This Tender Land (39 page)

“I couldn’t find him, Mama,” she said when she reached us. “I looked everywhere.”

I thought about her going alone into that blind pig and other places like it, searching in vain for her father, and every bit of the goodness I’d felt in giving that man our money drained right out of me. I considered confessing my part in visiting this misery on them, but I didn’t have the courage.

“He’ll come when he’s drunk up all of whatever he took for collateral,” Mother Beal said. “In the meantime, this Cream of Wheat is hot and ready to be eaten. Maybeth, will you call the twins?”

We sat in a glum silence while they ate their meal. Even the usually raucous twins seemed to feel the weight of their family’s despair and said not a word. I worked at trying to grasp the spirit of hopefulness that was one of the gifts of my time with Sister Eve. Instead, I found myself dwelling on thoughts about the skeleton of the Indian kid we’d buried on the island in the river, and about Mose, who’d sunk himself into a place beyond our reach and then had disappeared, about all that money I’d given away in a moment of stupid generosity, and finally about the fact that I was still a fugitive from justice and only one step away from spending my entire life behind bars. When darkness comes over your soul, it doesn’t come in light shades; it descends with all the black of a moonless night. In the faces of the women around that cook fire, what I saw was the vacant look of abandonment, and I knew it was all my fault.

“I’ll find him,” I said, thinking this might be a way to atone, but
also thinking that it would be a way to escape the despair of that little gathering.

“I’ll go, too,” Maybeth offered.

We rose and set off together.

“HE DOESN’T USUALLY
start his drinking until later,” Maybeth said as we walked. “It’s this whole situation, being stuck here with no idea how to get unstuck. He’s really a good man, Buck.”

I wished I believed that were so, but I knew the truth of the situation. I’d given her father the wherewithal to change his family’s dire circumstances, and all he’d done was head off on a tear. Good money after bad. I hated it when Albert was right.

“I don’t know if I’ve ever felt so low,” she said. “It kills me to see Mama and Mother Beal working so hard to hold us all together. And then Papa goes and does something like this.”

I held Maybeth’s hand. Even though her face was clouded with worry, she was still the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen, and her ache was mine. My conscience was screaming at me to confess, but my heart was cowering at the prospect of falling out of her good graces. I wanted to help but had no idea what to do at that juncture. So I did what came naturally to me. I hauled out my mouth organ and began to play a tune, the liveliest that came to mind, Gershwin’s “I Got Rhythm.”

A few bars in, Maybeth began to sing, and I was amazed that she knew the words.

She was smiling now, singing how you wouldn’t find old man trouble around her door, and her face seemed more beautiful than ever. Then her eyes rounded wide, and I caught what she’d just heard—the sound of her father singing along in a drunken tenor. His voice came from a short distance away, somewhere in Hopersville. I kept playing, and Mr. Schofield sang right along, and we followed the sound of his warble to where he sat on an upended water bucket, his back against
the raggedy wall of Captain Gray’s mostly cardboard shanty, keeping company with the captain himself. He gave us a broad smile and opened his arms in welcome.

“Will you look at this, Captain? My two favorite young people, glowing like angels in the morning sun.”

“Papa,” Maybeth said, her voice severe. “I’ve been looking for you everywhere.”

“Not everywhere apparently,” he said, beaming. “For here I am, love.”

“Drunk,” she said and cast a cold eye that included the captain.

Mr. Schofield raised his hand in a solemn pledge. “I haven’t touched a drop today. If I’m drunk, it’s only with happiness. And there’s the cause.” He poked his finger at me.

Despite his protestation, he sure seemed stewed. But close as I was to him, I caught no smell of booze. I did catch the smell of gasoline, however.

“Our deliverer, Maybeth child. And the fruit of his generosity.” Her father reached down and touched a red, spouted, five-gallon gas can with
SKELLY
printed on the side. “This is our ticket out of Hopersville. Next stop, Chicago.”

Maybeth looked rightly confused. “You haven’t been drinking?”

“As I said, not even a taste. I went off this morning in search of a gas station. And then a store, where I bought a little gift for everyone, you included.”

He reached down to a brown paper bag, stuffed full, and what he drew out made Maybeth gasp with surprise and pleasure: a blue dress.

