The Widows of Wichita County

In the early oil boom days of Clifton Creek, Texas, a bell was erected on the courthouse porch. When an accident happened in the oil fields the bell sounded and, within minutes, was echoed by churches and schools. Silently, the children would pack their books and head home…past the clanging…past men rushing to help.

They did not need to be told. They knew. Someone’s father, someone’s husband, someone’s son was dead amid the man-made forest of rigs.

October 11

9:45 a.m.

Montano Ranch

Anna Montano cleared away the breakfast dishes and poured herself the last of the coffee. She collected the letters she had picked up a few hours before and relaxed, finally having time to read. From her perch on a kitchen bar stool she could see all of what Davis called “the company space” in their home. The great room with its wide entry area at the front door and ten-foot fireplace along the north wall. An open dining room filled with an oversize table and ornate chairs, never used except when Davis paid the bills. And the breakfast nook, almost covered over in plants, where she ate most of her meals, alone.

Carlo’s familiar honk rattled the morning calm. In the five years they had been in America, Carlo had become more and more Davis’s foreman and less her brother. She had grown used to him walking past her to speak to Davis, or inviting her husband to go somewhere without including her.

Anna heard Davis storm from his office, hurry down the hall, and bolt out the front door. She knew by now he would not bother to look in her direction, or say goodbye. She was no more visible to her husband and brother than a piece of the furniture. He did not bother to inform her why he had returned to the house after leaving almost an hour before. She had not bothered to ask.

She watched as Shelby Howard’s truck plowed down the road toward the oil rig he was building on their land. She had only met the old oilman once, but he drove like he owned the land he leased. Another car followed in his dust, but Anna could not see the driver. From bits of conversations she had heard Davis having over the phone, Anna knew they needed more money to drill deeper for oil. She guessed the men were having a meeting this morning on the site.

She finished her cup of coffee, enjoying the quiet of the house once more. The sun had been dancing in and out of clouds all morning, making it impossible to trust the light in the back room—the only room in the house she dared to call hers.

Soon after she had arrived as Davis’s bride, she began to paint again just as she always had during her lonely childhood. Between the horses and her painting, Anna continued to pass the hours.

Anna watched the horses in the north corral for a while before climbing off the bar stool and washing her coffee cup. When she turned to put away the cup a sound, like a hundred rifles firing at once, thundered through the house, shaking the walls with fury.

By the time the cup had shattered on the tile floor, Anna was at a full run toward the door. Nothing in nature could have made such a sound.

She fought with the latch on the heavy front door, her heart pounding in her throat. When the door finally swung open, yelling came from the barn and bunkhouse. Men raced toward trucks and pickups, shouting at one another to hurry.

Anna held her breath, watching them, trying to figure out what had happened. The very air seemed charged with panic. Then she saw it. Black smoke billowed from the oil rig site that earlier had been no more than a dot along the horizon.

Carlo’s pickup sprayed gravel as it swung around the drive. “Stay here!” he yelled at her.

Anna stared at the smoke blackening the white-clouded sky, like ink spilling onto a linen tablecloth. “Where is Davis?” she whispered as Carlo raced away. He did not bother with the dirt road that ribboned toward the site. He bobbed across the open pasture directly toward the rising fury.

Anna huddled on the first step of the porch and watched the flames dance in the smoke as every hand on the ranch rushed to the fire. She did not need an answer to her question. She knew Davis must be there, somewhere in that smoke. Somewhere near the fire.

In her mind she painted the scene, closing her thoughts away to the tragedy unfolding before her eyes.

10:24 a.m.

Clifton Creek Courthouse

Helena Whitworth stared out the second-floor window of the Clifton Creek courthouse conference room, watching the Texas wind chase autumn into winter. She had seen pictures of places in New England where fall blanketed the landscape with brilliant hues and piled color in vibrant heaps like haystacks on an artist’s palette. But here, as the leaves began to turn, gusts ripped them from their branches and sent them northeast toward Oklahoma before the metamorphosis of color was given a chance to brighten the gray landscape.

Clifton Creek was rich in oil and cattle and sunny days, but sometimes, when the scattered patches of green dulled to brown, she felt washed out all the way to her soul.

The town of six thousand reminded her of a mesquite tree spreading out over the dry land, offering little in comfort or beauty. Even the streets were drawn out like points on a compass, north to south, east to west. No curves, no variance and no tolerance for change. She had lived here all her life, sixty-three years so far, and she always dreaded autumn.

Slowly, Helena straightened bony shoulders beneath her tailored suit and faced the rest of the city council members. “Gentlemen, it may be years, maybe even beyond our lifetimes, before we see the importance of building even a few small parks. But, mark my words, we will see it.”

