A Wilder Rose: A Novel (22 page)

Norma Lee filled the dishpan with hot water from the teakettle and began to wash the glasses and cups. She had seen the return address on the envelope. It was from Garet Garrett, a friend and fellow writer—a regular contributor to the
Saturday Evening Post—
who shared Mrs. Lane’s anti–New Deal, isolationist opinions. The two wrote frequently.

A little later, Mrs. Lane was back with a box of quilt scraps. “Now, let’s see,” she said, settling herself. “That summer. The summer of the Dust Bowl trip. Hard times. Oh, yes, hard, hard times.”

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Mother and Sons: 1933–1934

Things changed for me after that trip through the Dust Bowl. I had written
Hurricane
as a reply to pessimists and a testimony to the valor of the American spirit. But while we were driving through Kansas and Oklahoma, I also saw the story from the point of view of the people who were facing the worst that nature could inflict, saw how its hopeful optimism could be read as false, a tidy cheeriness that was undone by the fiercely corrosive realities of rainless skies, black blizzards, parched and starving livestock. Living at Rocky Ridge—and oh, how the hard truth of that name struck home to me now!—I was utterly isolated: friends, lovers, all gone, even little Bunting. Rexh was silent, too. He had finished at Cambridge and gone back to Albania, which was now in Mussolini’s iron fist. The boy had always written regularly, but I hadn’t heard from him in months and I was afraid for him, with so many ugly things happening in his country. Only my parents remained, and they were little comfort. My father was as taciturn as always. My mother kept exhorting me to get up and get busy around the house, as if it were sheer lazy obstinacy that was keeping me in bed. It was one of the lowest, darkest months of my life. My hurricane, and I wasn’t sure I would survive it.

But by late September, the worst of my physical distress had passed. I was shaky and uncertain on my feet, but I got out of bed one Tuesday morning and looked out the window. The sky was gray and threatening rain, but the maples were just beginning to change color. I needed a change, too, I thought, and I prodded myself to think about the possibility of going to New York, perhaps renting a cheap room, seeing editors, visiting with friends. The magazine market seemed to be easing somewhat—I had a couple of sales to prove it. Surely, in New York, I could write enough to pay the bills on both places. Or maybe my parents could move back to the farmhouse and rent the . . .

But the idea glimmered away into the drifting fog of my malaise. Listlessly, I dressed and went downstairs for a late breakfast—the first time in several weeks. Lucille had been coming in for a few hours a day to do the housecleaning and cooking, and she had made a nice meal of scrambled eggs with a bit of ham, with biscuits and hot tea. We ate together, and when she finished, she put on her jacket and a head scarf and went out to the box to get the mail. In a few moments, she was back.

“I need to drive to town for flour and sugar,” she said, putting several envelopes on the table in front of me. “And cocoa. I want to bake a chocolate cake.”

“A cake? For just the two of us?”

“You’re downstairs and that’s something to celebrate, isn’t it? I could fry up a chicken and make some potato salad and we could invite your parents for supper, if you want. They went to Springfield, but your mother said they’d be back by five. I’m sure she’d be glad not to cook tonight.” I nodded without enthusiasm and she took her car keys out of her purse. “Want me to get anything for you while I’m in town?”

“You could get me some Drene shampoo,” I said. “I suppose I should wash my hair. And please pick up the latest
Scribner’s
if you see it. Oh, and
Country Gentleman.
” If New York was ever going to be a possibility for me, I had to earn some money. “I should try to catch up on the latest fiction, see what the magazines are buying.”

At the thought of New York, I felt the fog lift a little. If I couldn’t go this fall, I could surely manage next spring.

“Shampoo,” she said approvingly. “Hair washing. Magazines. You’re on the mend, Rose.”

When Lucille left, I poured another cup of tea and opened the
Springfield
News & Leader.
The front page was nothing but crime stories. John Dillinger and two of his henchmen had held up an Indianapolis bank and got away with twenty-five thousand dollars. Eight gunmen had taken two cashboxes containing as much as one hundred thousand dollars (nobody knew for sure how much it was) from the Railway Express Agency in St. Paul. Over in Hays, Kansas, where I had interviewed a rancher and a grain-elevator manager the month before, four masked men armed with machine guns had robbed the Farmers State Bank, taken several hostages, and escaped after stealing a car. Closer to home, in Springfield, someone had broken into a chicken coop and made off with a half-dozen hens. “The crooks must’ve shoved ’em into a sack,” the owner said sadly. “Me and the missus heard nary a squawk.” I shook my head, wondering if I should try my hand at crime writing. There seemed to be an appetite for it.

