Stormy Weather

by Paulette Jiles

  She eased the silver horse ring from her finger and opened and closed her hands, put it back on.

  “Mayme, when you’re in town look at the junkman’s for paint. Any kind of paint.”

  “I’ll find something,” said Mayme. She shook out the Mineral Wells newspaper. “Wow. Fresh paint.”

  The next day Mayme came back from town with ten gallons of mint green paint left over from when they built the hospital, so old the labels were gone. She had got them for ten cents apiece.

  Dust clouded the windowpanes. Jeanine washed them and then spent three days ripping off the old wallpaper and began painting. The day after it was done she walked again and again through the hall and the parlor to see her shadow thrown on the pale, mint green walls in the pure color and the silence.

  President Roosevelt spoke over the radio. The newspapers had said he would give a fireside chat, if people had a fire, if they were willing to listen to chats. Bea’s face was shining with hope as she listened.

  Happiness lies not in the mere possession of money, it lies in the joy of achievement, in the thrill of creative effort. The joy and moral stimulation of work no longer must be forgotten in the mad chase of evanescent profits. These dark days will be worth what they have cost us if they teach us that our true destiny is not to be ministered to, but to minister to ourselves and our fellow men.

  “Does anybody know what he’s talking about?” asked Elizabeth.

  “Beats me,” said Jeanine and discarded; she and Mayme played Crazy Eights in the winter evening, chasing the elusive one-eyed Jack that would change the suit from clubs to hearts.

  JEANINE WALKED TOWARD the entrance of St. Stephen’s church hall in the remade garnet silk dress and jacket and makeup and her last pair of silk stockings. She felt synthetic, like a mannequin made of pressed sawdust and paint. She and Mayme walked through the pool of light at the entrance, while down the street in front of the squat Romanesque church two boys rode double on an uncurried ranch horse singing Show me the way to go home.

  “Over there,” a lady said. “They’re taking the boxes over there.”

  Jeanine laid her box down on the long table in front of a stout woman in a pie-tin hat. There were stacks of boxes on the floor beside her.

  “Name? We just want to know who to thank for contributing.”

  “Jeanine Stoddard.”

  “Contents?”

  Jeanine held out the list. Her hand thrust out of her stiff new jacket-sleeve ringless except for the little silver horse ring jammed onto her little finger. A blunt, small, inelegant hand.

  The trumpet player on the bandstand blew out a long flat note and a clarinet responded. Mayme’s auburn hair drifted in slow, pretty waves as she took off her coat. Underneath she wore her new dress in the juniper-colored silk.

  “There’s the band!” She turned toward the bandstand as if greeting an old friend. Her skirt flared and settled. “Jeanine, I’ll see you over at that table.”

  Minutes later Jeanine saw her sister stepping out onto the floor of the church hall in the arms of a short man to “Stormy Weather.”

  “Stormy weather,” said an elderly man. “Don’t we all wish.” He stood and held his hand out to his elderly wife. “Let’s get out amongst them, Mother. It’s a rain dance.”

  And then the dance floor was crowded with couples drawn into a two-step by the clarinet’s reedy, sensual tones. Jeanine sat at one of the small tables against the wall and watched her sister swinging around the sanded hardwood floor with the short boy in saddle shoes. There was no sign of Milton Brown. She was sitting alone among the potted palms and tinsel in her new clothes. Trying to have a social life.

  “There she is.” Milton took hold of the back of her chair and cleared his throat. “Boys in the band. A little drink or two.” She turned around and smiled up at him with relief. “Hate social lives. They’re no good. I have nine social lives and a drink always makes things a little easier.” He took off his glasses and wiped them on the tablecloth. “My speech becomes faultless. My accent moves into second gear, which is mid-Atlantic.” He put the glasses on again. “And how do you like your blue-eyed boy now, Mister Death?” He sat beside her and handed her a drink. Jeanine laughed and then drank down the paper cup of rum and Coke and it hit her as if she had been gassed.

