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Overview
After a violent dust storm leaves their mother dead and the family farm in ruins, twelve-year-old Laurie Field and her younger brother, Buddy, believe their world has ended when their grieving, debt-ridden father brings them to live with their reprobate grandfather in the Oklahoma Panhandle, promising to send for them when he finds one of those fabled jobs luring thousands to California.
Abandoned and afraid, the children find hope in the songs taught them by Johnny Morrigan, an itinerant oil field worker who hitched a ride with the family on his way to Texas. Desperate to escape their brutal grandfather, Laurie and Buddy hop a train clanging west and become fall in with a hobo named Way after he saves them from a sinister tramp.
In California, the children find only heartbreak, so they and Way set out for Texas in the hopes of reuniting with Johnny Morrigan. Like the fellow travelers they encounter on the roads and rails crisscrossing America, Laurie, Buddy, and Way take joy in simple pleasures such as a campfire meal, a starry night, and a song. They learn firsthand the kindness ordinary folk can show to those even poorer. At last, in lusty Texas oil field towns, they find work, Morrigan, and a deadly menace as Laurie grows from innocent girl to vibrant woman.
A riveting story of hardship, adventure, and romance, The Longest Road pays glorious tribute to the men and women who kept the American dream alive during the Great Depression.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781504036320 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Open Road Media |
| Publication date: | 07/05/2016 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 389 |
| File size: | 2 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
The Longest Road
A Novel
By Jeanne Williams
OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED MEDIA
Copyright © 1993 Jeanne WilliamsAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-5040-3632-0
CHAPTER 1
April warmth had opened the buds of the little cherry tree to lovely pink blossoms and its smooth bark was a deep wine color. The sapling had looked dead when Daddy brought the tree home in February from one of his trucking hauls out of eastern Kansas, but Laurie watered it faithfully and hopefully with water saved from rinsing dishes. Now, Laurie thought, its glory drew the eye from the weathered privy at the back of the lot and the boxlike little house with its blistering yellow paint.
Maybe this spring would be different. Maybe the winds and dust wouldn't blow and the tree would flourish, grow big and strong as the black locust in the front yard, the only other tree in this straggle of houses near the edge of town.
Suddenly, as she stroked the red bark and tried to imagine that the blossoms smelled as sweet as they looked, the light changed. She turned. Her heart stopped, then plunged and began to pound.
Black, towering in the sky, a shadow thickened in front of the sun before obscuring it completely. The sky wasn't really black but brown like a black horse left out in the weather — a darkness not shadowy and soft like night but thick and weighted, roiling in billows churned up from the soil as if the earth had spewed up its center, as if its navel cord had been ripped, and the insides were erupting.
The gleaming galvanized top of the grain elevator vanished first, the second story of the bank, the emblem at the top of the Masonic hall, then the tall steeple of the Methodist church lording it over the white cross of the tabernacle across from the Fields' house.
Jackrabbits streaked by, trying to outrun the stinging blast. Birds flew ahead of it, hawks and great horned owls as frantic to escape as the larks, sparrows, buntings, and curlews that were usually their prey. The poor prairie chickens! Any of them surviving in bits of unplowed grassland would hunker down and suffocate like the flying birds would when their wings could no longer carry them.
Darkness at noonday. Rivers of blood. One shall be taken and the other left. ... Terror froze Laurie. It was the end of the world, the way Brother Crawford was always preaching. Mama and Daddy would be swept away in the rapture and she'd be left with the wicked to pray for the mountains to fall on them while the angels poured out the vials of wrath. Only there weren't any mountains here.
But there was a tree, a blooming cherry tree. Laurie ran inside the screened porch and grabbed a sheet out of the laundry basket. Biting grit slashed at Laurie's face and fingers as she struggled to knot the ends of the sheet so the tree wore a lopsided hood. Her eyes watered from fear and grief as much as from the stinging dust.
