The Maid's Version Part 1

THE MAID'S VERSION.

DANIEL WOODRELL.

In memory of Grif Fariello.

These are the things the starry sky is set above: loneliness of the dead, courage of youth, and timber that's carried slowly away on great rivers.

a"Rolf Jacobsen.

A wounded deer leaps highest.

a"Emily d.i.c.kinson.

Thou desirest truth in the inward parts.

a"Psalms 51:6.

She frightened me at every dawn the summer I stayed with her. She'd sit on the edge of her bed, long hair down, down to the floor and shaking as she brushed and brushed, shadows ebbing from the room and early light flowing in through both windows. Her hair was as long as her story and she couldn't walk when her hair was not woven into dense braids and pinned around and atop her head. Otherwise her hair dragged the floor like the train of a medieval gown and she had to gather it into a sheaf and coil it about her forearm several times to walk the floor without stepping on herself. She'd been born a farm girl, then served as a maid for half a century, so she couldn't sleep past dawn to win a bet, and all the mornings I knew with her she'd sit in the first light and brush that witchy-long hair, brush it in sections, over and over, stroking hair that had scarcely been touched by scissors for decades, hair she would not part with despite the extravagance of time it required at each dawn. The hair was mostly white smeared by gray, the hues of a newspaper that lay in the rain until headlines blended across the page.

She spooked me awake daily that whole summer of my twelfth year, me awaking to see her with the dawn at her back, springs squeaking faintly, while a bone-handled brush slid along a length of hair that belonged in a fairy tale of some sort, and maybe not the happy kind. Her name was Alma and she did not care to be called Grandma or Mamaw, and might loose a slap if addressed as Granny. She was lonely, old and proud, and I'd been sent from my river town near St. Louis by my dad as a gesture of reconciliation. She was glad I'd been sent and concerned that I have a good time, a memorable summer, but she was not naturally given to much frolic; the last hours of play she'd known had been before World War I, some game now vanished from childhood that involved a rolling wooden hoop and a short stick. She tried taking me for long walks about the town of West Table, going to People's Park so she could watch me splash in the pool, let me pull weeds in the garden and throw a baseball against the toolshed door. It was the summer of 1965, but she still did not have a television, only a radio that seemed always to be announcing livestock prices and yield estimates. There was a tw.a.n.g stretching every word Alma said, but for days and days she didn't say much. Then came a late afternoon when I was dramatically dispirited, moody and bored, foot idly kicking at things I'd been told not to kick, a sweltering day that turned dark as a sinister storm settled overhead, and we sat together on her small porch in a strong wind to watch those vivid actions break across the sky. Storm clouds were scored by bright lightning, and thunder boomed. Her dress was flapping, her eyes narrowed and distant, and she cunningly chose that raging moment to begin telling me her personal account of the Arbor Dance Hall explosion of 1929, how forty-two dancers from this small corner of the Missouri Ozarks had perished in an instant, waltzing couples murdered midstep, blown toward the clouds in a pink mist chased by towering flames, and why it happened. This was more like ita"an excitement of fire, so many fallen, so many suspects, so few facts, a great crime or colossal accident, an ongoing mystery she thought she'd solved. I knew this was a story my dad did not want me to hear from her lips, as it was a main source of their feud, so I was tickled and keen to hear more, more, and then more. Dozens were left maimed, broken in their parts, scorched until skin melted from bones. The screams from the rubble and flames never faded from the ears of those who heard them, the cries of burning neighbors, friends, lovers, and kinfolk like my great-aunt Ruby. So many young dead or ruined from a town of only four thousand raised a shocked, grievous howling for justice. Suspicions were given voice, threats shouted, mobs gathered, but there was no obvious target for all the summoned fury. Suspects and possible explanations for the blast were so numerous and diverse, unlinked by convincing evidence, that the public investigation spun feebly in a wide, sputtering circle, then was quietly closed. No one was ever officially charged nor punished, and the twenty-eight unidentified dead were buried together beneath a monumental angel that stood ten feet tall and slowly turned black during year after year of cold and hot and slapping rain.

Alma yet lived in a small room with a small kitchen in the back portion of her last employer's house, and it was tight living. Her bed and the couch I slept on were five feet apart. Her sleep was chatty; she had one-way chats with people she'd once known or her sleep invented. She sometimes mumbled names I'd heard around the dinner table. She often wept without sound at night until tears s.h.i.+ned her neck, and made dull daytime company for a boy unless she was adding wrinkles to her story. When in the telling mood she'd sit on the porch for hours staring toward the dry white creek bed out back while drinking tea to keep her voice slickened, leaving each used tea bag in the cup when adding a fresh one and more water, soaking every penny's worth of tea into her cup until she sipped bitter trickles between four or five derelict bags. She would at times leave the public horror and give me her quiet account of the sad and criminal love affair that took her sister Ruby away from us all, left us with only pain, many dark mysteries, and a woman's hat with a long feather in the band.