  “Fancy meeting you here,” he said. He turned up his own drink. “I don’t know if you want to dance or not but consider it as taking your life in your hands.”

  Milton stood up again and smiled at her. He had been pressed at one time but now he was all wrinkled and his tie seemed to be too tight and it was making his face red.

  Jeanine said, “Oh, Milton.” She took hold of his coat sleeve.

  “Oh, Milton nothing. Shall we dance?”

  He led her onto the dance floor. Jeanine moved with him to help him keep his balance.

  “How are you Jennie? How are you?”

  “I’m fine,” she said. “How are you?”

  “Drunk. It helps. Never good at social things. I remember you in second grade, Jennie. In a yellow dress.”

  “And a yellow sunbonnet,” Jeanine said. “You forgot the sunbonnet.”

  “My memory is going. Next I’ll forget the dress and then where I am and then where my feet are. How is little Bea?”

  A glittering ball beamed revolving fragments of light over potted palms, and a board with the increasing numbers of contributed boxes, that was marked out and rewritten as more and more people came in, and a map of the areas hardest hit by the dust storms, and red paper hearts were plastered up on the walls. They danced unsteadily in the fugitive illumination.

  “Bea is up, and on crutches. She goes to school two times a week now.” Jeanine tried to smile.

  “Darling girl.”

  “Milton.”

  “Jeanine,” he said. “Help me. Repair my ragged coat, feed me, listen to me, clean my glasses, carry me home in a wheelbarrow.”

  Jeanine stood still and took his hand. “Let’s sit down.”

  They sat down and Jeanine waved to her cousin Betty. Betty and her friend Leona lifted their paper cups and shouted as the band played “We’re in the Money.” Jeanine refused somebody who asked her to dance. Her drink was half-empty and she wondered if her cup leaked. But the Episcopalians didn’t particularly care if anybody drank. When she turned back to Milton her drink had been refilled and he half smiled at her as if he had been caught at something. A man in an Army Air Corps uniform came to their table.

  “Do you mind?” he said.

  “No, no, not at all.” Milt invited him with an open hand to dance with Jeanine.

  She danced briefly with him. Then he said thank you and excused himself when he saw Mayme and her satiny auburn hair. Her sister was dancing with a young man in a bow tie and the airman tapped the young man on the shoulder and cut in. Mayme and the Air Corps fellow stepped gracefully across the sanded floor to “San Antonio Rose” and then they came to sit at the table and he shook hands with Milt and it seemed he could not stop smiling at Mayme.

  He said he was home in Tarrant visiting, he had come all the way from Randolph Army Air Field in San Antonio. They had just finished grading off a four-thousand-foot strip before those new AT-6 trainers were taking off.

  “Are you flying them?” asked Mayme.

  “Nope. Maintenance. Single-engine.”

  Milt said, “Jeanine, your face isn’t as long as it was a while ago.”

  “How would I know,” Jeanine said. “I didn’t make my own face.” She put her hand to her chin surreptitiously, and then reached for her drink again.

  Mayme and her Air Corps fellow with the wing-and-star patch on his shoulder were in a musical conversation as they danced a two-step to “You Are My Lucky Star.” Jeanine turned up her drink and emptied it.

  Milton turned to her to say something, and then closed his eyes. He woke up in a moment and stared around himself, as if he expected to find he had disappeared from the dance and then maybe reappeared o
n some other planet. Then he fell asleep again sitting up. Jeanine fanned him with one of the bulletins and went and got a glass of water and sat it in front of him. He woke up and drank it all and shut one eye. Behind his thick glasses the one open eye wandered from one side of the hall to another. Jeanine wasn’t feeling all that great herself. Then two men came up behind Milton and stood there, looking at him for a few moments.

  “Do you mind if we take him home?” said one of them. They seemed old enough to be his father and/or uncle. Their nails were stained very black. “We’re printers,” the other one said. “We’ve got to set type tonight.”

