Stormy Weather (19 page)

Then Biggety yelped and came running back down the stairs with Albert behind him clawing at his male parts. Again they went through all the downstairs rooms in reverse order and Albert kept pressing his advantage and both shot out into the yard. Biggety jumped back into Milton’s newspaper car and would not come out. Albert was puffed out to twice his original size and strolled up and down in front of the door with an arched back, making very deep terrible noises.

“Now now,” said Milt. “You really need this dog. G-g-g-get out of there, you flaming coward.” He grabbed Biggety by the neck and threw him out again. Biggety ran under the front veranda. Albert sat down and kept watch on the hole he had run into. Everybody was in for a long day.

Jeanine stood at the door with her hand over her eyes against the hard cold sunshine and watched Milton drive away. She didn’t mind about the dog. But he could have asked her to the dance.

T
he newspaper came. A subscription, a gift from Milton. It was thrown from the back of an old Model TT Ford truck. The truck was loaded with the Mineral Wells
Star
and the
Dallas Morning News
in tight folds. Two little boys in the back hurled the newspapers out to the mailboxes. The boys had neither shoes nor coats but kept themselves warm with hectic energy, flinging the newspapers and getting in one another’s way and arguing. Jeanine shook out the
Star
and read Milton’s story on the Texas Health Festival in Mineral Wells, with a parade featuring the Queen of Health and her court and tours to the sulfur-water baths at the Baker and Crazy Hotels. There were floods in California that drowned 144 people and a hurricane in New England where 628 people died. Jeanine was envious. How were both coasts getting all that rain and not a drop in Texas?

Shinnery Mountain was gray with forests of mesquite that had lost their leaves and turned the color of winter smoke; studded throughout
this cloudy color were the dark greens of live oak and cedar. Jeanine finished cutting cedar seedlings out of another five acres and started a second cultivation of the peach orchard. If only she could get water to it somehow. Every evening her hands hurt; the bucking steering wheel of the tractor fought against her like a live thing. But she soaked her hands in hot water and then sat down at the Singer. She ripped out a secondhand man’s gabardine suit jacket and turned it inside out, cut it once again, lined it with Quadriga cloth, and put in windowpane pockets and a bagged hem. She cut into the squirrel-fur coat and managed a good collar. Bea was allowed on crutches now, and she put the coat on and then propped herself up in front of the hall mirror. She was so happy and grateful it made Jeanine feel terrible. It was nothing but a remade coat with a little fur collar, but Bea turned in front of the mirror and admired herself so. She took Bea to school in the truck. Her younger sister was anxious to show off both her coat and her cast to Miss Callaway and the Miller kids. With the exception of the wet snow in early December, it had not rained in over a year.

She eased the silver horse ring from her finger and opened and closed her hands, put it back on.

“Mayme, when you’re in town look at the junkman’s for paint. Any kind of paint.”

“I’ll find something,” said Mayme. She shook out the Mineral Wells newspaper. “Wow. Fresh paint.”

The next day Mayme came back from town with ten gallons of mint green paint left over from when they built the hospital, so old the labels were gone. She had got them for ten cents apiece.

Dust clouded the windowpanes. Jeanine washed them and then spent three days ripping off the old wallpaper and began painting. The day after it was done she walked again and again through the hall and the parlor to see her shadow thrown on the pale, mint green walls in the pure color and the silence.

President Roosevelt spoke over the radio. The newspapers had said
he would give a fireside chat, if people had a fire, if they were willing to listen to chats. Bea’s face was shining with hope as she listened.

Happiness lies not in the mere possession of money, it lies in the joy of achievement, in the thrill of creative effort. The joy and moral stimulation of work no longer must be forgotten in the mad chase of evanescent profits. These dark days will be worth what they have cost us if they teach us that our true destiny is not to be ministered to, but to minister to ourselves and our fellow men.

“Does anybody know what he’s talking about?” asked Elizabeth.

“Beats me,” said Jeanine and discarded; she and Mayme played Crazy Eights in the winter evening, chasing the elusive one-eyed Jack that would change the suit from clubs to hearts.

