Paulette Jiles - Stormy Weather

Winifred Beasley drove up and walked into the house without a word to anyone. She bent over the stack of tin cans and bags in front of the window, and brought out a notebook and wrote things down and checked off a list. Elizabeth came in from the parlor and screamed when she saw Winifred in her stout gray suit and bird’s-nest hat.

“Well! I didn’t even know you were here!”

“I like to surprise people,” said Winifred. “Test of character.” Then she went straight to Bea’s room and said, “Well, how is our patient today?”

“Good.” Bea stared at her with wide eyes. “Why don’t you knock?”

“Ha ha ha!” Winifred laughed and smiled her stiff rectangular smile. “Oh I like to surprise people.” She sat down on the chair beside Bea’s bed and checked her hair.

“I don’t have any lice,” Bea said. “None of us have ever had lice.”

“There’s an outbreak in the school here,” said Winifred. “The law requires that I check. When I go to the Buckner’s Home for Children in Dallas, we have lists of things we have to check.”

“Do you work for them?” said Bea.

“No no no! I work for the county!” Winifred was very cheerful. “But I have been associated with them formerly and I have the greatest respect for them. The children are happy and well cared for. They have an enormous library, Bea.”

Jeanine boiled water for the dishes and listened. She wondered if somehow Winifred Beasley were paid for every child she spirited off to the orphans’ home. Jeanine thought she would, in a few more moments, be tempted to pour scalding water on the county health nurse. She turned away and took a long breath when Winifred came back into the kitchen with a ticktock noise of her polished shoes.

She said, “Does the Buckner Home get money from the government for each child?”

“Of course,” said Winifred. “But in the main it is the generosity of the good people of Texas, churches and so on.” She waved one hand out toward the world, full of generous people. “And so you sold your horse. What a great sacrifice you made for your sister.”

“Yes,” said Jeanine. “Sold him to Ross Everett over in Comanche County. And paid for the surgery.” She pressed her front teeth together and told herself to shut up. It didn’t do her any good. “Everett’s going to run him on the official tracks. He’s very fast.”

Winifred raised her eyebrows to express surprise in a wooden, polite way. Then she said, “Come and help me bring in the supplies,” she said. “I have asked for twice the amount of canned milk. Make her drink it down. Condensed milk is not pleasant but a glass a day of condensed milk and the malt tablets are desperately needed.” She started toward the door where wavy lines of blown dust crossed the floorboards. “I know Ross Everett,” she said. “I used to be the county nurse for Comanche County. He killed his wife.”

Jeanine pulled on her coat. She followed Winifred out the door and across the flat dirt of their front yard. There was almost no grass, just the dead matts of Indian grass flattened into circles. She held out her arms for the canned beef and condensed milk. Finally she said, “Oh, he killed her.”

“He killed her with overwork. She was delicate. She had asthma. I told him she was not to get up from bed. A week later I came in and she was in the stock pens keeping up the branding fire. I did my best to point out the inadvisability of this. After she died I recommended his boy be moved somewhere for his education and his own health. Mr. Everett was rude.”

“She was helping with the branding fire?” Jeanine balanced a load of tinned goods. “And she had dust pneumonia?”

“I wish it weren’t true.”

MAYME CAME HOME a week later, riding in Gareau’s milk truck, with a paycheck from the Magnolia Oil Corporation offices in Tarrant and laid it on the table. Seventy-five dollars. Bea could now sit up at the kitchen table, and the pain had subsided. Bea held the check between her two hands and looked at it intently. Her leg in its cast stuck out straight with a sock over the toes.

Bea said, “I need some more western romance magazines. They have emotionally charged story lines.” She thought for a moment and her toes writhed at the end of the cast. “Women tied to stakes. Rattlers crawling down out of the attic. Dropping in the beans. Jeanine could be struck by lightning, Mayme could be kidnapped, Mother could drive off a cliff in the dark or end up in Mexico with the white slavers.” She reached for her notebook. “The road could disappear, it could turn into a great chasm in the desert. I was taken away, screaming, to the Buckner Children’s Home.” Bea knew that she said these things because she was inventing dramatic stories in her head and she couldn’t stop herself from saying them aloud as if they were true. “I thrust my arms out the window, screaming, ‘Mother! Mother!’”

Jeanine put down the bottle of hot sauce and sat without eating, watching Bea writing and writing it all down.

“If a magazine were to pay me for something I wrote, would the check have my name on it like that?” Bea lifted a hopeful face to her mother.

“Yes, Bea darling,” said Elizabeth. “It would say your name, and the date, and the amount, and then somebody signs it. An authorizing person.”

“I could do it,” Bea said to herself. “Why not?” She lay in her cot beside the stove. Albert slept stretched out alongside her legs. “Why not?”

Nobody answered her. Beyond the back door they heard coyotes. One sang in a warbling soprano and the others barked in high yips; they were young coyote pups who had not yet learned to howl. It was a mother and her family. In the barn the hens flew up to the high beams because there had not yet been enough money to buy chicken wire until the check for seventy-five dollars was on the table. Everything had a family to feed, it was just a matter of who ate who and devil take the hindmost.

The day before Christmas, Abel Crowser appeared at the door with a fat cock turkey held upside down by its scaly feet. Bea cried out in her usual exclamation points that she would cook the turkey as her present to them all, but she was not allowed to, she was not even allowed on crutches. Jeanine set about roasting the bird with great care.

On Christmas morning they each woke up in their own beds and made silent promises to themselves to be cheerful. Their gifts to one another were things they could make; a tin star for the tree and the juniper green silk dress for Mayme, Lepp cookies for Elizabeth, and the promise of a new coat for Bea. They remembered the Christmas of ’29 in far West Texas, and of ’32 when they sang for their parents, and the worst one in ’35 when they had only exchanged promises. It seemed that Jack Stoddard was still alive in those places, driving nitro and saltwater pumpers, gambling in a back room, calling out for Red Buck to win, drifting transparently over the vast distances of the Permian or through the snow that sifted over the gas flares that Christmas of ’32 in Kilgore. He had always been a shape changer who could talk the legs off an iron stove, and imagined worlds of beauty and chance and drink, and desired these worlds so ardently it seemed impossible he should not still be here in some glassy apparition carrying transparent jelly beans or throwing a pair of invisible dice with stars for dots. Jeanine missed him. They all missed him and nobody would say so. The sisters needed him to drive nails and change the tires and to tell them what kind of men to look for in life, to say Don’t marry somebody like me. To explain why Roosevelt had stored all the gold in Fort Knox. But he was so irrevocably gone.

That afternoon Jeanine cut up what was left of the turkey and put it in jars. She heard a car’s tires crackling on the gravel. It was the schoolteacher, Miss Callaway, a young woman with a pompadour hairdo. She called out Hello! Hello! and jumped out of the car with a paper sack full of handmade Christmas cards from Bea’s schoolmates, and all of Bea’s schoolbooks and lesson plans. Miss Callaway had only been paid in scrip from the county, those official and optimistic IOUs, but she somehow contrived to be nicely dressed, with a long wraparound coat. She had an eastern accent and very deep, round brown eyes. She wouldn’t have any coffee, she was in a hurry. Many more homes to visit.