Stormy Weather (7 page)

It took them all day to make it from Wharton to Palo Pinto County, and all that day the countryside shifted and shape changed from the humid coast to the sharp, cracked red hills of north-central Texas. The windows on the truck were clouded and on the horizon was a haze of some distant dust storm. They passed men out in the fields, some with bedding plows and others with horse-drawn stalk knockers shattering the cornstalks into flying blond fragments and you could see the column of dust that they raised for miles. Sunset came as they were making their way through the limestone country of Glen Rose. Burma-Shave signs dotted the roadside; the wolf is shaved—so neat and trim—red riding hood—is chasing him. On Highway 80 they saw overloaded cars with mattresses and washboards tied to them, going west to the cotton harvest or to a new oil field, to the orchards of California. People searching for work, as if it were a thing, a metal in the ground or a place. They passed men walking silently with suitcases in one hand and a thumb stuck out. As they came into Central Texas the evening sky glowed with the red dust carried down from the eroding Panhandle on a northwest wind. Elizabeth drove without speaking.

By the time they got past Dallas it was dark and the headlights of other cars shone through the windshield on Elizabeth holding the steering wheel with both hands and Bea collapsed beside her asleep. Mayme and Jeanine rode in the truck bed wrapped in quilts. Smoky Joe shifted and stamped in the trailer, facing backward, with his tail
flying up over his back. At midnight they drove up the driveway of the old house, gravel bursting from under the narrow tires.

The truck engine cooled down with minute pings sounding slower and slower and then there was only the night wind. They were on a ridge looking out over the heavy darkness of the Brazos River valley, the old Tolliver house adrift in a sea of starlight. They sat in silence. Something was tapping at one of the windows. One of the front double doors was off its hinges and it moved slightly with a raking sound. Far across the valley a cow bellowed in a long series of urgent calls after some lost calf gone astray in the night.

“Well here we are,” said Elizabeth.

There was a half moon up, and they could see that many windows were broken and the entire yard was grown up with plants that seemed willing to do anything to take over the front yard and the porch. A deer flagged its white tail and went bounding out of the barn. They got out cautiously.

Rather than walk into the deserted house in the dark they slept that first night in the truck. Smoky Joe was let go into the pasture, where he galloped from one fence line to another, calling out across the valley, asking if there were any other horses left in the world.

M
rs. Joplin ran the store at Strawn’s Crossroads, a mile from the Tolliver farm. The original Strawn family had never called in their debts, so they became very poor and went off to pick cotton in Oklahoma. Mrs. Joplin always called in her debts and there was a big hand-painted sign in the front window of the store that said this is not a bank. Mrs. Joplin used to be a flapper but had ceased to flap after age twenty-five because of the unintended consequences. A person can’t flap forever.

She watched Jeanine and Mayme and Bea come through the double screen doors into Strawn’s Crossroads store. The brass bell jingled. They were oil field girls, you could tell that right away because of the bold way they carried themselves and the way they talked to one another in voices of normal volume, as if they were at home. For people dragged around from one town to another their whole lives, everyplace was home, or maybe no place was.

“You girls finding everything all right?”

“Yes, ma’am,” said Jeanine.

“Y’all are the Stoddard girls,” said Mrs. Joplin. She inclined her head in a polite, Victorian way when they introduced themselves. Mayme the tall one, the oldest, with auburn hair. Jeanine the skinny one in the middle, and the youngest, Bea, with a heavy braid down her back like a well rope.

“Do you have bobby pins?” said Mayme.

She must have got that red hair from the Stoddard side. None of the Tollivers had ever had red hair. It was such a deep winey red she might have dyed it.

“That shelf there is personal hygiene items,” said Mrs. Joplin. She led them to the wall shelves. “And if y’all need something else of a more intimate nature for ladies, I keep it behind the counter and I’ll wrap it for you.”

The three girls stood in front of the shelf and inspected the Prell shampoo, bath talcum, hairnets, and tooth powder. They didn’t buy any of it. They were in trouble. That’s why they had come back to that wreck of a house and the fields cooking down to hardpan in the relentless drought. They knew now what was in store for them. A can of trouble, a pound of misery, yards and yards of work to shore that old place up again. Deemie Miller came in, jangling the bell, and sat down on the Jell-O rack and she told him to get off of it.

After whispering and arguing together for a few minutes the middle one, Jeanine, walked off to another shelf and picked up a big bar of Sunshine soap. Mayme said, “Well who put you in charge?” but she picked up a jug of vinegar by the handle. Mrs. Joplin knew this was to start cleaning everything. They also bought pinto beans and a twenty-five-pound sack of cornmeal and salt pork.

Mrs. Joplin had heard Jack Stoddard was dead. She remembered him. As long as she could recall he would sit around and watch people with his eyes half shut. Now somebody said he’d got into sour gas at a
rig out near Houston and spent three days in a coma. When he woke up he said he had seen Lucifer himself and that he liked the look of him and that he’d struck a deal of some kind with him. And then was arrested for something unmentionable and died in a jail cell. That’s what Deemie Miller said.

