Paulette Jiles - Stormy Weather

“Well, you all need to get out socially,” said Betty. “There’s a farmer world and then there’s a social world.” She put out a foot shod in dark red leather. “I get shoes at cost, there where I work. These here you are looking at are dancing shoes. I don’t normally wear them walking around in the fields, but if you want dancing shoes, I got them.”

“We’ll come in town and see,” said Mayme. Bea sat on the edge of the tank and stared at Betty’s dancing shoes.

“What I am talking about is men,” said Betty. “You got to hunt them down, and never let them know you’re sort of stalking them, and you got to do it in really good-looking shoes.”

Jeanine clenched her hands together as if they were lips and nodded with an interested expression.

They took their aunt and cousin on a tour of the old house. It had been built in 1883 with lumber and glass hauled from Mineral Wells, a crowd of neighbors shouting to one another, lifting the beams. They set the foundation with red sandstones and raised chimneys at either end and the two stories filled with talk and music and disputes and children running down the staircase with a racket like falling barrels. At the age of ten Elizabeth had screamed with excitement when her cousins roped and broke in new horses in the corrals, and the big sugar-grinding stones in the barn roared as they turned on one another and juice bubbled from the spout and splashed into the boiling pans. Grandpa Tolliver’s two plow horses, Shorty and George, called in loud quivering whinnies every morning for their feed and banged their buckets to wake everyone up. Every evening Elizabeth’s father sat on this very veranda in a striped shirt and galluses and a vast black hat and sang cowboy songs to himself, songs about thundering stampedes. And now all was still.

They stood in the parlor with its nine-foot windows and cracked, shimmering glass and the Virginia creeper swarming over the panes so that the parlor seemed to be underwater. They peered down into the well where the old centurion cedar stood guard twisted in spirals by the daily journey of the sun. They went out to the graveyard to contemplate their mutual relatives. The graves had not been tended properly. They were grown up with agarita and cactus. The cast-iron fence was leaning in sections. Jeanine tried to straighten it and her sisters and mother said to leave it alone. Her grandfather’s grave spelled out his name in ornate letters, Samuel V. Tolliver, 1860-1932 and beside him Nannie Allen Neumann Tolliver, 1862-1932. Two unnamed babies that had lived only a few months; her mother’s forgotten brother and sister.

Betty said, “I just feel so bad for y’all losing Uncle Jack but I remember when my daddy picked up and left.”

“Hush up, Betty,” said her mother.

They went on, leading their aunt and cousin slowly and uneasily around this inherited property as if it were not really their own, as if they were squatters. Elizabeth and Lillian, the accidental sisters-in-law, sat on the front veranda and drank iced tea without ice, without sugar, and with hardly any tea in it. Lillian sipped at her glass and carefully put it down. She stared around at the weedy yard and the cardboard in the windows. She put her heavy hand on Elizabeth’s arm and said, “Liz, I want you to come into town. Me and Violet have something I want you to look into.”

“What?” Elizabeth said.

“Y’all got to do something. Y’all are going to starve out here.”

“Well, we decided to try for a while.”

“How much money do you have on hand right now?”

Elizabeth squinted her eyes against the late fall sunlight and thought. “I’ve got enough to buy chickens and garden seed and a few other things. Then something for an emergency.”

“What for an emergency?”

“An uncollected note. It was in Jack’s tally book. A man owed him money for hauling a boiler up to Jacksboro.”

“You come into Mineral Wells and visit with me and Violet Keener. We got something we want to talk to you about.”

SO THEY BEGAN to make their lives there, throughout the fall and winter of 1937. They tried to piece their lives together the way people draw maps of remembered places; they get things wrong and out of proportion, they erase and redraw again. From the radio they heard of people dying in the dust storms just to the north of them, in Oklahoma and the Panhandle. That Gloria Vanderbilt was reduced to dressmaking for a living. Of the faraway rich with more money than there ever was in the world while men starved and had no work and women starved and worked both, of strikes at the textile mills in Rhode Island and all the people going to California to pick peas or whatever there was to pick. But the Hamilton clock seemed to tell only of their own long hours of labor against the dust and the drought. They were in the midst of the Dirty Thirties, and that decade’s modish obsession with important people in far places, with gangsters and movie stars and oil barons and swing bands. It was easy to feel themselves invisible and empty of significance, to forget that behind every human life is an immense chain of happenstance that includes the gravest concerns; murder and theft and betrayal, great love; lives spent in burning spiritual devotion and others in miserly denial; that despite the supposed conformity of country places there might be an oil field worker who kept a trunk of fossil fish or a man with a desperate stutter who dreamed of being a radio announcer, a dwarf with a rivet gun or an old maid on a rooftop with a telescope, spending her finest hours observing the harmonics of the planetary dance.

IN EARLY NOVEMBER they had their first freeze. By this time in late November men had brought out the big lister buster plows and carved down the middles of the rows, with mules and horses straining in harness against the cotton and cane roots, ripping them out for the new seed, gambling against the drought.

The mailman drove a buggy with a big thunderous gray horse and when Jeanine saw him coming she raced out in the cold. The faint remains of the wind carried down the smell of the newly turned earth in the cotton fields. The mailman’s heavy dappled horse dozed along in a slow clopping saunter with the two shafts to either side of him bobbing to his walk. The mailman wore a hand-knitted muffler against the winter chill that some female relative had wrought for him in manly colors of brown and green and mustard and he wore it bravely, resignedly. He drove along with the reins in his lap and read all the return addresses and when he arrived at their mailbox he tipped his hat, and said his name was Herman Dienst, and then handed her the letters stained with rain.

Jeanine ran back into the house, searching through the letters. A notice from the county about taxes. A letter from Mayme’s young man in Conroe, Robert Faringham. The one who worked for the Conroe-Lufkin Telephone Company.

Elizabeth sat down and opened the notice about Palo Pinto county taxes. They owed three hundred dollars in back taxes. The county tax collector said it had come to his notice that the Tolliver farm was inhabited again and although the county did not want to foreclose because the county would have no use for the land in the present economic emergency Mrs. Stoddard would please take notice of the amount of back taxes and do something about it. Elizabeth put the notice down and then lifted it again and read it once more.

“They’ll give us an extension,” Elizabeth said. “They’re not going to throw a widow woman and three daughters off their land because of back taxes. They just won’t.” But the Cunningham bank in Palo Pinto had failed and in its collapse it had taken several public utility bonds with it. Men who had good jobs at one time were now sitting around the courthouse square in dirty clothes looking for freighting work, hoping for day labor with a shovel on the pipelines. “They won’t,” said Elizabeth. “They have to accept something less, they just have to.”