Paulette Jiles - Stormy Weather

At the time when Jack Stoddard was felled by sour gas, few men were required to wear gas masks on the rigs. It was impossible to wear the bulky gear and get work done because it was hard to see or talk and your own breath fogged up in your faceplate. The occurrence of hydrogen sulfide gas is capricious and unpredictable. H 2S is often precipitated out of the oil itself and gathers in half-filled tanks, seeps into low places beneath the rigs, suddenly appears along with the sweet gas without warning. H 2S knocks people unconscious at 300 parts per million, and at 600 ppm it is fatal within seconds. It has a distinctive taint of rotten eggs, but the gas also has the peculiar quality of destroying the sense of smell after the first inhalation, as if designed by the devil himself to draw the unsuspecting into the odorless world of brain injury and death.

Two other freight haulers brought Jack Stoddard home in the back of a truck, in a warm September rain straight off the Gulf of Mexico. He was laid out on a stack of blankets somebody had scooped up from the engine shack; he was covered with a slicker and awash in rainwater. His face and hands had the obscure, blue color of someone with cyanide poisoning, and although he was not conscious he floundered with vague shifting movements. Jeanine and Mayme told Bea to stop crying, he was going to be all right.

He lay on the bed with blood running from his nose and ears. A young company doctor folded his bag together and said in a thin tenor voice that Mr. Stoddard should avoid any strenuous activity for the next month or so, and he could not say one way or the other whether Mr. Stoddard would ever regain his ability to drive a truck. The effects might show up in the lungs, but on the other hand, did they know whether or not somebody hit him over the head? The doctor bent down and looked into Jack Stoddard’s eyes and said, “Did? Somebody? Hit? You? Over the head?” He was a tidy young doctor. With a quiet and efficient gesture wiped up the blood trickling from Jack Stoddard’s ear and said this was the result of a concussion of some kind, not sour gas. It was impossible to get the company to pay the medical bills because Mr. Stoddard was a contract worker and not a Shell employee.

Jeanine and her sisters watched as her father sat up straight in the bed and stared at them as if they were strangers. People completely unknown to him were gathered together in this small rent house with the ancient wallpaper and the lamp beside the bed in the gloom of the torrents washing down the windowpane, the iron bedframe and torn quilts. His two oldest daughters about to leave home, oddly grown to adults. A person wonders how it happens. His wife sitting with her head in her hands like somebody’s mother from the last century. She lifted her head and smiled at him.

“You’re going to be all right, Jack,” she said.

“I know it,” he said. “As soon as I get that horse in training.”

The young doctor said, “Mr. Stoddard, do you know what day it is?”

“It’s the day they asked me to fish out a wrench from the tank. One of those tanks. They thought it was a joke. That’s what day it is.” Jack Stoddard ran his hands over his blue face. He seemed to be checking to see if it was still there, on the front of his head.

A long pause. Then the doctor said, “Who is the president?”

“Franklin D. Roosevelt,” he said. “I voted for him.” He fell back onto the pillows. “Tell these people to get out of here.”

Their mother sat in the bedroom with him, reading aloud from newspapers or magazines, playing the radio. She was trying to reawaken him and make his brain work. He stared at the wallpaper and occasionally turned to look at his wife as if she were an intrusive busybody, a neighbor he knew only faintly.

Smoky Joe had been turned out into one of the sweeping coastal pastures where red cattle grazed and egrets in formal white garb tiptoed behind each cow with grave, worried gestures, darting their heads one way and then the other. Jack Stoddard had been offered three hundred dollars for him by Ross Everett, but her father had refused to sell for no reason other than the pleasure of saying no. Smoky Joe tore up the grass with great fervor. He was always hungry. From time to time Smoky charged forward into a long gallop across the pasture, scattering the domestic cows, running for the hell of it. He was now four years old and neglected, hairy, unshod, and only knew human beings as occasional visitors with food. He should have been sold long ago.

They had moved from Conroe to Wharton. It was in Wharton they heard King Edward was going to marry Wallis Simpson. Mayme couldn’t believe it. They had acquired an old Emerson radio and several neighbors came over to sit in their small kitchen with its kerosene stove to listen. It was an intense evening. In the distance they could hear the noise of the big water pumps, as the rice fields were flooded. Their father lay quietly in the back room regarding the wall, which had been plastered over with newspapers. Maybe he was reading the advertisements. Elizabeth had just that morning spent fifty cents out of their stock of coins to buy beans and potatoes and lard, and the potatoes were frying as they listened to the fading newscast.

Jeanine shifted from station to station to find a clear reception and finally got a Shreveport station. The king said it was impossible to carry the heavy duty of responsibility and to discharge his duties as king as he should wish to do, without the help and support of the woman he loved. Jeanine was on the king’s side but Mayme said what did he ever see in a skinny parasite like Mrs. Simpson and their mother said there wasn’t much to choose between them. There was something frightening about it. A man abdicating a throne for an arid woman, men in general surrendering to loss, to an absence of rain, air, money, love, kingdoms.

In Wharton they had found another rental house near the Colorado River. The river was dark red and alluvial and not many miles away it poured into the Gulf. The house was full of junked farm equipment and stacked paper bags that had held Paris Green arsenate for killing boll weevils. They worked for two days to clear it. Five blocks away a Hooverville had grown up on the banks of the river and at night there was the glow of fires and shouting and sometimes singing.

Mayme had acquired a boyfriend in Conroe who worked for the Conroe-Lufkin Telephone Company, his name was Robert Faringham. He continued to write her even when they moved to Wharton, down to the gas country where new gas wells were being drilled by independent operators. Jeanine’s father said there were all kinds of opportunities for a man who had connections. Humble was going to start up a cracking plant not too far away, to refine the wet gas and wring hydrocarbons from it. Engineers and the chemists would toss up molecules of methane and propane and butylene in a dazzling display of new modern technology, they would make aviation gas and synthetic rubber and nylon stockings and plastic telephones and cow feed from it, everything but candy kisses. He was going to leave off freighting and somehow find the means to study pipe fitting. There was good money in it. To Jeanine this meant they would go and live in some graceful country house and there would be green fields for Smoky Joe, and passionflower vines, and silence. But now he walked with careful deliberate steps around the house staring at things. He put a match to a piece of old telephone cord to see if it would burn. Elizabeth took it away from him and stamped on it and hid the matches.

Bea said, “Jeanine, were you and Mayme talking last night about leaving?”

Jeanine said, “We were, but we’re not now. Since Daddy’s got brain failure. Somebody’s got to stay and help Mother get him in a strait-jacket.” She closed her hands around a chair back. This throttled life had to end sometime, it had to.