Jack Stoddard used to come to this very store when the Strawns still owned it and buy jelly beans to take to Elizabeth before they were married. Mrs. Joplin lifted the lid on the jelly bean jar and poured out a quarter pound into a paper sack. They had come home to that collapsing old house with its windows busted out and the doors half off their hinges, a place where the noises of dinners and card games still echoed, many of which Mrs. Joplin had herself attended after her flapper days were over. After she had married. The house had been empty for years now, ten years, except for Elmo the Dwarf, who lived for a while up in the second story with a corn-shuck mattress and horse blankets until somebody found him a job in Fort Worth at the airplane factory where dwarves were needed to get up into the tail and finish the rivets. They didn’t know about Elmo and she wasn’t going to tell them.

Jeanine asked about oats and what quality they were and how much was a fifty-pound sack and Mrs. Joplin told her. Crimped oats, they weren’t mill sweepings. Clean, good quality. She asked them if they had a horse, as if she didn’t know.

“Yes,” said Jeanine, and her older sister said, “It’s her horse. He’s crazy. Two of a kind.”

“Ha-ha,” said Jeanine. “Why don’t you can it, Mayme. We just met this woman and you’re making fun of me.”

“Sisters fight, don’t they?” Mrs. Joplin turned to Bea. The girl smiled and looked down. She, more than the other two, had the appearance and ways of a Tolliver. Sweet natured and timid.

“Yes, ma’am.” She held a red Big Chief notebook to her chest. “I’ve got to have this for school.”

“We’ll get it, Bea,” said Mayme. “And pencils.”

Bea dropped the notebook on the counter and ran back to the school supplies shelf to choose two new, beautiful yellow pencils. She inspected each one carefully, as if they were not all alike. So much like her grandmother. Everybody is related to millions of people going back in time. Sometimes in the scriptures children were fathered by giants who were in the earth in those days, so you never knew. They had come back to find out who they were. They were like people whose images had been cut out of photographs so that the background was gone. She had done that herself in her flapper days. She pasted cute clippings from magazines under them;
Ooo la la!
And
I Wish I Could Shimmy Like My Sister Kate,
and then often wondered who it was who had taken the photo, but it was something people always forgot or didn’t think about. Now she ran the store and managed her husband, who was twenty-five years older than she was and at present very forgetful, so it was important to Mrs. Joplin not to forget anything on his behalf. Old Mrs. Tolliver whose maiden name was Neumann had been related to some of the finest families in southeastern Missouri.

“Well, I need some field corn,” said Jeanine. “How much is it a bushel?”

“Cracked, it’s ten cents the bag.”

“I’ll take a bag.”

“Do you want some old newspapers to take with you? For cleanup?”

“Yes, please.”

Mrs. Joplin knew the genealogies of everybody in two counties and wrote it all down because of the way things were lost and confused during the oil strikes and washed over by the immense army of people who had poured down into Texas looking for work in the oil fields. People from Delaware and France and Kansas City traveling through a wrecked and untrustworthy land, as if they were in some
country they had never heard of before, had come from another world called the 1920s. Mrs. Joplin was a dangerous person to be around if you were figuring on running from your past. There is no past; it is always an accordioned present consisting of compound interest accruing every second. She of all people understood this from her bathtub gin and Charleston days. Their grandfather Tolliver had been a forbearing old man who kept his fields free of cedar and the house painted white. And now the fields were grown up in cedar seedlings and burrs and the house was the color of gunmetal with a few chips of paint here and there. Mrs. Joplin could see his face in Bea’s deeply serious expression. The Tollivers and Neumanns had come from Missouri, by way of Hot Springs, Arkansas, and they had at some time in the past married into the Armstrongs, which is where the red hair might have come from. Mrs. Joplin’s grandson Timmy Joplin was out in West Texas, at Big Spring. He joined the CCC and they had them out there slaving away on some public parks project. He had to go and see what he called “the world.” He was engaged to one of the Armstrongs. He hadn’t yet realized that wherever you are, that’s the world. Mrs. Joplin wished Tim would come home.

Mrs. Joplin’s oldest son, Timmy’s father, had also gone off to see “the world.” He married during the oil strike, to a skinny woman from Indiana who was no more a mother than a cowbird, which was why Mrs. Joplin and her elderly husband had raised Tim. Mrs. Joplin told Deemie Miller to quit sitting on the Jell-O rack again and wrote up the purchases while the girls walked around the store and read the messages tacked up by the wall phone, as if they had just arrived from some uncivilized Pacific island. Mayme read with interest the notice about a dance at the Old Valley Road schoolhouse and said, “Jeanine, look here.”

Jeanine paid for the soap and vinegar and food with coins out of her jeans pockets.