Alma had been allowed to stay in school to the completion of third grade, then was sent to work some years in her daddy's fields before finding her way to town and becoming a laundress, a cook, an all-purpose maid. She lost two sons along the way, her husband, her sister, and earned but little, always one dropped dish and a loud reprimand from complete and utter poverty. She lived scared and angry, a life full of permanent grievances, sharp animosities and cold memories for all who'd ever crossed us, any of us, ever. Alma DeGeer Dunahew, with her pinched, hostile nature, her dark obsessions and primal need for revenge, was the big red heart of our family, the true heart, the one we keep secret and that sustains us.

It was years before I learned to love her.

Our long walks that summer did if nothing else prepare me to accept an early bedtime, for they were tiring and detailed. At any corner or alleyway, empty lot or spruced old house, she was liable to stop and leave me in her mind, revisiting yet again insults she couldn't forgive. "That place there was home to Mrs. Prater, who cheated me of near eleven dollars when your uncle Sidney was a-dyin' in bed with no medicine for the pain. He moaned constant as the wind and couldn't catch his breath. Not even fourteen years old. She had her a few daughters, and one has married here and stayeda"her children are named Cozzens. Couple of boys. Your big brother could whup either of them pukes this minute without even needin' to put his sandwich down. Years to come you'll thrash *em, too, if you should be so blessed as to come across one somewhere behind a building, or in the trees, and hear that name."

Or she'd drift in thought while staring at an empty spread of dirt and gra.s.s between two homes, and say, "Used to be a house here had a porch that went all the way around, with strangler vines growing up the sides, had those windows like eyes up top. Mr. Lee Haas lived there. He run the last dry goods near the square that would give us anything on tick. But his wife squawked over me bein' crazy and full of slander, the fool, and he cut me dead when most needed. That year was 1933, I think." She waved a big old withering hand at the lot where the house had been, spit toward the gra.s.s but fell short, so she stepped fully into the lot and spit again. "But you can forget thema"G.o.d done for them, and done *em up good, too, during the war."

On these rambles the cemetery was nearly always our final destination. We'd make our way through the wilderness of headstones, gray, brown, puritan white, glancing at some, nodding at some, Alma turning her nose up at others, until we reached the Black Angel, the sober monument to our family loss and a town bereaved. Standing in the shadow of this angel she would on occasion tell me about a suspect person or deed, a vague or promising suspicion she'd acquired with her own sharp ears or general snooping, and when she shared the fishy details with me it would be the first time she'd said them aloud to anybody in years. She'd repeat herself so I'd remember. We'd then walk home, going into the fat shade under the fat trees on East Main, and stop at Jupiter Grocery, where she always said, "Your momma's grandpa on her momma's side worked here thirty years. He cut a good piece of meat." We'd prowl the aisles and a.s.semble the evening meal, a meal usually made of the cheapest foodstuffs, some of which I'd never before considered as food and was scared to toucha"calves' brains to be served with scrambled eggs, souse for sandwiches I'd throw behind the shed, pigs' feet and saltines, pork rind and corn pone, chicken livers by the pound that she rendered into a bizarre gravy that was so surprisingly fine over egg noodles or white rice that I learned to whine for it as we walked. We'd eat together in her snug quarters, an early supper, always, elbow to elbow, watching squares of sunlight lose their shape along the walls, and return to the unending topic while forks clicked on her best plates, "What'd you learn today, Alek, and what use will you make of it?"

And Alma did that summer make certain that I knew this spot and that these pictures would be planted in my head, grow epic, never leave: The Arbor Dance Hall stood across the street from a row of small houses and one still stands. A house with nothing to recommend it but its age, shown up meanly in sunlight and made to look ancient in shadow. The yard between the house and the railroad tracks has become a worn patch of dust, the old oaks have withered from their long days and begun to founder toward earth, and no new neighbors have been built. In 1929, on this narrow span of sloping ground between the town square and the tracks beside Howl Creek, there had been six houses, five now gone, the dance hall, and the long-demolished Alhambra Hotel. At the bottom of the yard near the railroad ties and s.h.i.+ned rails there are burnished little stumps where elms that likely witnessed everything had been culled in the 1950s after the Dutch blight moved into town and caught them all.

The explosion happened within a shout and surely those in the house must have heard everything on that bright evening, the couples arriving, strolling arm in arm or as foursomes, the excited laughter, the cooed words, the stolen kisses on the way to the dance, all carrying loudly on that blossom-scented night between the wars, here in the town this was then of lulled hearts and distracted spirits. A Sat.u.r.day of suns.h.i.+ne, the town square bunched with folks in for trading from the hills and hollers, hauling spinach, lettuce and rhubarb, chickens, goats and alfalfa honey. Sat.u.r.day crowds closed the streets around the square and it became a huge veranda of ma.s.sed amblers. Long h.e.l.los and nodded goodbyes. Farmers in bib overalls with dirty seats, sporting dusted and crestfallen hats, raising pocket hankies already made stiff and angular with salt dried from sweat during the slow wagon ride to town. In the shops and shade there are others, wearing creased town clothes, with the immaculate hankies of gentlefolk folded to peak above breast pockets in a perfect suggestion of gentility and standing. The citizenry mingleda"Howdy, h.e.l.lo, Good gracious is that you? The hardware store is busy all day and the bench seats outside become heavy with squatting men who spit brown splotches toward the gutter. Boys and girls hefted baskets of produce, munched penny candy, and begged nickels so they could catch the matinee at the Avenue Theater. Automobiles and trucks park east of the square, wagons and mules rest north in the field below the stockyard pens, and after supper folks made their way downhill to the Arbor a and just as full darkness fell those happy sounds heard in the surviving house suddenly became a nightmare chorus of pleas, cries of terror, screams as the flames neared crackling and bricks returned tumbling from the heavens and stout beams crushed those souls knocked to ground. Walls shook and shuddered for a mile around and the boom was heard faintly in the next county south and painfully by everyone inside the town limits. Citizens came out their doors, stunned, alarmed to stillness, then began to sprint, trot, stagger in flailing and confused strides toward this new jumping light that ate into the night.

