Stormy Weather

by Paulette Jiles

  “No, n-no,” he said. “Just two or three in the past month. A m-month has fled past me during which t-time I have proposed nothin’ to nobody, not nohow.” He bent forward and kissed her. His breath was fragrant with mint and blackberries. “If I could ever get over my stutter I would duh-drop all this cynicism. It’s flat and shallow isn’t it? It’s the fashion.” He dipped into the bowl again. “Just through these copper wires, imagine, the voice and, uh, words have more power and import than they ever have in human history.” He waved his spoon. Jeanine stopped eating the mint and blackberries and listened. “Never has the human language been so imp-p-portant and that’s because far away things are now reaching out t-t-t-to us, we aren’t protected anymore here behind the Continental shelf. We can saturate people with words. They believe them. It’s lovely. I want to do that. Come with me to Chicago, Jenny. Sweet Jenny.”

  “You’re going to some school for elocution,” she said. “In Chicago.”

  He nodded and put one hand to his mouth, briefly. “Learn to speak at will. You don’t know…” He paused and his eyes had a watery brightness. “What a weight it is. Like every w-w-word is weighted or ch-chained.” He took up a triangular piece of ice in the bowl of his spoon. “I have a talent, Jeanine. A g-gift, and it is languishing in chains. So unfair!” He breathed out a long breath and swallowed. “It’s so unfair. And I don’t know why.” He wiped his forehead and then became himself again. “We could make p-plans,” he said. “Plots. I like plotting better than p-planning.”

  “You don’t have any money, Milton,” she said. “Are you going to go to school in Chicago on cabbages?”

  “Wait and see,” he said. “Juuu-just wait.” He spooned up the last bite, deep purple berries and syrup and bits of candy cane, and put it to her lips and she swallowed it. “Move in town,” he said. “B-b-beautiful Jeanine, of the gray eyes. Town is b-better. Even your cousin has running water. Even I have running water. Why not?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “If I said I just loved being out there, would that sound crazy?”

  “Yes. Everybody wants to get off the d-d-damn farm, Jeanine.”

  They sat together on his cot and listened to Kaltenborn’s report from Munich. Jeanine closed her eyes and lay back with Milton’s arm over her shoulder. They were trading countries with one another, chopping off pieces here and there and handing them around. She thought about moving into town. And then to a bigger town, the excitement of Chicago or St. Louis. They were all moving someplace else anyway, weren’t they? This thought made her heart constrict, briefly, and an image came into her mind of the old house empty once again. She could hear the sound of a T &P freight going through Tarrant, such a small place in the middle of Central Texas with the power plant on the Leon River and the farm and ranch stores, the town swimming pool and the doctor with his cactus growing in the front yard and the hotel where oil leases were sold and marriages betrayed, the rodeo grounds swirling with dust. And beyond the electric lights, the dark hills. Radio waves passed through all these things and were invisible as speech. The Tolliver house and the town of Tarrant suddenly seemed unimportant and common. Jeanine found herself in an anxious dream, walking behind several black-and-white people who were dressed in glossy stylish clothes; she was saying something that nobody was listening to. They would not listen to her. She and Milton were slumped against each other and sound asleep when Betty hammered on the door, yelling for them to wake up.

  JEANINE WADDED HERSELF up on Betty’s couch in a nightgown. Betty’s face was hot and sweaty, she twisted up her hair and said she’d been smooching with Si, and then they got into an argument, right there in the China Moon dance palace, and then they made up and the smooching went on unabated until she tore herself away and ran up the stairs to find Jeanine and Milton asleep and the big Philco radio blasting out Hawaiian dance music. Betty was covered in a yellow nightgown as big as a parachute. Her dark Stoddard hair snarled up in a tangle of pin curls. Lights from a passing car washed across the ceiling and the music of a radio from somewhere down at street level came to them. Betty frowned at her fingernails. She reached for an emery board on her nightstand. “Come on, Jeanine, go to work somewhere in Fort Worth. You could get a good job somewhere. Buy some nice clothes, you could be a receptionist. You could go to work in a flower shop or Montgomery Ward. There’s decent jobs around.”

