Paulette Jiles - Stormy Weather

The thunderheads erupted into the dry air with flat, circular mists crowning their tops. They blossomed upward in leisurely explosions, closed in the sky over the valley until the sky was full of thunderheads and could hold no more. The world turned a dark marine blue. The first blast of wind turned up a section of their newly repaired shingles like cat fur and ripped them off, layer after layer, and spun them off into the driveway and all over the yard, their work gone for nothing. Then the hail came down, a wild, tympanic hammering. It smashed two great galactic stars into the truck’s windshield. It beat down the clothes that were out on the clothesline, and brained one of the hens, which became confused and darted in a snaky, erratic motion for several minutes, unable to remember where the barn was. The terrier and Albert found themselves hiding under the same bed but neither one would move. They all began to cry out the names of things that would be smashed and ruined, The garden! It’s hitting the windows! The truck!

They could not do without the truck, they could not drive it with its windshield a mass of blued craters, and Jeanine ran for the door with such urgency she slammed into the kitchen table, and the coal-oil lamp tipped and rolled. If it fell and shattered, it would have sent out its flaming oil all over the floor. But Bea threw herself forward to catch it and grasped the hot glass chimney and set it back upright and burnt her hand severely.

Jeanine snatched up a quilt from the back porch and then the washtub, and held it over her head. She jumped down the three steps onto the grass; the barn and all the darkened world was being obscured by jumping spangled eyes the size of golf balls, beating on the galvanized metal of the washtub with an indescribable noise so that she could not hear the shouting inside the house as the lamp tipped and was taken up by its scalding chimney by Bea, in her bare hand.

Jeanine flung the quilt over the windshield of the truck. It had already been struck twice. The truck sat under the Spanish oak and the hail was bringing down small limbs and the new green leaves with their hanging pendants of tiny blooms and last year’s acorns. She then turned and ran back into the house under her washtub helmet with hail striking her on the bare legs and shoe tops and her unprotected knuckles grasping the handles.

When she got back inside Bea was sitting with a handful of hailstones in her burnt hand and a tea towel wrapped around it and the sound upstairs of glass smashing.

“My silk!”

Jeanine ran through the sudden darkness of the hallway and to the upstairs room where the wedding dress was laid out in all its complicated parts. The wind had blown out the cardboard. Jeanine threw a sheet over the silk, scattering button cards and spools of eggshell-colored thread. Her own room was also a mass of disorder as she had left her window open to the bright spring air of that morning. The window was smashed completely and hail was jumping inside. The wind had thrown the curtains and the rod with them onto her orange-crate dressing table, knocking down everything that sat on a level surface.

That night she and her sisters and mother sat at the kitchen table, over the luxury of fried chicken, eating the hail-bruised drumsticks. They went over the damage. Rain fell quietly outside, with a weeping noise. They had lost three windowpanes entirely, some were cracked, but the windshield of the truck had been hit only twice. The old house stood at the edge of ruin and for a moment Jeanine felt it was more than she could bear or care about. Bea, with her wrapped hand, glowed when Mayme and her mother exclaimed over her heroic snatch at the falling lamp and Jeanine smiled and said she was very brave. Her mother said the garden would come back, to leave it alone, even though the rows were still filled with the marbled, melting hail that by morning would be gone. It would come back.

The next morning they cleaned up. Elizabeth said, “What would I have done if it were just me and Bea?” They crept about in the upstairs hall, bent over to pick up splinters of glass. “If I just hadn’t spent that fifty dollars on shares in that well we could buy new panes.”

“Why don’t we just move in town?” said Mayme. “Let’s give it up.” She straightened up and glanced out the window into the yard, which was a mess of litter beaten down from the oaks. Her hair was twisted up in bobby pins.

Jeanine said, “No, listen, I know, I know how we can fix it. I am going to call Ross Everett. He has that empty tenant farm, he said he was tearing it down. I am going to ask him to give us the shingles and the windowpanes if he hasn’t been hit by this same storm.”

She forgot her objections to Ross throwing the tenants out into the snow. Too bad for them. She pressed her tangled hair from her face and her gray eyes were wide and anxious.

“We can’t pay him, Jeanine,” said her mother.

Jeanine said, “Maybe we could all dance and sing for him?”

“Oh there’s Vernon!” Mayme screamed and threw down her paper sack of broken glass. A car had driven up, it was the young airman from the Valentine’s Day dance. He got out of the old Model A carrying a limp bouquet of carnations and daisies that had suffered from the long drive in a borrowed car and stared around at all the storm damage. Mayme took the stairs two at a time, ripping the bobby pins from her hair.

By the time Mayme had brushed out her hair and put on lipstick Vernon had shed his jacket and rolled up his sleeves. Mayme said, oh don’t, Vernon, you don’t have to help. Hush, Mayme, he said. Then he peeled potatoes for supper and said he had peeled many a one in basic training. That evening before he left he and Mayme sat for an hour out on the veranda. What musical voices they seemed to have, what light tones of speech. Jeanine polished her oxfords with brown polish and tried not to hear them. Then Vernon came in to say good-bye and drew an airplane on Bea’s cast and drove away.

That evening as Jeanine was making the fire in the fireplace for Bea, Mayme crept up to her sewing room and picked up the silk wedding dress. The bodice was still in two halves. She held the front half up against herself, tucked the long skirt into her waistband. She saw herself in the black window, night behind it, the lamp in front.

THE SPRING RUSHED past them to somewhere else, some other dimension. The house was weathered to the color of burnished steel. It shut itself down every night as coals crumbled in the stove and the old well stood outside like a throat that would speak or sing from the underworld when it was dark and everyone was asleep. Every morning the windows gazed at the weather no matter if it were a spotless blue sky or great clouds that roared and tumbled overhead in fugitive waterless balloons while Jeanine’s immaculate laundry snapped on the line. Below, the Brazos drained out of the high plains and cut its way through the red earth and every month it was lower and lower until now there were only separated holes of water and it was possible the river would go dry for the first time in human memory.

Mrs. Joplin wrote down the occurrence of Jack Stoddard’s death in her book of the Brazos Valley Genealogies. It was a thick ledger in which somebody had started to enter the accounts of the old Strawn cotton gin and then quit after August 21, 1929; ten bales, six hundred pounds apiece. After that Mrs. Joplin set down intricate genealogies and random gossip. She gave the book to Bea to read. She said that she had heard that Bea’s father had once found a Comanche skull and if Bea knew anything about it or any of his memories she was free to write it down and it would give her some interesting thing to do while she was confined to crutches. Mrs. Joplin had heard that Bea was quite the little writer. These stories should be written down before they turned into folktales. She gave Bea a book on the Comanche and one on the history of Palo Pinto County. Bea kept on writing in this book for many years and in it the folds, or perhaps valves, of time were pressed together like the bellows of an accordion.