JEANINE WALKED TOWARD
the entrance of St. Stephen’s church hall in the remade garnet silk dress and jacket and makeup and her last pair of silk stockings. She felt synthetic, like a mannequin made of pressed sawdust and paint. She and Mayme walked through the pool of light at the entrance, while down the street in front of the squat Romanesque church two boys rode double on an uncurried ranch horse singing
Show me the way to go home.

“Over there,” a lady said. “They’re taking the boxes over there.”

Jeanine laid her box down on the long table in front of a stout woman in a pie-tin hat. There were stacks of boxes on the floor beside her.

“Name? We just want to know who to thank for contributing.”

“Jeanine Stoddard.”

“Contents?”

Jeanine held out the list. Her hand thrust out of her stiff new jacket-sleeve ringless except for the little silver horse ring jammed onto her little finger. A blunt, small, inelegant hand.

The trumpet player on the bandstand blew out a long flat note and
a clarinet responded. Mayme’s auburn hair drifted in slow, pretty waves as she took off her coat. Underneath she wore her new dress in the juniper-colored silk.

“There’s the band!” She turned toward the bandstand as if greeting an old friend. Her skirt flared and settled. “Jeanine, I’ll see you over at that table.”

Minutes later Jeanine saw her sister stepping out onto the floor of the church hall in the arms of a short man to “Stormy Weather.”

“Stormy weather,” said an elderly man. “Don’t we all wish.” He stood and held his hand out to his elderly wife. “Let’s get out amongst them, Mother. It’s a rain dance.”

And then the dance floor was crowded with couples drawn into a two-step by the clarinet’s reedy, sensual tones. Jeanine sat at one of the small tables against the wall and watched her sister swinging around the sanded hardwood floor with the short boy in saddle shoes. There was no sign of Milton Brown. She was sitting alone among the potted palms and tinsel in her new clothes. Trying to have a social life.

“There she is.” Milton took hold of the back of her chair and cleared his throat. “Boys in the band. A little drink or two.” She turned around and smiled up at him with relief. “Hate social lives. They’re no good. I have nine social lives and a drink always makes things a little easier.” He took off his glasses and wiped them on the tablecloth. “My speech becomes faultless. My accent moves into second gear, which is mid-Atlantic.” He put the glasses on again. “And how do you like your blue-eyed boy now, Mister Death?” He sat beside her and handed her a drink. Jeanine laughed and then drank down the paper cup of rum and Coke and it hit her as if she had been gassed.

“Fancy meeting you here,” he said. He turned up his own drink. “I don’t know if you want to dance or not but consider it as taking your life in your hands.”

Milton stood up again and smiled at her. He had been pressed at
one time but now he was all wrinkled and his tie seemed to be too tight and it was making his face red.

Jeanine said, “Oh, Milton.” She took hold of his coat sleeve.

“Oh, Milton nothing. Shall we dance?”

He led her onto the dance floor. Jeanine moved with him to help him keep his balance.

“How are you Jennie? How are you?”

“I’m fine,” she said. “How are you?”

“Drunk. It helps. Never good at social things. I remember you in second grade, Jennie. In a yellow dress.”

“And a yellow sunbonnet,” Jeanine said. “You forgot the sunbonnet.”

“My memory is going. Next I’ll forget the dress and then where I am and then where my feet are. How is little Bea?”

A glittering ball beamed revolving fragments of light over potted palms, and a board with the increasing numbers of contributed boxes, that was marked out and rewritten as more and more people came in, and a map of the areas hardest hit by the dust storms, and red paper hearts were plastered up on the walls. They danced unsteadily in the fugitive illumination.

“Bea is up, and on crutches. She goes to school two times a week now.” Jeanine tried to smile.

“Darling girl.”

“Milton.”

“Jeanine,” he said. “Help me. Repair my ragged coat, feed me, listen to me, clean my glasses, carry me home in a wheelbarrow.”

Jeanine stood still and took his hand. “Let’s sit down.”

They sat down and Jeanine waved to her cousin Betty. Betty and her friend Leona lifted their paper cups and shouted as the band played “We’re in the Money.” Jeanine refused somebody who asked her to dance. Her drink was half-empty and she wondered if her cup leaked. But the Episcopalians didn’t particularly care if anybody
drank. When she turned back to Milton her drink had been refilled and he half smiled at her as if he had been caught at something. A man in an Army Air Corps uniform came to their table.