“It’s almost exactly like the one I gave Janie Baldwin,” she cried and, taking the dress, held it to herself as if appraising in a mirror how it might look on her. I was thinking that it might look pretty wonderful.

“Buck, I hope you don’t mind me using a little of your gift to gift a few others,” Mr. Schofield said.

“It’s your money now,” I told him.

“Well, then I don’t guess you’ll mind that I gave Captain Gray
here a little gift, too. Enough money for a bus ticket to D.C. so he can join that Bonus Army gathering there.”

I didn’t know what a bus ticket to Washington, D.C., might cost. I just hoped there was enough left to get the Schofields to Chicago.

Mr. Schofield laughed. “I can see from your face you’re worried that I’ve blown the whole wad. Rest easy, Buck. I’ve done my calculations and there’s still plenty to see us all the way to Chi-Town.”

Captain Gray reached out to shake my hand. “And as for me, from the bottom of my heart and the core of my wooden leg, I thank you, Buck.”

Maybeth eyed me with amazement. “You have money?”

“Not anymore,” I said. “I gave it all to your father.”

I thought she was going to scold me for trusting cash to a man who knew the environs of a blind pig intimately. Instead, she leaned to me and, in front of her father and Captain Gray and anyone else who might have been watching, kissed me. Full on the lips. A long time.

“All right, all right,” Mr. Schofield said, lifting himself from the overturned water bucket and grabbing up his gas can. “Come along, Maybeth. We’ve got us some packing to do.”

He headed away toward the Schofields’ tepee, and Maybeth turned to follow.

And that’s when the reality of what I’d done hit me. Maybeth would be leaving. Maybeth would be gone.

GONE. GONE. GONE.

The word, like a death knell, rang in my head as I walked with the Schofields back toward their tepee. Maybeth held the blue dress in one hand and my hand in the other, and her step was light. My own feet were chunks of lead and my heart was ready to break.

Gone. So final. A headstone of a word. The ending.

Mrs. Schofield rose from where she sat beside the fire, and Mother Beal turned a wary eye on us as we approached. When she saw the gas can, Mrs. Schofield looked with disbelief at her husband.

“Is that . . . ?” she ventured.

“Enough gas to get us to a station where we can fill the tank,” he said.

“How . . . ?”

“It was Buck here. His doing. His generous heart.”

Mother Beal’s brow wrinkled as she studied me. “You bought gas?”

“That and more,” Mr. Schofield said.

He reached into the paper bag, drew out a scarf in a colorful floral print, and gave it to his wife. “That’ll keep the wind off you on our way to Chicago, Sarah.”

Mrs. Schofield draped the scarf over her hair, tied it beneath her chin, and tilted her head. “How do I look?”

“Like the angel you are,” her husband said and gave her a peck on the cheek.

“Where are the twins?” Mr. Schofield asked.

“Playing by the river,” his wife replied.

“Well, I’ve got a box of crayons and a Little Orphan Annie
coloring book for them.” He glanced at his mother-in-law. “And I have something for you, too, Mother Beal.”

From the paper bag, he brought a small roll of bills bound with a rubber band. He held it out to the old woman. “I’m a man of many weaknesses. This is what’s left of the money Buck has generously shared. I’d be obliged if you would take it and act as overseer of our finances until we arrive in Chicago.”

She reached up and solemnly accepted his offering. “I thank you, Powell.” Then she looked at me. “I’m not going to ask where a young man with no obvious resources comes up with enough money to save a family not even his own. I’m going to believe that you came by it honestly, and I’m going to simply say thank you and praise the Lord.”

Then she surprised me. She stood up, stepped toward me around the fire, and gave me a great, soul-embracing hug, burying my face in her bosom.

“Well,” she said, releasing me and scanning the encampment. “We’d best get started.”

Word spread quickly, and folks showed up to give the Schofields a hand. Maybeth fairly danced through the preparations to depart, and although I could understand her eagerness to be on the road to Chicago, I was hurt that she didn’t seem at all to grasp what that meant for me, for us. The tarps and blankets were removed from the tepee, but the decision was made to leave the skeleton of the structure intact in case someone else might want to take up residence there.

When all was nearly in readiness, Maybeth smiled broadly at me and said, “You can ride with me and the twins in back.”

