Paulette Jiles - Stormy Weather

It came salting over the town, a vague snow of lint. Elizabeth Stoddard and her sister-in-law Lillian Stoddard and Violet Keener sat around the Keeners’ kitchen table.

“The county is going to let us pay a hundred dollars for now,” said Elizabeth. “And twenty a month. That’s as much as Mayme makes.”

Lillian placed her reddened hands together. “I’m sorry about Jack,” she said. “I didn’t want to say much more with Bea there.”

Elizabeth turned her coffee cup around on the saucer and then back again. They wanted to hear all about Jack now that the girls weren’t here. Stories like big ripe watermelons shattered open into bleeding hearts.

“You knew about him for a long time, Liz.” Violet patted her arm. “I always had my doubts.”

Elizabeth blew her nose again. She got up and walked to the window to see the ordinary streets with ordinary people walking down them because she was about to cry again and she was tired of crying, it made her face hurt. She was a good-looking woman but it was difficult to say in what way, for her features were so perfectly regular that there was nothing remarkable in her face at all; she had a wide smile, when she smiled, and ordinary brown hair and blue eyes.

“Jeanine was always his little friend,” said Liz. “She got better treatment than her sisters. She lied for him.”

“Don’t blame her,” said Lillian. “It’s not fair.”

“It’s not a matter of blaming,” she said. “Just makes me hurt when I think of it, that’s all.”

“You knew it before, Liz.”

“I didn’t want to know.”

She began pacing again, to the corner shelf with all of Violet’s dimwitted doodads on it, china cherubs and a Bakelite soldier boy with a thermometer sticking out of his head.

“You two said I was supposed to get my mind on something else.”

“Well yes, we thought you ought to.”

“Yes, well, now look here.” Lillian laid out a sheaf of certificates. “This will take some figuring out.”

Elizabeth sat down again. “I’ve been married since I was eighteen and had three girls. And they’re going to be gone before long and I’ll be alone in that place.”

Violet said, “Now pay attention, Liz, this is exciting and risky.”

“Yes, look here.” Lillian pushed the papers in front of her. “We could get rich or end up in the County Home.”

They held the papers in their hands as if they were sheet music and they were about to begin singing. Violet read over the notes she had written down on the back of an envelope in an attempt to understand what the producer had told them in his office at the Baker Hotel.

Elizabeth said, “All right.” She examined one of the certificates. “And Jack was always telling me I could never handle money.”

Lillian said, “Well, there was never much to handle.”

“What do they do?” Elizabeth read one of them. “It says these certificates give us twenty-five seventy-five thousandths interest in the well. Does that mean the oil?”

Violet frowned at her certificate. It had an official number at the top, along with the words the BEATTY-ORVIEL OIL COMPANY.

Violet said, “Yes.” She paused. “The oil.”

The women examined their certificates with anxious care. Elizabeth moved her lips as she read the fine print. She and Lillian had endured the births of their children without a doctor, they had lived through the anarchy of oil strikes and blowouts and sour gas, they had kept house in two-room shanties, but the certificates and the mimeographed reports seemed dangerous to them. A frightening world of pro rata shares and seismograph readings.

Lillian Stoddard was Elizabeth’s sister-in-law, married to Jack’s brother Reid when he was there but he was there no longer, absconded at age twenty-eight and Lillian with a girl to raise. Now she folded other people’s sheets and towels and ironed their shirts in a Mineral Wells laundry and her girl Betty was selling shoes at the E-Z Step shoe store. Elizabeth took a handkerchief out of her sleeve and wiped the palms of her hands.

“Well, where is it?” Elizabeth tried to remember if she had ever heard of Beatty-Orviel.

“About ten miles north, it’s at the edge of that Jacksboro field. A wildcat means anything that’s two miles from a producing field.”

“I know that,” said Elizabeth. “You don’t have to tell me that.”

“Have you told the girls?”

“No,” she said, and thought for a moment what it would be like if the well actually came in. If they made money. Actual money.

“Now look here, look here at this other one!” Violet Keener snatched up another paper. This too said Beatty-Orviel Oil Company. “This one gives us one-hundredth of the leaseholder’s oil royalty. Now one-hundredth is per barrel. So we got stock plus a tenth of a penny a barrel.”

“What if it came in,” Elizabeth said. “Wouldn’t that be something?”

The Keeners had left the oil fields early on. Joe Keener had gone to work for the telephone company instead. They had chosen whatever was staid and dull and predictable, so they had the kind of home that Elizabeth had always longed for. Elizabeth examined the borders of the certificates, the elaborate Victorian designs. She had put into it almost all they had. But still she thought of objections so that when they argued with her and disposed of her doubts she would feel better.

“That producer is hoping this well doesn’t come in,” said Elizabeth. “Then he doesn’t have to pay off.”

“But he’s got a top geologist!” said Violet. She pressed her voice into the upper registers like a cheerful radio announcer. “He showed us the seismograph reports!”

Elizabeth raised her head. “I don’t know why I did this,” she said. “But I did it.”

Lillian and Violet glanced at each other.

“For entertainment,” said Lillian.

Lillian held the seismograph reports that had been mimeographed in sticky purplish ink. The producer Albert Spanner had extracted more than a hundred dollars altogether from the three women. Violet came to look over Lillian’s shoulder and read the figures again. They had all read them several times over but the phrases Woodbine pool and anticline trap and promising seismograph registration were so reassuring.

The coffeepot rattled its glass topper and Violet poured them all more coffee.

“I think our twenty-five seventy-five thousandths come out of the oil.” Lillian took up her pencil and tried to figure out what her twenty-five dollars would bring her.

“Think of what-all has to be paid before we see a cent,” said Elizabeth. “All those other people Mr. Spanner has sold certificates to, and you got to pay your driller and his crew, and people have to haul things. They got to lay pipe to get it somewhere.”

Violet said, “But listen, what if the price of oil goes up? Y’all never thought of that.”

Lillian said, “That’s right! Are we tied to the price it first came in at?”

They bent anxiously over their certificates again.

“No, here it is. Initial production sale…pro rata. That’s what pro rata means. If the price of oil goes up, we’ll get more.”

Elizabeth said, “Come to think of it, I remember plenty of wildcats that came in. Kilgore wasn’t anything but independents. They drilled a well right in the churchyard in the middle of town.” She might be able to make some money on her own, it was a surprising and happy thought. Her very own money. If the well came in. The happy thought was irresistible and warm, tranquil.

“And then the big operators come and buy you out,” said Violet.

Lillian had big, wide shoulders and did herself no favors with her crown of tightly plaited braids. There was nothing yielding about her.