A near portion of the sky founted an orange brilliance in a risen tower, heat bellowing as flames freshened in the breeze and grew, the tower of orange tilting, tossing about, and the sounds dancers let loose began to reach distant ears as anonymous wails and torture those nearby with their clarity of expression. There were those who claimed to have heard words of farewell offered by victims in the air or in the rubble, and some must be true accounts; so many citizens crawled into the flames to pull at blistered, smoking bodies that turned out to be people they knew, sisters, uncles, sons or pals. As with any catastrophe, the witness accounts immediately began to differ, as some saw dancers blown three hundred feet toward the stars and spreading in a spatter of directions, while others saw them go no more than a hundred and fifty feet high, give or take, though all agreed that several fortunate souls were saved from death by the force of their throwing, landing beyond reach of the scorching, pelted with falling debris, yes, and damaged, but not roasted skinless, hairless, blackened and twisted on their bones.

The nearest witness to survive and offer prompt testimony was eighty-nine-year-old Chapman Eades, an ex-Confederate, veteran of Pea Ridge and the siege of Vicksburg, who lived in the Alhambra. He did not see well and could not follow a conversation in his own little room without the aid of an ear trumpet. The next day Mr. Eades said to the West Table Scroll, "I don't know what they was arguin' about. They was over behind the back wall and I never seen them as nothin' but shapes standin' in shadows. But they was arguin' about somethin' awful lively, then the music struck up again and all h.e.l.l came callin' soon after."

Throughout that summer human sc.r.a.ps and remains were discovered in gardens two streets, three streets, four streets away, kicked up in the creek by kids chasing crawdads, in deep muck at the stockyards halfway up the hill. That fall, when roof gutters were cleaned, so many horrid bits were come across that gutters became fearsome, hallowed, and homeowners let a few respectful leaks develop that winter rather than disturb the dead.

My mother was never poor until she married. She was born a Hudkins, her place in the world was not Alma's, and she'd first met my father when he was the paper boy and she swooned for his dimples and blue eyes. She would've been around eight or ten (depending on what her true birth date is, for several have been claimed) and he was fourteen or so. The house had been given a name, even, called Hudkins, a large and comfortable old home with a full city block for a backyard, all fenced with white rails, two horses grazing or snuffling from the trough, a serviceable pickup truck parked in the dirt drive, a new sedan in the garage, the gray walls of the cemetery ever visible just beyond the farthest rails and across one street. Mother pestered Dad with friendly comments and he suspected mockery, mockery of everything about him, from boondockers held together with twine to his bib overalls that fit him better a year earlier and his sullied name, so he stooped to ground and raised to throw rocks at her without trying to bruise or come too close. She never forgot the excitement of having his full attention. Years later, while Dad was home on leave during the final hours of World War II, they locked eyes at the Echo Club, she in a pink sweater and saddle shoes, he wearing his navy hat c.o.c.ked saltily, the band playing swing, and both remembered the rocks. Nature did the rest and they married soon. Her father, Harlan Hudkins, never forgave Dad for knocking her up so young (Mom would lose the first two babies and feel doomed until a robust boy survived to be born in 1950), or her for being weak to a G.o.ddam Dunahew, no matter how sweetly he danced, and he had his ways of making everybody pay, even his only blue-eyed grandson, though I was always told to feel welcome, just come on by, and did visit happily many, many times. He was a big rugged man with a fabled past in athletics, wearing a Stetson hat colored pearl, a Roi-Tan cigar chomped between his teeth, owner of a feed mill, a few rental properties and several tracts of timberland. Harlan hunted often, for quail locally and pheasant up north, and kept bird dogs, three or four at a time, penned out behind the house. After the marriage of my parents he named every dog he had, or would ever have, Buster, the nickname of Alma's husband. Both of my brothers could step into a Hudkins family photo from any era and blenda"I am all Dunahew in appearance, and Harlan noticed. I had a choked, complicated regard for him, he was a powerful presence with so many qualities boys admire, but I identified as a Dunahew in my bones and att.i.tudes, grandson of a drunken b.u.m and a maid who couldn't read a grocery list, and said so often. Harlan heard me.