“You take this to your mother from me.” Mrs. Joplin handed the
jelly beans to Bea and watched the child’s face light up. She went to the front doors to see the three sisters start off down the road in the dry cool wind, carrying their soap and vinegar, and Jeanine the middle girl as skinny as a yard of pump water, and yet she was carrying the twenty-five-pound sack of cornmeal over one shoulder. Deemie stood at the screen doors to watch them as well. And after that nobody saw anything of them for a long time.

THEY HAD TRAVELED
all those miles to arrive at a place of dust. Dust moved through the atmosphere and hushed the evening to a powdery October darkness. It was hot during the day and hot all night long. All they had was the wood-burning cookstove and when it was fired up it drove them out to the front veranda. The valley of the Brazos River and the hills beyond seemed green because of the cedar and the oaks but the pastures were burnt out and the harvests thin. The peach orchard was stiff as whiskers with dead limbs and scale disease, the barn had lost so many boards from its walls that the floor was striped with bars of sunlight and in the shafts of light dust motes drifted. Their furniture seemed lost in the spaces of the two-story house. The kitchen chairs shrank into a huddle around the stove, and their beds jammed themselves up in the two rooms downstairs. The chain on the well windlass jerked and squealed as the bucket was cranked up.

The hills were a range of cracking red rock, they stood out against the blue sky, a country of tabled mountains that seemed to have been forged of cast iron in ages past and now were falling to pieces in rust and shattering fragments. Jeanine walked the entire fence line with Smoky trotting behind her. His hooves made crisp sounds on the dead grass. The fence was all standing but some sections of the wire were very low, and if Smoky took it in his head to go visit with the workhorses in the next field he could go right over it. She worked for
a day bracing up the mesquite posts. She took a stick and wrapped the barbed wire strands around it and twisted them tight. It would hold for a while.

The house was saturated with red dust. It fogged the windows and leaked from the baseboards. Mayme and Bea scraped away the putty on the broken windows and pulled the glass out with little breaking sounds. They covered the open panes with cardboard. Jeanine scrubbed the unbroken panes with vinegar and newspaper, and as the glass cleared she read the headlines. Bill Boyd and his Cowboy Ramblers were appearing at the Crazy Water Hotel in Mineral Wells. The government was making an aerodrome at Fort Worth, the textile mills of the East were either shutting down or emptied by violent strikes, California police were chasing migrants out of the camps. Many of these stories were written by somebody named Milton Brown. Jeanine read his name and remembered him, the stuttering boy who came to their grandparents’ funeral.

Mayme lifted a bucket of water from the old well. She leaned over the well curb and drew it up on the windlass. There was no depth of water in it and the water came up cloudy. She went in and placed it on the cookstove, and when it boiled she cut pieces of white soap into it, and then threw it on the kitchen floor in a long wave and began to mop.

“I’m going to see if that windmill will pump,” said Jeanine. She had pulled half a ruined silk stocking over her hair and wore one of her father’s old shirts with conroe oil field hauling embroidered on the pocket. Tiny holes from either acid or welding dotted the front. “That well water is no good.”

She climbed up the old Eclipse windmill and found the tall lever that unlocked the blades. They turned in the wind with rusty sounds and then water came out of the pipe and splashed down into the metal tank and they hauled it into the kitchen by the bucket. Jeanine reset the hinges on the front double doors and nailed them in with big common nails. She needed to make a new frame, she needed to use
wood screws, but she didn’t know how to do either of these things. Her father’s toolbox remained a mystery.

Then she walked in the dust down to the old barn to carry cracked corn to Smoky Joe. He paced the fence line and his pasterns sank with a loaded motion. He watched for her every evening and his outline against the rank pasture grasses was like something painted on a cave wall, a prehistoric horse frozen in flight. He drank from the old mule trough and the water dripped slowly from his muzzle so that the reflected rings of light made noiseless waves up the loose boards of the barn walls.

The blank sunlight poured through the rigid branches of the Spanish oaks, through the needles of the ancient cedar that bent over the well curb. Precise black shadows were shed by its turning limbs as it spiraled toward the westering sun as it had for more than a century. Jeanine carried water and soap to the parlor. She remembered being in that room, playing on the floor with thread spools, and seeing her mother outside with Aunt Lillian and Violet Keener. Jeanine thought of them talking and laughing together in their new flapper dresses, all three of them pretty and young and not yet worn down by cares and children and errant husbands and oil-boom towns. In their bobbed hair and bright dresses and T-strapped high heels, their waistlines down around their hips and their legs shining and pale in silk stockings, they moved forward into the 1920s, the years that came like a light summer wind all over Texas, a decade that would have a hundred years in it and would never end. Jeanine hammered in a nail to put up the lithograph of the little girl in the forest, and then hung the portrait of her grandparents in the hall, where they could stare out of their antique clothing, home again.