Tallgrass (28 page)

“Oh, it’s not so bad where it’s plowed. I put the chains on. I’d like to shake the hand of the man who invented the automobile heater and give him an Oh Henry bar. You taken yourself on a joyride, have you?”

“We’ve been out to the camp. Daisy had her baby, a girl.”

“Well, ain’t that fine. They come through all right?”

Dad nodded. “I don’t suppose you came out in this weather on a social call, Sheriff. You here on business?”

“I am.”

Dad turned to me. “Rennie, go ask your mother to make some coffee.”

Sheriff Watrous held up his hand. “You might ask the girl to stay a minute. This concerns her.”

Dad and I exchanged a look, and I thought about Susan Reddick. She’d been killed during a snowstorm. I thought, Maybe some other girl had been killed. I wondered if I’d ever quit thinking about Susan Reddick’s death, if I’d ever stop checking the locks on the doors or looking out the window when something woke me in the night.

“Wait just a bit,” Dad said. He was a farmer, and with farmers, animals always come before anything. He and I finished rubbing down Nancy, and Dad led her to a stall. I filled a bucket with water and hung it up for the horse, then went back and waited with the sheriff while Dad got grain. Sheriff Watrous blew on his mittened hands and stamped his feet until Dad finished and climbed into the sleigh, which was sitting in the middle of the barn. I edged in next to him. “Now, Hen, what can we do for you?” Dad asked.

“Gus Snow showed up in town this morning,” Sheriff Watrous said, leaning against a post and crossing his feet. He chuckled a little. “Two ’snowstorms,’ I guess you could call it.” He shook his head. ” ’Taint funny, McGee,’ as the feller says on the radio.” He pronounced the word
raad-e-o.

“He’s doing all right, is he?”

The sheriff shook his head. “I wouldn’t know. I’d heard he didn’t stay in that hospital but a short time, just kind of disappeared. But as long as he didn’t turn up here, it wasn’t any of my business. He did turn up this morning, however, just like a bad penny. He asked me where his girl was.” The sheriff took off his hat and slapped it against his leg to get rid of the snow before he put it back on his head. “I told him I didn’t tend kids.”

“I don’t suppose it will take him long to find out where she’s at.”

“No, not too long. And when he does, there’s nothing I can do to stop him from taking Betty Joyce. Mrs. Snow never did take out a restraining order or nothing. He hasn’t been here?” The sheriff removed the mitten from his right hand and took a cigar from his inside coat pocket and put it into his mouth. He didn’t light it.

I trembled, not from the cold, but from the idea that Mr. Snow could just take Betty Joyce. She’d have to go back to the hardware store, where he’d yell at her and hit her, and her mother wouldn’t be there to protect her. I realized even if we could hide her on our farm, she wouldn’t be able to attend school, because Mr. Snow would show up there and make her go home with him.

“No, he hasn’t been here yet, not in this storm,” Dad replied.

The sheriff turned to me, and I shook my head. “Not unless he came while we were at Tallgrass.”

“You didn’t see any sign of anybody, Mr. Stroud?”

“Didn’t look.” Dad shifted in the sleigh. “Is Gus still on the morphine?”

“That, I couldn’t tell you. He looked all right to me, but I don’t know much about those things.”

I wondered if Mr. Snow would make Betty Joyce go to work to earn money to buy him drugs. If Mr. Snow had gotten morphine from Beaner Jack, as Mom suspected, then Betty Joyce would have to be nice to Beaner. I was worried that Mr. Snow would make her marry one of the Jacks, and then she’d be just like Darlene Potts. I thought of the way Betty Joyce had been just before she came to live on our farm, tired and beaten down. She’d been so happy since she’d moved in with us, but I knew it wouldn’t take much to turn her into her mother. “Couldn’t she go live with her mom?” I asked suddenly.

“That’s what I’m thinking.” Sheriff Watrous chewed on the end of the cigar for a minute. “But with the wires down, I can’t even telephone to her.”

Dad asked when the lines would be fixed, and the sheriff said he thought it wouldn’t be for a day or two.

“Mr. Snow could find her by then,” I said.

“I kind of hate to wait that long myself,” Sheriff Watrous said.

