BEA AND ELIZABETH sat in Jeanine’s room upstairs. The windows were more tightly fitted up here because they were not used as much, but everything-doors and windows and floorboards and chair rungs-had all shrunk over the years of the drought. The window-lights were tall blanks of windy dust. Sometimes when the wind dropped they could see the well below and the barn, the whipping cotton plants, the places where everything had happened going back forty years in Elizabeth’s memory, as if revealing to them one scene after another. The roaring windmill whose blades sliced the wind and threatened to come off the derrick, the water that streamed from the pipe flashing out into wild sprays. How she had climbed that derrick on a dare, and the well her daughter had fallen into, the enormous live oak at the end of the driveway where she had sat with Jack Stoddard eating jelly beans and kissing passionately and planning their wedding. In one sweep the entire field of Abel Crowser’s cotton came clear, the cotton blossoms now gone and the bolls now forming in squares like green turbans, and disappeared again. The wind carried in another curtain of dust and then it fell again until it died out in the late evening.
Bea said, “Do you think they’re all right?”
“Yes,” said her mother. “Mayme and Vernon are in Eastland. And Jeanine is with Ross. She’ll be all right with Ross.” She turned from the window and sat down on Jeanine’s bed. “I think it’s going to start raining now.”
“How do you know?” Bea sat with Albert on her lap. Biggety lay asleep on the bed in a tight curl with his ears twitching.
“I don’t know how I know. I just do.”
Bea thought about it. Her mother had some way of knowing things that Bea didn’t understand but that she believed in. Her mother had known the well would come in all along. And so she must in some mysterious way know that the drought had come to an end.
“You mean a lot of rain?” said Bea. “Or a little?”
“A lot,” said Elizabeth. She stood up. “Let’s go make supper.”
Bea followed her down the stairs and into the gritty kitchen. She still found it miraculous to pull a chain and the clear glass lightbulb illuminated the entire kitchen with glare. She could read the labels on the cans of hominy and tomatoes. “You mean the drought is over?”
“Yes. I don’t know why, I just know. It’s over.”
THAT WAS THE last large dust storm to strike the southern plains. After that it began to rain and the nations of Europe moved toward war and were so heavily weighted with armor that the structures of peace collapsed and would soon take all the other nations with them. Many of the older people remembered the Great War and they said that the artillery expended in millions of tons of shells had caused the incessant rains of that time on the fields of France and that now this was what was happening again. The artillery of Chancellor Hitler and his armies, of the Japanese Imperial Army bombing Shanghai, shook the upper levels of the air and so this brought weather in long streaming columns of rain, the slow kind of rain that fell in very small droplets and soaked in.
Roosevelt came to Amarillo in his only visit to the southern plains, the barren country where all the disasters and dust storms had taken place, where all the news photos had been taken showing mountainous walls of dust falling upon towns, people struggling through wind and dunes. Roosevelt arrived in Amarillo, a town up in the Panhandle, on the presidential train in July of 1938, and it began to rain when the train pulled into the station. Some people said it was a sign from God, that God had forgiven him for trying to pack the Supreme Court and for hiring Harold Ickes. That in fact God had forgiven everybody in a kind of general amnesty and the seven lean years were over.
The rain swept down on President Roosevelt in sheets and he managed despite everything to stand up on his rigid braces and address the great crowd so that people would not see that he was a cripple in a wheelchair and be discouraged or think that a broken man was leading them forward out of the wilderness. He spoke to them with a good wide smile while rain ran down his face, and since nobody could find the umbrellas they had stored away years ago, they stood out in the rain too, and cheered and applauded wildly with wet, spattering hands.
JEANINE PUSHED KINDLING into the hot-water heater and lit it. The Millers had put in a gravity-feed tank that filled the commode and the bathtub, and a primitive hot-water heater. Now all the bathroom needed was paint, maybe a pale blue, and little soaps and talcum powder. She heard the newspaper truck backfiring as it struggled down the gravel road, through a faint drizzle, and when the boys threw the folded newspaper at each mailbox it sounded as if they were hurling shot puts. Jeanine ran out and got the paper, and laid it beside the bathtub, ran the tub full and stripped off her clothes. The muddy jeans could nearly stand by themselves. She sank her body into the water. She was going to read the newspaper in the bathtub and spend as much time as she liked soaking herself.