The Black Angel standing over the unidentified dead started to dance in 1989. Folks laying wreaths saw the angel s.h.i.+mmy her hips just a little and called for more witnesses and there were indeed more small attempts at divine dancing observed, so the newspaper was notified. The tombstone the angel stood atop was as long as two men, crowded with names chiseled into marble decades ago, but still s.h.i.+ny. The Black Angel towered and held a torch overhead, in case, I suppose, Truth tried to sneak past in the dark. The flame had also turned black.

My dad was in town, visiting Harlan, now all alone in a big house, and I helped the old man to the cemetery where everybody he ever loved but one are buried. His heart was shot, he walked on flimsy legs with short careful steps, and I carried his cigarettes, flask of Cutty Sark and a folding chair for him to rest on. An article in the Scroll attracted a pack of goth and stoner gawkers, spiritualists and ghost hunters, relatives of those below, and a lady reporter from the biggest Springfield television station. This a.s.sembly spent two evenings there, next to the monument, with big lights lit, reading over and again the names of the dead dancers spread chiseled into three columns. The names were yet known to many (great disasters being so diligently committed to memory and pa.s.sed on) and kin to a few of us gathered there, the pious or merely hopeful holding candles and runt crosses while the scientific fiddled with special cameras and infrared doodads.

During the first night the congregated dead below had been made bashful by so much strange company and not stirred a bit. Those present remained good-humored and interested, learning the repeated names (Powell, Mulvein, Breen, Gutermuth, Campbell, Steinkuhler, McCandless, Shelton, Shelton, Shelton, Gower, Bullington, Bullington, Boardman, DeGeer a ) until the roll call became a chant sung by a diverse crowd, then disbanded shortly after midnight.

Dad had a great time with the crowd and told as many stories as he heard.

At the second vigil the litany of names began again at dark and soon acquired a lulling meter, a pacifying drone that was maintained for two hours, until we all suddenly saw the same thing and popped to our feet. The crowd gasped in unison like a practiced choir. The Black Angel jigged an inch left, jigged an inch right, then ever so slightly to and fro. There was a general rush toward the hem of her skirt. I walked to the monument and rested my head against it, fingers tangled across all those names, palm flattened flush against Ruby's. They'd been down there so longa"why dance now? They surely did feel to be dancing, though, the angel trembling above as those souls below did the Lindy Hop, an aggrieved variation of it, I would suppose, but their young rhythm and spring could be felt through the stone and decades.

Dad shoved up from his chair, limped to my side, laid his hand over mine.

The spiritualists and goths beamed haughtily as though publicly vindicated, the stoners cackled until told to hush, the gathered relatives seemed to slump in recognition of an old responsibility to their own lost kin that they had long ago put aside when frazzled apathetic by too many mysteries and myriad angles, but might now need to resurrect. The scientific debunkers held forth about karst topography and caves riddling our hillsides but the big lights were extinguished even as they spoke.

As the crowd departed and we wended through the ranks of dead, then began crossing the street to Hudkins, Dad rested a hand on my shoulder, squeezed as strongly as he could but weakly, then said, "Tell it. Go on and tell it."

She hated that she fed another man's children before she fed her own. She cleared the supper table, the plates yet rife with food in this house of plenty, potatoes played with, bread crusts stacked on the tablecloth unwanted, meat bones set aside with enough shreds on them to set her own sons fighting one another for a chance to gnaw them clean and white. Her own sons sucked cold spuds at home, waiting. The Glencross kids, Ethan and Virginia, both handsome and bossy for their years, dawdled over their suppers with great disinterest until released from the table by their father. In the kitchen Alma took the bones and rolled them inside a page of newspaper, tucked the paper under her dress and into the thieving belt she wore hidden. Her own sons waited. She used the blade of her hands to shove the leavings from the plates into the slop bucket and carried the slop out back, across the big grand yard to the wire dog pen, bent and poured it into the rusted bowl as lonely Kaiser Bill licked her hands.

The kitchen had been cleaned, made orderly and plain, and she was about to sling the wet rag over the faucet to dry and be off and away, when Ethan and Virginia clomped into the kitchen and told her they were famished, suddenly terribly famished, and would Alma oblige them each with another plate of supper, and heat the cowboy gravy again, please. Alma set out plates she'd just washed and dried, sc.r.a.ped at with fingernails while dunking her hands into chilling water, then opened the icebox and felt about for bowls of leftovers. Her own sons waited at home, stomachs pinging, hoping tonight there'd be food that had a bone in it, or at least food that had once lived on a bone. A flame sparked, the pots went on the blue rings of fire, and as she stirred with a wooden spoon the kids wandered into the parlor, then she heard them climbing the stairs, going to their rooms, doors clicking shut.

She waited while the gravy cooled again.

She cleaned the pots once more, put everything away, and as she walked toward the door, Mr. Arthur Glencross, president of Citizens' Bank, a guarded but approachable man whose many good qualities were well known and celebrated while his lesser qualities were excused, beckoned Alma near, and whispered, "She wants me home tonight."

