Paulette Jiles - Stormy Weather

Elizabeth said, “I see.” He was talking about money. This was now a money problem. Bea was alive and her skull hadn’t been broken and she was in her right mind, she had her wits, and now the problem was money. They didn’t have it. She, Elizabeth, her mother, had thrown away almost all they had on a wild gamble and there was no getting it back.

“She needs extensive work if she is not to have one leg shorter than the other.” He clasped his hands together and sat down across from them with the knot of his pale, clean hands between his knees. “We can cast it now as it is but it will end up shorter.” He cleared his throat. “Several inches.”

“Please just tell us what she needs,” said Elizabeth.

“I’ll send her home now to save you the cost of the hospital,” the doctor said. “But the leg needs a bone specialist. It needs surgery. I wouldn’t attempt it myself. It needs a specialist who will insert pins and who knows how to set the right sort of cast. That’s how it is.”

“Where?” said Elizabeth.

“We can do it here, but we’ll have to have a specialist come from Dallas.”

“Get him,” said Jeanine.

Her mother turned to her for a moment and then looked at the doctor.

“What kind of arrangements can we make?” she said.

He hesitated. How many farm accidents had come in here, mangled arms and legs, tractor accidents, children kicked in the head by horses, unloaded guns going off, not to speak of tuberculosis and cancer and pellegra, and the loved ones asking what kind of arrangements they could make.

“I’m going to sell Smoky Joe,” said Jeanine. “I know where I can sell him.”

Elizabeth thought for a moment and then she said to the doctor, “Just let me know when you have some kind of estimate.”

“I will,” said the doctor.

“We can do it,” said Mayme. “Whatever it is.”

They spent the morning fussing over Bea, who lay on a narrow cot in a ward with a great many other people. It was a pauper’s ward, thought Jeanine. And we’re paupers. Bea had a large bandage around her head, and her leg was cast in a light plaster-and-webbing cast because it would soon have to be broken off again. She sobbed and swallowed repeatedly because of the pain and then she wanted a mirror so she could see her head bandage and when the nurse brought one she said in a shaking voice that it was very dramatic and the nurse laughed and patted her shoulder.

Bea smiled when they lied and told her that Prince Albert had led them to her. He had rushed into the kitchen and then to the door, leading them outside, he had done everything but point his paw down the well. They would wait until later to tell her that Elizabeth had come near shooting him, or maybe they would never tell her. Maybe they would never tell her how they had almost shoved the rest of the well curb down onto her. For now Bea was made very happy by the fact that her cat had cried out, and galloped around their legs, and had dashed back and forth between them and the well. It was important that she be happy. Her mother would not distress her by crying, thinking of her youngest daughter lying crushed and dying of the cold at the bottom of the well while they made supper and listened to the radio. Elizabeth would not say My baby, my baby, we almost lost you. Would you buy him some liver? Bea asked. And they said they would. The nurse stood by and listened. She liked to hear this. Times were hard. Very hard, and once in a while people like to hear stories with happy endings, pets saving their owners, for instance; stories of courage and hope. Or just go to a Busby Berkeley movie and watch a lot of people dancing.

JEANINE WALKED INTO the Baker Hotel. She approached the telephone on its stand, a new rotary telephone. She did not know how it worked. The clerk dialed the rotary phone for her and the operator said a call to Comanche would cost fifteen cents and she paid it, and took the heavy receiver in her hand.

She heard Mr. Everett’s voice on the other end of the line. Long bars of noon sunlight shone on the glossy black-and-white tiles. Men sat in the leather chairs of the lobby and smoked and read their Fort Worth and Dallas newspapers. A paper cut-out of a Thanksgiving turkey was pasted to the restaurant entrance and behind the desk the clerk’s radio said Hitler was sending thirty thousand Jews to resettlement camps. His voice startled her.

“Hello,” he said.

“Mr. Everett, this is Jeanine Stoddard.”

“What can I do for you, Jeanine?”

“Mr. Everett, Daddy said you once offered three hundred dollars for Smoky Joe Hancock. Do you still want him?”

She spoke very loudly in order to cast her voice all the way to his ranch in Comanche County, until she saw that the hotel clerk was putting his finger to his lips. She said All right, all right, and then listened carefully. He sounded like one of the thin electric voices on the radio.

“Maybe. I have to ask you, what’s wrong with him that you’re selling him now?”

“Nothing’s wrong with him, he’s as fast as ever.” She considered for a moment what she should say. “Bea’s been injured and we need to pay for a specialist to come out from Dallas.”

There was a considering pause. She waited through it. People were looking at her and she needed to go to the bathroom.

“Well, I’m sorry to hear it, Jeanine.”

“Daddy said you’d offered three hundred.”

“I did say three hundred, but that was a year ago and I wasn’t tied to it.”

Jeanine felt another wave of anxiety come over her and so she cleared her throat and pretended to be firm. She stepped back and forth as far as the telephone cord would allow.

“Mr. Everett, you don’t really have me over a barrel like you think you do. I have another offer for him, and rather than go to the trouble of hauling him all the way over to you I’d just as soon sell him to somebody closer to here. I wouldn’t have to pay so much for gas.”

“Who made you an offer?”

“Charles Findlay told me he was interested. I just called him.” She didn’t know what made her tell such an outrageous lie. It was panic. He could easily call old man Findlay and find out for himself.

“He is?”

“Yes, sir. You know he has those Buck Thomas mares there and he is real partial to the Hancock line.”

“When did you race him last?”

Jeanine lifted her head and breathed out through her nostrils slowly so he could not hear how nervous she was.

“He did three hundred and fifty yards in eighteen seconds at Kingsville last year. Me and Daddy took him there. He was matched against Chimney Sweep and beat him by a long head. You can call Bill Solwell and ask him yourself.”

She said nothing during the long silence as Ross Everett considered things. Finally he said, “All right. But I have to ask you to haul him here to my place.”

“What about gas and everything?”

“That’s not my problem.”

“All right, Mr. Everett. All right.”

“I once told you to call me Ross. For all the good it does.”

“All right, Ross.”

“I got my gray stud matched against a fellow on the fifth, maybe he’ll show up and maybe he won’t. There at the sale barn in Stillwater. Here’s how you get to it. Do you have a pencil and paper?”

She felt around in her purse with the receiver caught up between her shoulder and her ear. She wrote down the directions.

“All right. How will I know if you’re there?”

“Ask people, sweetheart.”

The nurses helped them load Bea in the back of the truck on the stretcher as if she were a pallet of grain sacks and gave them an entire list of rules they had to mind very carefully if they were not to injure her leg any further, and let them take the stretcher with them, and stroked Bea’s hair and said Good-bye now, honey, we’ll see you in a week or so. Another nurse said she wanted Bea to get well soon so she could sit up at a desk and write all her stories and sell them to magazines.