Stormy Weather

by Paulette Jiles

  Old man Fletcher walked among the dead horses. “We need that goddamned Gene Autry to come here and sing ‘Home on the Range’ for us,” he said. “Happy days are here again.”

  On the way back home they passed by the tenants’ houses on Grape Creek. The fields had not been turned that winter. There was no point. The tenants loaded a buckboard with their possessions and children and went to chop cedar. They would trim them down to fence posts and make five cents a post. They had paid him what they owed him in cedar posts for the new pasture fence. Everett would cannibalize the houses, strip them of glass and shingles. Then probably the best thing to do would be to set them on fire.

  Smoky Joe was galloping from one end of the horse barn lot to the other. His hair was all turned up, he galloped in wild short rushes and stared out over the top of the mesquite palings with his nostrils wide and white around his eyes. He was shod now and worked hard every morning on the bull’s-eye track behind the storage shed. It was strange how he could tell what had happened, miles away. But he knew. Then he called out to the red mare in a low murmur.

  Everett turned her into the sick corral and watched her. She stood in the center of the half-acre lot, very still, her red tail blowing around her hocks. It was a solid pen made with sucker rod pipe and casing pipe for the uprights and it would hold her well enough. She carried a Rafter S brand and he did not know where it was from. Nolan would know, he had the brand registries for the Texas and Southwestern Cattle Raisers’ Association and it was possible an owner would claim her, but he hoped not because she was a handsome girl, even drawn down by parasites and her hooves split out by drought. He carried a feed pan made of an old tire out to her and hung it over one of the uprights and filled it with feed. He could smell the rotting flesh from screwworm larvae but they could get to that later.

  The foal was turned into the lot with the whiteface and her bull calf. Innis stood and watched as both of them nursed from the cow and she was patient and chewed and ran her tongue up her nose holes. The foal sucked furiously and his short brush tail thrashed like a machine. Foam leaked out of the sides of his mouth.

  Innis found the creosote paste in the bunkhouse. It was now used for saddle storage and medicines and number three cans of hominy and tomatoes, the anvil and horseshoes. They could no longer afford to pay help. Old pieces of latigo and wooden stirrups were thrown on the beds. They would have to tie the mare down to dig out the screwworms and pour creosote into the meaty wound. He wanted the red mare to be well, and take up with the stud foal and mother him. If he were mothered, then the foal would thrive. Innis poured out the creosote into an empty tin can and swirled a brush around in it.

  Ross went into the house and climbed the stairs. From the window of Miriam’s room he could see Innis walking out to the sick corral with the creosote. He began to fold the possessions of the boy’s mother into boxes. The bedspread, the curtains, the doilies on the vanity and the things from the drawers. Outside, another relentless and bitterly clear day. The sky was blue from one horizon to the other and shaded only by a light marking of dust from the east, from Kansas, where topsoil lingered airborne in the lofting winds. Ross knew he had to do it sooner or later and the time had come because of Jeanine. He had made up his mind. He opened the closet and took out Miriam’s dresses. He folded those as well. They would go to the Baptist church and be sent somewhere. He would ask them to pack it all off to a Baptist church somewhere out of the area. Some woman headed for California, in a Model T with mattresses on top, with a washtub and blankets strapped to the back, would wear them.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  Mayme said, “Mother, go talk to Violet and Joe about a telephone. He works for the phone company. Get him to see how much it would cost to lay a line out here.” Mayme carried a bucket full of dead leaves from under the broad live oak and dumped them onto the dry earth around the zinnias. It helped keep the roots cool. Jeanine and Mayme had decided the zinnias and sunflowers were Mayme’s job, and in trade Jeanine would whitewash the rocks bordering the walk.