  “I couldn’t stand it,” said Jeanine. The thought of dressing up every day and living in a town and hurrying to please people was enough to freeze her blood. She could never manage to please people and especially not for five dollars a week. “I like to dress in rags and make chicken coops. I’m my own boss.”

  Betty didn’t laugh. “Get a dull stupid job,” she said. “Like me. And go out dancing or something in the evenings. Ross Everett is very serious about you.” Betty got up and poked in her little cupboard and found a waxed-paper sleeve of Saltines and jumped back in her bed and threw some to Jeanine. “Ross’d just love you in a playsuit. Can’t you just picture yourself spraying cows with tick dip and wearing a playsuit?” They ate Saltines and scattered crumbs on the sheets.

  “I like being at our place. I don’t want a playsuit. Why doesn’t anybody listen to me?” Jeanine found she had dribbled cracker crumbs into the neck of her nightgown and she tried to slap them away. “Why am I eating these things?”

  “And now Milton Brown, you buy yourself a satin dress for dancing in, and those little open-toed numbers I showed you, and he’s a dead man. Dead. Just get a job for a while and buy yourself some nice clothes, Jeanine. It ain’t forever.” Betty sighed with a big Ooof sound. She was exhausted from all the arguing and smooching with Si. “You’re seeing two different men! Now that’s what I call a social life. You got to nail down Milton, though. That’s the kind of guy he is. You got to nail his shoes to the floor.”

  “You’re not listening to me, Betty. This is like a nightmare.” Jeanine stared out the window. Then sleep nearly overcame her. She lifted her head and searched in her straw purse for her handkerchief and blew her nose. “When you talk and people don’t hear anything you say.”

  “Si keeps wanting to get married,” Betty said. “But I’m having too much fun right now. I ain’t ready for kids and housework.” Betty watched another car crawl by on the street below. “And we’re going to have some oil well money coming in.”

  “Betty, there ain’t going to be any oil well money.”

  “Yes there is. That well is going to come in.”

  “Come in what? Sour gas and salt water probably.”

  “Mama says it’s good.”

  “Good for what?” Jeanine yawned until tears ran, and then flopped back on the pillow.

  “She says it’s going to come in, girl.” Betty stared out the window into the faintly lit night of the small town. Then her eyes slid shut. “Going to be high-gravity and under pressure.”

  “You tell me how you know that,” said Jeanine. “But you ain’t going to answer, you’re going to sleep.”

  “No I am not, I’m just checking my eyelids for holes.”

  In a minute Betty fell into a light snoring. Jeanine thrashed around on the narrow couch and could not sleep; she looked out into the street where trees bent like hair, brushed by the wind that had come up out of the southeast as if there might be a hurricane down in the Gulf, as if this wind might reach all the way to Palo Pinto County bearing rain. Jeanine thought that if she lived in a big city it would no longer matter if it rained or not.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  The stores and offices on the main streets of Tarrant were bright with posters declaring we must all work together to bring America out of the economic emergency. At the MacComber House soup kitchen Jeanine made coffee and cut up donated, stringy beef for the soup. She washed her hands and sat down at a table with five other girls and threaded a needle. It was hard to hold all the material down with pieces of scrap iron and cut pipe rings but they could not do without the fan blowing on them. The streets ou
tside wavered with heat distortion. They were piecing together dust masks to be sent to other Red Cross centers. Most would go up to the Panhandle hospitals, to Lubbock and Amarillo, where the dust storms were the worst. The streets were filled with train noises and crowds. Martha Jane Armstrong showed up to help make decorations for the Fourth of July benefit dance and Betty came with a box of linen scraps. Uncertain, ragged families strung themselves one by one through the door and stood silently, waiting to be told, to be offered something and too proud to ask.

  Jeanine told Martha about the drive chain on the cultivator grabbing her scarf and Martha said she’d better carry a knife, she didn’t know how many people had caught their clothes in machinery and got killed. You need to cut yourself loose and if all else fails you can jam the blade in the gears.

  A stout woman named Bricey was the democratically elected head of the Mineral Wells Relief Committee and she had a voice like a sawmill whistle. Jeanine remembered her from the Valentine’s Day dance, where she had sat behind a table and took in the boxes, gray as cast iron and completely unmoved by the traveling light-spots that rained on her pie-tin hat, sorting the small gifts for poor people given by other poor people.

