Free Stormy Weather by Paulette Jiles Page B

were dusty. The Spanish moss that hung from the live oaks was dusty. He was throwing them out into a drought, into bank failures, into the national economic emergency. He wore white and carried a cane. He rapped again with the cane and cleared his throat of the dust and spat.
    Mrs. Stoddard opened the door. She wore a clean print dress with a red belt. Behind her in the kitchen he could hear the radio. Maybe she would offer him the radio in lieu of the rent. He wouldn’t accept it.
    “I don’t have the rent,” she said.
    “I want to say how sorry I am about your husband,” he said. “But it’s just as well. We don’t need perverts here in Wharton.” He tipped his hat to her. Then her three daughters came to stand behind her. He tipped his hat to them as well. “Sorry about your father,” he said. “But the rent is ten dollars. I know Mr. Stoddard was a gambler and my bet is he has something hidden away somewhere.”
    One girl stepped forward and put her hand on her mother’s shoulder.
    She said, “We’re going back to where we have our own farm.”
    “Where’s my ten dollars?” He banged the foot of the cane on the flat dirt of the yard. Down on the river some of the hoboes werecalling to one another in raffish, joking shouts. “Pay up or you leave right now.”

    “WE’RE GOING HOME,” said her mother. She sat at the kitchen table and moved the salt and pepper shakers around. “We’ve got to get packed up.”
    “Yes, Mother,” said Jeanine. It was so hot she felt faint, as if she would melt and flatten out.
    “You hid things for him,” said her mother. “I found two hundred and fifteen dollars in his toolbox. He always hid money.”
    “I never hid that money,” Jeanine said. She sat with a cold cup of weak coffee in her hands and blinked repeatedly. Then she turned to her two sisters, but Mayme only stared back at her with her arms crossed and Bea turned the flatiron over on the stove. Mayme’s boyfriend from Conroe had sent a sympathy card and his signature and no more. Mayme held it in her hand.
    “I guess that horse is yours, Jeanine,” her mother said. “We could try to sell him.”
    “Not yet,” said Jeanine. “Not just yet.”
    “Promise me you won’t gamble on the races again.”
    “I won’t. I promise.”

    JEANINE AND MAYME moved around the kitchen, packing up the lithograph of the little girl and the portrait of their Tolliver grandparents. They broke down the four-ten shotgun and stored the barrel and stock and shells behind the seat of the truck. They shut the lid on the Singer and they jammed blankets and quilts into tow sacks. They were going back to the old Tolliver farm because there was no place else to go. It was the only place where they didn’t have to pay rent. If they went back to Central Texas maybe nobody would know whathad happened. Jeanine washed every dish and utensil they owned and handed them to Bea and when Bea had dried them Mayme packed them in newspaper, and laid them in boxes. The five Tolliver silver spoons went into their Johnnie Walker whiskey tin. Bea worked for hours at constructing a box for Albert; it was like a wooden cell from which he gazed out with his broken nose and his jailbird stripes. They would have to pull Smoky Joe behind the truck. They had a ’29 Ford ton-and-a-half now, Jack had sold the old Reo long ago.
    It took them all day to make it from Wharton to Palo Pinto County, and all that day the countryside shifted and shape changed from the humid coast to the sharp, cracked red hills of north-central Texas. The windows on the truck were clouded and on the horizon was a haze of some distant dust storm. They passed men out in the fields, some with bedding plows and others with horse-drawn stalk knockers shattering the cornstalks into flying blond fragments and you could see the column of dust that they raised for miles. Sunset came as they were making their way through the limestone country of Glen Rose. Burma-Shave signs dotted