Stormy Weather (4 page)

They buried their kin in the old Tolliver graveyard, standing among a crowd of neighbors with heads bowed to hear the Methodist minister say
I am the resurrection and the life
while his tie fluttered in the hot, dust-laden wind. Little Bea was not allowed to come to the graveside because children should not be burdened with these things more than necessary or maybe the thinking was that if they were exposed to such things at a tender age they would become indifferent. Bea and a little redheaded neighbor girl had to stay inside the house where they sliced up the funeral bread and ate all the sugar and butter.

The older children gathered on the front veranda afterward to get away from the grown-ups who were suffering through emotions that the children could not help or allay and so they all sat and fooled
around with telephone line insulators. There was a boy named Milton Brown and he was not related to her but to some neighbors. He wore a suit and steel-rimmed spectacles. He stuttered so badly he sounded as if he were trying to speak in Morse code.

Jeanine turned up one of the glass insulators and put it over her nose and her cousin Betty laughed and then stopped laughing and cleared her throat.

“We went to school t-t-together,” Milton said to Jeanine. “I sat in front of, uh, you and stuttered.”

“I don’t remember you,” said Jeanine. She said it in a mean nasal voice around the glass insulator.

“How could you forget!” He seemed to speak better if he shouted. “I’ll remind you of it someday.”

He got up in a jerky way and went inside; he left Jeanine and her cousins feeling bad about themselves in a way that was not repairable at the moment. Jeanine turned to her cousin and then didn’t say anything, but got up and walked into the silent house after him. Milton Brown was sitting in the parlor in front of the Atwater Kent radio and watching the little balls inside the glass battery drift up and down while the Carter family sang “I’ll Fly Away.” He sat in a chair backward, his chin was on his forearms.

“B-border radio, Jeanine,” he said. “Hundred thousand watts, you can get it in your bobby pins in Del Rio. Yow.”

Through the nine-foot parlor windows she could see to the veranda where her cousins sat and turned the blue-green glass knobs over in their hands and the glass glinted in the hot air.
When I die, Hallelujah bye and bye, I’ll fly away
. From beyond the central hall she heard the sound of a man walking across the kitchen floor, and the tick of a dipper lowered into a white enamel water bucket. For one second she thought it was her grandfather, but it was not, nor would it ever be again. She suddenly remembered one slow, dark evening when she and her grandfather and her father and Uncle Reid had walked
down to the barn lot to see the work team. She did not remember when it was, or why they had come to visit, only that it was the most peaceful memory available to her. She had felt safe and secure with her hand in her father’s, and the men talking, the work team calling out to her grandfather in low tones, the warm good smell of harness and grass hay. The tears poured from between her fingers and she began to cry with quiet, strangled noises. Milton Brown sat absorbed in the radio noise and did not hear her.

IT WAS THE
last time she saw the old Tolliver farm for many years. It remained in Jeanine’s imagination a kind of lost kingdom far to the west of them, the old house guarded by Spanish oaks and one great live oak and the Brazos River running green and twisted far below. The scaling bark of the peach trees that had been left unpruned and uncared for, birds’ nests in the chimneys. The land shriveled in the dry heat. She was left with the confused idea of her grandparents, now buried in the Tolliver graveyard, as sailing away in the strata below them to a place of great joy, buoyed on underground streams of oil.

IT WAS IN
East Texas that her father began to gamble with intent seriousness, there in the outwash of people who had come seeking work in the oil fields as the Depression bottomed out. Jack Stoddard was like a juggler tossing up jobs and dice and racehorses and ladies of the night. Sometimes he caught them all in order and sometimes he forgot where they were or that he did not have enough hands.

They moved twenty miles south to Kilgore. Her father made up his mind to move the way birds made up their minds in midflight, wild, startling shifts that sent them spinning away through the vagrant airs to yet another oil field. They carried their cardboard boxes through a piercing cold norther into another tiny rent house of board-
and-batten. Close by was the chugging of a ditching machine biting through the dirt to lay a line of narrow production pipe. Some other family that lived there before them had blocked the holes in the walls with old corsets and underpants, and Mayme said whoever it was must have abandoned the place stark naked with their tits flopping loose and she and Jeanine laughed until they could not catch their breath.

