Stormy Weather

by Paulette Jiles

  “We all know that, Mr. Lacey,” said Spanner. “There will be enough to pay off everybody and lay the pipelines. You ought to know, Mr. Lacey. Your company’s field isn’t ten miles away, and if Magnolia has ten producing wells there, then, you see.”

  Elizabeth Stoddard remained standing, and did not sit down, and was not comforted. She said she wanted to see the old well log, the one from when they had drilled there five years before. Mr. Spanner laughed and said of course but well logs are hard to read.

  “I can read one, Mr. Spanner,” she said. “I would like for it to be made available.”

  Mr. Spanner said he would have it at the next meeting, in a week’s time.

  At the end of the meeting Mr. Lacey pushed his way through the crowd. He made a gesture with his hat at her in lieu of tipping it and then put it on his head. He asked Elizabeth if he could be of any service and if she needed a ride home.

  “Well, no,” she said. “I, well, no thank you, Mr. Lacey.”

  “I have the old well log,” he said.

  “You do?” People pushed past them in the hallway. The school seemed abandoned and bereft of children’s voices in the summer night; the closed rooms seemed dead.

  “Yes.” He took her elbow and with the other hand gestured toward his car. “You know, the City Lights Café has good big tables where we could sit and look at it. Have something cool to drink.”

  She paused and then said, “That sounds very nice.”

  THE ARMSTRONG HOUSE and headquarters was a lunatic asylum with hundreds of Angoras jammed into the pens and the scorching sound of electric shears and the howling engine of the generator, the Mexican crew singing “Los Caminos de Guanajuato” on the shearing platform. They peeled the silky mohair from the soft, baggy bodies like onionskin. The goats were then carried to another pen and by this time they were silent and stupid, their thin-boned bodies hung in a man’s arms like a grain sack. Mrs. Armstrong sprayed gentian violet on the shear cuts and then the mature does were run into one pen and the yearlings into another. Ross Everett leaned on the pen rails, watching. Men loaded the four-hundred-pound bags of mohair onto Everett’s two-ton trucks as soon as it was bagged, pounded down, and the burlap sewn shut and tagged.

  Jeanine and Martha Jane were in the bunkhouse trying on the wedding dress. They were both stripped down to their underwear. Every room in the Armstrong house was jammed with equipment and cartons of medicines and men walking in and out and so they had come out to the bunkhouse. Like everybody else, the Armstrongs had had to let their help go, so now the bunkhouse was a sort of tack room and toolshed, made of corrugated steel. Saddles were piled one on top of another and bridles and halters hung from nails in the beams and every metal surface gleamed with heat.

  Martha Jane wanted to see how it looked on, and so Jeanine pulled the dress on over her head and Martha pinned her up in back. Jeanine tried to walk gracefully in the long skirts but she stumbled over cans of sheep dip chemical and the long hoses of a cactus burner. The steel walls made cracking noises from the heat. Outside the thermometer said 100 and inside the bunkhouse it had to be at least 105.

  Jeanine picked up her marking chalk from a table full of paper shotgun shells beside the pellet-loading device. She handed it to Martha. “Here, mark where the shoulder pads go,” she said. “Why don’t y’all have a mirror?”

  “Soon as I sell my ram.” Martha Jane’s hands were wet with sweat as she laid quick white stripes on the shoulder with the chalk. “I got a good ram out of those dogies.” She stepped back. “You’re thinner than me.” She took a fistful of waist. “But it looks good. Turn around.”

  “Okay, but get your sweaty hands off it, Martha.” Jeanine turned in a slow spin and the yards of skirt floated out and snagged on the iron bedstead legs. She clutched up the material and said, “I’m going to pass out.”

  “Don’t,” said Martha Jane.

  “Martha, you’ve got to get this thing off of me.”

  “Wait, wait.” Martha chalked the buttonhole lines and then Jeanine pulled off the supple yardage of the wedding dress and took up an enamel pitcher of water and poured it over her head. She stood skinny and soaked in her underpants and brassiere with water dripping from her elbows and ears. It ran into her cotton socks. She wiped at her face with a towel and gasped.

