The Longest Road (39 page)

“Neither do I,” he laughed, and took her carrier, striding to the shed to mark down her crates and those of several pickers who were impatiently waiting.

She didn't go, of course. Next day, Bobby Jay flirted with Linda and marked up Laurie's crates as if he'd never seen her before. It stung a little, but not much. What stung more was that Bobby Jay had thought she might swim naked with him and then—

She thought of Morrigan and blushed hotly. It seemed almost blasphemous to think of him in connection with Bobby Jay's suggestion but grateful as she was for Marilys and Way, Laurie yearned for Morrigan almost in the way she did for her parents except with the hope she might someday see him again. Because he'd come to them the day they left Prairieville, the day that world had ended, and because he'd laughed and talked with Daddy, Morrigan was linked to her childhood, but she didn't want him for a father.

Laurie finished ninth grade in Splitlog, and Buddy the fourth. They came home with their report cards to find Way and Marilys loading the truck. “I'm sorry, kiddos, but we got to scoot,” said Way, pausing to wipe sweat from his forehead and crinkly eyebrows. “Feller who works with me has a brother who's a deputy sheriff. Told my friend a private detective's nosin' around for someone who looks like me—wanted for theft in Texas. He ruffled feathers in the sheriff's office. They didn't tell him anything but Splitlog's not big enough to hide in.”

Laurie's heart stopped, then pounded. She leaned against the truck to keep from falling. It had seemed so safe. She had almost stopped worrying. Marilys touched her cheek. “At least the detective didn't seem to know that we're all with Way. But it shows Dub hasn't given up. Change into your overalls, honey, and let's see how far we can get tonight.”

Who would eat the good things from their garden, pick grapes from the arbor, plums and apples from the trees? Who would sit on the porch swing and hear the mockingbird when the honeysuckle and magnolia smelled so sweet that you ached with the beauty?

Buddy's face screwed up. “Can I tell the guys so long?”

“Sorry, son.” Way dropped a hand on Buddy's shoulder. “Better not.”

The back of the truck was heaped with bedding and belongings, though the only thing they were taking along of the makeshift pieces they'd acquired was the sewing machine.

“Reckon we'd better stick to the oil fields, maybe head for Louisiana for a spell,” Way said as they rattled south.

Laurie got out the harmonica. As always, when starting for a new place, she wondered, Would Morrigan be there?

She launched into “Tumbling Tumbleweed,” using her fingers to make a rustle like the wind, and in a minute, the others were singing. How lucky that no matter how light you had to travel, you could always carry songs!

21

The family moved around Louisiana for the next two years with occasional job forays into East Texas, living in tents, tarpaper shacks, lean-tos. They didn't want Way endangering himself by working as a roughneck or roustabout but he hauled pipe and other supplies, and helped build tanks and rigs. Painted signs, too, about the time they were fixing to leave a camp. That was when Laurie and Buddy would entertain in cafés while Marilys played the piano or guitar wherever she could briefly make “a star appearance.” She did dressmaking, too, and gave piano lessons wherever there was enough of a permanent town for richer, settled folks to have pianos.

During the school year, they tried to stay a semester in the same town so Buddy's schooling wouldn't be too broken up. With Laurie coaching him, he managed to pass. “But you don't go anymore!” he protested when she marched him down to register for seventh grade.

“I finished ninth grade in Splitlog,” she reminded him. “When you get that far, you can decide if you want to go on so you can maybe go to college and be an engineer or something like that.” She knew he admired the engineers, who, like drillers, always wore the very best boots and Stetsons, though most were careful never to be seen in new-looking hats. They got them oily and spanked them in some dust. Laurie let that temptation sink in and continued, “You're staying in school till you're through ninth if it takes ten years so you might as well buckle down and study.”

He glowered at her triumphantly. “In ten years, I'll be twenty! You won't be the boss of me after I'm eighteen—not even that long if I run away.”

“Run if you want to,” she said, knowing he wouldn't, not for worlds. “But as long as you're home, you're going to finish at least ninth grade.”

