Speak Rain

by P. Edward Auman

  ~~~

  After Daniel recalled the whole story of the night of the second and his dream when he was instructed to head south, Rachel felt she might be speaking with a mad man. However, as they sipped yet another cup of coffee and the clock passed 2:00AM on the night of the eighth, she also recognized a number of unusual and coincidental events in their own meeting and discussion of the shadow that was woven into both of their lives separately until that point, and now seemingly together as well. She mused on whether she could trust her own senses in all this while Daniel continued to explain his actions earlier in the night.

  “…So…since experimenting with a little prayer seemed to do something that night…I did it tonight too.”

  “Are you telling me you believe God is watching over you?” The question was not entirely discrediting the idea, considering the fall of rain appear practically on command. But Rachel did want to understand what Dan’s perspective was.

  “I’m not sure,” he replied. He stood and took their mugs over to the sink and began rinsing them out. “I’ll tell you what though. This shadow, whatever he is…”

  “He?” Rachel said, a very tired smile at the corner of his lips. “How do we know it’s not a woman?”

  “Fine, then,” he replied. “’It’, whatever it is, practically told us it’s a ghost.”

  “It did,” Rachel hesitated, “but it also says it’s a Shaman.”

  “Do you understand what it meant by that?”

  “Well…from my great-grandpa, yes. But a Shaman really is a healer. That note had other things circled and…”

  “And…he doesn’t seem to be healing anything, does he?” Daniel surmised.

  “’It’,” Rachel continued.

  “Okay…If it is…or was a Shaman, a healer, what is it doing scaring people and controlling the rains?”

  “Yes…makes you wonder.” Rachel had folded her hands together and put them to her lips while she pondered the implications.

  “So then, anyway…it some sort of being…something not necessarily alive. I figured…what’s good for the goose is good for the gander.”

  Rachel’s eyes were suddenly alert. “So…if it exists then you figured God does too?”

  “Yes!” Daniel’s voice was alternated between a hiss and whisper. “Although, I don’t know if I’m going about it the right way, exactly.”

  “What do you mean?” Rachel equally lowered her voice in a conspiratorial tone.

  “What I mean is…I’m not sure I understand how things work exactly. Or if there is even a god out there listening, but I do know there’s something else out there at work besides what we understand. …And I mean to make it work for us now.”

  Rachel held her chin up with her two gathered fists a while longer. She considered again whether she should contact someone about a failing mind. The harm in that is she would be turning in her own predilection to believe in life after death, or at least in the effect of some other beings upon her life. Why should she be frightened by her previous confrontations with the shadow in the cliff dwellings if there was not something behind it of which to be afraid. In that context she decided there must also be an influence for good in the game as well, just as her parents and grandfather had taught her. Perhaps it was time for them to take control.

  One question remained.

  “Let me ask you this then,” she said, as she placed her hands on the table as she addressed Daniel.

  “Alright. Go ahead.”

  “Did you have to tell him to turn off the rain? Or is it going to just stop after the fire is out?” She was smirking.

  “No, no,” he laughed quietly in the still house. The fire department and scurry had died down and there was little noise in the neighborhood anymore, but the one remaining truck idling and monitoring for flare ups.

  “So…then…Can you tell the rain to stop completely?”

  “I’m not sure. I don’t think I can.”

  “Why not?” It was a fair question, but she wasn’t pressing belligerently. She was developing a plan of attack.

  “Well…I’ve asked before. Even that night I had the dream. I asked it to stop and turn to snow or something.”

  “I see.”

  Daniel continued in his hushed voice. “I’ve been asking for the last couple hours too since the fire.”

  “It’s died down,” she observed.

  “Yes, but it hasn’t quit. And…”

  The hesitation put Daniel ill at ease. There was something more to be said, but for some reason it wouldn’t come. His lips shimmied around the words and tears came to his eyes a bit. Rachel worried he would say something dreadful perhaps that she hadn’t considered. But that was not the case. She took his hands in hers and looked him in the eye.

  “C’mon. You’ve got to trust me at this point.” Rachel’s eyes were pleading. “What is it?”

  “Well…I think being around you helps keep this shadow…and the rain at bay.”

  She held his hands more tightly.

  “Why would you think that?”

  “Just look, Rachel,” he replied. This time Daniel’s voice was raspy with emotion rather than the budding conspiracy against the shadow in the rain. “Every time we’re together the rain dies down quite a bit…unless we want it heavier. But when we’re apart…”

  “Is when he attacks!” She finished. “That’s why when I was leaving the park he practically washed me out.”

  “Yes, exactly! I think that’s what it is. He doesn’t want us to work together!”

  Rachel nodded and released Daniel’s hands. Subconsciously she wanted to be able to determine the path they followed on her own terms as well, and not feel compelled to a specific action.

  “But why?” She asked.

  “I don’t know…but I’m betting together we’re something he can’t fight very well.”

  “Okay, look,” she slapped her hands down on the table, although not with much force. “You’re starting to sound like a movie or something. That’s the kind of stuff when two people have found ‘true love’ and all that crap.”

  Daniel snickered despite the tears still drying on his cheek.

  “Well…that’s why I felt a little awkward about it.”

  “Awkward? You were tearing up.”

  “Ya… I know. But…” He was still searching for the right way to phrase what he was feeling. “I think we were meant to work together…”

  “No relationship.” Rachel was smiling but she’d crossed her arms before her again.

