Paulette Jiles - Stormy Weather

By the time they got past Dallas it was dark and the headlights of other cars shone through the windshield on Elizabeth holding the steering wheel with both hands and Bea collapsed beside her asleep. Mayme and Jeanine rode in the truck bed wrapped in quilts. Smoky Joe shifted and stamped in the trailer, facing backward, with his tail flying up over his back. At midnight they drove up the driveway of the old house, gravel bursting from under the narrow tires.

The truck engine cooled down with minute pings sounding slower and slower and then there was only the night wind. They were on a ridge looking out over the heavy darkness of the Brazos River valley, the old Tolliver house adrift in a sea of starlight. They sat in silence. Something was tapping at one of the windows. One of the front double doors was off its hinges and it moved slightly with a raking sound. Far across the valley a cow bellowed in a long series of urgent calls after some lost calf gone astray in the night.

“Well here we are,” said Elizabeth.

There was a half moon up, and they could see that many windows were broken and the entire yard was grown up with plants that seemed willing to do anything to take over the front yard and the porch. A deer flagged its white tail and went bounding out of the barn. They got out cautiously.

Rather than walk into the deserted house in the dark they slept that first night in the truck. Smoky Joe was let go into the pasture, where he galloped from one fence line to another, calling out across the valley, asking if there were any other horses left in the world.

Mrs. Joplin ran the store at Strawn’s Crossroads, a mile from the Tolliver farm. The original Strawn family had never called in their debts, so they became very poor and went off to pick cotton in Oklahoma. Mrs. Joplin always called in her debts and there was a big hand-painted sign in the front window of the store that said this is not a bank. Mrs. Joplin used to be a flapper but had ceased to flap after age twenty-five because of the unintended consequences. A person can’t flap forever.

She watched Jeanine and Mayme and Bea come through the double screen doors into Strawn’s Crossroads store. The brass bell jingled. They were oil field girls, you could tell that right away because of the bold way they carried themselves and the way they talked to one another in voices of normal volume, as if they were at home. For people dragged around from one town to another their whole lives, everyplace was home, or maybe no place was.

“You girls finding everything all right?”

“Yes, ma’am,” said Jeanine.

“Y’all are the Stoddard girls,” said Mrs. Joplin. She inclined her head in a polite, Victorian way when they introduced themselves. Mayme the tall one, the oldest, with auburn hair. Jeanine the skinny one in the middle, and the youngest, Bea, with a heavy braid down her back like a well rope.

“Do you have bobby pins?” said Mayme.

She must have got that red hair from the Stoddard side. None of the Tollivers had ever had red hair. It was such a deep winey red she might have dyed it.

“That shelf there is personal hygiene items,” said Mrs. Joplin. She led them to the wall shelves. “And if y’all need something else of a more intimate nature for ladies, I keep it behind the counter and I’ll wrap it for you.”

The three girls stood in front of the shelf and inspected the Prell shampoo, bath talcum, hairnets, and tooth powder. They didn’t buy any of it. They were in trouble. That’s why they had come back to that wreck of a house and the fields cooking down to hardpan in the relentless drought. They knew now what was in store for them. A can of trouble, a pound of misery, yards and yards of work to shore that old place up again. Deemie Miller came in, jangling the bell, and sat down on the Jell-O rack and she told him to get off of it.

After whispering and arguing together for a few minutes the middle one, Jeanine, walked off to another shelf and picked up a big bar of Sunshine soap. Mayme said, “Well who put you in charge?” but she picked up a jug of vinegar by the handle. Mrs. Joplin knew this was to start cleaning everything. They also bought pinto beans and a twenty-five-pound sack of cornmeal and salt pork.

Mrs. Joplin had heard Jack Stoddard was dead. She remembered him. As long as she could recall he would sit around and watch people with his eyes half shut. Now somebody said he’d got into sour gas at a rig out near Houston and spent three days in a coma. When he woke up he said he had seen Lucifer himself and that he liked the look of him and that he’d struck a deal of some kind with him. And then was arrested for something unmentionable and died in a jail cell. That’s what Deemie Miller said.

Jack Stoddard used to come to this very store when the Strawns still owned it and buy jelly beans to take to Elizabeth before they were married. Mrs. Joplin lifted the lid on the jelly bean jar and poured out a quarter pound into a paper sack. They had come home to that collapsing old house with its windows busted out and the doors half off their hinges, a place where the noises of dinners and card games still echoed, many of which Mrs. Joplin had herself attended after her flapper days were over. After she had married. The house had been empty for years now, ten years, except for Elmo the Dwarf, who lived for a while up in the second story with a corn-shuck mattress and horse blankets until somebody found him a job in Fort Worth at the airplane factory where dwarves were needed to get up into the tail and finish the rivets. They didn’t know about Elmo and she wasn’t going to tell them.

Jeanine asked about oats and what quality they were and how much was a fifty-pound sack and Mrs. Joplin told her. Crimped oats, they weren’t mill sweepings. Clean, good quality. She asked them if they had a horse, as if she didn’t know.

“Yes,” said Jeanine, and her older sister said, “It’s her horse. He’s crazy. Two of a kind.”

“Ha-ha,” said Jeanine. “Why don’t you can it, Mayme. We just met this woman and you’re making fun of me.”

“Sisters fight, don’t they?” Mrs. Joplin turned to Bea. The girl smiled and looked down. She, more than the other two, had the appearance and ways of a Tolliver. Sweet natured and timid.

“Yes, ma’am.” She held a red Big Chief notebook to her chest. “I’ve got to have this for school.”

“We’ll get it, Bea,” said Mayme. “And pencils.”

Bea dropped the notebook on the counter and ran back to the school supplies shelf to choose two new, beautiful yellow pencils. She inspected each one carefully, as if they were not all alike. So much like her grandmother. Everybody is related to millions of people going back in time. Sometimes in the scriptures children were fathered by giants who were in the earth in those days, so you never knew. They had come back to find out who they were. They were like people whose images had been cut out of photographs so that the background was gone. She had done that herself in her flapper days. She pasted cute clippings from magazines under them; Ooo la la! And I Wish I Could Shimmy Like My Sister Kate, and then often wondered who it was who had taken the photo, but it was something people always forgot or didn’t think about. Now she ran the store and managed her husband, who was twenty-five years older than she was and at present very forgetful, so it was important to Mrs. Joplin not to forget anything on his behalf. Old Mrs. Tolliver whose maiden name was Neumann had been related to some of the finest families in southeastern Missouri.

“Well, I need some field corn,” said Jeanine. “How much is it a bushel?”

“Cracked, it’s ten cents the bag.”

“I’ll take a bag.”