Stormy Weather (21 page)

She walked with him to his truck, and when he drove away she ran into the house with a feeling that very bad weather was coming. She hunted around for something to eat. She sat in her dusty jeans in the empty house and ate bread and beans. Her mother was in town with Bea for a doctor’s appointment. Soon Bea’s cast could come off. She took the doll’s head to her sewing room and set it on the windowsill thinking someday she would make a body and a dress for it. She brushed out her wet hair and thought about Ross, and then went to the
hall mirror, and wished she had looked a little better when he drove up. Then she realized she had not asked Ross what was the best time of his own life. It would probably have been a time with Miriam, she thought. She had a hateful thought that she could end up in a competition with a dead woman and did not like herself for thinking it.

THE NEXT DAY
a hailstorm came out of the northeast. Solid-looking clouds the color of ice and irises peered at the Brazos Valley over the range of Shinnery and Blanco and Crawford Mountains, full of the immense voice of thunder and stitched with lightning. Bea was sitting up at the kitchen table, studying the odd habits of other nations for her social studies class. Hitler occupied Austria without resistance, and in the distant hiss of radio static CBS set up a thing called a news roundup with an announcer named Edward R. Murrow reporting from London.

The thunderheads erupted into the dry air with flat, circular mists crowning their tops. They blossomed upward in leisurely explosions, closed in the sky over the valley until the sky was full of thunderheads and could hold no more. The world turned a dark marine blue. The first blast of wind turned up a section of their newly repaired shingles like cat fur and ripped them off, layer after layer, and spun them off into the driveway and all over the yard, their work gone for nothing. Then the hail came down, a wild, tympanic hammering. It smashed two great galactic stars into the truck’s windshield. It beat down the clothes that were out on the clothesline, and brained one of the hens, which became confused and darted in a snaky, erratic motion for several minutes, unable to remember where the barn was. The terrier and Albert found themselves hiding under the same bed but neither one would move. They all began to cry out the names of things that would be smashed and ruined,
The garden! It’s hitting the windows! The truck!

They could not do without the truck, they could not drive it with its windshield a mass of blued craters, and Jeanine ran for the door
with such urgency she slammed into the kitchen table, and the coal-oil lamp tipped and rolled. If it fell and shattered, it would have sent out its flaming oil all over the floor. But Bea threw herself forward to catch it and grasped the hot glass chimney and set it back upright and burnt her hand severely.

Jeanine snatched up a quilt from the back porch and then the washtub, and held it over her head. She jumped down the three steps onto the grass; the barn and all the darkened world was being obscured by jumping spangled eyes the size of golf balls, beating on the galvanized metal of the washtub with an indescribable noise so that she could not hear the shouting inside the house as the lamp tipped and was taken up by its scalding chimney by Bea, in her bare hand.

Jeanine flung the quilt over the windshield of the truck. It had already been struck twice. The truck sat under the Spanish oak and the hail was bringing down small limbs and the new green leaves with their hanging pendants of tiny blooms and last year’s acorns. She then turned and ran back into the house under her washtub helmet with hail striking her on the bare legs and shoe tops and her unprotected knuckles grasping the handles.

When she got back inside Bea was sitting with a handful of hailstones in her burnt hand and a tea towel wrapped around it and the sound upstairs of glass smashing.

“My silk!”

Jeanine ran through the sudden darkness of the hallway and to the upstairs room where the wedding dress was laid out in all its complicated parts. The wind had blown out the cardboard. Jeanine threw a sheet over the silk, scattering button cards and spools of eggshell-colored thread. Her own room was also a mass of disorder as she had left her window open to the bright spring air of that morning. The window was smashed completely and hail was jumping inside. The wind had thrown the curtains and the rod with them onto her orange-crate dressing table, knocking down everything that sat on a level surface.

That night she and her sisters and mother sat at the kitchen table, over the luxury of fried chicken, eating the hail-bruised drumsticks. They went over the damage. Rain fell quietly outside, with a weeping noise. They had lost three windowpanes entirely, some were cracked, but the windshield of the truck had been hit only twice. The old house stood at the edge of ruin and for a moment Jeanine felt it was more than she could bear or care about. Bea, with her wrapped hand, glowed when Mayme and her mother exclaimed over her heroic snatch at the falling lamp and Jeanine smiled and said she was very brave. Her mother said the garden would come back, to leave it alone, even though the rows were still filled with the marbled, melting hail that by morning would be gone. It would come back.

