The Man Who Rained

by Ali Shaw

  The wind gushed above them, playing the air like a saw. She remembered the dog that had intruded into her room that morning and taken the kite in its teeth. Already now that kite was far away, lost over undiscovered country.

  ‘Deal,’ she said.

  ‘What? Are you serious?’

  She yanked his arm so that he followed and lay across her, looking down at her with only an inch of air between them. ‘Deadly. But for the moment let’s just stay here.’

  He grinned. Then, once again, that champagne-cloud began to show around the outline of his head, catching the light and giving him a silver lining. A gaseous halo, this time stretched and snatched at by the wind. She stroked her hand up over the bald dome of his head and the cloud parted at the motion.

  ‘This is your happiness,’ she whispered, ‘and I am so glad that I helped you to discover it.’

  18

  THE LETTER FROM BETTY

  In the morning Daniel trekked up Drum Head, to check the traps he had set there. He could taste moisture on the air – a change of weather was due. The sky was rugged with altocumulus, apart from in the north where the pointed peaks of the Devil’s Diadem had torn strips out of the clouds. Above him, the sun looked perched on the peak of the mountain, as if it were considering turning back down the far slopes. Below, in Thunderstown, somebody was having a bonfire: a thin helix of smoke drifted up from somewhere in the vicinity of Corris Street.

  He huffed, and turned his back on the town. He was still hurting from his treatment at the hands of Sidney Moses and his followers. He should have done his duty and killed that brook horse, not indulged a weak-hearted mood that must have made him seem like a silly, bleating little lamb.

  He came to a part of the mountain where bristling spears of slate jutted out of the earth. To progress uphill he had to wind his way between them – the slate spears were as regular as trees in a tight forest. This was a good place to kill goats, for the routes between the stones were narrow and could be laid with traps until the place was like a minefield. He trod carefully, watching the pebbly ground to ensure he didn’t fall victim to one of his own concealed devices. ‘Hah!’ he cried, the noise ricocheting between the trunks of rock, Sidney Moses would not last five minutes up here. He would no doubt chop his own hands off when he tried to prime his first trap. Likewise, Hamel Rhys would be done for within moments, and Sally Nairn too, and even a man such as Abe Cosser, who knew something of the mountains, wouldn’t survive.

  The first and second traps he came upon were empty, but in the third he found a young nanny who had died overnight in a vice of steel. He unhinged the metal jaws and slumped her body against a rock, where it would make quick crow fodder. He reset the trap, winching back the lever that helped open wide the jaws and lock them in their deadly circle, then he stood for a while with his hands in his pockets, looking at the saw-toothed metal.

  If you judged it rationally then of course it was futile. Even his grandfather had admitted that. One man with a rifle and a collection of snares could never hope to keep in check the population of an entire species. What mattered was the trying. A culler’s real work was not done up on the mountains but in the perception of the townsfolk, where it affirmed that somebody was out there in the wild, keeping Thunderstown safe.

  With a snort he crouched down and picked up a chunk of slate. He tossed it up and down a few times, then hurled it as hard as he could at the trap. With a crack and a clang the rock hit the pressure plate and the jaws slammed closed. He picked his way along the winding paths until he came upon his next trap, and this too he disarmed, and so on up the mountain until, come late afternoon, he had neutralized them all.

  When he got back to the homestead in the afternoon, he washed in cold water, sieving handfuls of cool fluid over his hair and face. Then he regarded himself in the mirror for a time, droplets occasionally falling from his beard. He tried to count all of the new wrinkles and grey hairs that Betty would not recognize if she ever came back, but there were too many.

  When he had dried himself he plodded down to the kitchen, tore a hunk of bread and sliced tomatoes across it. He took this through to the main hall and living space of the homestead. Stout wooden columns propped up the ceiling, and in a wall at the far end an impressive fireplace (lit as rarely as Daniel felt the cold) was surrounded by soft chairs that he never lounged in. The walls of the hall were crammed with portraits of Fossiters past, each sporting the same furrowed eyebrows and clipped black beard that Daniel wore. Previous generations had raised large families in this place, but there were no pictures of children or their mothers on these walls. His ancestors had had little time for either.

