Magnolia City (40 page)

She was lifting the cotton blanket when her fingers froze in midair. A gunshot split the night in two. Three more followed it in quick succession. The air ripped apart to let the sounds through, then closed back into an unnatural quiet. She drew her hand out of the crib and stepped into the kitchen. Pearl’s eyes glittered at her in the dim lamplight, knowing what Hetty knew—Pick would have slipped down to the derrick as darkness had fallen, opening the valve on the well so the tank could fill in the night. They both ran for the door.

A ghostly halo of light hung over Caney Creek.

“Oh no!” Hetty gasped, pulling the shawl closer about her. Pearl took her hand and led her slowly down the hill.

The whole derrick was luminous from the acetylene flame of the carbide lamp someone had lit. As it sat in one corner, its powerful white light flashed off the reflector plate and blazed through the twilight. Poke Pritchett stood in front of the lamp, which made the shadow he cast colossal as it stretched over the pine planks and fell down into the creek bed. He had a rifle crooked in his hands. Hetty could smell gunpowder. She made out other figures holding rifles in the shadows: Lone Wolf Gonzaullas, a few state troopers. She heard a horse whinny behind them. They had come over the Caddo mound, she could see, slipping soundlessly through the pine forests behind it. They were all looking at something, but the carbide was so blinding, she couldn’t see much. She shielded her eyes, and that was when she saw it: A body was lying at the foot of the Christmas tree. The one they’d just shot. She didn’t dare give it a name.

Pearl tried to steer her away, but she broke free and shinned her way up onto the derrick floor. The pine planks moaned as she walked on them, the light etching every detail into startling clarity. Pick lay crumpled like a dirty rag doll ahead of her. One arm was flung toward her, his head turned away. Everything was so black and white in the intense light of the acetylene gas, but Pick was blackest of all as he lay there unmoving in the shadow cast by the Christmas tree. It wasn’t until she stood right over him that she saw the other color: red. She could make out four gunshot wounds splattered across his torso and saw in her mind the headline she’d read in the paper last week: Wolters Tells Guards to Shoot at the Waistline.

Hetty stood there unable to move, unable to draw her eyes away. The blood soaked into his clothes and trickled through the cracks in the pine boards. She wanted to take her shawl off and stanch the wounds before it was too late, but she couldn’t move. What she saw was turning her to stone. Feeling faint, Hetty realized she hadn’t been breathing. She gasped for some air, but choked on the smell of gun smoke.

Reaching toward her friend, she tried to shout, “Help him!” but her voice only came out as a scratch. Lone Wolf wasn’t listening anyway. She could hear him behind her talking to Pearl, explaining how this man was found illegally operating the well after being told to leave town. “But he works for us,” she said, again in a scratch that nobody heard.

Hetty had to do something. She knelt beside Pick and unwound the wedding shawl from her shoulders. She hefted his body up and worked the shawl underneath him, then drew it as tight as she could across his chest to stop the flow of blood. Red splotches like poppies fanned out across the white silk. She hoped she wasn’t too late. She didn’t like the way his head lolled back so lifelessly. If only he’d wake up and talk to her. She tried to hold his body upright while she wound the shawl around and around him, but he was so heavy. He kept sagging back.

Somehow, by lifting first his shoulders, then his hips, she got the last wound covered and tied the
rebozo
in a knot. She kept tying and retying the knot to get it tight enough to stop the flow of blood and save his life.

A shadow fell over her hands. She looked up and saw the boots with the silver spurs. “He’s dead, ma’am,” Lone Wolf told her in a gentle voice.

She crawled around and cradled his head in her lap, stroking his cheeks that she always thought were like the smoothest onyx. “Are you sure?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

Poke added in an icy tone: “We can’t let a goddamn nigger break the law and get away with it.”

Touching Pick’s face all over, Hetty brushed his still warm lips and noticed that his eyes were open a crack. She closed them for the last time, holding his head to her breast and rocking him, back and forth, back and forth, in her arms.

The sheriff came in a truck to take the body. “Do you want your shawl back?” he asked her.

“No, I want him buried in it,” she said. Two troopers lifted the body out of her arms and rolled it off the derrick. She heard it hit the ground with a lifeless thud. They heaved it into the back of the truck like a sack of feed.

