IN SEPTEMBER THE
dread cabal in Washington had reduced the allowables on Central Texas wells and increased those in West Texas. Her mother couldn’t figure it out. Theirs was much higher-grade oil than the junk out in the Permian, that stuff out there was saturated
with sulfur. Mr. Lacey consoled her. It will change, he said. The West Texans have got more influence in the legislature than we have. And besides the pressure is still holding, it’s twelve hundred pounds of pressure at the wellhead and they aren’t going to need to pump it, it’s coming up on its own. Elizabeth sent Mr. Lacey home with casseroles because he was divorced and ate nothing but Spam sandwiches and she had at last been convinced to call him George.
“Vernon’s got leave! Vernon’s got leave! September fifteenth! Five days!” Mayme skipped around the kitchen and hugged Jeanine and held a geranium flower by her ear. She danced across the room in a sort of tango. “Rum and Coca-Colaaaa!” A slow rain poured down the windowpanes, and dripped from the tips of the sotol and agarita. Water ran off the edges of the roof in a glittering curtain and the grass was green again.
They would go into Tarrant and stay all night at the Kincaid Hotel and then the next day catch the train to Galveston to meet Vernon. Ross could not go to Galveston because the windmill crew was coming again, they had to pull sucker rods from the water wells in the Upshaw pasture and he had to be there.
But Jeanine and Bea and Mayme were very happy about the hotel, as they had never stayed in one, and could hardly imagine the maids making up a room for them, and cleaning up after them when they left. They would have the whole day in Tarrant, and her mother would talk with Bea’s teachers, and she would see the new high school, and she would choose for herself a new pair of beach shoes at the shoe store. Betty would probably urge two pairs on her. After all, Magnolia was making an offer to buy them out. And that Mr. Lacey would be joining them down in Galveston, in a white sharkskin suit, probably with a carnation in his buttonhole and he would take all of them out to dinner. It would be a dinner with daunting and peculiar food such as lobsters and shrimps. Mayme was in a state of anxiety about how to approach these things and what sorts of instruments she would have
to use, and Elizabeth said that Mr. Lacey—George—would have a long, serious discussion with Bea about going on to high school. Her mother was happier than Jeanine had ever seen her. Bea ran about the house singing
I used to love you ’til you ate my dog…
It was the Crazy Water Gang’s parody of lonesome heartbroke country and western music.
I ain’t no cowboy,
she sang.
I just found this hat…
Bea had lately been reading e. e. cummings, and had taken up an attitude of cynicism and hauteur, but that evaporated when she was mailed a check for five dollars from
Savage Western Tales
for her vivid story of Kitty Kelsay being stabbed repeatedly by a renegade white man during the Comanche attack in Uvalde County and the famous twenty-mile running fight led by the hero horse, Fuzzy Buck. Five dollars had utterly destroyed her desire to go to Paris and write free verse and live on the Rue Chat Noir. If there was such a rue.
Ten girls had come to her freshman party. Some of them were driven out from town in the endless rain. Two were from her eighth-grade class at the Old Valley Road schoolhouse. They snarled into excited knots and spoke in gasps and showed one another the brand names on their saddle shoes. They argued about hillbilly music and Tommy Dorsey. One of the girls said her sister was a junior and all the juniors and seniors loved Tommy Dorsey and so that ended the discussion. They asked about Bea’s fall down the well, and her operation, and she showed them the red scars on her leg and said she was going to write about it someday. The kitchen smelled of Evening in Paris cologne and Blue Grass talcum and a fine, soft dampness.
Bea’s hair was cut short and curled, she wore a dirndl skirt and peasant blouse and saddle shoes. There were three more skirts and two dresses in her closet. Her family owned an oil well. They had part interest in a racehorse. They lived in a white-painted two-story house with running water and electricity and a telephone and it was raining everywhere, all over the world.
“I’m going to be an author,” she said. “I’m published already.” She
showed them the check for five dollars with her name on it, and the date and the amount and signature by an authorizing person.
One of the girls from town said, “
Savage Western Tales
? Oh they read that down at the garage. Newton’s garage.” The girl stared at Bea for a long moment. “Well I guess that’s nice.”