Which caught me by complete surprise. “You think I’m going with you?”

“Aren’t you? I thought that was why you got us the gas, so we could all go to Chicago together.”

“They’re your family, Maybeth. Mine is somewhere else.”

“No, Buck. You have to come. What about us?”

“I can’t go. I want to, but I can’t.”

“Bring your family, too.”

“And what? Toss out some furniture to fit us all in? And don’t forget, we’re wanted criminals. I won’t risk getting all of you in trouble. I’m going to Saint Louis.”

A pearl rolled down her cheek, one small tear. “I don’t want to go then. I want to stay with you.”

“Your folks wouldn’t let you. It would break their hearts. And they need you, you know that. Besides, there’s no room in our canoe.”

“Oh, Buck.”

She threw her arms around me and we stood near the empty tepee, which was nothing but sticks now, the dark bones of a creature whose substance had vanished.

The Schofields were fitting the last of their belongings in the truck bed. “Maybeth,” Mr. Schofield called.

“Leave them be, Powell,” Mother Beal said.

Maybeth took my hand and we strolled to where we could both see the river flowing out of one distance and into another, a byway that was both my past and my future. The air was scented from the morning cook fires, but a breeze came off the water, cool against our faces and smelling faintly of all the silt carried by the Minnesota, which would deliver it to the Mississippi, where it would be taken all the way to the sea. Maybeth faced me and kissed me and leaned her head on my shoulder and murmured, “You’ll write me letters and I’ll write you and we won’t lose each other.”

“And send them where?”

“My aunt’s name is Minnie Hornsby. She lives in Cicero. It’s right outside Chicago.”

“Where will your letters to me go?”

“General delivery, Saint Louis.”

I didn’t think it would work, but if it made her feel better, that was fine.

We walked to the truck. The twins were already in back, nestled
among everything the Schofields had left to them. Mr. Schofield was behind the wheel, his wife beside him. Mother Beal stood at the opened passenger door. I helped Maybeth into the truck bed, and she settled onto a suitcase that had been laid flat with a pillow on top.

Mother Beal put her arm gently around my shoulders. “Buck, the heart is a rubber ball. No matter how hard it’s crushed, it bounces back. And remember this: 147 Stout Street.”

“What’s that?”

“My sister Minnie’s address in Cicero. You take care of yourself, you hear?”

“Yes, ma’am. I’ll try.”

She lifted herself into the cab, and Mr. Schofield started the engine. Albert had done well, and the motor fairly hummed. As the truck pulled away, those who by circumstance had first been neighbors and then friends waved goodbye, and I stood among them, the rubber ball of my heart crushed flat. Mr. Schofield drove slowly until he reached the dusty track that led into Mankato, and the last I saw of Maybeth, she held one hand high and, with the other, wiped her eyes.

NOTHING IS EVER
everything, but the loss of a true love feels that way. All-consuming. The blackest hole. The emptiest place in the universe. Maybeth was gone and it felt as if my life was over.

If you have never been in love, if, especially, you have never been young and in love, you might not understand the misery of parting or what I felt as I stood next to the bones of the Schofields’ tepee, beside the ashes of their dead fire, while the folks of Hopersville drifted back to their own lives.

Captain Gray clasped my shoulder, said, “They’ll be fine now, Buck. And thanks, again, son, for all you’ve done,” and he joined the stream of bodies draining away.

I was completely alone. I stood for a few minutes where, only a short time before, there’d been life, song, laughter, the smell of hot food, the warm blanket of family, and Maybeth. Now there was nothing. An everything, all-consuming nothing.

I walked, and where my feet took me, to this day I cannot say. It was past noon when I found myself at the camp among the poplars, where I’d left Albert and Emmy and Forrest. To my surprise, Mose was with them.

But he was not the old Mose. The old Mose had been a feather on the wind, and no matter where circumstance blew him, his heart remained light and his spirit somehow dancing. From the Mose who now sat by himself, well away from the others, came a threatening dark, and the eyes that watched my return were tortured.

“Hungry?” Forrest said. He seemed to take no notice of the storm cloud that was Mose. He tossed me an apple and a hunk of cheese
from our dwindling supply. “Norman, pass Buck that water bag so he can wet his whistle, too.”