Paulette Jiles - Stormy Weather

“Where were you going to go?”

Mayme said, “We were going to get an apartment back in Conroe. Stay there in one place. But Robert can just write me here.” The rain fell all over Wharton and the Colorado River ran as dark as wine. “I’m twenty-one, Bea. Jeanine’s twenty. We’re old maids.” Not too far away the river spilled out into the Gulf in tangled red currents. “Looks like we’re going to stay that way.”

“Would you have just left me here?” said Bea. “With them arguing and fighting all the time?”

The two older sisters glanced at each other.

“It’s all right, Bea,” said Mayme. “We aren’t going to leave with Daddy like this. It’s all right.”

“You would have too,” said Bea. “You would have gone and left me here.”

Jeanine said, “Nah. We’d have kidnapped you.”

They did not notice her bowed head and her heart burning in anguish. She would have been deserted. It was possible that her sisters did not love her except in the most dutiful and perfunctory way. They didn’t even read her stories. Her pretty young teacher at the Wharton Elementary had just printed up one of her stories on the mimeograph machine and had tacked it up on the bulletin board. She had so much admired Bea’s tale of the orphan girl and the abandoned puppy. Bea was sure that nothing good would ever happen to her except in books. When she was sitting on the back steps one evening a half-grown cat came out of the collapsing shed behind the house and sat down and mewed at her. Bea took him up gratefully and named him Prince Albert.

There was no money. They had to wait it out. They ate corn bread and grits, salt pork and cane syrup and told themselves things would get better after Jack got well. They cooked on a little kerosene stove that stank of fuel. They walked holes in their shoes looking for jobs, any job, but men with families to support wanted those same jobs and nobody would hire a single girl, even to pop the popcorn in a movie theater or sweep up at the barbershop. Fifteen million able-bodied men were out of work. Jeanine and Mayme made do. They could not face the social stigma of going on relief. They joined other women and children scavenging for soda bottles along the roadsides and lived on what was left of their father’s last paycheck. They were adrift. So were millions of others and no one could figure out why the economy had ceased to function, not even the banker J. P. Morgan. He said as much on the radio.

They tiptoed around the house so as not to disturb their father and then went out into the streets of Wharton to look in the shop windows, and stand under the great live oaks and their Spanish moss by the river. They walked by the transients and the bums in the Hooverville. It was like visiting a zoo.

Then, finally, Mayme got temporary work at the cotton gin writing labels for the bales and shared her five dollars with Bea and Jeanine. She treated them to a movie; sword hacking and high seas in Captain Blood.

Silently Jeanine made herself a dress from material she bought at one of the Wharton dry-goods stores. Nobody else would buy it so it was cheap. Nobody wanted it because it was printed in black-and-white tiger stripes. But she had seen a picture of a tiger-stripe pattern in a secondhand Good Housekeeping magazine and it didn’t look too garish. She would black her shoes with stove polish to match. The package of material thumped on the table.

“Shhhhh!”

She cleared the table of the fruit jar full of knives and forks and slid the scissors through the crepe. She sewed it by hand. The Singer would raise the dead with its creaking treadle. They kept the radio low.

Hitler marched into the Rhineland and made all other political parties illegal in Germany. He invaded when the crops were ripe in the fields; tanks plowed through the rye and oats and wheat and any human beings who stood in their way. Jeanine’s father listened to the news broadcasts with his hands in his lap, nodding, saying We’d better not get into this. Stay out of it is what I say.

AT NIGHT BEA sat with her striped cat at the kitchen table with her schoolbooks and her reading. The cat was not content unless he was with her and at night he slept on her head with a roaring purr. Her teacher had given her a book of poetry, The Family Album of Favorite Poems. She sat in front of the coal-oil lamp and read. Books contained speech without noise, human voices that spoke as loudly and as freely as they wished without being told to hush, hush. Mayme wrote to her young man in Conroe who worked for the Conroe-Lufkin Telephone Company. The letter was very long. Her pen made loud scratching noises. Jack Stoddard developed a strange, haughty air and spent the hot evenings sitting by the door, looking at something out in the night. He stared at his still-handsome face in the mirror on the back porch and shaved himself with slow strokes. He sat at the table in silence leafing through the women’s underwear section of the Sears Roebuck catalog until Jeanine took it away from him to use in the outhouse.

Bea came in from the girls’ bedroom with Prince Albert in her arms and her journal tucked beneath her elbow. The striped cat jumped down onto the kitchen floor and then into Jack Stoddard’s lap. Bea watched with an open mouth as her father snatched Albert up by the scruff of the neck, the fur wadded in his fist, and drew back and punched the cat directly on his nose. Bea threw down the journal and screamed. Albert made a gasping, snorting sound. Jack released him. He laughed when the cat thrashed in snakelike motions on the floor as if its back were broken. Albert gained his balance somehow and fled, weaving, toward the door and their father kept on laughing.

Elizabeth came running in from the back porch, asking what was the matter in a controlled voice. Jeanine threw open the kitchen window. Albert bolted through it.

BEA SAT IN the old shed for hours that hot September night calling over and over in a sweet, enticing voice. Finally Albert crept out of a corner toward her. His nose and mouth were crusted with dried blood. He crawled into her lap and blinked up at her with furtive glances, as if he were begging for forgiveness. Bea held him and told him she would protect him and that pretty soon her father would have a brain hemorrhage and die. Bea stared into the dark of the shed and felt they were all in mortal danger and that nobody cared and they were alone on the earth.

JEANINE SLEPT ON the floor to keep cool. It was much cooler on the boards than on the bed next to Mayme. She walked through intense dreams each night and she remembered them every morning before dawn. She dreamed of her father in a shining new truck and his eyes were as red as rubies. He was holding his head aloft so that everyone would look at him and he could look at them out of the crude scarlet of his eyes. He was saying eye eye oh eye or maybe it was I I oh I. Ross Everett sat unmoved in a burning building with an onion in his hand. Smoky Joe stood in the middle of a pasture of brown grasses, his ragged tail flying in the wind, and he was speaking to her. She woke up. It was near midnight and the air had turned cool.

Mayme said, “What are you doing, Jenny?” And then rolled over and went back to sleep.

Jeanine pulled on her striped dress and went to the window. She saw smoke rising in the chilled moonlight. It was coming from the shed. The shed was on fire.

She took up the hosiery rug from the kitchen floor and ran down across the wet grass. At the entrance to the shed she came upon her father. He was sitting on a nail keg with a dangling oily rag in his hand setting fire to it with matches. A heap of straw was on fire but it wasn’t burning well, since the straw was old and moldy and wet with the dew. She called out to him and threw the hosiery rug onto the sparkling straw and stamped on it. She kicked a smoking wad onto the gravel and ground it out.