Maud's Line Read online

  Maud said, “There’s fire in the stove.”

  When Lovely finished rolling, he opened the oven door and lit the cigarette on the wood. After Mustard had puffed it to a wet butt, Maud sat down at the table, buttered a biscuit, and spooned some plum jelly onto it. She held it out to her daddy. He said, “Don’t mind if I do.”

  Two mornings later, after Mustard and Lovely had gone off to their jobs, and the dishes were done and the beds made, Maud took a bucket to the pump, primed it, pumped fresh water, and sat down on the platform over the well. She had a clean rag and some Mercurochrome, and she was dabbing the purple medicine onto her wound and wondering if it would leave a scar that would mar the looks of her leg when she heard the sound of a team in the distance. She looked out toward the section line. Coming down it were a pair of horses and a wagon covered with a bright blue canvas. The team was driven by a man she didn’t recognize at a distance. Maud forgot about the possibility of permanent disfigurement; she even forgot about the tendency of Mercurochrome to drip off the dipping stick. She sat there on the wood of the well watching the blue canvas jog along until it stopped at her uncle Gourd’s house. Maud knew her uncle wasn’t at home, but the man called out. He called again. Then he turned the horses toward her and snapped his reins. She hastily put the cap on the Mercurochrome, tore the rag in two, and wrapped her leg with a bandage smaller than the one she’d been using. She stood, threw an arm around the pump, and watched the team, the wagon, and the blue canvas grow bigger and bigger in the bright sun.

  The driver was a man she’d never seen before. And with her father at the feed store in Muskogee and her brother in their neighbor’s field, and meanness fairly common, Maud wondered if she should, out of precaution, go into the house, where the guns were. But then she recalled Betty’s bellowing and felt fairly certain that unless the stranger shot her dead at a distance she could holler loud enough that Lovely would hear her over at Mr. Singer’s, jump on his mule, and be to her pretty fast. Then, too, there was something about the blue of the canvas that prevented her from moving. She found it reassuring or, really, more than reassuring, because it was a pretty blue, deeper than the color of the sky and brighter than a heron, a better blue, something new. She couldn’t fathom anyone choosing such a blue for any reason other than to please or to draw attention.

  The man driving the team was wearing a bowler. That in itself set him apart in Maud’s experience. She’d seen bowlers only on undertakers and in magazine pictures of men who were dancing lickety-split with girls who were flappers. Below the hat, he had a clean-shaven face and wore red suspenders and a light-colored shirt. After he closed the second cattle guard, he took off his bowler, waved it in the air over his head, and flashed a smile that glistened like water hit by sunlight. Maud was drawn to the smile like a jay to a piece of foil, but she was a little taken aback by the wave. Was she supposed to wave in return? To a stranger? That would seem forward. But she didn’t want to look country and backward, so she raised her right hand and waved her fingers. She kept her left arm slung around the pump.

  The man pulled the horses up to the hitching rail about thirty feet away from Maud. By then, his bowler was back on his head, but not so as the brim hid his hair. It was deep brown, thick and wavy. His skin was dark from the sun, but not, Maud thought, Indian. He was definitely a white man; his forearms below his rolled sleeves were hairy. He said in a voice that wasn’t a holler, but carried perfectly well, “Looks like you might have some water to spare.” Canteens were hanging on the side of the wagon.

  Maud nodded. “You can fill up if you care to.”

  “Just a cup for me, if you don’t mind. But Arlene and Evelyn would mightily appreciate a drink.”

  Maud cocked her head.

  “My horses. I named them after my aunts.”

  Maud laughed. By the time she’d stopped, he’d jumped off the wagon and was walking toward her. He said, “Couldn’t call them Sir Barton and Exterminator. They’re ladies.”

  “I can see that.”

  “And not too fast, either.” He took his hat off and scratched his head.

  “How did your aunts take to being honored?”

  “Haven’t told them yet. Aunt Arlene got married and moved all the way to Nashville. Aunt Evelyn is up in Springfield, Missouri. I was going to visit her last year, but then the floods came. I had to stay put and hang on by my fingers.”

