Stormy Weather

by Paulette Jiles

  Mayme read through the brochures of Galveston. It was where all the officers went to take their leave. If Vernon got leave they would meet there. Elizabeth had to come too so that it would all be aboveboard and Vernon’s parents wouldn’t think she was a redheaded stepchild. Jeanine laid out Vogue patterns on the table and then pinned the tissues to her sister’s shoulders.

  Jeanine sat up late that night and listened to Kaltenborn. He said that Chancellor Adolph Hitler was meeting with Chamberlain and there was going to be peace in our time. Then WBAP started to fade, a star fading at the horizon of radio time, and the voices and music from WLS Chicago, a place unimaginable to Jeanine, arrived transparent in the thin night air of the Brazos Valley. Then the WLS signal diminished and slipped away as if it had something to do elsewhere, some other people to entrance, and the music abandoned her to the night and the dry wind.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  Jeanine carried the kitchen table out to the veranda by herself and one leg jammed up on the doorframe and knocked her backward but she caught her balance and trundled on with it like a doodlebug.

  She threw their one linen tablecloth over it and straightened the edges. It was her August birthday. Her peaches birthday. She was twenty-one years old and now she could vote for President Roosevelt herself. Mayme had saved up sugar for two weeks and made a white cake with frosting. They sat on the front porch with the new peaches sliced up on plates in front of them and a basketful sitting beside the table. Bea bit down on a slice and bit again. Jeanine spooned out another helping.

  “Aren’t they good? This is what we came for.” She poured more of their precious sugar onto her peach slices. “Jeez, they’re like shoe leather.” She swallowed. “Use more sugar, y’all.”

  Mayme said, “Maybe next year they’ll be better.”

  They chewed industriously at the hard slices. The peaches had dark spots, and near the pit the flesh was pale green. They ate them anyway. They sat out on the front veranda in the shade, waiting for the evening wind to come up out of the earth’s shadow. Curtains streamed out of the open windows. The posts on the veranda were painted white, the passionflower vine was in bloom. It was very hot. Biggety came trotting up from the cedar brake. He had just eaten the lunch of one of the cedar choppers, a thick braunschweiger sandwich, and rolled in a dead armadillo. Life was good.

  “Where are you going to be next year, Mayme?” asked Jeanine. “On my next birthday?”

  Her sister laid her spoon on the plate.

  “I don’t know,” she said. She said it in an apologetic voice and pushed her red hair out of her eyes. There was a long silence and Jeanine held the hot basket of fruit in her hands like a load of failed hopes.

  BEA RAN INTO the driveway, with the purchases from Strawn’s store. She carried the flour and pork chops in the school satchel on her back and it slammed against her shoulder blades as she ran at top speed, on the tips of her toes. She was being pursued by Comanches. They appeared like wraiths out of the Texas earth, from the green matrix of the cotton field. She was Katie McLauren, Cynthia Parker, the Kelsay girl, and in the final yards to the door of the house she called out My God, Mother, they are killing me! She was full of arrows.

  “Bea, there’s a letter or something for you,” said her mother. It was from True Western Stories. Bea unloaded her groceries and sat down to read the letter. Her left leg was marked with deep red scars but she no longer needed the crutches. The letter said although hers was a commendable effort she needed more polish and whoever wrote the letter said in a cheerful tone that it was a sure bet that Miss Stoddard would attain that polish in the years ahead. Bea threw it away and ran to find her Big Chief. The world was full of ignorant people and one of them had just written to her. She went out to the back porch to sit on her busted old chair, found her book on the shelf under the washing buckets, and opened it to her place.

  Jeanine backed into the kitchen unrolling loops of fabric-covered wire.

  “Just leave it there,” said Mr. Miller. Upstairs another man thumped in the halls and through the rooms. In the kitchen Mr. Miller and his brother Deemie, who was generally useless but was occasionally browbeaten by his brother into some form of short-term work, shouted out instructions to each other as they threaded electrical wires up through the ceiling. They would be paid, when they had finished, with the wedding dress money. Jeanine turned her head up to the ceiling as the thick wire rose into the hole like a snake. Bea ignored it all for the seductive pleasures of The Yearling. She sat on the back steps bent over the book, imprinting sweaty fingerprints on the margins as she held it in a rigid grip because she could see it coming, she knew they were going to shoot that little deer. If the house caught fire she would not have been able to put it down.

