Stormy Weather (25 page)

“And now Milton Brown, you buy yourself a satin dress for dancing in, and those little open-toed numbers I showed you, and he’s a dead man.
Dead.
Just get a job for a while and buy yourself some nice clothes, Jeanine. It ain’t forever.” Betty sighed with a big
Ooof
sound. She was exhausted from all the arguing and smooching with Si. “You’re seeing two different men! Now that’s what I call a social life. You got to nail down Milton, though. That’s the kind of guy he is. You got to nail his shoes to the floor.”

“You’re not listening to me, Betty. This is like a nightmare.” Jeanine stared out the window. Then sleep nearly overcame her. She lifted her head and searched in her straw purse for her handkerchief and blew her nose. “When you talk and people don’t hear anything you say.”

“Si keeps wanting to get married,” Betty said. “But I’m having too much fun right now. I ain’t ready for kids and housework.” Betty watched another car crawl by on the street below. “And we’re going to have some oil well money coming in.”

“Betty, there ain’t going to be any oil well money.”

“Yes there is. That well is going to come in.”

“Come in what? Sour gas and salt water probably.”

“Mama says it’s good.”

“Good for what?” Jeanine yawned until tears ran, and then flopped back on the pillow.

“She says it’s going to come in, girl.” Betty stared out the window into the faintly lit night of the small town. Then her eyes slid shut. “Going to be high-gravity and under pressure.”

“You tell me how you know that,” said Jeanine. “But you ain’t going to answer, you’re going to sleep.”

“No I am not, I’m just checking my eyelids for holes.”

In a minute Betty fell into a light snoring. Jeanine thrashed around on the narrow couch and could not sleep; she looked out into the street where trees bent like hair, brushed by the wind that had come up out of the southeast as if there might be a hurricane down in the Gulf, as if this wind might reach all the way to Palo Pinto County bearing rain. Jeanine thought that if she lived in a big city it would no longer matter if it rained or not.

T
he stores and offices on the main streets of Tarrant were bright with posters declaring we must all work together to bring America out of the economic emergency. At the MacComber House soup kitchen Jeanine made coffee and cut up donated, stringy beef for the soup. She washed her hands and sat down at a table with five other girls and threaded a needle. It was hard to hold all the material down with pieces of scrap iron and cut pipe rings but they could not do without the fan blowing on them. The streets outside wavered with heat distortion. They were piecing together dust masks to be sent to other Red Cross centers. Most would go up to the Panhandle hospitals, to Lubbock and Amarillo, where the dust storms were the worst. The streets were filled with train noises and crowds. Martha Jane Armstrong showed up to help make decorations for the Fourth of July benefit dance and Betty came with a box of linen scraps. Uncertain, ragged families strung themselves one by one through the door and
stood silently, waiting to be told, to be offered something and too proud to ask.

Jeanine told Martha about the drive chain on the cultivator grabbing her scarf and Martha said she’d better carry a knife, she didn’t know how many people had caught their clothes in machinery and got killed. You need to cut yourself loose and if all else fails you can jam the blade in the gears.

A stout woman named Bricey was the democratically elected head of the Mineral Wells Relief Committee and she had a voice like a sawmill whistle. Jeanine remembered her from the Valentine’s Day dance, where she had sat behind a table and took in the boxes, gray as cast iron and completely unmoved by the traveling light-spots that rained on her pie-tin hat, sorting the small gifts for poor people given by other poor people.

Now Bricey cut sandwiches with a big carving knife, and laid them out in stacks. A family of four sat down on the unsprung couch and the mother handed the sandwiches to her husband and two small children. Jeanine glanced at them and away again.
Like we used to be,
she thought.
On their way to something better
.

“You girls just think I am a stodgy old lady,” said Bricey. She turned the key on another can of Spam. “But I have a secret life.”

“Well, tell us,” said Betty. “Don’t hold back.”

“I am an astronomer.”

They all said, No! Bricey smiled.

“Does that mean stars?” somebody asked in a whisper.

“Tell us,” said Martha Jane.