  He sat at the sturdy wooden table at which the Fossiters had eaten for centuries. He picked at the food, but no sooner had he sat down to eat it than he lost his appetite.

  He had always known that he was of two minds. His first was the slow-paced, sombre mind that the townsfolk recognized as Daniel Fossiter’s. This mind was the one he used to think and plan and reason, but with his other mind he could not manipulate or second-guess. It surged in the depths of himself, just as an ocean surges beneath the boat bobbing on its surface. It had its own thinkings, to which he was not privy, but which sometimes, looking down, he would glimpse for a second like the shape of a whale moving underwater. At other times it rocked him with such intense waves of feeling that all he could do was cling to some solid and rational thought until it stilled. It always did, eventually, or at least it always had done until now.

  He got up and crossed to his trunk, gently lifting the wooden lid. Inside were the paper birds Finn used to make him, which he parted carefully so as not to dent their wings. Beneath them lay his father’s Bible and his grandfather’s violin and, tucked between those, the letter Betty had written long ago for Finn.

  He returned to the table and placed the letter squarely on its surface, making sure it lined up perpendicular to the edges of the table. He wondered whether he could wait any more.

  He summoned his most treasured memories of her. A birthday of his on which, as with all prior birthdays, he had let the occasion go unacknowledged. He remembered that he had returned to the homestead after an afternoon’s labour to find it springing all over with flowers. A cake on the table, a russet-coloured sponge with fruit pieces as dark as ink blots. Betty, its baker, waiting for him in the doorway, wearing a silly pointed party hat and holding something wrapped in bright paper that was a present for him.

  Another memory, this time in the dead of night, when he heard a noise at his bedroom window. He sat up startled in bed, fists raised like a boxer’s. There Betty was, scrambling in through the open window in a dress pale as the moonlight. It made marble sculpture from her bare shoulders, but instead of sitting gobsmacked and admiring her, he protested that there was a front door downstairs designed for entering the premises. She cut back that life was better like this, if you let yourself be carried on it.

  He needed her wise words now more than ever, so he started to pick at the seal of the envelope. Then he paused and thought that to open it with his thick fingers would be like opening a jewellery box with a battering ram. He rushed to the sideboard and found the thin silver letter opener of his father’s. This he sliced precisely through the space between the sealed gum and the corner of the envelope.

  He raised the paper to his face and pressed his nose against the seal. It did not smell of Betty, as he had hoped, so he tried to imagine her favourite perfume. He found that he could not.

  No matter. The words were what would count. After eight patient years he would at last receive some sentiment of hers. The sheer shape of her handwriting would be enough.

  He opened the envelope. He had speculated, fantasized, dreamed about this moment so many times that to begin with he could hardly look.

  Inside were two sheets of paper which he unfolded. He stared into the grid of her handwriting and at first didn’t let himself read the words. He savoured instead the moment, absorbed the arrangement
of her sentences, treated them like a dance he could imagine her hand and her pen fox-trotting through. Then he wiped his face on his sleeve and began to read.

  Finn,

  There have been so many different versions of this letter. I have spent all day trying to write it. And if there’s only one thing you take from these words, it should be this: I have not left you. Please don’t think it even for a minute.

  Things have changed in these last few months and I need room to set my thoughts in order. You should know, though, that I don’t blame you for the burns I received from the lightning. It wasn’t your fault, and nor is it your fault that I’m going away for a bit.

  I’ve always known that you had lightning in you, and I’ve always accepted it. Daniel warned me again and again that you might be dangerous, but I couldn’t make him see that perhaps each of us is a danger, if we don’t know what’s inside of us. Now you understand about it too, and I feel like I should have given you some warning long ago. At your last birthday I tried to explain it. Sixteen years old seemed like a fitting time to tell you, but I could not find the words. Do you remember your birthday picnic on Drum Head, when I sat in silence and you asked me what was wrong? I was trying to tell you then. Trying to tell you that you were a thundercloud once, but that I love you just the same.

