Magnet, the pièce de résistance of his act, was an invention, rather a collage, of Prof. Simms’s own. Ordinarily Old Magnet had merely to make her appearance for somebody in the crowd to declare, “’Fore God!” or words to that effect, “Would you just look a-here what’s coming now! I George, Sam, if that contraption can’t make it rain, be about the only thing it can’t do, won’t it? Sounds,” the speaker was apt to observe, as soon as Prof. Simms began fiddling with the dials, “like she’s clearing her throat to get ready to say something.” Which in fact she once did. Suddenly remembering her long-dormant, not to say dead, function, she brought in station KRLD, Dallas, and gave out five whole minutes of Chicago cotton and grain futures before she could be tuned out. However, an early-model battery-set radio was merely a part of Old Magnet. Above a bank of switches like the manual of an organ were arrayed needle gauges, fuses, the works from a telephone box, the exposed coil from a Model-T Ford, more vacuum tubes, an electrical rheumatism cure, and a great deal more junk the origin of which Prof. Simms himself did not know. Leading off all this was a long coil of wire attached to a large horseshoe magnet.
For, as Prof. Simms explained—unless there was somebody in the audience to do it for him, and generally there was: some know-it-all who would save him the necessity of a further lecture, and to whom the Professor would listen with a quizzical brow and a half smile, although if there were not, as here, he employed the same explanation himself—it was your magnetism that drew all your other elements together. That charged your dust particles and made them draw your atoms of oxygen and hydrogen and form your drops which your clouds then soaked up. For a cloud was nothing more nor less than a sort of sponge, as you might say, a dry sponge looking for some water. There were your clouds (they still hung there, unmoving, not a breath of wind to stir them, hardly a breath of breath); your dust and your oxygen and your hydrogen were there. Now the thing was, to send up some magnetism. If that didn’t do it …
Well, if that didn’t do it, then the only thing to say was, there were times and places when all the advancements of science were to no avail. Time to begin to take the moral approach, or rather reproach. Half jokingly now, to be borne down on harder a little later on. But as of now to say, “Well, if what we’re about to do next don’t turn the trick, then it’s for you folks to say why, not me. I don’t know what you all have been up to, but if the Good Lord is displeased with you—and that’s about the only thing I can think of to explain a sky like that after all we’ve done—why then you realize, of course, that Albert Einstein himself if he was here couldn’t make it rain. It’s for you all to say why He is down on you; but till you folks make it right with the Lord, why, I’m just wasting my time and talents. When all’s said and done, He’s the one that’s got His hand on the hydrant, you know.”
To this, as to everything else, they listened without so much as nodding their heads—never even scratched them. Even that little boy in the slicker, following at his heels as he played the wire off the coil to the base of the windmill, just gaped solemnly at him.
An assistant from the audience was instructed in what order to throw the switches once Prof. Simms was on top of the windmill. He stood at the base of it, the horseshoe tucked into his belt, the wire trailing from him, looking up at the fan. Prof. Simms disliked heights, and he never failed at this point to think, surely there must be a better way than this to make a living. Taking a deep breath, he commenced hauling himself up the rungs of the tall, narrow ladder.
Just beneath the fan blades a narrow platform ran around the derrick. Standing on this platform the Professor signaled to his assistant down on the ground. Grasping the derrick with one hand, with the other he pointed the magnet out into space. Hardly was the last switch thrown when over the horizon appeared a huge black cloud.
“Great God!” gasped Prof. Simms.
Recovering himself at once, he said, “Don’t be a fool, like those down on the ground, Orville.”
But even as he said this the cloud doubled in size. “If you didn’t know better,” said Prof. Simms, “blessed if you wouldn’t almost believe there was something in it.” And despite himself a small shudder of fear, of awe ran through him—fear of, awe of himself.
Meanwhile the people down on the ground had not yet seen his cloud. He leaned as far out from the derrick as he safely could, holding out his magnet. Slowly he drew it back to his chest. Be damned if the cloud didn’t leap to follow it! He repeated the gesture: again the cloud raced nearer as if in response. “Well! If this don’t beat anything I ever saw!” said Prof. Simms.