So Bricey told them about the telescope on the roof of her house and how she went out on clear nights to see the rings of Saturn, and the canals of Mars, light-years from this town, so slack and depressed. The stillness afflicted her. The rising dust storms. So she went up to her roof and gazed out into the limitless Great Otherwise and worlds upon worlds.

“So there. My secret life.”

Jeanine smiled at Bricey, surprised. Bricey sat up on the roof and drank in the light of the stars like a little old nocturnal hummingbird. She had her own secret life there. And she dressed in dumpy dresses and her awful gray hat in the daytime. Jeanine realized she knew so little about people; that she and her family had moved around so much they had always depended only on each other and she in truth knew as little about the world as a nun. Jeanine’s big stitches galloped across a square of layered gauze.

Bricey had a small round mouth and never wore lipstick and when she smiled it showed her gold tooth.

“And I knew your mother, Jeanine. I think it’s marvelous that she bought into that oil well.”

“You knew my mother?”

“You were born here, Jeanine. Y’all weren’t brought up on a desert island.” Bricey took her hairbrush from her purse and brushed back Jeanine’s hair. “You should let your hair grow out, honey, and do it in one of those pompadours. It would make you look older.”

Jeanine sat carefully still while Bricey drew her short hair back and thought about the effect and then let it spring back to its brief waves.

“How did you know my mother?”

“Why, we went to high school together! She was a freshman and I was graduating. Oh she was so pretty. She’s still pretty. And that oil well is just the thing for her. She can busy herself to death with that thing and it’ll never come in and so she can buy into another one. She should have done something like that years ago.” She smiled and ruffled Jeanine’s flyaway hair. “I’m glad y’all are back, Jeanine,” she said. “Y’all have had your troubles but I’m glad you’re back.”

“Thank you,” said Jeanine, and wished she knew how to say more; something more of the sudden rush of gratitude for such simple words.

“And how is Bea?”

“She’s going to have that cast off pretty soon.”

“Is Mrs. Beasley taking good care of her?”

“Yes,” said Jeanine, and her good feelings evaporated at the image of Winifred Beasley and her bird’s-nest hat. She went to stand in front of the electric fan. “But if she keeps on ordering us around she isn’t going to live out the summer. I swear I’ll throw her down the well.”

“Jeanine!” Bricey jammed the hairbrush back into her purse and shut it up hard. “I didn’t know you were like that.” She closed her mouth over the gold tooth. “Winifred has dedicated her life to rural nursing. She is selfless. She has worked without cease.”

Betty stared at her cousin and put a finger to her lips.

“Well excuse me,” said Jeanine. “I didn’t know you knew her.” Jeanine sat down and started stitching quickly.

Bricey sat down with pinking shears and began cutting out linen squares. “Absolutely selfless,” she said. Jeanine felt like she ought to leave but Ross was supposed to come in on the afternoon train and she wanted to meet him and hear if he got a contract or not. She wondered if they would remain friends if Milton Brown presented her with an engagement ring and declared his undying love and set a date to m-m-marry her and they would stroll among the dinosaur tracks and kiss beside the drying bed of the Brazos where catfish swam in circles in the shrinking holes of water. Then they would get on a train to Chicago with everybody throwing shoes and rice and then herself and Milton in a Pullman bed. She turned toward the door as the Old Valley Road teacher, Miss Callaway, hurried inside with a box containing jars of red, white, and blue poster paint and a tube of sparkles. She wore a light pink printed cotton dress and she was crying. She stopped and put the box down and shook out a handkerchief and wiped her eyes.

“Why, Lou-Ann!” said Bricey. “What is it?”

Lou-Ann Callaway motioned toward the back room and Bricey got up and followed her. They all listened intently; they heard the
kind of pressured noise people make when they are whispering at top volume. It was something about a young man. Martha raised her eyebrows and kept sewing. Who was seeing someone else, she had just discovered. Betty thumped her heart with a fist and rolled her eyes. Martha Jane placed her wrist against her forehead and pretended to faint. Jeanine heard the faraway noise of the train whistle as it crossed the Brazos River Bridge coming into Mineral Wells, and said she would be back later. She knew that sooner or later Bricey was going to have a long chat with Winifred Beasley and that something would come of it; something unpleasant.

