Paulette Jiles - Stormy Weather

“Oh, I bought one share.” She smiled and lifted one shoulder in a slight shrug.

The connections foreman picked up several tungsten drill-bit teeth, they lay in a heap on his desk. He rattled them back and forth in his hand and then he dropped the drill-bit teeth on his desk. He felt a powerful urge to protect the woman, to ask her to let him look at what she had bought from Beatty-Orviel.

“Mrs. Stoddard, everybody is in a bind for money what with the bank failures. A person could hope he would hit something and pay off. But don’t buy any more shares in it. They’re selling shares to suckers for twenty-five dollars each. Don’t let them talk you into buying shares. It’s a wildcat well. Isn’t that a dry hole? I’ve seen it on an old lease map. They drilled there before.”

She pushed at her jaunty hat and flushed and tucked back the little veil. “I wouldn’t let anybody talk me into buying any more. They already drilled there?” She developed an innocent expression and put a gloved forefinger to her bottom lip.

“Yes, ma’am, and they didn’t hit nothing. I understand there’s a new producer, and he’s selling blocks of shares. He’s had a fortune-teller and a water-witcher and a carny barker and I don’t know what-all. Everything but a seismograph crew.”

She shook her head. “I know, it’s such a fraud.” She did not say But he does have a seismograph report! And she knew she would tell this to the girls, and they would get them out and go over the smeared purple ink yet again. “Well. And how much did the driller owe Jack?”

The connections foreman reached in a desk drawer and handed her a note. The date on it told her it was from when Jack had been gone for two weeks last year, and now she wondered where he had gone besides hauling the boiler for Crowninshield. Two weeks was a long time to haul a boiler over from Louisiana. She wondered if he had been somewhere else as well. Who he had seen. Staring at the note she understood how suspicion had begun to shadow every past year, every past hour of her marriage, and the wild and improbable thought occurred to her that he could even have another family somewhere, like H. L. Hunt, like old Dad Joiner.

“Fifty dollars. Your husband hauled a derrick for him up to Jacksboro. Crowninshield was out of money and gave him a note.”

“This will be very welcome,” she said.

“I guess he thought he’d mislay the note, so he asked me to hold it for him.” He smiled and was glad to do something for her, anything, a good-looking woman. Prudent and dignified.

“Well, thank you.” She folded the signed note. She had fifty dollars in cash now, and fifty in a promissory note. “I appreciate it.”

“I’ll just indicate here in my books that you took possession of the note. I don’t think I know your first name.” Mr. Lacey whisked up a sheet of Magnolia Oil notepaper and took up the pen again with a neutral expression on his face.

She hesitated. She should say Mrs. John C. Stoddard and that her first name was no concern of his. After a couple of seconds she straightened her shoulders and said, “Elizabeth.”

“Very well.” He wrote quickly. “Just an indication here to myself that you took possession of the note.” He paused. “You’ve got three daughters,” he said.

“Yes, I have.”

“Well, I’ll tell you what, Mrs. Stoddard. If any one of them can type, well, there’s probably work in the oil field office in Tarrant for her.”

“In the office?”

“Yes,” he said. “There might be a position there in a few weeks and I would be glad to put in a word for her.”

For a moment she was too surprised to speak. “That would be my oldest, Mayme.” Men were begging for work and he was saying the Magnolia oil field office might hire a single girl. “A woman? They would hire a woman?”

Mr. Lacey smiled. “Yes. I would put in a good word for her.”

“Well, I can’t thank you enough.”

“My pleasure.”

She smiled in return and then got up and walked to the door. He hurried to open it for her. A roughneck came up; he was carrying a pressure gauge in one fist and both fists on his hips and his battered, oily fedora drooped around his head.

The connections foreman said, “Just a minute, Lloyd.” Behind them, in the nearest derrick, the enormous block and tackle called the traveling block was drawing drill pipe from the hole, two hundred feet into the air, a joint at a time.

The roughneck said, “Tom, I wanted to ask you about one of them cores pulled up. If I could have it. It’s got a fish in it. For my fish collection.”

“Yes, just a minute.” He lifted his hat again to Elizabeth. “Like I said about that well.”

“Thank you, Mr. Lacey,” she said. “I wouldn’t put a penny on a wildcat.”

“Mrs. Stoddard, if you need advice or anything, please call me.”

“I will.”

He stood and watched as she got into the Studebaker and drove away down the road between the derricks and the pumpjacks.

BEA HAD TO go out and sit in the fodder shed, on a discarded old kitchen chair with no back, beside the cane shredder to write in her journal. Her breath poured out in frozen clouds. They had had the first freeze of the year on November 12 and it hadn’t let up yet but nonetheless the thirteen-year-old was flushed with a grateful, joyous feeling, like somebody pulled alive out of a collapsing house. They had paid an installment on the taxes and they would not foreclose for now. Life was possible. Bea put an old blanket over her knees and laid her journal on it.

She had to find out how you made a script. Where could she find a radio script? If she wrote to One Man’s Family would they send her an old one so she could copy it, and see how they did it? And how much did they pay you? It was easy to see how you had to write things up for magazines. Radio scripts were mysterious. They were a hidden, arcane secret.

Bea bit the end of her pencil. The eraser in her other hand was gummy and crumbling. There were spiders in this place. She drew her feet together.

AT GAREAU’S DAIRY, Mayme joyfully tore off her head scarf and said good-bye to Mr. Gareau. She would wait until she actually went into town to apply for the office job to tell him she was quitting, but in the meantime they all said she seemed so happy. Whistling when she scalded the separator vat and forked chopped cane to the Holsteins in the foggy atmosphere of the cow-house. Their breath and the manure and the hot milk made a constant lifting mist in the place. Her auburn hair was in spirals when she walked into the front door of the old Tolliver house.

JEANINE BENT OVER the cookstove, drying her own short hair in the rising heat. Their mother was sitting at the kitchen table, worrying over some papers. She had decided to make herself a little desk. Her own desk. Elizabeth’s mother’s old enamel worktable was on the back porch and she could bring it in and call it a desk. Nobody would remember her mother cutting up chickens on it.

“You said you were going to keep house while I made the money,” said Mayme. She sponged off her shiny old gabardine coat and blew the dust from her little cloche hat. “When are you going to fix the roof?”

“I need help,” said Jeanine. “There’s got to be two of us do it.” Her light-brown hair whipped and crackled through the bristles.

“And you can’t just turn those chickens loose in the barn. Varmints will get them. And that’s my brush, sister.” Mayme pointed accusingly and then beat on the hat with a dishtowel.

“I’m doing it! I’m closing in one of the old stalls.” Jeanine put the brush down.

“You need chicken wire for a run, Jeanine, and a dog. We need a dog to kill the varmints. Whoever heard of a farm without a dog?”