Maud's Line Page 3

  It wasn’t until after the meal, when he’d finished reading his paper, that Mustard interrupted Maud’s reading and musings. He was sitting in the only chair on the porch, and both she and Lovely had their backs propped against posts, their noses in books, and fans in their hands. He said, “Whatchya reading?”

  Lovely spoke first. “Arrowsmith, by that Lewis fellow.”

  “What’s it about?”

  “A doctor.”

  “Quack?”

  “Don’t think so. But maybe.”

  Mustard looked to Maud. “Mine’s about a bunch of rich people,” she said. “They don’t have much to do. They run up and down the road to parties.”

  Mustard nodded and fell silent again. But even though he generally was good about letting them read, Maud could tell he wanted to talk. She said, “Anything in the paper?”

  “Plans for the new Mississippi levees.” Mustard picked his Banjo and a store-bought cigarette package out of his pocket. He tapped the package on his lighter, knocked out a cigarette, and lit up. After a couple of puffs, he started talking about a man who’d come into the feed store trying to sell a litter of beagles.

  Maud and Lovely closed their books. Not having a dog was a problem. They wanted one for the company and to warn them of snakes, and they agreed that any dog that could bark would do. But Mustard wanted a Labrador. He didn’t have enough money for a purebred dog, but he liked to talk about shooting ducks down on the sandbar and eating dark duck meat all winter long. He mentioned the pros and cons of various kinds of dogs, described the markings of the beagle pups he’d seen, and told dog stories until dusk closed in and fireflies sprinkled the air with gold.

  To Maud’s disappointment, they went to bed without any more reading. But she consoled herself with ruminations on Booker until after the moon rose and she could see the front yard lit through the windows. She’d been asleep for several hours and was dreaming about hanging bright blue wallpaper when Lovely shook her by the shoulder. He whispered, “There’s a peculiar light in the sky.”

  She assumed he was talking about the yellow that comes before a tornado. She sat up in bed feeling some dread about having to go to the cellar. Then she saw it was dark outside the windows and the air was tinted only by moonlight. “What color?”

  “Like city lights.”

  “Where?”

  “Northeast.”

  “Above the trees?”

  “Yeah. High. Come see.”

  They tiptoed out to the porch. Maud followed Lovely to the east edge. “Look,” he said.

  The sky was yellow. But not tornado yellow. Maud said, “Fire.”

  “Yeah. We better see if it’s coming toward us. And if anybody needs help.”

  “You sure it’s not somebody burning off stubble?”

  “Could be. But it’s got to be late. Maybe two in the morning.”

  “What were you doing up?”

  “Taking a pee.”

  “Should we wake Daddy?”

  “You do it. He’ll take it better.”

  Mustard agreed that fire was in the air, and the three of them threw on clothes and shoes and piled into Mustard’s car, a 1919 retractable top Chevrolet that tilted and jiggled so badly that Maud, in the backseat, held on with both hands to the rods supporting the roof. When they turned off the lane onto the section line, she held on with one hand, and peered around her brother’s head into the night and the light ahead. Fairly soon, she began to smell the fire in the air, and by the time they climbed the rise beyond a body of water they called a “snake lake,” she could see the flames beyond the hood of the car. Passing through the cross of the section lines, she tasted cinders in the air. Mustard yelled, “She’s gone!” But neither of his children answered because they, too, could see that the schoolhouse that sat farther up the section line, the one they had both gone to, was completely engulfed in flames.

  Mustard stopped the car in the middle of the road. They all jumped out and quickly passed a few other automobiles and trucks until they got to a cluster of people, one of several, watching the fire. Grandpa, Uncle Ame, and Aunt Viola were in that group. Maud touched her great-aunt on the shoulder and was quickly enfolded close to the older woman’s hip. Viola said, “Poker woke us up barking like crazy.”

  “Did anybody get anything out?”

  “Don’t know.”