  “It’s going to fit you,” she said.

  “We got to get out of here,” said Martha Jane. “I don’t care when he gets back, we are getting married in December.” Martha took the pitcher from Jeanine and dipped the towel in it to wipe her face. Sweat ran into her eyes and burned until she could hardly see. “I got to go help Mother, Jeanine.” She pulled on her jeans and an old shirt of her father’s. “Stay and eat with us and the crew.”

  “I’ve got work at home,” said Jeanine. In reality she was afraid they would be eating goat. Goat babies. She wrapped the dress in its sheet, stuck straight pins in it to hold it together. “I can’t believe I am going to fire up that cookstove.”

  “Have y’all got electricity yet?”

  “Soon as y’all pay me.”

  “Get it from Daddy now,” said Martha Jane. “Before he spends it on does. He’ll blow it on does.”

  “Okay.”

  “God, I tell you, I’d about rather go be a missionary in Borneo than go through another shearing.” Martha pulled a comb through her hair. Jeanine put her chalk and scissors and spools of thread into an old purse she used for a kit. Martha pulled on her boots. She stood up and stamped her feet to jam her heels into the boots. She stamped again and walked out into a yellow blaze that seemed to swallow her up.

  Jeanine stepped out of the bunkhouse. At the door she gasped at the inferno radiating from the corrugated steel wall. She ran for the back porch of the Armstrong house, to the water bucket that hung from a spike nail, and under it a lusty growth of peppermint where the water was thrown by exhausted men whose shirts and underwear stuck to their bodies in the unvarying heat. She came upon Ross Everett with his pants undone, his belt hanging loose, his shirt open. His shorts were striped blue and hung from his hip bones. She screamed in a faint, hoarse noise. It was all she could manage.

  “Hello,” he said.

  “Why don’t you just strip naked?” said Jeanine. She turned her back.

  “You’re a virgin, Jeanine,” he said. “I can tell.”

  He took off his hat and poured a dipper of water over his head, and then began to stuff his shirt into his waistband.

  She felt dizzy with the heat and so she took a firm hold of the porch rail. “Can you say it a little louder?” she said. “They can’t hear you in the kitchen.”

  He zipped up his pants and buckled his belt.

  “Are you about to pass out?”

  “Yes.” She liked his voice, it was a strong voice with that sliding West Texas accent. “Just about.”

  He took hold of the collar of her shirt, touching her hot skin with his fingertips. He pulled it away from her neck and with the other hand scooped up a dipper of water from the bucket. He poured the water down into her shirt, flooding her breasts and ribs. Jeanine closed her eyes and he poured another over her head. “Hold out your hands.” He poured another dipperful into her cupped hands and she splashed it into her face. “How’s the dress?”

  “Ross, it’s beautiful.”

  He took the bucket from the giant nail and emptied it over her head and then set it beneath the pump. He filled it and hung it up again.

  “Good.”

  Jeanine said, “I could throw myself into the stock tank.”

  He shifted his hat to the back of his head. She was good to look at; drops sparkled in her eyebrows and on small tips of hair that hung against her cheeks. He handed her the towel and watched her wipe her face with it.

  “Come and see the shearing.”

  “Couldn’t you just tell me about it?”

  “No.” She followed him in her soaked shirt and overlong Levi’s, her hands over her ears because the violent noise of hundr
eds of distraught Angoras had risen to a deafening level. With his broad hand he gently turned back the fleece of a pinioned goat. The hair grew from the skin with a slight wave to it, it had the sheen of mother-of-pearl. “They’re taking it raw at the mill in Rhode Island, sticks and goat shit excuse me and lice and all. A few bags at a time.”

  “Why do they take it raw?”

  “Because they want to handle it themselves.” He stood back and two men chivvied the doe toward the shearing shed. “You need perfectly pure water, a neutral pH, to wash it and workers with great patience to comb the staple out or you end up with something that looks like mattress stuffing and will never be untangled in our lifetime. The water in Rhode Island comes from granite wells. Our water is alkaline, with this limestone. It’s very delicate fiber.”