Not one man dared argue. They could have been made of the same mahogany as the bookshelves lining three of the walls. To say Helena Whitworth was a thorn in their sides was as understated as calling skin cancer a blemish.

“J.D. and I talked it over.” She softened her blow by including her husband so the members would not look on her idea as simply a woman’s way of thinking. “And we’ve come up with a plan….”

“Mrs. Whitworth,” a plump woman, with a hair bun the size of a cow patty, whispered from the open doorway, “I hate to interrupt, but you have a call.”

“Not now, Mary. Please take a message.” Helena unfolded a chart, dismissing her assistant without another glance.

“No, Helena.” Determination hardened Mary’s normally soft voice. “It’s the hospital. Something about J.D.”

Helena placed the chart on the huge table, moved through the doorway and into the reception room before Mary’s voice settled in the air. In the almost forty years she had been in Helena’s employment, Mary had called her boss by her first name only twice.

As Mary handed Helena the phone, the two women’s stares locked. The men in the adjacent room would have been surprised at the sympathy in the secretary’s gaze and at the fear in Helena’s.

“Hello?” She hugged the receiver with both hands. “Yes, this is Mrs. Whitworth.”

A long pause followed. No questions. No denial of information. No cries. “I understand.” She forced her voice to steady. Years in business served her well. Emotions were a luxury she could not afford to wear. “I’ll be right there.”

Helena’s shoulders were rod straight now, as if her jacket were still on the hanger. Her voice brittled with forced calmness, for she knew full well the men labored to listen from just beyond the door. They couldn’t see her grip Mary’s hand. They heard no cry as her lips whitened with strain.

“There’s been an accident on the oil rig J.D. and Shelby Howard are investing in. The nurse said five men were badly burned. Some died before the crew got them to the hospital.”

“Five?”

Helena nodded once.

“J.D.?” Mary whispered.

“One man’s burned too badly to identify, but he’s still alive.” Helena shook her head. “The odds are not with us.”

Mary cried in tiny little gulps that sounded like hic-cups. Helena opened her arms to her employee, her friend. Helena had buried two husbands already. Mary had sobbed each time. But, for Helena, there was too much to do, too much to think about for tears.

She handed Mary a tissue. “Would you go to my house and tell the girls, when they arrive, to stay put until I get back to you? I know as soon as they hear, they’ll come by, and I don’t want them laying siege on the hospital with all their children in tow. Tell them I need them at my house to answer calls. I’ll phone as soon as I know something.”

“They love J.D. like he’s their father,” Mary lied, as always, trying to be kind.

Helena pulled her keys from her purse and smiled, thinking J.D. hated her forty-year-old twin daughters only slightly less than he hated bird poachers. If he were burned and near death, Paula and Patricia were the last two he would want at his bedside.

“He’s got to be the one alive,” Mary mumbled and blew her nose. “He didn’t survive thirty years in the Marines to come home and die in an accident. Three Purple Hearts prove he’s too tough for that.”

“Before you go, inform the men inside that the meeting is over.” Without another word, Helena turned and marched down the hallway, her steps echoing like a steady heartbeat off the drab walls lined with colorless pictures and maps.

She was not a woman to make a charade of being dainty or falsely feminine, but she would not wear grief lightly for a third time in her life.

“Be alive,” she ordered in more than a whisper. “Be alive when I get there.”

She hurried through the deserted courthouse. The alarm bell from years past hung in a glass case reserved for memorabilia. “Not today,” Helena said as she remembered her childhood during the oil boom. “I’ll hear no bell today. Not for my J.D.”

10:37 a.m.

Clifton Creek Elementary

In a town marinated in secrets, hinted at but never told, Meredith Allen played Alice, innocently lost in Wonderland. At thirty-four, she still wore her hair long with a ribbon and faced life as if all she saw made sense.

Her path would not have been so tragic if she had wandered blind, but she knew…she knew and she still pretended.

When pulled from the refuge of teaching her second-grade class to report to the office, Meredith saw a lie in the principal’s eyes. Something he refused to say. Something he could not reveal as he told her she was needed at the hospital. Kevin had been involved in an oil rig accident.

She asked no questions as they walked back to her classroom, brightly decorated in a papier-mâché autumn. Principal Pickett offered to read the students a story while Meredith gathered her things and organized her desk, putting markers in order and papers in line. She was in no hurry. The lie in what he had not said could wait.

Meredith compiled lies, organizing them, ranking each, but never confronting any. Her father had been the first master of the craft. Her first memories of Christmas echoed with stories and half truths. “Things will be better next year.”