Covering her head with her skirt, she ran inside and took the wet towel Mama gave her to hold over her face while she helped stuff rags under the door and along the crack where it opened. They didn't need to talk; they had done this all too often. The windows were already sealed with tape and Daddy had puttied every crack he could find. Last year, after the blowing season, the family had stayed at Floyd and Margie's while Daddy cleaned dust out of the attic, half a ton of it, and then carefully sealed the walls and roof. Not everyone had bothered, and ceilings had caved in all over the west parts of Kansas, Oklahoma, and Texas.
Dust storms weren't like the tornado that touched down last year, whirled up Slim Ellis's barn and wagon, and dropped them in shattered boards over in the next county. That great twisting funnel roared down like a freight train, swooped, and was gone in a few minutes. Laurie was used to spring dust storms just as she was to winter blizzards, but this day's storm was different, and worse, partly because of the cherry tree.
Daddy came in and shut the door as fast as he could. Laurie couldn't see his face but she knew it was him from his height. He was the tallest man in town — six feet two in his stocking feet — the best-looking man, too, with waving brown hair and sunny blue eyes. He had a dimpled groove in his chin and liked to joke a lot and talk to folks. Mama said he'd gotten his easy way of visiting with even total strangers from his father, Harry Field, who was such a horse trader that he'd been able to persuade seasoned buyers that Indian ponies brought down from Montana's Wind River Range were fine horses that just needed a little handling.
Even before Daddy reached her, Mama cried, "Ed! Isn't Buddy with you?"
Daddy stopped, looming in the murk as if he'd been turned to stone. "He's not here?"
"No. He took his .22 and started for Point of Rocks."
That jutting butte from which Indians had watched travelers along the Cimarron and sometimes preyed on them was a favorite picnic spot for townfolks. Grandpa Field, who was sixty-two, remembered — or claimed he did — when Custer was killed at the Little Bighorn in 1876 and he vowed he'd seen Geronimo when the train carrying the Chiricahua Apaches to prison in Florida stopped in St. Louis in 1886. That was a long time ago, even before World War I.
Daddy gasped. "Buddy's out in this?"
"Maybe he's at Tom Harris's," Mama said. Tom was Buddy's best friend. "Or when the storm came up, maybe he went in the nearest house."
"And maybe he's out by Point of Rocks," Daddy cut in. "I've got to find him!"
"Ed! You'll just get lost yourself! More than likely, he's fine. And if — if this is the end of the world, Jesus will take him."
"Well, I'm his daddy. If the world's ending I don't want the poor little guy to be by himself."
"Jesus will —"
"Rachel, that boy don't know Jesus like he knows me."
"Wait! Let me get you a wet towel to put over your face." Mama vanished into the dust.
The light bulb hanging from the middle of the ceiling glimmered like a smoky lantern. Mama's shadow merged for an instant with Daddy's. Then he was swallowed in the darkness that rushed in thicker as he opened the door. As it slammed shut, Laurie started after him.
"You come back here!" Mama caught her, drew her so close it hurt. "No use you running out there like a chicken with its head cut off!"
Laurie buried her face against Mama's warm, soft neck where the two small brown moles were. They held each other. It terrified Laurie that her mother sobbed, too. "I — I put an old sheet around the cherry tree, Mama. Maybe it'll be all right."
It wouldn't. She knew it wouldn't. Ever since Laurie could remember, the winds blew ferociously from February till May, the month's crops were planted and started to grow. That happened every year. What was different these last years was that there was little or no rain to bring up plants that would bind the soil with their roots. Sprouts that managed to get a few inches above the soil were blasted right out of the furrows. Any that lived were buried by powdery dust driven from whatever fields it came from to wherever it could settle till the wind swept it up again into the skies.
The scarred old black locust could stand the winds but the cherry was only a little taller than Laurie. The storm must have already snapped off the blossoms, razored the bark, smothered the limbs.
It was wicked to grieve about a tree when her brother might be lost or when the world might be ending, but Laurie couldn't believe Buddy would come to much harm. He hadn't broken his neck when he'd jumped off the neighbor's garage, or drowned when he'd fallen in the river when it was flooding, or got but one scar from the chicken pox he'd given her. She still had a dozen tiny indentations on her forehead and chin.
