Paulette Jiles - Stormy Weather

“Will you let me do the work, Mayme? Who asked you to supervise?”

“Well it’s got to get done!” Mayme slapped the hat down on the safe counter. “And you can’t hang colored clothes out in the sun!” Her voice was rising. “They fade, you faded my only good dress!” She turned to the laundry basket and jerked the dress out in an explosion of cloth, making Albert bolt out of the basket and across the room. Loud voices made him afraid of getting his nose smashed again. Mayme threw the print dress, now faded from navy and green to the color of old denim, at Jeanine. “Look at that!”

“It’s only faded a little!” Jeanine was yelling as well. They were yelling because they were afraid of taxes and drought, afraid of being reduced to taking relief in town, of being alone without their father to help them and it had come upon them suddenly, like a little hot dust devil full of field debris, stinging them. Jeanine’s hands shook. “They wouldn’t hire you if you walked in there stark naked with your hair on fire so shut up about it!” She wadded the dress into a tight ball and threw it back at Mayme and it hit the sugar canister and knocked the canister over. Sugar spilled out onto the floor, a rare and precious treasure pouring through the cracks of the floorboards.

“Stop it!” Elizabeth stood up and banged the hairbrush on the table. “Clean that up.”

Mayme and Jeanine got down on their knees with a spatula and a box top and began to scoop up the sugar. They were rigidly, furiously polite with each other. Jeanine knew she should say she would hang out the colored clothes overnight from now on. She should say Sorry . But she was too mad and also hurt and so she didn’t. Sugar clung to her fingers.

MAYME CAUGHT A ride on Gareau’s milk truck to the high school library in Tarrant and returned with an instruction book on typing. She made herself a piece of cardboard covered with rows of circles that said QWERTYUIOP and ASDFGHJKL and ZXCVBNM and she pressed these imaginary keys with her eyes on the ceiling with great fervor for hour after hour while Jeanine brought in wood and bleached out the tea towels and Bea sat with her homework, her small cat on her lap. The lithograph of the small girl in the forest turned in the rising heat from the stove and the glass flashed and it seemed to Bea the bird’s song had turned into fragments of light to enchant the solitary child. Then she sighed and forced herself back to the gray printed page and facts about the produce of the state of Texas. Cotton. Cattle. Oil. Peanuts.

“Try to stay friends with Mr. Gareau,” said Elizabeth. “We are going to need rides to town in the milk truck to save gas.”

Jeanine heard Smoky calling down in the field. It was a kind of scream. She pulled on her jacket and ran with the halter in her hand across the graveyard, through the peach orchard, then into the field with the seedling cedar. Smoky stood on one side of the fence line and old Mr. Crowser’s Jo-Jo on the other. Smoky was trying to paw the fence down to get at him. He wanted to kill him and then he would have the lovely Sheba all to himself. Sheba stood off to one side. She was a dark half-Percheron and very elderly and at this moment, coy. Jeanine saw old Mr. Crowser coming down in a stiff and jerky run. He was also carrying a halter and lead rope.

“Get away, Miss Stoddard,” he said. “You’re going to get hurt. Don’t get between them.” He put the halter on Jo-Jo to lead him away. Smoky shifted with tense, small movements, darting back and forth, his two front legs stiff as fence posts and squatting on his hind legs. He wanted to go over the fence and couldn’t make up his mind whether he would or not.

“I can handle him,” she said. But she was afraid of him. She held the halter in her left hand and put her right hand on his neck. His neck muscles were so tense they had the feel of warm iron. She slipped the halter over his nose and buckled it and jerked at the lead rope. “Pay attention to me,” she said. “Here, look here.” Her hair flew into her eyes.

“I’ll repair this fence line,” Mr. Crowser said. “But you’ve got to do something with that stallion.”

“Yes, sir,” she said. She took the slack of the lead rope in her left hand and lifted it. “He’ll mind me.”

Smoky flung his head against the lead rope and suddenly darted his head at her with all his teeth exposed. She struck him across the nose with the end of the lead rope and he reared. She held on and pulled him down.

“Young woman, you are going to get yourself killed,” said Mr. Crowser. He turned back to the barn with Jo-Jo following. “Keep him in the barn for a couple of days while I repair this fence.”

It took a long time to get Smoky back to the old sugar barn. It was like fighting with a tornado on the end of a rope. He circled her and once stood very still, watching her, as if he would charge. He was thinking about it. By the time Jeanine coaxed him into the barn she was sweating and shaking.

She rested for a while and then got up and warmed water to wash out the juniper green silk. She had to do something about Smoky Joe. When he got near a mare he became some other creature. He became volcanic. He was no longer her friend. He was nobody’s friend. She plunged the silk into lukewarm water and chipped soap into the tub. She handled it very carefully. She would make a pretty dress for Mayme from it and then they wouldn’t be mad at each other anymore. When she was done it hung on the line with the sun behind it sinking into a dust haze, and the material lifted and sank like a pale flag.

Mayme put on her faded good dress and the shiny gabardine coat, and drove the Ford truck with its balding tires into Tarrant to apply at the oil field office. They hired her.

It was as if he were pulling the calf out of a cave and some great force that had nothing to do with the cow had hold of the other end of it, and would not let it go.

Everett had a piggin string wrapped around the calf ’s front feet for a handhold. He tore the calf out of its mother with all the strength of his back and arm muscles. The cow struggled to get up, her tongue thrust out of her mouth. His boots made crackling sounds as he slid around in the crisp, dusty soil. His horse stood tied to a little persimmon tree and the dog lay at his feet, both of them staring at this difficult birth with a kind of dread interest.

The calf slid out in a rush of fluid and with it came the entire uterus, flowing out of the cow and turning inside out, prolapsing, a sliding sack of flesh the size of a sleeping bag, shedding its red lining. The cow made a gasping noise and she lay in a great mound, lifting her head again and again.

He tied the umbilical cord in two places, four inches apart, with twine. He cut between the knots with his penknife. He threw his slicker over the calf and pegged it down around it with rocks. It was a bull calf. He fished around for the roll of gauze bandage in his saddlebags and found it. He knelt down and began to wind it around and around the prolapsed uterus, now stuck all over with twigs and the small leaves of the Texas persimmon. There was blood all over his coat. He was smeared with fluids. Every predator within miles would be lifting its head, opening nostrils, licking its muzzle.

The bovine uterus was a great unwieldy bag that weighed more than thirty pounds. It began to take on a manageable shape as he wound the gauze bandage around it until it was the shape of a column. His hands seemed very old, older than the rest of him. They were spotted with white scars. They were difficult to operate. He got to his feet.

“Get up,” he said. She made a mawing, blatting sound. “Get up, goddamn it.” Her big hooves scrabbled and made grooves in the dust and ripping up the shiny, elastic stems of the leather plant. He knelt at her head and held her muzzle in one hand, clamping her mouth shut and with his other hand shut her nostrils and cut off her wind.