Sunny Jane

A sun-bleached Kansas pasture, once only whispering to the wind, suddenly glints with the dark shimmer of crude, and into this Eden of scrub and sky strides James Thornton—oil-prospector Midas in a Panama suit—ready to turn clods of earth into ingots. His gaze, however, lands less on the gushing well than on the farmer’s daughter who vaults fences barefoot, hair a tangle of thistle and sun, imagination spilling like yarrow seeds: Jane Dwight, self-styled Scheherazade of the wheat rows, who recites steamy serials to the hogs and waltzes with her own shadow. A handshake later, Thornton buys the farm and bankrolls Jane’s exile to an East-Coast finishing cage where French verbs and piano scales file down her wild edges. Twelve lunar cycles evaporate; she returns cloaked in silk affectations, a faux-duchess who calls her father ‘Pater’ and affects a lisp. Thornton, crestfallen, misses the hay-scented daredevil he once challenged to a potato race. In silent rebellion Jane slips into gingham, stows away in his Packard, and when Thornton discovers the calico stowaway he commands the chauffeur to gun straight for the nearest justice of the peace, as though love itself were a claim to be staked before the last drop of oil seeps away.