Stormy Weather

by Paulette Jiles

  IN EARLY NOVEMBER they had their first freeze. By this time in late November men had brought out the big lister buster plows and carved down the middles of the rows, with mules and horses straining in harness against the cotton and cane roots, ripping them out for the new seed, gambling against the drought.

  The mailman drove a buggy with a big thunderous gray horse and when Jeanine saw him coming she raced out in the cold. The faint remains of the wind carried down the smell of the newly turned earth in the cotton fields. The mailman’s heavy dappled horse dozed along in a slow clopping saunter with the two shafts to either side of him bobbing to his walk. The mailman wore a hand-knitted muffler against the winter chill that some female relative had wrought for him in manly colors of brown and green and mustard and he wore it bravely, resignedly. He drove along with the reins in his lap and read all the return addresses and when he arrived at their mailbox he tipped his hat, and said his name was Herman Dienst, and then handed her the letters stained with rain.

  Jeanine ran back into the house, searching through the letters. A notice from the county about taxes. A letter from Mayme’s young man in Conroe, Robert Faringham. The one who worked for the Conroe-Lufkin Telephone Company.

  Elizabeth sat down and opened the notice about Palo Pinto county taxes. They owed three hundred dollars in back taxes. The county tax collector said it had come to his notice that the Tolliver farm was inhabited again and although the county did not want to foreclose because the county would have no use for the land in the present economic emergency Mrs. Stoddard would please take notice of the amount of back taxes and do something about it. Elizabeth put the notice down and then lifted it again and read it once more.

  “They’ll give us an extension,” Elizabeth said. “They’re not going to throw a widow woman and three daughters off their land because of back taxes. They just won’t.” But the Cunningham bank in Palo Pinto had failed and in its collapse it had taken several public utility bonds with it. Men who had good jobs at one time were now sitting around the courthouse square in dirty clothes looking for freighting work, hoping for day labor with a shovel on the pipelines. “They won’t,” said Elizabeth. “They have to accept something less, they just have to.”

  All that remained in the house to eat was the pinto beans. They were eating them, it seemed, three times a day. Jeanine longed for the smell of baking bread, real yeast bread made with white flour. She lifted the pan of corn bread from the oven and sat it on a flour sack on the table beside the beans.

  “Supper!” she said, and thought, They have to.

  Bea gathered up Albert and came to the table. He was a handsome cat, even with his poor skewed nose. His eyes were outlined with black and he was dressed in an extravagant suit of stripes. He had to be dusted off every day with a flour sack when he came in. His green eyes appeared over the edge of the table from Bea’s lap, like a periscope arising from a deep feline sea. He stared over his broken nose at Bea’s plate of beans and searched for bits of bacon. He indicated with his tender paw which bit he would like, and Bea drew it to him on her fork. Then she reached over and turned on the radio.

  Elizabeth didn’t eat. She just sat there and held the notice.

  “I’ve got to ask for some kind of arrangement,” she said.

  Jeanine wiped up her plate. “Can we turn that radio off, little sister?”

  “No, don’t, I like it. It’s One Man’s Family.”

  “I hate the way they talk,” said Jeanine.

  “But they all sound so normal,” said Bea. “I just love One Man’s Family. They all sound so normal.”

  “They are not normal. They are rich and they talk like they’re from England. Save the battery.”

  Jeanine wanted to be kind and speak sweetly to Bea, like her mother, but now with the notice she herself was in deep need of somebody being kind to her. She had thought they would be safe here. No rent. None of them had thought about the county taxes. Unpaid over the years, stacking up. And there was Bea with her endless diary or journal, in which all their troubles were made into a chronicle, one misery strung out into another. Bea was only thirteen but she seemed to prefer sitting up at night and reading back through her diary and all her descriptions of family trouble like an old woman. Nothing could ever be fixed, no matter how hard Jeanine tried. It all just broke again but there was no other way but to lay hands on the pieces and fit them together, make them work.

  “I’m going to town tomorrow,” said Elizabeth. “Do we have the gas?”

  “Yes,” said Jeanine. “Let me drive in. I want to look around the farmers’ market. I could make us some clothes if I can find good secondhand ones.” Her sisters and mother nodded in silence. “Don’t you think?” Jeanine lifted her hand into the silence. “Everybody that thinks so raise your hand.” She smiled brightly. “We can go to the poorhouse in double-ruffled sleeves!”

  “That would be great,” said Mayme. She slapped down a magazine in front of Jeanine. “But I don’t know what for.” She was trying hard to be angry but tears sparkled in her eyes, and finally she folded up her letter from Conroe, in which Robert Faringham said that he felt they would be better apart, given the scandal about her father, and he hoped she would meet someone else more worthy of her. She lifted the stove lid and dropped the letter into the fire.

  “And don’t wear jeans,” said Elizabeth. She could not remember when young women first started wearing men’s Levi’s around the home but they had. It was one more confusing event that had crept up on her along with adultery and widowhood and the financial collapse of the United States and these two large gangly girls who were her older daughters.

