Stormy Weather (22 page)

T
he gang of cedar choppers came rattling down the road in a wagon. They hewed down acre after acre of cedar. They brought down the great mature cedars of the brake in perfumed chips and laid them in rows. Two mules towed the old wagon through the brush and out the barn gate. They swore in a conversational way, as if their sentences would be incomplete if they did not salt them with rich and graphic images. After one visit Jeanine stayed away.
That goddamned Ross Everett can kiss my ass,
they said.
I should have burnt down his ass-hole house, cheap son of a bitch.

Milton stalked behind her as she unrolled the chicken wire.

“But I want you to say s-s-something like ‘Everybody gets drunk at bub-benefit dances!’ I want you to understand me. Look deep into my soul, ragged as it is, a mere unraveled thing.”

The wire caught on everything. Jeanine jerked at it. She was dressed in the same dress she had worn when the sheriff had come to
them in Wharton and had told them that their father had been arrested. She should burn it, tear it up for rags, its loud tiger stripes were faded and apologetic. Mayme called it her Barnum & Bailey dress.

“Just help me, why don’t you?” she said. “All right, all right, here I am looking deep into your soul. Everybody gets drunk at benefit dances.” She wiped her face with the hem of her skirt. The flat sunlight stoked up the barn like a furnace even though it was only mid-March.

“Oh, Jeanine, you have released me from a hell of self-condemn-n-nation,” he said. “The nights I have sat awake listening to the St. St-St-Stephen’s Episcopaaaaal Church ringing the hours of one, two in the morning and reliving the dreadful scene as much as I could remember of it.” He reached out for the edge of the chicken wire and helped her pull it over the stall. He stuck himself with one of the ends and put his bleeding finger in his mouth and then took out a handkerchief and wrapped it around his finger. “I waited a whole month before d-daring to creep in here, wringing my hands. Ap-pologizing.” Biggity the rat terrier sped past them with a large, thrashing rat in his mouth. Since they would not allow him to kill the cat he took it out on the rodent population. He would bring Mayme the rat’s head because Mayme loved him.

“I hope you stayed awake until your eyes dried out,” said Jeanine. “You didn’t even ask me to the dance. It wasn’t even a date, and I was supposed to put up with you drunk?”

“I know it, I know, I know myself,” Milton said. He handed her nails. She slammed them in over the wire. “I know myself and every smoky b-b-backroom corner of my gelatinous mind. Who could c-c-care for me, Jeanine?” He caught his coat sleeve on the ends of the wire and tore loose more threads. “Every time I fall for a girl, I think, ‘I would never go out on a d-d-d-date with somebody like me.’ Take a girl with really really thick glasses, for instance, and a speech impediment, and twenty dollars a week at the local rag. I wouldn’t go out with her.”

Jeanine laughed and bent her head down on the chicken wire. “Stop, stop, stop,” she said.

“Here,” he said. “I am risking my mental health t-to offer this.” He reached in his jacket pocket and held up a small box covered with red satin. “The only thing a g-g-gentleman offers a lady is candy and flowers, and it was this or a set of new underwear. Do you need some underwear?”

Jeanine stared at the box and finally understood it was some sort of candy or chocolates.

“You’re breaking my heart,” she said.

“Kiss me,” he said, and closed his eyes. He tapped his lips with an inky forefinger. “Right here.”

Jeanine paused for a moment and saw his closed eyes behind the thick glasses, saw every eyelash and the darting movements of his eyes behind the lids. She leaned forward and kissed him. The wind was starting up again and old straw drifted down from overhead and landed on them.

“Again,” he said. His eyes were still closed. Jeanine reached out and took the box from him. She held the hammer in the other hand. She kissed him again, because he needed kissing. Maybe it would, like sticky tape, lift some of the stutter from his lips, and then they would say honest and heartfelt things to each other and his incessant light irony would crackle and drift off like onionskin.

He opened his eyes and smiled at her and put both his arms around her neck and pressed his forehead against hers. “No underwear?”

