The Longest Road (6 page)

Laurie was washing Buddy's face and arms to cool him when John Morrigan came up in an easy swinging stride. He dumped a handful of white inner bark shavings into the boiling water, let it come back to a full boil, and set the kettle on the ground. His neat, quick, way of doing things didn't waste a motion.

“It's none of my business, Mr. Field, but the kids might hold up better if you wait a couple hours and travel after it cools down. Looks like you got your, bedding. You could sleep out tonight and get to your father's place before it gets real hot tomorrow.”

Daddy looked like he was going to argue. Then he looked at Buddy. “Reckon that's good advice, John, but I sure hate to sit around when the old Ford could be makin' miles.”

“And flats. They'll be easier to change when it's cooler.”

“Guess you'll want to hitch a ride with somebody else,” Daddy said regretfully.

Morrigan shrugged. “Liefer visit with you folks, play a few songs to pass the afternoon. I got some canned peaches and salmon we can have for supper and a sack of oatmeal cookies a lady gave me along with dinner yesterday for fixin' her screen doors.”

Laurie's mouth watered for a cookie but Daddy said, “We can feed our company. Is that a guitar you got?”

“That's what it is.” Morrigan poured willow brew into a cup and handed it to Laurie. “Maybe your brother will take it better from you.”

Laurie doubted that. Buddy had to be spanked sometimes before he'd take his medicine. Mama always made sure he'd swallowed it because otherwise he'd hold a pill in his mouth till he could get away and spit it out. As Laurie gingerly raised the cup to Buddy's lips, Morrigan smiled at the boy.

“That's what Choctaw Indians use for upsets like yours, son. It's broke me out of a bad fever many a time.”

Buddy took a sip, struggled not to make a face, and gazed at Morrigan with wide, glittering eyes. “Are you a Choctaw, mister?”

“Grandma was a full-blood married to a quarter-Scots MacIntosh so that made my mother seven-eighths Choctaw. Grandpa Morrigan came over from Ireland and married a girl who was half Chickasaw. That made Dad a quarter Chickasaw. So—let's see now, Bud: I'm one-eighth Chickasaw on my father's side and one-sixteenth white on my mother's side, so what do you figure that makes me?”

Spellbound by Morrigan's teasing, lilting words, Buddy drank without protest, but shook his head at the question. “What does it make you, mister?”

For a moment, Laurie was afraid Morrigan would say “half-breed” but instead he laughed and gave Buddy's hair a gentle ruffling. “One mean Irish Injun! Shall I sing you a song about a man who was even more mixed up?”

Buddy nodded. By the time Morrigan got out his guitar, wiped it lovingly with a soft rag, tuned it, and rollicked through “I'm My Own Grandpa,” Buddy had finished another cup of tea and was sweating. His eyes had lost some of their mirrorlike blankness and he didn't squirm when Laurie, sparing of water since they might not be able to fill their jars that day, moistened the rag again and bathed his face, neck, and arms.

When she started to fold the cloth across Buddy's forehead, Morrigan said, “It'll do more good across his throat where it'll cool those big arteries on either side of his windpipe. Like some special song, Buddy?”

“Do you know ‘I Love Bananas Because They Have No Bones'?”

Morrigan did. And he played “Amazing Grace” for Daddy and “Pretty Redwing” for Laurie. “Now here's one about that dust storm,” he said. “I was visitin' this friend out by Pampa, Texas, when it came up and he wrote this song, ‘So Long, It's Been Good to Know You.' Mighty good songmaker Woody Guthrie is. This was just how it was, folks thinkin' the end had come and just sayin' good-bye to their neighbors.”

There were a lot of verses. They told exactly how it had been, and how it was, but this wasn't a sad song or a sad tune. Morrigan's deep sweet voice lilted soft or swelled high, rollicked along till your foot tapped, and made you believe that even if the dusty wind was blowing you and other folks away from home, there'd be a place to stop, a place to live again, in your own house with your own family.…

No, that couldn't ever be. Mama was gone. Without her the finest mansion wouldn't be home, but there could've been a kind of a one, even under a tarp, if Daddy would take them with him.

But he won't, thought Laurie, struggling with tears. He still wants to go to California even after Mr. Morrigan told him there aren't any good jobs. Daddy wants to get away from us. I guess we remind him too much of Mama and how it was. I guess he can't stand it. But how are
we
going to stand living at Grandpa Field's? It's not fair. Daddy can leave us wherever he wants and it doesn't matter a bit what we want.

