The Man Who Rained

by Ali Shaw

  He slipped the letter into his shirt pocket, and when he returned to the Fossiter homestead, that was where it remained.

  Take care of Finn for me.

  He realized he did not know how he would do as she asked. He could keep a roof over the boy’s head and keep him well stocked with groceries, but there was another duty implicit in Betty’s request, one that required more than practical measures. How to shepherd the weather in the boy? He turned to the memories of his father and grandfather for guidance, but they were cowering away from him and telling him to do the thing the darkest part of his heart instructed, the thing he would not do because the love of his life had requested that he take care of Finn for me. He reflected that during his own formative years his father and grandfather had abandoned him to deal with the turmoil inside of himself alone. There had been times in his youth when his emotions had risen up from the depths of him as implacably as floodwater, and he had felt as if he were drowning. He had cast around for help then and found neither his father nor his grandfather present. All he could do was try to tread water until the flood receded.

  He had ignored the damage those waters left in their wake. For just as a flood in a house leaves an aftermath of warped timbers and weakened foundations, he recognized there was a rotting and ruined layer inside of him too.

  He knew by these criteria that he could not look after Finn, and within an hour of Betty’s departure he had already failed in the task, when he told Finn the news and the boy asked, disbelieving, ‘Did she not leave anything for me? Not even a note?’

  ‘No,’ he replied, ‘not a thing.’

  With those few words he had made it impossible to ever hand over Betty’s letter. So he clung on to the envelope, and never told Finn of its existence. Eventually he become too fond of it to think of it as belonging to the boy in the first place. For that single specimen of her handwriting was the freshest piece of Betty he had left. To begin with he kept it tucked in his shirt pocket. For days and restless nights it remained there, on his person at all times like a locket. When finally he had to wash that shirt, that her fingers had brushed against and her chest had pressed to, he transferred the now crumpled letter to the pocket of his new shirt, and continued to carry it with him everywhere he went.

  Eventually it had grown so dog-eared that the seal had started – tantalizingly – to peel open. This at last made it too much for him to carry around, so he locked it in his trunk with his father’s Bible and his grandfather’s violin and still did not tell Finn it existed.

  Time passed. No call, no mail or message from Betty. And as the long months congested into the first half-year of her absence, the letter in his trunk took on a new significance. Secreted in its envelope were words of hers, words he had not heard before. Not only did he long for the sight of her handwriting, but he hoped that to read it would prompt the sound of her voice in his head. He began to want badly to unseal the letter and read it for himself. She would be disappointed in him, of course, and the threat of that guilt kept the letter locked up and safe.

  Further months passed. Betty neither returned nor made the slightest contact. He tried fruitlessly to track her down. He sought out the telephone numbers of old friends and relatives, but they knew nothing of her whereabouts and were as anxious about her as he was. Still he resisted reading the letter, although as time slouched by his motives for doing so shifted. Now fear stayed his hand instead of guilt. Were he to read it, there would be nothing new of her left to experience. He did not know whether he could cope with that. So he kept the letter sealed, even though every so often he took it from the trunk for his fingers to play at its corners, teasing him of their own accord.

  He began to dream about the lifeline of her handwriting, but he could no longer imagine her voice with clear diction. When he tried to replay things she had said she sounded suppressed, as if she were talking on the other side of a wall. He strode the mountains with his thoughts bent on the envelope in his trunk, hoping that to read her words might return her voice to him.

  Back in the homestead he would sit turning the envelope between his fore and index fingers, hypnotizing himself with its revolutions, just as his grandfather had so often with a playing card. He would think about Betty’s request – take care of Finn for me – and he would ask his thinking whether there was something he could give the boy to replace the stolen letter.

  A year after Betty’s departure his thinkings gave him the answer. He and Finn sat in garden chairs in the sunshine behind the bothy, with the rock walls of the bluff dashed golden and the sky full of blue, and he cleared his throat and said, ‘I would like to teach you something that my mother taught me.’

  His mother had shown him this thing not long before her own departure from Thunderstown. That departure had not been a shock like Betty’s had been, although it had plagued him as sickeningly as an infection. He had always known she was going to leave. He had known it even when he learned to crawl, even when he learned to tug her little finger and call her Mama. More specifically, he had known it since he first watched his father berate her.

  She did not leave without teaching him the trick which had delighted him since infancy: paper birds. She had kept their creation a closely guarded secret. He would find one waiting for him on his pillow at night, or tucked into his school bag, and he would immediately set upon it and take it apart, trying to understand how the folds built beak and wing. But he couldn’t comprehend their designs, and his mother kept her silence. She seemed to possess innate understanding of the design of a bird, so that she could fold without instruction any species from a flat expanse of paper.

  Then, in her final week in Thunderstown, when her bags were already packed, she had sat him down in front of her with a stack of crisp sheets and helped his fingers through the folds.

  He did his best to teach Finn, well aware that his own blunt attempts retained little of the magic of his mother’s. Still he tried his hardest, meticulous with concentration, poking his tongue out beneath his moustache. He held the result up to the sunlight. A paper dove with outstretched wings.

