Paulette Jiles - Stormy Weather

The Milky Way moved through its summer and winter journeys. The Comanche do not believe in a succession of numbered years. That the year 1873 will progress on to 1883 and then to 1889, and finally to 1937, and on into an infinity of numbers. They believe it is always the same year, unchanging, moving in a steady circle and within the circle of the year we are born and strive upward toward something and then we wilt and fade away. Within the year’s wheel different people rise to power and then are defeated and their names are a variation for the word lost , for disappeared, for remnant . And in the meantime in the center of the wheel the people charge forward in a glorious manner toward the places where their enemies dwell.

JEANINE BENT DOWN to pick up the arrowhead at the edge of the graveyard. She lay down her tools to hold it in both hands and look at it. It was a dark rose flint. The edge was still sharp. Flint never dulls. No matter how old an arrowhead might be it is still edged with ancient wars and bloodletting. She put it in her pocket and went on to the peach orchard with her borrowed pruning shears and the booklet from Texas A &M in hand. It was a pale, dry day and the peach orchard was raining a few pink petals, which lifted and fell on the traveling wind like snow from distant mountains. The directions were complicated. She had to remove all hanger shoots, rootstock suckers, and water sprouts from the center of the tree. Leave one-year-old, red, eighteen- to twenty-four-inch bearing shoots. Peach trees, it said, bear fruit only on one-year-old branches. She would make all this happen and it would leave her with a deep feeling of being more than herself.

She began to sculpt and carve the old trees and take away the imprisoning scale and opened the door for the new fruit. As she stood with a flowering branch in her hand it occurred to her that the round of the year would go on forever, the peach trees would bloom and then it would be hay time and cotton harvest and branding time all up and down the valley, and then winter again. This was work that she loved, the work that it took to keep the house alive, looking out of its shivery glass, its heart the beating small thunder of a good fire in the cookstove, and its voice the radio; Bob Wills singing “Time Changes Everything.”

The gang of cedar choppers came rattling down the road in a wagon. They hewed down acre after acre of cedar. They brought down the great mature cedars of the brake in perfumed chips and laid them in rows. Two mules towed the old wagon through the brush and out the barn gate. They swore in a conversational way, as if their sentences would be incomplete if they did not salt them with rich and graphic images. After one visit Jeanine stayed away. That goddamned Ross Everett can kiss my ass, they said. I should have burnt down his ass-hole house, cheap son of a bitch.

Milton stalked behind her as she unrolled the chicken wire.

“But I want you to say s-s-something like ‘Everybody gets drunk at bub-benefit dances!’ I want you to understand me. Look deep into my soul, ragged as it is, a mere unraveled thing.”

The wire caught on everything. Jeanine jerked at it. She was dressed in the same dress she had worn when the sheriff had come to them in Wharton and had told them that their father had been arrested. She should burn it, tear it up for rags, its loud tiger stripes were faded and apologetic. Mayme called it her Barnum & Bailey dress.

“Just help me, why don’t you?” she said. “All right, all right, here I am looking deep into your soul. Everybody gets drunk at benefit dances.” She wiped her face with the hem of her skirt. The flat sunlight stoked up the barn like a furnace even though it was only mid-March.

“Oh, Jeanine, you have released me from a hell of self-condemn-n-nation,” he said. “The nights I have sat awake listening to the St. St-St-Stephen’s Episcopaaaaal Church ringing the hours of one, two in the morning and reliving the dreadful scene as much as I could remember of it.” He reached out for the edge of the chicken wire and helped her pull it over the stall. He stuck himself with one of the ends and put his bleeding finger in his mouth and then took out a handkerchief and wrapped it around his finger. “I waited a whole month before d-daring to creep in here, wringing my hands. Ap-pologizing.” Biggity the rat terrier sped past them with a large, thrashing rat in his mouth. Since they would not allow him to kill the cat he took it out on the rodent population. He would bring Mayme the rat’s head because Mayme loved him.

“I hope you stayed awake until your eyes dried out,” said Jeanine. “You didn’t even ask me to the dance. It wasn’t even a date, and I was supposed to put up with you drunk?”

“I know it, I know, I know myself,” Milton said. He handed her nails. She slammed them in over the wire. “I know myself and every smoky b-b-backroom corner of my gelatinous mind. Who could c-c-care for me, Jeanine?” He caught his coat sleeve on the ends of the wire and tore loose more threads. “Every time I fall for a girl, I think, ‘I would never go out on a d-d-d-date with somebody like me.’ Take a girl with really really thick glasses, for instance, and a speech impediment, and twenty dollars a week at the local rag. I wouldn’t go out with her.”

Jeanine laughed and bent her head down on the chicken wire. “Stop, stop, stop,” she said.

“Here,” he said. “I am risking my mental health t-to offer this.” He reached in his jacket pocket and held up a small box covered with red satin. “The only thing a g-g-gentleman offers a lady is candy and flowers, and it was this or a set of new underwear. Do you need some underwear?”

Jeanine stared at the box and finally understood it was some sort of candy or chocolates.

“You’re breaking my heart,” she said.

“Kiss me,” he said, and closed his eyes. He tapped his lips with an inky forefinger. “Right here.”

Jeanine paused for a moment and saw his closed eyes behind the thick glasses, saw every eyelash and the darting movements of his eyes behind the lids. She leaned forward and kissed him. The wind was starting up again and old straw drifted down from overhead and landed on them.

“Again,” he said. His eyes were still closed. Jeanine reached out and took the box from him. She held the hammer in the other hand. She kissed him again, because he needed kissing. Maybe it would, like sticky tape, lift some of the stutter from his lips, and then they would say honest and heartfelt things to each other and his incessant light irony would crackle and drift off like onionskin.

He opened his eyes and smiled at her and put both his arms around her neck and pressed his forehead against hers. “No underwear?”

“Hush,” she said. She heard Bea calling from the back porch. She was calling Albert. She wanted to make sure the dog had not killed him. The wind increased and started tearing at the sheet iron of the barn roof. One of these days it was going to tear it off and send it flying across the pasture. Jeanine let out a long sigh and dropped the hammer. “No underwear.”

They walked back to the house against the hot wind, their arms around each other. The Spanish oak leaves were uncurling in tiny green fists and pushing off the tassels. He bent down his head against the wind and laid his hand flat on top of his hat to hold it on. He held the back door for her and dust followed them. Milton made himself at home in a kitchen chair, stretched out his legs. Biggety lay in the middle of the kitchen floor with half a rat body.

“Oh get it out of here!” said Jeanine. She found a paper sack and threw it in by the tail. She wadded up the sack and went outside and dropped it into the burn barrel. Biggety went after it. She came back in. “I’m making coffee,” she said. “Where are you going today?”