Still, she was heartened by Morrigan's singing, and cheered that Buddy was looking better. She smoothed back her brother's hair and closed her eyes, drawing the melody into her blood and breathing, filling the emptiness Mama's dying had left in her with John Morrigan's voice. “
It's me, it's me, it's me, Oh Lord, standin' in the need of a home
.…”

Wasn't it funny how a sad song could make you feel better? More as if you weren't alone, that other people had gone through as bad or worse and managed to make music out of it? She tried to remember the words of the songs Morrigan sang that she didn't know so she'd have them later, when he was gone.

You got to walk that lonesome valley,

You got to walk it by yourself.

Nobody else can walk it for you.

You got to walk it by yourself.…

He played and sang till the sun slanted low in the west. A little breeze made the shiny new cottonwood leaves whisper though, thank goodness, it didn't stir up dust or ashes. Laurie wished they could stay here, that they didn't have to travel on and lose Morrigan.

Daddy, eager as he was to get shut of them, must have felt a little the same. He sighed as he got to his feet and stared south. “Guess we'd better chug along. How far can you ride with us, John?”

“Why, if you can put up with me that long, I'd like to get off in Clinton—catch a ride there on the Chicago, Rock Island and Pacific. If the railroad bulls don't throw me off, I can go all the way to MacAlester on that line. Or I can hitchhike east on good old Route Sixty-six.”

“What're railroad bulls?” asked Buddy.

“Oh, you might say they're police the railroads hire to make sure nobody rides in their empty boxcars that're shuttlin' back and forth over land the government gave the railroads in order to get 'em to build as a public service. Yessiree, it's a public service 'long as you can pay your fare.”

Speaking in a hurry, because of course riding a train without paying for it was pretty close to stealing, Daddy said, “We can drop you right in Clinton, John. Glad of the company.”

Somehow they got Morrigan's guitar and sack tied on top with the suitcase. Buddy settled into a nest of bedding in the backseat, and Laurie sat between Daddy and Morrigan, turning her knees in order to give Morrigan's long legs more room. She savored his closeness and his odor. It was woodsmoke and salt and man scent that had no sourness or discouragement to it like Daddy's. She smelled tobacco, too, and ruefully concluded that Morrigan must be a sinner—but she didn't care.

Talk flowed back and forth between him and Daddy. They had to raise their voices above the sound of the engine and whine of the wind. When they neared a man shambling along in the other direction with a battered old cardboard suitcase, Daddy stopped and gave him what was left of the fried rabbit and a jar half-full of water.

“My landlord got money for tractors from the NBA,” said the shrunken, stoop-shouldered man whose face was wrinkled as a prune. “So he tells me and two other guys who were farmin' for him to clear out. Don't need us. Goddam gover'ment. Goddam machinery!”

“Brother, it don't help to take the Lord's name in vain,” said Daddy.

“Don't seem to have helped you not to. But I shouldn't have cussed in front of the kiddies.” The wizened face split to show good teeth and Laurie realized with shock that he must be no older than Daddy. “You just forget that, sissy, and remember how I sure am obliged. Good luck to you folks.”

“Good luck to you,” said Daddy, and Laurie echoed that.

“Want me to drive, Ed?” asked Morrigan, for Daddy had asked him to drop the “Mr. Field.”

“Glad for you to.” Daddy took up more of the seat than had Morrigan and Laurie had to brace herself to keep from jouncing to the floorboards. She forgot her discomfort, though, in the glory of the sunset that crimsoned the whole western sky, scarlet streaked with fiery gold. The brilliance deepened to glowing purple red, then slowly faded to hazy violet.

“They say dust makes these pretty sunsets.” Morrigan grinned. “Reckon that's the only good thing about it. Glad you gave that old boy back there some food. I've been mighty hollow myself and you know what I found out?”

“What?” asked Laurie, Buddy, and Daddy all at once.

“No use goin' to the churches. I've been run off from every brand of church under the sun. I knew better'n to go to the rich houses, but the middlin' ones won't feed you, either. What you do is go to the poor folks. They've been hungry. Whatever they've got, they'll share it. Funny thing is that these holy folks wouldn't let Jesus in their churches or homes if He came back today. They'd call him a hobo and jail him for not havin' a job. But you know, Ed, I have an idea that if He was here, he'd be with the Okies in those stinkin' California camps.”