Now the people down below saw it. Heads snapped around in that direction and fingers pointed and even up on his perch Prof. Simms heard the universal intake of breath. Three or four times more he repeated his gesture of drawing the cloud on with his magnet, and each time it leaped obediently to follow. The whole sky in that direction, from the ground up to the dome, was now solid black.
A gust of wind whipped his face, followed by another which shook the derrick and turned the fan blades over a couple of revolutions. Prof. Simms looked down. “There! That ought to satisfy you!” he said. He laughed to see them scurrying for shelter down below, drawing their jackets over their heads, whipping up the teams of their wagons, some diving underneath the wagonbeds. He had not long to gloat, however; a blast of wind shivered the derrick, very nearly plucking him off. The fan blades spun. He decided to climb down. He put his foot on the first rung of the ladder, looked down, and saw nothing. People, wagons, his own van, the base of the windmill, everything had disappeared. At that moment he got an eyeful of dust. In another moment all thought of getting down was put out of his mind by the blast.
And there, like a possum up a persimmon tree, clinging for dear life, while the derrick shook and shuddered and the dust came at him like a sandblast and the fan blades whirred like an airplane propeller, his eyes squeezed shut, the 1 & OnLY ProF. ORViLLe SiMMs spent the next twenty-four hours.
At the end of that time, when the wind had died and over everything had settled a Pompeian silence, Prof. Simms ventured down to reconnoiter. Halfway down he still could not see the ground. At that point he paused to listen. It was then that he noticed for the first time the smell, like a freshly surfaced asphalt road; but hearing no sound, he figured they were all still indoors or in the storm cellar, unaware that the storm had stopped, and that this was the moment to make his break. So he went down farther. Then he saw them. They were squatting around the base of the derrick waiting for him like a party of hunters waiting for a treed coon to come down. Like himself, they wore bandanas over their faces, only to them it lent the sinister look of a band of vigilantes. Halting in his descent, he called down, “Well, I told you all I never guaranteed anything, didn’t I?”
No one responded. They didn’t even look up. In the silence he heard the familiar whimper of a dog. That smell he had noticed earlier rose more sharply on the still air. Like asphalt, or like a new telephone pole, freshly creosoted. He saw a fire; on it an oil drum steamed. The society below, he now noticed, was exclusively male. He scampered hastily back up the ladder four or five rungs. “Dern it!” he cried. “Whose idea was this anyhow, yawl’s or mine?” He clambered back up into the protective gloom and to that rung of the ladder he clung for another hour, calling down from time to time, “Maybe yawl would like a refund? Hey? What do you say to that? Maybe yawl would like a refund, hey?”
IV
When Simms woke up in Texas he thought at first that he was still asleep and having nightmares. All around him for as far as the eye could stretch stood windmills thick as trees. He closed his eyes with a shudder, opened them and looked again. They were still there, but now he noticed that they lacked fans. Not windmills, then: oil-well derricks.
After breakfast, at which he was reunited with Samson, his dog, and after plucking Samson of his feathers, Simms drove down the road to the first gas station and general store he came to. Along the porch sat half a dozen men. Simms thought
he had seen ignorant, backwoods, gate-mouthed, dull-eyed faces in Oklahoma, and before that in Arkansas, but here … Well, he was about ready to restore the sign on his truck. Memories of Arrowhead braked that thought. But before he knew it he had asked, “Been this dry hereabouts for a good spell, has it?”
“Dry? Mister, ‘dry’ don’t cover it. They haven’t invented the word yet for the weather we been having.”
“Crops all burnt up, are they?” asked Simms, trying to look sympathetic and not grin.
“Ain’t much left in the way of crops around here.”
“Folks having to haul water, are they?”
“If they are I just wish you’d tell me where they’re finding it.”
“Ain’t nobody much trying to raise crops around here no more. Folks in this section have done all give up fanning just about.”
“How much rainfall you folks had this year?”
