Last Dance on the Starlight Pier, page 13
“Not on your life, buddy,” Cleo answered as she switched off the engine and folded her arms over her chest. “We’ve taken enough detours already for your freeloader friend. Those clodhoppers back there will be passing this way just as soon as their little bunny festival is over. She can stick her thumb out like she should have been doing from the start and hitch a ride with one of them.”
“Cleo’s right,” I said, getting out.
Zave limped over and joined me by the side of the road. “Hey, sorry about Cleo, but once her mind is set, she’ll make a mule look wishy-washy.”
“No, she’s right. I took you way out of your way. Thanks for getting me this far.”
“Are you kidding? You’re Denny Devlin’s daughter. That practically makes you my sister.” Zave grinned straight into a sun that was just starting to dip below the horizon.
Though I smiled at his joke, that word, “sister,” hit me hard. Just as I’d done with Sofie, though, I hid my true reaction.
“Listen, Gravy, we have to stay in touch. There’s so much I have to—”
A sharp honk interrupted Zave. “Wrap it up back there,” Cleo yelled. “We gotta hit Amarillo before the gas stations close.”
“Take it easy,” Zave hollered back. “I’m not leaving Evie alone on the side of the road with night coming on.”
“Oh, for the love of Pete,” Cleo groaned.
“Keep your shirt on,” Zave yelled. “Look, here come the clodhoppers now. I’ll catch one going into Litchfield.”
The sun had set and most of the rattletrap vehicles had chugged past before an ancient black Model T truck signaled a turn onto the Litchfield road. Zave flagged it down and stuck his head in to talk to the farmer at the wheel. A moment later, Zave waved me over.
The driver, a shy, taciturn man with a farmer’s work-hardened hands, gave me a nod of greeting then moved aside the bucket of eggs cushioned in hay that was occupying the passenger side of the bench seat and I got in. Zave shut the door, leaned in the window, and told me, “Take real good care of Denny Devlin’s daughter for me.” The farmer let the clutch out, the gears ground, and the truck pulled away.
I craned around in my seat. If Zave so much as waved, I was ready to jump out and beg Cleo to take me along. But Cleo barely gave him time to hop back in the Buick before she careened away. I gazed across the flat, empty land and followed the smooth comet streak of their taillights until they disappeared.
Only then did I recall that I’d left my suitcase in the trunk.
CHAPTER 30
The farmer steadied the bucket of eggs and, eyes never meeting mine, asked, “You headed to Vonda Kay’s?”
Startled to hear this stranger speak the name of a grandmother I’d never met, I asked, “How did you know?”
Nodding at the “For Sale” sign hanging on the gate of the abandoned farm we were passing, he answered, “She’s pretty much the only one left living out this way. I was on my way to deliver these to her.” He patted the eggs with a shy pride.
It was dark when the old truck creaked and groaned onto a lane even narrower and rockier than the road we’d been on. The desolate, desiccated land that opened up for miles all around was eerily luminous in the light of a pale, cloud-whipped moon. The mournful songs of whippoorwills filled the dry air. They fit my bleak mood. I dreaded the prospect of seeing Mamie again.
Brakes shrieking, the farmer stopped in front of a ramshackle house, with its rusty tin roof a patchwork of odd sheets of metal, its siding weathered to a ghostly gray, and the chimney little more than a pile of bricks slumping into the weeds. The place appeared deserted. Surely, the farmer had made a mistake. This couldn’t be where my glamorous mother, who would have been a movie star if the breaks had gone her way, had grown up.
Twisting his big, calloused hands on the steering wheel, the farmer peered nervously at the house and, his voice tense with alarm, muttered, “That’s not like Vonda Kay not to come out when she hears the truck.” He tapped a sharp blast on the horn. When there was no response, all his diffidence fell away.
“Vonda Kay needs help,” he said, springing from the truck.
I followed him inside the pitch-dark house.
“Vonda Kay,” the farmer called into the gloom. “It’s me, Dub.”
I heard the weakest of wheezes and rushed to my grandmother, who lay on the floor, unconscious and fighting for breath.
