“What?” She started backward.
“It’s me! M-m-milton Brown!” He was a short young man in a pair of spectator shoes, flagrant wingtips, and a wide tie with his hair sticking up in front and glasses so thick they magnified his eyes into unsteady blue marbles. They were round as half-dollars. “Oh Jeanine, Jeanine, look at this face!” He stood back and threw his hands wide to present himself and his pinwheel cowlick to her. He tipped his hat and then took the wad of clothes from her arms in order to see her entire form there before him. “Do you remember me? Have you not read my n-n-newspaper columns?”
“Give that back,” she said and took the clothes from him. “No. Well, I did when I was cleaning the windows. But I don’t remember you.”
“Yes you do yes you d-do!” He stuttered terribly. Then she remembered the boy and his hammering voice that seemed to leap into a kind of dit-dit-dah-dit Morse code when he talked, turning the knob of the radio at her grandparents’ funeral so many years ago; ten years ago.
“All right, yes I do,” she said. They were walking down the street with his hand on her elbow crashing through the Saturday crowds in the torrent of his enthusiasm and goodwill.
“Of course you do! We went to school together in Ranger! And then y’all left for Mexia. All I did”-he pulled her to one side to let a woman carrying a baby go past-“was listen to your grandp-p-parents’ radio. The world spoke to me! All I ever wanted to do was to talk back!”
“I remember,” she said.
“Dang, girl, your father has died. I know, I am a n-newspaperman, dammit, what a thing. I am the investigator of all that is odd and anomalous. Where are you, where are you, in short, where are you living?” He shoved his hat to the back of his head.
“We came back to the old Tolliver place,” she said. They swept past a hardware store where there was a tallest cornstalk contest, the winner to receive fifty cents. Desperate farmers had stood up their best cornstalk with their names tagged to them. “That’s where we’re living.”
“All of you? Anybody else dead?”
“No, no, me and Mother and Mayme and Bea.” She laughed. “Stop making me laugh,” she said.
“Your father has died. Your life is in shambles. You are starving on the old farm. You are in the midst of dust explosions and your potatoes have the Irish rot and the mules have all died and their bones are white-white-whitening in the sun. When can I come and see you?”
“Oh put a cork in it, Milton.” She couldn’t stop laughing. “What are you doing? When did I see you last?”
“When your grandparents died. I was out there at the graveyard because my aunt is B-Baylor Joplin and she’s related to the old lady at the Strawn store, you s-s-s-see all things are tied together. Ah Jeanine, your cloudy gray eyes, your sultry voice. How are y’all staying alive?”
He drew her to the benches in front of the post office. They sat down along with farmers and ranchers who were waiting for their wives to finish shopping.
“We’re doing fine,” she said. “Mayme has a job at the dairy and I’m keeping house, Bea is in school.” She lifted the wad of secondhand clothes. “And I’m making dresses for everybody. I’m the little housekeeper. We got out of the oil fields.”
The wind was pouring through the streets. It raised dust on the pavement and along the gravel roads leading up to the mountain above. The courthouse flag stood out its full length and then the confused wind backed and doubled it so that the stripes checkered themselves against the forty-eight stars. People walked with their heads down, skirt hems scalloped and rolled. In the north a solid bank of dark blue cloud was bearing down on them, with pallid, running sails of smaller clouds beneath. He gazed at her with a happy smile.
“Jeanine, you look so good. Ah, your daddy was a man I admired. Handsome devil. Rakish. They said it was sour gas. A workingman’s fate. I wanted to kill myself when y’all left for Mexia, slash my wrists with a shattered radio t-t-tube.” Jeanine bent over laughing. He lowered his voice. “It was your eyes, Jeanine. You could sing ‘I Wanna Be Loved by You’ all the way through and you had a yellow dress and a yellow sunbonnet to match. And then you went away. All of you. Off on the road of l-life. I think the papers all say trundling. You trundled off. What the hell is a t-t-trundle?”
“You don’t remember all that!” she said. “You’re making it up!”
“I am not.”