“Hush,” she said. She heard Bea calling from the back porch. She was calling Albert. She wanted to make sure the dog had not killed him. The wind increased and started tearing at the sheet iron of the barn roof. One of these days it was going to tear it off and send it flying across the pasture. Jeanine let out a long sigh and dropped the hammer. “No underwear.”

They walked back to the house against the hot wind, their arms around each other. The Spanish oak leaves were uncurling in tiny green fists and pushing off the tassels. He bent down his head against the wind and laid his hand flat on top of his hat to hold it on. He held the back door for her and dust followed them. Milton made himself at home in a kitchen chair, stretched out his legs. Biggety lay in the middle of the kitchen floor with half a rat body.

“Oh get it out of here!” said Jeanine. She found a paper sack and threw it in by the tail. She wadded up the sack and went outside and dropped it into the burn barrel. Biggety went after it. She came back in. “I’m making coffee,” she said. “Where are you going today?”

He put his chin on both hands and watched her fill the coffeepot and set it on the stove. She opened the box and looked at the chocolates, chose one. He chose another. They tapped them together as if they were champagne glasses and tossed them down. Then she found her sewing box and took his coat and turned it inside out and began to separate the lining from the sleeves. “This one is as bad as the overcoat.” She smiled at him and held up the needle. “Miss Fixer-upper.”

“Where to today? To the sulfur springs at Arlington. People drink the stuff for their health. Vile. I am inured to all the d-d-depravities of human nature. Why do they not do stories of the families living under the Trinity bridge in Dallas? People in tents, little children sleeping in the dirt. Living on stuff from garbage cans.” He slumped back in his chair, watching Jeanine fix his coat. It made him feel quiet and unstuttering. The chair creaked. The dry air had shrunk up the glue and it was about to fall apart. “I drift around the country looking at drought and the soil is like concrete, abandoned farms taken over by cedar, and all they want to hear about is all these people trying to attract t-t-tourism with concrete dinosaurs and rotten-egg water.”

“I would pay a dime to see dinosaur tracks,” said Jeanine. She turned back the cuffs an inch and snipped off the ragged threads and began to stitch them back to the lining.

“Then, my dear, you would love the town of Fairy.” He bent forward to watch her sew his sleeves up again as if she were neatly repairing his very self. “Named for some railroad owner’s daughter. What’s interesting about it is the cemetery. The Fairy Cemetery. I told them to put up some tombstones for Snow White and her dwarf entourage but d-d-do they listen to me? No. Then there are the weddings of all the rich oil people. Murchisons, Hunts.”

“What about ordinary people?” she said. “The ones who haven’t hit oil.”

“Ordinary people getting married?” He laughed heavily. Ha. Ha. Ha. “They have to pay to get their notices in the paper. Irish potatoes, chickens, eggs, and sometimes b-b-banknotes.” He lifted one clasped hand to his eye and peered through it. “Fifty cents to the photographer. We get to go to the big weddings sometimes.”

“Because you get free party favors. Free chocolates.” She threw his coat at him and he caught it up.

“N-no! Oh cold and r-r-rejecting one! Rife with suspicion!” He stood up and put on the coat and shot out his wrists, admiring the sleeves.

“You did! You didn’t buy them, you got them at some Dallas society wedding.”

“You don’t trust men, Jeanine. C-c-common psychological problem. Your father b-b-betrayed you, all men are suspect.”

She got up and crossed her arms. “What is this about my dad?” she said.

He was blank for a moment. “I’m trying to think what I just said. Mouth running but brain not engaged.” He put his finger to his lips. “Ah, your dad was arrested and unfortunately died in, in, ah jail.” He walked over to her and took her hand. She pulled it away. “They never said what for. Wasn’t reported in
my
paper.” He stared at the floor. Then at her. “I always wondered what for.”

