Along for the Ride Read online

  Obviously, Cement City was not named for a woman. Its official name was merely Cement, the “city” being a nod to the humans who toiled to feed the blast furnaces with stone from the jagged-edged quarries, like Dark Age peasants propitiating dragons.

  The widest and best-maintained roads in the district led to the Trinity and the Lone Star cement factories. At the foot of these, six rows of identical double houses, built for the workers, were packed like barracks along straight dirt streets. The remainder of Cement City spread west, a weedy confederation of fields and wire fences and stands of straggly trees littered with wooden farmhouses and all manner of outbuildings—lopsided barns, coops for chickens and geese, equipment sheds and mule sheds, pumps and outhouses.

  Even at the outer limits, where Emma moved her children into her parents’ low-slung house, the pounding of steel against rock, the pulverizing of limestone and shale, so that they could be ground fine, heated literally beyond endurance, and spit out as clinker to be ground again, was ceaseless. “That’s just how it is,” Mama said, when Bonnie complained about the noise. “You have to get used to it.”

  Bonnie did get used to that pulse underneath the other sounds of the day and night. She got used to the sulfurous taint of the smoke, too, which clung to the air like gauze. Bonnie wanted to sleep with Mama, but Grandma said it was time she quit being a baby and made her sleep with Buster in the attic, where nail points studded the sloped ceiling. No one knew what had happened to the braided rug, so when Bonnie felt afraid in the night, she had to turn her face toward the little window under the eaves and find comfort in the blast furnace glowing orange in the darkness.

  * * *

  Mama and Billie shared a tiny room tacked onto the back of the house. That was all right, Mama said, seeing as she was all alone now. Bonnie took hold of her mother’s hand to remind her that she certainly wasn’t alone. She had Bonnie and Buster and Billie. She had Grandma and Pop-Pop. And there were so many Krauses. Curly-haired Uncle Wylie and Aunt Elvina in the yellow bedroom, and Uncle Frank in the attic room across from Bonnie and Buster’s. Plus, relatives who seemed to live down every road in Cement City.

  Those first days, Dutchie—the cousin who’d flown from the house—tossed names like apples at Bonnie and Buster, as she took them around to meet their kin. Bud, Russ, Everitt; big boy brothers who spilled off a porch and ran for the woods. Aunt Pat, who was Dutchie’s mama and Mama’s sister, wore trousers and was really named Lily. Uncle Fred, his head fresh pumped, shook droplets like a dog. Up the road were mustachioed Uncle Dink and gap-toothed Aunt Millie with more cousins—LeRoy and Sally Ann, Clora Jean and Floyd. Big John and Wilma Rae had Little J—who was big—Monroe, Gladys, Alma, and baby George P. And—Dutchie flung her hand toward a dirt track that disappeared into the woods—Lela or Lula (or possibly Lela and Lula) with more husbands and children lived down over there.

  All these people—distracted uncles, sharp-eyed aunts, and running, climbing, kicking cousins—had to love Bonnie, because they were her family. She couldn’t wait to be just like Dutchie, knowing all the names and all the shortcuts. She wanted to walk right in those kitchen doors without knocking first.

  * * *

  Grandma took to Billie Jean, who was easy to appease with a crust to gnaw or a yarn doll to finger, and was impatient with Bonnie, who followed her, telling, showing, begging to be noticed.

  “Bothersome as a gnat,” Grandma complained, waving her hand in front of her face.

  Billie hummed softly to herself, but Bonnie sang loud and liked to stand on furniture when she did so. She raised her arms and spun.

  “No feet on the table! No feet on the settee! No feet on the bed! No dancing in the kitchen!” Grandma snapped and shooed. “Keep your voice down! You’re a little show-off, ain’t you?”

  Bonnie tried to be more demure, less herself, but in an hour or so, she felt so hemmed in that she hung by her knees over the end of the bed and fell on her head or two-stepped with the cat until a chair tipped over or a canister of flour spilled or the tiny glass donkey from Mexico plunged from Grandma’s dresser top and broke two legs.

  “Ain’t you learned her nothing?” Grandma asked Mama.