  And yet, I am frightened. I’m writing this and not speaking it because I could never say such a thing in person.

  How can I explain this fear? It’s like this ... The greatest joy of parenthood is passing things on. It’s what I always dreamed about doing – giving away all the things I thought were good in my own life and holding back all the bad. And I have wondered whether all we ever are is this: a filter of the good and the bad, trying to work out which is which, which we should withhold and which we should pass on. So before I digress and restart this letter for the hundredth time, here’s the start of the point I’m trying to make: I loved Daniel Fossiter for a little while. He was so absorbed in his fears, but sometimes I could prize them open and let out a part of him that was like a little boy, able to lose itself in life again, and that was the thing I loved. Yet all along, at the same time, he was trying to pass something on to me. Those fears he had grown up with and surrounded himself with, he wanted me to feel them too. They were, ultimately, all fears of things unexplainable. Fears of things like you, Finn.

  When the lightning came out of you he said it was proof. That there was something terribly wrong with you and that it needed righting. I said it only proved you were a miracle. Then a kind of zeal came over him and it made me sick to look him in the eye. He was so eager for us all to be doomed. And then I went to you, and as I have said I held nothing against you because of what happened, but no sooner did I see you than my body froze up with fear.

  I grew up in a rational world, Finn. A place far, far away from here. I am used to reason: if I know I am not frightened of you, then it follows that I am not frightened. But my body doesn’t think in the same way. I had worked everything through in my mind, and I intended for nothing to be different between us. Then I saw you for the first time after you struck me, and you looked so small and sheepish, and I was nearly paralyzed by fear. I am so, so sorry for how that must have made you feel.

  I ran back to Daniel after that. At last I understood him, for it was his fear that I now had inside of me. It had been passed on, just as he always hoped to pass it on by persuasion. No sooner did I understand him than I did not love him any more, and I realized I needed to be away from him and from Thunderstown.

  You are my salvation: a child when before I could have none. But now I feel like I am suffocating whenever Daniel is near. It’s like his words are smoke in the air. I flinch every time he opens his mouth. So I am going away, and by the time you read this I will have left Thunderstown. I have asked him to look after you. Please do your best to look after him in return. He is shrill with fear, and he does not know the first thing about it.

  Don’t worry, I will be back soon, I just need to breathe some fresh air and be in the company of strangers. You’re perhaps too young to feel the need for such a change, but I’ve learned that sometimes the things we don’t understand are the things that compel us most profoundly, and we have to decide whether to suffocate them or let them carry us. There’s no middle way.

  One more thing to say: you are a man. Now that you know what’s inside of you, you’ve grown up. You couldn’t be a child again even if you wanted to be. And the bleak and wonderful thing about growing up is that you have to work everything out on your own. You will do a fine job, I am sure, and before long we will be together again.

  Your loving mother,

  Betty

  For a time Daniel did not move. The second hand on the old clock made its slow struggle around the face, and only after it had turned a full circuit did he give a great bellow and batter his fists against his knees. He tore at his beard. She could not mean these things she had written. She could never have been so affected by the things he had felt about Finn.

  ‘Because I was wrong, Betty!’ he wailed. ‘Wrong!’

  Had he – with his constant haranguing – had he been the one who had changed her thinkings and strangled her feelings for him out of her? Man, his father had said, is cursed to love. To feel it as powerfully as he does. Man, his grandfather had said with a grin, dreamed up love because he was weak-willed, for a lover is a man who lets his guard down, and after that the killing blow comes in.

  ‘Except,’ he growled in reply to the voices of his ancestors, ‘you don’t say what is to be done about it.’ It seemed ridiculous to sit and speculate, when love was a thing that grabbed you by the guts and not the head and you did not know how to ride it out. He did not give a damn about whether love was a weakness or a curse, since trying not to fall in love was as doomed to failure as trying to murder yourself only by holding your breath. If the whole of Drum Head had been torn out of the earth and placed down on his chest, it would not have weighed as much as did the realization that he had put his own wretched fear into Betty, even though he had loved her with every atom of his body.