When everyone had left, Pearl helped her down off the derrick and turned to douse the carbide lamp. “Wait,” Hetty said, walking along the sandy banks. She took off her bloody pearls and tossed them into the willow trees, where they snagged on a high branch and hung there glistening like a string of stars, like seeds. As she watched them sway, she remembered the final words from Pick’s favorite hymn, the one where the angels always hung their harps in a willow grove:

The thick heat of deep August burned on, but Hetty didn’t feel it. She didn’t feel anything. She lay under a damp sheet on the chaise lounge and forgot to flick on the circulating fan even in the steamiest part of the day. While Pierce played at her feet, she pulled the sheet over her head and tried to sleep. When it was too hot to sleep, she gazed into the white blankness inside the sheet and counted the trickles of sweat running down her face. If Pearl brought her food, she mashed it up and fed it to Pierce. She lived on iced tea and Lucky Strikes. She wouldn’t talk to anyone. People came and went, hovering over the chaise, but they were like shadows catching at the corner of her eye.

One evening, Ada’s weathered face appeared in Hetty’s line of vision, above a steaming plate. “I brought you something special from my garden. It’ll strengthen your blood.”

Hetty looked down. The plate was piled with gashes of beets, oozing with red juice and butter. She hardly made it to the bathroom in time.

It was the red she was trying to forget. Didn’t they know that? Red running through black. That’s why she slept so much. She had almost succeeded in numbing her mind into amnesia when Pearl made the mistake of showing her the front page of the
Kilgore News Herald
dated August 31, 1931. She held it up right in front of Hetty’s eyes so she had to look at it. There was Henry Picktown Waller, laid out on a platform somewhere, her white wedding shawl still wrapped around him, stained with its poppies of blood. The huge headline read:
A WARNING TO ALL
. That set Hetty back for days. She would just lie there on the chaise and stare off into space, lighting cigarettes and forgetting to smoke them. She had no idea how much time passed in this manner.

Then one night, cool air wafted through the window. An early September norther. It soothed her feverish brow, and Hetty felt herself falling into an endless, dreamless sleep where she realized that oblivion was the deepest blessing of them all. Eons passed, and then she saw light, pure white light with blue pine shadows flickering through it as she opened her eyes and gazed at the wall above the chaise. Someone had thrown a blanket over the sheet in the night. The rich fumes of strong coffee teased her nose. She felt hungry. A rocking chair rolled to and fro on the wooden floor, and the words of a lullaby floated on the morning air:

Hetty stirred. Her head emerged from the thicket of bedclothes to see Pearl rocking Pierce, still wrapped in his blanket and half asleep. She staggered off the chaise, yearning for her baby so much she almost snatched him away. Pearl handed Pierce over and vacated the rocker. Hetty took her place, falling into the same swaying rhythm but unable to sing. She looked at her baby’s face and thought about the words of the lullaby. Hetty glanced at her friend, sitting in a smolder at the kitchen table. She looked more spectral than ever from the ordeal they’d been through. “I don’t know what I’d do without you. You’ve been keeping watch over both of us.”

“Somebody had to.” Hetty could hear the censure in Pearl’s voice.

“Don’t judge me too harshly, Pearl.”

“I leave that to God, hon.” She threw Hetty a wan smile.

“Right now, it’s all I can do not to duck back under the sheet.”

“I know.”

“I could feel that newspaper sitting there on the table. That’s why I couldn’t get up. I heard the pages crinkling as you and Ada read about Pick when you thought I was asleep. You tried to cry quietly so I wouldn’t hear, but I did. I knew what waited for me out here, and I couldn’t face it.”

Pearl lit a cigarette and took little quick puffs off it. “I just can’t believe it come to this.”

“You think it’s my fault, don’t you?”

Pearl didn’t say anything, just lifted her cigarette to her mouth.

“Well, it
is
my fault.”

“Hon, you can’t—”

“Oh, yes, I can. I was the one who sent him out there in the night to break the law. That’s what you’re thinking. And I can’t blame you for reproaching me. How could I do such a thing? I was so blinded by my—my rage at having my oil stolen. I should have made him go home. Garret was right—we should have all left days ago. He reached his hand out to me, and I couldn’t take it. Now I don’t even know where my husband is.” Hetty’s buried grief suddenly surfaced, trembling in the room.