  Now Bricey cut sandwiches with a big carving knife, and laid them out in stacks. A family of four sat down on the unsprung couch and the mother handed the sandwiches to her husband and two small children. Jeanine glanced at them and away again. Like we used to be, she thought. On their way to something better.

  “You girls just think I am a stodgy old lady,” said Bricey. She turned the key on another can of Spam. “But I have a secret life.”

  “Well, tell us,” said Betty. “Don’t hold back.”

  “I am an astronomer.”

  They all said, No! Bricey smiled.

  “Does that mean stars?” somebody asked in a whisper.

  “Tell us,” said Martha Jane.

  So Bricey told them about the telescope on the roof of her house and how she went out on clear nights to see the rings of Saturn, and the canals of Mars, light-years from this town, so slack and depressed. The stillness afflicted her. The rising dust storms. So she went up to her roof and gazed out into the limitless Great Otherwise and worlds upon worlds.

  “So there. My secret life.”

  Jeanine smiled at Bricey, surprised. Bricey sat up on the roof and drank in the light of the stars like a little old nocturnal hummingbird. She had her own secret life there. And she dressed in dumpy dresses and her awful gray hat in the daytime. Jeanine realized she knew so little about people; that she and her family had moved around so much they had always depended only on each other and she in truth knew as little about the world as a nun. Jeanine’s big stitches galloped across a square of layered gauze.

  Bricey had a small round mouth and never wore lipstick and when she smiled it showed her gold tooth.

  “And I knew your mother, Jeanine. I think it’s marvelous that she bought into that oil well.”

  “You knew my mother?”

  “You were born here, Jeanine. Y’all weren’t brought up on a desert island.” Bricey took her hairbrush from her purse and brushed back Jeanine’s hair. “You should let your hair grow out, honey, and do it in one of those pompadours. It would make you look older.”

  Jeanine sat carefully still while Bricey drew her short hair back and thought about the effect and then let it spring back to its brief waves.

  “How did you know my mother?”

  “Why, we went to high school together! She was a freshman and I was graduating. Oh she was so pretty. She’s still pretty. And that oil well is just the thing for her. She can busy herself to death with that thing and it’ll never come in and so she can buy into another one. She should have done something like that years ago.” She smiled and ruffled Jeanine’s flyaway hair. “I’m glad y’all are back, Jeanine,” she said. “Y’all have had your troubles but I’m glad you’re back.”

  “Thank you,” said Jeanine, and wished she knew how to say more; something more of the sudden rush of gratitude for such simple words.

  “And how is Bea?”

  “She’s going to have that cast off pretty soon.”

  “Is Mrs. Beasley taking good care of her?”

  “Yes,” said Jeanine, and her good feelings evaporated at the image of Winifred Beasley and her bird’s-nest hat. She went to stand in front of the electric fan. “But if she keeps on ordering us around she isn’t going to live out the summer. I swear I’ll throw her down the well.”

  “Jeanine!” Bricey jammed the hairbrush back into her purse and shut it up hard. “I didn’t know you were like that.” She closed her mouth over the gold tooth. “Winifred has dedicated her life to rural nursing. She is selfless. She has worked without cease.”

  Betty stared at her cousin and put a finger to her lips.

  “Well excuse me,” said Jeanine. “I didn’t know you knew her.” Jeanine sat down and started stitching quickly.

  Bricey sat down with pinking shears and began cutting out linen squares. “Absolutely selfless,” she said. Jeanine felt like she ought to leave but Ross was supposed to come in on the afternoon train and she wanted to meet him and hear if he got a contract or not. She wondered if they would remain friends if Milton Brown presented her with an engagement ring and declared his undying love and set a date to m-m-marry her and they would stroll among the dinosaur tracks and kiss beside the drying bed of the Brazos where catfish swam in circles in the shrinking holes of water. Then they would get on a train to Chicago with everybody throwing shoes and rice and then herself and Milton in a Pullman bed. She turned toward the door as the Old Valley Road teacher, Miss Callaway, hurried inside with a box containing jars of red, white, and blue poster paint and a tube of sparkles. She wore a light pink printed cotton dress and she was crying. She stopped and put the box down and shook out a handkerchief and wiped her eyes.