  “Mama scolds me way more than you do,” Bonnie said, standing up for her mother.

  But that turned out to be wrong, too, because it made Mama cry.

  * * *

  Mama was different in Cement City. In the mornings now, instead of standing at the stove in her soft robe with her hair uncombed, she sat at the table in a stiff skirt and hairpins and ate what Grandma put in front of her, before leaving the house to sew overalls for the men who worked in the factories. It was a good job, Mama confided, better than stitching bags for cement, like Aunt Elvina did. Was it better than making dresses, the way she had in Rowena? Bonnie wanted to know. This also made Mama cry.

  * * *

  Bonnie cried, too, when Mama went out the door, so loudly and long that, finally, Grandma gave up petting her and paddled her instead, because enough was enough and she might as well have something to cry about. “Time you grew up,” she said, giving Bonnie a flannel cloth of her very own with which to wipe the cement dust off the furniture.

  Bonnie always started in Mama’s room.

  “Goddamn slippers!” she said, collecting the flannel house shoes Emma had abandoned haphazardly in the middle of the floor—in this way, too, Mama had changed her ways—and lining them up under the bed. “Stay put where you belong!”

  She scolded the crumpled nightgown, as she lifted it off the floor: “Mama doesn’t have time for this nonsense.” She pressed it to her face and breathed Mama’s smell, the smell of before, and then stuffed the gown under Mama’s pillow.

  She poked her finger into the blue glass jar of Oriental Cream that Mama had left open on the nightstand, leaving a sizable divot.

  “Mama will be home soon,” she promised, closing the door behind her.

  CHAPTER 7

  On summer mornings, Bonnie lay half-asleep on the sweat-dampened sheets in the sweltering attic, waiting for Dutchie’s hoarse voice, incongruous in the throat of a pixie-faced, yellow-haired girl, to carry up the stairs and start her heart.

  “Bonnie! Buster! You up?” Dutchie opened the screen door with a yank that made the hinges squeal and let it bang behind her.

  Instantly, Bonnie would be pulling on the flour sack dress Mama had made for her to play in, so her wash dresses would stay nice for school. Grandma didn’t have time to feed no layabout kids—she had to get out in the garden before the heat kilt her, and she kept Billie with her—so it was just Bonnie and Buster and Dutchie, with the kitchen to themselves, slicing the biscuits with the sharp knife and lighting the stove to melt whatever was left of the gravy. After that, they ran, through high weeds in fallow fields, plant guts leaving sticky trails on their legs and fingers, into the cool, shadowy woods.

  On Saturdays, Aunt Pat gave them dimes for the Orpheum, where behind an unassuming brick storefront, a dark cavern flickered with exotic scenes involving elephants and hoop skirts, chandeliers and batting eyes, in which love was passion and sadness was desolation and bad behavior was outright wickedness. Even milk wagons and washbasins were arresting in the ghostly light and the deepened shades of the pictures. Those vibrant worlds hovered, tantalizingly inaccessible behind Bonnie’s eyes long after she’d returned to the pallid Cement City evening. She and Dutchie did their best to elevate ordinary life to the level of dreams.

  * * *

  “Ow! It’s hot!”

  “Well, quit touching it, Bonnie, for heaven’s sake!”

  Bonnie sucked her burned fingers, while Dutchie lifted the potato out of the dirt and ashes with a fork.

  They’d made the wigwam of feed sacks, draped over a framework of sticks, a house of their own between the garden and the barn. The sun shone through the loose weave, giving the inside a soft, yellow glow. Buster didn’t have much use for it, except as a prop to surround or squat behind for cowboys and Indians,
but that was just fine with Dutchie and Bonnie. They didn’t want any old boys in there anyway, and no baby Billie either, pulling at the sticks, making the whole thing fall down.

  They liked it with just the two of them, lying on the matted grass and weeds and staring up at the buttery light, smelling the corny-molassesy smell of the feed sacks and the bitterish, green smell of the crushed weeds, floating in a world apart from Grandma scolding and aunts finding chores.

