Stormy Weather (29 page)

“Let’s see if this thing will pump.”

Four or five of the sails were missing and the helmet had been shot full of holes by passing hunters, which would have let the dust into the gears and so it did not look promising. He pulled the stick lever and released the brake. The tailpin shifted and the windmill turned its face sideways to the wind and the sails creaked around on their hub. Ross waited until the upstroke and then gave a sharp rap on the water column with the tire iron and water began to pour out of the pipe and into the rusted tank.

“Wait,” he said. He held out both hands and tasted it, and then said it was all right. Jeanine put her tin can into the stream and drank down two cans full and then handed him the can, gasping, and he drank as well. The water poured out over her hands in hiccuping bolts.

“I meant for us to go someplace where they give you two forks,” he said.

She stood with both arms held out to the water. “It doesn’t matter. I don’t think anything could be as good as that tin can full of water.”

He took off his hat and held his head under the spout. He held her by the shoulders and kissed her wet face. She put her arms around his waist and stuck her thumbs in his belt and he reached around and took her hands and said Jeanine, you are always messing with me. They had to find some way to shovel out. He slid his hands down her shoulders again and again and felt that if he could not have her then he wished she would choose some other person and quickly. They could not stay there the night and so she would not take off that light print dress and lie down beside him, not yet.

HE SHOVELED OUT
with a flat piece of tin and the Dodge truck started up after several tries. At nine at night they came into Amarillo and parked outside the Stockman’s Hotel. They got out of the truck and she dusted him off as best she could with a tow sack she found in the truck and then herself as well.

They were ushered into the restaurant. The maître d’ asked them if they had been caught in that dust storm and Ross asked him if they did not look like it? The waiter came and said a lot of other people had been caught in it and were staying the night at the hotel and did they want a room and then noticed that Jeanine did not have a ring and said excuse me, excuse me.

Jeanine sat down with dreadful precision on the plush-and-ma-
hogany chair when Ross pulled it out for her. She put her hands in her lap and gazed at the ranks of silverware and crockery. Things happened around her in a noiseless, air-conditioned hush. Linen-covered tables stretched in every direction. This was a place where people were very
serious
about eating. The gray-haired waiter impressed her with his willingness to bring her anything she asked for, and to arrange her knives and forks and spoons and pour her a glass of water with ice in it. These were things a woman usually did. He seemed to be quite happy doing it, and Jeanine wondered if he were mentally unfit in some way. He clasped his hands together in front of his white apron and asked if they had kept on driving through the storm and Ross said they had taken refuge in a laid-by passenger car of the Atchison Topeka and Santa Fe and the waiter glanced at Jeanine’s tangled flyaway hair and said Lord, Lord.

The waiter came beside Ross’s chair to take his hat and then with brisk gestures, bore it away to the hat shelf and said he would get it brushed off.

“Have the steak,” Ross said. “Don’t eat it with your hands.”

“I ought to do it just to embarrass you.”

Ross ran his hand quickly through his hair to relieve the pressure of his hat. He opened the menu and did not read it.

He said, “I won’t quit until I have an answer.”

In the hotel dining room there was a murmuring buzz of voices drifting through the brick arches, but it was hushed and mannerly. Jeanine glanced around herself at all the white linen and silver water pitchers beaded with sweat. Ross reached over the table and took her napkin and shook it out and handed it to her.

“Did you hear me?”

“Yes.”

“Yes what?”

“Ross, life would be hard at your place.” She wrapped the napkin around one hand and unwrapped it. “There’s more to life than making money.” She spread the napkin on her knee and thought of
something lighthearted to say. She couldn’t think of anything at the moment.

“That’s true.” His hand tightened briefly into a fist. “I figure I’ll make it when the war comes and afterwards I’ll go to Texas U. in Austin and take courses in harpsichord music. And, let’s see.”

“I bet.”

“And watercolors. I’ll become a philanthropist. I’ll buy free iron lungs for everybody. Even people who don’t need them but might need them.”

She started wrapping the napkin around her hand again. She said, “My dad cheated on my mother all those years. And she put up with it and he finally went off with some fourteen-year-old.”

“I’m not your dad. You’re twenty-one, I would think you could tell the difference between one human being and another.”

She leaned her head on her fist. “I know as much about men as a hog knows about Sunday. But you know what?” she said. “I love you.”