  Finn took the model from Daniel’s hands and turned it around and around in awe. He tugged at its wings as if there were a danger of wounding it.

  ‘I thought you’d like it,’ said Daniel, and offered Finn a sheet of paper. ‘Could you tell how it was made?’

  Finn nodded and hungrily set to work. If the boy made a mistake, Daniel would silently reach out and reposition his fingers, motioning them through the line a fold should take.

  ‘Pretty good,’ he whistled when Finn had finished. The boy’s dove was easily as accomplished as his own, with a wonky wing its only imperfection. They looked at each other, and for a moment, were unguardedly amazed. Daniel marvelled that this skill had passed from his own self into Finn, just as once it had passed from his mother into him. He felt as if the three of them were layered together, as closely as the closed pages of a book.

  Finn was eager to try again. Daniel sat back and observed, without interruption, the best dove so far take form. Finn laid it delicately between his first attempt and Daniel’s, so that the three birds perched side by side. Then for a while they just stared at them, remembering the missing third member of their company, the one more perfect than the two that remained.

  For a while after that, Finn would make Daniel a paper bird every time he paid a visit. Daniel would come to the bothy after church and find one waiting for him on the table. He kept them all, placing each carefully into his trunk beside his father’s Bible and his grandfather’s violin. Sometimes he would test their flight before storing them, and the birds would always soar true, and this would excite Mole into yapping and pouncing after them as if they were butterflies, at which they proved just as elusive and dinked at the last minute away from her biting jaws, and this in turn reminded him of Betty and Mole chasing one another around the lawn beside the homestead, which was like Betty dancing, which was like the marvellous night of Mr Nairn’s one-hundredth bi
rthday, when he and Betty had stamped and flicked their legs in time with each other until the last note sounded from the fiddles of the band.

  Then one day Finn did not give him a bird when they met. They ate together at the bothy, and afterwards Daniel left. Only once he had reached the bottom of the mountain did he realize that his hands were empty. He did not comment, presuming the boy had forgotten. Likewise he left it unmentioned when the same happened after their next meeting. Reluctantly he supposed that Finn had grown tired of giving presents, and each time they parted thereafter he would look down at the creases of his palms and still be surprised to find himself wishing they held a paper bird.

  A mile outside Thunderstown a gorge with grizzled rock walls severed the foothills of the Devil’s Diadem. The gorge’s base was a dark road of sharp stones, but its sides were as rugged as any canyon’s and hewn with dangerously narrow tracks that only goats could tread. On inaccessible ledges eagles had built their eyries, but the eagles here were tatty-feathered birds and they flew without majesty. Above them, rough cirrus clouds hung in the sky, each like the scratched claw marks of some wild beast.

  Elsa had followed Finn up here with her hand held in his, except for in one steep stretch of the trail where hands were needed to help climb. They made up for that moment’s parting with a kiss, and as they kissed they pressed their bodies in a close embrace and Elsa delighted in the smoothness of Finn’s shape.

  She had carried a rug with her from Thunderstown, while he had brought a long cardboard tube, tucked under his arm. They were making their way along the top of the gorge, where the path squeezed between the sheer drop on their left and a screen of jutting boulders on their right. Elsa held on to their knobbly surfaces as she walked, feeling the height of the cliff as a tingle in the nerves of her toes. She was glad when they found a place to sit down, a U-shaped cleave among the boulders, sheltered on all sides bar the cliff’s. A lizard who had been basking on the rock walls watched them for a moment, then begrudgingly vacated the spot, his legs peddling away over the tawny stone.

  ‘This is the best place for it?’

  Finn nodded enthusiastically and she threw down the rug. He opened his cardboard tube and sat down beside her on the fabric. The rocks enclosed their spot so dependably that when he took out and unrolled the sheets of paper they lay still on the floor.

  ‘Time to teach you,’ he said.

  ‘I’m pretty bad at this kind of stuff. I can barely fold a letter into an envelope.’

  ‘This is different.’

  He folded a sheet in half, turned its corners into flaps, bent it in on itself again, and then she lost track. Folds, twists, turnings in on turnings, and then all of a sudden a paper dove, nestling in the palm of his hand.

  ‘May I?’ She took the dove and began to unfold it, trying to understand how it had been constructed. She could see that the angle of one fold allowed its wings to take shape, and that the halving of the paper defined its back, but beyond that the folds bent mystically into folds. When she had unfolded it entirely, only the creases were left. Nothing bird-like about it.

  ‘Your turn,’ he said.

  ‘Honestly, Finn, I won’t be able to.’

  He began to instruct her. Even at dummy’s pace she found it impossible to follow, but when she erred he led her hands back into position, setting right each finger as carefully as if it were the needle of a record player. His touch was cool, refreshing in the heat, and his instructions precise. He seemed to understand the workings of her hands as instinctively as he did the making of the bird.

  She quickly gave up trying to comprehend what she was doing. Under his tutelage she simply took each stage as it came. At last the finished article lay upside down on the rug.

  She laughed. ‘It looks more like a scraggy old pigeon than a dove.’

  He scratched his head. ‘I don’t understand what went wrong.’