  He walked at the edge of the frantic activity, for he was the buyer and the manager of the shearing and he would not get in the men’s way once they had begun. Two of the Mexican shear crew did not get a gate shut quickly enough and goats began to pour through it, suddenly becoming liquid, a dusty current of suds foaming out.

  Jeanine laid down the sheeted package of dress and ran forward. She grasped one of the goats by the horns and a man yelled at her, No por las cuernas! The goat twisted its head around so that it seemed it had a rubber neck. She was in the middle of four men all laying hands on the goats, gripping them by the shaggy hair.

  “Let go,” said Ross. He had a full-grown doe in his arms and waded through the noise and the dust. “You’ll bust those horns.”

  She let go of the horns and seized the doe up in her arms and carried her toward the shearing shed. The animal was baggy and loose in all its bones. They were bred for hair and for nothing else, not brains or hardiness or bone or color or flesh. The goat dropped pellets all down her jeans. A man took the doe from her and the gate was shut. Ross wiped his shirtsleeve across his face and streaked it with sweat and dust. She turned at the sound of shouts, men harried more goats into the hands of Mrs. Armstrong and now Martha Jane, who jabbed each Angora with a syringe of sore-mouth vaccination.

  Jeanine wiped her face on her sleeve. “It’s hard to believe Mr. Armstrong took up goats without somebody putting a pistol to his head,” said Jeanine.

  “It’s ranching life, honey.”

  “You should see their bedroom, Ross. It’s not a bedroom. It’s full of goat medicine and clippers and dirty Levi’s. What kind of a married life is this?”

  Ross turned and rested both elbows on the rails of the pen. “Good question,” he said. He lifted his head to the view away from the headquarters; a rising slope of mountain, complicated by limestone bluffs and fallen square boulders. The grass had shrunk into disparate clumps and was as crisp as paper. Prickly pear climbed up the slope with lifted round bats. He turned to watch the shearing crew fleecing off great sheaves of silky mohair in the suspended dust of the shearing shed. The gasoline engine thudded heavily. It was running on kerosene, which was cheaper than gas, but its smell was oily and hot. The shearer finished with a doe and dropped a red mountain laurel bean into a can as a counter.

  “I’d never live like this,” Jeanine said. She drooped on the fence and held to an upright.

  He nodded. “Mrs. Armstrong probably said the same thing.”

  She shoved the heels of her hands against her eyes to wipe away the running salty sweat. He took off his hat and ran his finger around the sweat band. The generator choked and failed. There were shouts and recriminations over who had not brought more kerosene, and then a man came lugging a jerrican. Ross fished in his shirt pocket for a cigarette. The generator sparked and snorted and started again.

  For some reason she couldn’t figure out herself she took his lighter from his hand and lit his cigarette for him and he drew on it. She dropped the old Zippo into his palm. He was silent for a few moments; smoke drifted around his fist.

  “Jeanine, you’re just always messing with me.”

  “I know it.”

  Over the shouts and baaing and noise of the generator, a loud and splintering crunch. One of Ross’s drivers had backed a haulage truck into the feed shed and smashed the rain gutter into a V. The truck sat in the driveway fully loaded and ready to go to the warehouse in Comanche and the kid had smashed up the rain gutter and part of the stock racks.

  “Well kiss my ass,” he said. He threw down the cigarette and stepped on it.

  Jeanine watched with interest. He would lose his temper and do something spectacular. He would commit some violence upon the sweating teenage driver. He left her and vaulted over a low fence made of railroad ties, and jerked open the truck door and said, Get out. She waited to see if he would lay his enormous hand on the boy’s collar and snatch him out into the dirt. The boy beat him to it. He turned and jumped to the ground.

  “Sorry, Mr. Everett!”

  “Shut up.”

  Ross climbed in and began the long process of shifting, moving an inch forward so as not to take the rain gutter with the truck, turning, backing. He spun the wheel and she saw his lips moving, he was swearing.

  “Mr. Everett, I didn’t see-”

  “Shut the hell up.” He got the truck clear and got out again, slammed the door, went to look at the gutter. “Don’t talk to me when I’m busy.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “You’ll fix that when you get back from the warehouse,” he said. “First you’re dropping Jeanine off at her house.”