  After that, there wasn’t much conversation. At first, Maud worried the fire would get out of control and she watched for that. But, fortunately, the wind was low and the schoolyard mostly barren. Men were shoveling its dirt over the runners. So after her worry about spreading ceased, the fire had a hypnotic effect that drew her into thoughts and images that arose without bidding. She thought of teachers she’d been schooled by in that building, of a day when she’d brought in purple flowers she’d picked on the way, of a boy she had hungered after whose family had come and gone suddenly, of running through hallways with cousins, of a play in which she’d been Maid Marian and worn a curtain on her head, and of her mother, still alive, leading her up the steps. She found she was crying.

  She wiped her tears, moved away from Viola, and threaded through the crowd of people. Their faces were lit by the fire almost as well as if the sun had been shining, but their backs were dark, and their shadows mingled with the light in a way that made it seem like the dirt was alive and moving. Most of the people in the river bottoms were there, and about half of them were kin to Maud; for that land, at the time of statehood, had been parceled out to the Cherokees living on it already. Her great-grandfather, Sanders Cordery, had settled in those bottoms at the end of the Trail of Tears. Maud’s grandpa, Bert, had married one of Sanders’ daughters, Jenny. And Jenny and all of her children, adult and minor, had been given allotments of land. One of Maud’s older sisters had been an infant at the time of allotment, and the other a tot; they’d received land of their own. But Maud, Lovely, and Mustard lived on Maud’s mother’s allotment. Maud’s aunts’ and uncles’ allotments were scattered around them, some with houses, some only farmland or pasture. Her grandpa, her mother’s younger siblings, Blue, Early, Lucy, and Lucy’s husband and child lived together on Jenny’s land. At the moment, Ame and Viola were hunkered with them, too, as Viola’s house in the old Creek Nation had been lost to the flooding of the Verdigris River. Most of the people around the fire who were not kin to Maud were white and had moved into the fertile Arkansas River bottoms whenever they could get their hands on Indian land.

  Maud talked to her mother’s younger sisters, Lucy and Nan; held their babies, one after the other; and watched the fire. But she also craned her neck this way and that, thinking maybe, just maybe, Booker might be there. Her good sense told her that nobody could easily drive a team of horses toward a fire, but she hoped that maybe he’d come on foot. A lot of the people around her had walked to get there. That was dangerous at night because of the snakes, so nearly everybody was armed and had their dogs with them. The lanterns they’d carried were clustered on the ground in groups like the watchers.

  After a while, Nan’s baby, Andy, got heavy, and Maud handed him off to his older sister and threaded through the patches of people, keeping one eye on the fire and the other on the crowd, still looking (and trying not to seem obvious) for Booker. And that’s what she was doing when she looked straight into the eyes and beard of a man who was standing by himself, not staring at the fire, but at her. John Mount. He flicked his tongue out in the air, wiggled it around, and settled it on his upper lip. It and his eyes reminded Maud of a snake. She turned fast and walked facing the blaze to another cluster of people that included several of her former schoolmates. They were talking about what was lost in the fire. They all agreed the building hadn’t been the same since the pigs had been run into it during the flood. But still, the loss of a school was a terrible thing, and several of the girls were weeping. Maud shortly got enough of that crying and threaded again through the crowd, this time not so much looking for Booker but trying to avoid John Mount and hi
s kin.

  She landed again with her aunts. And in the next group over were some men, including her daddy and her uncle Ryde. It unsettled Maud even more to see them together. She didn’t trust either of them to not start a fight, and more often than not, they got into trouble together. Maud noticed that they were facing away from the fire and the other men, and that their heads were close. She didn’t take that as a good sign, and she wondered what they were talking about. She couldn’t approach them to eavesdrop without drawing attention, but the sight of them together, clearly not watching the fire, disturbed her so much that she set off looking for Lovely.

