Paulette Jiles - Stormy Weather

Ross went into the house and climbed the stairs. From the window of Miriam’s room he could see Innis walking out to the sick corral with the creosote. He began to fold the possessions of the boy’s mother into boxes. The bedspread, the curtains, the doilies on the vanity and the things from the drawers. Outside, another relentless and bitterly clear day. The sky was blue from one horizon to the other and shaded only by a light marking of dust from the east, from Kansas, where topsoil lingered airborne in the lofting winds. Ross knew he had to do it sooner or later and the time had come because of Jeanine. He had made up his mind. He opened the closet and took out Miriam’s dresses. He folded those as well. They would go to the Baptist church and be sent somewhere. He would ask them to pack it all off to a Baptist church somewhere out of the area. Some woman headed for California, in a Model T with mattresses on top, with a washtub and blankets strapped to the back, would wear them.

Mayme said, “Mother, go talk to Violet and Joe about a telephone. He works for the phone company. Get him to see how much it would cost to lay a line out here.” Mayme carried a bucket full of dead leaves from under the broad live oak and dumped them onto the dry earth around the zinnias. It helped keep the roots cool. Jeanine and Mayme had decided the zinnias and sunflowers were Mayme’s job, and in trade Jeanine would whitewash the rocks bordering the walk.

Elizabeth sat in the shade of the veranda watching her daughters work and then said no to the telephone. She was afflicted with nervousness in waves. But she sat on a kitchen chair and appeared very calm in the light breeze, turning the little porcelain doll’s head over in her fingers. She was afraid for all the money she had poured into the drilling, money that was gone forever and herself a mother depriving Bea of the things she needed, condensed milk and subscriptions to Far West Stories . But the well might come in, it might come in. Elizabeth fanned herself with a piece of cardboard and said that before they spent money on a telephone, Mayme should buy herself clothes for work. Mayme brought in their only cash, and she should have new clothes and a good hat.

Mayme sighed and said Yes, Mother. She could have had a new spring straw hat months ago but she had instead given her mother ten dollars and then ten again, to buy more Beatty-Orviel stock certificates. What could she say? It made her mother happy. Elizabeth liked to sit with Lillian and Violet and go over the seismograph reports, talk about torsion balance technology, they visited the site with potato salad for the men. They were like schoolgirls. Mayme went inside, thinking up patterns for summer dresses. They could not afford new ones but Jeanine could put something together.

Jeanine pumped water from the kitchen sink pump over a colander of beans. “Get me the material, Mayme, I’ll make whatever you want.”

“I thought you were busy with Ross’s racing sheet. For Smoky Joe.”

“I can do that racing sheet in an afternoon.”

“Well, then.” Mayme brightened up and opened a magazine and flipped through the pages and then held it up. “Can you do something like this? I found some dotted swiss curtains at the church basement. There’s about ten yards.”

“Easy.” Jeanine took the magazine in her wet hand. “Cross-tabs on a standing collar. Sure. Easy.”

“What did Ross Everett say about the shingles and stuff?”

“He’s bringing them.”

Jeanine’s garden had burnt out. There was no rain and she could not carry enough water to keep it alive. But on the other hand she had collected so many agarita berries that she had filled ten jars with the rose-colored jelly. Mrs. Crowser showed her how to spread a sheet on the ground around the thorny bushes and then beat the agarita with a hoe handle until the berries fell into the sheet. Before long they would have a secure roof and then whole milk from the dairy in trade for eggs and then maybe a telephone from Mayme’s pay. They would talk to their cousin from their own kitchen, dressed in beautiful smart clothes like the women in the WPA posters, the annoying posters plastered everywhere that said you were to brush your teeth, take care of your hands, and save waste fats. What waste fats? Jeanine wondered who made up the damned posters. Didn’t they know everybody was eating their fats and it wasn’t waste?

Jeanine sat down and wrote out their budget for May. They were in the main living on Mayme’s seventy-five a month. They spent twenty a month for groceries and her Smoky Joe bet money went to pay off this year’s taxes, but still they owed over two hundred dollars for the years past and now they needed another fifty dollars for 1938 taxes. If only Smoky Joe would bring in a little more. Then she could buy luxuries like new dress material unrolled fresh and smelling of crisp sizing from a bolt in a store. Then the telephone. She put the paper aside. The rat terrier lay at the back screen door, on the outside, with his nose against the frame, blinking. Albert sat opposite him on the inside of the screen. He stared back and didn’t blink.

ROSS SAT ON a cane-bottomed chair in Jeanine’s room. He stretched out his long legs. He listened while Jeanine told him of her first cut into the silk. She had comforted herself with the thought that if she ruined it, she would have borrowed the money from him to replace it. Then the hailstorm. It was one thing after another.

Ross thought of how his grandfather or even his father would have shot themselves in the foot with a large-caliber weapon rather than step into a young woman’s bedroom, but times had changed. He smelled of mohair and sweat and cigarettes. He had a train ticket in his pocket, a coach seat all the way to Washington, D.C., where he would change trains for Woonsocket, Rhode Island. The American Wool Company was presently not on strike, but by the time he got there anything could happen.

He said, “Do you understand about the shingles? Can you do it?”

“Yes.” She lifted her face to him and smiled at him because she knew his face would change. He would flush a little at his cheekbones, he would smile back, slightly, at one corner of his mouth. “First, I smash Mayme’s thumb. She screams. We fall off the roof.” Then she opened her hand and dropped an imaginary hammer and said Thud. Ross smiled just as she thought he would and watched her pick up the wedding dress bodice and there was indeed a slight flush along his cheekbones, under the sunburnt skin.

In the kitchen Ross heard her mother and sisters talking, their quiet laughter. They had all looked on as if they were mildly astonished when he drove up and stripped off his tie and coat and vest, rolled up his white shirtsleeves and changed all four tires on their truck for four good used ones, and shook his head at the hail craters in the windshield. All the time her mother saying he would get grease and tire marks all over his suit and himself saying it was all right, he’d changed many a tire in a suit and tie before now. The glass panes were packed in straw and laid in long ammunition crates left over from the Great War and they would keep safe until Jeanine and Mayme could putty them into the frames. He carried a chain guard to the barn and fixed it over the chain drive on the cultivator.

They regarded him washing at the sink as if he were some strange official male come to deliver a telegram or inspect the property or lead them in prayer. His broad thick wrists, the way he took up the embroidered tea towel and dried his callused hands. He searched for someplace to put his hat and finally laid it on the safe counter upside down. They inquired about Smoky Joe and he assured them that the stallion was about to enter the official tracks. He had to qualify in Lubbock. Up north in the plains country. He would like for Jeanine to go with him. They would get there and back in a day.