How had they lived without this? How many times had they hung sheets to sit beside the stove, doubled up naked in a number three washtub, and then thrown it out in buckets. Jeanine hooked her heels over the edge of the tub, and shook out the Tarrant newspaper; she ignored the front-page stories. They were always boring. For instance, the Seiberling Latex plant near Akron, Ohio, was three weeks behind in orders making rubber statuettes of Dopey and Doc and Sleepy and the rest of the Seven Dwarves. She went on to the local news with wet hands, and then saw Milton’s picture in the society column, just above the obituaries. Milton Brown and Lou-Ann Callaway, former schoolteacher, had become engaged. They were smiling, she mooning up at him with a calflike adoring expression, and he gazing manfully at the camera. Milton’s cowlick stood out like a pinwheel. After their marriage they planned to live in Chicago where Mr. Brown of this city would take lessons in elocution and prepare for a career in radio broadcasting.
“What!!” She stood up and gushed water all over the bathroom floor. She climbed out of the tub and held the paper in front of her at arm’s length and stormed into the kitchen with soapy water pouring from her, the newspaper in one hand and a towel in the other. “He could have told me!” She threw the paper into the kindling box and began to dry herself. “He could have said something.” She wrapped herself in the towel, and the cat gazed down on her from on top of the Hamilton safe. “I was going to tell him.” She stalked back and forth on the narrow floorboards and into the hall and back again. This was deception, this was unfair, and it didn’t matter that she had said she would marry Ross, it was still unfair. She was doomed to be deceived. “Oh, who cares?” she asked Albert. “I don’t care. J-j-j-ust ask me if I care.”
She walked into her upstairs room and stood before the window to see the slow, light rain. It ran off the eaves in spangles. Everything was dripping, soaked. Wood filled out and doors tightened, the mortar of the well curb thickened and swelled and held. All the peach trees dripped black gum from the water the roots took up. The sky over the Brazos valley had not lifted for weeks. Drawn edges of cloud or mist were carried along the rims of the steep-sided valleys running into the Brazos and then caught and were pulled out like a sheer material.
But then, Jeanine thought, she had not told her mother and sisters of her promise to Ross, either. Six months ago when they were up on the roof she had laughed and told Mayme, He’d better not be hunting for me. That was embarrassing. Better to let Mayme tell everyone she and Vernon had got engaged, first. And Jeanine was still wavering. Her ties to this place where she had worked so hard might become frayed and insubstantial. Sometimes during the day she thought of taking the promise back again, as if she had only lent it, and abandoning the entire dubious enterprise of loving and falling in love, its inevitable betrayals; she wondered if maybe it would not be better to stay here forever, smooth and cool and ceramic, like the doll’s head.
She dried herself in the wet air and pulled on her old striped dress. She should turn on the radio for the soap operas, she should go in town to a movie. She needed to see some bold, brave young woman defy odds and take a long journey and fall passionatel
y in love. She wanted to see somebody run a plantation single-handed and shoot a Yankee and make dresses out of Mama’s portieres. She wanted to sit and eat popcorn and watch somebody with a small dog and impossible companions flee through a magic kingdom. To watch a girl ride National Velvet over the jumps. A story would unfold in which something terrible was at stake, where life and death mattered, where people committed themselves to some course of action without hesitation. Jeanine stood at the window in the parlor, which gave out onto the slope, where the cotton bloomed in tangled fibers out of its hard bolls, impelled by a relentless force. She watched Abel Crowser unhitch the cultivator and ride in on Jo-Jo and Sheba with their harnesses and collars still on them, to let them stand in the fairway of the barn, where they stood wet-footed, listening with revolving ears to the rain.
