Stormy Weather

by Paulette Jiles

  He lay on the bed with blood running from his nose and ears. A young company doctor folded his bag together and said in a thin tenor voice that Mr. Stoddard should avoid any strenuous activity for the next month or so, and he could not say one way or the other whether Mr. Stoddard would ever regain his ability to drive a truck. The effects might show up in the lungs, but on the other hand, did they know whether or not somebody hit him over the head? The doctor bent down and looked into Jack Stoddard’s eyes and said, “Did? Somebody? Hit? You? Over the head?” He was a tidy young doctor. With a quiet and efficient gesture wiped up the blood trickling from Jack Stoddard’s ear and said this was the result of a concussion of some kind, not sour gas. It was impossible to get the company to pay the medical bills because Mr. Stoddard was a contract worker and not a Shell employee.

  Jeanine and her sisters watched as her father sat up straight in the bed and stared at them as if they were strangers. People completely unknown to him were gathered together in this small rent house with the ancient wallpaper and the lamp beside the bed in the gloom of the torrents washing down the windowpane, the iron bedframe and torn quilts. His two oldest daughters about to leave home, oddly grown to adults. A person wonders how it happens. His wife sitting with her head in her hands like somebody’s mother from the last century. She lifted her head and smiled at him.

  “You’re going to be all right, Jack,” she said.

  “I know it,” he said. “As soon as I get that horse in training.”

  The young doctor said, “Mr. Stoddard, do you know what day it is?”

  “It’s the day they asked me to fish out a wrench from the tank. One of those tanks. They thought it was a joke. That’s what day it is.” Jack Stoddard ran his hands over his blue face. He seemed to be checking to see if it was still there, on the front of his head.

  A long pause. Then the doctor said, “Who is the president?”

  “Franklin D. Roosevelt,” he said. “I voted for him.” He fell back onto the pillows. “Tell these people to get out of here.”

  Their mother sat in the bedroom with him, reading aloud from newspapers or magazines, playing the radio. She was trying to reawaken him and make his brain work. He stared at the wallpaper and occasionally turned to look at his wife as if she were an intrusive busybody, a neighbor he knew only faintly.

  Smoky Joe had been turned out into one of the sweeping coastal pastures where red cattle grazed and egrets in formal white garb tiptoed behind each cow with grave, worried gestures, darting their heads one way and then the other. Jack Stoddard had been offered three hundred dollars for him by Ross Everett, but her father had refused to sell for no reason other than the pleasure of saying no. Smoky Joe tore up the grass with great fervor. He was always hungry. From time to time Smoky charged forward into a long gallop across the pasture, scattering the domestic cows, running for the hell of it. He was now four years old and neglected, hairy, unshod, and only knew human beings as occasional visitors with food. He should have been sold long ago.

  They had moved from Conroe to Wharton. It was in Wharton they heard King Edward was going to marry Wallis Simpson. Mayme couldn’t believe it. They had acquired an old Emerson radio and several neighbors came over to sit in their small kitchen with its kerosene stove to listen. It was an intense evening. In the distance they could hear the noise of the big water pumps, as the rice fields were flooded. Their father lay quietly in the back room regarding the wall, which had been plastered over with newspapers. Maybe he was reading the advertisements. Elizabeth had just that morning spent fifty cents out of their stock of coins to buy beans and potatoes and lard, and the potatoes were frying as they listened to the fading newscast.

  Jeanine shifted from station to station to find a clear reception and finally got a Shreveport station. The king said it was impossible to carry the heavy duty of responsibility and to discharge his duties as king as he should wish to do, without the help and support of the woman he loved. Jeanine was on the king’s side but Mayme said what did he ever see in a skinny parasite like Mrs. Simpson and their mother said there wasn’t much to choose between them. There was something frightening about it. A man abdicating a throne for an arid woman, men in general surrendering to loss, to an absence of rain, air, money, love, kingdoms.