  “Did you lose much? Or were you lucky?”

  “Lucky. I live on high ground in Fayetteville. But it sure looked like the end of the world. I bet it was bad around here.” He looked away from Maud. “I see the watermarks there on the house.”

  Maud glanced at the house, too. “If Grandpa hadn’t built her on stones, we would’ve lost her. When the river started overcoming us, we moved the beds and chest into the barn. Hung the beds by hooks from the rafters, put the chest and the drawers on top of the stalls, and slept on the hay in the loft. Lost eleven cows, though. Some of them drowned before we could rustle them up. Ran the others up to the foothills, and they either got lost or somebody stole them. The pigs we ran into the schoolhouse with everybody else’s. The chickens roosted with us. Our dog drowned.”

  The rains had started in the fall of 1926 and continued through the winter. By April of 1927, it was pouring morning and night, sometimes ten inches a day. The water had covered eastern Oklahoma and had run almost all of Maud’s family out of their homes. But according to the papers, it had also covered every state from Kansas to Pennsylvania, killed hundreds of people, and swollen the Mississippi to a sixty-mile span at Memphis. The disaster had united the whole country and survivors became friends in minutes. So it was not unusual for Maud and the stranger to settle into a conversation about a mutual experience while he was sipping on a dipper of water and the horses were drinking from the trough.

  Maud was gathering bits of information about the stranger like a wind rustles leaves into a pile and was sorting those leaves in her head before she realized she didn’t yet have his name or know why he had driven his bright blue covered wagon down their lane. She was thinking about how to ask and not seem like she really cared when he said, “By the way, my name is Booker Wakefield. Please call me Booker.” He smiled. There were little creases in the corners of his eyes. The eyes themselves were green, flecked with gold. Maud couldn’t tell if those gold flecks were pure color or sparkles of sunshine.

  She said, “I’m Maud,” but didn’t give her last name. It embarrassed her. Her mother’s family name, Vann, sounded better to the ear, and she’d always lived among her mother’s people. But instead of lying about her last name, she added, “What are you doing around here?”

  “I thought you’d never ask,” he said. “I’m a peddler. At least in the summertime. Gives me a way to see the world.”

  “You don’t peddle from town to town?”

  “The stores in towns have gotten so big and fancy I can’t compete. But not everybody can get to a store when they need one. A lot of people still appreciate their goods coming to them. Would you like to see what I’m carrying?” The peddler smiled wide, handed the dipper back to Maud, and walked to his wagon.

  He set his hat on the seat and drew the canvas up by pulling on a rope strung across the top of the hull. His wares were secured in place by netting, and he rolled the netting up just as he had the canvas. The goods were stacked on shelves that receded like the steps of a pyramid. On them sat bolts of denim and other cloth in colors pleasing to the eye. There were pots and pans and skillets of every size, suspenders, handkerchiefs, straw hats and fedoras, Woodbury soap, rolls of toilet paper, toothpaste, shaving cream, razors and straps, toothbrushes and pencils, coal-oil lamps, kerosene, and crystal radio sets.

  Maud’s eyes got wide. And the peddler stretched his arm so that his hand disappeared below the wagon seat. He brought out, between his thumb and forefinger, a spool of red thread. He said, “This is for the water. I think red may be your color.”

  Maud was wearing a faded
green dress, but red was, indeed, the color she pictured herself in. It looked best next to her skin. She ducked her head, but looked up and smiled when he dropped the spool into her hand. He said, “Take your time looking around.”

  At that moment, Maud didn’t have a cent to her name. There was some household money hidden away from Mustard in a baking-powder tin behind the match holder in the cabinet in the kitchen. But that money was family money for flour and sugar and an occasional treat from a store in Ft. Gibson. Maud was too upright to take family money and spend it on herself alone or without talking it over. Her daddy operated that way and it’d caused, over the years, hardship on the rest of the family. She said, “I’ll just be looking. I went into town yesterday. Got all my goods there. But thank you for the thread.”

  He smiled, leaned against the side of the wagon, and said, “Let me know if you see anything you can’t live without.”

