Paulette Jiles - Stormy Weather

She moved all her possessions into an upstairs room and when Mayme came home from work they carried the Singer upstairs as well. Jeanine liked the look of the bare room, uninhabited by furniture or pictures. Hers to own, a workplace. One window was covered in cardboard where they had pulled out the broken glass. Her own spare little room was next to it with a window where she could look out on the stacked blue lines of hills disappearing into the east. Jeanine took out the dress and the material and cut them into pieces. Scraps of cloth all over the floor. She cut out the sheer curtain for linings. But she knew clothes weren’t good enough. Pretty clothes wouldn’t get the cedar seedlings torn down or the peach orchard cultivated. She had to go over to the neighbors, the Crowsers, and get them to lend her their tractor. They had to fix the roof or the dust and the solitary, brief rains would drip down the chimney and they would wake up one morning to a cookstove full of water or dirt.

Abel Crowser got up stiffly out of his chair and went into the kitchen. He started a fire in the cookstove and then turned the crank on the battery charger so he could click on the Admiral radio. He had wanted to go over and be friendly but the women all seemed distracted and closed up, and who could blame them? With Jack Stoddard arrested for fooling around on Elizabeth with a young girl and then dead in a jail cell. Anyhow, that’s what they said at the Strawn’s crossroads store. Adultery always made for gripping stories, never failed to take your attention, look at the Vanderbilt trial. It was always a damn train wreck. The women kept to themselves and their dark stallion stood at the fence line and called out to Sheba and Jo-Jo, paced up and down, lonely and, like the rest of the world, without a job.

Abel rolled the knob through the landscape of Central Texas radio, through WBAP out of Fort Worth and KVOO from Tulsa until he found the National Hayride. There was a crackling burst of either static or applause. Alice clattered among the dishes and the flatware. She sang along with the staticky tenor of the music:

I want to be a cowboy’s sweetheart

I want to learn to rope and to ride…

He listened to her and outside the windows the blue night sank in, and the horses settled among themselves which one had priority at the hay bunker. The government had paid him for his underweight cattle and shot them and brought in relief labor to bury them below the house in an eroded ravine. He understood it was to prevent overgrazing but it was still hard. Now the grass was supposed to come back but you can’t have grass without rain.

Alice always had something useful to do no matter what age she got to. He had grown useless. He longed to plow a field again, set in good Red Top sorghum even if he had to drag the sulky plow through baked hardpan. But his old work team was so used to being retired he doubted if he could get a harness on them without a knock-down, drag-out fight.

They sat and ate by the light of the kerosene lamps. In her reflection Alice tipped her cottony head from side to side as Bob Wills and the Light Crust Doughboys sang Take me back to Tulsa , I’m too young to marry…

Alice said, “Abe, have you always been faithful to me?”

He stopped chewing. He stared at her. He swallowed and then he said, “Well, Alice. You know I have.”

“Even when you all were out there working on the Pecos high bridge?”

“You and I were just engaged then.”

“Ha. I knew it.”

“Alice, we were living in tents in Langtry and eating armadillo.”

“Mexico wasn’t five miles away.”

Abel laid his fork down. “Well, the foreman wanted ten feet of iron a day and nobody was stopping for a quick dally with a señorita.”

“I just wanted to know.”

“How come?”

“I thought you ought to get a prize. You should get an award. We could get one up from the Rotary Club there in Mineral Wells.”

“Well, Mother!” He stared out the window. “How would you prove it?”

“Word of honor.”

He was silent for a long time. “Word of honor. There you go.”

They finished their supper. Alice washed the dishes and then sat down with a dress and a needle and thread. Her white hair was cut short and fluffed out in curly waves around her head. She looked like Harpo Marx. Sometimes Abel thought all she needed was one of those ooga horns.

“What are you doing this week?”

“I don’t have much to do, Mother. I finished clearing them seedlings last year. It was something to do anyhow.”

“You could take up sewing.” She smiled and held the dress out to him. The needle and thread were thrust in the collar. “I’ll never tell.”

“Where would I hide the evidence?”

“I’ll take the blame. I’ll say it was me.”

Abel leaned back and smiled at her. “All right, I guess it’s time to confess.”

“Here it comes,” she said.

“I rode in a sidesaddle once.”

“You did not!” Alice stared at him.

“I did. It was before we were married. There wasn’t anybody to home, there on Mama and Daddy’s place. And Mama’s saddle horse was standing tied ready for her but she was in the kitchen arguing with Fat Cissy Cramer. I knew that was going to take all day.

“And I thought, ‘I’ve got to see how they ride in them.’ So I got in the damn thing and got my leg over the leaping horn and went trotting around the barn lot and then I heard somebody holler, some neighbor had come up, and I about went into a heart attack. I couldn’t get loose from it. I had the damnedest time getting out of it.” He snorted into his handkerchief and then tucked it away.

Alice began to laugh.

“It’s hell to get out of them. I nearly killed myself. I thought, ‘If I get hung up in this sidesaddle and I’m getting dragged around the barn lot when somebody comes in, I’ll have to pack up and quit the country.’”

“Who was the neighbor?”

“Thankfully it has been erased from my mind. I am going to forget my own name here one of these days.” In his mind he twisted at a doorknob that would not open. It made him impatient. Then it opened. “Everett’s youngest sister,” he said. “I think.”

They fell into silence and sat listening to a newsman talk about all the alphabet agencies that were to stem the dust storms and get the factories thumping away again. The question about faithfulness, he felt, still had not been deflected even with the sidesaddle story.

He said, “Do you have any confessions to make this evening?” He glanced up at her and observed with interest as she stitched, and folded his hardened hands one over the other.

“Give me a couple of days and I’ll see if I can match that one.” She shook her head. “The things I don’t know about you.”

The fire ate its way through mesquite wood. The two cows he and Alice still kept grazed in the harvested milo field, taking up the gleanings with their ponderous thick tongues. He thought he might go out to the barn and do something to the harness. He might put a saddle on Jo-Jo and tell Alice he had to go out and check on the salt trough. But instead he sat and watched the road for another hour as the possum-belly trucks went past carrying stock from Comanche County. They would kill them and can the good ones and the canned meat would go to the relief agencies. The cans would be placed into the hands of those who had nothing to eat but the gristly meat that the government handed out to them, and they would be grateful for it.

IN MINERAL WELLS the wind bullied scraps of flying cotton from the cotton gin. Buyers stuck their long knives deep into the six-hundred-pound bales to test the quality of the farmers’ cotton and loose bits of lint sailed into the air. There were very few bales at all. What the boll weevil had not eaten the drought had baked crisp. The men waited anxiously, leaning on the wagon wheels, talking and smoking. The crop was very poor, and when they bedded up and plowed the stalks under it had sent dangerous columns of dust into the air.