  In Wharton they had found another rental house near the Colorado River. The river was dark red and alluvial and not many miles away it poured into the Gulf. The house was full of junked farm equipment and stacked paper bags that had held Paris Green arsenate for killing boll weevils. They worked for two days to clear it. Five blocks away a Hooverville had grown up on the banks of the river and at night there was the glow of fires and shouting and sometimes singing.

  Mayme had acquired a boyfriend in Conroe who worked for the Conroe-Lufkin Telephone Company, his name was Robert Faringham. He continued to write her even when they moved to Wharton, down to the gas country where new gas wells were being drilled by independent operators. Jeanine’s father said there were all kinds of opportunities for a man who had connections. Humble was going to start up a cracking plant not too far away, to refine the wet gas and wring hydrocarbons from it. Engineers and the chemists would toss up molecules of methane and propane and butylene in a dazzling display of new modern technology, they would make aviation gas and synthetic rubber and nylon stockings and plastic telephones and cow feed from it, everything but candy kisses. He was going to leave off freighting and somehow find the means to study pipe fitting. There was good money in it. To Jeanine this meant they would go and live in some graceful country house and there would be green fields for Smoky Joe, and passionflower vines, and silence. But now he walked with careful deliberate steps around the house staring at things. He put a match to a piece of old telephone cord to see if it would burn. Elizabeth took it away from him and stamped on it and hid the matches.

  Bea said, “Jeanine, were you and Mayme talking last night about leaving?”

  Jeanine said, “We were, but we’re not now. Since Daddy’s got brain failure. Somebody’s got to stay and help Mother get him in a strait-jacket.” She closed her hands around a chair back. This throttled life had to end sometime, it had to.

  “Where were you going to go?”

  Mayme said, “We were going to get an apartment back in Conroe. Stay there in one place. But Robert can just write me here.” The rain fell all over Wharton and the Colorado River ran as dark as wine. “I’m twenty-one, Bea. Jeanine’s twenty. We’re old maids.” Not too far away the river spilled out into the Gulf in tangled red currents. “Looks like we’re going to stay that way.”

  “Would you have just left me here?” said Bea. “With them arguing and fighting all the time?”

  The two older sisters glanced at each other.

  “It’s all right, Bea,” said Mayme. “We aren’t going to leave with Daddy like this. It’s all right.”

  “You would have too,” said Bea. “You would have gone and left me here.”

  Jeanine said, “Nah. We’d have kidnapped you.”

  They did not notice her bowed head and her heart burning in anguish. She would have been deserted. It was possible that her sisters did not love her except in the most dutiful and perfunctory way. They didn’t even read her stories. Her pretty young teacher at the Wharton Elementary had just printed up one of her stories on the mimeograph machine and had tacked it up on the bulletin board. She had so much admired Bea’s tale of the orphan girl and the abandoned puppy. Bea was sure that nothing good would ever happen to her except in books. When she was sitting on the back steps one evening a half-grown cat came out of the collapsing shed behind the house and sat down and mewed at her. Bea took him up gratefully and named him Prince Albert.

  There was no money. They had to wait it out. They ate corn bread and grits, salt pork and cane syrup and told themselves things would get better after Jack got well. They cooked on a little kerosene stove that stank of fuel. They walked holes in their shoes looking for jobs, any job, but men with familie
s to support wanted those same jobs and nobody would hire a single girl, even to pop the popcorn in a movie theater or sweep up at the barbershop. Fifteen million able-bodied men were out of work. Jeanine and Mayme made do. They could not face the social stigma of going on relief. They joined other women and children scavenging for soda bottles along the roadsides and lived on what was left of their father’s last paycheck. They were adrift. So were millions of others and no one could figure out why the economy had ceased to function, not even the banker J. P. Morgan. He said as much on the radio.

  They tiptoed around the house so as not to disturb their father and then went out into the streets of Wharton to look in the shop windows, and stand under the great live oaks and their Spanish moss by the river. They walked by the transients and the bums in the Hooverville. It was like visiting a zoo.

  Then, finally, Mayme got temporary work at the cotton gin writing labels for the bales and shared her five dollars with Bea and Jeanine. She treated them to a movie; sword hacking and high seas in Captain Blood.

