Free The Woman in Oil Fields by Tracy Daugherty Page A

streets here on the west side’re lined with sexy new cigarette ads – enormous, rolling breasts filling billboards. I lift my foot off the gas pedal and coast in my lane, staring, more lonely than horny, at these huge women floating like helium balloons over the start-stop traffic. By the time I return to the rest home the sun’s set. The red light from the Coke machine on the patio pours through June’s window. She’s sitting up in bed, in the near-dark, twining yarn. From the big-screen TV canned laughter echoes down the hall. The curtains rustle, from the air vent. June’s squinting, trying to catch the movement. I don’t know how much she can see. She shushes me. “That whore is there at the window,” she whispers. I dangle a French fry under her nose. “She’s laughing,” June says. “Listen.”
    Nurse Simpson pokes her head into the room, says, “How we doing?”
    June says, “Bitch.”
    â€œWe’re fine,” I tell the nurse. “But maybe I’d better stay here tonight.”
    She nods. “I’ll bring the cot,” she says.
    ______
    I first heard about June’s whore late one night in my mother’s kitchen. I was twelve. Mother suspected my sixteen-year-old sister was in trouble, smoking dope, driving into dark fields with boys in dirty pants. “When I was her age I could’ve wound up that way,” Mom said. “It would’ve been easy. Now your sister.”
    â€œWhat way do you mean?” I asked.
    She told me the story then: “When she was young, your Grandma June was very beautiful. My father’s a fortunate man to’ve touched her. He was an oil worker in the East Texas fields, and not too smart, not too good or bad. At Christmas he drove home to Dallas bringing us store-wrapped gifts, and slept with us in the house. Your grandmother kept him busy with the vegetables for dinner or the furnace or anything else that needed looking after. At night he combed her blond hair and when he got through his hands seemed to take on her fair color and not the deep black they always seemed to be. But that’s me, you know, because I know his hands weren’t black. He washed the oil off – I never even saw crude oil – but he worked in the fields and I see him now, dark, in my mind.
    â€œThe woman who took him from us wasn’t beautiful like your grandmother but she slept in the shanties by the fields and sooner or later he found her, like they all did I suppose, all the men who worked in the East Texas fields. It wasn’t uncommon to see women strapping on their shoes at night and heading for the fields because there was money to make and they knew it. So he found her sooner or later. If he came home at Christmas he didn’t work around the house anymore. Then he didn’t come at all and he was with her, we knew. My brother Bud was old enough to take care of us now so he said, ‘Don’t worry,’ but I knew he’d be lost, like Daddy. The fields were the only place for him to go.”
    One night, driving home for the weekend, Bud ran his car off the road two miles south of a rig he’d been roughnecking. He never regained consciousness, Mother said.
    â€œDid he ever see your father?” I asked her.
    â€œNo, and he didn’t meet a woman of his own. He wasn’t the type to take up with that sort, and anyway we’d heard the shanty woman was dead by now, killed by some old boy who didn’t want to pay for her. They found her half-burned in the Mayberry Field, dress off, doused with gas.”
    â€œWhatever happened to Grandfather Bill?” I asked.
    â€œWe heard about him, sick and dying, in a Kilgore clinic years later.” My mother rubbed her throat; she’d gone dry. As in many family stories, the initial point had been lost in the telling. I never understood her fear about becoming the kind of woman she’d described. Maybe