  Elizabeth sat in the shade of the veranda watching her daughters work and then said no to the telephone. She was afflicted with nervousness in waves. But she sat on a kitchen chair and appeared very calm in the light breeze, turning the little porcelain doll’s head over in her fingers. She was afraid for all the money she had poured into the drilling, money that was gone forever and herself a mother depriving Bea of the things she needed, condensed milk and subscriptions to Far West Stories. But the well might come in, it might come in. Elizabeth fanned herself with a piece of cardboard and said that before they spent money on a telephone, Mayme should buy herself clothes for work. Mayme brought in their only cash, and she should have new clothes and a good hat.

  Mayme sighed and said Yes, Mother. She could have had a new spring straw hat months ago but she had instead given her mother ten dollars and then ten again, to buy more Beatty-Orviel stock certificates. What could she say? It made her mother happy. Elizabeth liked to sit with Lillian and Violet and go over the seismograph reports, talk about torsion balance technology, they visited the site with potato salad for the men. They were like schoolgirls. Mayme went inside, thinking up patterns for summer dresses. They could not afford new ones but Jeanine could put something together.

  Jeanine pumped water from the kitchen sink pump over a colander of beans. “Get me the material, Mayme, I’ll make whatever you want.”

  “I thought you were busy with Ross’s racing sheet. For Smoky Joe.”

  “I can do that racing sheet in an afternoon.”

  “Well, then.” Mayme brightened up and opened a magazine and flipped through the pages and then held it up. “Can you do something like this? I found some dotted swiss curtains at the church basement. There’s about ten yards.”

  “Easy.” Jeanine took the magazine in her wet hand. “Cross-tabs on a standing collar. Sure. Easy.”

  “What did Ross Everett say about the shingles and stuff?”

  “He’s bringing them.”

  Jeanine’s garden had burnt out. There was no rain and she could not carry enough water to keep it alive. But on the other hand she had collected so many agarita berries that she had filled ten jars with the rose-colored jelly. Mrs. Crowser showed her how to spread a sheet on the ground around the thorny bushes and then beat the agarita with a hoe handle until the berries fell into the sheet. Before long they would have a secure roof and then whole milk from the dairy in trade for eggs and then maybe a telephone from Mayme’s pay. They would talk to their cousin from their own kitchen, dressed in beautiful smart clothes like the women in the WPA posters, the annoying posters plastered everywhere that said you were to brush your teeth, take care of your hands, and save waste fats. What waste fats? Jeanine wondered who made up the damned posters. Didn’t they know everybody was eating their fats and it wasn’t waste?

  Jeanine sat down and wrote out their budget for May. They were in the main living on Mayme’s seventy-five a month. They spent twenty a month for groceries and her Smoky Joe bet money went to pay off this year’s taxes, but still they owed over two hundred dollars for the years past and now they needed another fifty dollars for 1938 taxes. If only Smoky Joe would bring in a little more. Then she could buy luxuries like new dress material unrolled fresh and smelling of crisp sizing from a bolt in a store. Then the telephone. She put the paper aside. The rat terrier lay at the back screen door, on the outside, with his nose against the frame, blinking. Albert sat opposite him on the inside of the screen. He stared back and didn’t blink.

  ROSS SAT ON a cane-bottomed chair in Jeanine’s room. He stretched out his long legs. He listened while Jeanine told him of her first cut into the silk. She had comforted herself with the thought that if she ruined it, she would have borrowed the money from him to replace it. Then the hailstorm. It was one thing after another.

  Ross thought of how his grandfather or even his father would have shot themselves in the foot with a large-caliber weapon rather than step int
o a young woman’s bedroom, but times had changed. He smelled of mohair and sweat and cigarettes. He had a train ticket in his pocket, a coach seat all the way to Washington, D.C., where he would change trains for Woonsocket, Rhode Island. The American Wool Company was presently not on strike, but by the time he got there anything could happen.

  He said, “Do you understand about the shingles? Can you do it?”

  “Yes.” She lifted her face to him and smiled at him because she knew his face would change. He would flush a little at his cheekbones, he would smile back, slightly, at one corner of his mouth. “First, I smash Mayme’s thumb. She screams. We fall off the roof.” Then she opened her hand and dropped an imaginary hammer and said Thud. Ross smiled just as she thought he would and watched her pick up the wedding dress bodice and there was indeed a slight flush along his cheekbones, under the sunburnt skin.