Jeanine didn’t know what to think or what to say. The chocolates
suddenly had a dismal and dusty look to them scattered in their brown paper cups. She listened to Bea’s light humming in the parlor across the hall. The wind made the back screen door open and shut, open and shut, bang bang bang.

“For gambling,” she said, finally, and stabbed the needle into her pincushion.

“There!” He snapped his fingers. “They didn’t even give him any medical care, I would bet. Scandalous, the way p-p-people are treated by Texas justice is scandalous. No good making a complaint, either, not with James Allred running things.” She watched as he struggled with himself to say something serious, to utter some genuine and sincere sympathy, some condolence. He made little waving motions as he fought without much conviction against the incessant stream of irony, and silliness, and derision. It was an affliction. He loved it. “Terrible loss,” he said. “Sad. Bitter.”

“I’m not sad and bitter, Milton,” she said. She marched back and forth across the kitchen twice and took an enormous breath of air, slapped both hands on the table and smiled. “See?”

“No, stupid thing to say. Always saying something stupid.” He took her hand again. “I am on the outside of everything, Jenny, and I like it. I am not g-g-good for much else. I am the perfect newspaperman. I would love to be K-K-Kaltenborn, I would love to intone in a deep clear voice that the Reichstag has burnt down or the Hindenburg exploded—Oh the humanity!—that was Herb Morrison. It was spontaneous. He said it on the spot. That will go down through the ages.”

“Milton, you know, maybe you’d better give up on radio.” She smiled at him once more.

“I work the buttons, though. I give airtime to hog callers. But no airtime for me.” He pushed a chair toward her and she sat down again. “How’s that for stimulating the economy? He may sound like a soul tortured in hell but he’s only c-calling hogs and making six bits for doing it on air.”

“Can’t you do anything about your stutter?” Jeanine didn’t know what caused stuttering but she could ask, couldn’t she?

“Yes.” He took another chocolate. “A school in Chicago. Excellent. Costs a lot of money. Saving every penny.” He ate the pecan creme and swallowed. His pale unweathered skin glowed in the dusty evening light and Jeanine heard her mother and Mayme drive up outside. His pinwheel cowlick made it seem as if his face were topped by a kind of toy. “And by God I will go there. And I am going to make it in radio. W-w-wait and see.” He stood up and put on his hat and walked to the door, waved at her mother and sister, turned back and took her by the shoulders and kissed her. “What if I asked you to go to the movies with me?”

“Try me,” she said. “See what happens.”

“What if I inquired about your interest in Fred Astaire and um, let’s see, we could bring our own popcorn?”

“Ask and ye shall receive.”

“What if I p-pressed myself upon you with insistence?”

“I would melt in your arms, Milton.”

In the little parlor Bea lay in a haze of liquid morphine; the pain that radiated from the pin in her broken leg was moderating and she dreamed of going to school again. Where the pretty teacher Miss Callaway would ask her about her day. Would lay out new books for her to read.

A
t breakfast they looked out at the ridges to the north; the flats below drifted with an early haze like thin smoke. Mingus bluffs rose behind them topped out with oak and cedar and the smoke of the breakfast fire climbed straight into the sky. Everything they said came back to them in a hollow repetition. “Hey!” shouted the boy. The bluffs said hey.

“Hush,” said Everett. He blew smoke away from himself and listened. Then he spit on the end of his cigarette and dropped it.

“Any of them you want particular, Ross?” said Homer.

Ross said, “Yes. She’s a red mare. All red. I want her. She must have got loose from somewhere.”

“Could have,” said Nolan. “Up at Lubbock the dust is drifted so high the stock is walking right over the fences.”

“Try not to hit her,” said Ross.

“All right.”

“I hear them,” Ross said. “Let’s get along.”