“I was ten when that song came out. We were in…” She paused to fetch up that year from her memory but she could not recall where they were. “Out in the Permian, in Monahans? I’ll have to ask Mayme. But what are you doing? How did you get on at the newspaper?”
Milton Brown took a pencil out of his jacket pocket and held the tip up in the air.
“I went to college until the old man couldn’t support me anymore and he said, ‘Sharpen your pencil and get d-d-d-down there to the newspaper and beg for a job, son.’ I was dying to get into radio. But I stutter. And I suffer from a T-T-T-Texas accent. I live in a rented room above the shoe store where people come in and try on rugged footwear to plod on through the economic emergency.” He stuck his foot in the air and she could see his wingtips were cracked and shiny with desperate applications of polish to cover the aged leather and thin soles. “I help out at the recording sessions at the Crazy Water Hotel, cut the acetate, then they run them into Dallas and b-b-broadcast them on WBAP. I’m being paid in scrip and cabbages and dozens of eggs. Do y’all need eggs?”
“Oh no!” Jeanine jumped to her feet. “I have to buy us a setting hen, I almost forgot.”
“Oh darling Jeanine, listen.” He stood up and took her elbow. “Move in town and live in luxury here where there are streetlights, get away from your country estate. Do y’all have enough cabbages and gruel to survive on?”
“Bye, Milton.” She held out her hand to him. He took hold of it.
“May I come and visit?”
“Yes. Leave a message at Strawn’s store.”
“I will. But you’ll break my heart, won’t you? You’ll lead me on and then c-c-c-crush my hopes.” He bent forward and kissed her cheek. “All of you will. You will toy with me, even little Bea. How old is Bea?”
“She’s thirteen.”
“And lethal, thirteen and lethal. I will be out your way because there is a huge dam going in on the Brazos just above you. WPA project. After the water is impounded Roosevelt will come out and walk on it. Prairie roses will bloom. What can I bring with me?”
“Oh…books for Bea.”
He swept off his hat and bowed. A man in coveralls sitting next to them on a bench chewed slowly and watched without expression.
“Before long, my cruel tormentor.”
JEANINE STOPPED IN at the E-Z Step shoe store to say hello to Betty.
Betty screamed, “Jeanine! Y’all are in town!” She made Jeanine sit down and try on shoes. So Jeanine tried on a new pair of oxfords made with manatee leather and a pair of canvas espadrilles just to look at her feet in them and imagine herself dancing in whole shoes. When Betty was putting them back in their boxes, her cousin said their mothers were over at Violet Keener’s house in a conspiracy about something, something dangerous.
“Dangerous how?” said Jeanine.
“I don’t know exactly but it’s about money.”
Then Betty walked Jeanine to the truck and said what Jeanine needed was shoes and lipstick and a date and a dance. Jeanine decided not to say anything more about learning to drive a tractor. She said good-bye and then found a farm wife with live chickens; she bought three brown hens in a cardboard box and started for home with five gallons of gas in the refilled jerrican. She left her mother to stay the night in Mineral Wells and whatever dangerous conspiracies she and Violet and Lillian might be hatching. She drove south on State Highway 281, past the fields of cotton now stripped down to a tangle of dried stems, as if the farmers had begun to grow fence wire. A pouring wave of sheep fled down a hillside, answering some unheard call, and the dense bank of cloud to the northeast told of a winds
torm to come.
She climbed up on the roof carrying a brick on a rope, dropped it down the chimney on the south end of the house, and knocked out the birds’ nests and branches. She climbed down again swept up the parlor and lit a fire in it. There was nothing like a good fire. At least they had a fire.