As for the world ending — the sky would roll up like a scroll, the moon would turn as red as blood — she had dreamed of it ever since she could remember. Now that it might be really happening she wasn't as scared as she'd been at first, or even as she had often been before. Many nights, when that awful moon fell toward her, growing larger and larger, she woke up screaming her throat raw. Mama always hurried in, never too tired or sick to comfort Laurie and pray with her. "If you were saved, honey," she'd say, "you'd be glad the Lord was coming — be glad this wicked old world was ending."
Laurie didn't argue about that but she didn't believe it. She loved the world, the fresh bright, leaves of spring, the white and yellow breasts of meadowlarks soaring upward, the mockingbird's song, snapdragons and pansies and sweet-smelling four-o'clocks that Mama cherished till wind and dust got them. People might be sinful but it didn't seem fair that along with them, and because of them, God would destroy all the other creatures, turn rivers to blood, make oceans boil so the great whales died, destroy the forests and mountains Laurie had never seen but which must be so beautiful.
"The heavens declare the glory of God, the firmament sheweth His handiwork." If people were the problem, why didn't He just get rid of them and leave the earth to the birds and animals?
Nothing made sense, though, when the ground that was supposed to stay under your feet and nourish flowers and trees and crops churned up in a wild, suffocating force that scoured the soil down to hardpan and when at last the wind died, what had been soil once settled in shifting, pulverized drifts where nothing could grow. It was a chaos of destruction, not creation.
What scared Laurie most was that Daddy and Bud were out there someplace in the howling dark and Mama was coughing so bad. She'd nearly died two years ago from dust pneumonia and that was when she'd lost the baby sister Laurie had wanted so much.
Bud had been fun to take care of when he was a baby but since he started school, he was always off with the Harris boy, Tom, or out hunting, or hiding out in that pitiful little hole he called his room. He kept the door shut with a rusty old padlock — as if anyone would want to go in there! Laurie could peek through a crack in the wall and see that all he had of any possible interest were some Big Little Books, thick cardboard-bound volumes about three by five inches printed on cheap paper, and the G-Man badge, decoder, and ring he'd sent off for with some cereal boxtops. These, along with arrowheads garnered from Point of Rocks and a huddle of snake rattles and shed skins, occupied a shelf above the cot spread with an old Navajo blanket. A coyote skull was nailed over the shelf, its moth-eaten tawny hide made a rug, and a few nails held Buddy's clothes except for socks and underwear. These Mama neatly arranged in an apple crate when she entered once a week to change the sheets while Bud stood guard to make sure Laurie didn't intrude.
Yes, a sister would have been nice, especially since Mama wouldn't let Laurie play with children whose families were worldly and that included just about all the Prairieville girls Laurie's age except Mary Harkness, who wasn't any fun, and Beulah Martin, who lived out on a farm and rarely got to town. Mary knew all manner of interesting things and when they were beyond earshot of adults, playing in the houses they built of tumbleweeds, she used words that Laurie knew were dirty and forbidden, though she didn't understand what they meant and wouldn't ask for fear of being laughed at, Shit must mean the same as fuck, and that had something to do with what men did to women, though Laurie couldn't imagine how the little nubbin she'd seen on Bud when she changed his diapers could possibly turn into anything that would do the scary and fascinating things Mary said it could. Once when the girls had seen two dogs hooked together, Mary said that was what grown-ups did to make babies. Laurie wouldn't, couldn't, think Mama and Daddy had done that.
If the world ended now, she'd go to hell because she'd listened to Mary talk nasty, hadn't repented for throwing hot oatmeal on Bud when he wouldn't dry the dishes, and wasn't saved, let alone sanctified. She prayed nights with Mama when she was scared but she'd never "prayed through." That was why she'd never gone to the altar during revivals even when she was sure she'd die that night for committing the unpardonable sin, which, like the age of accountability, was hard to figure out exactly, though it had to do with hardening your heart against God. Mama had been sanctified years ago — that meant she couldn't sin or backslide — but Daddy was only saved. He backslid so often that he never kept saved long enough to reach that next state of permanent righteousness.
