Paulette Jiles - Stormy Weather

“What’s a troth?” said Jeanine.

“They bear l-l-live young and lurk under bridges.” He then turned to the big Philco console radio and held his hand out to it. “Jeanine, this is Philco console radio. Philco, this is Jeanine Stoddard.”

“Charmed,” she said. “Crushed, devastated. Slaughtered.” She sat down and crossed her feet at the ankles.

“I sold the family cow for that thing. L-1-look, Jeanine.” He turned the fan toward her and the long strips of newspaper copy fluttered. He gestured out the window. She got up and came to lean out the window frame beside him. “I’ve strung antenna wire in a hu-u-u-u-uge c-circle, from the top of the saddle store to the peanut-shelling outfit, warehouse, whatever the hell they call it, to the harness-making place and b-b-back here. I can get anywhere, I can get goddamned Mars.” He turned the radio on. A glow appeared from behind its fabric front panel. “It’s on KMOX, St. Louis,” he said. “Listen. NBC.” He sang along with the tones; bong, bong, bong. The announcer’s voice came on. In twenty minutes we will have a report from H. V. Kaltenborn. Kaltenborn has spent the last eight days in Munich reporting on these momentous events, barely taking time to eat or sleep. Milton sat down in a chair beside her and his hair seemed to spike up in yet wilder shocks of internal electricity, his excitement made his glasses sparkle. “J-Jeanine, Jenny, come to Chicago with me. This is a proposal. We could guh-get married. Lots of people get married. You and I could marry one another, shamelessly, openly. Scandalize everybody.”

“Stop it,” said Jeanine, but she was laughing. “I like where I am.”

“But then we would move back! I promise. Little boys on the st-street would say ‘That’s Jeanine and Milton, used to live in Chi-Chicago!’” He jumped up. Big-band music came through the speaker. “But this is the modern world, Jeanine. Modern! Moving forward, p-pretty soon nobody will be from anywhere. Archaic ties. Ancient tribal deadwood.” He turned down the volume. “I have a favorite d-d-dish, here, saved it just for you.” She bent forward in the chair to watch him unscrew a jar of preserved blackberries, fling them in a dish, crush two peppermint candy canes with a hammer and sweep the crushings into the bowl. Then he took an ice pick and hewed mightily at a block of ice in the icebox and threw in cool, glittering pieces.

They bent over the single bowl with two spoons on his scarred and rickety table while the fan blasted them with hot air.

“You propose to everybody,” said Jeanine. She reached for a dishtowel and wiped her lips.

“No, n-no,” he said. “Just two or three in the past month. A m-month has fled past me during which t-time I have proposed nothin’ to nobody, not nohow.” He bent forward and kissed her. His breath was fragrant with mint and blackberries. “If I could ever get over my stutter I would duh-drop all this cynicism. It’s flat and shallow isn’t it? It’s the fashion.” He dipped into the bowl again. “Just through these copper wires, imagine, the voice and, uh, words have more power and import than they ever have in human history.” He waved his spoon. Jeanine stopped eating the mint and blackberries and listened. “Never has the human language been so imp-p-portant and that’s because far away things are now reaching out t-t-t-to us, we aren’t protected anymore here behind the Continental shelf. We can saturate people with words. They believe them. It’s lovely. I want to do that. Come with me to Chicago, Jenny. Sweet Jenny.”

“You’re going to some school for elocution,” she said. “In Chicago.”

He nodded and put one hand to his mouth, briefly. “Learn to speak at will. You don’t know…” He paused and his eyes had a watery brightness. “What a weight it is. Like every w-w-word is weighted or ch-chained.” He took up a triangular piece of ice in the bowl of his spoon. “I have a talent, Jeanine. A g-gift, and it is languishing in chains. So unfair!” He breathed out a long breath and swallowed. “It’s so unfair. And I don’t know why.” He wiped his forehead and then became himself again. “We could make p-plans,” he said. “Plots. I like plotting better than p-planning.”

“You don’t have any money, Milton,” she said. “Are you going to go to school in Chicago on cabbages?”

“Wait and see,” he said. “Juuu-just wait.” He spooned up the last bite, deep purple berries and syrup and bits of candy cane, and put it to her lips and she swallowed it. “Move in town,” he said. “B-b-beautiful Jeanine, of the gray eyes. Town is b-better. Even your cousin has running water. Even I have running water. Why not?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “If I said I just loved being out there, would that sound crazy?”

“Yes. Everybody wants to get off the d-d-damn farm, Jeanine.”

They sat together on his cot and listened to Kaltenborn’s report from Munich. Jeanine closed her eyes and lay back with Milton’s arm over her shoulder. They were trading countries with one another, chopping off pieces here and there and handing them around. She thought about moving into town. And then to a bigger town, the excitement of Chicago or St. Louis. They were all moving someplace else anyway, weren’t they? This thought made her heart constrict, briefly, and an image came into her mind of the old house empty once again. She could hear the sound of a T &P freight going through Tarrant, such a small place in the middle of Central Texas with the power plant on the Leon River and the farm and ranch stores, the town swimming pool and the doctor with his cactus growing in the front yard and the hotel where oil leases were sold and marriages betrayed, the rodeo grounds swirling with dust. And beyond the electric lights, the dark hills. Radio waves passed through all these things and were invisible as speech. The Tolliver house and the town of Tarrant suddenly seemed unimportant and common. Jeanine found herself in an anxious dream, walking behind several black-and-white people who were dressed in glossy stylish clothes; she was saying something that nobody was listening to. They would not listen to her. She and Milton were slumped against each other and sound asleep when Betty hammered on the door, yelling for them to wake up.

JEANINE WADDED HERSELF up on Betty’s couch in a nightgown. Betty’s face was hot and sweaty, she twisted up her hair and said she’d been smooching with Si, and then they got into an argument, right there in the China Moon dance palace, and then they made up and the smooching went on unabated until she tore herself away and ran up the stairs to find Jeanine and Milton asleep and the big Philco radio blasting out Hawaiian dance music. Betty was covered in a yellow nightgown as big as a parachute. Her dark Stoddard hair snarled up in a tangle of pin curls. Lights from a passing car washed across the ceiling and the music of a radio from somewhere down at street level came to them. Betty frowned at her fingernails. She reached for an emery board on her nightstand. “Come on, Jeanine, go to work somewhere in Fort Worth. You could get a good job somewhere. Buy some nice clothes, you could be a receptionist. You could go to work in a flower shop or Montgomery Ward. There’s decent jobs around.”

“I couldn’t stand it,” said Jeanine. The thought of dressing up every day and living in a town and hurrying to please people was enough to freeze her blood. She could never manage to please people and especially not for five dollars a week. “I like to dress in rags and make chicken coops. I’m my own boss.”

Betty didn’t laugh. “Get a dull stupid job,” she said. “Like me. And go out dancing or something in the evenings. Ross Everett is very serious about you.” Betty got up and poked in her little cupboard and found a waxed-paper sleeve of Saltines and jumped back in her bed and threw some to Jeanine. “Ross’d just love you in a playsuit. Can’t you just picture yourself spraying cows with tick dip and wearing a playsuit?” They ate Saltines and scattered crumbs on the sheets.