Paulette Jiles - Stormy Weather

“Well, daughter,” he said. Smoke rose around him. He dropped his arms on his thighs, flapped his hands. “Jeanine,” he said.

“What are you doing?” She stamped on flying sparks. She took a stick and lifted the glowing oily rag into the grass.

“Setting the shed on fire,” he said. He stood up. “I wanted to get your mother’s attention. I want her to know that I am crazy and dangerous.”

“I’ll call the sheriff,” she said. “I’ll run over to the neighbors’ and call the sheriff. They have a telephone.” They faced each other.

“Good for them.” He walked in a circle and hummed a popular tune. Down on the Colorado River there was a burst of laughter. Jeanine could see the reflection of a fire on the high branches of the live oaks that drooped over the water. He had the cardboard suitcase beside him.

“Dad, come in the house and go to sleep.” She made shoving motions at him. “Please. Please.”

He said he would go away if that was what they all wanted. Thrown out of his own home. He said for her to find for him those few little things that were still his own. His voice was that of an orphan abandoned by the roadside.

He took out a cigarette, a package of Old Golds. The smell of cigarette smoke and his Clubman’s aftershave brought back memories of the good times of match racing and the awful times of moving and misery, and also the time when he had been the handsome father who had loved her. Her throat hurt it was so tight.

“Well, daughter.” He smoked and looked around himself. “Jeanine. You were always my favorite.” He nodded. “You were. What the hell is that piece of crap you got on? A tiger-striped prom dress or something.”

“I’ll be awake all night for the rest of my life, wondering if you’re going to set the house on fire.”

“Good.” He slowly turned his head to her and regarded her. “I think I’ll leave, Jeanine.”

“Dad, you’re not well. You can’t just leave.”

“Give me a picture of you girls.”

He crushed out his cigarette on the ground. He patted her arm and she knocked his hand away. He said all he wanted was some pictures from the old album, to take with him wherever it was he was going which he didn’t really know where it was. But Jeanine ought to quit living like a Wild Man out of Borneo. If she would fix herself up she might get a man. If not, not.

“Dad, you and Mother have got to settle things. Please.”

“Jeanine, Jeanine,” he said. “Don’t take sides. I was a man never meant to be married, I’m a rambler and a gambler and a long way from home. Some men can’t be tied down. We’ve got to be free. I might come back. I might not.”

“Why did you get married, then?” She pawed at her eyes.

He said, “Wisdom comes with age. When you’re young you don’t think about consequences. You meet somebody and get married and then you girls came along.”

“We just came along. You just found us wandering down the road.”

“Now. Ask me anything.”

“Ask you what?”

“Anything. Ask me anything.”

Jeanine thought of him only as a father but he had been a child once himself and he knew all children were confused by the mysteries of their lives, and he was offering her the answers, inside information. Where certain songs came from and the names of lost dogs, what your grandparents were like when they were young. Here at the time of parting when he would leave his favorite child with her long gray eyes and his own square jaw and the name of Stoddard. The sour gas had ruined some synapses in his brain and oddly joined others. He fought his way through the fierce thorns of his own cynicism, trying to reach somewhere else, but he did not know where that somewhere else might be. What was the alternative. “Give me a picture of you girls to take with me.”

Jeanine tiptoed into the house and went to the tin trunk where the old photograph album lay and began flipping through the pages. All a child wants to know is if their parents love them and wanted them to come into the world. That’s all.

Ask him anything. Jeanine wanted to ask him, Why was I born? But instead she walked back out into the humid dark and handed him a photograph of the three sisters sitting in the back of the old Reo Speed Wagon.

“Who was it took this picture?” he said.

“I don’t know,” said Jeanine. She wanted to ask him, when was he born, and when did Grandfather Tolliver buy the land in Palo Pinto, and why did they leave? She wanted to ask him when he had first seen her mother and why he fell in love with her and what magic had brought herself and Bea and Mayme into the world as whole and entire people. It could not have been so ordinary. A dove must have appeared overhead. Or rather a redbird for Mayme and a white-wing for Bea and for herself the scrub jay who was so talkative and flashy in blue and rust. But she didn’t.

He shook his head. “You weren’t brought up right, Jeanine. Dragged around from town to town. Was nothing I could do about it. Your mother was never satisfied. Always had to go someplace new. Had to have a radio.”

Of course it wasn’t her mother who had wanted to move all the time. What was the point of arguing? It could have been Life with Father or One Man’s Family but he loved his dark unspoken life more than radio scripts, didn’t he.

He smiled down at the photograph. He pressed it against his coat with one hand. He was having secret thoughts. He loved having secret thoughts that nobody could see or penetrate or think about but himself. It made him inflate and grow very important and very large. Since he had swum up out of the deep underwater world of H 2S some kind of barrier had given way and he could think anything he wanted. The banisters on some internal stairs had broken with his weight. It was very good to have secret thoughts that nobody else knew about. Jack Stoddard smiled at the night and loved his own silence.

Jeanine clasped her hands together and tried to think of something good to say. Tried to make some gesture toward him.

“We had some adventures together, didn’t we? At the races.”

He said, “Yes. We did. I wanted to tell you, I learned about horses from Ab Blocker’s old foreman. A black man. Best cowboy on earth. He used to run down mustangs himself alone. He used to go visit the grave of Nigger Britt Johnson. Now there’s a story if anybody would care to tell it which they don’t as people are too caught up with stories of Bonnie Parker and the Vanderbilts and Ava Gardner. Went off alone to the Comanche and got back the women and children.” He glanced at her with a childish expression of anticipation. From inside the house she could hear the old Hamilton clock bong out the midnight hour. “But people like reading about the Vanderbilts.”

“Okay,” said Jeanine.

“And…” He thought about what more he could tell her. He motioned with his hand and then the hand fell into his lap. He had grown up on the land that was now Camp Wolters in Central Texas, near Mineral Wells. He had grown up there when it was open country covered with the wind-torn pelt of native grasses. Once he had come upon the skull of a Comanche with a bullet hole in the cheekbone and after some exploration he had found the thighbones and ribs and tangles of buckskin fringe. During high school in Mineral Wells he had memorized Travis’s last letter from the Alamo and declaimed it at graduation. He used to ride the Mineral Wells street railway to Elmhurst Park where there was a racetrack and a casino and the wind made women’s long dresses fly up so you could see the black stocking garters with the red marks they made and it moved him in inexplicable ways so that he laughed and elbowed Chigger Bates. He had seen Yellow Jacket run the 880. He shifted his feet and smoked and said that we all want our parents to be better parents. We want them to be heroic even if we are cowardly, and well dressed even if we go around looking like Ma Kettle in a homemade dress and they should all be steady and true to one another.