  More than anything else displayed, Maud desired the Woodbury soap. She’d gotten a bar for Christmas a couple of years back and was convinced it really did produce skin anyone would love to touch. She also liked the smell, which was, in her mind, as fresh as spring air or an open rose. So she shied away from the Woodbury bars and went to the crystal radio sets. She put her finger on top of a brown cardboard box labeled CRYSTAL EXTRAORDINAIRE, and said, “Do these pick up pretty well?”

  “The best in the business. They’ve got these little earpieces that bring music straight into your head and make you tap your toes a mile a minute.” He reached for a box, opened the lid, and held it below Maud’s nose.

  She peered in. She had a crystal set and so did Lovely. The static they pulled in was more irritating than pleasing, and the earpieces didn’t rest comfortably in her ears. She said, “I’ve got one that doesn’t pick up very well.”

  “You might try one of these. I’ve got one all put together that I use myself.” He closed the lid, replaced the box, and turned to the seat of the wagon. When he did, Maud picked up a bar of Woodbury soap and sniffed it quickly. She’d replaced it by the time he turned back around.

  They were far away from any town with a powerful station, but the closeness required for him to hand her the set and give her instructions about how to fit the earpieces in her ears would have overwhelmed a radio signal, even if WLS or WSM had been just one county over. He didn’t smell like a white man at all. Or not like the white men Maud was used to smelling. He smelled more like aftershave lotion and leather. The smell made Maud’s eyes lose focus.

  He said, “Hear anything?”

  She regathered her thoughts. “Two or three different stations, all at the same time.”

  He pointed northeast. “Turn and face that way.”

  She did, and the sound settled on one station, but she couldn’t smell him anymore. She turned back around, took the plugs out of her ears, and said, “I’m really more of a reader, anyway.” She handed him the receiver.

  His eyelids drooped. He smiled. “In that case, I may be able to tickle your fancy.” He put the receiver on the seat of the wagon. “Follow me.”

  They went to the other side of the pyramid. There, as before, he rolled up the canvas and netting, only this time the steps were filled with books. More books than Maud had ever seen outside of a library. She gasped and took a step back to take them all in. He said, “I’m a reader, too. At night, if I don’t have a place inside to sleep, I bunk on my wagon seat, light a lamp, and read longer than I should.” He picked out a book and handed it to her. “Ever read this? He may be my favorite.”

  The book was A Tale of Two Cities. Maud had read it, and all of Dickens she could get her hands on. She’d also read Hawthorne, Melville, Cooper, Poe, Irving, Howells, Twain, Hardy, and Austen. She replied, “‘It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom . . .’ I can’t remember beyond that.” She opened the book and read out the rest of the sentence.

  “You have a mighty fine reading voice. Do you practice it?”

  “Not much. I’m the baby of the family. I got read to.”

  “How many people in your family?”

  “I’ve got two sisters, a brother, and a daddy. My sisters are married and away; my brother’s just in the field over there.” Maud had forgotten about fearing the stranger, but the reference to Lovely brought that uneasiness back, and she momentarily wondered again if she’d be wise to be afraid. But the lure of the books drew her away from her skittishness, and she set to running her fingers over their covers, pulling out this one and that, and conversing with the peddler in a casual way, as though the books’ characters were friends mutually known for the strengths and flaws of their personalities.

  Finally, the peddler pulled a book from the lot. “Have you read this? It’s a little more modern.”

  She took it from his hand, opened it, and read the title page. “No. Is it any good?”

  “I liked it. I think the author may be a genius. But not everybody agrees with me. His other two books are more famous. I think this is his best.”

  “What’s so great about Gatsby?”

  “Well, he dreams who he wants to be and then makes something of himself.”

  Maud decided right there she needed to read that book. She was thinking about how to get it without spending any money when the peddler said, “Like I say, a lot of people don’t take to this book. But I did. Makes you want to go east in the worst way.”

  It had never occurred to Maud to go farther east than St. Louis or Kansas City, but she could tell the peddler—Booker, as she was beginning to call him in her mind—was thinking about an east that was different from either of those two towns and far out of her reach, even in her wildest imaginings. She felt, at that moment, insignificant under the wide sky, and she was glad they were on the side of the wagon where their backs were to the house. She was suddenly embarrassed by living there. She closed the book and said, “Well, then, maybe I should get it from the library rather than invest in it.”