She moved all her possessions into an upstairs room and when Mayme came home from work they carried the Singer upstairs as well. Jeanine liked the look of the bare room, uninhabited by furniture or pictures. Hers to own, a workplace. One window was covered in cardboard where they had pulled out the broken glass. Her own spare little room was next to it with a window where she could look out on the stacked blue lines of hills disappearing into the east. Jeanine took out the dress and the material and cut them into pieces. Scraps of cloth all over the floor. She cut out the sheer curtain for linings. But she knew clothes weren’t good enough. Pretty clothes wouldn’t get the cedar seedlings torn down or the peach orchard cultivated. She had to go over to the neighbors, the Crowsers, and get them to lend her their tractor. They had to fix the roof or the dust and the solitary, brief rains would drip down the chimney and they would wake up one morning to a cookstove full of water or dirt.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Abel Crowser got up stiffly out of his chair and went into the kitchen. He started a fire in the cookstove and then turned the crank on the battery charger so he could click on the Admiral radio. He had wanted to go over and be friendly but the women all seemed distracted and closed up, and who could blame them? With Jack Stoddard arrested for fooling around on Elizabeth with a young girl and then dead in a jail cell. Anyhow, that’s what they said at the Strawn’s crossroads store. Adultery always made for gripping stories, never failed to take your attention, look at the Vanderbilt trial. It was always a damn train wreck. The women kept to themselves and their dark stallion stood at the fence line and called out to Sheba and Jo-Jo, paced up and down, lonely and, like the rest of the world, without a job.
Abel rolled the knob through the landscape of Central Texas radio, through WBAP out of Fort Worth and KVOO from Tulsa until he found the National Hayride. There was a crackling burst of either static or applause. Alice clattered among the dishes and the flatware. She sang along with the staticky tenor of the music:
I want to be a cowboy’s sweetheart
I want to learn to rope and to ride…
He listened to her and outside the windows the blue night sank in, and the horses settled among themselves which one had priority at the hay bunker. The government had paid him for his underweight cattle and shot them and brought in relief labor to bury them below the house in an eroded ravine. He understood it was to prevent overgrazing but it was still hard. Now the grass was supposed to come back but you can’t have grass without rain.
Alice always had something useful to do no matter what age she got to. He had grown useless. He longed to plow a field again, set in good Red Top sorghum even if he had to drag the sulky plow through baked hardpan. But his old work team was so used to being retired he doubted if he could get a harness on them without a knock-down, drag-out fight.
They sat and ate by the light of the kerosene lamps. In her reflection Alice tipped her cottony head from side to side as Bob Wills and the Light Crust Doughboys sang Take me back to Tulsa, I’m too young to marry…
Alice said, “Abe, have you always been faithful to me?”
He stopped chewing. He stared at her. He swallowed and then he said, “Well, Alice. You know I have.”
“Even when you all were out there working on the Pecos high bridge?”
“You and I were just engaged then.”
“Ha. I knew it.”
“Alice, we were living in tents in Langtry and eating armadillo.”
“Mexico wasn’t five miles away.”
Abel laid his fork down. “Well, the foreman wanted ten feet of iron a day and nobody was stopping for a quick dally with a señorita.”
“I just wanted to know.”
“How come?”
“I thought you ought to get a prize. You should get an award. We could get one up from the Rotary Club there in Mineral Wells.”
“Well, Mother!” He stared out the window. “How would you prove it?”
“Word of honor.”
He was silent for a long time. “Word of honor. There you go.”
They finished their supper. Alice washed the dishes and then sat down with a dress and a needle and thread. Her white hair was cut short and fluffed out in curly waves around her head. She looked like Harpo Marx. Sometimes Abel thought all she needed was one of those ooga horns.
“What are you doing this week?”
“I don’t have much to do, Mother. I finished clearing them seedlings last year. It was something to do anyhow.”
“You could take up sewing.” She smiled and held the dress out to him. The needle and thread were thrust in the collar. “I’ll never tell.”
“Where would I hide the evidence?”
“I’ll take the blame. I’ll say it was me.”
Abel leaned back and smiled at her. “All right, I guess it’s time to confess.”
“Here it comes,” she said.
“I rode in a sidesaddle once.”
“You did not!” Alice stared at him.
“I did. It was before we were married. There wasn’t anybody to home, there on Mama and Daddy’s place. And Mama’s saddle horse was standing tied ready for her but she was in the kitchen arguing with Fat Cissy Cramer. I knew that was going to take all day.