  Silently Jeanine made herself a dress from material she bought at one of the Wharton dry-goods stores. Nobody else would buy it so it was cheap. Nobody wanted it because it was printed in black-and-white tiger stripes. But she had seen a picture of a tiger-stripe pattern in a secondhand Good Housekeeping magazine and it didn’t look too garish. She would black her shoes with stove polish to match. The package of material thumped on the table.

  “Shhhhh!”

  She cleared the table of the fruit jar full of knives and forks and slid the scissors through the crepe. She sewed it by hand. The Singer would raise the dead with its creaking treadle. They kept the radio low.

  Hitler marched into the Rhineland and made all other political parties illegal in Germany. He invaded when the crops were ripe in the fields; tanks plowed through the rye and oats and wheat and any human beings who stood in their way. Jeanine’s father listened to the news broadcasts with his hands in his lap, nodding, saying We’d better not get into this. Stay out of it is what I say.

  AT NIGHT BEA sat with her striped cat at the kitchen table with her schoolbooks and her reading. The cat was not content unless he was with her and at night he slept on her head with a roaring purr. Her teacher had given her a book of poetry, The Family Album of Favorite Poems. She sat in front of the coal-oil lamp and read. Books contained speech without noise, human voices that spoke as loudly and as freely as they wished without being told to hush, hush. Mayme wrote to her young man in Conroe who worked for the Conroe-Lufkin Telephone Company. The letter was very long. Her pen made loud scratching noises. Jack Stoddard developed a strange, haughty air and spent the hot evenings sitting by the door, looking at something out in the night. He stared at his still-handsome face in the mirror on the back porch and shaved himself with slow strokes. He sat at the table in silence leafing through the women’s underwear section of the Sears Roebuck catalog until Jeanine took it away from him to use in the outhouse.

  Bea came in from the girls’ bedroom with Prince Albert in her arms and her journal tucked beneath her elbow. The striped cat jumped down onto the kitchen floor and then into Jack Stoddard’s lap. Bea watched with an open mouth as her father snatched Albert up by the scruff of the neck, the fur wadded in his fist, and drew back and punched the cat directly on his nose. Bea threw down the journal and screamed. Albert made a gasping, snorting sound. Jack released him. He laughed when the cat thrashed in snakelike motions on the floor as if its back were broken. Albert gained his balance somehow and fled, weaving, toward the door and their father kept on laughing.

  Elizabeth came running in from the back porch, asking what was the matter in a controlled voice. Jeanine threw open the kitchen window. Albert bolted through it.

  BEA SAT IN the old shed for hours that hot September night calling over and over in a sweet, enticing voice. Finally Albert crept out of a corner toward her. His nose and mouth were crusted with dried blood. He crawled into her lap and blinked up at her with furtive glances, as if he were begging for forgiveness. Bea held him and told him she would protect him and that pretty soon her father would have a brain hemorrhage and die. Bea stared into the dark of the shed and felt they were all in mortal danger and that nobody cared and they were alone on the earth.

  JEANINE SLEPT ON the floor to keep cool. It was much cooler on the boards than on the bed next to Mayme. She walked through intense dreams each night and she remembered them every morning before dawn. She dreamed of her father in a shining new truck and his eyes were as red as rubies. He was holding his head aloft so that everyone would look at him and he could look at them out of the crude scarlet of his eyes. He was saying eye eye oh eye or maybe it was I I oh I. Ross Everett sat unmoved in a burning building with an onion in his hand. Smoky Joe stood in the middle of a pasture of brown grasses, his ragged tail flying in the wind, and he was speaking to her. She woke up. It was near midnight and the air had turned cool.

  Mayme said, “What are you doing, Jenny?” And then rolled over and went back to sleep.

  Jeanine pulled on her striped dress and went to the window. She saw smoke rising in the chilled moonlight. It was coming from the shed. The shed was on fire.