  “Tell you what. I’ll trade you. If you have a book inside you want to get rid of, I’ll exchange it for this one. Even trade.”

  Maud looked up at him. Those gold flecks in his eyes glittered. Did he know she didn’t have any money? Or did he want her to read the book because he liked it? She couldn’t tell. “Wait here. I’ll see what I have to spare.”

  Maud had a stack of books under her cot that she’d gathered over time and hoarded. Each one was a favorite she’d read again and again. She pulled from that stack Moby-Dick, and she picked it because, it being so thick, she’d read it fewer times than she had the rest and it was less worn. She walked back to the wagon with the big blue book in hand and exchanged it for the slimmer volume and a copy of Arrowsmith, which she angled for on the grounds that the Gatsby book was so thin compared to what she was giving up.

  The transaction completed, and without much else to say, Maud and Booker fell into an awkward silence that Booker broke by asking for information about who lived around. Maud pointed to the northeast and the west, named aunts and uncles and cousins, and pointed due north and named the Singers. “They have the most folks on that farm and the most money for extras. The man who owns it is Mr. Connell Singer. He likes to read. He has a library and lends me his books.”

  “Mr. Singer thinks highly of you then.”

  Maud couldn’t tell if that was a statement or a question, but she hoped that either way it indicated the peddler was looking for information about her possible suitors. “He’s nice. And generous.” She tucked her head and smiled to convey the notion that Mr. Singer was particularly generous to her.

  “I see. Those are good qualities in a neighbor.”

  “Yes, they are. Mr. Singer is the richest person around here. He supplies potatoes to the entire East Coast. Ships them by railroad all the way to New York City and Philadelphia.” Maud checked herself after that. She wasn’t exactly sure where her neighbor’s potatoes went; she just wanted to make it clear that she was familiar with rich people and cities in the
East.

  “I see. Well, this Mr. Singer, then, probably buys his wares from catalogues and has his books shipped in. Is he a married man?”

  “He was. Widowed now.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that.” Booker bit his lower lip. Then he looked to the sky, took a handkerchief out of his back pocket, and wiped his brow. “I guess I better move on before the sun gets higher.” He looked to Maud. “It’s been nice visiting with you.”

  “Stop by when you’re this way again. Next time, I might not have just been into town.”

  Their parting was marked by niceties that didn’t add to Maud’s store of knowledge about the peddler, and by the time his bright blue canvas was rocking away down the ruts of the lane, she was reckoning up all the things about him she wished she’d found out. Was he married (she thought maybe not, he didn’t mention any family beyond aunts), what did he do when he wasn’t peddling (he’d said he only peddled in the summertime), was he from Fayetteville, Arkansas, or some other Fayetteville (were there other Fayettevilles?), and how did he keep that blue canvas from fading in the sun (that was a complete mystery)? She might have thought about his marital status more than once.

  When Lovely came in for his midday meal, Maud had been reading and had forgotten to warm up the beans.

  He picked up her book. “Where’d you get this?”

  “Peddler came by. Got it off of him.”

  “Was he driving a wagon with a bright blue canvas?”

  “Yes. Did you see him?”

  “Didn’t see him to talk, but you can’t miss that blue.”

  “Did he go to Mr. Singer’s house?”

  “Probably. He went back up the line to the highway.” Lovely sat down at the table, picked up Arrowsmith, and started reading.

  Maud hoped that Booker hadn’t gone to Mr. Singer’s, or if he had, that he hadn’t found him at home. Mr. Singer was over seventy, and it would be clear he wasn’t a suitor. Maud gave that more worry during her chores, but by the time her father got home in the evening, she’d gotten far enough into her new book that she had taken to disliking most of the characters (except for Nick) and was wondering what Booker, who she now thought of entirely by name, found so wonderful about the novel. She hoped his enthusiasm didn’t mean that he was only attracted to rich women and fast cars.