Paulette Jiles - Stormy Weather

“Give that back,” she said and took the clothes from him. “No. Well, I did when I was cleaning the windows. But I don’t remember you.”

“Yes you do yes you d-do!” He stuttered terribly. Then she remembered the boy and his hammering voice that seemed to leap into a kind of dit-dit-dah-dit Morse code when he talked, turning the knob of the radio at her grandparents’ funeral so many years ago; ten years ago.

“All right, yes I do,” she said. They were walking down the street with his hand on her elbow crashing through the Saturday crowds in the torrent of his enthusiasm and goodwill.

“Of course you do! We went to school together in Ranger! And then y’all left for Mexia. All I did”-he pulled her to one side to let a woman carrying a baby go past-“was listen to your grandp-p-parents’ radio. The world spoke to me! All I ever wanted to do was to talk back!”

“I remember,” she said.

“Dang, girl, your father has died. I know, I am a n-newspaperman, dammit, what a thing. I am the investigator of all that is odd and anomalous. Where are you, where are you, in short, where are you living?” He shoved his hat to the back of his head.

“We came back to the old Tolliver place,” she said. They swept past a hardware store where there was a tallest cornstalk contest, the winner to receive fifty cents. Desperate farmers had stood up their best cornstalk with their names tagged to them. “That’s where we’re living.”

“All of you? Anybody else dead?”

“No, no, me and Mother and Mayme and Bea.” She laughed. “Stop making me laugh,” she said.

“Your father has died. Your life is in shambles. You are starving on the old farm. You are in the midst of dust explosions and your potatoes have the Irish rot and the mules have all died and their bones are white-white-whitening in the sun. When can I come and see you?”

“Oh put a cork in it, Milton.” She couldn’t stop laughing. “What are you doing? When did I see you last?”

“When your grandparents died. I was out there at the graveyard because my aunt is B-Baylor Joplin and she’s related to the old lady at the Strawn store, you s-s-s-see all things are tied together. Ah Jeanine, your cloudy gray eyes, your sultry voice. How are y’all staying alive?”

He drew her to the benches in front of the post office. They sat down along with farmers and ranchers who were waiting for their wives to finish shopping.

“We’re doing fine,” she said. “Mayme has a job at the dairy and I’m keeping house, Bea is in school.” She lifted the wad of secondhand clothes. “And I’m making dresses for everybody. I’m the little housekeeper. We got out of the oil fields.”

The wind was pouring through the streets. It raised dust on the pavement and along the gravel roads leading up to the mountain above. The courthouse flag stood out its full length and then the confused wind backed and doubled it so that the stripes checkered themselves against the forty-eight stars. People walked with their heads down, skirt hems scalloped and rolled. In the north a solid bank of dark blue cloud was bearing down on them, with pallid, running sails of smaller clouds beneath. He gazed at her with a happy smile.

“Jeanine, you look so good. Ah, your daddy was a man I admired. Handsome devil. Rakish. They said it was sour gas. A workingman’s fate. I wanted to kill myself when y’all left for Mexia, slash my wrists with a shattered radio t-t-tube.” Jeanine bent over laughing. He lowered his voice. “It was your eyes, Jeanine. You could sing ‘I Wanna Be Loved by You’ all the way through and you had a yellow dress and a yellow sunbonnet to match. And then you went away. All of you. Off on the road of l-life. I think the papers all say trundling. You trundled off. What the hell is a t-t-trundle?”

“You don’t remember all that!” she said. “You’re making it up!”

“I am not.”

“I was ten when that song came out. We were in…” She paused to fetch up that year from her memory but she could not recall where they were. “Out in the Permian, in Monahans? I’ll have to ask Mayme. But what are you doing? How did you get on at the newspaper?”

Milton Brown took a pencil out of his jacket pocket and held the tip up in the air.

“I went to college until the old man couldn’t support me anymore and he said, ‘Sharpen your pencil and get d-d-d-down there to the newspaper and beg for a job, son.’ I was dying to get into radio. But I stutter. And I suffer from a T-T-T-Texas accent. I live in a rented room above the shoe store where people come in and try on rugged footwear to plod on through the economic emergency.” He stuck his foot in the air and she could see his wingtips were cracked and shiny with desperate applications of polish to cover the aged leather and thin soles. “I help out at the recording sessions at the Crazy Water Hotel, cut the acetate, then they run them into Dallas and b-b-broadcast them on WBAP. I’m being paid in scrip and cabbages and dozens of eggs. Do y’all need eggs?”

“Oh no!” Jeanine jumped to her feet. “I have to buy us a setting hen, I almost forgot.”

“Oh darling Jeanine, listen.” He stood up and took her elbow. “Move in town and live in luxury here where there are streetlights, get away from your country estate. Do y’all have enough cabbages and gruel to survive on?”

“Bye, Milton.” She held out her hand to him. He took hold of it.

“May I come and visit?”

“Yes. Leave a message at Strawn’s store.”

“I will. But you’ll break my heart, won’t you? You’ll lead me on and then c-c-c-crush my hopes.” He bent forward and kissed her cheek. “All of you will. You will toy with me, even little Bea. How old is Bea?”

“She’s thirteen.”

“And lethal, thirteen and lethal. I will be out your way because there is a huge dam going in on the Brazos just above you. WPA project. After the water is impounded Roosevelt will come out and walk on it. Prairie roses will bloom. What can I bring with me?”

“Oh…books for Bea.”

He swept off his hat and bowed. A man in coveralls sitting next to them on a bench chewed slowly and watched without expression.

“Before long, my cruel tormentor.”

JEANINE STOPPED IN at the E-Z Step shoe store to say hello to Betty.

Betty screamed, “Jeanine! Y’all are in town!” She made Jeanine sit down and try on shoes. So Jeanine tried on a new pair of oxfords made with manatee leather and a pair of canvas espadrilles just to look at her feet in them and imagine herself dancing in whole shoes. When Betty was putting them back in their boxes, her cousin said their mothers were over at Violet Keener’s house in a conspiracy about something, something dangerous.

“Dangerous how?” said Jeanine.

“I don’t know exactly but it’s about money.”

Then Betty walked Jeanine to the truck and said what Jeanine needed was shoes and lipstick and a date and a dance. Jeanine decided not to say anything more about learning to drive a tractor. She said good-bye and then found a farm wife with live chickens; she bought three brown hens in a cardboard box and started for home with five gallons of gas in the refilled jerrican. She left her mother to stay the night in Mineral Wells and whatever dangerous conspiracies she and Violet and Lillian might be hatching. She drove south on State Highway 281, past the fields of cotton now stripped down to a tangle of dried stems, as if the farmers had begun to grow fence wire. A pouring wave of sheep fled down a hillside, answering some unheard call, and the dense bank of cloud to the northeast told of a windstorm to come.

She climbed up on the roof carrying a brick on a rope, dropped it down the chimney on the south end of the house, and knocked out the birds’ nests and branches. She climbed down again swept up the parlor and lit a fire in it. There was nothing like a good fire. At least they had a fire.