I Will Send Rain

by Rae Meadows

  “You’re not taking me to see some silly animal bones or something, are you?”

  Fred turned and pointed, and she could see something glinting in the sun, up high in the remains of a sun-bleached cottonwood tree. They crossed the dead field and Birdie squinted up at a mass of tangled metal in the skeletal tree.

  “What is it?” she asked.

  Fred flapped his arms like wings and grinned.

  She looked again.

  “Crows?”

  He nodded.

  With nothing growing, no hay or twigs or leaves lying about, the crows had chosen the most plentiful resource: barbed wire, which littered the landscape, poking up through the drifts or hanging from buried posts. A giant barbed-wire nest.

  “Isn’t that something,” she said. Why it made her feel better to see the nest she couldn’t say, but she liked the stubborn way it looked. “Thanks, Freddie.”

  He raised his eyebrows together in quick succession until she laughed. He’d first noticed the nest months ago, and he sat out here every so often at the base of the dead tree, motionless, until a crow flew in. After the men had bombed the skies and killed the birds, he was relieved the nest was still occupied.

  “I’m thirsty,” Birdie said. “You coming?”

  He wanted to hold her hand the way he used to, but he knew he was too old for that.

  * * *

  “THE RABBITS,” JACK said. He smoothed his hand over his folded napkin, a faint brown stain on its corner.

  “The rabbits,” Styron said, taking a bite of a donut, the sugar coating the top of his lip. “The little critters are everywhere.”

  Styron had been fascinated by the overrun of rabbits, the plaguelike nature of it. Only out here. But it was more than that. In those quiet dark moments before the sun came up, he knew the Panhandle had changed him and he couldn’t imagine going back to East Coast life. What would he do, wear a suit and become a banker like everyone he used to know? He was different, wilder. The land was huge, the sky unpredictable, the elements punishing, and he had come to believe that it was good to feel small against all that. He could see opportunity even if no one else could.

  “So they are.”

  Jack sipped his coffee and glanced around at the empty tables. Ruth’s was the name of both the restaurant and the bar next door, where old Ruth herself, all four feet ten of her with her white bun and red lipstick, tended bar. Her daughter, Jeanette, ran the café, always ready with a caustic laugh and an easy sway of her hips. Jeanette’s husband, Dwight, worked at the grain elevator; he was a charmed fiddle player who, when drunk, would often let his fists loose on Jeanette. Jack had seen the black eyes from under her heavy face powder.

  At the counter, Jeanette drawled mm-hmms to two farmers as she dried cups and saucers.

  “What did they have to lose?” he heard her say. “I mean, good Lord. The whole sorry bunch of them.”

  Half the town had a crush on Jeanette. Jack wished Samuel Bell wasn’t such a goddamn upright citizen. If you were going to covet your neighbor’s wife, it sure would feel better if your neighbor was a son of a bitch like Dwight.

  “Boss?”

  Jack focused on Styron. “There are a lot of rabbits, yes.”

  “And people eat them, right?” Styron said.

  “Yes, Styron, people eat them.” Jack didn’t have the patience for Styron’s antics today. He felt sluggish, the coffee not yet kicking in. “You have sugar on your lip.”

  Styron wiped his face with his napkin, and still the sugar clung. “So I was thinking…”

  Jack clunked his forehead down against the table. “Just get on with it.”

  “Come on, hear me out,” Styron said.

  Jeanette sauntered over with the pot of coffee. She was pretty, still, despite years with Dwight.

  “More for you, Mayor? Or something to eat? You look a little pale.”

  “I feel a little pale,” he said. “I’ll have a bowl of chili. And more coffee.”

  “You ever serve rabbit here, Jeanette?” Styron asked. His voice came out too high, like a boy’s, and he reached quickly for his coffee.

  Jack shook his head. “Don’t you mind him.”

  “Well, no, Mr. Styron, no, we don’t. You don’t see something you like?” She cocked her hip and Jack felt sad for her then, for the gesture of her younger hopeful self.