“And I thought, ‘I’ve got to see how they ride in them.’ So I got in the damn thing and got my leg over the leaping horn and went trotting around the barn lot and then I heard somebody holler, some neighbor had come up, and I about went into a heart attack. I couldn’t get loose from it. I had the damnedest time getting out of it.” He snorted into his handkerchief and then tucked it away.
Alice began to laugh.
“It’s hell to get out of them. I nearly killed myself. I thought, ‘If I get hung up in this sidesaddle and I’m getting dragged around the barn lot when somebody comes in, I’ll have to pack up and quit the country.’”
“Who was the neighbor?”
“Thankfully it has been erased from my mind. I am going to forget my own name here one of these days.” In his mind he twisted at a doorknob that would not open. It made him impatient. Then it opened. “Everett’s youngest sister,” he said. “I think.”
They fell into silence and sat listening to a newsman talk about all the alphabet agencies that were to stem the dust storms and get the factories thumping away again. The question about faithfulness, he felt, still had not been deflected even with the sidesaddle story.
He said, “Do you have any confessions to make this evening?” He glanced up at her and observed with interest as she stitched, and folded his hardened hands one over the other.
“Give me a couple of days and I’ll see if I can match that one.” She shook her head. “The things I don’t know about you.”
The fire ate its way through mesquite wood. The two cows he and Alice still kept grazed in the harvested milo field, taking up the gleanings with their ponderous thick tongues. He thought he might go out to the barn and do something to the harness. He might put a saddle on Jo-Jo and tell Alice he had to go out and check on the salt trough. But instead he sat and watched the road for another hour as the possum-belly trucks went past carrying stock from Comanche County. They would kill them and can the good ones and the canned meat would go to the relief agencies. The cans would be placed into the hands of those who had nothing to eat but the gristly meat that the government handed out to them, and they would be grateful for it.
IN MINERAL WELLS the wind bullied scraps of flying cotton from the cotton gin. Buyers stuck their long knives deep into the six-hundred-pound bales to test the quality of the farmers’ cotton and loose bits of lint sailed into the air. There were very few bales at all. What the boll weevil had not eaten the drought h
ad baked crisp. The men waited anxiously, leaning on the wagon wheels, talking and smoking. The crop was very poor, and when they bedded up and plowed the stalks under it had sent dangerous columns of dust into the air.
It came salting over the town, a vague snow of lint. Elizabeth Stoddard and her sister-in-law Lillian Stoddard and Violet Keener sat around the Keeners’ kitchen table.
“The county is going to let us pay a hundred dollars for now,” said Elizabeth. “And twenty a month. That’s as much as Mayme makes.”
Lillian placed her reddened hands together. “I’m sorry about Jack,” she said. “I didn’t want to say much more with Bea there.”
Elizabeth turned her coffee cup around on the saucer and then back again. They wanted to hear all about Jack now that the girls weren’t here. Stories like big ripe watermelons shattered open into bleeding hearts.
“You knew about him for a long time, Liz.” Violet patted her arm. “I always had my doubts.”
Elizabeth blew her nose again. She got up and walked to the window to see the ordinary streets with ordinary people walking down them because she was about to cry again and she was tired of crying, it made her face hurt. She was a good-looking woman but it was difficult to say in what way, for her features were so perfectly regular that there was nothing remarkable in her face at all; she had a wide smile, when she smiled, and ordinary brown hair and blue eyes.
“Jeanine was always his little friend,” said Liz. “She got better treatment than her sisters. She lied for him.”
“Don’t blame her,” said Lillian. “It’s not fair.”
“It’s not a matter of blaming,” she said. “Just makes me hurt when I think of it, that’s all.”
“You knew it before, Liz.”
“I didn’t want to know.”
She began pacing again, to the corner shelf with all of Violet’s dimwitted doodads on it, china cherubs and a Bakelite soldier boy with a thermometer sticking out of his head.
“You two said I was supposed to get my mind on something else.”
Stormy Weather Page 10
