Stormy Weather by Paulette Jiles Page A

a match to a piece of old telephone cord to see if it would burn. Elizabeth took it away from him and stamped on it and hid the matches.
    Bea said, “Jeanine, were you and Mayme talking last night about leaving?”
    Jeanine said, “We were, but we’re not now. Since Daddy’s got brain failure. Somebody’s got to stay and help Mother get him in a strait-jacket.” She closed her hands around a chair back. This throttled life had to end sometime, it had to.
    “Where were you going to go?”
    Mayme said, “We were going to get an apartment back in Conroe. Stay there in one place. But Robert can just write me here.” The rain fell all over Wharton and the Colorado River ran as dark as wine. “I’m twenty-one, Bea. Jeanine’s twenty. We’re old maids.” Not too far away the river spilled out into the Gulf in tangled red currents. “Looks like we’re going to stay that way.”
    “Would you have just left me here?” said Bea. “With them arguing and fighting all the time?”
    The two older sisters glanced at each other.
    “It’s all right, Bea,” said Mayme. “We aren’t going to leave with Daddy like this. It’s all right.”
    “You would have too,” said Bea. “You would have gone and left me here.”
    Jeanine said, “Nah. We’d have kidnapped you.”
    They did not notice her bowed head and her heart burning in anguish. She would have been deserted. It was possible that hersisters did not love her except in the most dutiful and perfunctory way. They didn’t even read her stories. Her pretty young teacher at the Wharton Elementary had just printed up one of her stories on the mimeograph machine and had tacked it up on the bulletin board. She had so much admired Bea’s tale of the orphan girl and the abandoned puppy. Bea was sure that nothing good would ever happen to her except in books. When she was sitting on the back steps one evening a half-grown cat came out of the collapsing shed behind the house and sat down and mewed at her. Bea took him up gratefully and named him Prince Albert.
    There was no money. They had to wait it out. They ate corn bread and grits, salt pork and cane syrup and told themselves things would get better after Jack got well. They cooked on a little kerosene stove that stank of fuel. They walked holes in their shoes looking for jobs, any job, but men with families to support wanted those same jobs and nobody would hire a single girl, even to pop the popcorn in a movie theater or sweep up at the barbershop. Fifteen million able-bodied men were out of work. Jeanine and Mayme made do. They could not face the social stigma of going on relief. They joined other women and children scavenging for soda bottles along the roadsides and lived on what was left of their father’s last paycheck. They were adrift. So were millions of others and no one could figure out why the economy had ceased to function, not even the banker J. P. Morgan. He said as much on the radio.
    They tiptoed around the house so as not to disturb their father and then went out into the streets of Wharton to look in the shop windows, and stand under the great live oaks and their Spanish moss by the river. They walked by the transients and the bums in the Hooverville. It was like visiting a zoo.
    Then, finally, Mayme got temporary work at the cotton gin writing labels for the bales and shared her five dollars with Bea and Jeanine. She treated them to a movie; sword hacking and high seasin Captain Blood .
    Silently Jeanine made herself a dress from material she bought at one of the Wharton dry-goods stores. Nobody else would buy it so it was cheap. Nobody wanted it because it was printed in black-and-white tiger stripes. But she had seen a picture of a tiger-stripe pattern in a secondhand Good Housekeeping magazine and it didn’t look too garish. She would black her shoes with stove polish to match. The package of material thumped on the table.
    “Shhhhh!”
    She cleared the table of the fruit jar full of knives and