  She took up the hosiery rug from the kitchen floor and ran down across the wet grass. At the entrance to the shed she came upon her father. He was sitting on a nail keg with a dangling oily rag in his hand setting fire to it with matches. A heap of straw was on fire but it wasn’t burning well, since the straw was old and moldy and wet with the dew. She called out to him and threw the hosiery rug onto the sparkling straw and stamped on it. She kicked a smoking wad onto the gravel and ground it out.

  “Well, daughter,” he said. Smoke rose around him. He dropped his arms on his thighs, flapped his hands. “Jeanine,” he said.

  “What are you doing?” She stamped on flying sparks. She took a stick and lifted the glowing oily rag into the grass.

  “Setting the shed on fire,” he said. He stood up. “I wanted to get your mother’s attention. I want her to know that I am crazy and dangerous.”

  “I’ll call the sheriff,” she said. “I’ll run over to the neighbors’ and call the sheriff. They have a telephone.” They faced each other.

  “Good for them.” He walked in a circle and hummed a popular tune. Down on the Colorado River there was a burst of laughter. Jeanine could see the reflection of a fire on the high branches of the live oaks that drooped over the water. He had the cardboard suitcase beside him.

  “Dad, come in the house and go to sleep.” She made shoving motions at him. “Please. Please.”

  He said he would go away if that was what they all wanted. Thrown out of his own home. He said for her to find for him those few little things that were still his own. His voice was that of an orphan abandoned by the roadside.

  He took out a cigarette, a package of Old Golds. The smell of cigarette smoke and his Clubman’s aftershave brought back memories of the good times of match racing and the awful times of moving and misery, and also the time when he had been the handsome father who had loved her. Her throat hurt it was so tight.

  “Well, daughter.” He smoked and looked around himself. “Jeanine. You were always my favorite.” He nodded. “You were. What the hell is that piece of crap you got on? A tiger-striped prom dress or something.”

  “I’ll be awake all night for the rest of my life, wondering if you’re going to set the house on fire.”

  “Good.” He slowly turned his head to her and regarded her. “I think I’ll leave, Jeanine.”

  “Dad, you’re not well. You can’t just leave.”

  “Give me a picture of you girls.”

  He crushed out his cigarette on the ground. He patted her arm and she knocked his hand away. He said all he wanted was some pictures from the old album, to take with him wherever it was he was going which he didn’t really know where it was. But Jeanine ought to quit living like a Wild Man out of Borneo. If she would fix herself up she might get a man. If not, not.r />
  “Dad, you and Mother have got to settle things. Please.”

  “Jeanine, Jeanine,” he said. “Don’t take sides. I was a man never meant to be married, I’m a rambler and a gambler and a long way from home. Some men can’t be tied down. We’ve got to be free. I might come back. I might not.”

  “Why did you get married, then?” She pawed at her eyes.

  He said, “Wisdom comes with age. When you’re young you don’t think about consequences. You meet somebody and get married and then you girls came along.”

  “We just came along. You just found us wandering down the road.”

  “Now. Ask me anything.”

  “Ask you what?”

  “Anything. Ask me anything.”

  Jeanine thought of him only as a father but he had been a child once himself and he knew all children were confused by the mysteries of their lives, and he was offering her the answers, inside information. Where certain songs came from and the names of lost dogs, what your grandparents were like when they were young. Here at the time of parting when he would leave his favorite child with her long gray eyes and his own square jaw and the name of Stoddard. The sour gas had ruined some synapses in his brain and oddly joined others. He fought his way through the fierce thorns of his own cynicism, trying to reach somewhere else, but he did not know where that somewhere else might be. What was the alternative. “Give me a picture of you girls to take with me.”

  Jeanine tiptoed into the house and went to the tin trunk where the old photograph album lay and began flipping through the pages. All a child wants to know is if their parents love them and wanted them to come into the world. That’s all.

  Ask him anything. Jeanine wanted to ask him, Why was I born? But instead she walked back out into the humid dark and handed him a photograph of the three sisters sitting in the back of the old Reo Speed Wagon.