  “He works too hard,” said the other. “Six days a week, ten hours a day.”

  “One drink and he’s a vegetable.”

  “A turnip,” said the other one.

  “Almost never drinks.”

  “He’s a doper. We take his needles away all the time.”

  “So don’t judge him harshly,” said the other one. “Just because he’s knee-walking drunk.”

  “He’s going to be talking to Beulah, the Queen of Porcelain.”

  They chortled. Then they each took him under an arm on either side and walked backward as Milt’s heels dragged two lines on the dance floor and his thick glasses slid forward on his nose. They disappeared into the swinging kitchen doors that snapped shut with a brief flash of light and steam. Jeanine sat turned around in her chair, watching the door flap open and shut for a few times. They had done that before. She started to pull on her gloves. She would go outside and walk around in the fresh air rather than sit here looking like a Kewpie doll that nobody wanted to buy. She was angry and humiliated. It seemed that people were glancing at her in secretive ways so she stared straight ahead stiff as a hammer wanting to knock somebody on the head.

  She had a hard time getting her gloves on. A big red pasteboard heart came loose from the wall and fell down onto the table and knocked over what was left of her drink. The rum and Coke ran off the edge of the tablecloth and splattered on her pumps and stockings. I am so mad, she said. She probably said it aloud. The rum and Coke smelled like something from hell. She wadded up the deceitful pasteboard heart and its fake paper lace and threw it on the floor. Her sister and the Army Air Corps man could hardly stop talking to each other. Her cousin Betty and Si were badgering the band for some swing music so they could jitterbug, and the dancing couples were all absorbed in one another, turning like planets in their own private courses. Jeanine thought about walking all fifteen miles home. Everybody else was having a good time; Mayme was clumsily trying to smoke a cigarette and laughing, fumes enveloped her hair, she looked both happy and flammable.

  Jeanine turned to see Ross Everett sitting beside her.

  He held his hat in one hand and in the other a cigarette glowed. He had apparently just skinned his knuckles. Jeanine tried to focus on him.

  “Well, what brings you here?” She delicately lifted her hair away from her forehead, afraid she would poke herself in the eye.

  “I volunteered to carry all the Red Cross boxes to Fort Worth,” he said. “To the Red Cross distribution depot.” He leaned back in his chair and crossed his legs at the ankles. His boots were shined.

  “How’s my horse?”

  “Good. I’ve plowed out an exercise track.”

  “How’s the ranch? Meanwhile.”

  “Meanwhile, back at the ranch.” The low light behind him lit up all his wool edges and his short-cropped hair. “Getting ready to buy up the mohair shear crop. Store it. Wait it out.” He drank from a small glass. “I’m throwing a tenant out of one of my tenant houses. That takes up a lot of time and yelling.”

  “That’s cruel.” She sat up in a wave of indignation and then found herself unable to sustain it and fell back in the chair again. “That’s not fair.”

  “No,” he said. “It’s not.”

  “You’re throwing children out into the snow.”

  “Throwing them out into the dust is probably just as good.” He reached across the table and picked up her hat, inspected it, and then put it down again. “I’m trying to think of a compliment. I love that ratty squirrel fur collar.” He thought again. “And the color of your dress is very good for you. A kind of furious bloody purple.”

  “I’ve been abandoned right here in front of strangers.”

  “You have your sister and your cousin here, I see.”

  “And you got Smoky Joe,” she said. “My horse. I could have raced him myself.”

  “You have a ten percent interest in him.”

  “And you took Maisie and Jeff and Big Man and Little Man too, and you sold them.” She couldn’t stop herself. Anger rose up like smoke out of her ruined heart. Ross Everett gazed back at her. He wore the same worn three-piece herringbone suit, and a white muffler of rough silk was draped over his shoulders. It made him look like a man in a magazine advertisement, or as if he were about to offer communion. She wondered where he got it. Probably his dead wife. Jeanine’s hand drifted to her eyes. She brushed away a small accumulation of tears.