The party lasted until nearly ten and when Bea lay down to sleep in her own bed, in her own newly painted room, she was suddenly frightened that she had said too much or done too much. Then she was not sleepy at all. She was assaulted with a very clear vision of the town girls in high school coming up to her and repeating Kitty Kelsay’s desperate scream,
Oh my God, Mother, they are killing me!
and laughing and laughing. She felt panicked. They would all read it at some garage in Mineral Wells. It was a stupid story, stupid, and it had her name on it, and it would go all over the country. Bea got out of bed and lifted up the sleeping Prince Albert and carried him into the kitchen and began to pace back and forth.
She didn’t want to go to high school after all. She would hide at home from her own printed words, hide out forever. Tears came to her eyes as she thought of the horror of it. And then at ten at night she heard Winifred Beasley’s voice, metallic and thin. A clear and reasonable Winifred Beasley that spoke to her of the joys of healthful foods, a sweet voice lecturing on the benefits of whole grains and Graham crackers and flaxseed. She was on the radio. Bea stopped pacing to walk over to the old Emerson and turn it up. That was her. After a few moments the announcer said that was the
Home Health Hour
presented by the Humble Oil Company, which would henceforth be aired a half hour every weekday night. They would never get rid of Winifred Beasley. Never.
A
t four o’clock on the blazing hot afternoon of September 13
Jeanine took the truck down to Strawn’s Crossroads store and filled the tires with air, and asked old man Joplin to change the oil for her. He peered into the engine with great interest for a long time and then remembered he said he would change the oil. Jeanine went in to pay. Mrs. Joplin was in the backyard, smoking a cigarette among the cages of live chickens, cooling herself in the shade of the live oak trees that surrounded the old frame building. She exhaled smoke heavily into the damp air, threw the cigarette down, and hurried into the store.
“Now, Jeanine,” said Mrs. Joplin. She slapped a package on the counter. The package was wrapped in a sheet and pinned together. “I hate to tell you this, but Martha Jane Armstrong is sending this wedding dress back to you.”
Jeanine’s mouth dropped open. “What’s wrong with it?” She came
up to the counter and laid her hand on the package. “It was perfect, Martha Jane said so, what’s wrong?”
Mrs. Joplin bent her long body over the counter and shifted the package around. “There isn’t anything wrong with it. It’s just Martha Jane. They say redheaded people have tempers, and Martha Jane always said she was going to prove otherwise, but she threw that dress down the stairs from that attic of theirs, and then she threw the veil down the stairs too.”
“What happened?”
Mrs. Joplin waved one hand at her. “Sit down. You are always, always in a hurry, Jeanine. You were in a hurry to be born. I remember it well. Your mother had you in three hours flat from when she was first took to when they cut the cord.” Jeanine sat down on the Jell-O rack. “Don’t sit on the Jell-O rack. Take that old chair seat. Well, my grandson Tim said he was going to work for Pacific Contractors. He made up his mind to. Nothing will change it. He has to see the world, he said. He signed a contract for three years, driving heavy equipment out there in the Pacific Ocean.”
Jeanine took the package and held it in her lap. She still had a blank and amazed look on her face. “How is he going to drive heavy equipment on top of the Pacific Ocean?”
Mrs. Joplin shook her head. “On some little island. What they’re doing is, they are grading off airstrips for the Army Air Corps. It’s called Wake Island. And he’s going to be there for three years, and won’t be home in all that time, and Martha Jane said it was as good as saying he didn’t want to get married, and he could just go to the hot place.”
“Three years,” said Jeanine. She had become acutely aware of the slightest hint of treachery from men, which seemed to operate conjointly in their heads with a tendency to get women to wait for them for indefinite periods, while they went wandering around without reason or limits, but she could not come to any conclusions whether
Tim Joplin was actually backing out of his promise or not. “That’s 1941,” she said.
“Yes. And I told her, honey, the Pacific Ocean
is
the hot place.” Mrs. Joplin lifted her thin shoulders in a shrug. “She’s mad enough to eat bees. Her mother said she wasn’t fit to see people. Her mother drove this over here and said either hide it or sell it. As if I was supposed to figure out what to do with it. I don’t know what I ought to do with it. You better take it back home with you. Need some moth crystals?” The tall old woman turned and began to rummage around in the various poisons she kept underneath the counter. “Here.” She slapped a blue box down on the solid walnut. “Those moths just love silk.”
“Didn’t she say she would wait for him?” Jeanine reached for the moth crystals. “It’s only…” Then her voice faded and she said in a lower tone, “Three years.”
