Paulette Jiles - Stormy Weather

“I’m from Pennsylvania,” said Miss Callaway. “The Keystone state!”

Elizabeth smiled. “I thought it was the Quaker state.” She put a cup of coffee in front of the teacher anyway and Miss Callaway lifted the cup and blew on it.

“Keystone!” shouted Bea, from the parlor. She eagerly read through all twenty-five of the crayoned Christmas cards.

“And don’t you tease me about being a Yankee,” said Miss Callaway. She had a very wide smile and good teeth. Jeanine cringed as the teacher poured a great deal of sugar and Bea’s condensed milk into her cup. “You Texans wouldn’t ever have got a drop of oil if it hadn’t been for us Pennsylvanians, we came down here and taught you how to drill.” She put the cup down. “Bea is so talented,” she said. “Wonderful stories about horse races and nitroglycerin and hobo jungles. How does she make all that up? What an imagination.”

“I know,” said Elizabeth.

JEANINE WALKED THE fields on Christmas Day from the seventy-five acres on the slope of the ridge, bristly with little cedars, to the heavy cedar brakes beyond the graveyard and then to the orchard. She came back and drew a map and thought about where to start.

Her Christmas present from Bea was a brochure from Texas A &M on the care of peach orchards. Peaches named Springold and Texstar. After a while she laid it down and fell asleep in the chair in front of the cookstove.

In late January Milton left a telephone message for Jeanine at Strawn’s store. She said thank you to Mrs. Joplin and read the words printed on the back of a wanted poster as the tall woman wrote up the beans and cornmeal and half a pound of salt pork and garden seeds. He was coming to visit her. Jeanine was pleased and cautiously happy. She felt she had become a permanent farm girl who drove tractors and hewed down cedar, and that personage had little to do with being attractive for young men.

Jeanine carefully counted out the coins. Maybe she should buy something else, something to present to Milton when he came. The cold display case held thick steaks and liverwurst; in the back, cages of chickens talked to one another. There was a steel barrel full of rakes and hoes but it seemed very few people were buying any of these things. What about gingersnaps? She turned a box of Mrs. Baird’s gingersnaps over in her hand in the grip of indecision and then with a sudden gesture laid them on top of the beans. There went another dime.

She paid Mrs. Joplin an extra nickel for the message and walked home into the fist of the glassy, hard wind. The haze at the edge of the world was yellow with Kansas dust. She pulled down her hat and held her purchases against her chest and bent her head. If the wind got under the brim of her little fedora it would throw it into the fields and she would be climbing through barbed wire to run after it. She might drop the gingersnaps.

She passed the Crowsers’. She could smell bread baking. In the distance Abel called out to his team. The hills were brown from drought, and even though they were approaching spring, some of the smaller live oaks were yellowing. The tabled tops of the far hills were held up against the sky like great sere altars.

As she came around the curve she could see the Spanish oaks beside the house that held on to only their topmost rusty leaves, the ones that would not give up or be torn loose. The repaired roof with its tin patches gave her a good feeling. Milton’s message had said he would drive up this afternoon in the newspaper’s car. And there he was, pulling a rooster tail of dust after him in a Model A. She ran into her own driveway.

“Why are you here now?” she said. “I was going to straighten the house, I was going to have coffee on the stove!” She held the packages against her plaid jacket.

He slammed the car door behind him and held on to the brim of his hat with one hand and her elbow with the other. Something live was leaping up and down in the backseat of the Model A. It was ripping up paper and flinging it around the backseat of the Ford.

“Let’s get in the house. It’s like being b-b-beat up,” he said. He had a newspaper rolled up in his hand.

Bea was singing along with the radio in the parlor across the hall. It was Bob Wills and the Light Crust Doughboys on WBAP. They were broadcasting out of a furniture store in Fort Worth and Bea knew the lemon oil commercial by heart. Lemon fresh, lemon bright, try Dickson’s Lemon Oyuuuuuul.

“Hello, Bea!” Milton shouted. He threw his hat across the room and it landed on a chair back. “Are you decent? Are you presentable for receiving g-g-guests? A handsome and dashing rep-p-porter?” He crossed the hall and stuck his head in Bea’s open bedroom door. “Crushed at the bottom of a well,” he said. “Left for dead.”

Bea pushed herself upright. “Don’t you take Jeanine anywhere,” she said. “Don’t run off and get married. She’s got to stay here until I can walk.”

“Oh, sweetpea Bea,” he said and sat down on her bed. She pulled at her feed-sack dress and tried to smooth down her fuzzy braid. “You look like you’ve combed your hair with a skillet, girl.” The hair on either side of her scar stuck up in bristles. Her cast lay on the bed like a section of pipeline and her toes stuck out of the end. She didn’t feel dressed without her sock over the toes but what could she do. “Look here what I brought for you. Grit newspaper. Look here. They pay two dollars for a poem. Feast on this, my wounded butterfly.”

Jeanine put the kettle on and hid their hosiery in the cornmeal bin and snatched up a brassiere and a pair of underpants that were drying in front of the stove and shoved them into the woodbox and put kindling over them. She wiped the table off in one long swipe, scattering loose beans and corn bread crumbs onto the floor and swept it all under the cookstove. There were wavy lines of dust in front of the door but she would have to leave that. Sweeping it would only fill the air of the kitchen with Kansas topsoil. She slammed down a fruit jar and stuck one of the yellow paper roses in it. Then she took off her coat and the fedora and ran a brush through her hair. She set out two cups and took a handful of ground coffee from the bin in the grinder. She dropped it into the coffeepot and poured boiling water over it. Prince Albert watched her from the top of the old Hamilton safe and yawned and rolled over.

“What poems?” Bea flipped over the pages of the newspaper. “What kind do they want? Two dollars?”

Milton bent over the paper with her. His magnified blue eyes shifted unsteadily behind his thick spectacles. “There,” he said. “There’s one, d-d-dripping with unctuous sentiments and garbled rhymes.” He stood up. “Read it and weep.”

“Thanks, Mr. Milton.” She smiled up at him. “Maybe I’ll try. If I can figure out what they want.”

“Milt,” he said. “M-m-milt to you, cruel charmer. They want your abject obedience and total conformity. What else do you need before I go into the kitchen and sweep your sister off her worn-out shoes?”

“Would you put my sock on my cast?” She held the sock up to him.

“Darling toes,” he said. “There.”

Bea settled down with the newspaper poems as if they were a puzzle that needed decoding, and when she had discovered their secret the reward would be two dollars. Her name written out on a check. Here, Jeanine, go and buy us cocoa and sugar and butter and liver for my minion. She heard a loud thud. Albert had gone to sleep on top of the safe and had fallen off. He did it all the time. The wind hooted and blew at the edges of the parlor windows, and the dancing orange pig curtains in the kitchen fluttered.

“Ah, the old hand-c-c-c-colored lithograph of the lost child in the forest,” said Milton. He stood before the framed picture and nodded. “The b-b-bird is singing to her, the bird is symbolic of a hernia truss, which is symbolic, Jeanine, of dread, which is symbolic-”