Straight - The Gettin Place

Copyright 1996 Susan Straight

All rights reserved. Except as permitted under the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher. For information address Hyperion, 1500 Broadway, New York, New York 10036.

The Library of Congress has catalogued the original print edition of this book as follows:

Straight, Susan.

The gettin place / Susan Straight.1st ed.

p. cm.

ISBN 0-7868-6086-3

1. Afro-American familiesOklahomaTulsaHistory20th centuryFiction. 2. Afro-AmericansOklahomaTulsaFiction. 3. FamilyOklahomaTulsaFiction. 4. Tulsa (Okla.)Fiction. I. Title.

PS3569.T6795G48 1996

813'.54dc20

95-50065 CIP

eBook Edition ISBN: 978-1-4013-0606-9

First eBook Edition

Original hardcover edition printed in the United States of America.

www.HyperionBooks.com

To the memory of Alberta Marie Sims: I miss your smile and stories and endless generosity; and the memories of Lanier and Mozelle Sims and Minerva Andrews, all Tulsa people.

I owe thanks to many: Dwayne Sims (as always), Richard Parks and Pat Mulcahy, the Holly Robinson Writers Workshop, General Sims, Gail and John Watson, Arnold and Evelyn Williams, Clarice and Jesse Lee Collins, Percival Everett, Rob Bauman, Ben Sanchez, Brenda Richardson, and the countless relatives and friends who tell me stories.

All characters and events, aside from major historical figures and incidents, are fictional.

The sweet, blood-laden smoke, clinging with the sheen of hair oil and soot, reached into the dark room of his dreaming, and Hosea saw the ruffled-thin mouth of the boy who had hit him with the rifle butt. The wood was meant for his temple, but Hosea had ducked and the shoulder blow had sent him into the dirt road where the pale boy came down hard, full on his flat hand with the heavy boot, grinding, pushing the sharp cinder deep inside his child-soft palm.

Hosea didnt open his eyes. No, he told himself calmly. Not Tulsa. You on your own place. Rio Seco. You smellin somebodys campfire in the riverbottom. Your fireplace been outfeel cool enough in here that you aint gotta look.

In the small coldhouse he and Salcido had built of river rock forty-one years ago, when Hosea was thirty-five and just married, he slept each night near the fireplace hed added for himself much later, after his fifth son was born and hed begun to escape from the night-mingled breaths and baby cries in the main house. No smoked hams or dried chiles or olive jars crowded the hollow spaces in the stone walls now. It was a warm house for him in winter. The plum wood he stacked outside was so hard and seasoned that one thigh-thick burl would burn hard, subside into gray, and often leap back into flame long after midnight, startling him from sleep.

But he heard no heat glistening in the ashes now, and no waves of warmth breathed onto his right side. He felt the pleasant morning cool prickle his face. Not like Oklahomathat bone-chalking chill on his grandfathers farm, scraped-thin flannel rags around him at night, afraid to move his nose an inch from the mask hed made of an old shirt.

He blinked, but the film of dawn and dreaming began to cover his irises again, and in the shifting gray he saw smoke rising from burned foundations of houses, wreathing the iron bedsteads that crouched like spiders in the rubble, and he felt the throbbing heat in his shoulder where the boy had poked him again with the rifle to make him walk. He followed the raised hands of the men in line before him, trying to look sideways for his father among the sprawled figures on the ground, some with ashes piled on their charred coats.

Without shuddering, without blinking now, he breathed in the faint smoke drifting from the burning Tulsa dream through the slit of open window above his bed. Hosea closed his mouth, pulled the smell fast into his nostrils, and turned his good-hearing ear, the left one, toward the tiny window. A pair of voices spiraled thin somewhere among the trees on his land.

Propping his hand on the cool stones, he stood quickly, listening, and then he pushed open the heavy door to see the house where his wife, Alma, her grandmother, and the grandchildren were sleeping. In the half-moons light, the deep turquoise star shape on one of the adobe walls still made him blink; Alma had been talking about painting the house a few months ago. The dark-blue patch looked like a gaping hole. But no smoke rose from the chimney, and no glow lit the windows in the purple night that was almost finished.

It was too early for his two oldest sons to be gathering for coffee, smoking Swisher Sweets while they pried open their eyes. And the other men, the mechanics and rim polishers and talkers, wouldnt come for hours. Behind the trees dangling with chains to lift engines, the huge stone barn across the yard was dim and gray, the metal sliding door still shut.

Hosea rubbed his forehead, feeling the almost morning moisture rising from the nearby riverbottom. It was not yet dawn. The coyotes whirling messages were long finished, and the crows hadnt started their early arguments. The wafting smell must have been the dream again, the dream of Tulsa burning, the same ashen days hed been seeing in his sleep for He pressed hard fingertips against the bones of his temples. Seventy years.

Hed seen fires in the riverbottom last summer, and nearly a year ago, the Rio Seco sky had turned black from the huge Grayglen blaze. Last month, a cigarette ember flipped by a speeding commuter had ignited the palm fronds woven into his chain-link fence. Right by the front gate, where the men parked, the dry fronds had blazed into a fringed wall of licking red, and everyone had run from the barn with fire extinguishers and hoses. The fence was charred, bare mesh now.

The voices were so faint that Hosea couldnt make out the direction. Could be his two middle sons, who usually slept in the trailers near the olive grove. Hosea wondered if he should walk the fences. He wouldnt get back to sleep now anyway; he seemed to need less sleep each year. Sometimes, when the mockingbirds or coyotes woke him, he built up the fire and sat in the coldhouse staring at the embers until morning. Sometimes he saw his friend Lanier, who needed less sleep now, too, since his wife had passed and hed moved to Treetown. Lanier had been wanting a small piece of Hoseas or his brothers land to raise a few pigs.

He tried to see across the shallow ravine to the olive grove, but mist hung lightly in the branchesnot fog that would shroud the whole city, but airy wet that swirled along only on the wide riverbed, cloaking the trees. His five acres were covered with trees, and he liked the veiling mist in winter, the steady, softened drip of rain, and the deep shade in summer. He looked up into the huge pepper tree, where the chains swung gently in a breath of wind. Back at the coldhouse, Hosea pulled his dark-green work jacket and huge key ring from the wooden chair and then knelt beside the bed, pausing. His wifes grandmother, who spoke only Spanish, had been trying to describe for him strangers shed seen in the hills nearby, and Hosea knew she didnt mean the homeless Vietnam vets whod lived in the riverbottom for years now, because she didnt circle her ear with her tiny brown forefinger. He reached under the narrow bed for the old .22 rifle.