Alma nodded, and went out through the side door, across the lawn to the alleyway in back. The alley was unlighted but offered the quickest route toward home, and she was guided over the slumping dirt and scattered stones by brightness from neighboring windows and the memory in her feet. The alley led to an avenue. Big trees kept the avenue shrouded, but the sidewalk was wide and mostly level underfoot. A cl.u.s.ter of peach trees grew in the large yard of a large old home near the corner where Alma turned south, and she paused there, took a stand near the trees, waiting to hear a voice. The peaches were young, small and hard but beginning to draw the branches down, and the air smelled fertile. She peered between tree trunks and c.o.c.ked her head to better hear anything said to her from inside that darkness. And in seconds a voice from the peach cl.u.s.ter asked, "Is he in the house?"

"He is."

"He's left me sittin' out here two hours waitin'."

"He's with his wife."

"That nervy b.a.s.t.a.r.d."

"She's keepin' him close tonight."

Ruby DeGeer had been squatted to the ground among the peach trees, and now she rose, dusted her behind with a swatting hand and stepped onto the sidewalk. The sisters linked arms and began walking without comment, all the way to the town square and halfway around, then past the stock pens and down the hill toward the Dunahew shack. The pens were empty this night, but still stunk of livestock, a nearly pleasing stench that lingered over the eastern side of town.

"And here I wore my new hat, too."

"I like ita"what'd it run?"

"Won't tell."

"He buy you it?"

"No. Somebody else."

The sisters favored as to posture, but Ruby was ten years younger and pet.i.te, with brown eyes that were often described in poetic terms, and a beguiling figure that she did not hide behind poorly fitted clothing or a dowdy fas.h.i.+on sense. Her hair was dark, with red aspects from henna she added, and was sculpted into a fas.h.i.+on that had roots in Egyptian myth, with straight, full bangs barely above the eyes and crisply sheared edges at jaw level. She was vivid in nature, sparky and game, and flirted readily with about any presentable man just to make time fly or snag a fatter tip at the Stockman's Cafe when she waited tables. She'd run away to New Orleans once for three months and returned eager to give the impression that she'd seen many scandalous practices in this wicked old world, but had not been rubbed wrong by too many of them. She smoked Sweet Caporals on the street and laughed out loud in public, sometimes swore, and Alma was fearful for her when she was not jealous.

Alma said, "Will you sleep with us?"

"I've got Irish taters in my bag."

"Them'll go good with these bones I brung."

Alma was of a height that earned no description save "regular," st.u.r.dy in her legs and chest, and her hair was an ordinary who-gives-a-hoot brown, with finger waves above the ears that always collapsed into messy curls as the day went along. Kitchen work required her to keep her hair trimmed short to ensure that long hairs did not grace the meals she served. She dressed in whatever clothing Providence provided her and was grateful for anything that fit.

When the sisters went up the stoop to the Dunahew shack their steps were carefully placed on the bad wood of the narrow, askew porch, but they were heard and the door flung open on all three boys gathered just inside, ages thirteen, ten and five in 1929, with thin necks, soiled young hands, and hope verging on greed in their eyes. Alma pulled the bones from the thieving belt under her dress, held them up and said, "There's gonna be supper."

The shack had been poorly made long ago, built to house itinerant folks who'd tended to apple orchards at the eastern edge of town before a variety of wasting blights came along and the trees died, taking two dozen jobs down with them. The front steps sagged under every footstep, and the roof of the house was compromised by rot and spavined, a roofline that slumped in the middle, with holes beneath the eaves that were often used as entrances to the attic by squirrels, and the sounds of toenails clicking across the ceiling became frequent and routine. Inside there were two parts to the only room, divided by a stick-legged table plus three chairs, so both parts were constantly open to view and no one could ever be out of sight. A floor had been made of roughhewn planks that had been slowly rubbed to a haggard softness by clomping boots, wallowing toddlers in flour sack britches, woolen socks sliding, and the brisk sweeps of a corn-husk broom. A noisy pump with a long handle brought water into the kitchen. The sink was not laid level in the kitchen counter, but hoisted higher to the left and wedged in stiff, the result of repairs done almost correctly by Maurice "Buster" Dunahew, Alma's husband. On most days the house held only four people, as Buster was no longer allowed to sleep there, or even visit much since he was required to arrive sober, and Ruby slept over only now and then, whenever blue clouds ma.s.sing inside her chest raised a need to rest among family.

Alma washed potatoes for the stew while Ruby wrestled on the floor with the two younger boys, Sidney and John Paul. They loved to hug her and feel her arms around their shoulders in return, squeezing them near to smell her perfume, her lipstick, her smoky breath so exciting as it burst onto their faces. Ruby's style, her looks, her sa.s.s and vinegar gave them the urge to fight for more, more of everything they could imagine, against anybody, whenever she was near. James was old enough to have heard stories and insults at school that narrowed his horizon in this town to a pinhole and made him more reserved, sullen on most days, with his taut face and slanted eyes. He had recently become captivated by tales of pirates on the high seas and the lucrative derring-do of regional outlaws, and thus inspired had taken to pinching necessary things from those who had them, and Alma did not ask as many questions as she might have done when medicines somehow came into the house, or canned pineapple, long johns, hunks of ham with savory juices that were memorized by the younger boys and described for weeks.