  In the kitchen Ross heard her mother and sisters talking, their quiet laughter. They had all looked on as if they were mildly astonished when he drove up and stripped off his tie and coat and vest, rolled up his white shirtsleeves and changed all four tires on their truck for four good used ones, and shook his head at the hail craters in the windshield. All the time her mother saying he would get grease and tire marks all over his suit and himself saying it was all right, he’d changed many a tire in a suit and tie before now. The glass panes were packed in straw and laid in long ammunition crates left over from the Great War and they would keep safe until Jeanine and Mayme could putty them into the frames. He carried a chain guard to the barn and fixed it over the chain drive on the cultivator.

  They regarded him washing at the sink as if he were some strange official male come to deliver a telegram or inspect the property or lead them in prayer. His broad thick wrists, the way he took up the embroidered tea towel and dried his callused hands. He searched for someplace to put his hat and finally laid it on the safe counter upside down. They inquired about Smoky Joe and he assured them that the stallion was about to enter the official tracks. He had to qualify in Lubbock. Up north in the plains country. He would like for Jeanine to go with him. They would get there and back in a day.

  Elizabeth handed her oldest daughter the tray with coffee cups. “That’s a hundred and fifty miles from here. Up where they have all those dust storms.”

  “I would really like to go,” said Jeanine.

  “Promise me you won’t bet,” she said.

  “I’ll make sure she doesn’t,” said Ross. “It’s illegal.”

  “Oh, Ross,” said Elizabeth. “Really.”

  “He has to what?” said Mayme. “Are they going to run all the way around the track?”

  “Qualify,” said Jeanine.

  “Qualify for what?”

  “For an A rating. If he does four hundred and forty yards in twenty-four seconds or less he’s rated A, and then he can race on all these official quarter-horse tracks. Against other A horses. The prize money is good.”

  Ross said that Mayme should come too. But she was going with Vernon to the baseball game in Eastland on that same date, and she said, “Y’all will have to go by yourselves.”

  Ross said, “The boy is coming.”

  Jeanine frowned. She shoved her hair out of her face. “His boy is coming, Mother,” she said.

  Ross glanced at her. He decided to ignore it. He said, “I see you made something out of that doll’s head, Jeanine.”

  The porcelain head with its black hair and red lips stared out with a stiff hieratic face from the mantelpiece, given new life with a stuffed body and a dress made from scraps of the eggshell-colored wedding silk.

  “Oh yes!” said Elizabeth. “It was my mother’s! I don’t know how you ever found it. Strange how things turn up.” She smiled. To Elizabeth she seemed to have come back out of the earth to take her place in the house again, after years of loss and neglect. “I was so happy.”

  Then they had played gin rummy for an hour in the newly painted parlor. There was the silent knowledge that he had come to be with Jeanine. Everything was proper and quiet inside the clean mint-colored walls. He saw how pleased Mrs. Stoddard was, that she radiated a lighthearted, even slightly apprehensive gladness that her daughters and herself had a house where they could receive, as people used to say; where they could offer a new-painted parlor and coffee, laugh and shriek over their triumphs at gin rummy. Ross remembered the board-and-batten shack in which they had existed in Conroe, with the washtubs out in back on the bare dirt and the front yard no more than eight hundred square feet littered with jacks and wheel hubs. The loud public battles in the ravaged tar paper shack next to them between a man and wife and innumerable children in some unrecognizable language. Pure squalor. And Jack Stoddard leaking money at every pocket in the gambling joints.

  Ross expressed admiration and astonishment at the way Prince Albert had personally rescued Bea from the well. He listened while they told him of Bea’s heroic grab for the falling lamp. When Bea cried out in her customary exclamation points that next year was high school, and she would be allowed to cut her hair! And she would have an English teacher! Just for English! he shook his head in amazement and whistled.

  “My, my. Just for English.”

  “But you knew that already, you graduated from high school,” said Bea, darkly.

