Paulette Jiles - Stormy Weather

He turned to her and thought about it for a minute. He pushed his hat to the back of his head. “You mean with a waiter standing around. Dressed up. At the Baker Hotel. Wine in an ice bucket. And so on. A string quartet.”

“Yes. I’ve never been. I’m an oil field child, raised on bread heels and beans. I’ve heard they give you two forks. You could take me.”

He smiled and said, “You know, somewhere under that hard varnish, Jeanine, you are a really awful person.”

“I do my best,” she said.

He said, “Other than a string quartet and nitro, is there anything you need?”

“We need tires. I wish I knew where I could find good used ones.”

Ross thought for a moment. “All right. I can do that.”

They sat in silence for so long that Jeanine fell asleep. Ross held her with one arm until his shoulder joint began to ache and at last he woke her up and said good night. She managed to make it up the stairs and fell asleep with her clothes on.

Martha Jane Armstrong was twenty years old with bright red hair and freckles. She was an only child and had a room by herself and that room was littered with letters from Tim Joplin, who was having a great time out with the CCC boys in Big Spring. Jeanine drove to the Armstrong house with her measuring tape and her suit and Bea’s coat. The Armstrongs were kidding out. Two minute Angora goat babies just born into a harsh world of coyotes and neglectful mothers lay beside the kitchen stove, folded in straw-filled washtubs making the kitchen a hell of noise and goat odor.

Martha Jane said they kept the silk upstairs in the loft because if they left it downstairs it would take up the smell of goats, as did everything else, including her hair and school clothes. It was the same heathen mess every year but her father and a lot of people were betting that the market would come back. When Daddy said he was quitting cattle and going to goats and sheep Martha Jane had about died. But the screwworms had driven them to this necessity and so the two newborn dogie goats with their strange horizontal pupils and soft, triangular cat mouths lay curled in washtubs and sobbed for attention.

Martha Jane and her mother and Jeanine went up a precarious set of stairs to see the silk there in the loft by the light of a kerosene lamp. Around them on the walls were varmint traps with carnivorous, rusty jaws. The silk shone like rare treasure in the lamplight, a faint eggshell color. It was brocaded with a shamrock or ace of clubs pattern that stood out when the material was tilted this way and that in the light. There were fifteen yards of it. No, it didn’t come from New Orleans, no matter what Alice Crowser told you, Mrs. Armstrong said. Their grandfather had brought it from New York in 1922, where he had also gone looking for somebody who not only owed him a great deal of money but who had also insulted him in ways no gentleman could endure. He saw it in some store and bought it to calm himself down. It has sat up here in the loft ever since.

Jeanine laid out Bea’s coat and her garnet silk dress and jacket to show them her work. She turned them inside out and held the careful seams and the linings and the windowpane pockets to the light. Martha Jane said she wished she could do work like that but when God was handing out patience and he said Martha Jane Armstrong! she must have been asleep. She was so sad to hear about Jeanine’s father. But wasn’t he in jail for something?

Jeanine said, “Malfeasance and walking disorderly. Homicide in a no-homicide zone.”

Martha Jane said Hmmmm and chewed gum. She said, “I kind of remember when y’all buried your grandparents there at the Tolliver place.”

“We came,” said her mother. “When they were laid in the all-enveloping grave.”

“Oh, you were the redheaded girl,” said Jeanine. “They kept you and Bea in the house and y’all got up on the table and ate all the bread and butter.”

“I know it.”

Then Mrs. Armstrong started telling Jeanine about the visions she’d been having about Tim, and Martha said Mother, be quiet. Martha Jane found the Vogue pattern in its envelope and they wrapped the material again in its old sheet. Mrs. Armstrong said a lot of people had visions. She herself had talked to Amelia Earhart on the Ouija board. Jeanine turned to her and wanted to hear what it was that Amelia Earhart said on the Ouija board but Martha said that Timmy was perfectly safe and he had not been bitten by a rattlesnake. Martha handed Jeanine the Vogue pattern and said, “Jeanine let us give you five dollars beforehand.”

“That would be fine,” said Jeanine. “Because I’ll have to buy thread and lining and buttons.”

On their way out Mr. Armstrong sat half asleep by the fireplace, exhausted and stained with blood and manure. He was short and balding; he struggled up out of the chair and said good evening to them.

“Y’all leasing your fields?”

“Yes, sir, to Abel Crowser.”

“Good, good.”

Jeanine said, “Well, are you finding a good market for your shear crop?”

“Oh Lord yes, fellow from Comanche County, Ross Everett, buying it all up. Has his own shear crews, electric shears, brings his own generator.” He sat back down again and folded his hands in his lap. They seemed to be made from wood and horsehide. “He’s a hard dealer, that man. Hard to bargain with.”

“But he’s good-looking,” said Martha Jane. “He’s got a cute butt.”

“Martha, you are headed for the lakes of fire,” said her mother. Mr. Armstrong ran a hand over his balding head and said he knew folks who were cedar choppers. In fact they lived on one of Ross Everett’s tenant farms. They’d do it for the posts. But stay away from them if they come. The way they cuss it would make your nose bleed.

JEANINE SAT DOWN to work at the Singer in her upstairs sewing room. It was late February; the shingles were in place on the roof so that dust would not leak in and stain the beautiful silk and sift into the machine gears. The room was dark because they had nailed cardboard over the missing panes but she would deal with that later. She laid out the silk and the tissues of the Vogue pattern and thought about where to make the first cut. She marked it with her chalk. Then she went downstairs to start the pinto beans and bread dough. With Mayme’s paycheck they could afford flour now, and the kitchen smelled of baking bread.

ABEL SANK THE nose of his sulky plow into the dry soil to terrace the field against the slope. The two workhorses bent into the job until the back band stood up off their spines and the muscles of their thighs were knotted and coiled. The sharp edge of the turning plow threw the earth to one side with a ripping noise. The layer of root matt was torn loose and turned over. He went over the field three times and then he would let it lie until early April to take in rain, which had not come for seven years but maybe it would come this year.

MAYME BROUGHT IN the mail. Church bulletins from the First Baptist and Third Presbyterian and a postcard from Vernon Galbraith, who was in the Army Air Corps and had danced with her the night of the Valentine’s Day dance to “You Are My Lucky Star” and had fallen in love with her auburn hair, and her unsinkable good cheer, and her kind heart that stood open to the world like a door painted in Chinese red.

ON A MONDAY in the first week of March Jeanine put the John Deere into gear and made her way up the slope with long divots flying up off the wheel cleats like birds made of dirt. It was midmorning on a late March day, and cool, and foggy. She could barely see Abel Crowser on the sulky plow with the rein ends thrown across his left shoulder; Jo-Jo and Sheba bent nearly to the ground, trying to haul the blade through the dry red soil. The fog rose up out of the Brazos River bottoms to the trees below Jeanine and then she watched Abel and the team disappear into it. It was a very still mist without wind, it seemed to develop of its own accord and suddenly she was in the middle of it and the air was heavy and wet.