The bones and shreds of meat flavored the broth, and she'd added onions and Irish taters, a few beans from yesterday, a ramshackle stew, but one that should fill every tummy for a night. Alma turned from the stove and spoke in a whisper, "Supper, boys," and she didn't need to whisper twice.

Miss Dimple Powell was fifteen years old and had never been to a dance. She'd prayed this night of music and boys would come before she wasted away from boredom, and had practiced dancing alone in her room for a full year now, her partner an overstuffed pillow with a das.h.i.+ng manner and a rather racy line of patter. His hair lay flat and glossy, s.h.i.+ning like Valentino's, and his hands sometimes roamed her back and she'd have to remind him she was fifteen and in no hurry, sir, but not mad, either. Her sister, July, and brother-in-law, Charles Lathrop, had gently hectored Mr. Powell, who had gotten accustomed to hearing the expectant sliding of waltzing feet from the floor above as he read the evening paper, until he said yes, finally, yes, and on dance night he gave Dimple a silent, rueful and humbled look over his spectacles as he watched her leaving his house so beautiful in a spotless new dress.

East Side: dirt streets spread with oil to hold the dust low, home after home where the rough-lumbered walls have been deserted by paint and wasps haunt the eaves: a tin roof the sun beats on nakedly and sears but rainwater glides from smoothly and is gone in a slap into the dirt, it makes reddish mud in the front yard, side yard, backyard. Sidewalks are of little use, usefulness burst by the foraging roots of nearby trees, the wooden planks softened by age and slanted in two directions or more from the corruption in the middle. The sidewalk staves make excellent weapons when weapons are suddenly neededa"he's drunk again, that's my bottle of milk, I just don't want you around here no more, got that? Cats prowl between houses, dogs range about in the alleys, and a welter of children with bare feet play in wan, worn yards, beneath fading trees, playing with the terrible intensity of those who know already how quickly pa.s.sing are their scant hours for fun.

Alma walked from the east each morning toward an important place, a house of prospering girth, brick walls st.u.r.dy as a vault, with a shaded veranda and heavy bal.u.s.trade of purified white, a trefoil arch in the masonry over the doorway, large windows spanned by gla.s.s that rippled and bowed in the antique manner, bringing a winsome disarray to the eye from certain angles, the view of the world outside bent as the gla.s.s would have it bent, or stretched, or truncated. Town life was not so much run by the sun anymore but by the time displayed on clock faces, though Alma still answered to the early c.o.c.k crows, roosters across town greeting dawn loudly but not in unison, somehow sensing daylight's arrival with considerable variance of time, some now, some several minutes later. But she would always be at work early enough to make breakfast for Mr. Glencross, a hearty eatera"pork sausage, eggs and cream biscuitsa"then the children, picky and complaining, usually wanting any cereal she hadn't cooked, or eggs if she'd made cereal, and finally Mrs. Glencross, who asked only for cooled toast with no b.u.t.ter or jam and a steaming mug of English tea.

She often ate while standing near the kitchen sink, staring from the window there, and might address Alma as the table was cleared, "Do you believe it could rain today?"

"It could."

"Believe it will?"

"Not likely. We need it too much."

"My poor roses."

Mrs. Glencross was the real source of wealth in the house. She'd been born into the Jarman family, and the Jarmans owned just about everything they cared to havea"giant swaths of Ozark land, cattle, hogs and rental properties, a lumberyard, the Opera House, and a big piece of Citizens' Bank. Mrs. Corinne Glencross had grown up s.h.i.+elded from a rounded experience of life, considered to be so delicate that she must not know the feel of direct sunlight upon her skin, the rude wind, dishwater on her hands, coa.r.s.e people, and the common gamut of unpleasant facts. She didn't know how to do anything much, but Alma liked her, liked her strange lilting mind, innocent and flitting about airily from subject to subject, making amusing points along the way but not lingering. She had few demands, or at least didn't think of many she cared to utter. She spent the middle hours of most days reclining on the divan in the parlor with the curtains drawn and a cold cloth over her eyes, waiting stoically for her next appointment with Dr. Thomason. When she felt better, peppy for an hour or two, she'd follow Alma around the house as she worked, watching her do laundry, clean all fourteen rooms, make lye soap some days, iron bedsheets others, and ask her why she did things this way instead of that way, or what would happen if you tried dusting with a sponge, or used a more slender stick to stir the clothes in the washtub.

Alma would be patient, try to tell her why, or else say, "You're lookin' peaked just now, Mrs. Glencross. Wouldn't want you to swoon to the floor and bruise. You got such good skin."