The pasture was two thousand acres. It had been recently fenced off with four strands of good wire, cedar posts nine strides apart. The band of feral horses had been there for two years and he had tolerated them but there had been no rain and they had increased more than the grass could bear and the hooves of horses were bad for the soil, tamping and compacting it. They had been joined by loose stock that wandered in from other places. Some of them had the weight and the appearance of Percherons or army remount Thoroughbreds. The April landscape was deceptively green along the slopes because of the cedar and live oak but in the valleys the grass stood in stiff clumps spaced farther and farther apart with every month, with hard dirt in between. The live oaks along the creek banks had lost limbs from drought. They shattered when they struck the ground. The same with the pecans. Another high wind and he would lose half the trees in the pecan flats.

The tips of Spanish dagger and the sotol held up their needled tips in blazing points of light. The sudden sunrise heat made the land smoke, a haze of thin evaporation lifted and moved slightly. To the north another battleship of red dust was building. They came down one of the long rolling ridges of Comanche County. It was a country of vastly separated ridges of limestone, and the country in between them held in place by a drying cover of grass that was not going to be there much longer if the horses grazed it out. They figured on being able to shoot about thirty head of horses that morning. They had run them away from the water for three days now.

Ross Everett and three of his neighbors rode to a bluff overlooking Upshaw’s Creek. There was one pool of water left in it. Wave after wave of scaled quail flushed up and flew, singing their high one-note song, and settled again and then flew again as they rode through the coveys once more.

The pool was twenty feet long, an eye drinking in light, the first
light of the morning. The smell of dust and the peppery smell of cedar lay close to the ground. Everett sat his horse with ease, loose at the waist, his canvas jacket hung open from his shoulders. The lines of his face were graven deep, and he seemed ten years older than he was. The small rain had passed and the weather turned the world back over to the drought. Low, nebulous clouds bowled past at a low altitude, loose, glowing banks of traveling mist.

Nolan Simms and his two sons moved away to another angle. They tied up in a cramped stand of live oaks that were no more than ten feet tall and all twisted into one another, and got out their rifles and lay down on the ground and sighted on the pool. Everett and Innis tied up and lay down as well. Ross took a box of 30-30 shells and opened it and placed it on the ground between himself and his son. Homer Fletcher and the two men who worked for him moved away to the right. Everett didn’t like the two men who worked for old man Fletcher but what could you do.

“I want you to think and shoot carefully,” Everett said. His son slipped in one shell after another. He was being asked to do a man’s job with a man’s rifle and it made his hands slick with sweat.

“Yes, sir,” he said. He wiped his hands on his shirt.

“I don’t want to see any wounded animals thrashing around suffering.”

“No, sir.”

They came in with an old mare leading them. The oldest mare always led the herd. The boss stallion came behind and some younger stallions darted around the outer edges of the herd, desperate for water and afraid of the boss stallion. They were all thin; it was painful to look at them. They seemed to be nothing more than bones moving inside horsehide and eaten by internal worms and wounded by the larvae of the insatiable screw fly that ripped at tissue and feasted on fresh blood. They knew there were men above them on the ridge and hidden in the stiffened dry brush but they could no longer go without
water. Suddenly Simms’s boy stood up in his excitement and fired. Then Nolan Simms and his other boy started firing.

Everett sighted on the old mare and brought her down. She seized up and stiffened as if she had suddenly been fired in pottery and then dropped with her head and flying mane falling last. She lay there and other horses ran over her. He shot and worked the lever and shot again. The red mare ran, low and graceful, in a panicked circle around and around the pool. She couldn’t keep on much longer. There was a festering, ragged wound on the inside of her right foreleg. One of the young stallions slammed into her and knocked her onto her side, but she fought to get on her feet again. Everett’s rifle barrel followed the young stallion for a few seconds and then he shot. It was a little bay stallion so thin a person would think it couldn’t still be alive and when he collapsed he looked like he had been dead for a month.

Dead horses lay unmoving around the glittering surface of the pool and at last you could hear the musical sound of falling water as it ran over a lip of rock and into a smaller pool. After that the water went underground. The only ones left standing were the red mare and a foal several months old that ran calling from one carcass to another.

