Stormy Weather Page 3

  The country near the Louisiana border was heavy and green, pine trees sagged under drapes of Virginia creeper vine that had turned the color of rust in the fall air. They came to the town of Arp. Under the black-on-white arp sign a redheaded woman with a flock of guinea hens pecking at her feet sold boiled peanuts from a two-gallon pail. The peanuts tumbled in the smoking water. They were the color of snuff and looked like eyes gone bad. Jeanine and Mayme tried to make Bea eat them to see if it would kill her or not. Bea was, at that time, an obedient and amiable child.

  Arp was where the railhead lay, a town of stacked casing pipe and barrels of drilling fluid, piles of cable and whipstocks and food supplies. The trains off-loaded equipment and canned goods and then took on the high-grade East Texas crude into tanker cars. The field had developed so fast there weren’t even enough pipelines. Trucks churned their wheels in the scarlet mud, hauling material to the drill sites throughout Rusk and Gregg counties. Locomotives came through at the rate of thirty a day, fifteen going north and fifteen south. There was almost no housing to be had. A city of tents had grown up around nearly every town in the area, and people lived among the forests of pine like an army of cheerful refugees. Boxcars and tankers arrived behind their engines, screaming out of the pine forests, down the unsteady roadbeds. Boxcars that said INTERNATIONAL AND GREAT NORTHERN, TEXAS AND PACIFIC, GULF COAST AND RIO GRANDE. Trains became the sound of Jeanine’s memories of East Texas, the steam engines with their hoarse and violent and distant singing.

  Her mother said they would not live in a tent even though Jeanine and her older sister were about to say they wanted to live in a tent more than anything. They imagined looking at the crashing loud oil strike world from under the ballooning fabric, it would be just their own family together under canvas. But their mother said if there was no house for them, she was leaving. She would take the girls and go home, back to the Tolliver farm, and he could make his own way as best he could. Elizabeth Tolliver Stoddard made a dramatic gesture toward throwing the skillet in a cardboard box and folding up Mayme’s overalls. Jack Stoddard reached out to touch Jeanine’s hair and said, No, Liz, I couldn’t make it without all of you. I’ll find us something. Don’t go, Liz.

  They were lucky to get part of a house in on the north side of Longview. It was a farmhouse whose farm had been devoured by the oil fields and the tents and the little board-and-batten rent houses. It had been added onto many times; the old farmhouse was a confusing jumble of rooms and closed-in porches and windowless additions. Over everything the thin hundred-foot East Texas pines bent in the wind and sang.

  They had three rooms in the back, looking out onto the well and the hard-packed dirt of the yard. There were at least three other families in the house but it seemed like more than that because there were so many children running rampant in the day and the night. Some people from Illinois on the second floor screamed at one another about whether or not a one-dollar bill the wife had received for three hens and all their chicks was counterfeit. Another family consisted of a set of parents and two ratlike boys with wide bare feet who attacked each other with chinaberry shooters and screamed and pretended to die. Jeanine helped to unpack; the girls would sleep in one room and their parents in another and they would eat and talk and cook and listen to the radio in the third. They stuck the stovepipe out a window. The sisters called it the Crazy House.

  After school they ran down to the railroad tracks and placed things on the rails for trains to run over; sometimes a penny, although pennies were precious. The trains did peculiar things to metal; nails flattened and shone, hairpins turned to steel ribbons. Men in tattered clothes jumped out of the freight cars and ran for the trackside weeds, there were so many of them that the railroad police just stood back and watched them and let them go. They were men who had seen the economic structure of the nation suddenly disintegrate without warning, and they felt they had become citizens of some strange country without knowing it. It was a nation they no longer knew. A wasteland without law or order, and they had taken to traveling through this wasteland almost like tourists.

  But there was work in the East Texas oil fields. Jeanine’s father drove loads from the railhead out to the field at ten dollars a load, and then fifteen dollars and then twenty dollars as the drilling became more intense and the immensity of the oil strike became apparent. The excitement of it gave him a merry, lunatic air. At one drill site, gas came up out of the mud of the slush pit in bubbles the size of baseballs. Jack Stoddard and the crew amused themselves while he waited for his load by throwing matches at the bubbles and watching them explode. He told Liz and the girls it wouldn’t be long before they had them their racehorse. He stopped drinking. He said he did not have a drinking problem, the problem was the hangovers. So he moved on to gambling instead and lost money stone-cold sober.

  While they lived in the Crazy House their Tolliver grandparents died within days of each other from pneumonia that many people said was caused by the dust, and Uncle Reid ran off and left Aunt Lillian and cousin Betty. He went north somewhere, maybe to the Oklahoma field, and nobody ever heard from him again. Jeanine realized people you love could disappear. This opened a hole in her universe, some illusory backdrop had torn away and beyond this an unlit waste and she could not see into it. She had a difficult time putting this into words to herself and so she sat with her fists against her eyes as they drove back to Central Texas, looking at the sparks against the dark of her eyelids.

  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 rem
embered 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 window 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.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  They 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.