Paulette Jiles - Stormy Weather

He said, “I bet you remember the song about the three little babes.” He wrapped up the photo of his three daughters sitting and smiling in the bed of the old Reo Speed Wagon in his handkerchief. He put it in the overcoat pocket. “You girls sang it for us at Christmas that year. Jeanine, you were so pretty, people just turned to look at you on the wagon seat, you were full of life, and you were a gutsy little kid.” He stepped on his cigarette butt. “Tell Bea and Mayme I sure do love them.”

“You tell them.”

“You got some lessons in life to learn, girl,” he said. “You better think about some serious changes in your attitude. You’ll never get a man. Men want somebody with a heart.” He jerked up the suitcase by the handle.

He said, “Bye, Pistol.”

And he turned his head toward his other, unfathomable life.

A week passed. Jeanine’s mother waited up until late into the night. She sat at the table with the coal-oil lamp burning its amber oil until sign-off and the national anthem at eleven and then until midnight and beyond. She was waiting up for Jack, and if not for him, then the sheriff or the coroner.

Mayme complained in her sleep about the barbed-wire crisscross of her bobby pins. Bea slept against the wall with its faded paper of milkmaids and silvered wreaths, with the striped tomcat purring under her chin. In the distance thunder rolled over the lifting waves of the Gulf of Mexico. It was early October and the nights were cooler but there had been no more rain even here on the rainy coast and the entire country was shrinking in drought. Jeanine felt the rent house sailing into the untrustworthy night with themselves as passengers and no one at the helm. She pulled the quilts up tight around her neck and turned to lie against her older sister’s back.

Sometime in the late windy hours her mother blew out the lamp. The flame lit her face for the brief moment before it was extinguished and it made a fire of her hair and then it was dark.

The sheriff drove in at five-thirty in the morning.

Even in her crowded dreams Jeanine heard the car stopping in front of the house. Jeanine sat up in bed. Her hair drifted into her eyes and she felt trapped in the twisted flannel nightgown. She came up out of a dream in which she had been charged and overcharged with straightening everything out and she could feel her angry frustration from the dream tumbling inside her like sand grains in a current. Mayme sat up as well and turned to the window; she pulled aside the rice-sack curtain and tried to see into the dark.

The two older sisters and their mother got up and struck a match to the lamps and dressed themselves for whatever was going to happen. A black-and-white Ford pulled up at the front gate and then the motor shut off. On the door was the insignia of the Wharton County Sheriff ’s Department.

He knocked on the front door and when it was opened to him he stepped into the light of the coal-oil lamp and took his hat off. He was a tall thin man in khakis with red-rimmed eyes and a revolver.

He said, “Mrs. Stoddard?”

“Yes, I’m Mrs. Stoddard,” Elizabeth said. “Come in.”

She turned and walked into the kitchen and he followed her. The deputy sheriff glanced around the kitchen, at the stockings soaking in a basin and the oaken icebox dripping into a pan. Curtains made of feed sacks printed with dancing orange pigs. A flesh-colored rug on the floor made of braided discarded hosiery. Jeanine’s mother sat down at the table as if her knees had become disjointed.

She said, “Is my husband in jail?”

“He’s in custody.” He took a handkerchief from his back pocket and blew his nose. “Sorry. Came down with a cold.”

“Is he shot?”

The deputy hesitated and looked over at the girls. He said, “No, ma’am. I better speak to you alone.” He put the handkerchief back in his pocket.

“No,” said Jeanine’s mother. “Say what you have to say.”

“Your husband is charged with statutory rape. An underaged girl.” A long silence drew itself out and Jeanine saw her mother frown, as if she had been confronted with some unaccountable puzzle and then she put her hand to her mouth.

“Where is he?” Elizabeth Stoddard lifted her head.

“The county jail.”

“This can’t be true,” she said.

“Mrs. Stoddard, your husband has been accused by a young girl here in Wharton. She’s fourteen. She ought to be charged as a juvenile delinquent but they ain’t going to do it.” He turned away and cupped both hands over his nose and sneezed violently. “Sorry.” He took out the handkerchief again.

Jeanine crossed her arms and stalked to the window where the aged glass distorted the lamp reflections. She had pulled on the tiger-striped dress, the first thing that came to hand.

She said, “We’d be better off if he were dead.” She buttoned the neck of the dress. “Graveyard dead.”

“Jeanine, be quiet.” Elizabeth Stoddard wadded the tea towel in her hands. “Are you sure you have the right family?”

“I’m very sorry, Mrs. Stoddard.”

Bea came out of the girls’ room. Her mother said, “Bea, go back in the bedroom.”

Bea turned and they heard the door slam.

Elizabeth got up and went to the bedroom door. “I’ll get dressed,” she said. She came out again in her Sunday dress and hat and white gloves. Then she walked to the door and the deputy held it open for her and they left.

Everything had changed. It was as if they had been bombed and their hearts pierced by random splinters. Jeanine sat down and stared around the kitchen, so strangely intact. The water bucket and its dipper and the crashing noise of the clock’s ticking. She and Mayme stared at the fruit jar full of knives and forks and spoons, none of them matching to any other. Bea came back in dressed and she carried her Big Chief writing tablet with her.

“Did you hear?”

Bea stared at them. Tears were running down her face but she did not seem to notice them.

“Yes,” she said. “At first I thought it was a radio program. I thought Mother had the radio on.”

“Where was he?” said Jeanine. She hugged her faded plaid jacket around herself, the lines of the plaid seemed to vaporize in soft, blending lines. She wiped her eyes. “Where did all of this happen?”

“You’d be the one to know,” said Mayme. “You were always covering up for him. You were always lying for him.” She wiped her hands on her jeans. “Bea, stop crying.”

“You stop,” said Bea.

“Get ready for school.”

“I don’t want to go to school,” said Bea. “I don’t ever want to go again.”

“No, go on.”

“What good is school?” Bea gripped her writing tablet to her thin chest. She and Mayme were both weeping again. “Everybody will know. What good is going to school?”

“I never covered up anything,” said Jeanine. “This ain’t my fault.”

“Yes it is. You encouraged it.”

“I never did any such thing.” Jeanine wiped tears from her face. She put the two ends of the jacket zipper together and with a tearing noise she zipped it up. The kitchen had grown cold. The fire in the cookstove had burnt down. The thought of her father laying hands on some young girl made her feel cold and diminished.

“Would you two quit bawling?” Mayme put the coffeepot on the kerosene stove to boil. “I should have left home when I turned eighteen.”

“And gone where?” said Jeanine.

“Just stayed in one place longer than y’all did.”

Bea’s lips were shaking. “This is going to be in the papers,” she said. “In the newspapers.”

Mayme wiped her eyes and started taking the hairpins from her hair. “Yes, and Jeanine’s going to testify at the trial. She’ll be in the newspapers. She’ll be famous. Like Bonnie Parker.”