Her father was planning (if you could call it a plan) to hole up with
the government payment till his two sons came home and they could
start again, fence off the bad earth. Vi wouldn’t stay just to keep his
house for him and wait. She thought—she knew—she could have
done what was necessary to get going again, the bank loans, the
inspections, meat prices were soaring, but she wasn’t going to talk
him into letting her. Wouldn’t and couldn’t. Even a woman could
make $2,600 a year as a welder, and she planned to send most of her
pay home.
He’d driven her out to the county road where the bus stopped once
a day and never said a word. She wondered if he’d go home and put a
shotgun to his head the way his uncle had done in the dust-storm days.
Just when the bus appeared far off raising its own cloud he took a
crushed roll of bills from his pocket and peeled off a ten and some
ones, and she thanked him meekly, but she’d already taken more than
that out of the bank, where she’d had an account ever since she turned
80 / J O H N C R O W L E Y
twenty, three years before. She hadn’t told him or anyone, not knowing
then what the money was for. It was for this.
“Bye, Daddy. Take care of yourself.”
“So long, Vi.”
“I’ll see you when the war’s over,” she said, but he didn’t smile.
The bus was filled with soldiers, only a few country people in among
them, and they stirred as one when Vi climbed the stair; one leapt up to
help her lift her bag into the netting overhead, a little ferrety fellow, she
let him think he’d helped. She took the seat they competed to offer her,
and for a time tried to make conversation, which she’d never been much
good at, especially the kind that had no purpose, or rather had one
hidden in the commonplaces. She gave them a word picture of the cattle
dying and stinking in the sun, how she’d pulled the ropes to help the
tractor drag them into the pits, sometimes pulling apart the longer-
lying bodies, all the time followed by the crows: and they mostly fell
silent, some because they knew what she meant and what it had been
like, some because they didn’t. A day and a night passed.
In the dark and the dawn she expected to be anxious and afraid.
But her heart felt cool. She passed through towns she’d never seen, the
trucks at the feed store, the tavern and the post office and the bank like
the ones in her town, the school and the churches, but not the same
ones, and beginning to grow different as she went west: why different
she couldn’t say. She couldn’t sleep even when the darkness outside the
window was so total she could see only the dim ghost of her own face,
a person who’d left home to find war work. Now and then what she
was doing came back to her in the middle of some bland string of
thought and her heart seemed to collapse into her stomach and her
breasts to shrink, the feeling of diving into water from a high rock. But
it only lasted a second, and she wasn’t even sure it wasn’t a good feel-
ing, in its way.
By the next night Vi was done with bus travel. She was filthy, she
felt limp and wound up at the same time, and the trip went on forever,
since the bus was forbidden by company policy to go faster than thirty-
five miles an hour to save gas and rubber, and even when the driver
picked it up a little, it did no good, because the stops were calculated at
the set speed, and you simply waited longer at stops. In any big town
she could have got off and found the train station, but she had paid for
F O U R F R E E D O M S / 81
the trip, and anyway in the fusty odor and noise of the bus, amid the
changeful crowd, she felt cocooned, waiting to come forth but not yet
ready.
That night they came to a broad crossroads, two great stripes of
highway at right angles, that had collected gas stations and bars and a
long diner around itself. Vi could see, as the bus downshifted and
slowed, a line of military vehicles, two-ton trucks, bigger trucks,
smaller ones, strung out just off the road, thirty or forty or more. When
the bus turned in to let out its passengers to eat and drink and use the
toilets, it passed a crowd, apparently the drivers of the vehicles, going
to or coming from the diner, gathering to talk or smoke a cigarette
before starting out again west where the vehicles were pointed—that’s
the thought that occurred to Vi. Over at the big garage behind the
diner, which came into view as the bus drew up to park, two of the
hulking brown trucks had their hoods open and were being worked on
under lights on tall poles. It was also clear now in the lights of the
parking lot that all the drivers in their jackets and caps were women.
Not soldiers but women, some in skirts, most in trousers. Vi getting off
heard their laughter.
There were several in the diner, waiting maybe for the disabled
vehicles to be fixed, crowded into the booths or seated on the stools.
They were all ages, some as young as Vi, some as old as her mother had
been, some as old as her mother would now be. The soldiers from the
bus who banged into the diner looked around in awe, no place they’d
expected to find themselves, an army of the opposing sex. They couldn’t
help but engage one another, though some of the boys were over-
whelmed and some of the women shy, maybe about the bandannas
turbanning their heads or their lipstick worn away or not even applied
that day, the ends of their dungarees rolled high.
They were drivers for a plant building military vehicles, in convoy
to deliver the trucks to the port where they’d be put aboard ships (the
women assumed) and sent out. Why not put them on flatcars, send
them by train? The women laughed, asked each other why not, but no
one knew for sure, maybe the trains were so busy now and the trucks
were needed quick.
They moved aside, pushed over, let the newcomers share their
booths, take their places at the counters, sit with them at their burdened
82 / J O H N C R O W L E Y
tables that two harried waiters and a colored busboy tried to manage.
Vi sat down next to a woman with her hair in a swept-up Betty Hutton
do, a cap perched on it so small and far back as to announce its useless-
ness, point out that its wearer wasn’t really a cap-wearer at all. But her
nails were short and darkened at the moons.
“Where you headed?”
Vi named the city on the sea, the same to which the convoy was
going.
“Whatcha doing there? That’s a long ways from home. Trying for a
job?”
“Right. Welding. I read about it.”
The woman, whose name was Shirley, looked Vi over in some admi-
ration. Vi thought to drop her gaze, thought she ought to, but Shirley
held it. Vi wondered how old she was: ten years older than she? “You’ll
do all right,” she said. “You going alone?”
“Yep.”
“You ever do anything like that? Welding?”
“Well on the ranch. A little acetylene torch, fixing hay rakes and
things. My brother was better.”
“This’ll be different,” Shirley said. She laughed. “When I got a job at
this plant, I was working in the yard, they came and asked, You ever
drive a truck? And I said Sure. I mean I’d driven a pickup, you know, how
hard could it be? So I was signed up. They took me out and showed me
this thing. I couldn’t even see how to get into it. Then there’s four forward
gears and an overdrive. Two reverse. I said Huh? They said Oh there’s a
chart right there on the floor. All the slots are numbered. Easy.”