Stormy Weather

by Paulette Jiles

  “I told you,” he said. “Don’t get all wrapped around the axle about a horse.”

  She went to stand once again in front of the hooded fireplace. The place was a mess. There was a saddle turned up on its fork against the wall and a stack of old Farm and Ranch magazines beside it, and Time and the Providence Journal, which seemed to be a newspaper from the East somewhere. A plate with half a dried-out sandwich on a chair. Trophies for prize cattle, championship Angora goats. The ageless contradictions of ranch life where creatures were cherished against storms and against sickness and other creatures, sometimes at the risk of a person’s health and even life, and then slaughtered. There was a stuffed, dusty javelina head with a red plaster tongue sticking out between the teeth and a spur hanging from one of the curved tusks.

  “Did you kill all this stuff?”

  “Yes. I did.”

  She untied her scarf and let it drape around her neck. It was getting warm; the fire had surrounded two large sections of live oak logs and lit up the zoo of taxidermy animals on the walls. She put the heel of her hand to her forehead and thrust her fingers into her hair.

  “Tell me about Bea,” he said. She told him. As she spoke she saw Bea at the bottom of the well in the dim light like a cracked and discarded Skippy doll and the loose, fainting feeling of horror that had come over her when she saw her little sister and the blood. Of the doctor with his loose mouth and the smell of Lysol in the hospital.

  “And she’s all right except for that leg?”

  “Yes. She just needs a specialist. A surgeon. That’s how come I’m selling Smoky Joe to you.”

  He stared at the fire for a moment. “And how are y’all holding out on that farm?”

  “All right.”

  “Lots of people are moving back to the country. At least you can raise chickens. Do y’all have chickens?”

  “Yes. And Mayme got a job at the Magnolia office in Tarrant.”

  He stared at the fire. “It seemed like things were going to get better for a while. In ’35. But the economy has cratered again.”

  “That’s when I saw you last,” she said. “In Conroe. I mean before Tarrant last month. Last time I talked to you was in Conroe.”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you remember me when I was fifteen?”

  He started to say what it was he remembered and then he changed his mind. He got up and crossed the room, slamming storage doors and then he opened the gun cabinet. He found a bottle of Irish whiskey behind the stock of a shotgun. He poured some into a dusty wineglass that said san angelo class of ’26.

  “Well, let’s give this a try,” he said. “Yes, I remember you very well. I remember you all very well.”

  Jeanine wrapped her arms around herself. “I guess you read it in the papers.”

  “Are you cold?”

  “No, I’m nervous.”

  “Yes, I read about it. I read about his arrest.”

  Jeanine considered her bitten nails. “For gambling.”

  He sat for a long time in silence; the fire erupted in sparks and the sparks winked out on the tile floor.

  “No, Jeanine. For statutory rape.” The whiskey charged into his bloodstream. Jeanine held her beer bottle wrapped in her fingers, as if she would break it. His cigarette burned and smoked out of the folded architecture of his two hands and the smoke drifted toward the fireplace and its draft. Finally he asked her, “Did you know the girl?”

  She took up a stick of kindling and shoved fiercely at the coals on the edge of the fireplace. “How would I know somebody like that?”

  “Jeanine, I’m sorry. I’m very sorry.”

  Jeanine felt her throat tighten and an odd, blocked feeling in her ears and realized that tears were rising to her eyes like mercury in a thermometer.

  He said, “You’re about to break out crying.”

  “I know it. I don’t want to.” If she started crying it would never stop. “Why?” she said. She lifted her head to him in search of an answer. “Why did he have to do that to us?”

  Everett took a long breath and blew it out his nose, along with smoke. He said, “I’m not the person to ask, sweetheart, but then you’re not asking me.” He got up and walked over to the fireplace beside her and threw his cigarette butt into it. The flames shone across the tiled floor and she heard footsteps in the kitchen, the low voices of children being very quiet and very intent. Then a slashing, sprung noise and the pinging sound of broken crockery.

