Oklahoma City

Oklahoma City appears briefly but meaningfully in Daughter’s account of Joe Washburn: it is tied to his oil work and to a report that he was engaged to a girl there. The city remains offstage, while its references register the distance between them and the life Joe is building away from the ranch.

References in Daughter’s Story

While Daughter is spending the summer at home, her brothers tease her that Joe is engaged to a girl in Oklahoma City. The report angers her, though the passage does not confirm that the engagement is real. Joe’s grave kindness and her own sudden, confused reaction to him make the rumor especially pointed: it touches a feeling she has not openly resolved.

Joe Washburn’s Oil Work

When Daughter and Ada Washburn travel north, Daughter hopes Joe will come to the station to see them off, but he is in Oklahoma City on oil business. The city thus marks a concrete reason for his absence at a moment when Daughter wants to see him. Later, after Joe has married, he is living in Oklahoma and growing rich through oil. The narrative moves from the earlier, uncertain report of an engagement in Oklahoma City to the broader fact of his established life in the state, set against Daughter’s continued emotional difficulty in seeing him.