  Jeanine put on her jacket to go feed and water Smoky. She took the fashion magazine with her. She carried two buckets at a time and filled the trough and then poured out the cracked corn into a hubcap. She read while he ate so she could get the hubcap away from him when he was done. Otherwise he would take it in his teeth and bang dents into it as if it were a toy, and it was the only spare hubcap they had. Smoky Joe bent his head over the fence to her, solitary and curious.

  “Want to see the fall fashions of ’37?” She held out the magazine and Smoky took it in his teeth and tossed it up and down, the spectrally thin women with slinky draped dresses and shawl collars torn out page by page. They sat together in silence while the evening shadows flooded the valley and he made grinding noises with his great horse teeth. The light was draining away westward, and as it poured away the clear hard stars opened up one by one like rain lilies.

  THE NEXT MORNING Jeanine ran out in the early cold to pour some gas into the tank. She lugged out the ten-gallon jerrican. Her breath smoked. The eternal wind carved its transparent way through the limbs of the oak overhead, and all around her in the Central Texas farm and ranch country the faint yellow lights of coal-oil lanterns shone from remote kitchen windows.

  And in all these kitchens the whisper of radio voices spoke in staticky tones to men pulling on heavy lace-up boots with tangled strings and to women breaking eggs into hot frying pans. They listened to the Early Birds from WFAA out of Dallas and to the songs of Karl the Kowhand. And in all the barns and pastures, animals lifted their heads to listen, their eyes turned with deep and patient interest to the lighted windows. Scorpio stood in the deep blue sky and shone through the branches of the oak tree and lifted its brilliant, poisonous tail over all the valley of the Brazos River.

  It was eight in the morning and already the teams and plows were out in the fields alongside the Brazos. Jeanine and her mother drove north toward Palo Pinto, the county seat, a small town that the railroad had passed by leaving it with only a courthouse and a jail. As she drove, the hills took on form under the wash of light like invisible writing under the pressure of fire. The frost was melted now except in the shadows of trees, and then the sun moved on and left ghost shadows of frost on the pasture grasses. Sheep and Angora goats wandered under stripped-down trees. Mules bent into their collars, and the plows tore down through the pe
anut fields and the cotton-row middles, a red spillage of earth on either side pouring away from the blade. The wind was dry and bitter and drove dust against the windshield.

  The courthouse was a fine stone building that belonged to a much larger town but railroads go where they will.

  The county tax collection office was on the first floor. People sat on chairs in the hall outside. They were all there for the same reason. The county could not collect most of its taxes and so it could not repair roads or improve schools. Counties were themselves applying for federal drought relief. Jeanine sat beside her mother and glanced at the faces around her. She wondered if she was related to any of these people, or if they had known her Tolliver grandparents. They all sat watching the door with its opaque glass and the black letters that said county tax office.

  She went into the office with her mother when their name was called. She had to watch her mother’s humiliation as she asked for an extension. Saw her lay down a hundred dollars and say they would pay twenty a month.

  “But the taxes will still accumulate,” said the man. “This is November and by January another fifty dollars will be due.”

  “This is all I can do,” said Elizabeth.

  “All right, Mrs. Stoddard,” he said. He wore a sweater vest and sleeve garters. “We don’t want to foreclose on you.” He lifted his hands in a helpless gesture. “What would we do with another farm?” Elizabeth said Yes, of course, as if she understood and stood resolutely waiting for what he would say next. “We would have to auction off the farm and I doubt that it would be bought by anybody other than a bank.” He snapped one of his sleeve garters. “And the banks ain’t looking too good.”

  “Well, no,” she said. Jeanine saw that her mother’s lower lip was trembling slightly. Jeanine wanted to say something to the man but couldn’t think of anything polite.

  “So we’ll just ask you for this hundred.” He laid his hand flat on the bills and slipped them from the table and into a tin cash box. “And wait for the next hundred.”

  Elizabeth took a firm grip on Jeanine’s upper arm and they left the office.

  They drove on down Highway 80 into Mineral Wells. Hotels up on the mountainside dominated the town. The Crazy Water Hotel, the seven-story Baker Hotel. They had been built when Mineral Wells became famous for its sulfur springs and mineral waters. The springs were said to cure insanity and the water was bottled and sold as Crazy Water and Upper 10 Lithiated Lemon. Even movie stars came to the baths to cure whatever it was they suffered from, nervous disorders or immoderate thirst, a desire to be seen, an unslaked curiosity about Texas. Marlene Dietrich had slunk around the halls of the Baker, along with the Three Stooges and Clark Gable. Blurred photographs of the stars appeared from time to time in the Mineral Wells newspaper. Not one of them had ever had a home sold on the courthouse steps for taxes, Jeanine thought. Or ate beans twice a day. She stopped in front of the Keeners’ little house on Fourth Street and saw her mother turn at the door before knocking and wave her gloved hand.