THROUGH THE HEAT
waves and engine steam she saw Ross Everett stepping off the westbound passenger train. He took off his hat and came walking toward her. “I figured I would find you here. This is one of your days at the Red Cross.”

She came to him and took his coat sleeve in her hand. He laid his hand over hers and bent down to kiss her hot face. The smell of his body and skin was very intimate; tobacco, train, sweat, himself. He said they would go somewhere cool, the drugstore, and have something cold, and he would tell her about his contract if she were interested, and then he would drive her home when the temperature had cooled down. He told her about the rain he had seen in the East. Sheets of it. The feel and air of the world when it was drenched and running with water. One beautiful rain after another.

They drove back out to the Tolliver farm in the blue evening, listening to his car radio. She bent forward and turned it up when she heard the first strains of “Stormy Weather.”

I
t was toward the end of July that they got the telephone. Joe Keener backed toward the house, unreeling telephone line from a large spool. He bored holes in the wall and ran the line in and tested it with a kick meter that registered things called megohms. The next day the phone rang and Mayme screamed.

“What was that??”

Her mother said calmly, “The telephone.”

Jeanine lifted her head with the scissors in her hand.

Mayme said, “How many times does it ring?”

“Just answer it!” Elizabeth said.

“Maybe it’s Vernon!” Mayme clapped the large receiver to her head. “Hello!” she shouted. “Hello!”

“Don’t shout,” said Elizabeth.

Mayme carefully laid the receiver down. “It’s for you, Mother. There’s a shareholders’ meeting.”

The shareholders and others with the certificates of interest met in St. Stephen’s church hall. Elizabeth told people how she had learned about the meeting from a
telephone
call. Their own telephone in their own parlor. She sat with her purse on her lap and a feeling of desperation. The producer wore his loudest tie, an orange and blue fish pattern, and held up charts and graphs while they all shouted at him. He said they had reached two thousand feet at very little cost, why, it had hardly cost six thousand to drill that far and that was cheaper than he had ever imagined. All they needed was to drive it a little farther. It was down there. Elizabeth stood up and spoke at a public meeting for the first time in her life. Mr. Lacey the connections foreman sat in the back row unnoticed and listened to her. She pulled at her gray cotton gloves nervously and her voice shook but she asked the producer if he was slant drilling and he swore he was not and wondered how this woman knew about slant drilling. Then she asked if he had tried acid, and he said they couldn’t afford acid, all they needed was a few more hundred feet. Oil wants to migrate. Oil always wants to go somewhere else, it wants to be on top, it wants to wander. It is wanton and unfaithful, it’s almost always riding on salt water, looking for better company. It ain’t lying down there in a big pool. It’s in the pores in sandstone. Smashed into the pores among sand grains and under pressure if we’re lucky. In another five hundred feet, we should hit the sand.

George Lacey stood up. Elizabeth turned to see who was speaking. He said, “And when and if it comes in, it could be oil, it could be oil and gas, it could be oil and salt water or gas and salt water. If it comes in gas you stand a good chance of blowing yourself up along with the derrick if there’s a live flame anywhere. If it’s H
₂
S it will kill the whole crew. And if you live through that, if you get oil, you got to lay production pipeline to get it somewhere.”

“We all know that, Mr. Lacey,” said Spanner. “There will be enough to pay off everybody and lay the pipelines. You ought to
know, Mr. Lacey. Your company’s field isn’t ten miles away, and if Magnolia has ten producing wells there, then, you see.”

Elizabeth Stoddard remained standing, and did not sit down, and was not comforted. She said she wanted to see the old well log, the one from when they had drilled there five years before. Mr. Spanner laughed and said of course but well logs are hard to read.

“I can read one, Mr. Spanner,” she said. “I would like for it to be made available.”

Mr. Spanner said he would have it at the next meeting, in a week’s time.

At the end of the meeting Mr. Lacey pushed his way through the crowd. He made a gesture with his hat at her in lieu of tipping it and then put it on his head. He asked Elizabeth if he could be of any service and if she needed a ride home.

“Well, no,” she said. “I, well, no thank you, Mr. Lacey.”

“I have the old well log,” he said.