“Maybe Mrs. Stroud could take her to Pueblo,” Dad suggested.

The sheriff nodded. “I was hoping you folks’d see it that way.” He took the cigar out of his mouth and looked at the end, which was soggy.

“Will it be all right, Betty Joyce just showing up like that?” I asked.

“It will,” the sheriff replied. “LaVerne Booth—that’s Mrs. Snow’s sister, I think you know—she’s an odd one, but she’s got a soft spot for a hard case, unless it’s Gus Snow. She takes in stray dogs, cripples, widows, orphans. She don’t know a stranger.” He put the cigar into his pocket.

“I guess we’d better go talk to Mrs. Stroud. They’ll be wanting to leave pretty quick, before Gus comes here.” Dad stepped down from the sleigh and held out his hand to me, and we went into the house.

Mom and Betty Joyce were waiting for us in the kitchen, and when the sheriff told Betty Joyce that her father was in town, she clasped her hands together until they turned white. Then she moved behind Mom. I went over to her and pried one hand loose and held it, whispering that everything would be all right. We’d become almost sisters in the time she’d lived with us, and I hated to see her leave. It would be just like Marthalice going away. But there wasn’t any choice. I couldn’t ask her to stay on with us if there was danger of her father coming for her and taking her away.

“I like it here. I’ve never been with a real family before,” Betty Joyce told Sheriff Watrous. “I’m scared of him.” And I thought again what a terrible thing it was to be afraid of your own father. Betty Joyce said she’d run off before she’d go back to him.

“You don’t have to do that, sis. I think we’ve got a plan,” Sheriff Watrous said. He turned to Morn and asked if she’d be willing to take Betty Joyce to her mother in Pueblo. He’d drive the two of them to Lamar on the hard road, which had been plowed, and they could catch the train there. That way, they wouldn’t chance running into Mr. Snow in Ellis. I helped Betty Joyce pack her few things, and I pinned the new V for Victory pin onto her coat. I’d sent money to Cousin Hazel to get a second one and had given it to Betty Joyce for Christmas. An hour later, Betty Joyce and Mom were gone.

Before they left, Dad gave Mom a check for Mrs. Snow, to cover the items Dad had taken from the hardware store. When I asked him why he did that—because, after all, Betty Joyce had lived with us since fall and Mom was paying for their train tickets—Dad replied, “It wouldn’t be right not to.”

Mr. Snow never came to our farm. He stayed around Ellis for a week or two, living in the hardware store, although the heat and lights were turned off. He sold everything in the store that was worth a nickel, the stock as well as the furniture and Mrs. Snow’s dishes and silverware, even her old shoes and aprons. Mr. Snow spotted me in town once and yelled, but I ran into the Lee Drug, and he didn’t follow me. Mr. Lee said I could go out the back door and that he’d drive me home, but Mr. Snow wandered off toward Jay Dee’s and disappeared.

Not long after that, Mr. Snow went on the tramp. For a time, people thought he’d turn up, asking for a handout, whining about his luck. I worried that he’d blame us for what happened to him, that some night when it was darkest, I’d go into the barn and he’d be waiting there, crazed on morphine, and push me into the tack room and kill me. But that didn’t happen. After a while, Dad decided Mr. Snow had just drifted off, maybe froze to death on the prairie or died in a hobo jungle.

DAISY CAME BACK TO
work for us a couple of weeks after Amy Elizabeth was born. “I’m as strong as a tractor. I feel like a million,” she insisted. When Mom told her it was too soon, Daisy said, “Here’s the dope: I can come here and be useful, or sit in that darn barracks and go crazy. Now that’s the straight stuff.” She sounded like the old Daisy. And she was the old Daisy. Maybe it was having the baby to live for that had restored her.

While Daisy worked, Amy Elizabeth slept in our family cradle, which Dad took down from the hayloft and set up in the living room. Mom scrubbed it and fitted it with a new mattress, and Granny worked a couple dozen baby quilts for it. Hut Daisy said her favorite was the one that Betty Joyce and I had made.

