Free Stormy Weather by Paulette Jiles Page A

turned eighteen.”
    “And gone where?” said Jeanine.
    “Just stayed in one place longer than y’all did.”
    Bea’s lips were shaking. “This is going to be in the papers,” she said. “In the newspapers.”
    Mayme wiped her eyes and started taking the hairpins from her hair. “Yes, and Jeanine’s going to testify at the trial. She’ll be in the newspapers. She’ll be famous. Like Bonnie Parker.”
    Jeanine reached in her coat pocket for a brush and drew it furiously through her short, light brown hair.
    “Stop it, Mayme.”
    Bea said, “Mayme, don’t lay your bobby pins on the kitchen table. That’s disgusting.” Bea hugged her striped cat with the broken nose close to herself but he writhed out of her arms and dropped to the floor with a padded thud.
    “Well excuse me, Your Holy Cleanliness.” Mayme put the hairpins in her jeans pocket. She wound up her long hair in French rolls on both sides of her head, which gave her head a square look. Her nose was red from crying. “Maybe she’s a liar.”
    Bea said, “But who would lie about something like that?” She looked up wonderingly. “And how would she even know Daddy? And who is she?”
    Mayme turned to Jeanine. “Got any answers?”
    The wind danced through the faulty window frames in thin and merry whistles. The coffeepot gurgled with a laughing noise like some small kitchen spirit calling to them that it was going to be all right, everything was going to be all right and it puffed animated, tiny clouds from its nose.
    Then Bea opened her diary or journal or whatever it was. The blank book in which she wrote down everything of note that happened. She took up her pencil.
    Mayme said, “I was about to get engaged. Get married and get out of here.”
    “I didn’t know he proposed,” said Jeanine. She watched Bea write down Will Robert break the engagement? And then lay down the pencil and put out her hands toward the kerosene stove with its odorous yellow flame. The flame reached up to the coffeepot on the stove lid and the Hamilton clock said it was six-thirty in the morning. Outside it was barely light. Whatever kind of life they had been able to cobble together despite the Depression and the oil fields and their father’s love of good times and gambling was collapsing all around them.

    JACK STODDARD DIED in his jail cell, sitting on his bunk with a copy of Black Mask Detective in his hands. It was October 17, 1937. Outside the windows of the county jail a parade filed past with several high school bands playing “Our Boys Will Shine Tonight”; his half-shut dead eyes were fixed on the window bars. A cleaning woman named Myra ran down to the office and said there was something wrong with a man in cell seventeen. The coroner said it was a brain hemorrhage brought on by the concussion and the sour gas. He couldn’t imagine how the man had lasted so long.
    Jack was buried in the Wharton city cemetery. It was a bright sunny day. Jeanine saw her mother upright and calm. Then Elizabeth began to shake, as if she had been stricken with convulsions. I can’t stop shaking, Elizabeth said, what’s happening to me? Mayme took hold of her mother with both hands. Jeanine ran to the truck and sat there for a while, crying so hard she could not lift her head from the steering wheel. It was pity as well as grief, pity that her handsome father should be confined in the cold and the dark beyondthe sound of human voices. She dried her face on her skirt hem and started the truck engine. They drove away and left him to both the apparent and the invisible world.

    THE LANDLORD CAME to their door and knocked lightly. He rapped his knuckles like a man who wanted his money but on the other hand the women were recently bereaved and he was fat and what he was doing appeared to be a scene from a Charlie Chaplin movie, or something from The Perils of Pauline , orphans being thrown out into the snow by an overweight rich landlord, which he was. The streets of Wharton