  He turned toward the kitchen and said, “Innis!”

  Jeanine wiped at her eyes firmly. Ross reached to his back pocket and brought out a handkerchief, shook it out of its folds and handed it to her. She took it and scrubbed at her eyes and blew her nose.

  The door from the kitchen opened. The boy stood there, his face spotted with large freckles, the doorknob in his hand. He wore a very dirty small Stetson and a stained sweater that zipped up the front. Behind him another boy kicked pieces of a china plate under the kitchen table.

  “Yes, sir?”

  “What are you doing?”

  “Well, me and Aaron were going to get something to eat.” He had a slingshot in his hand cut from the Y crotch of a branch. It was made with strips of inner tube for slings and a leather pocket made of an old shoe tongue.

  “You were going to get something to eat with a slingshot?”

  Innis glanced down at the primitive weapon in his hand. “Kind of.” He stuck it into his coat pocket. “We were shooting at rats and Aaron broke one of those Spodes.”

  Another smash. Jeanine saw chips of china spray across the kitchen floor.

  Ross stood up. “Damn it!”

  “Well, we were going to sit up and wait for that coon.” The boy had fair hair cut short with a whirled cowlick in the middle of his forehead. “Since I can’t use the twenty-two on him. Can Aaron stay all night?” He turned and said, “Aaron, stop shooting.”

  “Not tonight.”

  The boy stood silent in the doorway. He glanced at Jeanine and pressed his lips together and regarded his boot toes.

  “Why not?”

  Ross said, “Somebody is going to get snatched bald-headed in a minute. Aaron’s dad is going home. Aaron is going with him.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  The door closed.

  Jeanine set her beer bottle down on the tiles beside the fireplace.

  “I’ll drink another beer,” she said.

  “No.” He said it in an absentminded sort of way. He crooked his forefinger over the bridge of his nose. “You’ll be up all night peeing.” He stood beside her, watching the fire. “The bathroom is behind the kitchen.” He lit another cigarette. Flaming bits of paper fell to the floor and he stepped on them. She watched the smoke wander into the bars of light and out again. “I’ll make you out a bill of sale,” he said.

  She got up and walked from one end of his dining room to the other while he wrote. He used it for an office. His desk was the long dark dining table, made in the fashion of the 1920s, when people liked that spare straight look, and it was scarred with cigarette burns and lamp rings. Apparently he and the boy ate in the kitchen, probably living on tamales and chili and mutton or whatever the cook made up for them.

  “It’s hard to give him up,” she said.

  “You don’t have the money to campaign him properly. He needs to run on the good tracks in New Mexico and Arizona. He needs to get used to a starting gate, he needs to be exercised the right way, consistently.” Everett saw how spare she was, not big enough to hold the horse to a working gallop. Not much bigger than his son. “He’ll go down on one of these brush tracks before long and break a leg and you don’t even have the money for vet bills.”

  “You saw him run today.” She had a stubborn edge to her voice. “He’s worth more than three hundred.”

  “Then try to get it somewhere else.”

  Jeanine sat and listened to footsteps coming down a hall somewhere. A door opened and then the sound of running water.

  “H
ow do I know you’ll treat him well?” It was the last objection she could think of.

  “Look at my other horses,” he said. “I beat them regularly. I use a hammer.”

  Jeanine lifted her shoulders. “I guess I’ve got to.”

  He thought about it for a moment. Then he said, “I’ll pay you two hundred and you can have a percentage in his winnings. Ten percent.”

  Jeanine paused and then whispered the math to herself.

  “But how would I get it?”

  “I’ll hand it to you, sweetheart.” He drank up his whiskey. “I hate to take a good horse away from an ignoramus like you.”

  “That sounds like a deal.” She didn’t smile. “I promised my mother I wouldn’t ever bet anymore.”

  “You’re not. I’ll do it.”

  “Well here, then.” She handed him back a ten-dollar bill. “Put it on Smoky whenever you race him.”

  “All right.”

  “Well, write it out,” said Jeanine. “And sign it.”

