Jane owed Momma.
Her supposedly ten-pound, twenty-two-inch body had ripped Momma open at birth, taking so long in the push out before her brother Benjamin that she’d blocked him from pushing out at all. Daddy wasn’t there when this happened.
Momma said Granny had to pull Benjamin out, rough, with tongs.
“Selfish from the outset,” Momma said.
She said Benjamin had been born blue and never cried once before they buried him behind Granny’s place and he became spirit, a stream of particles, charged like light. Jane would often think about the magic or physics of that, and it worried her, though the story made them special, and she did like that.
From her birthday tear, Momma developed an infection that almost killed her, and when she was out of her mind with pain and grief, passing in and out of consciousness, she suckled Jane the offender, too big for her womb, as if it were her greatest calling, passing that virulent secretion into her daughter, so that the incident and what it seemed to mean became a part of her.
The two of them surprised everybody by living.
That’s why Jane owed Momma.
Now, at seventeen, she still hadn’t cleared the account, though she’d tried in a thousand off-target ways. No matter what mile time or exemplary attendance record she brought home, Momma found fault—“Who got first?” “Perfect record of bootlicking!”
Momma kicked her ass and waited for thank you.
Daddy seemed to like her better but not enough so to counteract the Momma effect. He was insufficient for that. His strengths lay elsewhere.
Momma used to tell Jane stories about it in their tent.
“Your uncle Arthur drove us from Bonham over to Paris— Paris, Texas—to watch baseball. We was sitting in the stands, all those folks hollering and cheering and drinking beer. But the only thing I could see was your daddy. Such a handsome man. Slick and strong, like a new truck . . .”
She put a piece of watermelon in her mouth and licked a red bit off her finger. Even in the dark, you could see she was beautiful, her heart-shaped face, her heavy arched brows.
“Watching him out there?” She sighed, shook her head. “And then his voice. After the game, he come on over to us in the stands and picked up another fella’s guitar and started to sing. You remember this one?—‘Will you miss me? Miss me when I’m gone?’”
She sang it high and thin, a complaint, making Jane’s eyes water.
“I could see he was doin’ it just for me.” She smiled. “Charged straight through me.” She kneaded the skin over her heart. “Your daddy had a certain kind of power.”
Still has it, Jane thought.
“Wasn’t no stopping it. We made you and your brother. God’s greatest blessings, no matter I was just the age you are now.”
Momma had delivered two babies, buried one, when she was just fifteen.
“But you know what, Jane? Your daddy don’t have that power over me no more. Power I need now? Electricity. I want a man who can turn on the lights.”
That wasn’t Daddy.
IN spite of Momma’s prophesying, by seventeen, Jane didn’t look like the kind of person who was gonna do something. Though she was tall, coming up on six feet, she only weighed 125 pounds—“All vine, no taters,” Momma said. She couldn’t consume enough eggs and biscuits to stop her collarbones from sticking out further than her bosom. She wore her thick brown hair in a single braid wrapped in a coil at the nape of her neck to hide her irregular schedule of washing, which was hard to do well with a bucket of river water. The hairdo called attention to her wide mouth and dark lips just covering an abundance of teeth. If she’d had a big mirror in the tent to examine the effect of the hairstyle, she might have rethought it. But she had eyes the color of spring peas, and you could see how her features might be improved with a skillful hand and money for makeup.
Momma would grimace when she caught sight of Jane, no doubt wishing she had the time and tools to fix her appearance, cogs turning in her pretty-woman mind, probably calculating how she might divert the tragedy of Jane’s ugliness, making her more useful, if she didn’t have to work so hard appeasing creditors or corralling Daddy, advancing their circumstances in a world that required constant vigilance.
That may make her sound mean, but people who didn’t know Momma almost always seemed to like her, the way innocents sometimes like a shrewd woman. She’d always been smart about earning at cotton, timing their picking and the weighing of the bags according to the dew, and she’d share her tactics with some of them who were new to the fields, city transplants who’d joined the exodus to California, where everybody said money grew on orange trees.
Even if a person knew Momma well enough to fear her, that person would often move closer to her spot at the side of a field, offering to share a sip of water out of a lidded mayonnaise jar, mimicking the way she stretched her back and arms, the way she laughed loud at a joke. Though she was only five foot one, she was powerful and real and completely herself, not a fake. And when a person stood near enough to her, he had a good chance of hearing the truth about his life—“Baby oughta be crawling by now.” “Stop howling and get off the porch.” “Don’t like the shape of that mole.”
Jane heard a lot of her honest talk. Heard she was too slow, too careless, too noisy, too sloppy, too selfish. If it was Momma’s goal to improve Jane, then it worked, because Jane always tried to fix what Momma criticized. She’d had a lot of practice trying to win her approval. It got to where she wouldn’t enter a contest she didn’t think she could win—spelling bees, high jump, Daily Dragon features editor—winning them all in spite of being a white trash Okie, freckled with pollen and tent dirt.
Nothing much came of her successes. She hadn’t pleased Momma yet, and she wouldn’t have money for college, so she quit school after her junior year and went to work full-time in a Natomas tomato field instead of just-before and right-after school, thinking maybe earning a good amount of money was what she was supposed to do. After a couple months working harder in the 106-degree heat than any boy, woman, or man, she’d begun to understand no farmer would promote a girl picker to foreman. There would be no payoff in tomatoes.
She’d been wondering if there was going to be any payoff at all for her, living in a tent between the river and the tracks, no matter how hard she worked. That’s what she was thinking the night she came home to find Momma packing their belongings into Uno’s Ford.
UNO lifted the tent’s sheet flap with his good left arm and sneered. “Evening, beauty queen.”
She scowled. “What’re you doing with our stuff?”
“Don’t be rude to Mister Jeffers.”
“Mister Jeffers?”
Momma stepped out of the headlights’ glare, closer to Jane. “Our names were drawn for a cabin. We’re back in.”
Uno was manager of Tumbleweed, the federal labor camp. The wait list was long, and the Hoppers had a black mark next to their name.
“You musta bent some rules,” Jane said. “Does Daddy know?”
“Well, he should know,” Uno said, “but he probably don’t.”
Momma pointed her melon belly in his direction, looking up through her lashes.