Besides the newspaper, there were three letters and a postcard. Troub wrote that she was working as a private nurse to a wealthy man in Boston. She was thinking of making another stab at authorship—a series of books for older girls about nurses, she said. If I was planning to be in New York this fall, maybe I’d come up to Boston and help her with it. And maybe I could suggest some publishing connections for her.

Mary Margaret wrote from Los Angeles, where she had finally found steady work, writing and ghostwriting pulp biographies of Hollywood movie stars that sold in five-and-ten-cent stores. “Polished off Joan Crawford last week,” she wrote. “Next week, Betty Boop and Olive Oyl. I swear.” In parentheses she added, “The mighty are fallen and the proud brought low. But I’m broke again. I’ll do
anything
to earn money.” She signed the letter, “Invincibly yours, MM.”

A penny postcard from Catharine Brody in New York said simply, “
Cash Item
out at last, reviews middling good. Thanks for putting up with me. Tell your mother and her friends that I’m back where I belong.”

Troub with a new job and a writing scheme in Boston. Mary Margaret, broke but still wry and funny in Los Angeles. Catharine with a new book, belonging in New York. And here I sat, alone, isolated, sick, with nothing upstairs in the typewriter, nothing in my mind. I
had
to find a reason to get started again.

I opened George Bye’s letter last. Always the cheerleader (a very good trait in an agent), he wondered plaintively if I had fallen off the face of the earth. “We’re hungry for another Rose Lane story,” he wrote. “Adelaide Neall at the
Post
is begging for more of your homestead fiction. She’s desperate for a follow-up to ‘Hurricane’ to lift everyone’s spirits. Can’t you pull another one out of your hat? On bended knee, George.”

Homestead fiction.
I thought of the farmer with the bleak, dark-rimmed eyes sunk in a dust-streaked face, and shivered. “
This
is your hurricane,”
he’d said, gesturing to the desolate land. I folded George Bye’s letter and put it back in the envelope. What could I say to him? That I was flat out of the happy endings the magazines wanted? That there was nothing in my head or my heart that I could put on paper—nothing that anybody would want to read, that is?

There was a knock at the back door. My mother never knocked, and anyway, she and my father had driven to Springfield and wouldn’t be back until suppertime. It might be Jess, but he usually yelled as well as knocking. Or Angela, his wife, wanting to visit. I made a face. I was feeling better, but I was in no mood for company.

But it wasn’t company. The boy who stood at the back door was ragged and dirty, his dark hair long around his ears and uneven, as if someone had chopped at it with a knife. He was in his midteens, thin faced and skinny. He wore a red cap and a frayed blue plaid cotton shirt. His shoulders were hunched against the chilly drizzle. He wasn’t wearing a jacket.

“Yes?” I asked, reaching for the screen-door hook, latching it. I wasn’t afraid of the boy, but with all the crime sprees in the news, it would pay to be cautious. He was just a boy, but he might have a companion, lurking somewhere out of sight. We didn’t often see hobos this far out of town, more than a mile from the railroad depot where they got off the freights. But Mrs. Moore, on the other side of the Rock House, had reported that a pair of Mr. Moore’s bibbed overalls and one of his flannel shirts had disappeared from the clothesline. She reckoned it was a tramp, needing something to wear against the coming winter cold. “I hate it when somebody steals,” she had told my mother, “but it ain’t Christian to begrudge a poor fella a clean shirt and a pair of overalls. I figger he must need it worse than Mr. Moore.”

The boy’s glance followed my reach for the screen-door hook. He dropped his eyes, but not before I saw the sudden hurt burn in them.

“Don’t mean to trouble you none, ma’am.” He shoved his fists into his pockets and added defensively, “I ain’t lookin’ for no handout. I’ll trade a half-day’s work for a meal.” He glanced over his shoulder toward the barn. “Another half-day for a bed in your loft.”

The flare of hurt had gone straight to my heart, and I was ashamed. There was something about the boy—the quick glance out of those dark eyes, the turn of the head, the stubborn set of the shoulders—that reminded me of Rexh, whom I had met when he was just about that age. Or perhaps it was the red cap, pulled jauntily over one eye.