Daddy looked startled but then he nodded. “The Lord said the foxes had holes and the birds had nests but He didn't have anyplace to rest His head.”

“There's another song Woody taught me,” Morrigan said. “Goes to the tune of ‘Jesse James.'” Softly, he began a song about Jesus and how he was killed. From that, he moved on to songs Laurie had heard all her life, “Chisholm Trail,” “Strawberry Roan,” “She'll Be Comin' Around the Mountain,” and “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot.”

Laurie and her father joined in the choruses. It made her feel better, lightened the sick heaviness of her heart. Maybe as long as you could sing or make up songs about how you felt, it kept you from feeling quite so hopeless and poor and lonesome. Singing made you think about whoever made the song and all the people who'd sung it since, and everybody who was in the same fix, made you know you belonged to the human race even if your home was gone and your family busted up and you didn't know what was going to happen.

I'll try to keep Morrigan's songs, Laurie vowed. If I can remember them after he's gone maybe it'll seem a little like he's still with us. Uncomfortable as her perch was, she didn't want this time with him to end.

Close to the road, they passed a blistered farmhouse where a family was piling furniture and belongings into an old Ford truck. In spite of this melancholy occupation, they waved, so Daddy stopped to ask if they could fill their water jars.

“Help yourself, mister,” said the graying man, weathered and gnarled as a cottonwood root clinging to an eroded bank. “At least the well ain't dried up yet.”

His wife, except for her ruffled sunbonnet and faded dress, looked remarkably like him, too old to be the mother of the towheaded little girl peering from behind her. The oldest boy was taller than Laurie. Three other youngsters stairstepped between him and the toddler, all fair-haired, blue-eyed, and clad in patched overalls that obviously descended through the children according to size till they fell off the thin, sunburned bodies.

The Fields and Morrigan climbed out, each taking a jar, and headed for the well at the side of the house. The door of a sagging barn creaked and swung in the wind. There wasn't a tree in sight, nor any flowers or bushes. It didn't seem to Laurie that any place could be more forlorn but as they paused to visit a few minutes, she saw tears in the woman's eyes.

“Owned two sections of land free and clear in twenty-nine,” the farmer said. “But the bank closed with all our savin's and me owin' for this truck—it was new then—a combine, tractor, and seed. Never got out of debt again because I never made another good crop. If wind didn't blow it out in spring, or hail pound it into the ground, the grasshoppers gnawed it to the roots in summer. Just kept a-plowin' money under. Mortgaged the land. The bank's foreclosed on us so we've got to go.”

“My first baby's buried here,” said the woman, picking up the ragged little girl and burying her face against the soft neck. “He'd be sixteen this June. Onliest one of the young'uns that had brown eyes and hair like my daddy. There was a yellow rosebush on his grave and a honey locust shadin' it. I kept 'em watered, but hoppers killed them.”

“Headin' for Californy,” said the farmer, “With all of us but the two least 'uns workin' hard for a year or two, we ought to get together enough cash for a start. They say that earth's so rich that anything you plant just plain jumps out of the ground.”

Morrigan frowned. It was clear he hated to discourage these hard-hit folks but hated worse for them to be too disappointed. “Well, mister, you got a good work crew for certain, but I'm just back from California and I hope you'll let me give you a word of advice. If you find work on your way out, a place where you can live decent, better stop right there.”

“But I've heard a man can get five dollars a day pickin' fruit or cotton!”

“Not with thousands of folks like us comin' every month, dead broke, and havin' to work for whatever pay they can get,” Morrigan said. “You see, since the Gold Rush, California's had cheap labor. First Chinese, then Japanese and Filipinos and Mexicans. Now they don't need 'em to work, they're forcing lots of Mexicans to go back to Mexico whether they want to or not. Now the growers have Okies—boy howdy! have they got Okies! That's what they call us whether we're from Kansas or Texas, Arkansas, Tennessee, Colorado, or New Mexico. Californians treat us just like they do folks with dark skins. Signs in some movie houses say ‘Negroes and Okies in the balcony.'” He shook his head. “That California water Jimmie Rodgers sings about tastes more like vinegar than cherry wine, friends. Sure, you can sleep out every night because there's no roof you can afford unless you're pickin' on a farm where they make a whole family live in one of their one-room shacks and pay a dollar a day for it.”