“Oh, Lord, Mister, we done all just about forgot what rain looks like, ain’t that right, O.B.? When do you reckon was the last time we seen rain?”
“Well, let’s see. I remember it was raining when my wife was fixing to have our last boy. The last boy, that is, not the girl. And only yesterday she had to warsh his mouth out with soap for using dirty talk. He’s precocious, still that’ll give you some idea.”
“What did she use for water?” asked one of the others.
“Wellsir,” said a third, “I have paid up to six bits a pint for it right on the streets of Delco. R. D. Blair, that’s got that deep artesian well, why my godamighty he’s made more money off of that thing than most men has off of oil wells. I’ve seen bottled water go for twenty-five cents one of them little bitty old Dixie cups full. It’s got so around here we dilute our water with whiskey, stranger. Costs too derned much to drink it straight.”
“Is it water you’re talking about? Selling drinking water on the streets? In bottles? In paper cups? Like soda pop?”
“Naw, sir, not like soda pop. Soda pop don’t cost but two bits a bottle. And if you take my advice you’ll keep away from it. Won’t nothing raise a thirst like a bottle of that damn pop. Worse than salted peanuts.”
“Well! I thought I’d seen dry sections of the country before, but this sure beats them all.”
“Yes, Lord, I reckon the man that comes up with a way to turn crude oil into drinking water will make him a killing here in Texas.”
“I hear they’re fixing to bring it out in powdered form soon now.”
“Fixing to bring what out in powder form, Gus?”
“Water. Powdered water. Dehydrated. When you’re ready to use it you take and mix it with a little water. They say it makes a pretty fair substitute. Tastes a little flat, they say, but does all right for mixing.”
“Lord, what won’t they think of next, eh?”
It was true what those men said, people thereabouts had all given up farming; but drought was not their reason. They did not need to farm, not with oil wells pumping away in front and back yards and stretching away over former cotton fields for as far as a man could see. If they needed water it was not for the sake of their crops. They could use some to float those cabin cruisers in the one-time lakes that Simms passed. A bit for an occasional bath, maybe, and to water their flowerbeds. Mainly to wash those big Cadillacs and Packards and Pierce-Arrows that stood, sometimes double-parked, outside their cabin doors. They could pay for it, too, as no dirt farmer worried about his crops and his thirsty livestock could ever afford to pay. So in the hardware store in Delco, Simms said to the clerk, “Housepaint. Want some housepaint. Gimme a gallon of the white, quart of red, quart of yellow, quart of blue, and a pint-size can of aluminum. Don’t bother to wrap them.”
V
The day fixed upon for his performance was just the worst sort of day. With no assistance from Prof. Simms, the sky had clouded over and now thunder commenced to rumble. It was going to rain. You could smell it, could read the signs: birds bunched together along electric wires, leaves of trees showing their undersides, smells sharpening, sounds deepening. After three unbroken years of drought, today it was going to rain, and before he could lay claim to it. He pitched in frantically, trying to get set up and going before it actually started coming down, make it look as if he had a little something to do with it; but even as he tore around, the first drops fell, fat warm drops that struck the hard, unabsorbent earth with a spat and scattered in droplets like quicksilver. Prof. Simms only hoped there were others in the audience like the one he overheard say, “Well, if this feller ain’t a cutter! He don’t even hardly have to do nothing to make it rain, does he?”
The elevation this time was the tower of the county courthouse, seven stories tall. The crowd, biggest he had ever drawn, was gathered on the courthouse grounds. It was to have been the grandest production Prof. Simms had ever staged: a Texas-sized production—was he not being paid a Texas-sized fee? What a stupendous plan he had devised for the dynamite blasts! What a store of skyrockets he had provided! Magnet, inconsiderately tossed inside the van by the mob at Arrowhead, had been refurbished, improved by the addition of a spark-plug tester and something else found on the town dump which Prof. Simms judged to be part of the works of an X-ray machine, and which, when a current was sent through it, reacted with a most impressive crackle. He had been looking forward to the show himself. Was anything on earth as undependable as the weather?
