Stormy Weather

by Paulette Jiles

  “Go on, Elizabeth,” said Lillian. “Go on now.”

  Violet gave her a little shove. “Go talk to him now.”

  Elizabeth took a deep breath and pulled her gray gloves tight and then walked over to the promoter.

  “Mr. Spanner?”

  “Yes.”

  He turned to her, to her mild and pleasant face, her wide smile. His loud tie beat on his shirtfront in the wind like a single hand clapping.

  “Um, the driller there, that Mr. Crowninshield, owes my husband fifty dollars.” She held out the note. Spanner took it and examined it carefully. She said, “For hauling this boiler up to here this last September.”

  “Well, he is going to have to wait a little longer to be paid,” he said. “But it won’t be for very long, madam, not very long!”

  “Well, my husband has passed away, Mr. Spanner.”

  “Madam! I am so very sorry!” He lifted his hat to her. “But this well is going to produce, madam, and you will be proud of having lent money to this enterprise. Proud. There is oil down there and it’s going to deliver itself into our hands.” He also lifted his porkpie hat to Lillian and Violet, up and down, up and down. “Now here are two ladies with faith in this well. Mrs. Keener, the other Mrs. Stoddard. They are trusting the Beatty-Orviel Oil Company with their hard-earned dollars. Y’all are in for…?”

  “Seventy-five each,” said Violet.

  Elizabeth said, “Well, what I thought was, I would exchange this note for shares. Fifty dollars’ worth of shares.”

  “Madam! You have made an extremely wise choice!” He turned to another small grayish man sitting with a bored expression in the front seat of his car. “Let’s do the paperwork!”

  They rolled the strange machine off the flatbed. Both crewmen and the captain and several volunteers all began to shove. It rolled down the ramps and struck the ground with its iron wheels. Then Crowninshield hooked a chain between it and the 1918 Nash and pulled it into place.

  Elizabeth and Lillian and Violet stood for a while, watching them haul wooden boxes and suitcases out of the Nash truck, pack them into the engine shed and set up house. They even had a small cookstove and a chuck box. The farmer’s wife came up to the crew, her full dress skirts were ballooning and her hair sprang out from under a slat bonnet.

  “Ma’am,” they all said. “Howdy, ma’am.”

  “Do you-all eat hominy?” she asked. “Black-eyed peas?”

  The men nodded eagerly.

  The captain said, “They’ll eat anything you send over, ma’am. Andy here, he used to be a geek in a carnival. He bit heads off chickens and then he got religion and joined a drilling crew.”

  Andy lifted his hat again.

  “I’ve eat chicken before,” he said. “Fried.”

  “Tastes just like armadillo,” said Otto.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Prince Albert sat on the old well curb and made nervous mewing noises. He was watching the sparrows that lived up in the well cover in their trashy little nests. It was in early December and the entire world of the Brazos valley was crisp and dry and burnt out. Bea had decided to pray that morning that her mother would not throw away all their money on the oil well certificates. She didn’t know what else to do. Her mother was going to lose all they had, and then they would take the house for the taxes still owed and this time there would be no rent house to go to. She had wished her father dead and then he had died. But it didn’t work the other way around. She could not wish him back again alive out of his jail cell, out of his lonely grave in Wharton. They would be evicted from their own land and house and then they would go and live in a tent under the bridge in Fort Worth. That was where Bonnie Parker and her family lived when Bonnie Parker was a little girl, before she had taken up a life of shooting policemen. When her father was arrested Bea understood that there were unknown depths to which people could fall, when all the structures of the world came loose, the framework gave way. When, like the king, you abdicated.

  Bea came out of the back door of the house with a lard pail full of cracked corn for the chickens, in her ragged housedress and tennis shoes without socks. She saw the cat reaching out over the empty space of the well toward the little roof and the sparrows’ nest.

  “Albert, get away!”

  His tail lashed and he gathered himself for a jump. Bea threw down the lard pail, and the bits of corn scattered over the hard dirt. She ran for the well.

  “Albert, no!”

