Paulette Jiles - Stormy Weather

Bea stepped up the dusty stairs into the attic and came upon a book called The Flight of the Silver Airships and fell into the book as if into a well. She was hungry for print and for stories about cheerful people who overcame great odds. Within the week she started school at the Old Valley Road school a mile away. She hurried from the house every morning with her books strapped in a piece of harness Jeanine had found in the barn.

As soon as the house was as scrubbed and bright as they could manage, Mayme went to ask for a job at Gareau’s Dairy and Creamery only two miles down the road. They were surprised at the appearance of a new neighbor, and a young, pretty, redheaded one at that, but they needed somebody. She would be paid five dollars a week to scald milk bottles and wipe down the bottling room and throw fodder to the cows, and she could bring home as much skim milk as she wanted. So Mayme stepped out of the silent house at five-thirty every morning, carrying the empty glass vinegar jug, and shut the screen door carefully behind her. At breakfast time Elizabeth and Bea and Jeanine turned on the radio to hear the Crazy Water Gang, broadcast out of Mineral Wells. They listened as if the brainless jokes and live country music contained secret messages about the people who lived out beyond their silent house and would bring them news of their home county they had so longed for, all those years in the oil fields.

The windows looked out into their own 150 dry acres, studded with red outcrops of rock tumbling down the slope. About half of their land was clear of cedar seedlings; Jeanine did not know how that had happened. The rest was grown up in cedar and other brush. In the valley below were a few cotton fields now bloomed out in white tufts of fiber, and Jeanine and her sisters could see the pickers lifting their long pick-sacks and making gestures as if they were calling to one another, but they were too far away to be heard.

Two weeks after they moved in, a high wind started up at six in the morning and continued all day. It was a deliberate, hurtful wind. By the next morning the blowing dust was so thick Mayme could not walk the two miles down the road to the dairy. Lines of dust came in under the doors. They stopped up the cracks in the windows with rags. The wind hooted at the chimney like someone blowing across the top of a bottle. The dust was carried on gusts from the northeast along with bits of dry grass and other debris from the fields, thrown against the windows. The blow lasted another night. By dawn Elizabeth was sitting beside the cold cookstove with a wet cloth in her hand. The surface of the old stove was streaked with red dust.

“We’ve got to think about this,” she said. “I don’t know if we can last this out.”

That night they gathered around the Emerson radio to listen to the evening news while the wind beat at the windows. Dust poured through the ceiling beside the chimney. Jeanine and Mayme swept it up on pieces of cardboard boxes and Bea kept the fire going in the cookstove. Jeanine saw Bea staring at the radio speaker, listening as if it mattered. Everything mattered to Bea. Bea’s heart was engaged with the world like a gear.

Elizabeth clicked off the radio and said they had to decide what they were to do in the coming months. The old house they had longed for all those years shunting around the oil camps, that they remembered as the good place of plenty and quiet, was in a mess. The peach orchard eaten by scale and unpruned. The roof was a leaking patchwork of composite shingles and fifty-year-old cedar shingles, the fields grown up with cedar seedlings, parasites that ate up all the good things from the soil. The south fireplace had been bricked up and its chimney blocked by leaves and birds’ nests. They needed chickens and a garden and money for seeds and the wallpaper should be stripped.

Bea got up and went to the bedroom she shared with her mother and came back with her book of famous poems. All the beautiful words in their sparse print telling of great events and shattering emotions. Her mother said, “Bea, you’d better listen to this.” Bea shut the book.

“We’ve got to move in town,” said Elizabeth. “We can live better if we move into town.”

“No, Mother,” said Jeanine. “No, let’s stay.”

“Jeanine, I don’t know if you have a vote here,” said her mother.

Mayme said, “We can all move in town with Aunt Lillian and Jeanine can stay out here by herself.”

“That’s mean,” said Bea. “But it’s dramatic.”

“Y’all still blame me about Daddy,” said Jeanine. “It wasn’t my fault what Daddy did.”

“No, you just covered up for him.”

“Mayme, hush,” said Elizabeth. “You girls have lived in towns all your lives. We can’t keep up with the work. We might be able to sell. And you girls need a social life.”

Jeanine said, “I don’t want a social life. We can fix all this, Mother.” Jeanine made vague circles in the air with both hands to indicate some completeness, some kind of culmination. “Nobody’s going to buy. And we’ll plant things. I’m going to move upstairs and set up the Singer.”

“You’ll freeze in the winter up there. There’s no heat,” Mayme said. She wore a white kerchief over her hair all the time now, she had made it from a sugar sack and hemmed it neatly. It made her look like a nun.

“I’ll find a kerosene stove somewhere. And by next fall Bea will have a going-to-high-school party.” Jeanine said this in an enthusiastic tone of voice. They were still mad at her. They were all still confused and damaged by Jack Stoddard’s death, and it seemed his long shadow remained on earth even though he was gone, and it had followed them across the country to perpetuate their conflicts and divisions.

Bea put her finger in her book to mark her place. “Can I cut my hair? When I have my high school party?”

Elizabeth said, “Jeanine stop that. Don’t make her believe those things.”

“We can’t move again,” said Jeanine.

“Then what?” said Elizabeth. She laid her hand on the table. “Then what?”

Mayme was the only one with a job. The winter was coming, and they needed wood for the kitchen range, which was $1.75 a rick or five dollars the cord and a cord would last them, say, about a month. And coal oil for the lamps would come to $3.50 a month if Bea didn’t stay up all night reading.

“Bea, make a list,” said Jeanine. “Of what all we have. Write all this down.” Bea flipped over the pages of her Big Chief notebook and ruled out columns. She doodled at the edges. A stick man sat on a block of ice, milk bottles rolled their eyes at one another. “Listen to me, this will look a lot better when there’s a list.”

They could lease the fields, maybe for as much as five dollars a month. Jeanine said she would clear fifty acres of cedar somehow. And what about the work in the house? Elizabeth said. All her life she had done nothing but keep house, she had hauled and boiled water and ran out the bedbugs with sulfur and stuffed newspapers in the cracks and wrung out clothes by hand and look where it got me. Her voice was rising. Look where it got me. Bea kept her head low and wrote it all down.

She said, “I am not going to do housework anymore. Y’all are big.”

“But what would you do, Mother?” Mayme bit her lip. She could not imagine what her mother would do other than keep house.

“I want to go into town, and spend time with Lillian and Vi,” she said. Bea’s pencil stopped in mid-milk bottle.

“Mother, you’re not leaving, are you?” Mayme was alarmed.

Bea said, “Mother? Are you going away?” She had a desperate expression on her face. Then she bent over the notebook again and drew drilling rigs.

“Y’all look like you been shot,” said Elizabeth. “I’m not leaving, but you had better think about the work this involves.”