Free The Woman in Oil Fields by Tracy Daugherty Page B

she’d been tempted to follow the oil workers herself when she was young, to raise money for June who’d had to scramble for cash after Bill disappeared. In fact, my mother didn’t leave home until she met my father – who also eventually wound up in the fields. (My sister, more level-headed than Mother ever gave her credit for being, turned out fine. She’s married now and living in Houston.)
    That night, twenty years ago, sitting with me in her kitchen, my mother laughed sadly. “I don’t know what’s so damned attractive about the oil fields, but every man in my life has been drawn to them.”
    I remember thinking, Not me. I won’t be trapped by that hard-packed Texas ground.
    â€œBud was such a good kid,” she said. “There was no need for it, no need for it at all … when he ran his car off the road, people said the marks looked like he’d swerved to miss something, but there weren’t any tracks in the dirt.”
    At twelve, I was already familiar enough with my mother’s grim tales to know they usually ended in guilt or remorse. I knew what Bud had swerved to miss on the road that night. I knew why Mother worried about my father when he worked late. The oil field woman would haunt my family from now on.
    My father’s a quiet man, and shy, and even if the shanties still stood during his wildcatting days he wouldn’t have gone to them for the world. But the Mayberry Woman, as she was known in the fields, came to the oil workers now, the way she’d come to Bud and stood like fog in the middle of the road. She didn’t say why she came. Maybe she was looking for her money, though what could it mean to her now?
    In 1963 my father moved up in the small oil company he worked for. He stopped going to the fields. He bought an air-conditioner and a new car for us, and paid off the mortgage on June’s Dallas home. In the evenings we watched television. Dad said the country would never recover from Oswald’s rifle in the window. No one told me stories at night to put me to bed. My mother fretted about my sister, my father read the paper. In time, I began to realize it was up to me: I’d been given a version of a story, though I was too young to know how to tell it.
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    For a long time the story stayed inside me. When I was a little older (but still too young to know how to begin) I scared myself with it. Watching meteors one dusk in a mesquite-ridden field I had the sense that the Mayberry Woman was just behind a bush. I wouldn’t go to her. A few yards away, on the highway, diesel trucks signaled one another with their horns. I hoped she’d know the drivers were stronger men than I was, full of hard little pills to keep them awake. They’d give her more of whatever it was she was looking for than I could. Presently a jeep loaded with Mexican boys pulled up to the edge of the field. The sky had turned coal black. A spotlight in the back of the jeep flashed on and the boys fired at cottontail rabbits cowering in the mesquite. I sank into myself. The shots didn’t come my way. As they hunted the boys sang a story of their own:
    La pena y Ia que no es pena; ay llorona
Todo es pena para mi .
    The story was similar to mine: an airy woman, damp with sweat and talcum and cheap perfume, walked the streets of a Mexican town, touching the faces of children, seducing men from the taverns, lying with them in the back seats of rusted cars.
    The hunters laughed and didn’t even want the dead rabbits. I imagined that, years from now, after they’d forgotten this night, they’d remember the story they were singing. La Llorona was more embedded in their minds than the spotlight and the guns, and I felt a kind of kinship with them.
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    This morning I overhear two nurses in the hall, whispering about me. One says, “It’s awful the way he leaves his grandma each week, then sneaks back and tells her he’s been