash. Tuesday, Iron. Wednesday, Clean
, etc. Beneath reminders like this, I've cross-stitched little animals for decoration. Monday's animal is a lamb. Tuesday's, a goose. Wednesday's, a cat. I have yet to stitch the others. But since Thursday is
Mend and Sew,
I'll be done soon enough.

Charlie takes his empty plate and cup to the kitchen sink. I stand, too, though I'm nowhere near done. “I wish you wouldn't eat so fast.” I can't keep the missing-him-already out of my voice.

Charlie picks up his lunch pail. “I'd just be putting off what's inevitable.”

“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.