  “That’s the problem. I’m not talking about a romance. I’m talking…I think we’re both dangerous to him, and together…he must have something to fear. I just feel like…we’re meant to be a team…and I don’t know. I care a lot about you…even if it’s not romantic.”

  There was a momentary pause before Rachel replied.

  “We’ve started calling it a ‘he’ again.”

  “I know…I think it’s a him,” Dan nodded.

  “Actually, so do I.”

  “Really?”

  “Yeah. I guess I do,” Rachel conceded, swiping her right hand across the table a bit, hoping in a sense for more coffee.

  “Why do you say that?” he asked.

  “Well…I’ve got this theory…” she replied.

  “Let’s hear it.”

  “So…my great grandfather had some stories to tell, and as you know I’m part Hopi Indian from his line.”

  “Okay…that could partly be why he’s there in the cliff dwellings harassing you: some sort of connection there.”

  “Yes maybe,” she hesitated again, trying to lay out how she might explain. “I think he might be from those pueblo people, actually. Like…he wouldn’t be Hopi, the Hopi were long after the cliff dwelling people. But we’re likely descendants…maybe one of several different tribes that came from them and the people who dwelt in the Cortez valley.”

  “Alright, I’m following
you so far. Maybe that gives you some advantage over him?”

  “Maybe. But it also means our traditions were probably from theirs. Our archeologists even say many of our symbols in our early writing are similar to the ones in the dwellings…although sometimes they’re backwards, or maybe sideways from the way we wrote them.”

  Daniel leaned back in his chair. He was learning far more from a few minutes of brainstorming with Rachel than he thought he ever could doing his own research at the city library two towns up the state route, even with an internet connection and a librarian to help.

  Rachel continued, “Anyway, I think what he was trying to tell us is that he was a Shaman in life…and that would make him a man.”

  “You didn’t have women shaman?”

  “No…I don’t think so. We had women healers in some of our traditional stories, but…the shamans themselves were always men.”

  “Okay…we’ll agree to call him a ‘he’ then.”

  “Agreed. …Besides, that makes the thing seem a little more manageable,” she added.

  Daniel was inclined to agree. Theoretically if it had been human once, an Indian Shaman at one time, then it might be reasoned with…or overcome somehow.

  “There’s more though.”

  “Go ahead,” Daniel prompted.

  “See…I think he might be an Earth Spirit now. It is believed that sometimes, when a shaman had a really strong effect on the tribe he was in, or where he lived he might sort of…graduate to being an Earth Spirit when he died, instead of his soul going on to be part of the Great Spirit or creator.”

  “I don’t follow exactly. What is an Earth Spirit?”

  “Well…” Rachel again tried to find the right words to explain what she’d been taught in her youth. Her parents generally did not keep any of grandfather or great grandfather’s traditions and most of what she’d learned was before she’d turned eight. “My grandfather once tried to explain something Great Grandfather had said about a Shaman who had become an evil shaman of the wood.”

  “Like a…forest shaman or something?” Daniel tried.

  “Yes!” Rachel’s voice had become stronger as she and Dan worked out together what was in her mind, and she tried to quiet it back down to a whisper again. “That’s exactly right. And I think it happens a lot! But…in this case, he said the forest shaman had gone insane or something.”

  Daniel felt like he was digesting incredible information as an archeologist might. Once he learned an idea as new as this one was to him the neurons in his mind continued firing and jumping from one understanding to the next. He was beginning to form a plan on how to disarm this shadow. He had to let the creature understand that he knew about him. Fear subsides as understanding grows, and Daniel intended to control the shaman with sufficient knowledge.

  “Supposedly, two families fought over animals in a forest, not really that far from here down in that same general area as the Sleeping Ute mountain and the mesas. Once, by entrapment, one family slew an entire family in the forest and left them to rot. Within the year, all the trees within a few miles had died. The animals had moved on, and the tribe had to move hundreds of miles away before they could get enough wood and food.”

  “Hmm…” Daniel replied. “Sounds like justice to me.”

  “Maybe…but the reason they had to move so far was this forest shaman was…like…punishing them. They said it went insane. It would do things like grow trees in the middle of their pueblos and even in their hunting teepees if they left them setup for long. They would cut them and a few days later six of them would be springing up, six or twelve inches tall overnight.”

  Rachel and Dan stared at each other assessing what one another was thinking, neither coming to any conclusion. Both felt they should consider the other completely nuts, but both acknowledging that their own ideas were just as unbalanced. Rachel decided she’d better end the story and let Daniel do with it what he would in his own mind. She was still trying to find a means of stopping the rain herself as well.

  “They said he’d gone insane because he was no longer healing, he was hurting. He was no longer taking care of the forest, but using it to harm and frighten the people. They learned they could not go into the forests nearby because many would be lost and never return.”

  “So…this thing that’s been harassing us…he’s like a water shaman, maybe? And now he’s using the water against us. But why? And why so many droughts for so many years too? If there’s a water shaman here you’d think he’d help keep things going right.”

  “Unless he’s really gone insane over something! I don’t know,” Rachel replied. “You know, Grandfather could have been interpreting G.G. wrong. Or maybe G.G. was spicing up the story a bit. But…I think it may be at least partly true. If these souls stay on earth…maybe they go insane after a while. …Or maybe they get angry sometimes.”