  “Just thinking about our current abundance is all,” Styron said stiffly.

  “Plenty of people skinning and eating what they catch these days,” Jeanette said, nodding hello to the fellows who walked in. “Just not sure they want to see it on the menu.” She walked away calling back, “I’ll get that chili to you, Mayor.”

  “Out with it,” Jack said to Styron.

  “Okay. People are angry about the drought, and here are these little animals multiplying, hopping around destroying gardens and what little crops are growing.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “And people are struggling. Rabbits are meat.”

  “Styron—”

  “An event. A roundup.”

  “A roundup?”

  “We round up all the rabbits. Pen them in.”

  “We?”

  “Divide up the meat at the end. Make it festive. It’ll be a sporting event. A hunt.”

  “It’s not a hunt if they’re in a pen.” Jack was already unsettled by the idea.

  Jeanette returned with coffee and a small chipped bowl of chili.

  “Don’t worry, I’m not listening,” she said.

  As Jeanette walked away, Jack leaned in and lowered his voice. “You’re talking about a bloodbath.”

  “Rodents,” Styron said.

  “Hares,” Jack said.

  “Pests. Whatever they are. Besides, it’s not a big deal for these folks to kill animals.”

  “Jesus, Styron.”

  Styron lifted his hands in defense. “I bet people would come from all over the county for it. All’s I’m saying.”

  Even though he usually drank it black, Jack dropped a sugar cube into his coffee. He pushed the chili away, the smell turning his stomach.

  And then there she was. Annie Bell. Walking down First in a blue dress and matching hat, her eyes cast down but her pace brisk, a paper sack in her arm. As she neared Ruth’s, she looked in and caught Jack staring. With a curious tilt of her head, she smiled back.

  “I’ll see you back at the office,” he said to Styron, surprising himself as he sprang up from the table.

  “Wait, what? What about the rabbits?”

  Jack clumsily counted coins and spilled them onto the table.

  “Do whatever you want.”

  * * *

  ANNIE NEEDED WHITE thread, pins, lard, and cornmeal. Or so she’d told Samuel. She did need those things, but not today, not enough to make a separate trip into town. But standing in her hot kitchen, having swept the floorboards again, and put the bread to rise and chased grasshoppers from the windowsill, and snapped the beans, she thought about the Woodrows on a road to where it was green. Sure, there was no perfect life waiting for them in the West. She imagined them foraging for grubs and weeds in a highway ditch to fill their bellies on the way. But there had to be relief in leaving the drought behind. She wiped the hair from her face and felt a soft itchy flutter in her chest, like the beating wings of moths trapped in a lantern. I must get out, she thought. And once she had thought it, she couldn’t shake it. She waited until Samuel had finished his lunch.

  “Do you need anything while I’m out?” she asked, trying to slow her breath.

  “I’m all right for now,” he said. He licked peanut butter from his fingertips. “Oh, you know what? I need some stamps. If you could swing by the post office. You might ask after Edward’s wife. Her joints are bad again.” He pushed away from the table, rubbed his hands together and stretched his arms overhead. “I’ll see you later.”

  Samuel felt himself pretending. All he could really think about were the dreams that visited him almost nightly now, the dr
eams of ferocious rain.

  * * *

  ANNIE HAD RUSHED to clear his plate and it clanged against the sink as the door swung shut behind him. He hadn’t noticed anything. She ran upstairs, taking the steps two at a time. She splashed water on her face and washed under her arms and changed into a navy blue dress, one she hadn’t worn since the Judson wedding two years ago, its sailor collar still flattering when she checked in the flecked mirror above her dresser. And she opted for a cloche hat, reddening some as she put it on. She was older than pretty, she knew, yet that didn’t help temper the longing for something just outside of her periphery, something she could not yet name. Annie licked her lips. She had never in her life worn lipstick, but she wished she had some now, a little pink.

  Samuel was out in the field tending to fragile shoots, which should have been heading but were barely jointing. There wasn’t much to do, but he was still out from dawn to dusk every day. More and more, he saw the drought as a test of faith. More and more, she feared the drought would free this tight coil of restlessness in her, expose her as someone less than steadfast.

