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could not finish it. Their father was attentive and silent over his coffee and their mother put her hand to her face and wept.
    That night Jeanine could not sleep. The girls were crowded up in their one bed, wadded in quilts. They had made their mother weep on this night of the archangels and shepherds in the fields, when they were supposed to be joyful. She got out of bed and went to the window to stare out into the night, and as she wiped angrily at her eyes with a corner of the quilt snow began to fall. It was the first snow Smith County had seen in thirty years. The tops of the pine trees disappeared in a foam of descending snow. It fell on the needles and lined them with spines of white and built up on the wires of the fence lot, and burdened all the sounds of the town and the derricks with a deep, submissive hush. It was a swansdown welcome for the new year, a confetti and ticker tape parade. All over the oil fields and through the overcrowded towns, each person had some small reason that the snowfall was for them alone, a sign that their lives were going to get better.
    She watched as the flakes struck the windowpane and traced them with her fingertip down the cold glass as they slid and melted out of their ornate and classical designs. Far away the derrick lights shone into the columns of radiant drift. It was just before the bank failures of 1933, and the rest of the nation paused, dumbfounded, in their party clothes and tinfoil hats, in Chicago and New York and Los Angeles and New Orleans, while money fell like hot ashes out of the bottoms of their pockets.

C HAPTER F OUR
    T hey were photographs that people took of one another with their box cameras, the old Kodaks, not the documentary photographs taken by the Farm Security Administration. People appeared at their best and kept their secrets to themselves. Elizabeth carefully pasted pictures into the album with its black paper and kept the album in a tin trunk to safeguard it from being thrown out again. There was a picture of Uncle Reid Stoddard and some other unidentified men grasping the tongs on a rotary rig; whoever took the picture must have been a friend, a fellow worker. Reid and his fellows are posing boyishly, their caps tilted. In the background are canvas shields around the drilling platform to baffle the cutting wind. They are all smiling. This was shortly before Reid left in the middle of the night for Oklahoma and pinned a note to the front door with a shingle nail.
    Also in the album is a picture of the three girls sitting on the flatbed of the Reo Speed Wagon carefully posed in starched dresses with theirarms around one another and Bea in the middle between Jeanine and Mayme, and they all have enormous smiles. The kitten in Bea’s clutches was soon lost in some move or other. There is a blurry shot of Elizabeth and Aunt Lillian at a carnival, holding fringed satin pillowcases that say EL PASO LAND OF SUNSHINE AND GALVESTON. They had never been to either one of these places but you take whatever you win when you knock over the chalk milk bottle. There is a photograph of Jack Stoddard in a fedora holding a cane fishing pole with an old boot dangling on the end of the line. Who was it who took that picture? they asked themselves. They forgot, or checked to see who was missing, or tried to recall who all was there.
    People at that time did not take photographs of themselves or others at gambling or drinking in the sleazy honky-tonks that mushroomed at the edges of the East Texas boomtowns and nobody with any kind of camera caught her father on film in the dance hall and bar called the Cotton Blossom dancing with a very young woman about whom he only knew her first name. The album didn’t have any pictures of her mother washing clothes in a washtub in the backyard near the railroad tracks. There was no device that recorded her mother’s building fear that her husband would be injured or killed in the increasing violence of the boom or that he might