  He saw her and jumped straight up into the construction of the roof over the well, and when Bea leaned on the well curb to reach for him the entire curb gave way. The mortar that had been dried out by seven years of drought shattered and Bea went down into the well along with the blocks of limestone. They fell alongside her and before her. She fell twenty feet in an endless cascade of rock and showering mortar. She struck the projecting stones of the bottom where the well narrowed and several rocks the size of bread loaves fell onto her head and her legs. There was four feet of water at the bottom. Her head was above water and one arm was jammed between fallen stones and the wall. Far above her was the narrow eye of light from the upper world. She was not entirely conscious. She couldn’t tell whether the dripping from her ear and jaw was water or blood. She couldn’t make her mouth work.

  The water was very cold. She heard Prince Albert making strange noises far above at the edge of the well. Bea could feel a distant sort of panic overtaking her but she seemed to look on her overwhelming fear of being buried alive at the bottom of the well from a faraway place. The well cover was twisted; after a few moments a board fell from it and came turning over and over down the well shaft and struck her foot, but her foot seemed to be connected to some other body. She was drifting in deep December water. She was in the terrible underground. She was in another world, which was deadly, and above her was the old house and the warm stove and Albert.

  MAYME JUMPED OUT of the Gareau’s milk delivery truck at six o’clock and ran inside to turn on the radio so she could hear One Man’s Family and the evening news. The sun was melting red and flat on the horizon of tabled hills. She beat up corn bread batter and put the pan into the oven. She washed the greens. They would have a good supper that night. In her purse she carried five pounds of bacon. She unwrapped it and cut it into thick slices and put them in the skillet.

  Jeanine came in from the fields carrying her borrowed saw. Her wrists above the old leather gloves were torn by cedar. She stood in front of the stove and lifted her head to listen to a distant noise. It was very peculiar. An animal noise, a sort of low hoarse crying. There were things out there in the Brazos Valley she knew nothing about.

  She said, “Should I make a fire in the parlor?”

  “Not with that cedar,” said Mayme. “You’ll set the chimney afire. When are you going to get somebody to cut up that dead oak?”

  Elizabeth had just come back from Mineral Wells with more of the oil-well certificates; she turned from her desk and asked where Bea was.

  Nobody knew.

  She might be with the Miller kids staying late at school, she might be hidden away in the house somewhere, reading. They searched through all the rooms but Bea wasn’t anywhere reading or writing. Still the low crying went on outside, behind the house. Elizabeth stood up and tried to think if there had been any strangers walking down the road during the day. The Lindbergh kidnapping was always on her mind.

  “Go to the school,” she said to Jeanine. “Maybe she’s stayed after school with the teacher.”

  Jeanine ran most of the mile to the Old Valley Road schoolhouse, but it was closed up and dark. She stopped by the Crowsers’ but they had not seen Bea either. The old couple were worried by her breathless question and stood watching her run out the door and down the road standing side by side in a portrait of Gothic alarm.

  “Well, where is she?” Elizabeth got up and went to the back porch and they all called her Bea! Bea!

  “That well curb has given way,” said Jeanine. Prince Albe
rt sat on an upturned lard can beside the well and was making a noise that was not very much like a cat at all. He was howling in a sort of deep singing. His eyes were wide and he cried and cried to them in a low hoarse voice. The chicken feed, a yellow scattering of shorts, was strewn all around him. The cat was staring at them in an odd and disconcerting way.

  Elizabeth clapped both hands to her face. “My Lord he has rabies!” she said. “He’s bitten Bea! She’s laying sick and she’s in convulsions somewhere!”

  Mayme turned and ran back to the porch and stood staring at Albert, as if to keep the porch rail between herself and the cat.

  “Do you think?” she said. “I never saw anything with rabies before.”

  “Get the shotgun,” said Elizabeth. “He is, he’s rabid, he’s bitten Bea.”

  Jeanine said, “No, Mother. He’s not rabid.” She held out her hand and walked toward the cat and called to him but he evaded her and stared at her and called out again. Jeanine stopped. “When did the well curb fall in?”