“You do?” People pushed past them in the hallway. The school seemed abandoned and bereft of children’s voices in the summer night; the closed rooms seemed dead.

“Yes.” He took her elbow and with the other hand gestured toward his car. “You know, the City Lights Café has good big tables where we could sit and look at it. Have something cool to drink.”

She paused and then said, “That sounds very nice.”

THE ARMSTRONG HOUSE
and headquarters was a lunatic asylum with hundreds of Angoras jammed into the pens and the scorching sound of electric shears and the howling engine of the generator, the Mexican crew singing “Los Caminos de Guanajuato” on the shearing platform. They peeled the silky mohair from the soft, baggy bodies like onionskin. The goats were then carried to another pen and by this time they were silent and stupid, their thin-boned bodies hung
in a man’s arms like a grain sack. Mrs. Armstrong sprayed gentian violet on the shear cuts and then the mature does were run into one pen and the yearlings into another. Ross Everett leaned on the pen rails, watching. Men loaded the four-hundred-pound bags of mohair onto Everett’s two-ton trucks as soon as it was bagged, pounded down, and the burlap sewn shut and tagged.

Jeanine and Martha Jane were in the bunkhouse trying on the wedding dress. They were both stripped down to their underwear. Every room in the Armstrong house was jammed with equipment and cartons of medicines and men walking in and out and so they had come out to the bunkhouse. Like everybody else, the Armstrongs had had to let their help go, so now the bunkhouse was a sort of tack room and toolshed, made of corrugated steel. Saddles were piled one on top of another and bridles and halters hung from nails in the beams and every metal surface gleamed with heat.

Martha Jane wanted to see how it looked on, and so Jeanine pulled the dress on over her head and Martha pinned her up in back. Jeanine tried to walk gracefully in the long skirts but she stumbled over cans of sheep dip chemical and the long hoses of a cactus burner. The steel walls made cracking noises from the heat. Outside the thermometer said 100 and inside the bunkhouse it had to be at least 105.

Jeanine picked up her marking chalk from a table full of paper shotgun shells beside the pellet-loading device. She handed it to Martha. “Here, mark where the shoulder pads go,” she said. “Why don’t y’all have a mirror?”

“Soon as I sell my ram.” Martha Jane’s hands were wet with sweat as she laid quick white stripes on the shoulder with the chalk. “I got a good ram out of those dogies.” She stepped back. “You’re thinner than me.” She took a fistful of waist. “But it looks good. Turn around.”

“Okay, but get your sweaty hands off it, Martha.” Jeanine turned in a slow spin and the yards of skirt floated out and snagged on the
iron bedstead legs. She clutched up the material and said, “I’m going to pass out.”

“Don’t,” said Martha Jane.

“Martha, you’ve got to get this thing off of me.”

“Wait, wait.” Martha chalked the buttonhole lines and then Jeanine pulled off the supple yardage of the wedding dress and took up an enamel pitcher of water and poured it over her head. She stood skinny and soaked in her underpants and brassiere with water dripping from her elbows and ears. It ran into her cotton socks. She wiped at her face with a towel and gasped.

“It’s going to fit you,” she said.

“We got to get out of here,” said Martha Jane. “I don’t care when he gets back, we are getting married in December.” Martha took the pitcher from Jeanine and dipped the towel in it to wipe her face. Sweat ran into her eyes and burned until she could hardly see. “I got to go help Mother, Jeanine.” She pulled on her jeans and an old shirt of her father’s. “Stay and eat with us and the crew.”

“I’ve got work at home,” said Jeanine. In reality she was afraid they would be eating goat. Goat babies. She wrapped the dress in its sheet, stuck straight pins in it to hold it together. “I can’t believe I am going to fire up that cookstove.”

“Have y’all got electricity yet?”

“Soon as y’all pay me.”

“Get it from Daddy now,” said Martha Jane. “Before he spends it on does. He’ll blow it on does.”

“Okay.”

“God, I tell you, I’d about rather go be a missionary in Borneo than go through another shearing.” Martha pulled a comb through her hair. Jeanine put her chalk and scissors and spools of thread into an old purse she used for a kit. Martha pulled on her boots. She stood up and stamped her feet to jam her heels into the boots. She stamped again and walked out into a yellow blaze that seemed to swallow her up.