The next morning they cleaned up. Elizabeth said, “What would I have done if it were just me and Bea?” They crept about in the upstairs hall, bent over to pick up splinters of glass. “If I just hadn’t spent that fifty dollars on shares in that well we could buy new panes.”

“Why don’t we just move in town?” said Mayme. “Let’s give it up.” She straightened up and glanced out the window into the yard, which was a mess of litter beaten down from the oaks. Her hair was twisted up in bobby pins.

Jeanine said, “No, listen, I know, I know how we can fix it. I am going to call Ross Everett. He has that empty tenant farm, he said he was tearing it down. I am going to ask him to give us the shingles and the windowpanes if he hasn’t been hit by this same storm.”

She forgot her objections to Ross throwing the tenants out into the snow. Too bad for them. She pressed her tangled hair from her face and her gray eyes were wide and anxious.

“We can’t pay him, Jeanine,” said her mother.

Jeanine said, “Maybe we could all dance and sing for him?”

“Oh there’s Vernon!” Mayme screamed and threw down her paper sack of broken glass. A car had driven up, it was the young airman from the Valentine’s Day dance. He got out of the old Model A carrying a limp
bouquet of carnations and daisies that had suffered from the long drive in a borrowed car and stared around at all the storm damage. Mayme took the stairs two at a time, ripping the bobby pins from her hair.

By the time Mayme had brushed out her hair and put on lipstick Vernon had shed his jacket and rolled up his sleeves. Mayme said, oh don’t, Vernon, you don’t have to help. Hush, Mayme, he said. Then he peeled potatoes for supper and said he had peeled many a one in basic training. That evening before he left he and Mayme sat for an hour out on the veranda. What musical voices they seemed to have, what light tones of speech. Jeanine polished her oxfords with brown polish and tried not to hear them. Then Vernon came in to say good-bye and drew an airplane on Bea’s cast and drove away.

That evening as Jeanine was making the fire in the fireplace for Bea, Mayme crept up to her sewing room and picked up the silk wedding dress. The bodice was still in two halves. She held the front half up against herself, tucked the long skirt into her waistband. She saw herself in the black window, night behind it, the lamp in front.

THE SPRING RUSHED
past them to somewhere else, some other dimension. The house was weathered to the color of burnished steel. It shut itself down every night as coals crumbled in the stove and the old well stood outside like a throat that would speak or sing from the underworld when it was dark and everyone was asleep. Every morning the windows gazed at the weather no matter if it were a spotless blue sky or great clouds that roared and tumbled overhead in fugitive waterless balloons while Jeanine’s immaculate laundry snapped on the line. Below, the Brazos drained out of the high plains and cut its way through the red earth and every month it was lower and lower until now there were only separated holes of water and it was possible the river would go dry for the first time in human memory.

M
rs. Joplin wrote down the occurrence of Jack Stoddard’s death in her book of the Brazos Valley Genealogies. It was a thick ledger in which somebody had started to enter the accounts of the old Strawn cotton gin and then quit after August 21, 1929; ten bales, six hundred pounds apiece. After that Mrs. Joplin set down intricate genealogies and random gossip. She gave the book to Bea to read. She said that she had heard that Bea’s father had once found a Comanche skull and if Bea knew anything about it or any of his memories she was free to write it down and it would give her some interesting thing to do while she was confined to crutches. Mrs. Joplin had heard that Bea was quite the little writer. These stories should be written down before they turned into folktales. She gave Bea a book on the Comanche and one on the history of Palo Pinto County. Bea kept on writing in this book for many years and in it the folds, or perhaps valves, of time were pressed together like the bellows of an accordion.

In times past, before the Tollivers had built the house, before Europeans had come, before there were horses, the spring air was choked with smoke as the Lipan Apache set fire to the grass in the valleys. After the fire, small sprouts grew up for the buffalo who every year came out of caves in the far south. The ridges were left wooded where men could sit in the shade and become invisible to the buffalo down below. Where they could watch them with the intense pleasure the predator has in watching its prey. The creatures they hunted were not only animals but also the representatives of animals to come, they were the protagonists of stories.

