Paulette Jiles - Stormy Weather

Mayme said, “Vernon!”

“Well, almost a sister-in-law.” Vernon shifted his garrison cap around in his hand. He was sitting on a toolbox chest. To the men he said, “I was going to ask her to marry me and if she married me, then her sister would be my sister-in-law.” He pulled at the knot of his mohair tie. “Both of them.”

Mayme said, “I’m glad to hear about this.”

This turned the conversation toward marriage in general. They waited out the dust storm that was hammering against the steel sides of the drive shed by giving their opinions on marriage during a time of Depression and drought and dust storms. And a very short man said that no matter what happened in the world people got married. It didn’t have anything to do with what the weather was like or if you had any money or not, people just went and got married. Another man said that a war was coming and here this boy was in the service, that was something you had to keep in mind. He could get sent to some aerodrome in a foreign country. But the short man said it didn’t matter about wars, either. It was the damnedest thing. He didn’t know what would matter, anywise.

BEA AND ELIZABETH sat in Jeanine’s room upstairs. The windows were more tightly fitted up here because they were not used as much, but everything-doors and windows and floorboards and chair rungs-had all shrunk over the years of the drought. The window-lights were tall blanks of windy dust. Sometimes when the wind dropped they could see the well below and the barn, the whipping cotton plants, the places where everything had happened going back forty years in Elizabeth’s memory, as if revealing to them one scene after another. The roaring windmill whose blades sliced the wind and threatened to come off the derrick, the water that streamed from the pipe flashing out into wild sprays. How she had climbed that derrick on a dare, and the well her daughter had fallen into, the enormous live oak at the end of the driveway where she had sat with Jack Stoddard eating jelly beans and kissing passionately and planning their wedding. In one sweep the entire field of Abel Crowser’s cotton came clear, the cotton blossoms now gone and the bolls now forming in squares like green turbans, and disappeared again. The wind carried in another curtain of dust and then it fell again until it died out in the late evening.

Bea said, “Do you think they’re all right?”

“Yes,” said her mother. “Mayme and Vernon are in Eastland. And Jeanine is with Ross. She’ll be all right with Ross.” She turned from the window and sat down on Jeanine’s bed. “I think it’s going to start raining now.”

“How do you know?” Bea sat with Albert on her lap. Biggety lay asleep on the bed in a tight curl with his ears twitching.

“I don’t know how I know. I just do.”

Bea thought about it. Her mother had some way of knowing things that Bea didn’t understand but that she believed in. Her mother had known the well would come in all along. And so she must in some mysterious way know that the drought had come to an end.

“You mean a lot of rain?” said Bea. “Or a little?”

“A lot,” said Elizabeth. She stood up. “Let’s go make supper.”

Bea followed her down the stairs and into the gritty kitchen. She still found it miraculous to pull a chain and the clear glass lightbulb illuminated the entire kitchen with glare. She could read the labels on the cans of hominy and tomatoes. “You mean the drought is over?”

“Yes. I don’t know why, I just know. It’s over.”

THAT WAS THE last large dust storm to strike the southern plains. After that it began to rain and the nations of Europe moved toward war and were so heavily weighted with armor that the structures of peace collapsed and would soon take all the other nations with them. Many of the older people remembered the Great War and they said that the artillery expended in millions of tons of shells had caused the incessant rains of that time on the fields of France and that now this was what was happening again. The artillery of Chancellor Hitler and his armies, of the Japanese Imperial Army bombing Shanghai, shook the upper levels of the air and so this brought weather in long streaming columns of rain, the slow kind of rain that fell in very small droplets and soaked in.

Roosevelt came to Amarillo in his only visit to the southern plains, the barren country where all the disasters and dust storms had taken place, where all the news photos had been taken showing mountainous walls of dust falling upon towns, people struggling through wind and dunes. Roosevelt arrived in Amarillo, a town up in the Panhandle, on the presidential train in July of 1938, and it began to rain when the train pulled into the station. Some people said it was a sign from God, that God had forgiven him for trying to pack the Supreme Court and for hiring Harold Ickes. That in fact God had forgiven everybody in a kind of general amnesty and the seven lean years were over.

The rain swept down on President Roosevelt in sheets and he managed despite everything to stand up on his rigid braces and address the great crowd so that people would not see that he was a cripple in a wheelchair and be discouraged or think that a broken man was leading them forward out of the wilderness. He spoke to them with a good wide smile while rain ran down his face, and since nobody could find the umbrellas they had stored away years ago, they stood out in the rain too, and cheered and applauded wildly with wet, spattering hands.

JEANINE PUSHED KINDLING into the hot-water heater and lit it. The Millers had put in a gravity-feed tank that filled the commode and the bathtub, and a primitive hot-water heater. Now all the bathroom needed was paint, maybe a pale blue, and little soaps and talcum powder. She heard the newspaper truck backfiring as it struggled down the gravel road, through a faint drizzle, and when the boys threw the folded newspaper at each mailbox it sounded as if they were hurling shot puts. Jeanine ran out and got the paper, and laid it beside the bathtub, ran the tub full and stripped off her clothes. The muddy jeans could nearly stand by themselves. She sank her body into the water. She was going to read the newspaper in the bathtub and spend as much time as she liked soaking herself.

How had they lived without this? How many times had they hung sheets to sit beside the stove, doubled up naked in a number three washtub, and then thrown it out in buckets. Jeanine hooked her heels over the edge of the tub, and shook out the Tarrant newspaper; she ignored the front-page stories. They were always boring. For instance, the Seiberling Latex plant near Akron, Ohio, was three weeks behind in orders making rubber statuettes of Dopey and Doc and Sleepy and the rest of the Seven Dwarves. She went on to the local news with wet hands, and then saw Milton’s picture in the society column, just above the obituaries. Milton Brown and Lou-Ann Callaway, former schoolteacher, had become engaged. They were smiling, she mooning up at him with a calflike adoring expression, and he gazing manfully at the camera. Milton’s cowlick stood out like a pinwheel. After their marriage they planned to live in Chicago where Mr. Brown of this city would take lessons in elocution and prepare for a career in radio broadcasting.

“What!!” She stood up and gushed water all over the bathroom floor. She climbed out of the tub and held the paper in front of her at arm’s length and stormed into the kitchen with soapy water pouring from her, the newspaper in one hand and a towel in the other. “He could have told me!” She threw the paper into the kindling box and began to dry herself. “He could have said something.” She wrapped herself in the towel, and the cat gazed down on her from on top of the Hamilton safe. “I was going to tell him.” She stalked back and forth on the narrow floorboards and into the hall and back again. This was deception, this was unfair, and it didn’t matter that she had said she would marry Ross, it was still unfair. She was doomed to be deceived. “Oh, who cares?” she asked Albert. “I don’t care. J-j-j-ust ask me if I care.”