  ‘It’s me, stupid.’ She shrugged. ‘Don’t worry, I came to terms with my lack of creativity a long time ago. But I’m afraid I wouldn’t back this thing to fly.’

  He took it from her, opened it up and tinkered with its folds. Then he handed it back to her, beautified slightly. ‘Try it.’

  She tossed it into the gorge.

  It dipped to begin with. She thought it was going to drop like a stone, but it swooped unexpectedly at the last, out along a flat trajectory then up in a half-circle against the yawning air. She grinned and threw his bird after hers. His soared instantly, catching the updrafts, wind making its paper wings flutter. The two birds drifted at different altitudes, his gliding gracefully, hers with a laboured bent, until with a croak an eagle flapped up from the gorge’s depths to investigate. It chased Finn’s bird, caught it and stabbed it hard with its beak. The paper buckled and lost its buoyancy. The broken dove dropped quickly into the shadows.

  Elsa cackled and clapped her hands. ‘Does that make mine the winner?’

  He offered her another sheet, but she raised her hands.

  ‘I’ll quit while I’m ahead. I’m happy just to sit back and watch you. Do something complicated, something difficult.’

  He squinted up at the eagle, pursed his lips, then began to fold swiftly until he had built an eagle of his own, with a hook in its beak and wings with saw-toothed edges. He threw it into the air and watched it ascend majestically. The first eagle, the blood-and-feather one who was still patrolling the thermals, shrieked as its paper counterpart whooshed past. It fled the scene and left Finn’s bird circling.

  Elsa gave him a round of applause. ‘That’s perfect! How did you do that? You’re amazing, Finn!’

  He blushed, and even though they had been kissing on the way up here she felt goofy for gushing that out in such awestruck tones. She was still unused to the openness that had so readily fallen into place between them. Her relationship with Peter had been a sort of cautious dance, a series of suggestions and cool flirtations. If what she had found with Finn was any kind of dance at all, it was the unconscious ballet of two sleeping lovers who wake throughout the night to find their limbs in new tangles.

  ‘Well,’ he said, ‘I can’t take the credit because I don’t really think about it. It’s just something I’ve had a knack for since I first tried it.’

  She watched his eagle flutter and roll, and bank to the side through the hot air. ‘I think it’s wonderful.’

  Finn stared out across the cleft of the gorge.

  She shuffled conspicuously closer, so that their bodies were touching.

  ‘Elsa,’ he asked, ‘did you ever lie on your back as a kid, and watch the clouds go by?’

  ‘Yeah, of course. I loved doing that.’

  ‘And did you ever get the feeling that that was the right way up to be? With your back against the planet, looking straight out at the universe?’

  ‘I used to lie like that until I no longer felt like the sky was up. The sky was forwards, and up was whichever direction my head happened to be pointing in. That way the clouds were in front of me, on a level with me, and it felt like they could be reached. I used to love that. The world felt, I don’t know, like it had always meant to be that way up. As if it had been knocked over, and to lie like that was to put it right again.’

  ‘That,’ he said, ‘is exactly how I feel when I’m with you. You’ve put me the right way up. You’ve fixed me. For the first time since I was tiny I feel like I fit together.’

  ‘Finn?’

  ‘I don’t have to choose between being a man and being the weather. You’ve helped me see that. I can be both at once.’

  ‘Finn, hang on, there’s something stuck to your cheek ...’

  She reached across for what looked like a bit of cotton or fluff, but it broke apart at her touch. It was a wisp of cloud. She brushed it away and beneath it his skin was smooth. Then she saw another strand on the crown of his scalp, as white and curled as a pillow feather. She stroked her palm through it and it dispersed.

  ‘What is it?’ he asked, trying in vain to look
up at his own head.

  She left her hand caressing his cheek and temples. Another lock of mist emerged along the curve of his ear and masked the detail of the lobe. ‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘It’s like a tiny cloud.’

  He touched his fingers to his head, confused. Another ribbon of cloud shimmered across his scalp, as bubbly a vapour as the gas that floats free of opened champagne. ‘This has never happened before.’

  She reached out for his hand as delicately as she might for a floating bubble. Cloud clung to his fingers where he had touched his head.

  ‘What do you think we should do about it?’ he asked worriedly.

  A longer drift of cloud had appeared along the inside of his collar, and now another thickened out of a haze along his brow.

  ‘Nothing,’ she said. ‘This isn’t like storm cloud. This is like those clouds we used to watch as kids. You’re still in one piece, aren’t you? Perhaps this is exactly what you were just talking about. Perhaps this is being a man and being the weather at the same time.’

  It was not long before so much of the strange soft mist had emerged that it outlined his body. It kept coming, fuming gently out of his pores and reaching ethereally into the air. At its thickest it was white as snow, but its edge began to catch the light and the sun outlined it in yellow.

  ‘You’ve got a silver lining,’ she whispered, and kissed him.

  While their lips moved the cloud grew, and filled their little boulder-backed enclave with mist. The gorge vanished, the sky vanished. It was just the two of them in a cottony world. Then he tensed and she stopped kissing him and backed off slightly. ‘What’s wrong?’