Stormy Weather

by Paulette Jiles

  “Yes. And I told her, honey, the Pacific Ocean is the hot place.” Mrs. Joplin lifted her thin shoulders in a shrug. “She’s mad enough to eat bees. Her mother said she wasn’t fit to see people. Her mother drove this over here and said either hide it or sell it. As if I was supposed to figure out what to do with it. I don’t know what I ought to do with it. You better take it back home with you. Need some moth crystals?” The tall old woman turned and began to rummage around in the various poisons she kept underneath the counter. “Here.” She slapped a blue box down on the solid walnut. “Those moths just love silk.”

  “Didn’t she say she would wait for him?” Jeanine reached for the moth crystals. “It’s only…” Then her voice faded and she said in a lower tone, “Three years.”

  “When people are set on getting married they don’t like waiting. It is a true fact. They’re just thinking, ‘Well, it’s the biggest decision I’ll ever make, let’s just get on with it.’ Like somebody that’s going to be hanged at dawn. ‘Why don’t you just hang me at midnight and get it over with?’ Martha Jane has no patience.” Mrs. Joplin lifted her head as one of the Miller kids came in; it was the youngest one. He carefully laid out a penny on the counter and said he wanted a jawbreaker, a purple one. He went away making sucking sounds, with a frightening bulge in his cheek. His bare feet left dust tracks across the floor. “She was set to be married and she’s going to get married one way or another.” The phone rang and Mrs. Joplin reached up and took the earpiece out of the hook and shouted, “What?” She listened. “He’s changing somebody’s oil. No, he don’t want any.” She hung it up again and turned back to Jeanine. “Now, you’ve been out visiting at Ross Everett’s place. How do you find it?”

  Jeanine had been out to the ranch in Comanche County three times now. She had watched as Innis ran Smoky at a slow gallop on the exercise track, standing in the stirrups; had gone with him to the corral to admire his foal and the red mare. The foal was nearly six months old; he had shed out to a light gray and his leg bones had grown sturdy and straight. The red mare’s wound was healed to a spiderweb of scar tissue and the mare followed Ross along the fence line and called to him for feed or attention. Innis proudly showed her the wind charger that powered the kitchen and the two clear electric lightbulbs and the electric iron. She had sat down beside Ross as he went over the accounts with her; he explained the shearing costs and how to stay up with the price of mohair in the Dallas newspaper. One evening before she drove home Ross said they needed to do some serious talking, so they sat on the stone-floored veranda and spoke of the future. He wanted her to think clearly about what she would do were anything to happen to him; ranching was a dangerous business. Jeanine found this frightening and she felt like stopping up her ears, but it was a bigger matter than her fright or alarm, and so she sat and read over his will with a still and serious expression as he pointed out the provisions.

  The next time she had got through all the roundup gear and the smoke-blackened cooking pots and they had painted the kitchen, and Jugs had helped to move in a new electric refrigerator. Through the tall kitchen window was a view of the branding pens and the long sweeping ridges beyond, now glowing in wet, intense colors. After they married she would look out on this view for many years to come.

  Still she had not set a date. Next time, she said, next time. But people lost patience, she thought. They wanted to be married or hanged without delay once it was decided but still Jeanine had said Wait, wait.

  “I find it is very well,” said Jeanine. “The old stone house is beautiful.”

  “Well, so does Martha Jane,” said Mrs. Joplin. She turned to look out the back door and saw that Mr. Joplin had sat himself down on an orange crate and was now cleaning the spark plugs. If she didn’t say anything he would go on to rebuild the entire engine, but Mrs. Joplin knew it made him happy. “Martha Jane said to her mother she was going to run over there to Everett’s place and ask to see if he was shipping any of her mohair. She said he bought two woolsacks that were hers. I mean separate from her mother and daddy’s. Now that don’t make sense to me. You know, ‘Oh I think I’ll just drop in and visit with my woolsacks.’ Like they were people. Woolsacks weigh four hundred pounds and they ain’t people. But there it is. Everett’s probably lonely out there, has been for years, just him and the boy. And his wife deader than Santa Ana.”

  Jeanine listened with a blank face. She shifted the package of wedding dress around on her lap and then stood up. She wanted to ask when it was that Martha Jane had visited, and for how long, but it would be too humiliating. Jeanine had the sudden but familiar feeling of everything going to pieces, despite anything she did, but she was also becoming angry as well as alarmed.

  She said she had to get back, she had left beans on the stove. She put the moth crystals and four oranges and a pound of longhorn cheese into her heavy canvas bag and went out to ask Mr. Joplin to put the spark plugs back in so she could start up her engine and go home, and revive her life and her faith in humanity, or at least men.

  Mrs. Joplin watched the ’29 Ford truck roar off down the road, throwing gravel. Then she walked out to the backyard and sat down beside her elderly husband. She had done what she thought she ought to do. Maybe it was the right thing, maybe not. Mr. Joplin raised his head and then glanced down again.