“Anybody want him?” Everett yelled. He stood up. So did his son. The ammunition box was empty.

“I do.”

Everett turned and put his hand on the boy’s shoulder. “That’s what I get for taking you to see
Bambi
,” he said. “No more Walt Disney for you.”

“I want him,” the boy said.

Everett called out, “Leave the foal!”

They walked down to the gravel of Upshaw’s Creek. The red mare thrust her muzzle into the water and drank and drank. When Everett came toward her she stepped back with a dripping muzzle and nodded to him. She took one step toward him and then two. She was begging
for her life. He had seen other horses do it. It was a strange thing. He turned his back to her and crossed his arms and stood very still. She came toward him and he could hear her sucking ragged breath. She touched his shoulder with her muzzle and stood there shaking.

Old man Fletcher walked among the dead horses. “We need that goddamned Gene Autry to come here and sing ‘Home on the Range’ for us,” he said. “Happy days are here again.”

On the way back home they passed by the tenants’ houses on Grape Creek. The fields had not been turned that winter. There was no point. The tenants loaded a buckboard with their possessions and children and went to chop cedar. They would trim them down to fence posts and make five cents a post. They had paid him what they owed him in cedar posts for the new pasture fence. Everett would cannibalize the houses, strip them of glass and shingles. Then probably the best thing to do would be to set them on fire.

Smoky Joe was galloping from one end of the horse barn lot to the other. His hair was all turned up, he galloped in wild short rushes and stared out over the top of the mesquite palings with his nostrils wide and white around his eyes. He was shod now and worked hard every morning on the bull’s-eye track behind the storage shed. It was strange how he could tell what had happened, miles away. But he knew. Then he called out to the red mare in a low murmur.

Everett turned her into the sick corral and watched her. She stood in the center of the half-acre lot, very still, her red tail blowing around her hocks. It was a solid pen made with sucker rod pipe and casing pipe for the uprights and it would hold her well enough. She carried a Rafter S brand and he did not know where it was from. Nolan would know, he had the brand registries for the Texas and Southwestern Cattle Raisers’ Association and it was possible an owner would claim her, but he hoped not because she was a handsome girl, even drawn down by parasites and her hooves split out by drought. He carried a feed pan made of an old tire out to her and hung it over one of the
uprights and filled it with feed. He could smell the rotting flesh from screwworm larvae but they could get to that later.

The foal was turned into the lot with the whiteface and her bull calf. Innis stood and watched as both of them nursed from the cow and she was patient and chewed and ran her tongue up her nose holes. The foal sucked furiously and his short brush tail thrashed like a machine. Foam leaked out of the sides of his mouth.

Innis found the creosote paste in the bunkhouse. It was now used for saddle storage and medicines and number three cans of hominy and tomatoes, the anvil and horseshoes. They could no longer afford to pay help. Old pieces of latigo and wooden stirrups were thrown on the beds. They would have to tie the mare down to dig out the screwworms and pour creosote into the meaty wound. He wanted the red mare to be well, and take up with the stud foal and mother him. If he were mothered, then the foal would thrive. Innis poured out the creosote into an empty tin can and swirled a brush around in it.

Ross went into the house and climbed the stairs. From the window of Miriam’s room he could see Innis walking out to the sick corral with the creosote. He began to fold the possessions of the boy’s mother into boxes. The bedspread, the curtains, the doilies on the vanity and the things from the drawers. Outside, another relentless and bitterly clear day. The sky was blue from one horizon to the other and shaded only by a light marking of dust from the east, from Kansas, where topsoil lingered airborne in the lofting winds. Ross knew he had to do it sooner or later and the time had come because of Jeanine. He had made up his mind. He opened the closet and took out Miriam’s dresses. He folded those as well. They would go to the Baptist church and be sent somewhere. He would ask them to pack it all off to a Baptist church somewhere out of the area. Some woman headed for California, in a Model T with mattresses on top, with a washtub and blankets strapped to the back, would wear them.