Paulette Jiles - Stormy Weather

Jeanine and her father and mother and sisters moved again, this time to Tarrant, and things started going seriously downhill. Jeanine’s mother, Elizabeth, had seen the world change so rapidly she was in a state of anxiety. Women’s clothing had changed in ten years from floor-length dresses and big hats to little narrow skirts that stopped above the knee, and the women who wore them drank whiskey and smoked. Her husband had taken her away from farm life to the oil fields, and she had become a mother three times over. Like so many others who followed the oil strikes, they left behind not only the place where they had been born but the Tolliver farm and their kin and the local doctor. They left behind a community where their family names were known and the graveyard under the cedars, whose stones were carved with those same names.

When they lived in Tarrant, Jeanine’s father was gone every weekend to the brush-track races. When he came back, sometimes he had money and sometimes he didn’t. Often he had too much to drink and then for a while he was as much fun as people on the radio. He was tall, dark, and handsome and Jeanine believed everything he said. He let her light his cigarettes, her small fingers cautiously lifted the flaming kitchen match in the dark of the front porch, in the heat of a summer night.

He said someday when he made his money in the oil fields they’d have horses, they would have something fast enough to beat Harmon Baker, faster than Ace of Hearts. He sang to her the old race song about Molly and Tenbrooks. She was too young to know he was drunk and had gambled away the last of the McAllister boiler money. Molly went to California, she done as she pleased, come back to old Kentucky and got beat with all ease…

WHEN THEY MOVED to the next oil strike at Mexia, in 1927, her mother packed up the photograph album and the quilts and the five Tolliver silver spoons and dishes and the buckets and her framed print of a little girl sitting alone in the woods. The little girl was listening to a bird that sang some unheard melody from the branch of a white tree and it seemed to Jeanine that the girl was dangerously alone in an alien, watery forest.

He took her with him to the brush-track races around Mexia. She held her father’s bet money and watched as the horses were led up to the score line. She was only nine and the men thought she was charming, she waved her straw hat and cheered as the horses and jockeys roared down the quarter-mile straightaway track with the jockeys up in the irons, their caps turned backward, suspended over the horses’ necks. They flashed past the prickly-pear flats when the cactus fruit was ripe and stood up in bloodred crowns. The jockeys fought against one another in an avalanche of red dust and radiant hides, the horses hurling up clods and rocks behind them, their nostrils big as boreholes, always running on the edge of disaster, for the Texas brush tracks were poorly graded and the footing was treacherous. Betting was illegal in Texas but the money that changed hands sometimes amounted to a man’s monthly wage or half the cotton crop, and often enough the bills were stained with crude oil. At that time incomparable horses ran on the Texas brush tracks: Old Joe Hancock, Red Buck, Flying Dutchman, Hot Shot, Oklahoma Star, My Texas Dandy, Rainy Day, and the beautiful earless Red Man.

He brought her with him down to the blacksmith shop in Mexia; an abode of men and fire and iron and cars in various stages of disassembly. He backed the Model T into the open shed and called out to the men sitting beside the forge fire and pulled the hand brake.

“I’m just going to see what the boys are up to,” he said. He slapped Jeanine’s arm in a comradely way. “You sit out here in the car and watch for the law. If you see a Texas Ranger, you say, ‘Cheese it, the cops.’”

“I seen that movie,” said Jeanine. “Why do I say cheese it the cops?”

“They don’t like us playing cards. They get into people’s private business.”

The men all went out to the yard behind the shop and cleared a worktable. Cards spun out to each in turn. Jeanine didn’t want to sit in the car. Instead she stood at her father’s elbow and looked at his cards. She listened to him talk in fragments of sentences with a younger man across from him at the worktable; he was talking about selling the team. Her father said he needed to buy a truck, comes a time when you got to face facts. I’ll save an hour a day not having to throw a harness on them. Cigarette smoke drifted over their heads in gray planes.

“This here fellow is Ross Everett,” he said to her. “You wouldn’t mind if he bought our team, would you? He ain’t but nineteen years old but he says he’s figured out how to feed them.”

Jeanine was nine now, and she knew better than to plead and besides it was not in her nature. She would bargain, try to salvage something, fix things.

“I guess you can,” she said. “But I want Big Man. He can have Maisie and Jeff and Little Man.”

“Pistol, Big Man would be lonely,” her father said. “He’d cry every night, he’d get drawn down.”

The talk drifted to racing, to bloodlines and quarter-mile and eighth-of-a-mile times and what the Cajuns were going to run in Louisiana. They got that mare named Della Moore, they’re coming over to get into Texas racing. One man said he’d never been to Louisiana; he said it just for the record. Another man with his front teeth crossed one over the other said them boys are hot. They turned that stud San Jacinto loose at 350 yards in Eagle Pass and he ate everybody up.

Jeanine lifted her square face and smiled anxiously.

“But, Daddy, didn’t you say Red Nell was the one to beat at 350 yards?”

“What did I tell you?” He looked around at the other men. “What did I tell you. She knows more than Ott Adams.”

The younger man didn’t laugh. He glanced up from his cards at her. She wasn’t supposed to be here. She already knew this, that her father took her places that girls weren’t supposed to go. She turned away and went to poke sticks into the forge fire. There was a pack of old playing cards burning. They were used up, the men had thrown them away, and the queen of clubs dissolved into flame. Maybe he would get so drunk he would forget about selling the team.

After a while she fell asleep in the Model T on top of the groceries; bags of flour and sugar and a jug of kerosene, soup bones and bologna wrapped in brown paper. When she woke up the blacksmith’s shop was silent and dark. She couldn’t hear any voices. Everybody was gone. For a few terrified moments she could not remember what town they were in. Mexia, she thought, we’re in Mexia. She did not know what hour of the night it might be, or what could have happened to her father.

She waited for a while and watched the last gleams from the forge fire run over the walls, the coals were a deep gemlike red and seemed like something you could hold in your hand. A cat came out from behind the quenching vat with a rat in its mouth. Jeanine sat there for a long time and was perfectly still, like a small animal in the face of unknown dangers.

She grasped the lever handle on the passenger door and opened it and stepped down. He had been out in the back. There had been a lot of laughing and talking and drinking but they must have all gone home and possibly her father had gone too and forgotten that he had come in the car and that she was with him. The floor was crusty with hoof shavings and bits of metal. She walked by the last light of the fire toward the back bay doors. She heard a noise beyond the wall, it sounded like something was dying. Long snarling groans.

Jeanine eased herself through the doors. By the remote light of the street gas lamps and a quarter moon she saw a man sitting upright in a kitchen chair with a cane in his hands. He turned his head in her direction.