  “Well, Pearl, I guess I got that job done.”

  “Yes, you did.” They sat at ease, resting within the spotted, tossing shade.

  “What was it?”

  “You changed that young woman’s oil and cleaned the spark plugs.”

  He cleared his throat. He was struggling with the profound shame of knowing that his mind was drifting away; all he had was Pearl to keep him anchored. She watched him sigh heavily and wipe his hands together.

  “Pearl, dear,” he said. “Sometimes I don’t know where I am.”

  Mrs. Joplin stroked his back. “It’s all right, James,” she said. “Wherever you are, that’s the world.”

  JEANINE DROVE BACK the one mile to the house with her foot jammed down on the pedal, and the wind came in all the open truck windows in gusts. Behind her the sheet came unwrapped from the silk wedding dress and the whole package began to flounder about in the backseat. The arms of the wedding dress thrashed around, she could see it in the rearview mirror. The skirt billowed up like a dummy turned upside down, the sheet seemed to be pouring out the window, an escapee. She did not know what to do with it. On the other hand, she could save it for Mayme. Mayme wouldn’t care if it had been made for somebody else. She was so in love with Vernon she’d get married in a bedspread. Jeanine stamped on the brake and came to a halt under the Spanish oak. What would she do without Ross in her life? It would be terrible, it could not happen.

  She called Ross as soon as she got in the house. She threw the wedding dress and the sheet onto the kitchen table and dialed his number. She listened impatiently as the party lines got crossed and two men were discussing some sheep that had got out and were up on Jim Ned Creek. Then finally she heard Ross’s voice say, Hello?

  “Ross, it’s Jeanine.”

  “Hello, girl,” he said.

  “Ross, I want to set a date. And the date is…” She paused. She said the first thing that came into her head. “December twelfth.”

  Faint voices in the background spoke of three head got out and gone up past Ganlin’s water gap, they were seen yesterday. Finally he said, “What brought this on?”

  “Martha Jane Armstrong.”

  He laughed. “Jeanine,” he said. “Jeanine darling.”

  “Well?”

  There was a long pause. Jeanine sat on the kitchen chair and beat her foot on the floor. You could grow hair in the man’s pauses.

  “I didn’t tell her to come out here, Jenny. I don’t like being asked to explain myself.”

  “Well, did you ask her to go?”

  “I did not invite her into the house. When she left, Innis nailed her taillight with a hexagonal nut. He was hiding behind t
he rock tank.”

  “Shame on him,” said Jeanine. “Ha-ha.”

  “Stay friends,” said Ross. “You could have no worse enemy than Martha Jane Armstrong.”

  Then it was Jeanine who fell into the long gap of a wordless pause. She ran her fingers through her tangled hair and finally said, “All right.”

  “Then if you are determined on that date, there is a lot to do.” Her mind vaulted forward to all that there was to do and she banged the toes of her shoes together. “Your ring came,” he said. Nervously she wrote in the air with her forefinger; r-i-n-g.

  “Oh good, Ross!” She listened intently against the distant voices crackling on the crossed party lines about looking for Barkley’s merinos as Ross asked her to make lists. Jeanine and her mother and sisters had to present a festive occasion to the world, a celebration that was to be joyful and at the same time corseted with tradition. All the right people had to be invited for fear of offending the wrong people, nothing unlucky must happen, nor could they ignore the dead, who shadowed the event from some other dimension: her father, Ross’s first wife. Like fossils printed in stone they sent faint indications of themselves on down the years, admonishing and reminding because they were still very present in memory and because of the children they had introduced, willy-nilly, into the world of the living.

  Jeanine did not like talking on the buzzing, public party line; she wanted to hang up, to say that they would talk later, but Ross wanted her to find a pen and paper and write out an announcement now, this very minute, and take it in to the newspaper in Tarrant when they all went in to catch the train to Galveston and have done with it. She bent over a sheet of lined paper with her tongue between her teeth and her hair falling in her face and wrote, Mrs. Elizabeth Stoddard of Palo Pinto County announces the marriage of her daughter Jeanine… and so she was committed.

  She put the receiver back into its cradle and looked up at the kitchen. It was somehow a different kitchen. Some shift had taken place. Some alteration in the boards and windows and the kitchen curtains with their jolly orange pigs as she felt her connection to this place suddenly become tenuous and frayed. It was as if she were looking at some memory, already in the past and dearly beloved in each commonplace detail; the braided rug and the old cookstove and Prince Albert asleep on the cool stone of the fireplace hearth.

  She folded the paper and put it in her purse and then started the washing to get everyone ready for their weekend in Galveston. She flung clothes into the churning suds of the washing machine and the fumes of the gasoline engine filled the back porch. A strange feeling of being a visitor overcame her; a kind and polite visitor who was helping out with the housework, and who had someplace else to go, someplace exciting.

