Paulette Jiles - Stormy Weather

The water was very cold. She heard Prince Albert making strange noises far above at the edge of the well. Bea could feel a distant sort of panic overtaking her but she seemed to look on her overwhelming fear of being buried alive at the bottom of the well from a faraway place. The well cover was twisted; after a few moments a board fell from it and came turning over and over down the well shaft and struck her foot, but her foot seemed to be connected to some other body. She was drifting in deep December water. She was in the terrible underground. She was in another world, which was deadly, and above her was the old house and the warm stove and Albert.

MAYME JUMPED OUT of the Gareau’s milk delivery truck at six o’clock and ran inside to turn on the radio so she could hear One Man’s Family and the evening news. The sun was melting red and flat on the horizon of tabled hills. She beat up corn bread batter and put the pan into the oven. She washed the greens. They would have a good supper that night. In her purse she carried five pounds of bacon. She unwrapped it and cut it into thick slices and put them in the skillet.

Jeanine came in from the fields carrying her borrowed saw. Her wrists above the old leather gloves were torn by cedar. She stood in front of the stove and lifted her head to listen to a distant noise. It was very peculiar. An animal noise, a sort of low hoarse crying. There were things out there in the Brazos Valley she knew nothing about.

She said, “Should I make a fire in the parlor?”

“Not with that cedar,” said Mayme. “You’ll set the chimney afire. When are you going to get somebody to cut up that dead oak?”

Elizabeth had just come back from Mineral Wells with more of the oil-well certificates; she turned from her desk and asked where Bea was.

Nobody knew.

She might be with the Miller kids staying late at school, she might be hidden away in the house somewhere, reading. They searched through all the rooms but Bea wasn’t anywhere reading or writing. Still the low crying went on outside, behind the house. Elizabeth stood up and tried to think if there had been any strangers walking down the road during the day. The Lindbergh kidnapping was always on her mind.

“Go to the school,” she said to Jeanine. “Maybe she’s stayed after school with the teacher.”

Jeanine ran most of the mile to the Old Valley Road schoolhouse, but it was closed up and dark. She stopped by the Crowsers’ but they had not seen Bea either. The old couple were worried by her breathless question and stood watching her run out the door and down the road standing side by side in a portrait of Gothic alarm.

“Well, where is she?” Elizabeth got up and went to the back porch and they all called her Bea! Bea!

“That well curb has given way,” said Jeanine. Prince Albert sat on an upturned lard can beside the well and was making a noise that was not very much like a cat at all. He was howling in a sort of deep singing. His eyes were wide and he cried and cried to them in a low hoarse voice. The chicken feed, a yellow scattering of shorts, was strewn all around him. The cat was staring at them in an odd and disconcerting way.

Elizabeth clapped both hands to her face. “My Lord he has rabies!” she said. “He’s bitten Bea! She’s laying sick and she’s in convulsions somewhere!”

Mayme turned and ran back to the porch and stood staring at Albert, as if to keep the porch rail between herself and the cat.

“Do you think?” she said. “I never saw anything with rabies before.”

“Get the shotgun,” said Elizabeth. “He is, he’s rabid, he’s bitten Bea.”

Jeanine said, “No, Mother. He’s not rabid.” She held out her hand and walked toward the cat and called to him but he evaded her and stared at her and called out again. Jeanine stopped. “When did the well curb fall in?”

It was growing dark. It was the time of evening when the sun set the low hills afire and the shadow of the old sugar barn poured in a tide of darkness over the house and the back porch and the well and the twisted cedar that guarded the well.

“Push it all in,” said Elizabeth. “We need to just collapse it completely and stop that well up. Bea could come wandering back here in the dark and fall in it.” She stepped down the three steps to the bare dusty yard. “Then I’ll go to the Millers and you girls get down to the barn and look there.”

They all three went out to shove the rest of the stones of the well curb into the well. Albert stopped his terrible calling and began to mew. He darted around their legs. They bent over the opening and heard a long exaggerated voice from deep in the well. Mother Mother Mother.

THEY DROVE BEA to the hospital in Mineral Wells. It seemed to take years to drive the twisted road. Jeanine drove. Mayme and her mother sat holding Bea, laid in the bed of the truck on as many quilts and pillows as they could rip off the beds, her left leg bent at an acute angle, as if there were a new joint in the middle of her shin. Jeanine’s hands and legs and coat were covered with mud and torn by the rope they had lowered into the well. Mayme had run to the Crowsers’, but by the time Abel got there Elizabeth and Jeanine had rigged the rope to the cedar tree and Jeanine had gone down into the well. She didn’t know if she had torn or broken Bea’s legs any worse getting her out. Bea’s face was covered in blood so that it looked as if somebody had thrown red paint in her face. Her skin was pale blue and splattered with random blood splashes.

Mayme and Abel Crowser put blankets to the stove to heat them and wrapped Bea in them and so they appeared in the emergency room at the Mineral Wells hospital. The nurse asked if anyone else was hurt. Jeanine’s clothes were in such a state it seemed that she had fallen in herself. She was covered in well slime and her shoulders smeared with blood from Bea’s head wound, but she told the nurse no. They took Bea away on a gurney. At one in the morning the doctor came to them in the waiting room and said the left lower leg was broken in several places, very badly broken, for them to go somewhere and get some sleep and we’ll see in the morning how things are.

They slept at Violet Keener’s house, on the floor, in the blankets they had wrapped Bea in.

THE NEXT MORNING all three of the women walked to the hospital from Violet’s. They ate biscuits as they walked. Violet could not make them sit and eat breakfast nor could she let them go without food so they carried the biscuits with them. The streets were full of people going to work, men in suits going to the oil company offices, the boys selling the Mineral Wells Star and Grit and the Dallas papers.

“That cat of hers was trying to tell us,” said Jeanine. She started to cry again.

“Yes, but I don’t speak cat,” said Mayme. “Hush, Jeanine, don’t cry in front of the doctor. They don’t like it.”

THE DOCTOR WAS a short man with a fringe of hair around his head and a loose lower lip that he constantly caught up with his upper teeth. He walked on rubber-soled shoes and wore a white coat with a stethoscope looping out of his pocket. A nurse brought them coffee and said these kinds of accidents happened and we never know when they are going to happen, things are peaceful one minute and then, you know. Elizabeth nodded. Yes, she said, yes yes.

“Mrs. Stoddard, she’s going to be fine.” They waited. “She’s had a scalp laceration. Not serious. Sewed it up. We’ve taken X-rays and her pelvis is most likely slightly fractured, but there’s nothing to be done about that, except lying quietly for a month. Now her left lower leg is broken in several places, both bones of the lower leg. That’s a problem.”