THUGLIT Issue One - [9]

The boyfriend flashed a mouth full of gold, “Take back what’s yours,” he said.

Miss Padilla smiled, satisfied.

Then she snatched back the gold chains from Angel’s hand.

He looked in his palm before the gun took his life, and he was holding Brandy’s thin gold chain, the one she had hoped to pass to her daughter someday.

The Gleaner's Union by Court Merrigan

I come home from the Gleaner’s Union hangdog with a corn whiskey stumble in my step, trying not to believe what the boys was saying. How a man didn’t hardly have a choice no more. How he had to hire out. The boys who still came in to the Union, they was stalwart, they knew good as me the difference between laboring for wages and working your own land. But young ones can’t eat your knowing all winter, can they?

Cora sat by the stove, skinning spuds.

“How you been, little girl?” I said to her. “You go out walking today?”

“Yeah,” she said.

She looked up from that half-skinned spud all ladylike, knees pressed tight together, hands on her lap. Cora never sat like that unless she was bad upset.

I pulled up a chair. Took the tater and knife out of Cora’s slick little hands. Wanted to wrap her up in my big arms but that wouldn’t do, big as she was getting.

“Ma,” I said, “I plain forgot to change out the goat’s hay. Maybe you want to give it a look.”

“I already been out there,” said Ma. I just…” Then she saw how I was looking at Cora. “Yeah,” she said, reaching for her coat. “I better check.”

She’s always been a good woman.

“Now what is it, baby girl?” I said to Cora when Ma was gone.

“I was over round Griselda Harlan’s place today,” she said.

“Cora…”

“I know you told me and told me. But I didn’t mean nothing by it. I was coming back out of Seven Mile Draw and you know that tree line they got’s the best way to get back. It’s out of the wind.”

“Out of sight from the house, you mean.”

Cora nodded. We’d all helped Harlan plant in that windbreak and of course them trees come up like weeds the first years before the drought and alkali. Now they was just thick tangles of branches for pheasants to hide out in.

“I seen Mr. Ryne and Griselda,” said Cora.

“That’s Mrs. Harlan to you, little girl.”

“Him and Mrs. Harlan. I known it was Mr. Ryne because of that Mustang of his tied up outside.”

“Go on.”

“I saw em, Pa. Together.”

“Together.”

“I just wanted to see, Pa. I couldn’t help myself.”

Feature of life out there in that hardscrabble valley: no one had curtains. Couldn’t afford em, for one thing, didn’t need em, for another, what with your nearest neighbors living miles away.

“Well, what’d you see?” I asked.

“They was rutting, Pa.”

She didn’t have to say it, of course. Maybe I shouldn’t of made her come out with it.

“Mrs. Harlan, she was bent over the table, and Mr. Ryne, his face was all twisted up and…”

“That’ll do, girl,” I said. “They see you?”

“No. They was too busy.”

We sat there a while, pondering the possibilities.

“Pa,” Cora said, “you can’t go rutting someone you ain’t married to, can you?”

“No, baby girl,” I said, “you cannot.”

*****

You want to go back, you’d blame it on Harlan’s taking the job with the railroad. Course, he only took that job on account of the alkali eating up his land. For that you’d have to blame God. Or the government putting out the land around Spirit Lake, Wyoming, up for homesteading, what used to be Indian ground-but of course they never done nothing with it. Hundred-sixty acres free and clear if you pledged to work it seven years.

Course, we wasn’t up here three years before the drought come on and never let go and the alkali started leaching up, poisoning the soil yellow so nothing would grow on it. Then you throw the Depression on top of that.

That’s when we started finding out who was who. Some up and disappeared into the night, like them Okies down south jumping the Dust Bowl for California, giving up their land to get owned body and soul for a few bucks a day. Others kept their name on the deed and went out laboring, like Harlan.

Like I say, Harlan got on at the railroad. A good job, too, working the lines across the state two weeks at a stretch. A hundred men a day down at the rail yard clamoring for that job. We all thought Harlan got lucky till we heard he took his wife Griselda along with him. She was a looker, all right. Flouncing around in skirts and makeup like she lived downtown in Omaha or some such and not on parcel of hardscrabble Wyoming dirt a hundred miles from anywhere. You could see how a man could come by a job by her, if she got left alone with the hiring man a few minutes.

Harlan would be gone two, three weeks at a time. Not many women can cope with that kind of lonesomeness and Griselda wasn’t one of em. So Jack Ryne come along to comfort her. Riding a fine Mustang, best horse in Spirit Lake.

*****

Cora now, you couldn’t keep her to the homeplace if you strapped a plow to her back. I know we was sometimes the talk of folks, the way Cora would come strolling across someone’s place chewing on a hickory stick in her boy’s overalls, hair ragged short because she clipped it herself with sheep shears, toting along some Indian artifact she found back in the bluffs. Howdy doo, she’d say, have herself a drink of water out of the well and stroll on. I’d hear about it a couple days later and I know there was folks saying I should of reined her in.