I unhooked the screen and stepped out, pulling my sweater around me against the chilly damp. “Well, then, if you’re willing, you can weed that flower border.” I pointed. “Just weeds, now, mind you. Let me know when that’s done, and I’ll give you something else to do.” I thought of Lucille’s fried chicken and was glad of the chocolate cake. I’d never met a young boy who didn’t love chocolate cake. “We usually eat supper around six.”

I went back upstairs, sat down at the typewriter, and answered the letters. The keys were familiar under my fingers, the rhythmic clack-clickety-clack cheered me, and it felt good to see words on paper. When I went out to check on the boy’s progress, I was surprised to see that he had done an unusually thorough job in spite of the wet. I gave him an old denim jacket of Papa’s that was hanging in the porch and put him to work on the iris bed. Several hours later, when he was through with that, I offered him a hot bath in the workshop.

His name was John Turner. Bathed and combed, he was quite good looking, with fine dark hair and dark eyes, straight dark brows, and a firm jaw. He was fourteen, he said, from a farm outside of Tulsa. Both his parents had died of tuberculosis the year before, leaving him on his own. He had hopped a freight to Texas, where he worked until the previous December picking cotton, then attended school in El Paso. He went back to Texas this year, he said, but there was no work because the government was making the farmers plow up half their cotton. He’d had some other clothes and a photo of his mother and father. But they were in his bedroll, which had been stolen by a hobo in the freight yard in Texarkana. All he had was what he was wearing.

My parents came for supper, so there were five of us around the table: Mama Bess and Papa, Lucille and I, and the boy. But before we sat down, my mother pulled me into the kitchen to warn me against taking in tramps.

“People in town are saying that if you feed one and give him a bed, word will spread up and down the railroad line and you’ll have a passel of hobos beating a path to your door. And not just your door, Rose, but everybody’s. Mine and Mrs. Moore’s, too, since we’re just up the road.” She frowned. “Why, I’ve heard that they put a secret mark on your mailbox, so the other tramps will know that they can get a handout from you.”

Maybe. But it did my heart good to watch the boy tuck into Lucille’s crisp fried chicken and rich chocolate cake, as if he hadn’t eaten for a week—which was likely the truth. He was polite and considerate, and when we got up from the table, he volunteered to wipe the dishes while I washed. Later that evening, Jess made up a bed in the workshop, which was warmer than the barn, and John slept there that night. He got up with a bad cold the next morning (and no wonder, sleeping outdoors and slogging through the wet with no jacket), so I suggested that he stay on for a day or two. The next time Lucille came out from town, she brought some boys’ clothing she’d borrowed from a friend, so he had something warm to wear. At the end of the week, when his cough was better, he began painting and doing some chores that Jess hadn’t gotten around to. He was a willing worker, bright and capable, and he seemed to take directions well.

John wasn’t the only young boy on the road, of course. The “boxcar kids,” an army of nomadic young people variously estimated from two hundred thousand to one million, drifted from place to place, hitchhiking along the highways or riding the rails—a gang of rabble that some said would turn into lifelong vagrants, bandits, and criminals. Reading of them, I was reminded of the
bezprizorni
, the homeless, hopeless Russian street children who were left orphaned and abandoned after the 1917 Revolution. When I was traveling in Russia, I was warned to keep my eye on my belongings—especially my pocketbook—and to travel always with others. The
bezprizorni
banded together in packs as pickpockets, thieves, and robbers, armed with homemade weapons. They pounced on the unwary like wolves on a stray lamb.

But I could also see these boxcar kids as a generation of young American pioneers, eager to escape from their conventional parents and small towns and venture out into the great unknown. They were nomads eager for adventure, for new lives, pursuing dreams of hope and abundance—like myself, when I was seventeen and escaped from Mansfield by boarding that train bound for Kansas City. Or like the hitchhiking boy in Kansas who had rejected my suggestion that he look for work back East.

“Ain’t you never heard the old saying, missus?” he’d asked. “Go west, young man. Go west. Me, I’m going west. I’m going west and make my fortune.”

And who could blame him, or any of them? I thought of all the American generations who have believed that growth on our continent lies naturally in a westward direction. Men and women left the East, fenced with stability and permanence and predictability and tradition, to plant farms and build towns and create new lives in the West. They were hungry for movement, for change, for freedom from tradition, and yes, for instability, for risk. They wanted to escape the past. They wanted to belong to the future and to
themselves
, not to somebody else.