  He opened a drawer beneath the table edge, one of those drawers where people used to keep the silver. In it were a metal cash box and a revolver. He opened the cash box and took two one-hundred-dollar bills. He found a sheet of paper and a pen. He wrote out a new bill of sale and a percentage agreement. He handed it to her. She paused and read it over. He waved away the drifting veils of cigarette smoke. The lamp sat between them on the table and shone on their faces and hands and they were reflected in the black windows like some old portrait of conspirators or highwaymen, their treasure before them, dividing the spoils. She signed her name to the paper.

  She shoved the bills and her winnings into her jacket pocket. Everett drew their chairs closer to the fire and they sat side by side, for the night was growing intensely cold and the cold crept through the walls of the old house, slipped under the warped baseboards. The fire was collapsing into crumbling red coals.

  He turned his dark blue eyes to her and then away again. He listened for any new damages going on in the kitchen. “If that kid breaks something else I’ll kill him.” He swirled the final drops of whiskey in his glass. “He does this when I have somebody to visit.”

  “Like who?” said Jeanine. She didn’t know why she asked it.

  “Women.” Everett shoved at a log with his boot. “Find yourself a room. Make sure it’s the one with the window looking out at the shearing platform. So the windmill crew can see you and you can scandalize the place. Try upstairs. There’s blankets somewhere.”

  Jeanine found her way through the kitchen and then opened a door to one side of it. It was a boy’s room. Archie comics and the Red Ryder puppet and balsa wood airplanes. Faded small jeans on the floor. Old-fashioned square wooden stirrups and boxes of twenty-two ammunition. The boy was probably still outside with his slingshot, waiting up for the midnight visit of a raccoon or a ringtailed wildcat. They all thirsted for the blood of chickens and the yolks of eggs.

  She opened another door; a room jammed full of old-style folded canvas cowboy beds and cooking pots. It was camping gear, roundup gear. It had all come back from the fall works unwashed and it stank of campfire smoke and bacon grease. Unlucky the woman who had to clean that mess up. Jeanine closed the door and climbed a flight of stairs and walked down a hallway. The old wooden floor creaked beneath her feet.

  She knew she was not going to be able to sleep. She saw framed photographs on the hallway walls, people in 1920s clothes. She didn’t stop to see who they were, they were frightening, they might be of his dead wife. At the end of the hall was a tall window framed in stone like the door to another world. Jeanine saw outside a sudden graininess to the night air and realized snow was falling. She put her face to the glass. Out beside the shearing platform a fire still burnt and snow fell into its lit red heart, like moths drawn to light.

  She opened the last door in the hallway and in that room found a bed with bright pillow shams. Three mirrors at a vanity reflected her dark figure in the doorway, wavering like a trinity of selves. She reached for the light chain and pulled it and sat on the bed. He was crazy to keep her room like this. Jeanine wished she hadn’t found it. She couldn’t make herself turn off the light but lay back, wrapped in blankets that she found in a trunk at the foot of the bed.

  She saw a wardrobe built into a corner and its shut door was worrisome to her. As to what might be in it. Her clothes. Some part of a person always remained in their clothes somehow. Snow pinged at the window, it came sweeping down out of the Texas Panhandle unobstructed. He didn’t want anybody here. Except some sort of women; casual women. That’s why he kept her room like this. And he blamed it on the boy.

  At last she pulled the light chain. She knew she would not sleep. She got up again and drew a chair to the window. She leaned her forehead against the pane to watch the mysterious and rare sight of a fall of snow.

  The fire outside died and the last of the windmill crew left in a trailing glitter of red taillights that winked out in the restless foaming of the snowstorm.