“I know where mine is. In prison.”

“I’m sorry, Pearl.” Hetty felt tears falling down her cheeks.

“Don’t you start in. You’ll get me to crying, too. Heartache’s catching, don’t you know that?” She rose and showed Hetty some packages of Diamond Dyes that had been sitting on the kitchen table, along with a tin of Polyshine. “I’ve been cleaning out Pick’s room. I found these. They’re black.”

Hetty gazed at the objects quivering in her friend’s thin fingers. The shock started wringing all the blackness out of her mind as she understood what Pick had been doing with the dye, how his onyx skin disappeared into the shadows so she sent him out there night after night to be invisible and save her oil. He’d dipped his clothes in Diamond Dyes for her sake. “He was trying to make himself disappear,” she said.

Hetty and Pearl stood looking at the Wichita flatbed truck, its orange paint splattered with splinters of mud. “Think you can drive this bus?” Pearl asked.

“I sure hope so.”

Hetty opened the demi-door and pulled herself up. Pearl came in the other side, Pierce wiggling in her embrace. Hetty had to stretch her leg to reach the clutch. She pushed it in, turned the key, and hit the starter button. The cold motor churned.

“Pick always pulled out the choke first,” Pearl said, pointing.

“Damn. Choking is my downfall,” Hetty said. She pulled it out halfway and tried the starter again. After a few attempts, she got the motor racing and ground the gears into first. Her white sandals were so delicate, she had to pump a little harder on the heavy accelerator as they headed south. She and Pearl had spent the last two days packing up the shotgun houses and burning all the soiled work clothes. “Oil leaves such stains,” she’d said.

“Don’t burn the suit Pick wore to church,” Pearl had said. “I think we should keep that.”

As they stood over the smoldering ashes, Hetty had gotten a call on Ada’s party line from Nella. Her mother’s tinny telephone voice had delivered bad news: Both the Warwick Hotel and the Esperson Building were being sold at auction. She and Kirby had no choice but to move out. They wanted back the money they had sunk into the consortium. “I’m not living in a bankrupt hotel,” she had announced. Hetty realized that she had to sell the well, her last remaining asset. The Hillyers were in agreement with this, as long as they still called it the Ada Hillyer. That’s why she and Pearl were now chugging down a narrow dirt road that twisted through acres of fallow farmland turning brown in the August heat. They passed the Goss house and barns, then rolled into pastures full of the roar and clatter of wells being drilled. She pulled up to the field house, a rough clapboard shed with a tin roof and the Splendora logo on the door.

“Wait here,” she told Pearl.

The grizzled crew working a derrick nearby looked surprised when she stepped out of the muddy truck carrying an oil well log. She had spent an hour grooming herself, and she knew her dark eyes looked especially radiant in the shade of her large white brimmed straw hat. All the men kept their stares clamped on her as she strolled their way, her blue chiffon dress fluttering in the breeze. Someone whistled. Only one man was wearing a white shirt and tie to show that he was boss. He turned to see what all the men were gawking at and broke out into a big grin when he spotted her.

“You finally found me!” Lamar shouted.

“It wasn’t easy,” Hetty said, stepping up to him daintily. “What are you hiding?”

“Treasure, of course.”

“That’s what I came to talk to you about. Could we go somewhere private?”

He gestured. “Step into my elegant office, ma’am.”

A circulating fan tried to stir up the sultry air in the field house, making the maps pinned to the wall flap now and then. Red flags punctured the paper where wells had been drilled. Hetty did a quick count while Lamar threw open the roll-top desk. Almost two dozen.
He’s not wasting any time
.

Lamar’s wooden office chair squeaked when he sat down. Hetty lounged back on an old, stained leather couch, pulling her dress up an inch or two and crossing her legs. She lit a Lucky and blew the smoke in his direction. “I’ve decided to sell the Ada Hillyer Number One. I’m willing to let it go for five thousand. You’ll make that back in a few weeks once they lift martial law.”