Paulette Jiles - Stormy Weather

Bea looked at her sisters. They seemed so coarse and normal but then she became transparent again when her mother laid her hand on Bea’s forehead and said the surgeon was very happy with the operation. Bea wanted to see her leg in its white bandages and then she drank a cup of smoking broth and ate cherry Jell-O and fell asleep again.

WINIFRED CAME AND organized Bea’s sickroom in the parlor, and opened the windows for fresh air. She recommended that Jeanine wear a dust mask whenever she was working outside and could see haze in the air, especially if another dust storm came at them from Oklahoma. This was to prevent dust pneumonia. They did not need more sickness if Bea was to be taken care of and recover the use of her leg after that very, very expensive operation.

Bea was in intense pain, and the pain was dulled only by the bottle of brown liquid at her bedside. Winifred brought a package of yellow crepe paper and pipe cleaners for Bea to make yellow roses with, so she could contribute to the celebration for Texas Independence Day at the Old Valley Road schoolhouse and forget that her shinbone was a rod of intensely painful fire. Winifred sat down to look at what food they normally ate and wrote out, in a small square hand, recipes for nutritious meals that could be made from white beans and soup bones and a jelly from agarita berries, and admonitions about prudent spending.

She brought more books for Bea and some pamphlets about chickens for Elizabeth on raising productive layers. She read Bea’s journal when Bea was asleep. She went through Elizabeth’s reports on the oil-well investment when Elizabeth was not in the house and read some of her other papers-Jack Stoddard’s death certificate and the lawyer’s report on the charges. She was interested in the charges. It was too late to do anything about removing the child from the home but you never knew. There was so much in the world a wonderful child like Bea had a right to. Music lessons and a plentitude of good books and new shoes. Stimulating friends, art museums. Winifred rolled up Savage Western Tales to shove the magazine into the cookstove fire but changed her mind. They probably needed it for toilet paper.

MAYME AND JEANINE climbed up on the roof with hammers and tin cans that had been sheared open and flattened out with bricks. It was the Sunday before Christmas. They tore up shingles looking for the leak and their breath smoked out in front of them and their hands were bent and white with cold. They could see down the slope to the river.

“Here the damn thing is, Jeanine. Help me with this.”

They crawled forward on hands and knees to the chimney to tear out the shingles. Next to the brick they found the rotted laths and ripped them out and replaced them with the slats from a set of wooden window blinds. Nothing but old composite shingles tacked over cedar shakes stood between them and the dust and the wind. The grit ground into their knees as they worked side by side. They nailed the flattened tin cans over the hole and watched more dust-haze come up over Shinnery Mountain. Mayme lifted her head and stared out across the valley when she heard the sound of hen turkeys yelping, anxious after their broods that all came shifting and hurrying in curious gliding motions far down the slope, at the edge of the Brazos.

“I wish we had one of those for Christmas dinner,” said Mayme. Her head was wrapped in the white kerchief and she was working bare-handed. There was only one pair of gloves and she let Jeanine have them.

“Maybe I could shoot us one,” said Jeanine.

“You need to let both barrels go on that damn nurse. Winifred the Almighty.”

“Too bad we covered the well over with hog wire. They’d never find her body.” Jeanine mentally threw Winifred off the Brazos River Bridge and watched her float away, screaming, amid tangles of driftwood.

Mayme sat back and wiped her nose with her sleeve. She turned up her collar against the wind.

“Why do we let that witch talk to us like that?”

“Because we need the relief food, that’s why,” said Jeanine. “We’re letting ourselves be insulted for food. When are you getting paid?”

“They say it’s a month. Two weeks’ probation and then another two weeks and I get my paycheck.”

“Do they pay you for the probation?”

“Yes, but only half.” Mayme placed another set of shingles with her bare hands, which had become raw with the asphalted grit. “And so when is Ross Everett going to be out here looking for you with a bouquet of roses?”

Jeanine laughed. “Mayme, you should see how they live. Him and that boy. It’s a mess. And the kid is as mean…” She searched for the right sort of thing he was as mean as, but couldn’t think of a comparison.

“He’s hunting for a wife to clean the place up. You can bet on that.”

“He better not be hunting for me.” Jeanine tapped in finishing nails to hold the laths in place. She sat back and regarded the horizon of hills, a column of smoke from the Crowsers’ cookstove beyond the Spanish oak. “Sometimes I wish Dad could know we were doing all right here. That we’re getting by on our own.”

Mayme paused with her hammer in the air. Then she laid it down and put both arms around her sister’s neck and held her for a moment and then picked up the hammer again.

“If we’d have lost Bea too,” she said. “Well, I don’t know what.”

“But we didn’t,” said Jeanine.

“I remember one time he said I had Orphan Annie hair. I don’t have Orphan Annie hair but at least he said something to me.” She fished around in her coat pocket for a nail. “He only talked to you and Mother.”

“I know it.”

Mayme laid her hammer down and sat back to rest. “How much is left over?”

“From the surgery? About fifty dollars.”

“Hide it, Jeanine. Don’t let Mother know you have it.”

“Because she’ll buy more shares in that well.”

“Yes.”

“All right. It’s got to go for the tax bill anyway.”

They laid their thin fingers crisscross over the old shingles to hold them there, over the heads of their mother and their little sister to protect them from the crawling dust and whatever else might come upon them from the four corners of the world. Jeanine positioned a nail.

“Sock it in, Mayme,” she said. “Don’t smash my finger.”

A DRY NORTHER boomed in and the temperature fell to eighteen. Cold dust surged up and hissed in wind-thrown horizontal lines. Jeanine fought through it and into the kitchen with armloads of wood. She built up the parlor fire; Bea could at least be kept warm. She was asleep when Jeanine came in, fragments of yellow crepe paper in her fingers. She was so pale.

Jeanine put on three splits and tiptoed out again. Her hair was gritty and she dreamed of a bath in a six-foot tub, with something foamy in it, big thick towels. She wanted the shiny look people had when they owned a house with a bathroom. And a good-looking man with a suit and a country estate held a bouquet of roses, waiting to take her to dinner at the Baker Hotel. She wished she knew something about hot-water heaters.

Tomorrow Abel Crowser was going to start bedding in with the sulky plow. The Tolliver farm had 150 acres according to the title. Fifteen was in orchard, twenty in a thick cedar brake with trunks the size of stovepipe. Fifty acres were completely clear. The rest was studded with cedar seedlings and sotol. She could cut that by hand. She would get hold of Ross Everett and ask when he was running Smoky Joe. If she owned 10 percent of him and he was 100 percent horse she hoped her part was that on the forward end, the square head with the toilet-brush forelock that would stretch out and win by a nose.

AND THE DAYS went on through the last week of December with a high-velocity wind that would not stop. There was no end to the flat sunshine and dry skies, and the wind, the endless river of sandpaper wind.