  “What are you reading, Bea?” said Jeanine.

  “The Yearling. Miss Callaway,” said Bea. “She gave it to me to read.” Bea turned a page. “Oh no,” she groaned.

  Jeanine said, “I thought Miss Callaway went back to Pennsylvania for the summer.”

  Bea stood up and kept her finger in her place. “No, she’s staying in town, Milton Brown carried her stuff into Tarrant, suitcases.” Bea found herself speaking disjointedly in her desire to go hide somewhere and finish the story. “She just adores Milton. I hate love stories. Oh what does it matter? They’re going to shoot him anyway.” She stalked off to the barn with Prince Albert trailing after her, his tail held up in a slight curve like a question mark. In the hot amber air of the barn she would be able to sob in peace.

  ELIZABETH AND VIOLET and Lillian sat on the fenders of somebody’s car. They didn’t speak about what might happen because it would be bad luck. People who could get away from work came with their children and wives and lunches of thick homemade bread and bologna. Local ranchers came, and also the young people who had never seen a well come in but had heard the stories. Several well-dressed men from the other oil company offices in Fort Worth drove up. They were scouts and lease hounds and seismograph men, and they had heard through the invisible oil field telegraph that Crowninshield had hit sand.

  Oilfield Willy came to call out the demonic names of the geological strata, to preach on the text of the seismograph charts and he walked back and forth as he preached. His ancient suit of shiny gabardine hung on him like a theatrical draping and once in a while someone would hand him a dime or a quarter, and he nodded and kept on. The Lord only knows where it all lies in His deep dominions, he shouted. And what shall be done with it and where it shall go. This is the blood of the earth in its veins and its arteries and he created it and so it belongs to the earth’s heart and not to mankind.

  Captain Crowninshield strode about the drilling platform. It was a shaky structure that had been nailed together out of mesquite poles and mill sidings. The long, twisted cable lifted and fell, lifted and fell. His hand rode up and down with it as if he were playing an immense stringed instrument. It rose and fell out of the borehole and the thumping of the great drill string went on long into the blue evening when the whitewing doves came to water, and it went on when the sky turned madonna blue and the first stars came out, late summer stars, clear and icy.

  Elizabeth said she had to go home. “Nothing’s going to happen,” she said. “Just because he hit the pay horizon doesn’t mean anything.” It was a hot night, hazed over with fine dust carried high among the contrail clouds that made stars seem blurry, even the great yellow Arcturus. She and Lillian and Violet climbed into the Studebaker.

  More and more people started up their engines and went home, the ones with children to put to bed. Others stayed on, perhaps fifty or sixty people. The men in good suits stood leaning against the car fenders, their ties pulled loose from around their necks, listening and watching. They had not always worn good suits nor had they always driven comfortable passenger cars. They knew the sound of a cable-tool rig, they knew what it was doing and what it was saying and they didn’t talk very much but listened intently. There was a light wind and the temperature
fell slightly. The cartoon dog Pluto, painted on the flatbed truck door, grinned at everybody. Pluto, god of precious metals and of the underworld.

  Andy said, “I’ll build us a fire for coffee.”

  “No, don’t,” said the captain. He was filthy with drilling mud, and Otto and Andy stood ready at the forge fire and the bailer, if either were needed. Crowninshield held his hand on the cable, rising and falling two feet six inches. He bent toward it, intent, as if it were speaking to him.

  He said, “Otto, put that forge fire out.”

  Steam rose from the extinguished embers. The men all around noted this and turned to one another. He’s putting the damn forge fire out. A couple of cars started up and turned on the headlights to provide Cap with illumination. Several men crowded into a big Dodge to listen to the baseball game.

  Otto and Andy were smoking homemades, sitting at the cable spool they used for a table on the drill platform, where they kept swivels and hooks and pieces of lead for bushing and a box of dominoes. Otto laid out a hand of dominoes. As he reached for a piece it danced oddly across the surface in a strange clattering jig and away from his hand. He frowned and grabbed at it. The rest of the dominoes started to rattle. They fell over and began to jitter about the surface like live things. Otto clasped them together in his hand and lifted his head with an alarmed look. Andy spread his hand out on the cable spool and felt it vibrating. The vibration grew stronger each second.