Jeanine stepped out of the bunkhouse. At the door she gasped at the inferno radiating from the corrugated steel wall. She ran for the back porch of the Armstrong house, to the water bucket that hung from a spike nail, and under it a lusty growth of peppermint where the water was thrown by exhausted men whose shirts and underwear stuck to their bodies in the unvarying heat. She came upon Ross Everett with his pants undone, his belt hanging loose, his shirt open. His shorts were striped blue and hung from his hip bones. She screamed in a faint, hoarse noise. It was all she could manage.

“Hello,” he said.

“Why don’t you just strip naked?” said Jeanine. She turned her back.

“You’re a virgin, Jeanine,” he said. “I can tell.”

He took off his hat and poured a dipper of water over his head, and then began to stuff his shirt into his waistband.

She felt dizzy with the heat and so she took a firm hold of the porch rail. “Can you say it a little louder?” she said. “They can’t hear you in the kitchen.”

He zipped up his pants and buckled his belt.

“Are you about to pass out?”

“Yes.” She liked his voice, it was a strong voice with that sliding West Texas accent. “Just about.”

He took hold of the collar of her shirt, touching her hot skin with his fingertips. He pulled it away from her neck and with the other hand scooped up a dipper of water from the bucket. He poured the water down into her shirt, flooding her breasts and ribs. Jeanine closed her eyes and he poured another over her head. “Hold out your hands.” He poured another dipperful into her cupped hands and she splashed it into her face. “How’s the dress?”

“Ross, it’s beautiful.”

He took the bucket from the giant nail and emptied it over her head and then set it beneath the pump. He filled it and hung it up again.

“Good.”

Jeanine said, “I could throw myself into the stock tank.”

He shifted his hat to the back of his head. She was good to look at; drops sparkled in her eyebrows and on small tips of hair that hung against her cheeks. He handed her the towel and watched her wipe her face with it.

“Come and see the shearing.”

“Couldn’t you just tell me about it?”

“No.” She followed him in her soaked shirt and overlong Levi’s, her hands over her ears because the violent noise of hundreds of distraught Angoras had risen to a deafening level. With his broad hand he gently turned back the fleece of a pinioned goat. The hair grew from the skin with a slight wave to it, it had the sheen of mother-of-pearl. “They’re taking it raw at the mill in Rhode Island, sticks and goat shit excuse me and lice and all. A few bags at a time.”

“Why do they take it raw?”

“Because they want to handle it themselves.” He stood back and two men chivvied the doe toward the shearing shed. “You need perfectly pure water, a neutral pH, to wash it and workers with great patience to comb the staple out or you end up with something that looks like mattress stuffing and will never be untangled in our lifetime. The water in Rhode Island comes from granite wells. Our water is alkaline, with this limestone. It’s very delicate fiber.”

He walked at the edge of the frantic activity, for he was the buyer and the manager of the shearing and he would not get in the men’s way once they had begun. Two of the Mexican shear crew did not get a gate shut quickly enough and goats began to pour through it, suddenly becoming liquid, a dusty current of suds foaming out.

Jeanine laid down the sheeted package of dress and ran forward. She grasped one of the goats by the horns and a man yelled at her,
No por las cuernas!
The goat twisted its head around so that it seemed it
had a rubber neck. She was in the middle of four men all laying hands on the goats, gripping them by the shaggy hair.

“Let go,” said Ross. He had a full-grown doe in his arms and waded through the noise and the dust. “You’ll bust those horns.”

She let go of the horns and seized the doe up in her arms and carried her toward the shearing shed. The animal was baggy and loose in all its bones. They were bred for hair and for nothing else, not brains or hardiness or bone or color or flesh. The goat dropped pellets all down her jeans. A man took the doe from her and the gate was shut. Ross wiped his shirtsleeve across his face and streaked it with sweat and dust. She turned at the sound of shouts, men harried more goats into the hands of Mrs. Armstrong and now Martha Jane, who jabbed each Angora with a syringe of sore-mouth vaccination.

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.