Then the
Nermernah
came down from the Rocky Mountains, from the remote north. They came on horses of all colors, out of the plains of alkali water. The
Nermernah
scattered before them the Apaches, the Mexicans, the Texans, the Tonkawas, and the Caddos, and took what they wanted: captives and guns and horses and women’s petticoats and mattress ticking and watches and chamber pots and kegs of tobacco. The few Lipan Apache who were left alive went away to the east, and were not heard from anymore. Their name among the Mescalero Apache and the Jicarilla Apache was a variation of the word for
lost
, for
disappeared
, for
remnant
.

By their enemies, the
Nermernah
were called
Komantcia
, Comanche. It meant someone who wants to fight all the time. Long ago they lived in the far north. They were a tribe on foot who were driven into the mountains by stronger people. They lived hungry lives and were always in fear of other tribes. They hid in the Wind River Mountains that stand like a wall of snow in northern Wyoming. They seemed to be inept, they were good at nothing. Their own cousins, the Utes, called them snakes and dirt eaters. They had messy hair and wore unclean skins. Their language had only vague names for colors. They had no ceremonies and they were too proud to eat dog. Other tribes ate dog but the Comanche would not, even if they were starving. And so the dogs that nodded and wagged at the edges of their campfires
were grateful, and after many centuries of arrogant starvation and suffering on the part of the Comanche, the dogs brought to them a gift: horses.

The horse spread across the plains sometime after the Pueblo Rebellion of 1680. The dogs came harrying them through the deep snows, up a ravine. They waited and turned in the snow and stared expectantly at the people around the campfires. And when the Comanche were mounted, they found that they were more than themselves. They discovered something in themselves that had been there all along. They possessed a genius for war and horsemanship beyond all other people. They sank onto the horses’ backs in the knowledge that they had acquired the other half of their bodies, that they were now complete. They turned on those who had disdained them. They were a moving wall of fatality. Their cavalry charges swept the plains clean. They could not be unhorsed nor outrun. Nothing could equal their joy in riding at suicidal speeds toward the terrified enemy.

They raided and set fire to Mexican settlements in South Texas and New Mexico, and if the women and children survived they were ransomed back or sold as slaves. They ranged up to the Black Hills to batter the Sioux and the Cheyenne. Their war cry was
Rah! Rah! Rah!
They grew rich in horses. They loved their horses beyond anything and they bred them carefully for splashy three-colored paints. They rode these unflinching horses into war and then came home in triumph wearing corsets and top hats and other people’s hair.

For two hundred years they were the lords of the southern plains. Nothing could stand before them except the slow tidal wave of people who came from the East. This was because the Europeans divided the land into pieces, and recorded everything they did in writing, which was a form of distilled speech. And that was the end of the story of the wars of the Comanche. The grinning, treacherous dogs trotted up in the night, gray as bullets, and took back their gift of horses.

The house was built in 1873, the year the last person in Palo Pinto
County was killed by the Comanche. Jesse Veale’s horse threw him as he tried to escape, near Ioni Creek. They found him dead and pale, leaning back against a tree, shot through many times. His hat and his gun were gone, but he still had his hair. By that time Samuel Tolliver had bought land including the ridge overlooking the Brazos, and with his two brothers he laid the sandstone foundations of the house, and lifted the balloon frame over it and dug the well. They nailed on cedar shingles and placed glass in each window.

In 1883 Nannie and Samuel Tolliver lost their two children in a diphtheria epidemic. That year Mussolini was born in the village of Predappio in Emilia-Romagna, and in 1884 Isoroku Yamamoto was born in Niigata on Honshu Island in Japan. In early January of 1887 a norther struck the Brazos River valley, dropping the temperatures to eight degrees Fahrenheit. By the fifteenth of January the temperature had climbed to eighty-six degrees. Then on the sixteenth of January a second norther blew in at four-thirty in the afternoon, driving the temperature down to forty-two. By the thirty-first of that same January the temperature was ninety degrees in the shade.