“Granma.” I whispered the name as naturally as if I’d been saying it all my life. “It’s Evie Grace, Mamie’s daughter. I’m going to take care of you.”
She didn’t open her eyes, responding only with a terrifyingly feeble moan.
A lantern flared to life. With exquisite tenderness, Dub scooped my grandmother up and laid her on the sofa.
Kneeling beside my grandmother, I could feel the fever burning off of her as I pressed my ear against her chest. Her breathing was shallow and rapid. Her lungs crackled with every labored inhalation. The sound made me remember the cows with mud in their lungs that Sister had told us about.
My grandmother, not Mamie, was the one who had dust pneumonia. And Mamie had abandoned her.
“How far’s the nearest hospital?”
“Lubbock.”
“She won’t last that long. Find a quilt, a blanket, something,” I instructed Dub as I rushed to the kitchen.
Fortunately, there were live embers banked at the back of the cast-iron stove and I had a fire built and the kettle boiling in no time. Dub tented a quilt over us and I held a steaming pan of water close enough to my grandmother that she could inhale the moist, warm vapor.
Through the night, Dub brought me fresh water and I coaxed the healing steam into my grandmother’s congested lungs. Gradually, her breathing eased. Near dawn, she opened her eyes. She had Mamie’s eyes, a startling, gentian blue. In her unadorned face, though, they looked gentle and a little scared instead of calculatingly feline.
“I’m Evelyn Grace,” I explained again. “Your granddaughter. I’m a nurse. I’m going to take care of you.”
She managed to put her hand, light and papery, atop mine. On her face a wave of wrinkles rose and crested in a beatific smile even as her eyelids drooped shut.
Dub returned with another steaming pan.
“She’s stable now,” I told him.
Dub’s big, hard-muscled body sagged with relief at the news. He turned his gaze upward, touched the tips of his calloused hands together, and whispered, “Thank you. Thank you.”
Daylight came. Large beams shot through holes in the roof and the chinks riddling the walls. Clouds of dust floated through the sunlight. Drifts of the powder-fine sand that the dry land puffed up with every breeze formed humps beneath all the windows and doors.
I fashioned a mask from a tea towel and placed it over Granma’s mouth and nose. “That should help. At least until we get her to the hospital.”
“Is she fit to travel?” Dub asked.
“We don’t have a choice. The emergency is past, but she won’t really get any better until she’s on oxygen.”
“Let me go fetch in the eggs and check on Daisy.”
“Daisy?”
“Her goat. She’ll be needing milking. Vonda Kay would never forgive me if I didn’t see to her. That goat and the groceries I bring been about the only things keeping her alive. Do we have time?”
“Her fever has broken and her lung sounds are a bit better, so yes, we have a little time. But not much.” At the pump in the back, I filled a bucket. The vast fields behind Granma’s house that must have once swayed with limitless acres of wheat were now a desert humped with sand dunes and riven with deep crevices that split the barren land. Off beneath the shade of a tall cedar elm, the only tree for miles, Dub milked Daisy, Granma’s floppy-eared goat.
For some reason, then, in that brief moment of calm, I thought of Marvin the Man of Marvels, telling me that a person could do anything they put their mind to. Even claim a nursing pin that had been wrongfully withheld. As if blessing my insight, a cooling breeze blew across my flushed face.
The moment didn’t last long.
Across the field, Dub started hollering, “Whoa. Whoa, Daisy!” The pretty goat had suddenly gone crazy. Kicking and bleating, she butted Dub away and yanked at her tether. With a sudden jerk, she snapped the rope and bounded off. I ran over to intercept her.
Daisy was fast, but after a short chase, Dub managed to haze her toward me, and I grabbed the rope trailing from her neck. Her capture didn’t seem to please Dub, though. Instead, his face fell as he looked off to the north and, his tone grim and tight, he said, “That’s what Daisy was trying to escape.”
Across the entire northern horizon, thunderheads unlike any I had ever seen before rose in a solid black wall. They surged up, dense and angry. This strange, swift-moving bank of clouds boiled ever higher into the sky until the sun was blotted out entirely.
“We gotta get back,” Dub said. “Now.”