  Annie had stuffed the hat into her handbag and skittered to the car. The tires spun and dust rose up around her until she jolted forward, onward, toward town.

  * * *

  ANNIE WALKED QUICKLY along First, as if she had somewhere to be. She felt the McCleary brothers watch her as she passed, even though that was sort of the point. What was she doing, anyway? Trying to be different from the farm wife that she was? Her head was roasting in her dark hat and there was a pebble in her shoe cutting into her heel. The afternoon was hot and quiet. Her errands were done, all her purchases made in fifteen minutes, so she walked, the grain elevator looming at the end of the street. Ruth’s was the last place on the block, and she considered stopping for an iced tea and an oatmeal cookie to resurrect her mood. But she couldn’t stop, because of how it might look—dressed up and whiling away the afternoon alone—not to mention the fifteen cents they couldn’t spare.

  When she glanced in the cloudy front window, there, not for the first time, was the mayor looking right at her. Jack Lily. She smiled without showing her teeth, and kept walking.

  “Afternoon, Mrs. Bell,” he said.

  She stopped and turned, shifting the paper sack to her hip as if it were a baby.

  “Oh. Hello, Mayor,” she said, registering how quickly he had managed to make it out to the sidewalk. She wished she’d had a chance to blot her face with a handkerchief.

  “Solving all our problems?” she asked, nodding toward Ruth’s.

  He chuckled and crossed his arms. “Trying to rein in my deputy. He thinks everything deserves a plaque or a parade.”

  “Nothing wrong with a parade,” she said. She should have kept going then, but there she stood, a tension between them both awful and delicious. “You can call me Annie.”

  “Can I carry that for you? Help you to your car?”

  No one who saw them would have thought anything of it, and yet Annie knew different. What could people see anyway? They couldn’t see the weight of a glance or the impurity of a thought. They were in plain view, but the town might just have easily fallen away. “No, no. I’m all right,” she said. But she didn’t move on.

  “I don’t mean to keep you.” Jack glanced at the towering grain elevator at the end of the street. “Where are you headed?”

  Annie could feel sweat above her lip as she looked both ways and then back to Jack Lily, his pale, smooth hands. Even after years out here, he hadn’t lost the refined city way about him, an imprint of his old life in Chicago.

  “I should have an answer,” she said. “But I guess I’m just walking some.”

  “Walking is good,” he said.

  “The truth is I didn’t want to go home just yet.” She felt lighter having said it, a new hollow in her gut.

  “Can I walk with you? I’m in no rush to get back to my desk.”

  She was pleased, but she knew it was not quite right for him to ask. Are you doing good by God, Annie? she heard her mother say before she could quiet the voice.

  “Okay,” she said.

  “Okay, Annie,” he said. “And you can call me Jack.”

  She nodded and switched her groceries back to her front. They walked a few feet apart down the block and beyond where the buildings gave way to dirt and scrub and the blackened, crumbled remains of the old feed store, which had burned down last year.

  “It’s not like Chicago, I bet,” she said.

  “No, it’s not. But there are things I don’t miss about the city,” he said.

  Glad to be moving, Annie felt the motion settling her down.

  “I miss it and I’ve never even been there,” she said, and laughed. “Not that I’d know what to do off the farm.” The reference to the farm made her feel better; it held the mention of her family, of Samuel. They passed the loading platforms of the deserted silos and crossed the train tracks. And then at the same time they looked up to the sky. Where had the sun gone all of a sudden on a cloudless day?

  “No,” they said in unison to the darkness ahead. Another duster, this time, it seemed, thundering right toward the two of them.

  Annie’s hat lifted off her head and when she reached up to grab it, the bag fell from her arms, spilling thread and lard and salt and baking soda and the cherry drops she’d gotten for Fred and the red ribbon she’d gotten for Birdie and the coffee and stamps she’d gotten for Samuel, across the road that led east out of town. She stooped to salvage her purchases as the wind whipped her dress and drove dust into her face, took her hat straight up into the air.