  Worse still, she had intended to leave only briefly. At times during these last eight years he had hoped that when she’d said as much, on the day that she’d left Thunderstown, she had lied to him. If it were a lie and a lack of caring it was possible to imagine her forging a new life in a new landscape, and although that was painful at least it meant she was alive to live it. What if, by accident or design, she had taken that journey from which there was no possible return?

  From the walls of their homestead the Fossiter portraits watched in silence. ‘Damn you,’ he growled at them, including himself among their countenances. ‘Damn you all.’

  He could not bear to be in their company so he charged outside, into the climbing sunlight of the morning. In the yard he paused and bit hard on his tongue. He wondered what he might have done for her or said, had he known what he did now.

  He blundered across to the workshop. In here hung the corpse of the last goat he had hung, beheaded and drip-dried now of the blood that had filled it. He unknotted the cords that kept it dangling from its hooves and thumped it on to his butchering table, a wood-topped counter stained by the blood of generations of goats, spilled by generations of Fossiters. Its surface was notched like a prison wall by the tally blows of their cleavers.

  He had often wondered what differentiated the goats’ burly, braying existences from a man’s. A goat lived its life like every goat in every generation before it. It chewed on anything it could, polished its horns against tree bark, moulted in the autumn, rutted in the spring. All this it did with dull stony eyes and a placid expression, as if its life were a routine played out a million times, a chore lived with duty and not wonder.

  But a man ... a man had a fire, a spark in his eye. His life seemed to him an exquisite flame, and he would tend it greedily. What was that fire, wondered Daniel, and where did it come from?

  ‘Betty!’ he gasped without pl
anning to do so, croaking up at the ceiling.

  And why did he address the ceiling? Because he thought God lay up there? God in the heavens? God in the workshop’s loft? The goats did not croak at the sky when they died their slow deaths with their legs bent in metal jaws. All that was up in the sky was water and dust on the wind, and then a nothingness beyond human imagination, so everlasting that it could not even be measured in light years. He closed his eyes and pictured God the Father seated on His throne, and God the Father had a serious brow, a long nose and a black beard. God the Father was a Fossiter.

  He took up his flaying knife and returned to the carcass on the butchering table. Parting the dirty hair around the goat’s crotch, he worked the knife into its groin and cut out an exit for the slop of its innards, which he dragged out in his fist and plopped into a bowl. Then he set to work with the knife, drawing with its blade the practised patterns of cuts and slices that gave him a grip on the animal’s skin. With tugs and pulls he undressed the body of its coat, as easy as if it had been a cardigan on a human being.

  He rubbed salt into the newly removed goat skin and hung it up to cure. He chose another cleaver and chopped briskly through the meat and bones, separating out the body into joints and chops. Then he could go on no more.

  He twisted around and flung the cleaver through the air. It whistled as it flew, then slammed into the woodwork of the door frame. He kicked over the bleed trough so that its liquid mix of innards and viscera sprayed out across the workshop wall. His hands were shaking and he screwed up his eyes and yelled into the darkness of his thinkings. After yanking free the cleaver he headed back into the homestead. The first thing to hand was his father’s bookshelf, which he broke from the wall with one powerful blow, so that all of the books fell in a mess to the floor. He dropped after them on to his knees and one by one slammed the cleaver through their covers until the floor was snowy with paper. Then he sprung up and swung the cleaver at his grandfather’s favourite armchair, hacking through the arm and ripping open the cushions until he spluttered on the dust and the feathers flying forth. He kicked over the table, and butted his head against a painting of his great-great-grandfather so that the canvas smashed in. He slashed and scored his way along the wall of portraits, until he came to his old trunk in the corner. Greedily he threw it back open – and then stopped.