  They were Indian squaws, wrapped in wool blankets, warming their hands around a real fire, tying the chamois clothes Pop-Pop used to wash his wagon around their feet as moccasins. Whose idea was it to take matches from the can next to Grandma’s stove and actually light the little pile of tinder? It never occurred to them—Dutchie could say this with certainty—that this was what was meant by playing with fire. They weren’t playing; they were roasting potatoes. Bonnie had read how you could bury them under the blaze and taste the fire in their powdery flakiness when they were done.

  “Dutchie! Bonnie! Run down to the Coakers’ for some meal!”

  “In a minute, Grandma!”

  Bonnie loved fire, the mesmerizing motion of the flames, repetitive, yet unpredictable, their patterns always shifting. She put her bare palms close to test how long she could stand the pressure of the heat. That day they’d built the fire higher than they’d ever done before, not just a thin, tentative flicker, but a flame-leaping, green-twig-popping mini-conflagration with two bakers underneath.

  “Right now, girls, or I’m coming in there and draggin’ y’all out.”

  They threw off the blankets that made them Indians and ran as little girls the half mile to the Coakers’ and waited on one foot and then the other for Mrs. Coaker, who moved slow as a slug, banking up the dirt around her potato hills, leaning the shovel up against the fence post, putting one deliberate foot in front of the other all the way into her kitchen.

  “You ain’t brought no sack? How about a bowl? You got you a bowl? Well, what am I gonna put the meal in, then, I wonder?” She scanned her kitchen walls dreamily, as if a sack might slither out from between two boards if she happened to fix her eyes on the right spot.

  “Here, Miz Coaker, just pitch it in,” Bonnie said, making a sling by holding up the hem of her skirt.

  Bonnie moved her legs as fast as she could, never minding that her drawers showed, but the fire was so strong and fast that it had already eaten through the wigwam, torn across the yard, and was attacking the back fence, where Grandma Mary and Aunt Pat were beating at it with brooms.

  Bonnie was too big by then to lie over Grandma’s tiny knees, so Grandma held her tight to her chest with one arm, while she reached around with the other to wield the brush. “I’ll learn you!”

  * * *

  Bonnie would pass her fingers through flame and swallow stuff that scorched her throat and tasted like poison. She would throw herself into water of any depth or darkness and climb into the high, fragile branches of any tree on which she could get a purchase, but she wouldn’t touch the gun.

  * * *

  The gun sleeps under Pop-Pop’s pillow.

  “Pop-Pop,” Bonnie thinks, is a foolish name. It bears no more relation to her heavy-browed, eight-fingered grandfather than Buster’s popgun bears to the pistol in the old man’s bed. To Bonnie, her grandfather is Krause. At least, in her mind, she calls him Krause; to his face, she doesn’t dare call him anything.

  * * *

  “Come on!”

  Dutchie’s fingers are locked around Bonnie’s wrist.

  Bonnie hangs back with her shoulders, making Dutchie pull, but she lets her feet lead her forward. She likes feeling a little bit scared; it’s an opportunity for daring.

  The bedroom embodies Grandma and Krause. Its two plain-framed windows, hung with yellowed curtains trimmed with old-fashioned lace, are stern and correct. Under the bed’s dark wooden headboard, the mattress sags in two ditches, as if ghosts are resting on the faded Lone Star quilt. On Grandma’s bedside table is no pretty jar of Oriental Cream, but a gray ceramic pot half-full of foul-smelling ointment, a brown bottle that reads “Paine’s Celery Compound” in raised lettering, and a tin of tablets.

  “Go on.”

  As usual, Dutchie has claimed Grandma’s side, so Bonnie has to go over to Pop-Pop’s, where the ditch is deeper and the table holds just a hurricane lamp and a Farmer’s Almanac.

  Giggling nervously, both at the thought of Krause’s head lying on the pretty puff, edged with crocheted lavender blossoms, and of what lies beneath it, Bonnie raises the pillow with two hands.

  The pistol’s single black eye stares. The gun is meant to be feared and obeyed, like her grandfather himself, who to Bonnie’s mind is the very image of God, with his cold, blue eyes and the sharp hairs that poke from his nostrils and ears, and the fury in his voice when he shouts.