"Oh, God," prayed Mama through racking coughs that shook Laurie, too, since they still had their arms around each other. "If you're coming to judge us, have mercy on Ed! Forgive anything he's done wrong since the last time he got saved. He's a good man, Lord, though he's had to battle his temper, but when you think how his dad put him out to work for neighbors when he was eight years old, and how hard he's had it, maybe you'll give him credit for tithing ten percent even when there's holes in his shoes."
Laurie's thoughts veered after Grandpa, Harry Field, who farmed on the shares down in southwestern Oklahoma. He was a tough, stocky, baldheaded, hook-nosed man who had lost one eye in a saloon brawl when he was a soldier in the Spanish-American War. His tight slit of a mouth was profane with tobacco, whiskey, and foul language. He and Mama couldn't stand each other so it was lucky he lived three hundred miles away. Just to aggravate Mama, he rattled up in an old truck every few years with his invariably pregnant young third wife, Rosalie, and stair-step kids who took possession of Laurie's small room and Buddy's tiny nook partitioned off the back porch. These aunts and uncles — yes, that's what they were — jumped on the beds and sofa with dirty feet, always had snot running down their faces, and, worst of all, wet the beds so that the mattresses were streaked and had a faint stink for weeks no matter how hard and soapily they were scrubbed or how long they were left out in the sun.
Mama, tight-lipped, adjured Laurie to be polite and show respect to her grandfather but Laurie detested him till her insides twisted. He made her ashamed, ashamed that he was her kin. In spite of his wife's slovenliness, Laurie couldn't help liking Rosalie, who was pretty, good-natured, smelled good, and shared the gum and pop she bought for her kids. She could also tell spine-tingling ghost stories. Enduring these visits was like living through a small war, and when the truck rumbled off, Mama always said under her breath, "Thank you, Lord, for my good husband, who doesn't take after his father except for never meeting a stranger and liking to tell jokes and being too friendly with women brassy enough to roll down their stockings."
Now, in the terrible storm, Mama was still praying for her husband. "You know, Lord, he gave his good sheepskin coat to a tramp last winter, and he's always ready to help anyone who needs it." Mama paused as coughs doubled her over and went on breathlessly, hugging Laurie close. "Nevertheless, Lord, if you can't spare Ed, let me stay with him. I don't want to go to heaven if he can't."
There was a pounding on the door. "Sister Rachel!" That was the preacher, Brother Arlo. Laurie had heard him bellow often enough to recognize his voice even in the shrieking wind. "Let us in, sister! The roof's blown off the tabernacle!"
Mama let go of Laurie and groped toward the door. Laurie hurried to pull away the rag wadding. She couldn't make out people's faces as they poured in, driven by the wind, but she recognized the bulk of Mr. Echols who ran the feed store, the mousy odor of scrawny Annabel Howard, the square stockiness of Brother Arlo. There was a whiff of the lavender scent worn by Sylvia Palgraves, who played the piano and had a job at the bank that paid ten dollars a week, an unheard-of wage. Margie, Mama's closest friend, had suggested to Mama, only to be firmly, squelched, that Sylvia might be friendlier than she ought to be with her boss, Henry Tate, the banker.
Smelling cigarettes and oil on the skinny man behind Sylvia, Laurie guessed he was Jack Dakin, the town mechanic, who must have dashed into the tabernacle because it was the nearest shelter, since he didn't go to any church. The last person in was Barney Smith, the dairyman, whose broad shoulders narrowed to a slim waist and hips. He didn't go to church, either. When he shut the door, Laurie stuffed the cracks again.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Longest Road by Jeanne Williams. Copyright © 1993 Jeanne Williams. Excerpted by permission of OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED MEDIA.
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