  The entire drilling platform was shaking.

  The engine began to rattle in its mounts and the Sampson post swayed weirdly sideways instead of up and down.

  “Put out those cigarettes!” screamed Crowninshield. He jumped up on the platform and came running at them. “Kill the damn boiler fire, Otto! Now!” He snatched the cigarettes from their hands. “Put out the boiler fire, she’s coming in!”

  Otto jumped to his feet and crashed through a pile of bailers and slammed the boiler door shut and cranked on the damper.

  “Get the hell off the platform!”

  Crowninshield and Otto and Andy all came off the platform at the same time. They struck the dirt and fell and got up again. They ran toward the engine shed. It was the only cover available. They heard the deep and sinister roar coming from the borehole as if something down there was calling out to them in a rage at being awakened from a million-year sleep. Andy’s hair rose all over his body.

  Then he turned and saw the most amazing thing. He saw casing pipe rising up out of the borehole as if it were self-propelled, joints of pipe that weighed more than two hundred pounds apiece, flying up one after another, in a spray of white salt water that was as thick and hard as a sycamore trunk. And then more pipe was blown out by a great fountain of sand, enclosed in a foaming mist of gas that expanded like a geyser, sideways, snaking low and wild over the ground.

  Then the massive drill bit rose up out of the hole, twenty feet long and weighing two tons, spewing straight up through the derrick and taking out the crown block along with it. Spars and shattered planks flew upward in ballistic fragments.

  Within moments the pieces of lumber were raining down on the roof of the engine shed. Andy yelled, “Ooooh! Ooooh! Shit! There went the derrick!” Cap was on his hands and knees looking for the flashlight. They dared not strike a match to the lamp.

  Then the oil came in, under great pressure, a standing column of jet that erupted with a deafening roar. The entire derrick blew away, leaving only the footings and twisted masses of metal.

  The people who had gathered to watch were either huddling in their cars, or running, or driving away. Cap heard their engines, some of them growing more and more distant while overhead the tornado of pure oil wavered and shrieked and lunged snakelike into the night sky.

  Crowninshield shouted, “Andy, Otto, we got to get help to get that thing shut down!” He had to yell over the noise of oil beating on the engine-shed roof. He sat crouched over as crude oil rained on the ground and the noise of the blowout sounded like some beast roaring and looking for prey.

  “Okay, boss,” said Andy. His voice was faint and very calm in the most peculiar way. He sat on Cap’s bed among the detective novels and the sardine cans. “But I think we ought to hang in here and wait in case any more of that casing pipe gets blown out, you know, because if it lands on somebody, that’s all she wrote. They’ll ship you home in a shoe box.”

  “I know it.” They hunched their shoulders up around their ears, as if they were being struck, and the flashlight shone on their anxious faces.

  “We’re lucky something ain’t come through the roof already.”

  Cap said, “I think we can make a run for it.”

  “I never thought I’d live to see it,” said Andy. “A blowout like this.”

  “You might not yet,” said Otto.

  JEANINE STOOD AT the front door and counted the cars. There were five or six automobiles parked in their driveway. The telephone rang every five minutes.

  “Oh, I don’t think we’re going to be rich,” Elizabeth said. “And if they don’t get it shut down they’ll lose pressure and they’ll junk the well. And there’s too many people to share the money with, but what the heck!” She hung up the telephone and turned to her daughters. “Who was I just talking to?”

  There was laughter and shouts as more people drove in. Jeanine said hello to Betty, and Aunt Lillian, and a man named Mr. Lacey from the Magnolia field, all of them with congratulations and advice and cautions and recent figures on price per barrel.

  “Elizabeth.” Mr. Lacey carried his hat in his hand. “I was never happier to be wrong in my life. And I’m just going to be rude here and insist on advising you. Beatty-Orviel is going to be made an offer and it could be by my company.” He turned his hat by the brim. “I can get you a volunteer blowout crew. From our company.”