  “You’re drunk.”

  “No, I’m not.”

  “You could at least not be drunk in public. Stay home and drink Lydia Pinkham in the barn.”

  “I’m sober as anything,” she said. “As whatever things are sober.”

  “And you’re about to get mean.” He drew on the cigarette.

  “You’re just dying to ask me out, aren’t you?”

  She was indeed drunk or she wouldn’t have said it.

  “No.” He took the cigarette from his mouth and turned in his chair to shove it into the dirt of a potted palm.

  “Why not?”

  “My boy runs them all off.”

  “Children need discipline.”

  “I’m taking you home.”

  He got up and went away and then came back, put her coat over her shoulders and helped her get her arms into the sleeves. She suddenly seemed to have four arms but he managed. They crossed the street in the cool night air and he lifted her into his two-tone Dodge pickup in the parking lot of the men’s store.

  They pulled up in front of the old Tolliver farmhouse where the lamps were on and the second story stared into the winter night from blind windows. The light from the parlor lamp spilled out onto the long front veranda through the thick Virginia creeper vine, and their five-leaved clusters threw spider shadows. She trod on a saucer of milk and bread crusts. There was milk all over her pumps.

  “Let’s sit on the porch a minute,” he said. “Until you sober up.”

  “My mother will jerk a knot in my tail,” she said. “If she knew I’d been drinking.”

  “Well, just sit here for a minute.”

  They sat for a while as the sky cleared over the Brazos valley in scudding small clouds. He put his left boot up on his knee and ran his hand over it. The stars turned on their immense and distant wheels and Orion stood out in blazing winter jewels.

  He turned his hat in his hands. “Here’s the plan, Jeanine. You choose Smoky’s colors. Racing colors. And come with me when we cash in at the official tracks.”

  “That means we’re dating. That means your kid is going to put a hole in my truck with double O buckshot.”

  “I’ll break his arm. We’re not dating. We’re business partners.”

  From inside they heard the radio laughter from Fibber McGee and Mollie. Milton said their names were really Jim and Marian Jordan, that they had tried out for the Crazy Water radio program but they got turned down. So they went to New York and said to hell with you, Texas. Jeanine listened for a moment, staring at the spur marks on his boots and then lifted her wobbly head and said, “Ross, don’t say anything to my mother about my percentage.” She put her hand on his coat sleeve.

  He ignored her hand and her sudden alarmed expression and sat sturdy as a post in his heavy wool suit and the odor of cigarette smoke and Lysol. Inside the kitchen Bea and her mother had turned off the radio and were singing “We Are Marching to Zion.” The
ir voices poured out of the kitchen into the halls and rooms and out onto the veranda of the old house. Jeanine closed her eyes for a minute and still behind her eyelids Orion swarmed with stars on his shoulders. She suddenly felt ill and bent forward.

  “Are you going to throw up?”

  “No. Not yet.” She opened her dress collar for air. He reached over and pulled it back gently and saw the blue bruises around her neck.

  “Have you tried to hang yourself, Jeanine?”

  “No. Don’t tell Mother.”

  “Don’t tell Mother what?”

  He waited a moment. He contained his exasperation by drumming his fingers on the chair arm.

  “I got my scarf hung up in the drive chain of the cultivator. Both ends. It finally ripped loose.”

  He took a pack of Lucky Strikes from his coat pocket and shook one out.

  “Is this going to bother you?”

  “No.” She fell against the chair back again.

  “You’d probably feel better if you threw up.”

  “I don’t want to throw up.”

  “You may not have any choice.”

  Jeanine drew in another deep breath through her nose. “Don’t talk about it and I won’t.”

  Sparks from his cigarette sprayed into the dark. “Is there some kind of gear cover on it?”