It came to Christmas Eve of 1932; next door to them, another family lived in an abandoned engine shed. They were a foreign people and they sang
Quanno nascette ninno a Betelem me, E rannote pa vea meizo journo…
There was no money for presents so Jeanine and her older sister Mayme and Bea, who was eight, decided to sing to their mother and father. This would be their Christmas gift. In those days most people could sing unaccompanied, and the greater part of the time they had to. The sisters meant to sing Christmas carols or comic songs, but the songs that occurred to them were old melodies of terrible sadness, songs that came to the girls without thought. They sang
O Shenandoah, I love your daughter
and
If I had the wings of an angel, over these prison walls I would fly.
They could not stop themselves, they were caught up in a descending chute of music that mourned aloud for all the Christmases unattended and wandering people who could not find their way home. They sang “A Shanty in Old Shanty Town” and at last they slid into the atonal hills song “The Three Little Babes,” this last a most terrible ancient lament as old as Scotland itself. It was a Christmas morning, when everything was still, and the ghosts of the three dead children came running down the hill. Jeanine could not finish it. Their father was attentive and silent over his coffee and their mother put her hand to her face and wept.

That night Jeanine could not sleep. The girls were crowded up in their one bed, wadded in quilts. They had made their mother weep on this night of the archangels and shepherds in the fields, when they were supposed to be joyful. She got out of bed and went to the win
dow to stare out into the night, and as she wiped angrily at her eyes with a corner of the quilt snow began to fall. It was the first snow Smith County had seen in thirty years. The tops of the pine trees disappeared in a foam of descending snow. It fell on the needles and lined them with spines of white and built up on the wires of the fence lot, and burdened all the sounds of the town and the derricks with a deep, submissive hush. It was a swansdown welcome for the new year, a confetti and ticker tape parade. All over the oil fields and through the overcrowded towns, each person had some small reason that the snowfall was for them alone, a sign that their lives were going to get better.

She watched as the flakes struck the windowpane and traced them with her fingertip down the cold glass as they slid and melted out of their ornate and classical designs. Far away the derrick lights shone into the columns of radiant drift. It was just before the bank failures of 1933, and the rest of the nation paused, dumbfounded, in their party clothes and tinfoil hats, in Chicago and New York and Los Angeles and New Orleans, while money fell like hot ashes out of the bottoms of their pockets.

T
hey were photographs that people took of one another with their box cameras, the old Kodaks, not the documentary photographs taken by the Farm Security Administration. People appeared at their best and kept their secrets to themselves. Elizabeth carefully pasted pictures into the album with its black paper and kept the album in a tin trunk to safeguard it from being thrown out again. There was a picture of Uncle Reid Stoddard and some other unidentified men grasping the tongs on a rotary rig; whoever took the picture must have been a friend, a fellow worker. Reid and his fellows are posing boyishly, their caps tilted. In the background are canvas shields around the drilling platform to baffle the cutting wind. They are all smiling. This was shortly before Reid left in the middle of the night for Oklahoma and pinned a note to the front door with a shingle nail.

Also in the album is a picture of the three girls sitting on the flatbed of the Reo Speed Wagon carefully posed in starched dresses with their
arms around one another and Bea in the middle between Jeanine and Mayme, and they all have enormous smiles. The kitten in Bea’s clutches was soon lost in some move or other. There is a blurry shot of Elizabeth and Aunt Lillian at a carnival, holding fringed satin pillowcases that say
EL PASO LAND OF SUNSHINE AND GALVESTON.
They had never been to either one of these places but you take whatever you win when you knock over the chalk milk bottle. There is a photograph of Jack Stoddard in a fedora holding a cane fishing pole with an old boot dangling on the end of the line. Who was it who took that picture? they asked themselves. They forgot, or checked to see who was missing, or tried to recall who all was there.

People at that time did not take photographs of themselves or others at gambling or drinking in the sleazy honky-tonks that mushroomed at the edges of the East Texas boomtowns and nobody with any kind of camera caught her father on film in the dance hall and bar called the Cotton Blossom dancing with a very young woman about whom he only knew her first name. The album didn’t have any pictures of her mother washing clothes in a washtub in the backyard near the railroad tracks. There was no device that recorded her mother’s building fear that her husband would be injured or killed in the increasing violence of the boom or that he might disappear into a life of compulsive gambling and nocturnal assignations with unknown or even known women. She had spoken of going home to the old Tolliver farm so often that it became a kind of music, a ballad. It was “My Old Kentucky Home” and “I’ll Take You Home Again, Kathleen,” a place of noiseless days and solitude and peaches and clear water from a well, without rent, unmortgaged. Jeanine believed every word of it.