  “And also from Texas A &M,” said Ross. “I learned just enough to come back and tell my old man how to run the ranch.”

  “Are your parents still with us?” asked Elizabeth. Jeanine spun out the cards to each in turn and then picked up her hand and gasped in amazement at what she had and Ross laughed at her transparency.

  They were very much alive, he told her, living in San Angelo. They started out as cross-timbers ranchers with cattle running loose and a couple hundred acres saved aside for cotton and hay. And three boys. His father got desperate and tried sheep and poured a shearing platform and then gave up on sheep. Then somebody hit that Fry field, it came in good in 1926, Pure Oil bought out our leases. Daddy made money on it. He never liked ranching anyhow, and his brothers didn’t either. His father was an odd man, Ross was fully prepared to admit it, involved with inventions, one of which was a pecan-shelling machine that had thrown shattered pecan shells all over the old stone ranch house where Jeanine had spent the night, until he finally perfected it, and so he had made a great deal of money. He and Ross’s mother garnered their oil-lease and shelling machine profits and at long last fled the Comanche County ranch and its six thousand acres for life in town. Now his father was working on the hydraulics of irrigation pumps. The Depression had not affected them all that much. He asked if he could smoke. Bea hurried to bring him a saucer and watched with a kind of helpless, hypnotized fascination as he lit up. His mother, he said, was nearly six feet tall and could sing like an angel, alto, and when she was in a full cry on “Faith of Our Fathers” you could hear her from Brownwood to Rising Star. Ross’s two brothers had joined them in San Angelo to work with his father in the engine shed full of machines and parts of machines, with his mother inside the house practicing for a choir, shattering glass. Ross snorted out smoke and shuffled again. And so during the drought, with the dust storms and the falling cattle prices, they had signed over the ranch to him and he abjured any part in the profits from their noisy and malodorous inventions.

  Then after a while her mother and sisters yawned and laid down their cards. They drifted in vague, diplomatic movements away to the kitchen and Ross followed Jeanine up the stairs to her room to see the wedding dress. Elizabeth and Bea and Mayme were now sitting in the kitchen, in steamy domestic peace, to knit and read and listen to the news.

  “What are you doing other than running around with a washtub on your head?” he said.

  “Driving that tractor,” she said. “Sewing. How’s your boy? The gunslinger.”

  “I had a serious talk with him. I don’t want him hitting people with slingshots. I told him before long he’s going to get a new mother. Sooner or later. He’s not allowed to kill her. He�
��s exercising Smoky and doing pretty well with him. When he qualifies, the money will come in by the cotton sack.”

  “You’re going to tell him that I’m going to be his new mother!” She dropped a card of buttons and grabbed his shirtsleeve. “Don’t you dare.”

  He picked up the card. They were little mother-of-pearl knobs. There would be twenty-five of them up the back of the dress, he figured. “I’ll tell him you’re going to be my mistress, my paramour, my secret valentine.”

  “Oh stop it.”

  “I told him we were going to have wild, uninhibited sex in the barn and he should turn Catholic and pray for our souls.”

  Jeanine kicked at the baseboard. “You’re going to go to hell, Ross.” She crossed her arms. “You’re going to go to hell and shovel ashes.”

  “I know it,” he said, calmly. “Are you coming to Lubbock?”

  “Yes. We can get there and back in a day?”

  “Yes.”

  She got up and threw a window open, the one that looked out over the valley where harmless cottony clouds crept over Blanco Mountain, shadow by shadow, and behind them stars lit themselves. The light made her seem almost transparent. The evening wind swept into the room like a guest from the horizon of tabled hills and rippled the fringes of her bedspread.

  She smiled at him and he looked away from her sweet mouth and sunburnt skin. He rolled down his sleeves and buttoned them. Desire had taken hold of him like a mugger. It was beating him up. Many small evasive plans came to him, of stopping off at the Bluebird’s Rest Tourist Courts near Lubbock, where that transparency would dissolve in his hands. He jiggled his foot.