Paulette Jiles - Stormy Weather

Elizabeth handed her oldest daughter the tray with coffee cups. “That’s a hundred and fifty miles from here. Up where they have all those dust storms.”

“I would really like to go,” said Jeanine.

“Promise me you won’t bet,” she said.

“I’ll make sure she doesn’t,” said Ross. “It’s illegal.”

“Oh, Ross,” said Elizabeth. “Really.”

“He has to what?” said Mayme. “Are they going to run all the way around the track?”

“Qualify,” said Jeanine.

“Qualify for what?”

“For an A rating. If he does four hundred and forty yards in twenty-four seconds or less he’s rated A, and then he can race on all these official quarter-horse tracks. Against other A horses. The prize money is good.”

Ross said that Mayme should come too. But she was going with Vernon to the baseball game in Eastland on that same date, and she said, “Y’all will have to go by yourselves.”

Ross said, “The boy is coming.”

Jeanine frowned. She shoved her hair out of her face. “His boy is coming, Mother,” she said.

Ross glanced at her. He decided to ignore it. He said, “I see you made something out of that doll’s head, Jeanine.”

The porcelain head with its black hair and red lips stared out with a stiff hieratic face from the mantelpiece, given new life with a stuffed body and a dress made from scraps of the eggshell-colored wedding silk.

“Oh yes!” said Elizabeth. “It was my mother’s! I don’t know how you ever found it. Strange how things turn up.” She smiled. To Elizabeth she seemed to have come back out of the earth to take her place in the house again, after years of loss and neglect. “I was so happy.”

Then they had played gin rummy for an hour in the newly painted parlor. There was the silent knowledge that he had come to be with Jeanine. Everything was proper and quiet inside the clean mint-colored walls. He saw how pleased Mrs. Stoddard was, that she radiated a lighthearted, even slightly apprehensive gladness that her daughters and herself had a house where they could receive, as people used to say; where they could offer a new-painted parlor and coffee, laugh and shriek over their triumphs at gin rummy. Ross remembered the board-and-batten shack in which they had existed in Conroe, with the washtubs out in back on the bare dirt and the front yard no more than eight hundred square feet littered with jacks and wheel hubs. The loud public battles in the ravaged tar paper shack next to them between a man and wife and innumerable children in some unrecognizable language. Pure squalor. And Jack Stoddard leaking money at every pocket in the gambling joints.

Ross expressed admiration and astonishment at the way Prince Albert had personally rescued Bea from the well. He listened while they told him of Bea’s heroic grab for the falling lamp. When Bea cried out in her customary exclamation points that next year was high school, and she would be allowed to cut her hair! And she would have an English teacher! Just for English! he shook his head in amazement and whistled.

“My, my. Just for English.”

“But you knew that already, you graduated from high school,” said Bea, darkly.

“And also from Texas A &M,” said Ross. “I learned just enough to come back and tell my old man how to run the ranch.”

“Are your parents still with us?” asked Elizabeth. Jeanine spun out the cards to each in turn and then picked up her hand and gasped in amazement at what she had and Ross laughed at her transparency.

They were very much alive, he told her, living in San Angelo. They started out as cross-timbers ranchers with cattle running loose and a couple hundred acres saved aside for cotton and hay. And three boys. His father got desperate and tried sheep and poured a shearing platform and then gave up on sheep. Then somebody hit that Fry field, it came in good in 1926, Pure Oil bought out our leases. Daddy made money on it. He never liked ranching anyhow, and his brothers didn’t either. His father was an odd man, Ross was fully prepared to admit it, involved with inventions, one of which was a pecan-shelling machine that had thrown shattered pecan shells all over the old stone ranch house where Jeanine had spent the night, until he finally perfected it, and so he had made a great deal of money. He and Ross’s mother garnered their oil-lease and shelling machine profits and at long last fled the Comanche County ranch and its six thousand acres for life in town. Now his father was working on the hydraulics of irrigation pumps. The Depression had not affected them all that much. He asked if he could smoke. Bea hurried to bring him a saucer and watched with a kind of helpless, hypnotized fascination as he lit up. His mother, he said, was nearly six feet tall and could sing like an angel, alto, and when she was in a full cry on “Faith of Our Fathers” you could hear her from Brownwood to Rising Star. Ross’s two brothers had joined them in San Angelo to work with his father in the engine shed full of machines and parts of machines, with his mother inside the house practicing for a choir, shattering glass. Ross snorted out smoke and shuffled again. And so during the drought, with the dust storms and the falling cattle prices, they had signed over the ranch to him and he abjured any part in the profits from their noisy and malodorous inventions.

Then after a while her mother and sisters yawned and laid down their cards. They drifted in vague, diplomatic movements away to the kitchen and Ross followed Jeanine up the stairs to her room to see the wedding dress. Elizabeth and Bea and Mayme were now sitting in the kitchen, in steamy domestic peace, to knit and read and listen to the news.

“What are you doing other than running around with a washtub on your head?” he said.

“Driving that tractor,” she said. “Sewing. How’s your boy? The gunslinger.”

“I had a serious talk with him. I don’t want him hitting people with slingshots. I told him before long he’s going to get a new mother. Sooner or later. He’s not allowed to kill her. He’s exercising Smoky and doing pretty well with him. When he qualifies, the money will come in by the cotton sack.”

“You’re going to tell him that I’m going to be his new mother!” She dropped a card of buttons and grabbed his shirtsleeve. “Don’t you dare.”

He picked up the card. They were little mother-of-pearl knobs. There would be twenty-five of them up the back of the dress, he figured. “I’ll tell him you’re going to be my mistress, my paramour, my secret valentine.”

“Oh stop it.”

“I told him we were going to have wild, uninhibited sex in the barn and he should turn Catholic and pray for our souls.”

Jeanine kicked at the baseboard. “You’re going to go to hell, Ross.” She crossed her arms. “You’re going to go to hell and shovel ashes.”

“I know it,” he said, calmly. “Are you coming to Lubbock?”

“Yes. We can get there and back in a day?”

“Yes.”

She got up and threw a window open, the one that looked out over the valley where harmless cottony clouds crept over Blanco Mountain, shadow by shadow, and behind them stars lit themselves. The light made her seem almost transparent. The evening wind swept into the room like a guest from the horizon of tabled hills and rippled the fringes of her bedspread.

She smiled at him and he looked away from her sweet mouth and sunburnt skin. He rolled down his sleeves and buttoned them. Desire had taken hold of him like a mugger. It was beating him up. Many small evasive plans came to him, of stopping off at the Bluebird’s Rest Tourist Courts near Lubbock, where that transparency would dissolve in his hands. He jiggled his foot.

Jeanine sat down on her bed and started laying the piecings of silk one on top of the other, her long legs knobby at the knee, her hair cut at a pageboy length and curling at the edge of her square jaw.