  It was growing dark. It was the time of evening when the sun set the low hills afire and the shadow of the old sugar barn poured in a tide of darkness over the house and the back porch and the well and the twisted cedar that guarded the well.

  “Push it all in,” said Elizabeth. “We need to just collapse it completely and stop that well up. Bea could come wandering back here in the dark and fall in it.” She stepped down the three steps to the bare dusty yard. “Then I’ll go to the Millers and you girls get down to the barn and look there.”

  They all three went out to shove the rest of the stones of the well curb into the well. Albert stopped his terrible calling and began to mew. He darted around their legs. They bent over the opening and heard a long exaggerated voice from deep in the well. Mother Mother Mother.

  THEY DROVE BEA to the hospital in Mineral Wells. It seemed to take years to drive the twisted road. Jeanine drove. Mayme and her mother sat holding Bea, laid in the bed of the truck on as many quilts and pillows as they could rip off the beds, her left leg bent at an acute angle, as if there were a new joint in the middle of her shin. Jeanine’s hands and legs and coat were covered with mud and torn by the rope they had lowered into the well. Mayme had run to the Crowsers’, but by the time Abel got there Elizabeth and Jeanine had rigged the rope to the cedar tree and Jeanine had gone down into the well. She didn’t know if she had torn or broken Bea’s legs any worse getting her out. Bea’s face was covered in blood so that it looked as if somebody had thrown red paint in her face. Her skin was pale blue and splattered with random blood splashes.

  Mayme and Abel Crowser put blankets to the stove to heat them and wrapped Bea in them and so they appeared in the emergency room at the Mineral Wells hospital. The nurse asked if anyone else was hurt. Jeanine’s clothes were in such a state it seemed that she had fallen in herself. She was covered in well slime and her shoulders smeared with blood from Bea’s head wound, but she told the nurse no. They took Bea away on a gurney. At one in the morning the doctor came to them in the waiting room and said the left lower leg was broken in several places, very badly broken, for them to go somewhere and get some sleep and we’ll see in the morning how things are.

  They slept at Violet Keener’s house, on the floor, in the blankets they had wrapped Bea in.

  THE NEXT MORNING all three of the women walked to the hospital from Violet’s. They ate biscuits as they walked. Violet could not make them sit and eat breakfast nor could she let them go without food so they carried the biscuits with them. The streets were full of people going to work, men in suits going to the oil company offices, the boys selling the Mineral Wells Star and Grit and the Dallas papers.

  “That cat of hers was trying to tell us,” said Jeanine. She started to cry again.

  “Yes, but I don’t speak cat,” said Mayme. “Hush, Jeanine, don’t cry in front of the doctor. They don’t like it.”

  THE DOCTOR WAS a short man with a fringe of hair around his head and a loose lower lip that he constantly caught up with his upper teeth. He walked on rubber-soled shoes and wore a white coat with a stethoscope looping out of his pocket. A nurse brought them coffee and said these kinds of accidents happened and we never know when they are going to happen, things are peaceful one minute and then, you know. Elizabeth nodded. Yes, she said, yes yes.

  “Mrs. Stoddard, she’s going to be fine.” They waited. “She’s had a scalp laceration. Not serious. Sewed it up. We’ve taken X-rays and her pelvis is most likely slightly fractured, but there’s nothing to be done about that, except lying quietly for a month. Now her left lower leg is broken in several places, both bones of the lower leg. That’s a problem.”

  Elizabeth said, “I see.” He was talking about money. This was now a money problem. Bea was alive and her skull hadn’t been broken and she was in her right mind, she had her wits, and now the problem was money. They didn’t have it. She, Elizabeth, her mother, had thrown away almost all they had on a wild gamble and there was no getting it back.

  “She needs extensive work if she is not to have one leg shorter than the other.” He clasped his hands together and sat down across from them with the knot of his pale, clean hands between his knees. “We can cast it now as it is but it will end up shorter.” He cleared his throat. “Several inches.”

  “Please just tell us what she needs,” said Elizabeth.