  “Yes sir, Mr. Everett.”

  “You’re lucky I didn’t kill you.”

  “I know it.”

  After she said good-bye to the Armstrongs he handed her into the cab of the truck. She held the silk dress safely wrapped in the sheet. She had the fifty dollars in her jeans pocket.

  “What if it had been me that smashed up that gutter?” she said.

  The young driver turned quickly and walked over to the feed shed and pretended a deep interest in the twisted convolutions of the tin gutter. Ross cleared his throat and hitched up his pants. He stared at the goat pens with a blank face for several seconds.

  “I understand what you’re saying.” He reached up to the windshield wiper and pressed back a loose edge. “Would you like some kind of promise that I would never lose my temper with you?”

  Although no particular words came to Jeanine’s mind she knew that she stood at the very thin edge of a commitment, of binding promises exchanged. Which might lead to hot, stiff wedding dresses that shut around your waist like a clamp, a bedroom full of blackleg medicines in boxes and piled horse blankets, and if they were both worn out, to arguments and broken vows. And leaving the Tolliver farm where she had worked so hard, and had made the place her own with nobody to account to. How could she just trust in words? Words words words.

  “No, Ross, don’t make any promises.” But still she reached out to him and laid her hand on his neck, beneath the collar. She didn’t care if the Armstrongs saw her. She loved the touch of him. Still she wavered and drew her hand away and laid it on the sheeted packet of silk. “You just carry on all you want.”

  He smiled, and slapped his hand on the door and stood back. “See you in a week.”

  She held the packet carefully all the way home. The dress now only needed the skirt lining and twenty-five buttons up the back. And Tim Joplin, who was three hundred miles away.

  She made up her bed neatly with the chenille bedspread, and the satin pillow with the sprayed-on legend, EL PASO LAND OF SUNSHINE. The cool air of the early morning rolled in through the tall windows and katydids sang in the oaks outside with their long, crawling noise. She dressed in an ironed blouse and clean Levi’s, brushed her hair and clipped on the earrings, looked in the mirror and was pleased with herself. The cotton had opened into its four leaves each and Abel was drawing the cultivator through the rows. Jeanine herself was turning and leaving out in some kind of interior rain, washed and wet and bright, despite the drought. Despite anything and everything an image of herself reaching out toward Ross came into her
mind again and again, and she understood, all by herself, without reading it in a novel or hearing it on a radio program, that falling passionately in love with someone, without reservation or holding back, was good for the heart. For its valves and its arteries and that invisible shadow of the heart called the soul. Falling in love was good for the soul. However. And Jeanine felt herself stuck in the However.

  A letter, or rather a sort of announcement, came from Winifred Beasley that stated it had come to her notice that Mrs. Stoddard was investing in an oil well, and if that were the case they certainly were not justified in taking relief supplies and in fact there could be an examination of the possibility that Mrs. Stoddard was involved in welfare fraud. If Mrs. Stoddard wished to continue to receive relief supplies for her daughter, to wit Bea Stoddard, would she please present herself to the county relief committee. Many other families were in need and it was unconscionable of her to take supplies that others were so in need of yours truly Winifred Beasley County Health Nurse, R.N.

  “Oh this makes me feel terrible!” Elizabeth slapped the letter down. “I feel like a thief!”

  “We’re well rid of her,” said Jeanine. “Let it go, Mother.” She was cutting up sweet potatoes with an eye in each piece in order to try for a fall garden. She was not going to quit on the garden. They might get rain.

  “If my parents ever knew we were even on relief, much less accused of fraud…” Elizabeth pressed her lips together in a thin line. She smashed up the letter into a wadded missile that she shot into the cookstove. Mayme and Jeanine had never seen her so upset. She was furious.

  “Let it go, Mother,” said Mayme.

  Bea spread out her schoolwork on the location and products and peoples of New Guinea to read it aloud to their mother, who quickly put away her rage over Winifred Beasley so that Bea would not ask what was the matter, and said My gracious. Elizabeth looked at the National Geographic illustrations Bea had pasted in, grimy dark photos of the people of New Guinea. She said, Why do people do those things to themselves?