Only then did I realize how far Daisy had led us. The house seemed small and fragile and far away in the darkening distance. Dub grabbed my hand and, leading Daisy behind us, we hurried toward safety.
Frantic with fear, Daisy tripped on a deep crack. As Dub paused to gather her into his arms, a silence as complete as the darkness fell. A second later, it was broken by the frantic calls of thousands of birds. The desperate flock filled the sky, all flapping madly to escape the storm that was bearing down on them.
A roar loud as a freight train shattered the silence and we were engulfed in a dust storm that turned the day blacker than any night I’d ever known. Tumbleweeds cartwheeled crazily past. The corrugated tin roof of the shed was ripped free and went swirling past. The sand blasted against every inch of my exposed skin, slicing into it with a thousand razor edges.
The air crackled with static electricity that made the hair on my arm stand on end and the barbed-wire fence hum and glow blue. The wind knocked me to my knees and lashed stinging needles into my eyes. Blinded by the black fog of swirling dirt that hid the house from view, I crawled on all fours.
“Follow the fence!” Dub bellowed at me, pointing to the sputtering blue line glowing through the choking cloud. It led us to the house. The three of us scrambled inside only to find that the dust swirled nearly as thick inside as it did out. The small house creaked and shuddered. Terrifying whomping sounds made me fear that the roof would be ripped away.
Following Dub’s lead, I grabbed every towel, sheet, and blanket in the house, wet them all, and tacked them over the windows and doors. Then we soaked newspapers and stuffed them into every crack we could find. And still the wind drove the devilishly fine particles in. Dub gathered Granma and me together on the sofa and we held each other through the endless, dark night while the wind howled and pounded and Dub muttered that we would all be fine.
Just fine.
CHAPTER 31
It was dark as a cave the next morning, but at least Granma, sleeping in Dub’s arms, was still breathing.
“We have to get her to the hospital,” I whispered to Dub, who nodded in silent agreement.
Tiptoeing across the drifts of dust, I peeked out the blanketed window and was stunned to find the sky an achingly clear blue. I pushed open the door to go outside.
At least, I tried to go outside. The door would not budge. It was held fast from the outside. Dub helped me shove it open. A foot-high drift of dirt encircled the entire house. Bodies of birds that had suffocated in the storm littered the yard.
Cradling her as carefully as a newborn, Dub carried Granma to the truck and, head cushioned on my lap, snuggled her in. Whenever he wasn’t shifting gears, he held her hand as we sped through the vast land that had kept us imprisoned.
At the West Texas Sanitarium in downtown Lubbock, a nurse settled Granma in beneath a crackly tent of thick, clear cellophane. With calm efficiency, she twisted the valve on the tank beside the bed and the enclosure filled with oxygen. Gradually, my grandmother’s cheeks lost the alarming grape tint they’d had. Her eyes fluttered open. When her gaze settled on me, joy suffused her expression.
“Hi, Granma.”
My grandmother lifted her hand and placed it on the curtain. I pressed mine against it and a feeling I didn’t have a name for coursed through me.
The nurse, Bettye Jo, according to her name tag, asked, “Who is the family member here?”
I hesitated to claim such a grand award, but Dub nodded at me and said, “She is. She’s Vonda Kay’s granddaughter.”
“Can we talk?” Bettye Jo asked, motioning me to join her as she stepped away from the bed.
Bettye Jo quickly confirmed what I suspected: Granma would require a lengthy hospital stay before she’d be ready to return to life on a remote farm. I asked how much it would cost to keep her in this private room.
Though I didn’t say anything when she answered, Bettye Jo read my expression and offered gently, “Listen, even if we have to move her to the charity ward, I’ll make sure she gets excellent care.”
“Thank you, but I can’t allow that to happen. I’ve seen country people in crowded wards. They don’t adjust well.” I don’t mention that, as isolated as she’d been, she’d have zero immunity to every germ the city patients brought in. Including tuberculosis.
“Dog it,” Bettye Jo went on, her voice tight. “I hate to have to say this, and only would because this hospital is fixing to go broke, but I can only give you one free night. After that, administration is going to make me move her. I’m sorry. I truly am.”
I inquired about jobs.
“Doing what?” Bettye Jo asked.