  “Pick it up.”

  Grandma has taught them how to make the beds together, one girl on each side. But before the plumping and the tucking, the gun must be scrupulously removed.

  “Baby!”

  Holding her breath, Bonnie slides her hand very slowly toward the pistol, but when her fingertip brushes against it, she yanks her hand back. “I can’t!”

  Tears prick her eyes. Her arms tremble.

  “Baby.”

  Bonnie squinches up her eyes, while her scornful cousin slides her palms flat under the gun and lifts. She places it on the dresser top, safely out of the way, while they pound the pillow back into shape—Bonnie’s favorite part—and pull the sheet and quilt up. When Dutchie brings the gun back, Bonnie cautiously traps it with the pillow. Sometimes she puts the almanac on top, for good measure.

  CHAPTER 8

  “Do they call it Chalk Hill Road because of the chalk they use at school?” Dutchie didn’t know and Buster didn’t care, but this was the sort of question Bonnie liked to think about. “Or maybe the name of the road made them think it was a good place to put a school.”

  Chalk Hill School was almost directly across the street from the entrance to the Lone Star. The pounding of the pulverizer that retreated into the background at home stood out here, a regular wallop of metal against rock, the beat beneath the shrieking and yelling of the schoolyard before the bell.

  In the schoolyard, Dutchie became Dodie and loosed herself from Bonnie to join the bigger girls. Bonnie ran, swooping and bellowing with the other children, throwing her head back and stretching her arms wide, soothing herself with the pump of her muscles and the rush of air over her skin.

  * * *

  “Girls here!” A big-knuckled hand closed around her arm, changing her trajectory so that she staggered against another little girl with brown curls and a crutch. The grand front entrance, with its exotic concrete pointed archway like the entrance to the church-that-Daddy-built, was for teachers only. The children jostled through smaller doors on either side. Almost at the top of the stairs, the girl with the crutch stumbled and dropped her dinner pail. A single potato rolled out.

  “I’ll get it!” Bonnie scurried after the spud, but it was tricky to bend and grab and run down steps all at once. A couple of times, she could just about have snagged it, but aware of the laughter coming from the line of girls watching the chase, she missed, a little bit on purpose, so that there would be another step, another miss, more laughter that lifted her like a warm wind.

  At the bottom, the spud rolled away, and a big girl raised her black boot and brought it down hard. The flesh spattered against Bonnie’s ankles.

  The big girl scraped the white paste from her shoe onto the dirt. “You gonna cry, crybaby?”

  Bonnie, standing alone at the bottom of the stairs, as the rest marched into the building, obliged.

  * * *

  When Bonnie was angry, she made other people cry. Noel, with ears that pinked when she talked to him, offered her Black Jack gum every morning, pulling a stick halfway up and then holding out the pack, a nicety that impressed her. But when he was captain for Red Rover, he
didn’t choose her until there was no one left but her and crippled Florence. That afternoon, when she saw him in front of the drugstore where he bought his damn gum, she was on his back with her legs clamped around his waist and a scrap of metal at his throat before she could think. She relished his blubbering.

  “Crybaby,” she said. “I’ll learn you.”

  She’d cried herself later, in her attic bed. She’d expected him to pick her first. He ought to have known that even though she was small, she could hold on tighter than any of them. They’d have to tear her hand off before she’d let go. Or break her arm, at least.

  When she did things like this, Grandma said she’d “flown off the handle,” and indeed, in the midst of her fury, Bonnie felt she was whirling through the air, like the head of Krause’s hatchet the time it came loose from its shaft and stuck so deep in the side of the outhouse that they’d had to rip the board out of the wall to free it.

  * * *

  Bonnie loved to practice the Palmer method, which connected the letters like the stitches that ran from her mother’s sewing machine. Writing forced her to quit looking around the room—which was exhausting—and turned her inward instead. She savored all aspects of words: their rhythms and sounds, and the puzzle of their structures—syllables and letters, bases and prefixes and suffixes, the way rhyme made sentences waltz.