  “I’ll send her home now to save you the cost of the hospital,” the doctor said. “But the leg needs a bone specialist. It needs surgery. I wouldn’t attempt it myself. It needs a specialist who will insert pins and who knows how to set the right sort of cast. That’s how it is.”

  “Where?” said Elizabeth.

  “We can do it here, but we’ll have to have a specialist come from Dallas.”

  “Get him,” said Jeanine.

  Her mother turned to her for a moment and then looked at the doctor.

  “What kind of arrangements can we make?” she said.

  He hesitated. How many farm accidents had come in here, mangled arms and legs, tractor accidents, children kicked in the head by horses, unloaded guns going off, not to speak of tuberculosis and cancer and pellegra, and the loved ones asking what kind of arrangements they could make.

  “I’m going to sell Smoky Joe,” said Jeanine. “I know where I can sell him.”

  Elizabeth thought for a moment and then she said to the doctor, “Just let me know when you have some kind of estimate.”

  “I will,” said the doctor.

  “We can do it,” said Mayme. “Whatever it is.”

  They spent the morning fussing over Bea, who lay on a narrow cot in a ward with a great many other people. It was a pauper’s ward, thought Jeanine. And we’re paupers. Bea had a large bandage around her head, and her leg was cast in a light plaster-and-webbing cast because it would soon have to be broken off again. She sobbed and swallowed repeatedly because of the pain and then she wanted a mirror so she could see her head bandage and when the nurse brought one she said in a shaking voice that it was very dramatic and the nurse laughed and patted her shoulder.

  Bea smiled when they lied and told her that Prince Albert had led them to her. He had rushed into the kitchen and then to the door, leading them outside, he had done everything but point his paw down the well. They would wait until later to tell her that Elizabeth had come near shooting him, or maybe they would never tell her. Maybe they would never tell her how they had almost shoved the rest of the well curb down onto her. For now Bea was made very happy by the fact that her cat had cried out, and galloped around their legs, and had dashed back and forth between them and the well. It was important that she be happy. Her mother would not distress her by crying, thinking of her youngest daughter lying crushed and dying of the cold at the bottom of the well while they made supper and listened to the radio. Elizabeth would not say My baby, my baby, we almost lost you. Would you buy him some liver? Bea asked. And they said they would. The nurse stood by and listened. She liked to hear this. Times we
re hard. Very hard, and once in a while people like to hear stories with happy endings, pets saving their owners, for instance; stories of courage and hope. Or just go to a Busby Berkeley movie and watch a lot of people dancing.

  JEANINE WALKED INTO the Baker Hotel. She approached the telephone on its stand, a new rotary telephone. She did not know how it worked. The clerk dialed the rotary phone for her and the operator said a call to Comanche would cost fifteen cents and she paid it, and took the heavy receiver in her hand.

  She heard Mr. Everett’s voice on the other end of the line. Long bars of noon sunlight shone on the glossy black-and-white tiles. Men sat in the leather chairs of the lobby and smoked and read their Fort Worth and Dallas newspapers. A paper cut-out of a Thanksgiving turkey was pasted to the restaurant entrance and behind the desk the clerk’s radio said Hitler was sending thirty thousand Jews to resettlement camps. His voice startled her.

  “Hello,” he said.

  “Mr. Everett, this is Jeanine Stoddard.”

  “What can I do for you, Jeanine?”

  “Mr. Everett, Daddy said you once offered three hundred dollars for Smoky Joe Hancock. Do you still want him?”

  She spoke very loudly in order to cast her voice all the way to his ranch in Comanche County, until she saw that the hotel clerk was putting his finger to his lips. She said All right, all right, and then listened carefully. He sounded like one of the thin electric voices on the radio.

  “Maybe. I have to ask you, what’s wrong with him that you’re selling him now?”

  “Nothing’s wrong with him, he’s as fast as ever.” She considered for a moment what she should say. “Bea’s been injured and we need to pay for a specialist to come out from Dallas.”

  There was a considering pause. She waited through it. People were looking at her and she needed to go to the bathroom.

  “Well, I’m sorry to hear it, Jeanine.”

  “Daddy said you’d offered three hundred.”