Mayme poses very carefully in a print dress, made especially for her high school graduation in Kilgore. She stands in front of a flowering crepe myrtle. The photograph does not give the slightest indication that in the town, twenty-four derricks stood within half a block
of each other along Commerce Street, or that another was driven in a churchyard or that a man sitting in a barbershop getting his morning shave watched as a roughneck walked in, painted a red
X
on the floor and said,
We’ll drill here.
Nor does the black-and-white photograph indicate the lovely dark red of her hair.

There is a photo of Bea at the age of eight sitting with her schoolbooks on a running board, she holds them out for the camera, she is proud of them. She has just finished writing a story that she very much hoped would please her teacher, the story of a princess in an enchanted forest who ate nothing but peaches. A dwarf pulling a cart had come to offer her eternal life in exchange for her golden hair. She stares at the camera while invisible stories appear and evaporate inside her skull.

The only professional photo is of Jeanine mashed in with forty-eight other children for her freshman high school picture. She turns her square face and long, bright eyes toward the school photographer, her light hair carefully curled. She is unfolding inside, leaf after leaf. She is becoming a young woman and it happens without effort.

Pictures taken at match races are hard to come by. There were no racing sheets or published bloodlines, no bleachers or stands, no guardrail, no photo finish. It was roughhouse racing, where a Stetson was dropped to the ground as a starting signal, where once a jockey killed another with a loaded bat in a race in Rocksprings and nobody was ever charged. The horses that ran on these tracks were a breed that had no official name, they were short and hardy and had a phenomenal sprint that could carry them a quarter of a mile at blazing speeds. So different from the prestigious and expensive Thoroughbred racing on distant tracks in California and Maryland and Kentucky and New York where the tall sleek horses pounded out a mile, a mile and a quarter. This was Texas, it was old-time grassroots horse racing, a colonial holdover, and enormous amounts of money changed hands below the notice of tax collectors and lawmakers.

Often the owners of these quarter-mile racehorses asked someone to take a picture of themselves with their champion in the front yard of the farmhouse or the ranch house. There are a great many of these photographs. Somebody to one side is flapping a blanket or opening an umbrella to get the horse to point his ears, to look alert, like the speed demon he is supposed to be. Many of these horses came to be famous in later years but in the Kodak Brownie photographs they always look commonplace and sleepy. If they did not win at the races they would go home and start herding cattle and dragging wood to the chuck fire.

In one photo the man named Ross Everett who had rescued Jeanine at the blacksmith shop sits on the running board of a new 1934 Chevrolet truck with his western hat at the back of his head. A roan pony stands tied to the slats of the stock rack. The pony was for his boy, who was only five, and Jeanine was in a state of acute anguish over the fact that a five-year-old kid got his own horse and she, at seventeen, had none. And so she told Ross Everett that she used to like horses but she didn’t anymore, she was looking for something that talked and could sit in a seat at the movie theater and eat popcorn with its hands. She said it to be smart like Claudette Colbert. She really wanted to live in the country, married to a banker, where she could have Thoroughbreds and Airedales.

He said,
Well, that happens
. He had come all the way from Abilene to East Texas to write down the names of famous winning racing quarter-mile horses in a notebook. They had to be stallions. He thought they ought to be a recognized breed, but some people regarded them as being in the same category as bathtub gin. He was off to Louisiana here in a minute to deal with the coonasses. Ross Everett smiled into the lens and sat on the running board and pushed his hat to the back of his head and gazed out into the black-and-white world of the potential photograph. Mrs. Everett was very pretty. She stared down with deep concentration into the viewfinder to see that Jeanine had also
appeared in one corner of it, looking back at her sister Mayme, her thin arms going in different directions and so she clicked it twice. She told Jeanine’s mother she would send her one of the pictures. In the background a train is taking on water.

Jack Stoddard stands holding the halter of Smoky Joe Hancock, in a pressed shirt and khaki pants. The horse is blocky and ungraceful and no amount of blanket-flapping or umbrella-opening will make him look like he could cover 440 yards in twenty-four seconds. His forelock is short and frazzled, his ears flop each to one side. But Jack Stoddard has his hat brim snapped over his face and a cigar between his fingers.

This is how people wanted to appear to the world and to later generations. It is how they wished to be remembered no matter how hard life might have become. They framed themselves in their best clothes and with their most valuable possessions and smiled. Hard times and collapsing marriages and heavy labor was nobody’s business but their own.