  She sang “Your Cheating Heart” in a hoarse and wobbling voice as she hung tea towels and underpants and brassieres and sheets on the line as clouds skated overhead like glacial soapsuds. She walked through the garden where the fall harvest of trilobite leaves of sweet potatoes appeared, childlike things toasting brown in their earth beds. Her fields all swept of seedling cedar now seemed to belong to somebody else, and so did the orchard. So she walked through the stones of the family graveyard and pulled up a greenbrier sprout that had sprung up with the new rains and had begun to crawl over her grandmother’s headstone. What home had Nannie Tolliver left behind to come here from Northeast Texas, what family graveyards had she abandoned to the greenbrier? You had to wonder. Nannie probably loaded up her trunk with quilts and dishes and the porcelain doll’s head and said Let’s go, Samuel. Jeanine turned away and went into the house, restless, seized by a need for movement.

  She threw cold water in her face and then went down into the cotton field. Abel lifted his hat to her; he was on a four-sweep riding cultivator behind Jo-Jo and Sheba. She listened for a moment as he spoke to them, listened to the jingle of the harnesses and the distant sound of the small points slicing through the soil. Tomorrow she would ride the seed drill, which would carry the steel barrels of Paris Green arsenate to kill the weevils and next year when she came back to visit, the new plants would flush out free of infestation. Then she went back into the house again, to stand in front of the electric fan for a moment. In all the valley fields the cotton was expanding into knots of white fiber. It was Tuesday evening; the sky blued with the watercolors of evening. Fibber and Molly burst into the sound waves. Oh, Molly, how patient and sane you are, with your silly and loving husband, how calm in the make-believe world of radio, in some imaginary town that never changes. She finally rested on the veranda steps, slouched back against one of the posts, watching the seamless evening fall across the world.

  That night she sat in her room while her sisters and mother talked about the suitcases and what if they were lost when they changed trains in Dallas. Whether the Texas Railroad Commission was going to shut down the well, if Clark Gable was going to divorce Rita Langhorn, and did he really pilot the plane in Test Pilot. They listened to the radio for an hour and then her mother and sisters went to bed. Jeanine walked restlessly into the hall. A series of selves stood behind her reflection in the beveled mirror, tokens of herself as she grew up from one year to another, from Ranger to Tarrant to Mexia, out to Monahans in the great sea of the Permian Basin, to Arp and Kilgore, to Wharton, where her father had betrayed them so terribly and where he lay in his lonely grave, and finally here, to home, which would soon not be her home anymore. And all the time her heart opening and closing, opening and closing, carrying her through whatever shifts and changes came at her, an unshakable core of self. She pulled on her thin nightgown and went to bed but she could not sleep. The hours went by like scrap metal, rusty and slow. Jeanine got up and went down the stairs and into the kitchen. The moon shone in bars through the windows.

  She reached for the drawer with the old photograph album in it. She found herself sitting in front of the lamp with the clear electric light gleaming across the yellowed pictures of herself in her father’s arms, of Uncle Reid smiling into the camera with his hands on the great wrenches at the Kelly hose, bound for oblivion. At her father, handsome and still young, before the sour gas, before the arrest, holding Smoky Joe’s lead rope and the stallion’s blocky dark body a coiled spring from which speed would explode, loosing him down the track into a winner’s circle. From across the hall Bea spoke to somebody in a dream and her voice was full of garbled conviction. Jeanine gazed down at the photo of Mayme in her high school graduation dress, Ross Everett sitting on the running board of his truck with his hat pushed back, herself at the edge of the photo in her accidental appearance, in that black-and-white landscape of 1935. And the spectral presence in all these pictures, the one standing behind the camera. The one looking into the lens whose name was soon forgotten or confused in these family albums and so at last remained only as a loving and generous unseen presence.

  Jeanine saw that there were four or five pages in the back that were still empty. She ripped out a page from the Sears Roebuck catalog and slipped it in to mark the place where the wedding pictures would go, and postcards from aerodromes in far places, and then photographs of children and all the other lives to come, and shut the old album carefully, and put it back into the tin trunk.

  Acknowledgments

  Thanks to my agent, Liz Darhansoff, and my editor, Jennifer Brehl, for their patience. Special thanks to Donna Stoner for her encouragement. My gratitude to Gary Pogue for explanations of match-racing and betting, to Betty Nethery for personal stories of horses and match-racing in West Texas, to cable-tool drillers Pete Roseneau and Tommy Johnson, to geologist Denise Ranagan for allowing me on a drill site, to Sky Lewey for information on the mohair industry, and to the docents at the Midland Oil Museum. To Jim and Lois Webb for memories of the 1930s.

  About the Author

  PAULETTE JILES is a poet and memoirist. She is the author of Cousins, a memoir, and the bestselling novel Enemy Women. She lives in San Antonio, Texas

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