  She found him farther back than the others, leaning against the hood of a truck, talking with Gilda Starr, the girl he had his eyes on. Gilda had gone to school with them in the early grades, but her family had moved into town afterward. Still, Maud and Lovely saw Gilda at dances, fairs, rodeos, and sometimes walking the planks in front of Ft. Gibson’s stores. The last time Maud had seen her to talk to at any length was in Taylor’s General Store on a day that the rains had been so torrential they’d been trapped there all afternoon. Lovely had been trapped, too, and Maud was of the opinion that it was then when Gilda had grabbed her brother’s attention. She was attractive and good-natured, but above them in station. So Maud, as she turned and walked the other way, hoped Lovely wouldn’t get his heart broken. She was still pondering that possibility and glancing sideways at the fire every so often when she ran smack into a man’s chest.

  She sprang back and stumbled before she realized it was Claude Mount’s. Then she felt her face take on the heat of the fire. Mount grinned and said, “You needn’t look so snakebit.”

  “I’m not snakebit. You surprised me, that’s all.”

  “You might watch where yer going.”

  Maud thought Claude Mount had stepped into her path from behind the cab of a truck, but she didn’t accuse him of that because she didn’t want conversation. She said, “I will,” and turned. But he grabbed her by the arm, and said, “Hey, Maud, don’t ya have time to jaw with yer neighbor?”

  “Take your hand off my arm.”

  “No offense meant.” Mount held both hands up next to his ears like he was surrendering. He wasn’t that much taller than Maud, but he was powerfully built and had a full beard. The hair on the top his head was stringy. He smelled like he’d been wrestling hogs.

  Maud said, “No offense taken then.” She turned to go again.

  “I hear tell yer uncle Ryde is accusing my brother of breaking the back of one of yer cows,” Mount said, in a voice loud enough to be heard at a distance over the sound of the fire. Maud looked to see who else was within hearing range. Then she turned to him and said, “I don’t know about that. But somebody did.”

  “Well, it wasn’t John. I can tell ya that. He were with me.”

  “That’s a fine recommendation.”

  “It ain’t natural for full brothers to be working together?”

  “Depends on what the brothers are working at.” Maud looked around. She didn’t want to stay in a conversation with Claude Mount, especially that far away from the fire. Most everybody was still turned toward it with the roar in their ears.

  “Minding our bizness like ever’body else. You tell yer uncle Ryde the Mounts don’t take to false accusations.”

  Maud saw a gun in a holster below Claude’s belt. But she didn’t see it as adding to his threat. He was frightening enough without a gun, and the Mount brothers were prone to sneaky violence, not the shoot-you-in-the-chest kind. Besides, to have come without a gun would’ve been stupid. Cottonmouths were as thick as thistles down where the Mounts lived. She said, “I’ll tell him if I see him,” a statement she had no intention of fulfilling. Telling her uncle Ryde would make him even more prone to pick a fight and drag her daddy smack into the thick of it. Not that he needed dragging. In fact, Maud knew, it was just as likely that he’d be leading.

  She walked off, and as she did, just by habit, shook her hair. It was long and black, and she shook it often for all sorts of reasons. That time she shook it to shake off the smell of Claude Mount. But it provoked a sound from Mount that was animal and unmistakable in intention, and that frightened Maud so much that she felt that she, like her cow, had been assaulted in the back. Her muscles contracted around her spine, and her legs extended to their fullest stride without running. She walked straight to her aunt Nan, took Andy again, and stood there watching the blaze until she was carried away into its depths.

  By the light before the dawn, the fire had lost its height and most of the building had fallen. Volunteer firemen from Ft. Gibson had arrived in a fire truck with hoses they didn’t bother distending. Whenever it looked like any arm of the fire was going to run away, somebody shoveled dust over it, threw on it a bucket of water they’d drawn from the truck, or took a wet feed sack and slapped it out. People were beginning to tire, and Maud was starting to find Andy heavy again. She passed him to his sister and walked toward a spot where she could see if Lovely was still talking to Gilda without having to go past where Claude Mount had been. It was during that walk that she overheard some man she barely knew say the word peddler.