When Daisy hung up laundry or worked in the yard, she carried Amy Elizabeth around in a sort of sling across her chest. Daisy chattered to the baby all day long or put records on the phonograph and jitterbuggeed around the living room with Amy Elizabeth in her arms. “She’s the nuts,” Daisy said. The little girl had inch-long black hair that stuck out all over and eyes as black as currants. Amy Elizabeth hardly ever cried, and she smiled before she was a month old, and after she stopped looking like a walnut, she really was pretty.

Dad worried about Daisy, Carl, and the baby coming to the farm by themselves in the mornings. He offered to pick them up in the truck. “You can’t carry the baby all the way from the camp, especially in this weather,” he told Carl.

“That baby doesn’t weigh any more than a sack lunch,” Carl told him, and he refused Dad’s offer of a ride.

Still, some mornings when he heard a truck or a car going down the Tallgrass Road toward the camp, Dad went out on the porch and watched for Carl and Daisy. He said he’d feel better when spring came and Carl hired boys from Tallgrass to help with planting. It wouldn’t be long now. Carl and Dad were spending more and more time preparing the fields instead of repairing equipment and working in the barn.

One Friday morning, when school was closed for a teachers’ conference, Mom asked me to go with her to town. A storm was threatening and she’d run out of her medicine. The winter had sapped Mom, who was feeling weak again and was glad that Daisy had taken over the heavy work. Mom didn’t like driving the big, awkward truck. But Dad was off at the sugar refinery with the team and wagon, and she didn’t want to wait until he returned. It was too cold for me to walk into town, Mom said, and she’d feel safer if I drove along with her. “I just don’t know how I could have let a thing like this slip my mind, but I hate to go without those pills,” she told me. Daisy, with Amy Elizabeth in the sling, was hanging out the wash when we left, and Mom called to her and said we were going into Ellis.

She pulled out onto the Tallgrass Road and drove with both hands clutching the wheel, staring straight ahead, barreling along at five miles an hour. We could have walked faster. When a beat-up truck passed us, going the other way, she slowed down. “How those boys do speed,” she complained. We hadn’t gone far when a dog came out of the field and ran alongside us in the ditch, unnerving Mom. She used to be just fine driving Red Boy, but since she’d been sick, she’d lost her self-confidence along with her strength. Mom slowed, glancing at the road, then at the dog, her head going back and forth. Finally, she stopped to let the dog cross in front of us, but it only continued along in the ditch. So Mom started up again, and in a minute, the dog disappeared into the field, and she breathed a sigh of relief and stepped on the gas.

At that moment, a jackrabbit darted in front of the truck, and Mom turned the wheel hard, too hard. She corrected, turning the wheel in the opposite direction. Red Roy jerked one way, then the other, and the right front wheel plunged into the ditch and we came to a stop. “Well, darn it all!” Mom said. We were going so slowly that she barely hit her chest against the steering wheel. “Rennie, are you all right?”

I’d put out my hands and caught myself against the dashboard. “Yeah.” I blew out my breath and looked at Mom and almost laughed. We were no more hurt than if she’d stopped at a red light. I opened the door and got out and looked at the front wheel, which was all the way down in the ditch. I climbed back in and told Mom the truck was all right, too, but there was no way we could back it out. “Dad and Carl will have to bring the horses and pull it out.”

“Well, that’s a heck of a thing,” Mom said. “What’s your Dad going to say about that?”

“Probably ’Thank the Lord you’re both okay.’ ”

Mom reached over and squeezed my hand, and there were tears in her eyes. Dad was the only man in the county who wouldn’t blow up at his wife for running his truck off the road. “I guess we’d better get out and start walking,” she said.

As we started back up the frozen dirt road, it began to sleet— hard little granules of snow like clumps of sugar that hit our faces and necks. After a minute, they turned into snow. “I hope your Dad can get the truck out in time to drive the Tanakas back to camp tonight. I don’t like the idea of them walking home in this storm with that dear little baby,” Mom said. We shivered as we walked along, and Mom drew me close to her to keep us both warm. For a few minutes, we sang “Onward, Christian Soldiers,” marching along in tandem. We finished the last verse hut kept on taking big steps together until we reached our driveway. As we turned in, Mom stopped and scanned the yard, frowning as she looked at the clothesline. A sheet was half-pinned to the line, and the clothes basket was turned over. “Where’s Daisy?” Mom asked. She sounded confused more than worried.