There was no postponing it: no rainchecks on a rainmaking. The timing was set. Ready or not, rain or shine, on the stroke of ten from the courthouse clock things would get under way with a bang. Four bangs, to be exact.
Observing that the signs looked promising, Prof. Simms, face dripping, soaked to the skin, began his address to the crowd. He disavowed magic and mystery. His was a science, he said, and science—here he had to raise his voice to make himself heard above the patter—had no secrets. It was coming down harder every moment as he explained the origin and composition of raindrops, the need to raise some dust. The clock overhead wound itself up to strike. Prof. Simms brought down his upraised hand and the earth shook as sixty sticks of dynamite, fifteen to each of four charges, went off outside the city limits. But instead of the cloud of dust that was to have arisen, down fell a torrent of rain.
Just my luck, thought Prof. Simms, looking down from the top of the courthouse steps upon the umbrellas popping up like mushrooms all over the grounds. Maddening to think that those umbrellas, faded from disuse, dotted with holes, had been brought there out of faith in his powers. His hand stole to his pocket and fondled regretfully the fat roll of bills nestled there. For a moment he toyed with the thought of absconding with it. For only a moment, though; then he remembered the tales he had always heard about Texans, how mean they were, how dangerous it was to trifle with one of them. In tones forlorn he silently chanted, “Rain, rain, go away, come again another day, little Orville wants to play.”
“Will wonders never cease!” Prof. Simms exclaimed to himself when the rain promptly complied with his request. The sky brightened by several shades. It was probably as well, however, that precipitation did not cease entirely, just slackened off to a steady drizzle; for Prof. Simms was not there to prevent rain, after all, as to some credulous minds he might appear to have done. Moreover, this was only a lull in the storm; from the west fresh battalions of clouds were moving up, dark as the one in the sign on his van. Could he—perhaps by dropping one act, say the skyrockets, from his program—be ready for it when it got there? Nothing ventured, nothing gained.
In his race against the advancing storm clouds, Prof. Simms explained the molecular structure of water while at the same time inflating his balloons. For the occasion three instead of the usual one marksman were recruited and armed with rifles. The first release of balloons numbered nine, in proportions proper to the valence of the elements. But before a shot could be fired, even as the word “Fire!” was already in Prof. Simms’s mouth, such a cloudburst poured down it was enough to make a person wonder whether God had broken the pr
omise He made to Noah of old.
This was no passing shower, this was the real thing, good for all day and into the night, if Prof. Simms was any judge. “Well, old hoss,” he consoled himself, “you did your best. The elements were against you. Better luck next time.” Giving the bankroll one last feel, peering through the gaps in the curtain of rain, he searched the crowd for the faces of the men with whom he had contracted for today’s performance, intending to refund their money. He could not discover them. What Prof. Simms discovered instead was one of those insights that can change the lives of men and alter the shape of history. He saw all those faces looking up at him, streaming wet, waiting patiently to see what he was going to do next, cupping their ears to hear him, hushing up their children whining to be taken in out of the wet, their heads still nodding in conviction, comprehension of his last-spoken words. Modesty, and a lifelong inclination to think too well of people, almost made Prof. Simms deny the moment of his greatness. Nobody could be that stup—Through a momentary parting in the curtain, he looked again. You could have heard a pin drop in the silence of Prof. Simms’s mind.
“Orville, my friend.” he said to himself in an awestruck whisper, “if you had just half the belief in yourself these folks have in you, you could be governor of this state.”
By seven o’clock in the evening the county records had been twice removed: first from the flooded basement to the ground floor, thence to the second floor of the courthouse. Since half past four the building had been without electricity, at six telephone service was disrupted. To have stepped outdoors would have been to commit suicide by drowning; therefore those who had taken shelter and were now trapped inside were resigned to going supperless and to spending the night sleeping on the floors, the women and children in the offices, the courtrooms, and the judges’ chambers, the men in the corridors.
The Collected Stories of William Humphrey Page 34