On shopping days Alma would stride toward the square with a canvas tote bag and a small wad of money. She liked the meats from Jupiter Grocery, the produce from Widow McLean's, and bought bread at the Greek's down the avenue. When the Greek's opened, Alma had resisted the place for months but relented, and on her first attempt to shop there she felt the Greek was trying to get an advantage on her in the amount of seven cents. She'd eyed him coldly, coin purse clenched unopened in her hand, then said, "You do me thisaway, mister, and you ain't skinnin' me at alla"you're skinnin' Mr. Arthur Glencross. You best ask a friend who that is." In the early gloaming of that evening the Greek called at the Glencross house with a heavy sack of hard candy, two loaves of bread, black olives and a long low nod for Alma. The Greek's bread quickly became so highly regarded by the gentry that all the maids were relieved of bread-making duty, and though their grat.i.tude to the Greek went unspoken, they became forever loyal to the store. The four and sometimes five or six maids who worked near the square tried to meet at the Greek's between dusting time and lunch. They fingered the jars of interesting foods, smelled the coffee beans, and gathered on a bench outside in the shade where they could observe the avenue but were unlikely to be overheard as they sat there telling the truth in whispers or laughing about it with their faces turned to the sky.

Ruby DeGeer didn't mind breaking hearts, but she liked them to shatter coolly, with no ugly scenes of departure where an arm got twisted behind her back by a crying man, or her many failings and damp habits were made specific in words shouted out an open window. Accepting boredom did not come easily to her, and some men could bore her beyond courtesy before the first drink was drained or the key rattled into a hotel room door, but if she liked a fella, then he knew unleashed marvels until she didn't anymore and in their fresh agony the heartbroken twisted her arm crying or yelled her business to the street. She'd known poverty from birth but been blessed with pizzazz and understood early that life was a fight and she couldn't win even one round if she kept her best hand tied behind her back. If men were smitten by her lyric eyes and fluctuating mounds and scented sashay, well, let them display their feelings in meaningful ways: clothes, hats, rent, a big weekend at the Peabody in Memphis, a morning visit on Christmas Day when they ought to be home with their wives and children but couldn't stay away, just couldn't do it, just can't.

"Bring me somethin' adorable I want when you come round again."

She'd part from them one by one as the men grew too complicated with their appet.i.tes and plans or her dance card became too full with the newly smitten, who tended to splurge more readily anyhow. She'd soon sink the new beneath her blunt desires and work them and work them until the pump handle started to stick, then spring a farewell moment and move along. The money never amounted to all that much, but it now and then bought a few items of worth, some to be worn, some to be polished and saved in a drawer for p.a.w.ning later, fed her fairly regular meals, helped her rent a private room. It was not prost.i.tution in her view because she did not extract a payment for each intimacy, never did that, never would, but only accepted something more like a sneak t.i.thing from fellas she called friends. "That's just romancin'," she'd say. Wives disagreed and she'd been a.s.saulted a few times, called a dirty-leg wh.o.r.e, bimbo, tramp, had her hair pulled, been kicked blue in the s.h.i.+ns, slapped in the face. Alma almost lost her job when she hunted the wife who'd bloodied Ruby's nose on the square and made the lady say "Snuff" with her face pushed against a store window, then suggested in whispers as she pressed from behind that who the lady ought to be hitting was wearing pants and a mustache. (There'd been calls from friends of the whupped lady for Alma to be dismissed, but Mrs. Glencross heard about the encounter, the vulgarity and vigor displayed by women tussling in a public place, the sunlight brilliant on exposed skin, and flushed with secondhand excitement as she listened, then said, "Valiant, so valiant," to describe Alma's defense of Ruby, and that was that.) Such moments were what made sisters special to sisters, and Ruby shared her spoils from the field of amour with Alma and the Dunahew boys whenever she had any surplus. Alma did not like the way Ruby lived, had often said so in the sternest tones, but understood too well, too well her baby sister's ravenous need for the comforts and adulation that men provided her, and the savage joy that bounced in her soul whenever she dumped a stricken beau and went out once more dancing alone.

Alma said their early lives had been like this: Cecil DeGeer was white-haired at Alma's birth, and owned with the bank about twenty-five acres across the road from South Turn Creek, maybe fifteen acres in timber and the rest red clay and scrub. They made a huge garden by poaching good soil from the creek bottomland of their neighbor and carrying it away in peach baskets by the light of the moon or in utter darkness. There was no fence line, making it easy to splash buckets from the creek onto row upon row of things to eat if the weather didn't listen to the Devil and blaze or the creek flood again and wash every meal of tomorrow downstream, and run a few hogs in the brambles and timber. Their mother was a Pruitt with cancer of the nose that required a large portion be sliced off, so she seldom left the land or went among strangers, but worked long, long, long hours, as though to punish herself for whatever act or failure cost her that slice of nose. There was slim reward apparent for her relentless toiling but an eking survival and the toil itself. She was kind, made that effort, she hoped, less and less but still, she tried, on and on. As soon as Alma could wield a short-handled hoe she bent her back to work the land. Her mother begged until the girl was let go to school, and begged each year until begging ceased to be effective, and after third grade (she still couldn't quite read or write and never would) Alma worked the dirt from daylight to dark.