In 1889 Adolph Schickelgruber was born in Braunau-am-Inn, Austria, and the great Union Stockyards were open for business in Fort Worth, with a capacity for 5,000 head of cattle per day. In the spring of 1892 Israel C. Everett, a cattleman of Comanche County, drove into the nearby town of DeLeon with his wife and two sons. They were on their way to attend the funeral of Reverend Cyrus Campbell, one of the oldest settlers of the area. The two boys were told to look carefully at the face of the dead man, because in his youth he had been paid five dollars by the Republic of Texas to forge the leg irons for Santa Ana after the battle of San Jacinto. In 1897 John Cardwell Stoddard was born at the remains of the Stoddard ranch west of Mineral Wells while his father and grandfather drank themselves blind in the corn crib. In 1900, Samuel and Nannie’s last and only surviving child was born, a late baby that they named Elizabeth.

The Tolliver house was built in the southern style, with a fireplace and chimney at each end and a long cool hall in the middle. The house was alive in a stubborn and silent way and within its walls people were born and died and bread rose in its wooden tray. The wearings of use patterned the house; the beaten path to the well, the grapevines that grew in profusion near the washhouse where soapy water was thrown out, a trench dug by the front hooves of horses at the hitch rack. Men left their spurs at the back porch rail. Visiting cousins hid in the sugar barn to attempt smoking cigarette butts and watched in nauseated fascination as the world revolved slowly around them. Men left for the oil fields and broke their marriage vows and marriages were contracted again and broke apart and re-formed and somewhere a woman wept with her face to the window glass.

Two hundred miles to the north, where the rolling hills of Central Texas flattened out to the plains, the XIT ranch was broken up because of the drought and financial depression of the late 1880s. The owners began to sell most of its million acres in farm-size lots. The Slaughter ranch did the same. Families came for cheap land, thirteen dollars an acre, and gang plows tore up the grama buffalo grass and the wire grass. They planted wheat and dismembered the root matts of the short-grass plains and for a while the dry-land farmers made money with wheat, but it didn’t last long. The Great Depression and the great drought began in 1930. On April 14, 1935, the largest dust storm ever recorded foamed across the skinned land and in three states buried whole towns, railroads, cars, trucks, people, cattle, and houses. Miriam Everett died of dust pneumonia.

The Milky Way moved through its summer and winter journeys. The Comanche do not believe in a succession of numbered years. That the year 1873 will progress on to 1883 and then to 1889, and finally to 1937, and on into an infinity of numbers. They believe it is always the same year, unchanging, moving in a steady circle and within the circle of the year we are born and strive upward toward
something and then we wilt and fade away. Within the year’s wheel different people rise to power and then are defeated and their names are a variation for the word
lost
, for
disappeared
, for
remnant
. And in the meantime in the center of the wheel the people charge forward in a glorious manner toward the places where their enemies dwell.

JEANINE BENT DOWN
to pick up the arrowhead at the edge of the graveyard. She lay down her tools to hold it in both hands and look at it. It was a dark rose flint. The edge was still sharp. Flint never dulls. No matter how old an arrowhead might be it is still edged with ancient wars and bloodletting. She put it in her pocket and went on to the peach orchard with her borrowed pruning shears and the booklet from Texas A&M in hand. It was a pale, dry day and the peach orchard was raining a few pink petals, which lifted and fell on the traveling wind like snow from distant mountains. The directions were complicated. She had to remove all hanger shoots, rootstock suckers, and water sprouts from the center of the tree. Leave one-year-old, red, eighteen- to twenty-four-inch bearing shoots. Peach trees, it said, bear fruit only on one-year-old branches. She would make all this happen and it would leave her with a deep feeling of being more than herself.

She began to sculpt and carve the old trees and take away the imprisoning scale and opened the door for the new fruit. As she stood with a flowering branch in her hand it occurred to her that the round of the year would go on forever, the peach trees would bloom and then it would be hay time and cotton harvest and branding time all up and down the valley, and then winter again. This was work that she loved, the work that it took to keep the house alive, looking out of its shivery glass, its heart the beating small thunder of a good fire in the cookstove, and its voice the radio; Bob Wills singing “Time Changes Everything.”