  CHAPTER TEN

  At the farmers’ market four children and a young mother sat on the curb with a basket of shelled pecans. They had built themselves a fire in a small sheet-iron stove. Two of the children were girls and they were barefoot and sat cross-legged with their cotton skirts pulled over their knees to keep warm and played the slap-hands game. Down in the valley where the green grass grows sat little Edna as sweet as a rose. A thin black man made hand-carved wooden puppets jump around on top of an orange crate. Farm women sat on the bumpers of trucks and sold eggs and very yellow butter that smelled of wild onions and a boy stood with a calf ’s lead-rope in his hand holding up five fingers. A blind man sang a song about waiting around a water tank for a train to take him to California, his face lifted to the daytime moon and one hand out in a dramatic stage gesture.

  Jeanine bent her head and pressed past all these people until she found a man in a buckboard wagon who was selling old clothes. In the jumbled heap Jeanine found a dress of garnet twilled silk that must have belonged to somebody that weighed three hundred pounds and then either died or lost weight and didn’t need it anymore. She also found something for Mayme; a dirty remnant from a bolt of juniper green tabby-weave silk, and some sheer curtains that could be used for linings. Then she paid ten cents for an old squirrel fur coat. They would use it somehow. Winter was coming.

  A crazy man called Oilfield Willie stood at one end of the market calling out the demonic names of Hitler and preached on the deep strata of oil and salt water.

  “I am Ozymandias, king of kings!” he shouted. His ragged suit hung on him in folds. “I have brought my sword to bear on the Oil Kings of the netherworld and upon the arteries and the hearts of coal, and I declare war on the trains of Russia and the underwater torpedoes at sea, for the devil and his soldiers are marching as to war! My children, gird up your harps and bagpipes and play the music of the great conflicts and the great strivings or the angels of iniquity will take you all down into the places where the dead hide and are turned as dark as low-grade crude! Mussolini and Hitler are waiting with skeleton rockets. Rise up! Listen! Take heart! Be not afraid! Lift up your hearts and be not dismayed, my children. I am the oil and the truth and the nitroglycerin and none can stand before me, my children.” People dropped a nickel or a dime into his hat, which sat turned up on the pavement.

  Ross Everett walked up with a young boy following him. He wore a dark three-piece tweed suit and a good gray Stetson. He had a can of Arbuckle’s coffee under his arm. The boy went to stand in front of the dancing puppets and as he stood there the thin black man made a Red Ryder puppet wring both arms around and around on their pivot.

  “Jeanine Stoddard,” Ross said. He lifted his hat and replaced it. “Son, this is Miss Stoddard.”

  The boy turned to her and lifted his own hat and turned back to the puppets. Now Little Annie Roonie was jigging across the orange crate. The square was crowded with people selling, and the sky over Mineral Wells was reddish with dust blown down from the Panhandle. A wind snaked around through the streets and the hotels and fluttered the skirts of the girls.

  “How do you do, Mr. Everett,” she said. She was surprised to see him, she had forgotten he lived somewhere close to Mineral Wells. She wadded the sheer curtains into a ball and then snatched up the squirrel fur coat and the stained crepe and mashed it all together with frantic motions. She did not want Ross Everett to see her pawing around among old used clothing. “How good to see you again.” Jeanine felt strangely formal and reserved toward him now that she was grown up and all of twenty years old.

  He smiled as she tucked the wad under one arm. “I heard y’all had moved back,” he said. “I’m sorry to hear your dad passed away.”

  “Well, how did you hear that?”

  “Race people,” he said. He stood aslant with one hand in his coat pocket. His suit coat was worn. He looked like he hadn’t bought a new suit since about 1920.

  “Race people. Well.” She didn’t want to talk to him for some reason. Or she did but some other time when the world had been better to her and her sisters and her mother, when they were not so desperate for money, when she didn’t have a bundle of rags under her arm. “Yes, we did, we moved back to our grandparents’ old farm.”

  “You still have that horse?”

  “Smoky Joe? Yes, we have him.”

  “Are you selling?” He glanced down at the material in her hands and then he turned to the boy and said for him to buy one of the puppets if he wanted. The boy reached for the Red Ryder cowboy figure.

  “No,” said Jeanine. “I reckon we’re going to race him one of these days.” She smiled as if she were very confident.

  Everett nodded. He reached into his pocket for a nickel and handed it to the boy. Then the boy said he wanted a soda and Everett handed him another nickel. “I could buy myself a beer for that,” he said. He turned back to Jeanine. “Good luck trying to get a match,” he said. “Nobody’s going to match up against a g
irl.”

  “No, they’ll match up against the horse,” said Jeanine. “Hope y’all are doing well.”

  “We’re doing fine,” he said. “Just in on a monthly trip into town. Good day, Jeanine.” The boy came after him as he stepped up on the curb and they went on with their coffee and their puppet.

  Jeanine saw schoolchildren running past. It must have got to three-thirty and school was out. She wanted to go into the Oil King Drugstore and buy herself something. A Dr Pepper, an ice cream, a shaker of talcum powder shaped like a champagne glass. But she would not. The holes in her shoes were like the holes in everybody’s shoes but still she was ashamed of them. She seemed to be walking on dirt. She stepped by the little girls and the tin stove with its wavering column of smoke, up onto the sidewalk and walked on past the drugstore. A man in a porkpie hat came toward her and suddenly seized her by both shoulders.

  “Jeanine Stoddard!” he shouted.