Great-grandpa Cecil could not ever seem to reconcile himself to his circ.u.mstances, or want to, and sat still more often than could be forgiven. He'd been born to comfort and a fair portfolio of wealth in Texas, blown his inheritance before the age of twenty-five (he drank wildly and thought he could gamble wildly, too), gone to his kin to beseech for more, a new start, and within a year blown that as well, then become permanently estranged from his family when they would loan him no more, not a chance, don't even bother to ask. His face flushed to a scalded red that didn't go away and his hands quivered. The DeGeers never spoke again, nor traded letters, birth or funeral notices, and became unknown to each other. Being born to poverty one is accustomed to the degradations and neediness, hence at home in all that dinginess, while not much is worse (Cecil was certain of this) than becoming accustomed to a high station from birth only to watch yourself sink, incredulously, lower by the season, until you land b.u.mpy-a.s.sed on rocky dirt with folks cloaked in rags and desperation who were now your peers, no arguing that, but who would never feel like equals. Cecil was basically unemployable by temperament; he quit jobs over slights no one else heard or even a.s.signments stated too plainly, the very plainness of wording an insult to his pedigree. This arch sensitivity to social hierarchy prevented him from working steadily, a sullen employee always, even if he worked for himself, every workday a diminishment of his proper standing in the world, a daily lessening that meanly sapped his vim, rendered him forlorn and inert, while his women, made natural va.s.sals by their gender, worked like swampers, muckers, field hands toiling for his ease. They sweated dry in sunlight and slept in stiffened calico. Cecil sat and dreamed or walked to Wilhoite's for a jar and returned home to resume sitting, his dreaming now aided by gulps of s.h.i.+ne. A far richer life continued hourly behind his eyes, a life painted on sky-blue panels, and in it he was again a well-to-do DeGeer from Lampasas with daily feasts, horses to the horizon, cattle spread beyond, petticoats falling in a white drift beside any bed he rested on.

Alma fled at fifteen, sorrowful to leave Mother behind with little Ruby and that old drinking man, crying as she ran, but positive-sure she'd strangle herself before midnight with a barbed-wire strand if she didn't start running today, this minute, get to town, tear open a new life and crawl inside.

Ruby had it worse. She was allowed no schooling at all, and Cecil in his dotage had become fond of the whip. He applied lashes to both Ruby and her mother and shouted his point of view while they ducked or cowered. Despite being half-nosed and forever working, Mother stood accused of lying with strangers, probably at creekside while Cecil slept, since he'd pondered on the porch and convinced himself that pretty little Ruby must be the sp.a.w.n of a fornication that had not included him. In looks she did not favor Cecil or any kin he ever saw and that made her nothing but a mouth to feed, an a.s.s to beat, a young body of no relation he could sometimes let his hands rub on the buds and rump and linger until his breathing thickened and he had to lie down next to the wh.o.r.e, her mother, for a piddling relief.

It was grim living and those years made indelible memories that would never die or even fade enough to be misremembered. Flashes of recall would forever plague Ruby, those stunning jagged flashes that contain crushed feelings, certain smells, sorry pictures that fired unbidden into the mind and made her cringe, cringe, cringe, and she'd cry into her hands for an hour or go find a man she'd render weak with her smile and lead him straight to the shearing shed.

Then came the morning Cecil did not wake but stretched purple in bed, tongue lolling, and soon enough after the farm was taken by the bank and Mother's fort.i.tude dispersed skyward in a single beam of dimming light. She'd lost her final ounce of oomph and was moved to the Work Farm, while Ruby, at age thirteen, was sent to town and Alma's care. In very short order Alma found a live-in job for Ruby as an apprentice laundress and general helper at the home of Mr. and Mrs. J. T. Duxton, who had a large house on a good street, two teenaged sons, and plenty for a young girl to do.

Mr. Arthur Glencross would eventually have a statue of his likeness placed in a position of honor on the town square. Glencross had many fine qualities and a pleasing manner he'd adopted as a teen and clung to throughout. He was born into a family of a.s.sistant merchants, that is, folks who did okay but spent their days as clerks in parlous (even torturous) proximity to those who owned the factory and did mighty d.a.m.n well. The social distance between grated and Glencross was shaped early by the resentment his folks nurtured in private and shared with him in words, glances, facial expressions. He was a half-decent baseball player and an excellent student, one A+ (instead of a mere A-) shy of being valedictorian of his cla.s.s. During deer season he went to a camp in the forest with his father and cronies, but he preferred fis.h.i.+ng mountain streams alone. His only dates in high school were with daughters of his mother's close friends and none was memorable or repeated. His folks did without luxuries, scrimped and saved, and he was sent to the state university at Columbia. There he lived in a quiet rooming house of dour scholars and achieved the honor roll, heard John Cowper Powys give a lecture on the meaning of art that enlarged his mind, saw Mabel Normand wave a long-stemmed rose from a touring car, and became deeply smitten with a large and brilliant girl at Stephens College who had to be reminded of his name every time they met. Business reversals required that he return home after applying two and a half years toward a four-year degree, and he did so with hangdog reluctance but quickly took a job at Citizens' Bank.