  “Why, Lou-Ann!” said Bricey. “What is it?”

  Lou-Ann Callaway motioned toward the back room and Bricey got up and followed her. They all listened intently; they heard the kind of pressured noise people make when they are whispering at top volume. It was something about a young man. Martha raised her eyebrows and kept sewing. Who was seeing someone else, she had just discovered. Betty thumped her heart with a fist and rolled her eyes. Martha Jane placed her wrist against her forehead and pretended to faint. Jeanine heard the faraway noise of the train whistle as it crossed the Brazos River Bridge coming into Mineral Wells, and said she would be back later. She knew that sooner or later Bricey was going to have a long chat with Winifred Beasley and that something would come of it; something unpleasant.

  THROUGH THE HEAT waves and engine steam she saw Ross Everett stepping off the westbound passenger train. He took off his hat and came walking toward her. “I figured I would find you here. This is one of your days at the Red Cross.”

  She came to him and took his coat sleeve in her hand. He laid his hand over hers and bent down to kiss her hot face. The smell of his body and skin was very intimate; tobacco, train, sweat, himself. He said they would go somewhere cool, the drugstore, and have something cold, and he would tell her about his contract if she were interested, and then he would drive her home when the temperature had cooled down. He told her about the rain he had seen in the East. Sheets of it. The feel and air of the world when it was drenched and running with water. One beautiful rain after another.

  They drove back out to the Tolliver farm in the blue evening, listening to his car radio. She bent forward and turned it up when she heard the first strains of “Stormy Weather.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  It was toward the end of July that they got the telephone. Joe Keener backed toward the house, unreeling telephone line from a large spool. He bored holes in the wall and ran the line in and tested it with a kick meter that registered things called megohms. The next day the phone rang and Mayme screamed.

  “What was that??”

  Her mother said calmly, “The telephone
.”

  Jeanine lifted her head with the scissors in her hand.

  Mayme said, “How many times does it ring?”

  “Just answer it!” Elizabeth said.

  “Maybe it’s Vernon!” Mayme clapped the large receiver to her head. “Hello!” she shouted. “Hello!”

  “Don’t shout,” said Elizabeth.

  Mayme carefully laid the receiver down. “It’s for you, Mother. There’s a shareholders’ meeting.”

  The shareholders and others with the certificates of interest met in St. Stephen’s church hall. Elizabeth told people how she had learned about the meeting from a telephone call. Their own telephone in their own parlor. She sat with her purse on her lap and a feeling of desperation. The producer wore his loudest tie, an orange and blue fish pattern, and held up charts and graphs while they all shouted at him. He said they had reached two thousand feet at very little cost, why, it had hardly cost six thousand to drill that far and that was cheaper than he had ever imagined. All they needed was to drive it a little farther. It was down there. Elizabeth stood up and spoke at a public meeting for the first time in her life. Mr. Lacey the connections foreman sat in the back row unnoticed and listened to her. She pulled at her gray cotton gloves nervously and her voice shook but she asked the producer if he was slant drilling and he swore he was not and wondered how this woman knew about slant drilling. Then she asked if he had tried acid, and he said they couldn’t afford acid, all they needed was a few more hundred feet. Oil wants to migrate. Oil always wants to go somewhere else, it wants to be on top, it wants to wander. It is wanton and unfaithful, it’s almost always riding on salt water, looking for better company. It ain’t lying down there in a big pool. It’s in the pores in sandstone. Smashed into the pores among sand grains and under pressure if we’re lucky. In another five hundred feet, we should hit the sand.

  George Lacey stood up. Elizabeth turned to see who was speaking. He said, “And when and if it comes in, it could be oil, it could be oil and gas, it could be oil and salt water or gas and salt water. If it comes in gas you stand a good chance of blowing yourself up along with the derrick if there’s a live flame anywhere. If it’s H2S it will kill the whole crew. And if you live through that, if you get oil, you got to lay production pipeline to get it somewhere.”