“This is just as good as what you wanted.” He kept up the falsehoods until finally he told his last, “Don’t worry, princess, I’m not going to die and leave you.”

As Meredith left the school, she thought of how Kevin had fallen right into the shoes of her father with his lies. Only last week he had sworn he no longer left the bank except to eat lunch. He must have lied, for oil rigs did not spring up over cafés. He was probably still leaving the office every chance he got, still staying away too long. His boss would be furious if Kevin lost hours of work or was hurt bad enough to have to take sick days. He might even be fired.

Ten minutes later, Meredith parked in front of the twenty-bed hospital, straightened her sweater appliquéd with the alphabet and lifted her head, carefully erasing all anger from her face.

County Memorial Hospital stood exactly as it had since the early ’70s when Meredith had played on the grass out front while her father died inside. The trees had grown larger. A slice of lawn had been paved over in the ’80s to allow for three handicap parking spaces. The eaves, built without any thought of architectural style, now sported aluminum siding and gutters. All else, even the putty-colored door frames, remained the same. Twenty beds available for a town that had never needed ten.

As a young girl, she had tried to imagine a big city hospital where people rushed about shouting orders, and groups huddled in corners speaking in foreign tongues. The busiest night at Memorial had probably been three years prior when the Miller triplets were born. Memorial was not much of a hospital. Even the name, Wichita County Memorial Hospital, that had once been lettered across the front had been shortened to simply County Memorial. It was mostly where the people of Clifton Creek came to give birth and die. If anyone needed surgery or faced a long stay, they drove the hour to Wichita Falls.

Meredith slammed her aging blue Mustang’s door three times before it stayed closed. Kevin had promised to fix it a month ago. But he had not, just as he had not done a hundred other things. Or was it a thousand by now? Things had been piling up since they started dating at sixteen and married five years later.

It must be at least a thousand, she thought: the car door, the front lock, the garbage disposal…their marriage. Not that their marriage was crumbling, only cracked, Meredith decided. She had no doubt they both still loved one another. But sometimes, it felt uneven, like a table with one short leg, never in danger of falling, but irritating all the same.

Meredith fought the wind as she hurried into the emergency entrance. She glanced back at the bank of dark, boiling clouds forming to the north. The storm was moving in quickly. She should be in reading circle, not standing in a tiny foyer with the smell of bleach and antiseptic death thickening the air around her.

A swirl of dried leaves charged the automatic door as it closed behind her. She arranged her sweater once more and touched the ribbon that held her natural curly auburn hair away from her face.

Shaking her head, she tried to figure out what Kevin had managed to do now. With all his sports activities and weekend drinking, the hospital was a familiar place. As a junior officer at the bank, he had no business being out at an oil rig. If he had ruined another suit, she would say something this time.

Last summer, she had sat quietly as Kevin told his latest adventure to his friends. He had been looking over land near the south fork of the Red River when an old football buddy begged him to catch one more long pass.

In the end, the buddy got his loan from the bank, and Meredith used half her paycheck for stitches across Kevin’s forehead and the other half to replace the three-piece suit he used as “game clothes.”

I’m already working two jobs to keep us out of bankruptcy, she reasoned. Every year Kevin found more football buddies who remembered the great games over beer, and every year he found another job after he fumbled.

Amid it all, he somehow managed to remind her of how she had been the lucky one to catch him. Right now she did not feel lucky. She felt frightened and tired to the bone of worrying about money…and guilty for even thinking about it when the only man she had ever loved might be hurt.

“Morning, Mrs. Allen.” A candy striper greeted Meredith where three short hallways merged. The center passage doorway had been closed and a sign, No Unauthorized Personnel, taped across the seam.

The girl had that do-you-remember-me? look in her eyes.

“Good morning, Kimberly.” Meredith forced a smile. Kimberly had not changed in ten years. She had been a timid second-grader who grew into a hesitant woman. Her age and bust size were well beyond her youthful uniform, but the girl’s insecurity clung to one more year of childhood.

“I’m looking for my husband.” When Kimberly did not answer, Meredith added, “Kevin Allen.”

Meredith glanced at the reception desk but, as usual, it was deserted. Paperwork was usually handled at the nurses’ station, or in an emergency room while waiting for one of the town’s three doctors.

“This way.” Kimberly hurried down the hallway marked with a number 3 above the entrance. Her head low. Her hair curtained her face.

“Has Kevin been admitted?” Meredith hoped not. They could not afford a hospital stay. If he was laid up, she would take a few days of emergency leave and take care of him. Lately, everything in her life boiled down to how to save money, nothing more.

