Paulette Jiles - Stormy Weather

“Oh, Milton.” Jeanine poured coffee.

“Of feet. Bea looks wonderful, rosy cheeks,” he said.

“How did you know about Bea?” Jeanine said. She set out a plate with gingersnaps on it. She had carefully counted out three for each of them and the rest were for her sisters and her mother.

“Reporters are sick and twisted people,” he said. “We haunt emergency wards, we always have hopes somebody might, might have been, ah, dismembered by a passenger t-train, preferably the Sunset Limited carrying a politician, po-police reports, Baker Hotel, famous or desperate cinema stars drying out in the Crazy Water baaaths. Drying out in a bath.” He laboriously slapped his knee. “That’s the kind of sophisticated reporter jokes we make in the newsroom. Beautiful Jeanine. What are these?”

“My seed packages.” She managed to stop laughing.

They sat down with the Burke’s seed packages. Enormous vegetables in violent colors glowed on the stiff paper. Sexual-looking beets and radishes, poisonous rutabagas, sweet potatoes and lettuces swarming in swamp greens.

“Are you going to raise this stuff?” He pulled off his topcoat. A threadbare Chesterfield, a formal evening coat, that was about fifteen years old with worn velvet on the collar and threads netted and loose around each cuff. “These things look like they could crawl out of the g-g-garden at night and f-f-fasten themselves on your faces.” He clawed his hand over his face. “Ahhhhhhhh, Ma! Ma! Get it off me!”

Jeanine grasped his hand and pulled it away from his face. “This is food,” she said. “I’m Jolly Jeanine the Texas farmer girl.”

“Don’t bend over in the garden, Grandma, you know them taters got eyes.” He slammed his hand on the tabletop and made the coffee cups jump. “By God, there’s a poem for Bea. That’ll get her t-t-ten dollars. What rhymes with eyes? Lots of things rhyme with eyes.” He poured some of Bea’s condensed milk into his coffee. “I regard coffee as a food,” he said. Jeanine handed him the sugar and watched as he shoveled two heaping teaspoons full into the cup and stirred it. “Come with me,” he said. For the first time since he had walked into the house he looked at her. Her short flyaway brown hair and deep gray eyes, her thin shoulders, her hands around the coffee cup for warmth and the worn plaid jacket over her shoulders. “Come with me to Glen Rose. They have let me loose with the newspaper automobile. You could sit in the p-passenger seat and be whisked along Texas highways, paved with taxpayer dollars.”

“Why are you going to Glen Rose?” Jeanine smiled and wished she had put on her gold clip earrings.

“I must commune with a concrete dinosaur. It looms over the courthouse. Ponder, darling, these busted statues. I must solicit advertisements for Dr. T-Tabler’s Buckeye Pile Cure. This is the life I am leading.” He lifted the smoking coffee cup to his mouth, blew on it and drank. “Jeanine, it’s cold in here. Let me throw on some k-kindling for you to prove my manliness.”

“No no!” She jumped up and stood between him and the woodbox and the hidden wet underpants and brassiere; she threw out both arms. “I’ll get some splits from outside. We have to save the kindling.”

“Y’all are st-st-starving out here and perishing of the cold,” he said. She came back in from the back porch where they had stacked the day’s wood. Her breath smoked.

“I can’t go to Glen Rose with you, I can’t leave Bea,” she said. She threw in two splits of live oak and slammed the cookstove door shut. “I would love to see the concrete dinosaur. My mother said I had to have a social life, and a concrete dinosaur would be just the thing. Would it?”

“No, the better thing would be to come to that benefit d-d-dance they’re having on Valentine’s Day. It’s for poor p-p-people. I mean it’s for the poor people.” He fanned himself with the seed catalog as if he were fanning air toward her. “Can you smell my new aftershave? I was hoping you would swoon.”

Jeanine closed her eyes and took a deep breath. “No. Yes. It’s Clubman’s, isn’t it?”

“In exchange for an aaaad, ahem, ad, from Horton’s Men’s Store.”

“And so the dance is for poor people. And?” She opened both hands and raised her colorless eyebrows.

“Yes. That doesn’t include you-all because you-all are wearing clothes. The really poor people are up in the Panhandle b-b-buried stark naked in dust storms. They have shoes made out of bark and gravel. They eat asphalt.”

“Fill me in, Milt,” she said. “Are you asking me to the dance?” She leaned close to him and took the Chesterfield from the back of his chair. “I should turn these cuffs for you. Then you wouldn’t look like you’re selling apples on a street corner. Where did you get this coat?” Jeanine’s life had been a chain that had come unlinked and left connections broken and scattered and she had a pleased, sort of loose feeling of comfort that here was somebody who remembered her from second grade when she wore a yellow bonnet. She wanted to fix whatever was wrong with him. His buttons, for instance. They were of three different kinds all down his shirt.

“The mortuary supply.” He put another spoonful of sugar into his cup. “Ask you to the d-d-dance!” He turned up his coffee cup and drained it of the last sugary drops. “I am haaaaard to get, Jeanine. I am not somebody who thu-throws myself at the first girl that asks me to a poor-people dance. I am not desperate for flattery and attention. No, no indeed.” He stood up and took the coat from her. “It’s the Red C-c-cross and the Tarrant County Relief Committee. You bring a box of something. Food somethings, any old lumpy foodish articles you happen to have, on the theory that giving to charity makes people feel less poverty-stricken.” He put on the coat and took off his glasses. He pulled out his shirttail and wiped them and then put them back on and smiled at her. “Grinding. That’s what poverty always is. Grinding.”

Jeanine said, “Why are you telling me this, Milt?” She crossed her arms.

“Because I have to be there and write about it. And if you’re there too, well, voilà , girl, I take you in my arms and we d-d-d-dance. And if your mother wants you to get a social life, tell her social lives aren’t laying around on the street like hamburger papers. You’re too old for the high school crowd and you’re not going to college and the CCC won’t take you because of your g-g-gender and so the answer is…” He held up a forefinger.

“Good works!” said Jeanine.

“Ding!”

He went out to the car and threw open the door and a black-and-tan rat terrier left off tearing a magazine into pieces and sprang out as if it had been shot from a popgun. Jeanine put her arms in the sleeves of the plaid jacket and squinted in the glaring hard sun. Cold and rainless, every day was the same, blue and dry and a perfectly clear sky. It was weatherless weather in which nothing ever happened from one month to the next. She peered into the window of the Model A.

“This,” said Milton, “is Biggety the rat killer. The chicken protector, the security alarm. Go get ’em, Rats.” The dog darted from the Spanish oak to the flower beds to the veranda. He seemed to be operating on a different level of time. He was in a speeded-up dimension where entire days went by in minutes. By the time Jeanine said she didn’t know if they really needed a dog, Biggety, or Rats, had shot into the house through the half-open door and was pursuing Albert from one room to another. They seemed to cover every room in the downstairs within a minute and a half. Bea screamed. She tried to get out of bed. Albert tore up the stairs with Biggety immediately behind. Jeanine laid hold of the garden mattock with its short handle and went after them. She decided to brain the dog.