Paulette Jiles - Stormy Weather

“Do you want some old newspapers to take with you? For cleanup?”

“Yes, please.”

Mrs. Joplin knew the genealogies of everybody in two counties and wrote it all down because of the way things were lost and confused during the oil strikes and washed over by the immense army of people who had poured down into Texas looking for work in the oil fields. People from Delaware and France and Kansas City traveling through a wrecked and untrustworthy land, as if they were in some country they had never heard of before, had come from another world called the 1920s. Mrs. Joplin was a dangerous person to be around if you were figuring on running from your past. There is no past; it is always an accordioned present consisting of compound interest accruing every second. She of all people understood this from her bathtub gin and Charleston days. Their grandfather Tolliver had been a forbearing old man who kept his fields free of cedar and the house painted white. And now the fields were grown up in cedar seedlings and burrs and the house was the color of gunmetal with a few chips of paint here and there. Mrs. Joplin could see his face in Bea’s deeply serious expression. The Tollivers and Neumanns had come from Missouri, by way of Hot Springs, Arkansas, and they had at some time in the past married into the Armstrongs, which is where the red hair might have come from. Mrs. Joplin’s grandson Timmy Joplin was out in West Texas, at Big Spring. He joined the CCC and they had them out there slaving away on some public parks project. He had to go and see what he called “the world.” He was engaged to one of the Armstrongs. He hadn’t yet realized that wherever you are, that’s the world. Mrs. Joplin wished Tim would come home.

Mrs. Joplin’s oldest son, Timmy’s father, had also gone off to see “the world.” He married during the oil strike, to a skinny woman from Indiana who was no more a mother than a cowbird, which was why Mrs. Joplin and her elderly husband had raised Tim. Mrs. Joplin told Deemie Miller to quit sitting on the Jell-O rack again and wrote up the purchases while the girls walked around the store and read the messages tacked up by the wall phone, as if they had just arrived from some uncivilized Pacific island. Mayme read with interest the notice about a dance at the Old Valley Road schoolhouse and said, “Jeanine, look here.”

Jeanine paid for the soap and vinegar and food with coins out of her jeans pockets.

“You take this to your mother from me.” Mrs. Joplin handed the jelly beans to Bea and watched the child’s face light up. She went to the front doors to see the three sisters start off down the road in the dry cool wind, carrying their soap and vinegar, and Jeanine the middle girl as skinny as a yard of pump water, and yet she was carrying the twenty-five-pound sack of cornmeal over one shoulder. Deemie stood at the screen doors to watch them as well. And after that nobody saw anything of them for a long time.

THEY HAD TRAVELED all those miles to arrive at a place of dust. Dust moved through the atmosphere and hushed the evening to a powdery October darkness. It was hot during the day and hot all night long. All they had was the wood-burning cookstove and when it was fired up it drove them out to the front veranda. The valley of the Brazos River and the hills beyond seemed green because of the cedar and the oaks but the pastures were burnt out and the harvests thin. The peach orchard was stiff as whiskers with dead limbs and scale disease, the barn had lost so many boards from its walls that the floor was striped with bars of sunlight and in the shafts of light dust motes drifted. Their furniture seemed lost in the spaces of the two-story house. The kitchen chairs shrank into a huddle around the stove, and their beds jammed themselves up in the two rooms downstairs. The chain on the well windlass jerked and squealed as the bucket was cranked up.

The hills were a range of cracking red rock, they stood out against the blue sky, a country of tabled mountains that seemed to have been forged of cast iron in ages past and now were falling to pieces in rust and shattering fragments. Jeanine walked the entire fence line with Smoky trotting behind her. His hooves made crisp sounds on the dead grass. The fence was all standing but some sections of the wire were very low, and if Smoky took it in his head to go visit with the workhorses in the next field he could go right over it. She worked for a day bracing up the mesquite posts. She took a stick and wrapped the barbed wire strands around it and twisted them tight. It would hold for a while.

The house was saturated with red dust. It fogged the windows and leaked from the baseboards. Mayme and Bea scraped away the putty on the broken windows and pulled the glass out with little breaking sounds. They covered the open panes with cardboard. Jeanine scrubbed the unbroken panes with vinegar and newspaper, and as the glass cleared she read the headlines. Bill Boyd and his Cowboy Ramblers were appearing at the Crazy Water Hotel in Mineral Wells. The government was making an aerodrome at Fort Worth, the textile mills of the East were either shutting down or emptied by violent strikes, California police were chasing migrants out of the camps. Many of these stories were written by somebody named Milton Brown. Jeanine read his name and remembered him, the stuttering boy who came to their grandparents’ funeral.

Mayme lifted a bucket of water from the old well. She leaned over the well curb and drew it up on the windlass. There was no depth of water in it and the water came up cloudy. She went in and placed it on the cookstove, and when it boiled she cut pieces of white soap into it, and then threw it on the kitchen floor in a long wave and began to mop.

“I’m going to see if that windmill will pump,” said Jeanine. She had pulled half a ruined silk stocking over her hair and wore one of her father’s old shirts with conroe oil field hauling embroidered on the pocket. Tiny holes from either acid or welding dotted the front. “That well water is no good.”

She climbed up the old Eclipse windmill and found the tall lever that unlocked the blades. They turned in the wind with rusty sounds and then water came out of the pipe and splashed down into the metal tank and they hauled it into the kitchen by the bucket. Jeanine reset the hinges on the front double doors and nailed them in with big common nails. She needed to make a new frame, she needed to use wood screws, but she didn’t know how to do either of these things. Her father’s toolbox remained a mystery.

Then she walked in the dust down to the old barn to carry cracked corn to Smoky Joe. He paced the fence line and his pasterns sank with a loaded motion. He watched for her every evening and his outline against the rank pasture grasses was like something painted on a cave wall, a prehistoric horse frozen in flight. He drank from the old mule trough and the water dripped slowly from his muzzle so that the reflected rings of light made noiseless waves up the loose boards of the barn walls.

The blank sunlight poured through the rigid branches of the Spanish oaks, through the needles of the ancient cedar that bent over the well curb. Precise black shadows were shed by its turning limbs as it spiraled toward the westering sun as it had for more than a century. Jeanine carried water and soap to the parlor. She remembered being in that room, playing on the floor with thread spools, and seeing her mother outside with Aunt Lillian and Violet Keener. Jeanine thought of them talking and laughing together in their new flapper dresses, all three of them pretty and young and not yet worn down by cares and children and errant husbands and oil-boom towns. In their bobbed hair and bright dresses and T-strapped high heels, their waistlines down around their hips and their legs shining and pale in silk stockings, they moved forward into the 1920s, the years that came like a light summer wind all over Texas, a decade that would have a hundred years in it and would never end. Jeanine hammered in a nail to put up the lithograph of the little girl in the forest, and then hung the portrait of her grandparents in the hall, where they could stare out of their antique clothing, home again.