Paulette Jiles - Stormy Weather

She walked into her upstairs room and stood before the window to see the slow, light rain. It ran off the eaves in spangles. Everything was dripping, soaked. Wood filled out and doors tightened, the mortar of the well curb thickened and swelled and held. All the peach trees dripped black gum from the water the roots took up. The sky over the Brazos valley had not lifted for weeks. Drawn edges of cloud or mist were carried along the rims of the steep-sided valleys running into the Brazos and then caught and were pulled out like a sheer material.

But then, Jeanine thought, she had not told her mother and sisters of her promise to Ross, either. Six months ago when they were up on the roof she had laughed and told Mayme, He’d better not be hunting for me . That was embarrassing. Better to let Mayme tell everyone she and Vernon had got engaged, first. And Jeanine was still wavering. Her ties to this place where she had worked so hard might become frayed and insubstantial. Sometimes during the day she thought of taking the promise back again, as if she had only lent it, and abandoning the entire dubious enterprise of loving and falling in love, its inevitable betrayals; she wondered if maybe it would not be better to stay here forever, smooth and cool and ceramic, like the doll’s head.

She dried herself in the wet air and pulled on her old striped dress. She should turn on the radio for the soap operas, she should go in town to a movie. She needed to see some bold, brave young woman defy odds and take a long journey and fall passionately in love. She wanted to see somebody run a plantation single-handed and shoot a Yankee and make dresses out of Mama’s portieres. She wanted to sit and eat popcorn and watch somebody with a small dog and impossible companions flee through a magic kingdom. To watch a girl ride National Velvet over the jumps. A story would unfold in which something terrible was at stake, where life and death mattered, where people committed themselves to some course of action without hesitation. Jeanine stood at the window in the parlor, which gave out onto the slope, where the cotton bloomed in tangled fibers out of its hard bolls, impelled by a relentless force. She watched Abel Crowser unhitch the cultivator and ride in on Jo-Jo and Sheba with their harnesses and collars still on them, to let them stand in the fairway of the barn, where they stood wet-footed, listening with revolving ears to the rain.

IN SEPTEMBER THE dread cabal in Washington had reduced the allowables on Central Texas wells and increased those in West Texas. Her mother couldn’t figure it out. Theirs was much higher-grade oil than the junk out in the Permian, that stuff out there was saturated with sulfur. Mr. Lacey consoled her. It will change, he said. The West Texans have got more influence in the legislature than we have. And besides the pressure is still holding, it’s twelve hundred pounds of pressure at the wellhead and they aren’t going to need to pump it, it’s coming up on its own. Elizabeth sent Mr. Lacey home with casseroles because he was divorced and ate nothing but Spam sandwiches and she had at last been convinced to call him George.

“Vernon’s got leave! Vernon’s got leave! September fifteenth! Five days!” Mayme skipped around the kitchen and hugged Jeanine and held a geranium flower by her ear. She danced across the room in a sort of tango. “Rum and Coca-Colaaaa!” A slow rain poured down the windowpanes, and dripped from the tips of the sotol and agarita. Water ran off the edges of the roof in a glittering curtain and the grass was green again.

They would go into Tarrant and stay all night at the Kincaid Hotel and then the next day catch the train to Galveston to meet Vernon. Ross could not go to Galveston because the windmill crew was coming again, they had to pull sucker rods from the water wells in the Upshaw pasture and he had to be there.

But Jeanine and Bea and Mayme were very happy about the hotel, as they had never stayed in one, and could hardly imagine the maids making up a room for them, and cleaning up after them when they left. They would have the whole day in Tarrant, and her mother would talk with Bea’s teachers, and she would see the new high school, and she would choose for herself a new pair of beach shoes at the shoe store. Betty would probably urge two pairs on her. After all, Magnolia was making an offer to buy them out. And that Mr. Lacey would be joining them down in Galveston, in a white sharkskin suit, probably with a carnation in his buttonhole and he would take all of them out to dinner. It would be a dinner with daunting and peculiar food such as lobsters and shrimps. Mayme was in a state of anxiety about how to approach these things and what sorts of instruments she would have to use, and Elizabeth said that Mr. Lacey-George-would have a long, serious discussion with Bea about going on to high school. Her mother was happier than Jeanine had ever seen her. Bea ran about the house singing I used to love you ’til you ate my dog… It was the Crazy Water Gang’s parody of lonesome heartbroke country and western music. I ain’t no cowboy, she sang. I just found this hat…

Bea had lately been reading e. e. cummings, and had taken up an attitude of cynicism and hauteur, but that evaporated when she was mailed a check for five dollars from Savage Western Tales for her vivid story of Kitty Kelsay being stabbed repeatedly by a renegade white man during the Comanche attack in Uvalde County and the famous twenty-mile running fight led by the hero horse, Fuzzy Buck. Five dollars had utterly destroyed her desire to go to Paris and write free verse and live on the Rue Chat Noir. If there was such a rue.

Ten girls had come to her freshman party. Some of them were driven out from town in the endless rain. Two were from her eighth-grade class at the Old Valley Road schoolhouse. They snarled into excited knots and spoke in gasps and showed one another the brand names on their saddle shoes. They argued about hillbilly music and Tommy Dorsey. One of the girls said her sister was a junior and all the juniors and seniors loved Tommy Dorsey and so that ended the discussion. They asked about Bea’s fall down the well, and her operation, and she showed them the red scars on her leg and said she was going to write about it someday. The kitchen smelled of Evening in Paris cologne and Blue Grass talcum and a fine, soft dampness.

Bea’s hair was cut short and curled, she wore a dirndl skirt and peasant blouse and saddle shoes. There were three more skirts and two dresses in her closet. Her family owned an oil well. They had part interest in a racehorse. They lived in a white-painted two-story house with running water and electricity and a telephone and it was raining everywhere, all over the world.

“I’m going to be an author,” she said. “I’m published already.” She showed them the check for five dollars with her name on it, and the date and the amount and signature by an authorizing person.

One of the girls from town said, “ Savage Western Tales ? Oh they read that down at the garage. Newton’s garage.” The girl stared at Bea for a long moment. “Well I guess that’s nice.”

The party lasted until nearly ten and when Bea lay down to sleep in her own bed, in her own newly painted room, she was suddenly frightened that she had said too much or done too much. Then she was not sleepy at all. She was assaulted with a very clear vision of the town girls in high school coming up to her and repeating Kitty Kelsay’s desperate scream, Oh my God, Mother, they are killing me! and laughing and laughing. She felt panicked. They would all read it at some garage in Mineral Wells. It was a stupid story, stupid, and it had her name on it, and it would go all over the country. Bea got out of bed and lifted up the sleeping Prince Albert and carried him into the kitchen and began to pace back and forth.