Free Maud's Line by Margaret Verble Page B

fast.” She bit her lower lip. While still on her cot, she’d begun feeling guilty about necking with Billy. Not about the necking itself, which they’d done before, but about necking when Booker had been carted off to jail, and about necking after meeting Booker at all. She told herself that had she not known Billy expected it, had she not been light-headed from the cigarettes and beer, if it hadn’t been dark, and if she hadn’t been feeling like she was ready to burst, she never would’ve done it. She was hoping that none of that showed on her face when Lovely added, “She gave me her Bible to read.”
    â€œHer Bible? She brought it to the dance?”
    Lovely put his head in his hands. “No. We walked over to her house to get it. All the Starrs are Christians.”
    Maud smiled. “Not all of them. Some are outlaws. The rest have to look respectable just to live down their bank robbers and killers. Don’t worry about it.” She got up, opened their little icebox, took out some fatback, and started slicing it. After she’d slapped several pieces into a skillet, Lovely added, “I think I’m gonna read it.”
    â€œYou should. It’s got interesting stories.” Maud’s mind swam to Jonah and the whale. She’d learned the tale in school, and it had captured her imagination the same way
Moby-Dick
had. Maud didn’t feel any particular animosity against individual Christians as much as she was inclined to see the hypocrisy in their religion. Beyond that, she was too mixed blooded to have any truck with the Keetowahs, and there weren’t any other faiths around. So she hadn’t given religion much thought beyond recognizing that powers in the universe, like the river and the sun, were mightier than humans and had to be reckoned with. She did hope there was a force that would propel her into a better life, but she felt like that could only be a combination of pleasing looks, some education, and her wits.
    About that time, a grunt came from the next room, and the conversation about the Bible died. But as soon as Mustard slid in at the table, he was eager to swap news. He’d arrived in town with some of his running buddies as the band was closing up and a fight was being organized on the dance square. He’d laid a bet on who’d win, and he reached into his pants pocket and drew out several large bills. “By damn, don’t ever bet against an Indian if he’s fighting a white man. If the Indian’s sober, you’ll lose ever’thing ya got. I’m gonna get my dog with these winnings. Lovely, after breakfast, we’re gonna build us a dog house and pen. We’ll use them boards and wire we salvaged from the roosters’ coops.”
    Maud did her chores while they hauled from the barn wire and boards that had, before the flood, been fighting cocks’ pens. The posts were still standing, and as they strung the wire, she sat in her daddy’s chair holding
Arrowsmith
and thinking about Booker in jail. When Mustard left to ask Blue who he knew with a ready litter, Maud was so busting to talk about Booker that she blurted out even before Lovely’s butt reached the stoop, “The sheriff arrested the peddler for setting fire to the school.”
    Lovely had heard that. “Does he have any evidence?”
    â€œOnly vicious gossip. And him selling kerosene.”
    â€œHe’s a stranger,” Lovely added.
    That was, of course, the root cause, at least in Maud’s estimation. She knew there were strangers in No Man’s Land where, for all of her life, they’d come from every corner of the continent to make money in wheat. She also knew there were strangers in the central part of the state where oil was gushing, and in the Osage oil fields in the Outlet. But around the bottoms and Ft. Gibson, strangers came only to dig potatoes. And it was too early in the season for them to start