Paulette Jiles - Stormy Weather

“I like being at our place. I don’t want a playsuit. Why doesn’t anybody listen to me?” Jeanine found she had dribbled cracker crumbs into the neck of her nightgown and she tried to slap them away. “Why am I eating these things?”

“And now Milton Brown, you buy yourself a satin dress for dancing in, and those little open-toed numbers I showed you, and he’s a dead man. Dead. Just get a job for a while and buy yourself some nice clothes, Jeanine. It ain’t forever.” Betty sighed with a big Ooof sound. She was exhausted from all the arguing and smooching with Si. “You’re seeing two different men! Now that’s what I call a social life. You got to nail down Milton, though. That’s the kind of guy he is. You got to nail his shoes to the floor.”

“You’re not listening to me, Betty. This is like a nightmare.” Jeanine stared out the window. Then sleep nearly overcame her. She lifted her head and searched in her straw purse for her handkerchief and blew her nose. “When you talk and people don’t hear anything you say.”

“Si keeps wanting to get married,” Betty said. “But I’m having too much fun right now. I ain’t ready for kids and housework.” Betty watched another car crawl by on the street below. “And we’re going to have some oil well money coming in.”

“Betty, there ain’t going to be any oil well money.”

“Yes there is. That well is going to come in.”

“Come in what? Sour gas and salt water probably.”

“Mama says it’s good.”

“Good for what?” Jeanine yawned until tears ran, and then flopped back on the pillow.

“She says it’s going to come in, girl.” Betty stared out the window into the faintly lit night of the small town. Then her eyes slid shut. “Going to be high-gravity and under pressure.”

“You tell me how you know that,” said Jeanine. “But you ain’t going to answer, you’re going to sleep.”

“No I am not, I’m just checking my eyelids for holes.”

In a minute Betty fell into a light snoring. Jeanine thrashed around on the narrow couch and could not sleep; she looked out into the street where trees bent like hair, brushed by the wind that had come up out of the southeast as if there might be a hurricane down in the Gulf, as if this wind might reach all the way to Palo Pinto County bearing rain. Jeanine thought that if she lived in a big city it would no longer matter if it rained or not.

The stores and offices on the main streets of Tarrant were bright with posters declaring we must all work together to bring America out of the economic emergency. At the MacComber House soup kitchen Jeanine made coffee and cut up donated, stringy beef for the soup. She washed her hands and sat down at a table with five other girls and threaded a needle. It was hard to hold all the material down with pieces of scrap iron and cut pipe rings but they could not do without the fan blowing on them. The streets outside wavered with heat distortion. They were piecing together dust masks to be sent to other Red Cross centers. Most would go up to the Panhandle hospitals, to Lubbock and Amarillo, where the dust storms were the worst. The streets were filled with train noises and crowds. Martha Jane Armstrong showed up to help make decorations for the Fourth of July benefit dance and Betty came with a box of linen scraps. Uncertain, ragged families strung themselves one by one through the door and stood silently, waiting to be told, to be offered something and too proud to ask.

Jeanine told Martha about the drive chain on the cultivator grabbing her scarf and Martha said she’d better carry a knife, she didn’t know how many people had caught their clothes in machinery and got killed. You need to cut yourself loose and if all else fails you can jam the blade in the gears.

A stout woman named Bricey was the democratically elected head of the Mineral Wells Relief Committee and she had a voice like a sawmill whistle. Jeanine remembered her from the Valentine’s Day dance, where she had sat behind a table and took in the boxes, gray as cast iron and completely unmoved by the traveling light-spots that rained on her pie-tin hat, sorting the small gifts for poor people given by other poor people.

Now Bricey cut sandwiches with a big carving knife, and laid them out in stacks. A family of four sat down on the unsprung couch and the mother handed the sandwiches to her husband and two small children. Jeanine glanced at them and away again. Like we used to be, she thought. On their way to something better.

“You girls just think I am a stodgy old lady,” said Bricey. She turned the key on another can of Spam. “But I have a secret life.”

“Well, tell us,” said Betty. “Don’t hold back.”

“I am an astronomer.”

They all said, No! Bricey smiled.

“Does that mean stars?” somebody asked in a whisper.

“Tell us,” said Martha Jane.

So Bricey told them about the telescope on the roof of her house and how she went out on clear nights to see the rings of Saturn, and the canals of Mars, light-years from this town, so slack and depressed. The stillness afflicted her. The rising dust storms. So she went up to her roof and gazed out into the limitless Great Otherwise and worlds upon worlds.

“So there. My secret life.”

Jeanine smiled at Bricey, surprised. Bricey sat up on the roof and drank in the light of the stars like a little old nocturnal hummingbird. She had her own secret life there. And she dressed in dumpy dresses and her awful gray hat in the daytime. Jeanine realized she knew so little about people; that she and her family had moved around so much they had always depended only on each other and she in truth knew as little about the world as a nun. Jeanine’s big stitches galloped across a square of layered gauze.

Bricey had a small round mouth and never wore lipstick and when she smiled it showed her gold tooth.

“And I knew your mother, Jeanine. I think it’s marvelous that she bought into that oil well.”

“You knew my mother?”

“You were born here, Jeanine. Y’all weren’t brought up on a desert island.” Bricey took her hairbrush from her purse and brushed back Jeanine’s hair. “You should let your hair grow out, honey, and do it in one of those pompadours. It would make you look older.”

Jeanine sat carefully still while Bricey drew her short hair back and thought about the effect and then let it spring back to its brief waves.

“How did you know my mother?”

“Why, we went to high school together! She was a freshman and I was graduating. Oh she was so pretty. She’s still pretty. And that oil well is just the thing for her. She can busy herself to death with that thing and it’ll never come in and so she can buy into another one. She should have done something like that years ago.” She smiled and ruffled Jeanine’s flyaway hair. “I’m glad y’all are back, Jeanine,” she said. “Y’all have had your troubles but I’m glad you’re back.”

“Thank you,” said Jeanine, and wished she knew how to say more; something more of the sudden rush of gratitude for such simple words.

“And how is Bea?”

“She’s going to have that cast off pretty soon.”

“Is Mrs. Beasley taking good care of her?”

“Yes,” said Jeanine, and her good feelings evaporated at the image of Winifred Beasley and her bird’s-nest hat. She went to stand in front of the electric fan. “But if she keeps on ordering us around she isn’t going to live out the summer. I swear I’ll throw her down the well.”

“Jeanine!” Bricey jammed the hairbrush back into her purse and shut it up hard. “I didn’t know you were like that.” She closed her mouth over the gold tooth. “Winifred has dedicated her life to rural nursing. She is selfless. She has worked without cease.”