She hadn't felt right about being a burden on Marilys and Way while she finished high school. Besides, though she loved to learn, she was tired of always being an outsider, fearing to make friends she'd lose in a few months. She had another guitar and knew she could make a living from music. Marilys had taught her to sew and Laurie now made her own clothes. She liked cooking a lot better and she and Marilys took turns preparing meals. Several times, she and Marilys hired on to cook in boomtown restaurants. Laurie learned from Marilys how to banter with the oil-field workers while making it clear that none of them were walking her home. It was seldom necessary for Marilys to give an importunate roughneck or toolie his marching orders, but when it was, her tongue was so scathing that the man slunk away among the hoots of his companions—who, at that point, would have made sure he let the women alone.

These workers, many of them from ruined farms or ranches, ranged from one field to the next, Texas, Oklahoma, Louisiana, Kansas, working twelve-hour “towers,” cleaning up, eating, then looking for some fun, which was usually a fight, before collapsing on a cot that was often warm from the previous occupant. Laurie saw so many tanned, joking, oil-stained men that it seemed Morrigan should have turned up amongst them.

“That driller, Jim Hartford, seems real nice,” Marilys remarked one day as she put a row of pies in the oven and Laurie washed dishes in the open-sided tent restaurant where they were working. “And I've heard that movie he asked you to,
Algiers
, is really good—with Charles Boyer, it has to be!”

“Jim is nice.” Laurie scrubbed at some hardened egg. “But—well, it doesn't seem right to go out with him.”

“Whyever not? He can't be more than twenty-three or -four. It's true you're only fifteen but you're grown up.”

When she really was grown up—and when Buddy was eighteen, so Redwine's custody order wouldn't count—then they could settle down. Way could start a painting business, Marilys could teach piano, maybe play in a nice restaurant, and Laurie and Buddy could perform without worrying about getting caught.

They could go visit Rosalie, too, and collect the books and things Laurie hoped she was still saving. Through the years, Laurie had sent Rosalie money now and then and let her know they were fine, but she always mailed letters from some town they were just passing through, or gave them to a worker who was heading for another field to mail when he got there. There mustn't be any way for Grandpa Field to track them and hand them over to Redwine. Of course he probably didn't want her now, but he'd cause Marilys and Way plenty of grief, maybe even get them sent to the penitentiary. All this passed through Laurie's head before she rinsed the last dishes and began drying them.

“Don't think I'm crazy, Marilys, but I keep hoping that—well, that John Morrigan may turn up.”

“Good grief!” Marilys's jaw dropped. She wiped her hands on her apron and sighed. “Laurie, baby, am I right that this man was with you for just a day while your daddy was driving you to your grandpa's?”

Memories flooded back from those times she remembered no more than she had to, except for Morrigan. Leaving Prairieville and the brave little cherry tree, the desolate wasteland of the Oklahoma Panhandle, Buddy sick, Daddy wrestling with the flat tire, and Morrigan appearing, just when they all needed hope and comfort so much. As always, when she really allowed herself to think about him beyond being grateful daily for the harmonica and his songs, Laurie's gratitude mingled with a silent wail from her heart.
Morrigan, Morrigan, won't I ever see you again, won't I ever find you?

“He came along at noon the day we left home,” she said, blinking back tears. “He got Daddy to rest till it cooled off and made willow tea for Buddy. He helped Daddy drive and change flats and we let him off next morning so he could catch a train.”

“So he was really with you less than a day.”

“Yes, but you know how days are. Lots are just about the same. Some are real happy and others are pretty bad.” Laurie groped to explain. “Some days are like—hinges. They can swing either way and shut you on that side. Black Sunday was like that, when Daddy went after Buddy and we all thought the world was coming to an end. That was the day when everything changed.” Laurie could still hardly bear to think about her mother's last illness and forged ahead. “It was a hinge day when Buddy and I ran away and met Way on the train. If he hadn't been there—” She shivered even now to remember the jocker. “It was a hinge when we got in Redwine's car for the first time. And when you decided to come away with us and hunt for Way.”

“But, honey, Morrigan only did what any decent man would have.”