IN SEPTEMBER THE dread cabal in Washington had reduced the allowables on Central Texas wells and increased those in West Texas. Her mother couldn’t figure it out. Theirs was much higher-grade oil than the junk out in the Permian, that stuff out there was saturated with sulfur. Mr. Lacey consoled her. It will change, he said. The West Texans have got more influence in the legislature than we have. And besides the pressure is still holding, it’s twelve hundred pounds of pressure at the wellhead and they aren’t going to need to pump it, it’s coming up on its own. Elizabeth sent Mr. Lacey home with casseroles because he was divorced and ate nothing but Spam sandwiches and she had at last been convinced to call him George.
“Vernon’s got leave! Vernon’s got leave! September fifteenth! Five days!” Mayme skipped around the kitchen and hugged Jeanine and held a geranium flower by her ear. She danced across the room in a sort of tango. “Rum and Coca-Colaaaa!” A slow rain poured down the windowpanes, and dripped from the tips of the sotol and agarita. Water ran off the edges of the roof in a glittering curtain and the grass was green again.
They would go into Tarrant and stay all night at the Kincaid Hotel and then the next day catch the train to Galveston to meet Vernon. Ross could not go to Galveston because the windmill crew was coming again, they had to pull sucker rods from the water wells in the Upshaw pasture and he had to be there.
But Jeanine and Bea and Mayme were very happy about the hotel, as they had never stayed in one, and could hardly imagine the maids making up a room for them, and cleaning up after them when they left. They would have the whole day in Tarrant, and her mother would talk with Bea’s teachers, and she would see the new high school, and she would choose for herself a new pair of beach shoes at the shoe store. Betty would probably urge two pairs on her. After all, Magnolia was making an offer to buy them out. And that Mr. Lacey would be joining them down in Galveston, in a white sharkskin suit, probably with a carnation in his buttonhole and he would take all of them out to dinner. It would be a dinner with daunting and peculiar food such as lobsters and shrimps. Mayme was in a state of anxiety about how to approach these things and what sorts of instruments she would have to use, and Elizabeth said that Mr. Lacey-George-would have a long, serious discussion with Bea about going on to high school. Her mother was happier than Jeanine had ever seen her. Bea ran about the house singing I used to love you ’til you ate my dog… It was the Crazy Water Gang’s parody of lonesome heartbroke country and western music. I ain’t no cowboy, she sang. I just found this hat…
Bea had lately been reading e. e. cummings, and had taken up an attitude of cynicism and hauteur, but that evaporated when she was mailed a check for five dollars from Savage Western Tales for her vivid story of Kitty Kelsay being stabbed repeatedly by a renegade white man during the Comanche attack in Uvalde County and the famous twenty-mile running fight led by the hero horse, Fuzzy Buck. Five dollars had utterly destroyed her desire to go to Paris and write free verse and live on the Rue Chat Noir. If there was such a rue.
Ten girls had come to her freshman party. Some of them were driven out from town in the endless rain. Two were from her eighth-grade class at the Old Valley Road schoolhouse. They snarled into excited knots and spoke in gasps and showed one another the brand names on their saddle shoes. They argued about hillbilly music and Tommy Dorsey. One of the girls said her sister was a junior and all the juniors and seniors loved Tommy Dorsey and so that ended the discussion. They asked about Bea’s fall down the well, and her operation, and she showed them the red scars on her leg and said she was going to write about it someday. The kitchen smelled of Evening in Paris cologne and Blue Grass talcum and a fine, soft dampness.
Bea’s hair was cut short and curled, she wore a dirndl skirt and peasant blouse and saddle shoes. There were three more skirts and two dresses in her closet. Her family owned an oil well. They had part interest in a racehorse. They lived in a white-painted two-story house with running water and electricity and a telephone and it was raining everywhere, all over the world.
“I’m going to be an author,” she said. “I’m published already.” She showed them the check for five dollars with her name on it, and the date and the amount and signature by an authorizing person.