  “Annie,” Jack said, “leave it.”

  He took her hand and they ran.

  CHAPTER 4

  What hath God wrought. Ever since the first duster hit, that was what Samuel heard like a hammer on tin, over and over in his head. Shovel the sand. What hath God wrought. Spoon up the beans and gravy. What hath God wrought. Pump the well. What hath God wrought. Insistent like a heartbeat.

  He watched Annie sleep, the rise and fall of the sheet. He wanted to wake her when the dreams came. But he didn’t. She was exhausted, too. Each breath a heavy sigh. The dust was never gone. In their ears and eyes. In the sheets. On their toothbrushes and coffee spoons. In the butter. A layer of gray on the milk.

  Pastor Hardy couldn’t say whether withholding the rain and showering them with dust was a condemnation by God, but how can we not feel cursed? Samuel thought. Our land is on the wind.

  Before Eleanor, before Fred, he and Annie used to sit together at the kitchen table when Birdie had gone to sleep and hold hands and bow their heads for just a minute or two before moving on to the tasks still needing tending. Those few minutes of intimacy were grounding, a reminder. But when the baby died, Annie stopped praying with him. She never said anything about it, just busied herself in another part of the house. Now Annie was distant. Annie was beautiful. She closed her eyes in church, but Samuel was pretty sure it was not to pray.

  When they had first arrived, sleeping in the wagon lined with the mattress she’d slept on as a girl, he had never felt closer to her, to anyone. “Samuel,” she’d say. “Samuel, tell me about the farm.” And he would describe the place he imagined it would be when it was done. He had thought about it every day—working the soil for Ben Gramlin until his hands split—every day since he was seventeen. A sea of tilled fields flat and dark. A timber house with dormered windows and a grove of locust trees to remind her of Kansas. Together they carved out the barely-there hill for the dugout and planked two rooms that would shelter them until they could build the farmhouse. Centipedes clicked in the earthen walls, but it was theirs. At the end of each day their arms quivered and their palms were ground with dirt. He’d look over at her, his Annie who’d never done more than housework, sweat darkening her dress, and he would praise God for his good fortune.

  Samuel had about a quarter of the wheat left. Scrawny plants that uprooted with the slightest tug. He could count the cows
’ ribs. The last duster had clogged the well.

  And yet. I cannot leave this land that is ours, he thought, any more than I can crawl back to Dickinson County to work another man’s acres, making a dollar from dawn until I can’t see my hands. Or get on the relief. On relief you might as well be dead.

  A farmer needs a farm. Didn’t he know it.

  The rains would come. The rains would come and God would show them the way back. Samuel had to believe that.

  * * *

  CY ROLLED AWAY from Birdie with a sigh. She poked his side, and he squawked and fell partly onto the floor, legs splayed.

  “Hey now,” he said, laughing a little and repositioning himself on the torn mattress.

  The scavengers had picked the Woodrows’ house clean, but they’d left the mattress, Birdie had been pleased to discover. She stared up at the mottled ceiling. Sepia water stains bloomed from the cracks, vestiges of rain. His sweat left her front slick so she waited to dress, thankful for the breeze that crisscrossed through the tumbledown house.

  “You know it’s my birthday coming up,” she said.

  “Oh yeah?” Cy propped himself up on his elbow. “When?”

  “Two months. I’m giving you ample notice.”

  He laughed and lay back down. “Thanks for letting me know.” He turned to the window and watched a gauzy cloud scud by.

  Her birthday meant sixteen. And what she hoped for was that Cy would ask her to marry him. They had not talked about it yet, but they had confessed love, and to Birdie, this was as good as any promise. He made her feel like a new person, no longer just a daughter and sister, no longer a child. He was like a lantern held high, letting her see what might be possible just ahead. When he said, “I love you,” she swallowed those words whole and they spread out through her limbs until she felt fortified, sated, as if she could live forever on love alone.