Broken Ground Read Online Free

hands over my nose and mouth to block the smell, to suppress the cry thickening in my throat, and time starts again. Neighbors spill from tents and homes like ours, women and children and men—men too old to be working or injured men unable to work—who are shouting. “Blowout!” Over and over I hear the word, but no matter how many times I hear it, I can’t think what it means.
    Someone tugs at my dress. “I have to find my ma.”
    Edna Faye’s high, thin voice is solemn with understanding. I drop to my knees. We are eye to eye, and she is the teacher. “What happened?”
    â€œBlowout,” she says.
    Something in my expression—impatience? anger?—makes Edna Faye wince. She is afraid. I don’t want to be another adult who makes her fearful. I should smile reassuringly and tell her to go find her ma. Instead, I grab her shoulders and yank her close so I can hear her every word through the noise of lamentation rising all around us.
    â€œWhat’s a blowout?”
    â€œA fire. A big fire. A bad fire.” She’s crying now. “Killed my uncle and my grandpa, too, up in Whizbang a while back.”
    Whizbang, Oklahoma, she means. The boomtown that sprang up almost overnight around one of the biggest gushers ever discovered—nearly as big as the gushers here. I heard about Whizbang. I heard about that fire. It destroyed everything in its path. It almost destroyed Whizbang.
    I look to the horizon again. The fire is in the west. Which way did Charlie drive this morning after he folded himself into our truck’s front seat? I watched him walk to the truck, his lunch pail swinging at his thigh. I watched him climb inside. I raised my hand and blew him a kiss. He blew a kiss back. Waving, he backed the truck toward the dirt road that took him in whichever direction he went. But I didn’t watch him drive away. Already, I’d turned back to the house. Because today is Monday. Monday, Wash. I had to get busy. And there are his shirts, soaking in the pot. There are his dungarees, hanging from the line, and his socks, clothespinned into place. The East Texas wind has dried them already. But I will wash them again— Monday, Wash —because look: faint tendrils of oily, black smoke, black as any dust storm’s blizzard, black as any mood, snaking around the dungarees and socks, and the shirts still soaking in the pot—clothes that Charlie will wear against his skin. My husband’s skin smells like Ivory soap, and beneath that, a hint of Lava. I can’t have him heading off to work smelling like something— oh, God —like someone burned.
    This is what I’m doing when a man comes and tells me that Charlie is dead, killed in the blowout. I’m scrubbing Charlie’s shirts, dungarees, and socks. The man talks to me. He talks to me. Talks to me. To the back of my bowed head he talks, to my rounded shoulders, my body heaving with effort. I hear “husband,” and I hear “dead,” and that is all I hear. That is all I need to hear. Now I must get busy. Never have I worked so hard at one simple task. Monday’s task. I work at it.
    But I cannot get Charlie’s clothes clean enough. I cannot wash them white as the snow that I have seen only a few times in my life. One time I was with Charlie. This was eight years ago. He was fourteen. I was thirteen. We were walking home from school late one January afternoon, when the moon already hung in the sky, as the moon must hang in the sky now, only that January moon was hidden by clouds and this March moon is hidden by smoke. Charlie and I were walking and talking, discussing a comment Mrs. Himmel had made about the sixth day and Adam and Eve. In a low voice, Charlie told me about something he’d read on the sly, tucked away in the corner of the Alba public library where one day I would work. Charlie had read bits and pieces from a book by a man named Darwin. This man