Paulette Jiles - Stormy Weather

Jeanine reached in her coat pocket for a brush and drew it furiously through her short, light brown hair.

“Stop it, Mayme.”

Bea said, “Mayme, don’t lay your bobby pins on the kitchen table. That’s disgusting.” Bea hugged her striped cat with the broken nose close to herself but he writhed out of her arms and dropped to the floor with a padded thud.

“Well excuse me, Your Holy Cleanliness.” Mayme put the hairpins in her jeans pocket. She wound up her long hair in French rolls on both sides of her head, which gave her head a square look. Her nose was red from crying. “Maybe she’s a liar.”

Bea said, “But who would lie about something like that?” She looked up wonderingly. “And how would she even know Daddy? And who is she?”

Mayme turned to Jeanine. “Got any answers?”

The wind danced through the faulty window frames in thin and merry whistles. The coffeepot gurgled with a laughing noise like some small kitchen spirit calling to them that it was going to be all right, everything was going to be all right and it puffed animated, tiny clouds from its nose.

Then Bea opened her diary or journal or whatever it was. The blank book in which she wrote down everything of note that happened. She took up her pencil.

Mayme said, “I was about to get engaged. Get married and get out of here.”

“I didn’t know he proposed,” said Jeanine. She watched Bea write down Will Robert break the engagement? And then lay down the pencil and put out her hands toward the kerosene stove with its odorous yellow flame. The flame reached up to the coffeepot on the stove lid and the Hamilton clock said it was six-thirty in the morning. Outside it was barely light. Whatever kind of life they had been able to cobble together despite the Depression and the oil fields and their father’s love of good times and gambling was collapsing all around them.

JACK STODDARD DIED in his jail cell, sitting on his bunk with a copy of Black Mask Detective in his hands. It was October 17, 1937. Outside the windows of the county jail a parade filed past with several high school bands playing “Our Boys Will Shine Tonight”; his half-shut dead eyes were fixed on the window bars. A cleaning woman named Myra ran down to the office and said there was something wrong with a man in cell seventeen. The coroner said it was a brain hemorrhage brought on by the concussion and the sour gas. He couldn’t imagine how the man had lasted so long.

Jack was buried in the Wharton city cemetery. It was a bright sunny day. Jeanine saw her mother upright and calm. Then Elizabeth began to shake, as if she had been stricken with convulsions. I can’t stop shaking, Elizabeth said, what’s happening to me? Mayme took hold of her mother with both hands. Jeanine ran to the truck and sat there for a while, crying so hard she could not lift her head from the steering wheel. It was pity as well as grief, pity that her handsome father should be confined in the cold and the dark beyond the sound of human voices. She dried her face on her skirt hem and started the truck engine. They drove away and left him to both the apparent and the invisible world.

THE LANDLORD CAME to their door and knocked lightly. He rapped his knuckles like a man who wanted his money but on the other hand the women were recently bereaved and he was fat and what he was doing appeared to be a scene from a Charlie Chaplin movie, or something from The Perils of Pauline, orphans being thrown out into the snow by an overweight rich landlord, which he was. The streets of Wharton were dusty. The Spanish moss that hung from the live oaks was dusty. He was throwing them out into a drought, into bank failures, into the national economic emergency. He wore white and carried a cane. He rapped again with the cane and cleared his throat of the dust and spat.

Mrs. Stoddard opened the door. She wore a clean print dress with a red belt. Behind her in the kitchen he could hear the radio. Maybe she would offer him the radio in lieu of the rent. He wouldn’t accept it.

“I don’t have the rent,” she said.

“I want to say how sorry I am about your husband,” he said. “But it’s just as well. We don’t need perverts here in Wharton.” He tipped his hat to her. Then her three daughters came to stand behind her. He tipped his hat to them as well. “Sorry about your father,” he said. “But the rent is ten dollars. I know Mr. Stoddard was a gambler and my bet is he has something hidden away somewhere.”

One girl stepped forward and put her hand on her mother’s shoulder.

She said, “We’re going back to where we have our own farm.”

“Where’s my ten dollars?” He banged the foot of the cane on the flat dirt of the yard. Down on the river some of the hoboes were calling to one another in raffish, joking shouts. “Pay up or you leave right now.”

“WE’RE GOING HOME,” said her mother. She sat at the kitchen table and moved the salt and pepper shakers around. “We’ve got to get packed up.”

“Yes, Mother,” said Jeanine. It was so hot she felt faint, as if she would melt and flatten out.

“You hid things for him,” said her mother. “I found two hundred and fifteen dollars in his toolbox. He always hid money.”

“I never hid that money,” Jeanine said. She sat with a cold cup of weak coffee in her hands and blinked repeatedly. Then she turned to her two sisters, but Mayme only stared back at her with her arms crossed and Bea turned the flatiron over on the stove. Mayme’s boyfriend from Conroe had sent a sympathy card and his signature and no more. Mayme held it in her hand.

“I guess that horse is yours, Jeanine,” her mother said. “We could try to sell him.”

“Not yet,” said Jeanine. “Not just yet.”

“Promise me you won’t gamble on the races again.”

“I won’t. I promise.”

JEANINE AND MAYME moved around the kitchen, packing up the lithograph of the little girl and the portrait of their Tolliver grandparents. They broke down the four-ten shotgun and stored the barrel and stock and shells behind the seat of the truck. They shut the lid on the Singer and they jammed blankets and quilts into tow sacks. They were going back to the old Tolliver farm because there was no place else to go. It was the only place where they didn’t have to pay rent. If they went back to Central Texas maybe nobody would know what had happened. Jeanine washed every dish and utensil they owned and handed them to Bea and when Bea had dried them Mayme packed them in newspaper, and laid them in boxes. The five Tolliver silver spoons went into their Johnnie Walker whiskey tin. Bea worked for hours at constructing a box for Albert; it was like a wooden cell from which he gazed out with his broken nose and his jailbird stripes. They would have to pull Smoky Joe behind the truck. They had a ’29 Ford ton-and-a-half now, Jack had sold the old Reo long ago.

It took them all day to make it from Wharton to Palo Pinto County, and all that day the countryside shifted and shape changed from the humid coast to the sharp, cracked red hills of north-central Texas. The windows on the truck were clouded and on the horizon was a haze of some distant dust storm. They passed men out in the fields, some with bedding plows and others with horse-drawn stalk knockers shattering the cornstalks into flying blond fragments and you could see the column of dust that they raised for miles. Sunset came as they were making their way through the limestone country of Glen Rose. Burma-Shave signs dotted the roadside; the wolf is shaved-so neat and trim-red riding hood-is chasing him. On Highway 80 they saw overloaded cars with mattresses and washboards tied to them, going west to the cotton harvest or to a new oil field, to the orchards of California. People searching for work, as if it were a thing, a metal in the ground or a place. They passed men walking silently with suitcases in one hand and a thumb stuck out. As they came into Central Texas the evening sky glowed with the red dust carried down from the eroding Panhandle on a northwest wind. Elizabeth drove without speaking.