  Elizabeth turned to him with an interested expression and before long Mr. Lacey had to bring up the dreaded name of Harold Ickes and the attendant suggestion of dark cabals in Washington.

  “We are going to have to tell the Texas Railroad Commission that what we have here is an eleven-thousand-foot well in order to increase your allowables.”

  Elizabeth said, “Texas Railroad Commission?” She paused and touched his arm. “Allowables? Harold Ickes?”

  Mr. Lacey said he would explain. He stood very still so she wouldn’t take her hand away, and his heart was drowned in a sweet, high-gravity sensation.

  Lillian and Violet started making plans for a big dinner, and an entire turkey for the crew. Jeanine and Mayme brewed coffee and slammed cups on the kitchen table and sang snatches of songs; That old black magic has me in its spell…

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  The skies in the summer of 1938 were gravid with rain clouds that passed over the Brazos valley dryshod and spilled their rain up against the wall of the Rocky Mountains or the Sangre de Cristos in New Mexico. Hurricane season turned the Gulf of Mexico into a tormented cauldron of wind and rain, and people said that this time the season would bring rain into north-central Texas and there would be grass again. Elizabeth and her daughters lived under an atmosphere that shifted its higher winds in a different direction throughout the remote strata miles above the earth. Some change was taking place. Droughts come and stay for seven years and in those seven years the weak are driven away; mistakes and miscalculations grow into catastrophes, there is no margin for error. Drought is a lack of something, a vacuum, an empty place in danger of implosion.

  JEANINE STOOD IN the stands with Innis at the Lubbock South Plains Livestock Show and Rodeo race grounds under the metal roof where people were packed together as if the limits of shade were an invisible fence. The national anthem ended and Innis and a thousand other men raised their hands to replace their hats on their heads. It looked like a broad shore of birds taking flight. Innis and Jeanine were uneasy with each other and so they showed great politeness and Innis said Yes, ma’am to everything she said or happened to mention. Sometimes he said Yes, ma’am before she eve
n finished a sentence and so it made her forget what it was she was saying. Jeanine wore a straw hat with the brim turned up in front, a silk rose pinned to the hat-band, and a cool print dress in the new style. Everything was changing. Fashions were changing. Her dress had sharp padded shoulders and a Peter Pan collar. All the styles were sharper now; there was less of a feeling of stylish lassitude, drooping hems, no more sagging necklines that lolled like tongues.

  Jeanine had been raised with sisters and Innis had been brought up around adult men and every day of his life he wished to be like them, to be a grown man instead of a child, and grown men did not sit in the bleachers with women when there was a horse race in the works. A grown man was down in the shedrow, among the horse trailers and the manure and the nervous horses, they made obscure references to women and livestock, in brief sentences. It was a love of language, never to waste a word.

  He knew his father’s regard had undergone some great shift, toward this woman who was very mature, with lipstick and high heels and a rose in her hat. He wondered if he had to do whatever she said and just who was the enforcer around here. But there was nothing to be done about it except to say Yes, ma’am to whatever she said. He ran his hands along his hat brim to bring it down in front like Randolph Scott’s hat. His cheeks were bright red in the heat. Far away he heard one of the high school bands that had come to play for the evening rodeo tooting and blowing spit out spit-valves. They began on “Mexicali Rose.”

  Jeanine beat the hot, still air with the racing program. Innis sat in his white shirt and tie, his Stetson pulled down over his eyes, with both hands knotted between his knees. Down behind the starting gates Smoky Joe was held by two boys, one on each side of his halter. The jockey was worried. Smoky Joe Hancock was a hard case. Everybody knew he was a hard case. Smoky opened his nostrils wide and struck out at the horses around him. Horses that were springy two-year-olds and hot with energy lay in wait for him. But Smoky was seven years old and he would be running in a pack of other horses for the first time. It was an oval track with grandstands newly painted, with an official clock and a camera at the finish line whose eye was infallible and settled all arguments about nose-to-nose races. The two boys released him. The saddling area was a flaming white blur, and across it, Smoky Joe came at his lunging trot, with his navy and red saddlecloth, his coat shining brilliant as some vital, dark metal. They had done something with his mane; it lay down on his neck, tamed and silky. His tail streamed out in one solid banner.