Paulette Jiles - Stormy Weather

Jeanine wiped her face on her sleeve. “It’s hard to believe Mr. Armstrong took up goats without somebody putting a pistol to his head,” said Jeanine.

“It’s ranching life, honey.”

“You should see their bedroom, Ross. It’s not a bedroom. It’s full of goat medicine and clippers and dirty Levi’s. What kind of a married life is this?”

Ross turned and rested both elbows on the rails of the pen. “Good question,” he said. He lifted his head to the view away from the headquarters; a rising slope of mountain, complicated by limestone bluffs and fallen square boulders. The grass had shrunk into disparate clumps and was as crisp as paper. Prickly pear climbed up the slope with lifted round bats. He turned to watch the shearing crew fleecing off great sheaves of silky mohair in the suspended dust of the shearing shed. The gasoline engine thudded heavily. It was running on kerosene, which was cheaper than gas, but its smell was oily and hot. The shearer finished with a doe and dropped a red mountain laurel bean into a can as a counter.

“I’d never live like this,” Jeanine said. She drooped on the fence and held to an upright.

He nodded. “Mrs. Armstrong probably said the same thing.”

She shoved the heels of her hands against her eyes to wipe away the running salty sweat. He took off his hat and ran his finger around the sweat band. The generator choked and failed. There were shouts and recriminations over who had not brought more kerosene, and then a man came lugging a jerrican. Ross fished in his shirt pocket for a cigarette. The generator sparked and snorted and started again.

For some reason she couldn’t figure out herself she took his lighter from his hand and lit his cigarette for him and he drew on it. She dropped the old Zippo into his palm. He was silent for a few moments; smoke drifted around his fist.

“Jeanine, you’re just always messing with me.”

“I know it.”

Over the shouts and baaing and noise of the generator, a loud and splintering crunch. One of Ross’s drivers had backed a haulage truck into the feed shed and smashed the rain gutter into a V.The truck sat in the driveway fully loaded and ready to go to the warehouse in Comanche and the kid had smashed up the rain gutter and part of the stock racks.

“Well kiss my ass,” he said. He threw down the cigarette and stepped on it.

Jeanine watched with interest. He would lose his temper and do something spectacular. He would commit some violence upon the sweating teenage driver. He left her and vaulted over a low fence made of railroad ties, and jerked open the truck door and said, Get out. She waited to see if he would lay his enormous hand on the boy’s collar and snatch him out into the dirt. The boy beat him to it. He turned and jumped to the ground.

“Sorry, Mr. Everett!”

“Shut up.”

Ross climbed in and began the long process of shifting, moving an inch forward so as not to take the rain gutter with the truck, turning, backing. He spun the wheel and she saw his lips moving, he was swearing.

“Mr. Everett, I didn’t see-”

“Shut the hell up.” He got the truck clear and got out again, slammed the door, went to look at the gutter. “Don’t talk to me when I’m busy.”

“Yes, sir.”

“You’ll fix that when you get back from the warehouse,” he said. “First you’re dropping Jeanine off at her house.”

“Yes sir, Mr. Everett.”

“You’re lucky I didn’t kill you.”

“I know it.”

After she said good-bye to the Armstrongs he handed her into the cab of the truck. She held the silk dress safely wrapped in the sheet. She had the fifty dollars in her jeans pocket.

“What if it had been me that smashed up that gutter?” she said.

The young driver turned quickly and walked over to the feed shed and pretended a deep interest in the twisted convolutions of the tin gutter. Ross cleared his throat and hitched up his pants. He stared at the goat pens with a blank face for several seconds.

“I understand what you’re saying.” He reached up to the windshield wiper and pressed back a loose edge. “Would you like some kind of promise that I would never lose my temper with you?”

Although no particular words came to Jeanine’s mind she knew that she stood at the very thin edge of a commitment, of binding promises exchanged. Which might lead to hot, stiff wedding dresses that shut around your waist like a clamp, a bedroom full of blackleg medicines in boxes and piled horse blankets, and if they were both worn out, to arguments and broken vows. And leaving the Tolliver farm where she had worked so hard, and had made the place her own with nobody to account to. How could she just trust in words? Words words words.

“No, Ross, don’t make any promises.” But still she reached out to him and laid her hand on his neck, beneath the collar. She didn’t care if the Armstrongs saw her. She loved the touch of him. Still she wavered and drew her hand away and laid it on the sheeted packet of silk. “You just carry on all you want.”

He smiled, and slapped his hand on the door and stood back. “See you in a week.”

She held the packet carefully all the way home. The dress now only needed the skirt lining and twenty-five buttons up the back. And Tim Joplin, who was three hundred miles away.

She made up her bed neatly with the chenille bedspread, and the satin pillow with the sprayed-on legend, EL PASO LAND OF SUNSHINE. The cool air of the early morning rolled in through the tall windows and katydids sang in the oaks outside with their long, crawling noise. She dressed in an ironed blouse and clean Levi’s, brushed her hair and clipped on the earrings, looked in the mirror and was pleased with herself. The cotton had opened into its four leaves each and Abel was drawing the cultivator through the rows. Jeanine herself was turning and leaving out in some kind of interior rain, washed and wet and bright, despite the drought. Despite anything and everything an image of herself reaching out toward Ross came into her mind again and again, and she understood, all by herself, without reading it in a novel or hearing it on a radio program, that falling passionately in love with someone, without reservation or holding back, was good for the heart. For its valves and its arteries and that invisible shadow of the heart called the soul. Falling in love was good for the soul. However. And Jeanine felt herself stuck in the However.

A letter, or rather a sort of announcement, came from Winifred Beasley that stated it had come to her notice that Mrs. Stoddard was investing in an oil well, and if that were the case they certainly were not justified in taking relief supplies and in fact there could be an examination of the possibility that Mrs. Stoddard was involved in welfare fraud. If Mrs. Stoddard wished to continue to receive relief supplies for her daughter, to wit Bea Stoddard, would she please present herself to the county relief committee. Many other families were in need and it was unconscionable of her to take supplies that others were so in need of yours truly Winifred Beasley County Health Nurse, R.N.

“Oh this makes me feel terrible!” Elizabeth slapped the letter down. “I feel like a thief!”

“We’re well rid of her,” said Jeanine. “Let it go, Mother.” She was cutting up sweet potatoes with an eye in each piece in order to try for a fall garden. She was not going to quit on the garden. They might get rain.

“If my parents ever knew we were even on relief, much less accused of fraud…” Elizabeth pressed her lips together in a thin line. She smashed up the letter into a wadded missile that she shot into the cookstove. Mayme and Jeanine had never seen her so upset. She was furious.

“Let it go, Mother,” said Mayme.