Paulette Jiles - Stormy Weather

Bea spread out her schoolwork on the location and products and peoples of New Guinea to read it aloud to their mother, who quickly put away her rage over Winifred Beasley so that Bea would not ask what was the matter, and said My gracious. Elizabeth looked at the National Geographic illustrations Bea had pasted in, grimy dark photos of the people of New Guinea. She said, Why do people do those things to themselves?

Mayme read through the brochures of Galveston. It was where all the officers went to take their leave. If Vernon got leave they would meet there. Elizabeth had to come too so that it would all be aboveboard and Vernon’s parents wouldn’t think she was a redheaded stepchild. Jeanine laid out Vogue patterns on the table and then pinned the tissues to her sister’s shoulders.

Jeanine sat up late that night and listened to Kaltenborn. He said that Chancellor Adolph Hitler was meeting with Chamberlain and there was going to be peace in our time. Then WBAP started to fade, a star fading at the horizon of radio time, and the voices and music from WLS Chicago, a place unimaginable to Jeanine, arrived transparent in the thin night air of the Brazos Valley. Then the WLS signal diminished and slipped away as if it had something to do elsewhere, some other people to entrance, and the music abandoned her to the night and the dry wind.

Jeanine carried the kitchen table out to the veranda by herself and one leg jammed up on the doorframe and knocked her backward but she caught her balance and trundled on with it like a doodlebug.

She threw their one linen tablecloth over it and straightened the edges. It was her August birthday. Her peaches birthday. She was twenty-one years old and now she could vote for President Roosevelt herself. Mayme had saved up sugar for two weeks and made a white cake with frosting. They sat on the front porch with the new peaches sliced up on plates in front of them and a basketful sitting beside the table. Bea bit down on a slice and bit again. Jeanine spooned out another helping.

“Aren’t they good? This is what we came for.” She poured more of their precious sugar onto her peach slices. “Jeez, they’re like shoe leather.” She swallowed. “Use more sugar, y’all.”

Mayme said, “Maybe next year they’ll be better.”

They chewed industriously at the hard slices. The peaches had dark spots, and near the pit the flesh was pale green. They ate them anyway. They sat out on the front veranda in the shade, waiting for the evening wind to come up out of the earth’s shadow. Curtains streamed out of the open windows. The posts on the veranda were painted white, the passionflower vine was in bloom. It was very hot. Biggety came trotting up from the cedar brake. He had just eaten the lunch of one of the cedar choppers, a thick braunschweiger sandwich, and rolled in a dead armadillo. Life was good.

“Where are you going to be next year, Mayme?” asked Jeanine. “On my next birthday?”

Her sister laid her spoon on the plate.

“I don’t know,” she said. She said it in an apologetic voice and pushed her red hair out of her eyes. There was a long silence and Jeanine held the hot basket of fruit in her hands like a load of failed hopes.

BEA RAN INTO the driveway, with the purchases from Strawn’s store. She carried the flour and pork chops in the school satchel on her back and it slammed against her shoulder blades as she ran at top speed, on the tips of her toes. She was being pursued by Comanches. They appeared like wraiths out of the Texas earth, from the green matrix of the cotton field. She was Katie McLauren, Cynthia Parker, the Kelsay girl, and in the final yards to the door of the house she called out My God, Mother, they are killing me! She was full of arrows.

“Bea, there’s a letter or something for you,” said her mother. It was from True Western Stories. Bea unloaded her groceries and sat down to read the letter. Her left leg was marked with deep red scars but she no longer needed the crutches. The letter said although hers was a commendable effort she needed more polish and whoever wrote the letter said in a cheerful tone that it was a sure bet that Miss Stoddard would attain that polish in the years ahead. Bea threw it away and ran to find her Big Chief. The world was full of ignorant people and one of them had just written to her. She went out to the back porch to sit on her busted old chair, found her book on the shelf under the washing buckets, and opened it to her place.

Jeanine backed into the kitchen unrolling loops of fabric-covered wire.

“Just leave it there,” said Mr. Miller. Upstairs another man thumped in the halls and through the rooms. In the kitchen Mr. Miller and his brother Deemie, who was generally useless but was occasionally browbeaten by his brother into some form of short-term work, shouted out instructions to each other as they threaded electrical wires up through the ceiling. They would be paid, when they had finished, with the wedding dress money. Jeanine turned her head up to the ceiling as the thick wire rose into the hole like a snake. Bea ignored it all for the seductive pleasures of The Yearling. She sat on the back steps bent over the book, imprinting sweaty fingerprints on the margins as she held it in a rigid grip because she could see it coming, she knew they were going to shoot that little deer. If the house caught fire she would not have been able to put it down.

“What are you reading, Bea?” said Jeanine.

“The Yearling. Miss Callaway,” said Bea. “She gave it to me to read.” Bea turned a page. “Oh no,” she groaned.

Jeanine said, “I thought Miss Callaway went back to Pennsylvania for the summer.”

Bea stood up and kept her finger in her place. “No, she’s staying in town, Milton Brown carried her stuff into Tarrant, suitcases.” Bea found herself speaking disjointedly in her desire to go hide somewhere and finish the story. “She just adores Milton. I hate love stories. Oh what does it matter? They’re going to shoot him anyway.” She stalked off to the barn with Prince Albert trailing after her, his tail held up in a slight curve like a question mark. In the hot amber air of the barn she would be able to sob in peace.

ELIZABETH AND VIOLET and Lillian sat on the fenders of somebody’s car. They didn’t speak about what might happen because it would be bad luck. People who could get away from work came with their children and wives and lunches of thick homemade bread and bologna. Local ranchers came, and also the young people who had never seen a well come in but had heard the stories. Several well-dressed men from the other oil company offices in Fort Worth drove up. They were scouts and lease hounds and seismograph men, and they had heard through the invisible oil field telegraph that Crowninshield had hit sand.

Oilfield Willy came to call out the demonic names of the geological strata, to preach on the text of the seismograph charts and he walked back and forth as he preached. His ancient suit of shiny gabardine hung on him like a theatrical draping and once in a while someone would hand him a dime or a quarter, and he nodded and kept on. The Lord only knows where it all lies in His deep dominions, he shouted. And what shall be done with it and where it shall go. This is the blood of the earth in its veins and its arteries and he created it and so it belongs to the earth’s heart and not to mankind.

Captain Crowninshield strode about the drilling platform. It was a shaky structure that had been nailed together out of mesquite poles and mill sidings. The long, twisted cable lifted and fell, lifted and fell. His hand rode up and down with it as if he were playing an immense stringed instrument. It rose and fell out of the borehole and the thumping of the great drill string went on long into the blue evening when the whitewing doves came to water, and it went on when the sky turned madonna blue and the first stars came out, late summer stars, clear and icy.