He shifted his large body in the chair and turned up a fork and looked at the tines. The waiter came bearing a salad with strawberries in it. They were small red hearts crying out to be eaten. At the next table several dusty-haired men were urgently discussing the possibilities of using artillery as a rainmaking device. He put the fork down.

“I love you too,” he said. “I have for a long time.”

She said, “Are these strawberries just for decoration? Or are they rubber?”

“They look real to me.”

When they were done with the steak, she ordered the thickest, sweetest dessert on the menu. The overhead fans shifted her hair in vagrant strands about her head. She smiled up at him over the pound cake and its caramel sauce.

“Last chance, Jeanine,” he said.

“Yes,” she said.

He sat without saying anything for a moment and then asked her
when. She said in a year, in the year 1939, well, more than a year, in December of 1939. She thought of the orchard and the graveyard and all her work and the pain of leaving it, but still, she would close the door behind her. After that, she thought, would come 1940 and 1941, and so on, she would become a stepmother and there would be hard work, children, droughts, one year opening into another and herself and Ross Everett in their own bedroom and the circle of the year turning outside like the sails of the windmill unfurled and taking into its wheel any wind that came.

J
ugs and Innis sat on the two beds of the Bluebird’s Rest Tourist Court cabin and listened as the sand hammered at the windows. Innis jiggled his knee up and down. He got up and walked to the door and then walked back again. Smoky Joe was safe in a stall at the fairgrounds. The Bluebird’s Rest Tourist Court was near the new, bald campus of Texas Technological Institute, on the outskirts of Lubbock. Texas Tech, with its Spanish-style buildings scattered over the hard earth and now the visibility was down to a hundred yards and one building could not be seen from another.

“They’re going to be all right,” said Jugs.

“Well, this can give people dust pneumonia,” Innis said.

“I know it,” said Jugs. “But this is a different person.”

“Well, I guess she doesn’t have asthma,” said Innis.

“No,” said Jugs. “She don’t.”

Innis nodded and finally he sat down. He took up the fringes of
the chenille bedspread and began twisting them. They couldn’t get anything on the radio because of the static. He thought about Smoky Joe getting dust pneumonia but he had never heard of animals coming down with it. They were trapped in this one room while the wind and dust tried to take the tourist cabin apart. The floor was gray concrete, slick from years of footsteps. Innis sat on the bed and listened to the shrieking wind. The pillow smelled of hen feathers.

He stared at the pictures on the wall and listened to Jugs snapping out a hand of solitaire. One picture was a landscape with deer drinking from a pool and the other was a framed print of the Sacred Heart of Jesus. The people who owned the place must be Catholic. Jesus himself looked all right, with his mild countenance and an intense gaze in his blue eyes, but he was holding open his red robe and there was a glowing human heart with a crown of thorns on it and Innis found this disturbing and unfathomable. It seemed to him like some terrible surgery. Then he fell asleep and when he woke up in the middle of the night, from a confused dream of burning food on the stove at home, the picture was still there and still without explanation. But the wind had died. They were enveloped in an exhausted silence. Innis sat and listened to it for a long time. He heard coyotes crying in the surrounding hills. They decanted themselves and their warbling, soprano, unstable voices down the draws, unseen in the distance. After a while he fell asleep again.

AFTER TWO HOURS
the dust moved on from the southern plains into Fort Worth and then on to Waco, losing material as it went and becoming only a high wind with a fluting noise that called and sang at every window and door in Central Texas. Vernon and Mayme parked in a drive shed in Cisco. The shed was used by the Sinclair oil company and the workmen saw the storm coming and they saw the car with two people in it turn off the main highway and they shoved
back the doors for them. Vernon and Mayme got out and sat with the men and shared their big glass jug of iced tea without any ice in it. The men asked them where they were headed, and Mayme said they were going to her home, a farm outside of Mineral Wells. They had been to the baseball game in Eastland, because Vernon got a weekend pass. The Fort Worth Cats had beaten the Coca-Cola team from Eastland and they were just getting into the car when it hit. The dust storm had scattered people, thrown them off the highways and into shelters all over the country in general, sent vehicles and people on foot into odd trajectories. Vernon said his sister-in-law and her fellow were caught out in it somewhere, up by Lubbock, and he was worried about them.

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.”

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.