Laurie shook her head. “He gave me music.”

“Yes, and that was wonderful—is wonderful.” Marilys gave Laurie a helpless, worried look. “Listen, dear, all I'm trying to say is that you've turned this Morrigan into a hero. With you dreaming over him all these years, building him up, he seems smarter and handsomer and wiser and stronger than any man who's going to walk in here and stretch his legs under the table. But they're
here
.” She hesitated. “Laurie, I hate to say this, but you've got to face it. The oil fields're dangerous and so's a hobo's life. He could be dead.”

“If he is, I don't want to know it.” Laurie hugged the older woman and laughed. “Marilys, I'm only fifteen! The way you're carrying on, anyone would think I was an old maid! I'll bet if I wanted to marry Jim, you and Way would have fits.”

Marilys grinned reluctantly. Marriage agreed with her. She was prettier now she ever had been, not so frail and wispy, with good healthy color in her cheeks. “You
are
too young to get married, but you're of an age when you ought to start getting acquainted with men, go out with some nice ones, fall in love a few times for practice.”

“I don't think I'm going to do that.”

Marilys scanned her closely. “Oh, Laurie, baby! You sure can't think you're in love with John Morrigan!”

Laurie colored. “I don't know what it is. He lives in the back of my mind, he's always there, just like his songs.” She had never tried to pursue her feelings for Morrigan till she could put them into words. “He—he came to us when it was like the end of the world. Rosalie was nice to us, but if Morrigan hadn't come, if he hadn't left us his songs, I don't know what would have happened to Buddy and me.”

“You'd have managed.”

“Maybe. But it's like you would've managed without Way.”

Way just then drove up in front of the café and got out of the truck. They looked anxiously at each other as they heard him coughing. “That asthma gets worse all the time,” Marilys said soft enough for him not to hear. He got mad when they fussed over him. “I think it's the mold and damp. It didn't start till we moved to Louisiana.”

Laurie thought about that. “Maybe we need to move to where it's dry.”

“Maybe. But we can't get near the Panhandle in case Dub's still got the law or his detectives after Way and us.”

“We could go to Oklahoma or central Texas.”

“May have to.” Marilys poured a mug of steaming coffee and handed it to Way as he sank down on a bench. Coffee helped relax his spasming chest muscles. By the time he swallowed a second mug, his skin had lost its pallor and he could speak.

“Sorry, gals,” he said, with a twisted grin. “You better take me out and shoot me.”

“Hush that!” Marilys studied him anxiously as she refilled the mug. “What we'd better do is move to where you can breathe!”

They had argued this before. It was a mark of how bad off Way was when he hunched his shoulders and then nodded. “Okay,” he wheezed. “Soon as Buddy finishes school. Can't pull him out three weeks before the end of the term.”

“All right,” bargained Marilys, “as long as you'll lay off work and take care of yourself.”

Three weeks and two days later, they picked Buddy up at school, stopped at the drugstore to celebrate with chocolate malts his passing sixth grade, and drove toward the setting sun.

They didn't get into the worst part of the Dust Bowl, but the fringe that the Fields had driven through on their way to southwestern Oklahoma four years ago had changed past recognition. It had rained enough last year in 1938 to finally break the drought that had begun in 1931 and produce something of a wheat crop. This year's rainfall was close to normal. Many farmhouses stood empty but around them, instead of oceans of fine, rippled dust, valiant spears of corn and wheat marched to the horizon and cattle grazed where buffalo grass had revived and ruffled softly in the wind, changing color like rose-gold velvet rubbed against the grain before it was smoothed again.

“Remember that story we read last year in
The Saturday Evening Post
?” Laurie asked. She loved the magazine for its good stories and usually managed a nickel for it. Because “It's Gotta Rain Sometime” reminded her so powerfully of her home region, she'd read it several times and remembered the April 9, 1938, date, and the author, Ross Annett. “I wonder if that really happened to some farmer out here?”

“Let's see,” mused Way. “The bank took back two of the feller's tractors but another was buried so deep in dust it couldn't be dug out.”