Kimberly did not answer.

“Has he seen the doctor yet?” With the center doors closed maybe the doctors were busy with a birth or a car wreck, and had not had time to get to him yet. “Were there others hurt in the rig accident?”

The timid girl seemed to have gone deaf as well as mute.

Meredith stopped her with a touch. “What is it?” The thought that Kevin might be behind the No Unauthorized Personnel sign worried its way into her thoughts.

Kimberly shook her head. “I don’t know nothing. I was just told to ask the widows to wait in the break room.”

“Widows,” Meredith whispered.

Kimberly shoved open a door at the end of the third hallway and waited for Meredith to step inside a room lined with vending machines.

The blood in Meredith’s head sought gravity, leaving her brain suddenly light and airy. She felt nothing, absolutely nothing, as she peered into the cavelike room at the other women who, with one word, had become her clan, her tribe. Widows.

11:03 a.m.

County Memorial Hospital

Black mascara tears trailed down Crystal Howard’s tanned face as she stepped into the break room. She looked around with a watery gaze. In a town the size of Clifton Creek, everyone knew everyone. They might never have spoken, but Crystal had seen pictures in the paper, or passed them in a store, or stood behind them in line at the bank. Strangers were people with out-of-state license plates, the women before her were home folks.

“Shelby’s been in an accident!” Crystal said to no one in particular. She ran a thumb beneath the stretchy material of her watermelon-colored body suit that fit her curves like a second skin and tried to pull the garment lower over her hips. “He may be dead already, and they’re not telling me. I’ve a right to know. I’m his wife.”

“We understand.” A tall, silver-haired woman’s low voice seemed to fill every inch of the room. “Our husbands were also in the accident. We’re all waiting to hear something from the doctors.”

“Only one survived,” added a woman a few years older than Crystal. “I’m Meredith Allen, Kevin’s wife, and this is Helena Whitworth. J. D. Whitworth and my Kevin were at the oil rig when it exploded.”

When Crystal just stared the woman continued, “Helen’s husband, J.D., planned to invest in the rig. For some reason, my Kevin went along for the ride this morning.”

Crystal looked down at Meredith’s offered hand. People in Clifton Creek were never friendly to her when Shelby wasn’t around. She knew what they said about her, marrying a man thirty years her senior. She’d been a waitress with nothing to her name, and he was a rich engineer, newly widowed. No one would believe they married for love even if Shelby had been willing to shout it from the courthouse roof.

Crystal took the hand. Meredith Allen did not look like the type to listen to gossip, much less spread it. She probably hadn’t heard any of the colorful stories about her and Shelby. Crystal found it hard to imagine this woman walking into Frankie’s Bar, wearing an ABC sweater, and sitting down to have a drink.

“I’m Mrs. Shelby Howard,” Crystal said, daring anyone to comment. She’d been married five years, had her hair bleached blonde at a fancy salon and bought her clothes in Dallas. She had endured three surgeries to mold her body to perfection, but she still felt like street trash. She was prepared to fight every time she met someone new.

“I know your husband.” The silver-haired lady stepped forward. “Though he was a few years younger, I went to school with him. He’s friends with my husband, J.D. I’m Helena Whitworth.”

Crystal tried to pull her jersey jacket closed across her workout clothes. She suddenly wished she’d had time to change. The gym fashion didn’t belong here. She swiped a palm across her cheek and stared at the makeup on her hand. Not only was she dressed improperly, if she didn’t stop crying she would be without makeup. Shelby was sure to yell at her.

A third woman, Crystal hadn’t noticed before, moved away from the shadows. She was tall, but then everyone towered over her five-foot-two-inch frame.

The woman pulled a cloth handkerchief trimmed in lace from the velvet folds of what looked to be an English-style riding jacket. She held the linen square out to Crystal.

Refusing the offer, Crystal added, “Oh, no. I couldn’t.”

The woman didn’t lower the handkerchief. When Crystal met her gaze, she was struck by the natural beauty before her. Huge dark eyes. Long black hair. Breeding that came with generations of old money.

Crystal took the handkerchief and stood up straighter, wishing she had her four-inch heels. “You’re not from around here, are you?” The question was out before she knew she’d spoken, but no one looking like this woman ever grew up in Clifton Creek. She reminded Crystal of a picture of Snow White she had seen in an old children’s book.

“I—I am Anna,” the woman said in a way that made the words sound foreign. “I—I am the wife of D-Davis Montano. The oil rig was being built on our land. I—I have been told Davis was there when the accident happened.” Her words stumbled over each other. “A—a nurse said they found his wallet in the pile of burned clothes collected from the emergency room floor.”