“I trained as a nurse.”
“Trained?” she asked. “Are you registered?”
I shook my head.
“Couple, three years ago I’d have sent you upstairs to fill out an application whether you had a pin or not. But now? Way the economy is? We have nurses with pins scrubbing out toilets.”
Dub joined us. “I overheard you talking,” he said, holding out a few wadded bills and some change on his leathery palm. “This is all I have right now. I can try to sell my farm. At least the equipment. But that’ll take time. I know Vonda Kay had put some savings aside, but well, Mamie, she…” His voice trailed off. He didn’t need to explain. Mamie had cleaned her mother out. It was what Mamie did.
I curled his fingers around the money. “Don’t worry. I’ll take care of it. Take care of her,” I said, because I knew then exactly what I had to do. I gave Bettye Jo the little cash I had left and told her I’d get the rest. Soon. “Just don’t move my grandmother to the charity ward, okay? Please.”
“Don’t worry, you have my word on it,” she promised. “One nurse to another.”
“One nurse to another.”
I asked Dub if he could bring me a change of clothes. “Anything my grandmother has will be fine.”
Distress creased his expression when he answered, “I might not be able to make it back for a few days. I’ve got livestock to see to. Pump’s going out on the windmill. Animals won’t have any water if I don’t fix it.”
I told Dub that I’d be fine. I was in a hospital. It’s where I belonged. Dub gazed for a long moment at my sleeping grandmother with equal parts fondness and fear and then he left.
I was marching upstairs to beg Administration for a job, any job, when Bettye Jo intercepted me and said, “Hey, I found something for you. It’s not much, but it pays.”
She brushed off my thanks, and led me to the hospital laundry down in the basement. Soon I was feeding a load of the sheets I’d just washed through an iron mangle nearly as tall as I was. The giant wringer pressed the water out and they emerged as thin and as dry as a slice of deli meat.
That night, the charge nurse, a good-hearted country woman named Darla, looked the other way when she found me sitting vigil beside my grandmother’s bed. The tray she brought the next day held enough food for a couple of lumberjacks. “Bettye Jo said you were a good kid,” she said, placing the tray in front of me.
My grandmother opened her eyes and gave me a beatific smile that vanished when she said in a voice so soft that I read her lips more than heard her, “Forgive me.”
“Forgive you? For what? I don’t have anything to forgive you for.”
Each word cost her, yet in a raspy whisper she managed to answer, “For Mamie. I should have come. Should have saved you. Should have—”
A hacking cough interrupted her regrets. “Rest, Granma, rest. Let your lungs heal. It’s all right. Everything will be fine now. I promise.” I reached under the crinkling barrier to bring a glass of water to her lips. As she sipped, she stroked my hand. After a few bites of egg, she drifted off again.
At the start of her shift, Bettye Jo appeared with a simple day dress and a clean, crisply starched, and ironed uniform. “It’s an extra,” she said, shoving it at me and waving away my objections. “Patients’ bath is down the hall. Take your time. You’ve earned a nice long soak.”
Never had a bath felt so luxurious.
For the next five days, I blended seamlessly back into the life of a hospital. When I wasn’t shoveling loads of soiled linen into the hospital’s giant washers, I was tending to my grandmother. When I could I did everything possible to help Bettye Jo and Darla with the mindless chores around the floor as a way of trying to thank them for their kindness.
Late on the afternoon of the sixth day, Dub reappeared. He was gaunt, his face drawn with exhaustion. Fresh cuts and bloodstained bandages on his hands attested to the hard battle he’d fought with the broken windmill.
Without a word, he went to my grandmother. Her eyes swimming with tremulous joy, she put her hand on the cellophane curtain. The cellophane crinkled as he closed his raised hand around my grandmother’s.
Giving them privacy, I went upstairs, collected my pay, and handed almost all of it right back, with instructions to put it toward Vonda Kay Cooper’s bill and a promise that I’d send more in a few days. A week at the most.
Granma was sleeping again when I returned. Dub handed me a handsome, nearly new suitcase. It was heavy and stuffed full to near bursting. I half joked, “I hope you didn’t clean out Granma’s closet.”