“Do you mind?” he said.

“No, no, not at all.” Milt invited him with an open hand to dance with Jeanine.

She danced briefly with him. Then he said thank you and excused himself when he saw Mayme and her satiny auburn hair. Her sister was dancing with a young man in a bow tie and the airman tapped the young man on the shoulder and cut in. Mayme and the Air Corps fellow stepped gracefully across the sanded floor to “San Antonio Rose” and then they came to sit at the table and he shook hands with Milt and it seemed he could not stop smiling at Mayme.

He said he was home in Tarrant visiting, he had come all the way from Randolph Army Air Field in San Antonio. They had just finished grading off a four-thousand-foot strip before those new AT-6 trainers were taking off.

“Are you flying them?” asked Mayme.

“Nope. Maintenance. Single-engine.”

Milt said, “Jeanine, your face isn’t as long as it was a while ago.”

“How would I know,” Jeanine said. “I didn’t make my own face.” She put her hand to her chin surreptitiously, and then reached for her drink again.

Mayme and her Air Corps fellow with the wing-and-star patch on his shoulder were in a musical conversation as they danced a two-step to “You Are My Lucky Star.” Jeanine turned up her drink and emptied it.

Milton turned to her to say something, and then closed his eyes. He woke up in a moment and stared around himself, as if he expected to find he had disappeared from the dance and then maybe reappeared on some other planet. Then he fell asleep again sitting up. Jeanine fanned him with one of the bulletins and went and got a glass of water and sat it
in front of him. He woke up and drank it all and shut one eye. Behind his thick glasses the one open eye wandered from one side of the hall to another. Jeanine wasn’t feeling all that great herself. Then two men came up behind Milton and stood there, looking at him for a few moments.

“Do you mind if we take him home?” said one of them. They seemed old enough to be his father and/or uncle. Their nails were stained very black. “We’re printers,” the other one said. “We’ve got to set type tonight.”

“He works too hard,” said the other. “Six days a week, ten hours a day.”

“One drink and he’s a vegetable.”

“A turnip,” said the other one.

“Almost never drinks.”

“He’s a doper. We take his needles away all the time.”

“So don’t judge him harshly,” said the other one. “Just because he’s knee-walking drunk.”

“He’s going to be talking to Beulah, the Queen of Porcelain.”

They chortled. Then they each took him under an arm on either side and walked backward as Milt’s heels dragged two lines on the dance floor and his thick glasses slid forward on his nose. They disappeared into the swinging kitchen doors that snapped shut with a brief flash of light and steam. Jeanine sat turned around in her chair, watching the door flap open and shut for a few times. They had done that before. She started to pull on her gloves. She would go outside and walk around in the fresh air rather than sit here looking like a Kewpie doll that nobody wanted to buy. She was angry and humiliated. It seemed that people were glancing at her in secretive ways so she stared straight ahead stiff as a hammer wanting to knock somebody on the head.

She had a hard time getting her gloves on. A big red pasteboard heart came loose from the wall and fell down onto the table and knocked over what was left of her drink. The rum and Coke ran off
the edge of the tablecloth and splattered on her pumps and stockings.
I am so mad,
she said. She probably said it aloud. The rum and Coke smelled like something from hell. She wadded up the deceitful pasteboard heart and its fake paper lace and threw it on the floor. Her sister and the Army Air Corps man could hardly stop talking to each other. Her cousin Betty and Si were badgering the band for some swing music so they could jitterbug, and the dancing couples were all absorbed in one another, turning like planets in their own private courses. Jeanine thought about walking all fifteen miles home. Everybody else was having a good time; Mayme was clumsily trying to smoke a cigarette and laughing, fumes enveloped her hair, she looked both happy and flammable.

Jeanine turned to see Ross Everett sitting beside her.

He held his hat in one hand and in the other a cigarette glowed. He had apparently just skinned his knuckles. Jeanine tried to focus on him.

“Well, what brings you here?” She delicately lifted her hair away from her forehead, afraid she would poke herself in the eye.

“I volunteered to carry all the Red Cross boxes to Fort Worth,” he said. “To the Red Cross distribution depot.” He leaned back in his chair and crossed his legs at the ankles. His boots were shined.