Paulette Jiles - Stormy Weather

Betty stared at her cousin and put a finger to her lips.

“Well excuse me,” said Jeanine. “I didn’t know you knew her.” Jeanine sat down and started stitching quickly.

Bricey sat down with pinking shears and began cutting out linen squares. “Absolutely selfless,” she said. Jeanine felt like she ought to leave but Ross was supposed to come in on the afternoon train and she wanted to meet him and hear if he got a contract or not. She wondered if they would remain friends if Milton Brown presented her with an engagement ring and declared his undying love and set a date to m-m-marry her and they would stroll among the dinosaur tracks and kiss beside the drying bed of the Brazos where catfish swam in circles in the shrinking holes of water. Then they would get on a train to Chicago with everybody throwing shoes and rice and then herself and Milton in a Pullman bed. She turned toward the door as the Old Valley Road teacher, Miss Callaway, hurried inside with a box containing jars of red, white, and blue poster paint and a tube of sparkles. She wore a light pink printed cotton dress and she was crying. She stopped and put the box down and shook out a handkerchief and wiped her eyes.

“Why, Lou-Ann!” said Bricey. “What is it?”

Lou-Ann Callaway motioned toward the back room and Bricey got up and followed her. They all listened intently; they heard the kind of pressured noise people make when they are whispering at top volume. It was something about a young man. Martha raised her eyebrows and kept sewing. Who was seeing someone else, she had just discovered. Betty thumped her heart with a fist and rolled her eyes. Martha Jane placed her wrist against her forehead and pretended to faint. Jeanine heard the faraway noise of the train whistle as it crossed the Brazos River Bridge coming into Mineral Wells, and said she would be back later. She knew that sooner or later Bricey was going to have a long chat with Winifred Beasley and that something would come of it; something unpleasant.

THROUGH THE HEAT waves and engine steam she saw Ross Everett stepping off the westbound passenger train. He took off his hat and came walking toward her. “I figured I would find you here. This is one of your days at the Red Cross.”

She came to him and took his coat sleeve in her hand. He laid his hand over hers and bent down to kiss her hot face. The smell of his body and skin was very intimate; tobacco, train, sweat, himself. He said they would go somewhere cool, the drugstore, and have something cold, and he would tell her about his contract if she were interested, and then he would drive her home when the temperature had cooled down. He told her about the rain he had seen in the East. Sheets of it. The feel and air of the world when it was drenched and running with water. One beautiful rain after another.

They drove back out to the Tolliver farm in the blue evening, listening to his car radio. She bent forward and turned it up when she heard the first strains of “Stormy Weather.”

It was toward the end of July that they got the telephone. Joe Keener backed toward the house, unreeling telephone line from a large spool. He bored holes in the wall and ran the line in and tested it with a kick meter that registered things called megohms. The next day the phone rang and Mayme screamed.

“What was that??”

Her mother said calmly, “The telephone.”

Jeanine lifted her head with the scissors in her hand.

Mayme said, “How many times does it ring?”

“Just answer it!” Elizabeth said.

“Maybe it’s Vernon!” Mayme clapped the large receiver to her head. “Hello!” she shouted. “Hello!”

“Don’t shout,” said Elizabeth.

Mayme carefully laid the receiver down. “It’s for you, Mother. There’s a shareholders’ meeting.”

The shareholders and others with the certificates of interest met in St. Stephen’s church hall. Elizabeth told people how she had learned about the meeting from a telephone call. Their own telephone in their own parlor. She sat with her purse on her lap and a feeling of desperation. The producer wore his loudest tie, an orange and blue fish pattern, and held up charts and graphs while they all shouted at him. He said they had reached two thousand feet at very little cost, why, it had hardly cost six thousand to drill that far and that was cheaper than he had ever imagined. All they needed was to drive it a little farther. It was down there. Elizabeth stood up and spoke at a public meeting for the first time in her life. Mr. Lacey the connections foreman sat in the back row unnoticed and listened to her. She pulled at her gray cotton gloves nervously and her voice shook but she asked the producer if he was slant drilling and he swore he was not and wondered how this woman knew about slant drilling. Then she asked if he had tried acid, and he said they couldn’t afford acid, all they needed was a few more hundred feet. Oil wants to migrate. Oil always wants to go somewhere else, it wants to be on top, it wants to wander. It is wanton and unfaithful, it’s almost always riding on salt water, looking for better company. It ain’t lying down there in a big pool. It’s in the pores in sandstone. Smashed into the pores among sand grains and under pressure if we’re lucky. In another five hundred feet, we should hit the sand.

George Lacey stood up. Elizabeth turned to see who was speaking. He said, “And when and if it comes in, it could be oil, it could be oil and gas, it could be oil and salt water or gas and salt water. If it comes in gas you stand a good chance of blowing yourself up along with the derrick if there’s a live flame anywhere. If it’s H 2S it will kill the whole crew. And if you live through that, if you get oil, you got to lay production pipeline to get it somewhere.”

“We all know that, Mr. Lacey,” said Spanner. “There will be enough to pay off everybody and lay the pipelines. You ought to know, Mr. Lacey. Your company’s field isn’t ten miles away, and if Magnolia has ten producing wells there, then, you see.”

Elizabeth Stoddard remained standing, and did not sit down, and was not comforted. She said she wanted to see the old well log, the one from when they had drilled there five years before. Mr. Spanner laughed and said of course but well logs are hard to read.

“I can read one, Mr. Spanner,” she said. “I would like for it to be made available.”

Mr. Spanner said he would have it at the next meeting, in a week’s time.

At the end of the meeting Mr. Lacey pushed his way through the crowd. He made a gesture with his hat at her in lieu of tipping it and then put it on his head. He asked Elizabeth if he could be of any service and if she needed a ride home.

“Well, no,” she said. “I, well, no thank you, Mr. Lacey.”

“I have the old well log,” he said.

“You do?” People pushed past them in the hallway. The school seemed abandoned and bereft of children’s voices in the summer night; the closed rooms seemed dead.

“Yes.” He took her elbow and with the other hand gestured toward his car. “You know, the City Lights Café has good big tables where we could sit and look at it. Have something cool to drink.”

She paused and then said, “That sounds very nice.”

THE ARMSTRONG HOUSE and headquarters was a lunatic asylum with hundreds of Angoras jammed into the pens and the scorching sound of electric shears and the howling engine of the generator, the Mexican crew singing “Los Caminos de Guanajuato” on the shearing platform. They peeled the silky mohair from the soft, baggy bodies like onionskin. The goats were then carried to another pen and by this time they were silent and stupid, their thin-boned bodies hung in a man’s arms like a grain sack. Mrs. Armstrong sprayed gentian violet on the shear cuts and then the mature does were run into one pen and the yearlings into another. Ross Everett leaned on the pen rails, watching. Men loaded the four-hundred-pound bags of mohair onto Everett’s two-ton trucks as soon as it was bagged, pounded down, and the burlap sewn shut and tagged.