“When people are set on getting married they don’t like waiting. It is a true fact. They’re just thinking, ‘Well, it’s the biggest decision I’ll ever make, let’s just get on with it.’ Like somebody that’s going to be hanged at dawn. ‘Why don’t you just hang me at midnight and get it over with?’ Martha Jane has no patience.” Mrs. Joplin lifted her head as one of the Miller kids came in; it was the youngest one. He carefully laid out a penny on the counter and said he wanted a jawbreaker, a purple one. He went away making sucking sounds, with a frightening bulge in his cheek. His bare feet left dust tracks across the floor. “She was set to be married and she’s going to get married one way or another.” The phone rang and Mrs. Joplin reached up and took the earpiece out of the hook and shouted, “What?” She listened. “He’s changing somebody’s oil. No, he don’t want any.” She hung it up again and turned back to Jeanine. “Now, you’ve been out visiting at Ross Everett’s place. How do you find it?”
Jeanine had been out to the ranch in Comanche County three times now. She had watched as Innis ran Smoky at a slow gallop on the exercise track, standing in the stirrups; had gone with him to the corral
to admire his foal and the red mare. The foal was nearly six months old; he had shed out to a light gray and his leg bones had grown sturdy and straight. The red mare’s wound was healed to a spiderweb of scar tissue and the mare followed Ross along the fence line and called to him for feed or attention. Innis proudly showed her the wind charger that powered the kitchen and the two clear electric lightbulbs and the electric iron. She had sat down beside Ross as he went over the accounts with her; he explained the shearing costs and how to stay up with the price of mohair in the Dallas newspaper. One evening before she drove home Ross said they needed to do some serious talking, so they sat on the stone-floored veranda and spoke of the future. He wanted her to think clearly about what she would do were anything to happen to him; ranching was a dangerous business. Jeanine found this frightening and she felt like stopping up her ears, but it was a bigger matter than her fright or alarm, and so she sat and read over his will with a still and serious expression as he pointed out the provisions.
The next time she had got through all the roundup gear and the smoke-blackened cooking pots and they had painted the kitchen, and Jugs had helped to move in a new electric refrigerator. Through the tall kitchen window was a view of the branding pens and the long sweeping ridges beyond, now glowing in wet, intense colors. After they married she would look out on this view for many years to come.
Still she had not set a date.
Next time,
she said,
next time
. But people lost patience, she thought. They wanted to be married or hanged without delay once it was decided but still Jeanine had said
Wait, wait
.
“I find it is very well,” said Jeanine. “The old stone house is beautiful.”
“Well, so does Martha Jane,” said Mrs. Joplin. She turned to look out the back door and saw that Mr. Joplin had sat himself down on an orange crate and was now cleaning the spark plugs. If she didn’t say anything he would go on to rebuild the entire engine, but Mrs. Joplin knew it made him happy. “Martha Jane said to her mother she was
going to run over there to Everett’s place and ask to see if he was shipping any of her mohair. She said he bought two woolsacks that were hers. I mean separate from her mother and daddy’s. Now that don’t make sense to me. You know, ‘Oh I think I’ll just drop in and visit with my woolsacks.’ Like they were people. Woolsacks weigh four hundred pounds and they ain’t people. But there it is. Everett’s probably lonely out there, has been for years, just him and the boy. And his wife deader than Santa Ana.”
Jeanine listened with a blank face. She shifted the package of wedding dress around on her lap and then stood up. She wanted to ask when it was that Martha Jane had visited, and for how long, but it would be too humiliating. Jeanine had the sudden but familiar feeling of everything going to pieces, despite anything she did, but she was also becoming angry as well as alarmed.
She said she had to get back, she had left beans on the stove. She put the moth crystals and four oranges and a pound of longhorn cheese into her heavy canvas bag and went out to ask Mr. Joplin to put the spark plugs back in so she could start up her engine and go home, and revive her life and her faith in humanity, or at least men.
Mrs. Joplin watched the ’29 Ford truck roar off down the road, throwing gravel. Then she walked out to the backyard and sat down beside her elderly husband. She had done what she thought she ought to do. Maybe it was the right thing, maybe not. Mr. Joplin raised his head and then glanced down again.
“Well, Pearl, I guess I got that job done.”
“Yes, you did.” They sat at ease, resting within the spotted, tossing shade.