  She saw Ross Everett walk out of the house, moving through the dark. Snow settled on the shoulders of his canvas coat. He sat down beside the still water of the windmill tank. He sat and smoked and watched the surface of the water twilled by the grainy fall of the snow, a rough and luminous weave. The fan of the windmill turned, clanking, in the hard wind. He threw his cigarette into the water. A sudden gust of wind shook the window, the old glass panes vaulted in their frames and Jeanine’s dim reflection moved in strange angles.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  After a long time he went into the house and in the bathroom shoved a handful of kindling in the hot-water heater and poured kerosene on it and fired it up. He lay back in the hot water and listened to the wind. There was no sound of the tailpin shifting; it meant the wind was fixed. It’s going to bring more hard weather behind this front. He dried off and pulled on his jeans and walked barefoot and shirtless into the dining room and stood in front of the dying fire. Garish colors of magazines in the chair. Miriam’s book on cave art. Early humans, twenty thousand years of stalking aurochs and wild horses, painting the horses on cave walls in their beautiful calligraphy. I love you, I love you, I want to kill you. Events come about in chains. People die without warning. Droughts settle on the country and become fixed and will not move on. Without warning a boy starts turning into a man. Nothing you yourself did or failed to do. He stared into the design of the fire. The wind fluted at the edges of the roof and at the windowpanes in a wandering series of tones. In the stanzas of the wind’s singing he could hear voices from a past time, and they were hard voices, for this was a hard country and they were living in a hard time.

  The people who had built the stone house were still here. Like the imprints of fish and shells he had seen in the tumbled blocks of fossil hash on the San Saba River. They were still here and had not gone away. In some other dimension their songs and words and passionate loves and hatred and violence and gestures of selflessness had not gone away. Made some permanent petrified record. Her father for instance. It was so easy to be cruel to people who trusted you. First they had to trust you.

  He opened the drawer in the dining room table. He lifted out a ledger that had been used as a diary for decades, with weather records written in it from 1886. He wrote in the date and the fall of snow. He noted two hundred dollars paid out for a Joe Hancock stallion and a hundred dollars lost on a match race. He went to his room and stripped off his Levi’s and fell into bed under cold quilts, heavy with batts of compressed wool. He stared into the black-and-white night; into unbidden images of horses with the power of speech and the clock at his bedside paying out, with its light-boned hands, the hours in gold earrings one after another.

  The moon was now dimmed by the cloud cover and the snow fell, glazing the hills and the pastures.

  IN THE MORNING Jeanine sat up in her stiff pile of blankets. She threw them to one side quickly and pulled on the chilled socks and jeans and shirt and her tweed jacket. She hurried down th
e stairs and into the warm kitchen.

  The boy and his father were already at their breakfast. They sat and ate and their movements and their low voices were very like one another. The boy took up a spoonful of oatmeal and, seeing her, plopped it down again. Remnants of what had once been a woman’s kitchen were still visible in the red and white checkered curtains, the clock with a sun face, a shelf of Spode china plates in the Italian Blue pattern, now with two empty holders. They were eating with the good silver. Wedding silver.

  “I thought you left,” the boy said.

  “Innis.” His father stood up out of his chair.

  “What?”

  “You’re on thin ice, son.”

  Ross went to the stove and poured a cup of coffee and handed it to her.

  “I don’t want any breakfast,” she said. Her hair was tousled and uncombed. “I better get going.”

  “Good,” Innis said.

  Ross reached across the table and took the boy by the collar and the belt and lifted him out of his chair. He turned him around and walked him toward the back kitchen door.

  “Wait for the bus outside,” he said. “And if you are still in that mood when you come home, don’t bother coming in the house.” He turned to her. “Get your coat,” he said. “Say good-bye to your horse.”

  “Oh, tell him to come back in,” she said. “Where’s his coat?”

  “Let’s go.”

  Jeanine pulled on her muffler and hat and hurried out the back door after him. The snow had brushed up the dusty world of corrals and bare trees like new paint. It was still coming down in winking columns of drift. She caught up to him and they both left black prints behind them in the snow that led backward into 1935 and even farther, to a vanished blacksmith shop in Mexia and the blind man who sends us all off on some journey through a night lit only by gas flares.

  She said, “I’m sorry, Ross. I shouldn’t have stayed.”