So Bukka White sang in the East Texas juke joints in Houston, Conroe, Corsicana. He held the neck of the Dobro guitar like a baseball bat and wrung blues from it, and after him came Ma Rainey’s Jazz Hounds. Her father lifted the dice in his fist and all eyes were on him alone until he threw and then the magical moment would be gone. The singer turned to the old 1920s song “Red Cap Porter” and the dice moved with infinite slowness around the circle from hand to hand, manic little creatures with dots for brains. He either bought or won Smoky Joe in 1935, when they moved to Conroe, north of
Houston. The Conroe field lay inside the skirts of drifting fog that came from the Gulf of Mexico. He drove up to the house shouting for them all to come out, they’d got their first real racehorse.

Smoky Joe Hancock was an own son of Old Joe Hancock, a dark two-year-old stud with a savage temper and horizontal scars on his legs where he had fought his way out of a trailer. He had stubby ears and a head like a shoe box. His mane sprayed up from his stallion’s crest in short, wild tassels. He was known as a hard case. He threw his jockeys. The seller admitted he had once run off a railless brush track and tore through several barbecue tables and a line of people with plates in their hands like a boxy rocket before they could get him to the score line. It was why her father got him for a low price.

Bea said, “He’s had a hard life.” Little Bea had been assigned the novel
Black Beauty
in her reading circle at the new Conroe Elementary and the book had taken a fixed grip on her imagination with its injustices and its defiantly happy ending. “He used to belong to a rich widow, and she had her coachman to beat him with a bumbershoot until he fell to his knees.” Bea paused and then said, in a low, dramatic voice, “On the hard cobblestones.”

He turned the stallion into an abandoned brick yard down the street from their rent house in Conroe. Smoky was both defiant and lonely in all the trash thrown into the oil-soaked earth, alert and suspicious among the broken toilet seats and greasy paper sacks.

“We got our speed demon, Jeanine,” he said. “We’re going to run the competition around here into the ground. He’s blazing hell at four hundred forty yards. He just needs a hit over the head once in a while.” He said this carelessly, as if it were a matter easily taken care of with a two-by-four or a section of pipe. “I think he can stay the longer distances. We can win some money with this horse, Pistol. And I don’t want you trying to handle him. He’s dangerous.”

“I don’t want to take care of him,” said Jeanine. “I got other things to do.” The brightly printed flour sacks were hard to get. Many other
girls had figured out the place to get them was at the bakery or the big hotels in Conroe, where bakers and cooks emptied them and then piled them in the storage rooms. It took six flour sacks to make a dress, and you had to get them all matched. Jeanine was at present working on collecting a pattern in aqua and dark blue. It had a risqué slash of red in it.

She tossed her new short bob in a way that made the blunt ends fly up. She made astonished gestures at herself in the cracked mirror.

“Either that or he starves.”

Whatever her father took up it was bound to go wrong. They would move and leave Smoky Joe behind somewhere. They would lose him. He would die of sleeping sickness, he would break one of his legs. It was the same for everybody. The feeling that things were falling apart and that nothing worked. Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow had been killed over in Louisiana, a hundred miles away, and for ten cents you could see the tan Ford V-8 shot all to pieces, it still had blood and the stain of brains all over the seats. The baby son of Charles Lindbergh was kidnapped and murdered. Not even rich and famous people could protect themselves from alien beings creeping in during the dark hours and destroying your life. Even if you were virtuous. Nothing was stable or safe. Even the earth itself lifted into the sky of the high plains of Texas and Oklahoma and blew into dust storms as thick as airborne petroleum.

Jeanine had a sample tube of lipstick in a harsh red and with it she made herself several new kinds of lips. She was interested in young men. Young men were attracted by good hair and open-toed shoes with inch-and-a-half heels and dresses with the new drooping shawl collars, fall fashions of 1934. They wanted to go places and see things; you could see a demonstration of how they faked the play-by-play ball games in front of the Conroe radio station, where a man knocked two pencils together to imitate a base hit. That was free.
Play ball!
the announcer shouted into the microphone, and a man spun crowd sounds
on a record. She understood that her father slid from addiction to addiction, a shape changer, and nothing would hold him in one place for long, and she knew this with a childlike combination of disillusion and forgiveness.

“Horse, you are in for a hard life,” she said. “Hope you like potato peelings.”

She and her father walked away and Jeanine turned back to see the dark horse staring after her with his ears up, a frightened young stallion only two years old, who did not know where he was nor who had bought him nor what was to happen to him.