“What was it?”
“You changed that young woman’s oil and cleaned the spark plugs.”
He cleared his throat. He was struggling with the profound shame of knowing that his mind was drifting away; all he had was Pearl to
keep him anchored. She watched him sigh heavily and wipe his hands together.
“Pearl, dear,” he said. “Sometimes I don’t know where I am.”
Mrs. Joplin stroked his back. “It’s all right, James,” she said. “Wherever you are, that’s the world.”
JEANINE DROVE BACK
the one mile to the house with her foot jammed down on the pedal, and the wind came in all the open truck windows in gusts. Behind her the sheet came unwrapped from the silk wedding dress and the whole package began to flounder about in the backseat. The arms of the wedding dress thrashed around, she could see it in the rearview mirror. The skirt billowed up like a dummy turned upside down, the sheet seemed to be pouring out the window, an escapee. She did not know what to do with it. On the other hand, she could save it for Mayme. Mayme wouldn’t care if it had been made for somebody else. She was so in love with Vernon she’d get married in a bedspread. Jeanine stamped on the brake and came to a halt under the Spanish oak. What would she do without Ross in her life? It would be terrible, it could not happen.
She called Ross as soon as she got in the house. She threw the wedding dress and the sheet onto the kitchen table and dialed his number. She listened impatiently as the party lines got crossed and two men were discussing some sheep that had got out and were up on Jim Ned Creek. Then finally she heard Ross’s voice say,
Hello?
“Ross, it’s Jeanine.”
“Hello, girl,” he said.
“Ross, I want to set a date. And the date is…” She paused. She said the first thing that came into her head. “December twelfth.”
Faint voices in the background spoke of three head got out and gone up past Ganlin’s water gap, they were seen yesterday. Finally he said, “What brought this on?”
“Martha Jane Armstrong.”
He laughed. “Jeanine,” he said. “Jeanine darling.”
“Well?”
There was a long pause. Jeanine sat on the kitchen chair and beat her foot on the floor. You could grow hair in the man’s pauses.
“I didn’t tell her to come out here, Jenny. I don’t like being asked to explain myself.”
“Well, did you ask her to
go
?”
“I did not invite her into the house. When she left, Innis nailed her taillight with a hexagonal nut. He was hiding behind the rock tank.”
“Shame on him,” said Jeanine. “Ha-ha.”
“Stay friends,” said Ross. “You could have no worse enemy than Martha Jane Armstrong.”
Then it was Jeanine who fell into the long gap of a wordless pause. She ran her fingers through her tangled hair and finally said, “All right.”
“Then if you are determined on that date, there is a lot to do.” Her mind vaulted forward to all that there was to do and she banged the toes of her shoes together. “Your ring came,” he said. Nervously she wrote in the air with her forefinger; r-i-n-g.
“Oh good, Ross!” She listened intently against the distant voices crackling on the crossed party lines about looking for Barkley’s merinos as Ross asked her to make lists. Jeanine and her mother and sisters had to present a festive occasion to the world, a celebration that was to be joyful and at the same time corseted with tradition. All the right people had to be invited for fear of offending the wrong people, nothing unlucky must happen, nor could they ignore the dead, who shadowed the event from some other dimension: her father, Ross’s first wife. Like fossils printed in stone they sent faint indications of themselves on down the years, admonishing and reminding because they were still very present in memory and because of the children they had introduced, willy-nilly, into the world of the living.
Jeanine did not like talking on the buzzing, public party line; she
wanted to hang up, to say that they would talk later, but Ross wanted her to find a pen and paper and write out an announcement now, this very minute, and take it in to the newspaper in Tarrant when they all went in to catch the train to Galveston and have done with it. She bent over a sheet of lined paper with her tongue between her teeth and her hair falling in her face and wrote,
Mrs. Elizabeth Stoddard of Palo Pinto County announces the marriage of her daughter Jeanine…
and so she was committed.
She put the receiver back into its cradle and looked up at the kitchen. It was somehow a different kitchen. Some shift had taken place. Some alteration in the boards and windows and the kitchen curtains with their jolly orange pigs as she felt her connection to this place suddenly become tenuous and frayed. It was as if she were looking at some memory, already in the past and dearly beloved in each commonplace detail; the braided rug and the old cookstove and Prince Albert asleep on the cool stone of the fireplace hearth.