One of the girls from town said, “Savage Western Tales? Oh they read that down at the garage. Newton’s garage.” The girl stared at Bea for a long moment. “Well I guess that’s nice.”
The party lasted until nearly ten and when Bea lay down to sleep in her own bed, in her own newly painted room, she was suddenly frightened that she had said too much or done too much. Then she was not sleepy at all. She was assaulted with a very clear vision of the town girls in high school coming up to her and repeating Kitty Kelsay’s desperate scream, Oh my God, Mother, they are killing me! and laughing and laughing. She felt panicked. They would all read it at some garage in Mineral Wells. It was a stupid story, stupid, and it had her name on it, and it would go all over the country. Bea got out of bed and lifted up the sleeping Prince Albert and carried him into the kitchen and began to pace back and forth.
She didn’t want to go to high school after all. She would hide at home from her own printed words, hide out forever. Tears came to her eyes as she thought of the horror of it. And then at ten at night she heard Winifred Beasley’s voice, metallic and thin. A clear and reasonable Winifred Beasley that spoke to her of the joys of healthful foods, a sweet voice lecturing on the benefits of whole grains and Graham crackers and flaxseed. She was on the radio. Bea stopped pacing to walk over to the old Emerson and turn it up. That was her. After a few moments the announcer said that was the Home Health Hour presented by the Humble Oil Company, which would henceforth be aired a half hour every weekday night. They would never get rid of Winifred Beasley. Never.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
At four o’clock on the blazing hot afternoon of September 13
Jeanine took the truck down to Strawn’s Crossroads store and filled the tires with air, and asked old man Joplin to change the oil for her. He peered into the engine with great interest for a long time and then remembered he said he would change the oil. Jeanine went in to pay. Mrs. Joplin was in the backyard, smoking a cigarette among the cages of live chickens, cooling herself in the shade of the live oak trees that surrounded the old frame building. She exhaled smoke heavily into the damp air, threw the cigarette down, and hurried into the store.
“Now, Jeanine,” said Mrs. Joplin. She slapped a package on the counter. The package was wrapped in a sheet and pinned together. “I hate to tell you this, but Martha Jane Armstrong is sending this wedding dress back to you.”
Jeanine’s mouth dropped open. “What’s wrong with it?” She came up to the counter and laid her hand on the package. “It was perfect, Martha Jane said so, what’s wrong?”
Mrs. Joplin bent her long body over the counter and shifted the package around. “There isn’t anything wrong with it. It’s just Martha Jane. They say redheaded people have tempers, and Martha Jane always said she was going to prove otherwise, but she threw that dress down the stairs from that attic of theirs, and then she threw the veil down the stairs too.”
“What happened?”
Mrs. Jo
plin waved one hand at her. “Sit down. You are always, always in a hurry, Jeanine. You were in a hurry to be born. I remember it well. Your mother had you in three hours flat from when she was first took to when they cut the cord.” Jeanine sat down on the Jell-O rack. “Don’t sit on the Jell-O rack. Take that old chair seat. Well, my grandson Tim said he was going to work for Pacific Contractors. He made up his mind to. Nothing will change it. He has to see the world, he said. He signed a contract for three years, driving heavy equipment out there in the Pacific Ocean.”
Jeanine took the package and held it in her lap. She still had a blank and amazed look on her face. “How is he going to drive heavy equipment on top of the Pacific Ocean?”
Mrs. Joplin shook her head. “On some little island. What they’re doing is, they are grading off airstrips for the Army Air Corps. It’s called Wake Island. And he’s going to be there for three years, and won’t be home in all that time, and Martha Jane said it was as good as saying he didn’t want to get married, and he could just go to the hot place.”
“Three years,” said Jeanine. She had become acutely aware of the slightest hint of treachery from men, which seemed to operate conjointly in their heads with a tendency to get women to wait for them for indefinite periods, while they went wandering around without reason or limits, but she could not come to any conclusions whether Tim Joplin was actually backing out of his promise or not. “That’s 1941,” she said.
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