Stormy Weather (31 page)

She folded the paper and put it in her purse and then started the washing to get everyone ready for their weekend in Galveston. She flung clothes into the churning suds of the washing machine and the fumes of the gasoline engine filled the back porch. A strange feeling of being a visitor overcame her; a kind and polite visitor who was helping out with the housework, and who had someplace else to go, someplace exciting.

She sang “Your Cheating Heart” in a hoarse and wobbling voice as she hung tea towels and underpants and brassieres and sheets on the line as clouds skated overhead like glacial soapsuds. She walked through the garden where the fall harvest of trilobite leaves of sweet potatoes appeared, childlike things toasting brown in their earth beds. Her fields all swept of seedling cedar now seemed to belong to somebody else, and so did the orchard. So she walked through the stones of the family graveyard and pulled up a greenbrier sprout that had sprung up with the new rains and had begun to crawl over her grandmother’s headstone. What home had Nannie Tolliver left behind to come here
from Northeast Texas, what family graveyards had she abandoned to the greenbrier? You had to wonder. Nannie probably loaded up her trunk with quilts and dishes and the porcelain doll’s head and said
Let’s go, Samuel
. Jeanine turned away and went into the house, restless, seized by a need for movement.

She threw cold water in her face and then went down into the cotton field. Abel lifted his hat to her; he was on a four-sweep riding cultivator behind Jo-Jo and Sheba. She listened for a moment as he spoke to them, listened to the jingle of the harnesses and the distant sound of the small points slicing through the soil. Tomorrow she would ride the seed drill, which would carry the steel barrels of Paris Green arsenate to kill the weevils and next year when she came back to visit, the new plants would flush out free of infestation. Then she went back into the house again, to stand in front of the electric fan for a moment. In all the valley fields the cotton was expanding into knots of white fiber. It was Tuesday evening; the sky blued with the watercolors of evening. Fibber and Molly burst into the sound waves.
Oh, Molly, how patient and sane you are, with your silly and loving husband, how calm in the make-believe world of radio, in some imaginary town that never changes.
She finally rested on the veranda steps, slouched back against one of the posts, watching the seamless evening fall across the world.

That night she sat in her room while her sisters and mother talked about the suitcases and what if they were lost when they changed trains in Dallas. Whether the Texas Railroad Commission was going to shut down the well, if Clark Gable was going to divorce Rita Langhorn, and did he really pilot the plane in
Test Pilot
. They listened to the radio for an hour and then her mother and sisters went to bed. Jeanine walked restlessly into the hall. A series of selves stood behind her reflection in the beveled mirror, tokens of herself as she grew up from one year to another, from Ranger to Tarrant to Mexia, out to Monahans in the great sea of the Permian Basin, to Arp and Kilgore, to Wharton, where her father had betrayed them so terribly and where
he lay in his lonely grave, and finally here, to home, which would soon not be her home anymore. And all the time her heart opening and closing, opening and closing, carrying her through whatever shifts and changes came at her, an unshakable core of self. She pulled on her thin nightgown and went to bed but she could not sleep. The hours went by like scrap metal, rusty and slow. Jeanine got up and went down the stairs and into the kitchen. The moon shone in bars through the windows.

She reached for the drawer with the old photograph album in it. She found herself sitting in front of the lamp with the clear electric light gleaming across the yellowed pictures of herself in her father’s arms, of Uncle Reid smiling into the camera with his hands on the great wrenches at the Kelly hose, bound for oblivion. At her father, handsome and still young, before the sour gas, before the arrest, holding Smoky Joe’s lead rope and the stallion’s blocky dark body a coiled spring from which speed would explode, loosing him down the track into a winner’s circle. From across the hall Bea spoke to somebody in a dream and her voice was full of garbled conviction. Jeanine gazed down at the photo of Mayme in her high school graduation dress, Ross Everett sitting on the running board of his truck with his hat pushed back, herself at the edge of the photo in her accidental appearance, in that black-and-white landscape of 1935. And the spectral presence in all these pictures, the one standing behind the camera. The one looking into the lens whose name was soon forgotten or confused in these family albums and so at last remained only as a loving and generous unseen presence.

Jeanine saw that there were four or five pages in the back that were still empty. She ripped out a page from the Sears Roebuck catalog and slipped it in to mark the place where the wedding pictures would go, and postcards from aerodromes in far places, and then photographs of children and all the other lives to come, and shut the old album carefully, and put it back into the tin trunk.

Thanks to my agent, Liz Darhansoff, and my editor, Jennifer Brehl, for their patience. Special thanks to Donna Stoner for her encouragement. My gratitude to Gary Pogue for explanations of match-racing and betting, to Betty Nethery for personal stories of horses and match-racing in West Texas, to cable-tool drillers Pete Roseneau and Tommy Johnson, to geologist Denise Ranagan for allowing me on a drill site, to Sky Lewey for information on the mohair industry, and to the docents at the Midland Oil Museum. To Jim and Lois Webb for memories of the 1930s.