  She stopped, folded her arms under her breasts, and turned toward the fire. Three men were in a conversation with one woman. They were all white and the woman was doing most of the talking. She was answering the men’s questions, relating the details of a visit Booker had made to her place. Maud wasn’t exactly sure where that was, but she thought it was a little house between the highway and Ft. Gibson. The men wanted to know if the woman found him strange in any way. Where was he from? Did his manner seem shifty? It was clear to Maud the woman was enjoying the attention, and she talked at length about his visit. As for shifty, he’d cheated her on some cloth and she’d noticed he was carrying a lot of kerosene on that wagon.

  At the mention of kerosene, Maud turned and stopped her pretense. She said, “I visited with the peddler. He seemed like a good Christian to me.”

  One of the men spoke. “How do you know that?”

  “He tried to peddle me a Bible, but I already had one. So he read some scripture to me. He had a fine reading voice. One whole side of his wagon is taken up with books.”

  “Most of those were novels,” the woman said.

  “Some of them were. Some were schoolbooks, some were Bibles. He had all sorts of books. He’s an educated man, as far as I could see.”

  One of the men smiled at Maud. “That helps clear up some of the suspicions about him, I guess. Thank you for your remarks.” He touched the brim of his hat.

  The woman said, “I wouldn’t be too quick. He’s here this morning and then tonight this.” She gestured toward the fire. “It’s not like many strangers come through.”

  “What makes you think somebody set the fire?” Maud asked.

  “We were just speculating,” another man said. “Most fires start in winter.”

  Maud couldn’t deny that. “Well, I can tell you, I spent a good deal of time going through his wares and buying books from him, and he’s a fine man with a good family. Named his . . .” She realized she had gone too far. Anybody would find naming your team after your aunts funny, even people who obviously had no senses of humor. She finished the sentence by mumbling.

  One of the men said, “I didn’t quite get that.”

  Maud said, “Named all the books of the Bible in the old part. Just rattled them off. It was impressive.”

  She left after that and resumed her search for Lovely. She saw him still standing with Gilda, decided she’d waited long enough, and marched over to them. The three of them were still talking when the sun hit the rim of the earth and, at the same time, a Packard rolled down the section line at a creep. Maud, Lovely, and Gilda all recognized the car, as did everybody else, and when it rolled to a stop, one of the men standing close to it walked over, spoke to the driver, and then opened the door and held it. A slim man with a white goatee and moustache and hair to match appeared from inside th
e car and walked with a cane toward the fire. Gilda said, “I was wondering where he was.”

  “Did he just now show up or is he coming back, do you think?” Maud said.

  “It takes him a while to get organized,” replied Lovely. “He hasn’t been feeling well.”

  The old man, Connell Singer, took several steps toward the fire, spread his stance, and planted his cane. The man who had opened his door had been treading behind him and stopped behind his shoulder. That man made a motion with his hand that was clearly for the purpose of calling other men over, and they came, a single man at first, and then several others. They stood in a half arc around Mr. Singer, leaving an opening so that his view of the fire, what was left of it, was unobstructed. Maud couldn’t hear a word of what was said. But she witnessed arms extending into the air and enough general gesturing to be able to tell that the men were giving Mr. Singer a full description of how high the fire had climbed, where the walls had fallen, and how the runners had been stopped in their paths.

  Maud shortly got bored with watching a conversation she couldn’t hear and that she felt confident was passing on information she already had, and she turned again to the fire. In daylight and dying, it looked less magical and more like a big mess that would take a lot of work to clear. Little patches of flames were still dancing, but they were separated from one another and resembled fires that might be used for roasting or camping on the river. Smoke rose from most of the wood, and some of it, Maud thought, would burn for days unless rain came. She was looking at the sky for any sign of that and recalling when rain clouds were the last things she wanted to see when Gilda said, “Mama’s waving to me. I better get going.”