Paulette Jiles - Stormy Weather

Jeanine and Martha Jane were in the bunkhouse trying on the wedding dress. They were both stripped down to their underwear. Every room in the Armstrong house was jammed with equipment and cartons of medicines and men walking in and out and so they had come out to the bunkhouse. Like everybody else, the Armstrongs had had to let their help go, so now the bunkhouse was a sort of tack room and toolshed, made of corrugated steel. Saddles were piled one on top of another and bridles and halters hung from nails in the beams and every metal surface gleamed with heat.

Martha Jane wanted to see how it looked on, and so Jeanine pulled the dress on over her head and Martha pinned her up in back. Jeanine tried to walk gracefully in the long skirts but she stumbled over cans of sheep dip chemical and the long hoses of a cactus burner. The steel walls made cracking noises from the heat. Outside the thermometer said 100 and inside the bunkhouse it had to be at least 105.

Jeanine picked up her marking chalk from a table full of paper shotgun shells beside the pellet-loading device. She handed it to Martha. “Here, mark where the shoulder pads go,” she said. “Why don’t y’all have a mirror?”

“Soon as I sell my ram.” Martha Jane’s hands were wet with sweat as she laid quick white stripes on the shoulder with the chalk. “I got a good ram out of those dogies.” She stepped back. “You’re thinner than me.” She took a fistful of waist. “But it looks good. Turn around.”

“Okay, but get your sweaty hands off it, Martha.” Jeanine turned in a slow spin and the yards of skirt floated out and snagged on the iron bedstead legs. She clutched up the material and said, “I’m going to pass out.”

“Don’t,” said Martha Jane.

“Martha, you’ve got to get this thing off of me.”

“Wait, wait.” Martha chalked the buttonhole lines and then Jeanine pulled off the supple yardage of the wedding dress and took up an enamel pitcher of water and poured it over her head. She stood skinny and soaked in her underpants and brassiere with water dripping from her elbows and ears. It ran into her cotton socks. She wiped at her face with a towel and gasped.

“It’s going to fit you,” she said.

“We got to get out of here,” said Martha Jane. “I don’t care when he gets back, we are getting married in December.” Martha took the pitcher from Jeanine and dipped the towel in it to wipe her face. Sweat ran into her eyes and burned until she could hardly see. “I got to go help Mother, Jeanine.” She pulled on her jeans and an old shirt of her father’s. “Stay and eat with us and the crew.”

“I’ve got work at home,” said Jeanine. In reality she was afraid they would be eating goat. Goat babies. She wrapped the dress in its sheet, stuck straight pins in it to hold it together. “I can’t believe I am going to fire up that cookstove.”

“Have y’all got electricity yet?”

“Soon as y’all pay me.”

“Get it from Daddy now,” said Martha Jane. “Before he spends it on does. He’ll blow it on does.”

“Okay.”

“God, I tell you, I’d about rather go be a missionary in Borneo than go through another shearing.” Martha pulled a comb through her hair. Jeanine put her chalk and scissors and spools of thread into an old purse she used for a kit. Martha pulled on her boots. She stood up and stamped her feet to jam her heels into the boots. She stamped again and walked out into a yellow blaze that seemed to swallow her up.

Jeanine stepped out of the bunkhouse. At the door she gasped at the inferno radiating from the corrugated steel wall. She ran for the back porch of the Armstrong house, to the water bucket that hung from a spike nail, and under it a lusty growth of peppermint where the water was thrown by exhausted men whose shirts and underwear stuck to their bodies in the unvarying heat. She came upon Ross Everett with his pants undone, his belt hanging loose, his shirt open. His shorts were striped blue and hung from his hip bones. She screamed in a faint, hoarse noise. It was all she could manage.

“Hello,” he said.

“Why don’t you just strip naked?” said Jeanine. She turned her back.

“You’re a virgin, Jeanine,” he said. “I can tell.”

He took off his hat and poured a dipper of water over his head, and then began to stuff his shirt into his waistband.

She felt dizzy with the heat and so she took a firm hold of the porch rail. “Can you say it a little louder?” she said. “They can’t hear you in the kitchen.”

He zipped up his pants and buckled his belt.

“Are you about to pass out?”

“Yes.” She liked his voice, it was a strong voice with that sliding West Texas accent. “Just about.”

He took hold of the collar of her shirt, touching her hot skin with his fingertips. He pulled it away from her neck and with the other hand scooped up a dipper of water from the bucket. He poured the water down into her shirt, flooding her breasts and ribs. Jeanine closed her eyes and he poured another over her head. “Hold out your hands.” He poured another dipperful into her cupped hands and she splashed it into her face. “How’s the dress?”

“Ross, it’s beautiful.”

He took the bucket from the giant nail and emptied it over her head and then set it beneath the pump. He filled it and hung it up again.

“Good.”

Jeanine said, “I could throw myself into the stock tank.”

He shifted his hat to the back of his head. She was good to look at; drops sparkled in her eyebrows and on small tips of hair that hung against her cheeks. He handed her the towel and watched her wipe her face with it.

“Come and see the shearing.”

“Couldn’t you just tell me about it?”

“No.” She followed him in her soaked shirt and overlong Levi’s, her hands over her ears because the violent noise of hundreds of distraught Angoras had risen to a deafening level. With his broad hand he gently turned back the fleece of a pinioned goat. The hair grew from the skin with a slight wave to it, it had the sheen of mother-of-pearl. “They’re taking it raw at the mill in Rhode Island, sticks and goat shit excuse me and lice and all. A few bags at a time.”

“Why do they take it raw?”

“Because they want to handle it themselves.” He stood back and two men chivvied the doe toward the shearing shed. “You need perfectly pure water, a neutral pH, to wash it and workers with great patience to comb the staple out or you end up with something that looks like mattress stuffing and will never be untangled in our lifetime. The water in Rhode Island comes from granite wells. Our water is alkaline, with this limestone. It’s very delicate fiber.”

He walked at the edge of the frantic activity, for he was the buyer and the manager of the shearing and he would not get in the men’s way once they had begun. Two of the Mexican shear crew did not get a gate shut quickly enough and goats began to pour through it, suddenly becoming liquid, a dusty current of suds foaming out.

Jeanine laid down the sheeted package of dress and ran forward. She grasped one of the goats by the horns and a man yelled at her, No por las cuernas! The goat twisted its head around so that it seemed it had a rubber neck. She was in the middle of four men all laying hands on the goats, gripping them by the shaggy hair.

“Let go,” said Ross. He had a full-grown doe in his arms and waded through the noise and the dust. “You’ll bust those horns.”

She let go of the horns and seized the doe up in her arms and carried her toward the shearing shed. The animal was baggy and loose in all its bones. They were bred for hair and for nothing else, not brains or hardiness or bone or color or flesh. The goat dropped pellets all down her jeans. A man took the doe from her and the gate was shut. Ross wiped his shirtsleeve across his face and streaked it with sweat and dust. She turned at the sound of shouts, men harried more goats into the hands of Mrs. Armstrong and now Martha Jane, who jabbed each Angora with a syringe of sore-mouth vaccination.