I Will Send Rain

by Rae Meadows

  “That’s weird, Birdie. Who doesn’t know where they’re walking to?”

  Birdie saw Mary as she would be at forty. Same body, as straight up and down as a tree trunk, same nosy face. Hair shorter and starting to gray. The smug pinches of her mouth hardened into wrinkles.

  “What did your mother want?”

  “See if you wanted to come over. Daddy’s filled a tub from the well. Thought we could cool off in it. I’m deathly bored from the heat.”

  “That would have been nice, sure,” Birdie said, scanning the horizon, suddenly desperate for shade.

  “Let’s go then. I’m sweating and it’s disgusting.”

  “Some other time, maybe. It’s too far to go home and change.”

  “You can borrow a bathing suit from me. I have two. One’s a little faded but still works okay. Has this little bow at the waist.”

  Birdie knew she couldn’t squeeze into a bathing suit. Mary would home in on her tummy like a vulture to a carcass.

  “I don’t think so. Thanks, though.”

  “Oh please, please, please? I need your advice about my dress for the dance.”

  “School doesn’t even start for another week.”

  “It’s never too early. You better start thinking about it. With Cy gone and all. Set your sites on Luke Carlton. I’m working on John Bellows. That way, we can go together! Oh my gosh, what if we ended up marrying those two!”

  I used to be like you, Birdie thought.

  “I’m going to go home,” she said. “I don’t feel well all of a sudden.”

  “Oh, phooey on you,” Mary said. “You’re strange, Birdie.”

  Birdie turned without saying goodbye as Mary pedaled away.

  * * *

  ANNIE SAT ON the edge of the bed. Her face raged hot, her head dizzy. She imagined herself, or a smarter, more modern version of herself, walking with tall glittery buildings on either side of her, the blue shimmer of Lake Michigan in the distance. She didn’t know what Chicago looked like, but she’d seen pictures of New York and had been, that one time, to Kansas City, so maybe it was a combination of the two. The wind would blow her skirt as she walked, her rounded strapped pumps hitting the sidewalk with decisive clacks as she crossed the street to a restaurant where she was to meet Jack Lily for lunch, the sounds of clinking teacups and low voices and forks against china as she pulled open the door.

  Did she love him? She felt bubbly, the escape of it the headiest part of it all. She loved that he was different from anyone she’d known before, that he had chosen her. She loved his hands that had never worked a plow. How he made her body feel. The heat of it. But love? She couldn’t quite reach it. Not yet. They’d barely talked, when it came down to it, so overcome by just being alone together. Love went beyond that, she knew.

  From the window she could see Samuel leaving the coop and heading to the barn. How would it feel to leave him? There would be loss. There would be relief. She would miss him, the comfort of what she’d known her entire adult life. All that they shared. The children, of course. She could not run away.

  She folded Jack’s note into a square and then another and another. And yet, what would it be like to decide something for herself alone? A few days. And then she would come back. She looked down at her old flat shoes, unraveling at the heels. She could do it. She would go. Yes.

  Her tired dresses hung in a sad bunch in the armoire. On the train she would wear the navy blue one she’d worn when they’d sat out the storm together. She pulled it from the hanger.

  * * *

  BIRDIE HADN’T BEEN to the Woodrow house since Cy left, and it now looked like it had been deserted for years, patches of shake gone from the roof, a dune almost entirely obscuring the front window, which was cracked and scratched. The front door had fallen over on its side. Anything of value, even the door handle, had been stripped.

  She climbed through sand up to her knees at the threshold, and once through the door she called out, but was met with silence. She climbed the steps slowly. There, the window. There, the mattress, or what was left of it, chewed by some animal, now spilling its stuffing and springs. There, we were in love. Birdie crouched on the dirty floor without the slightest idea of what to do.

  And then she felt it again, that same quivering in her belly from the morning. It came to her: quickening, the word like some medieval spell, whispered by women with knowing smiles. She’d heard her mother say it when she was pregnant with Fred. There was a baby in there and it just moved and I felt it, she thought, her hand against her firm tummy, still tender when she pressed her fingertips against it. It would be the girls who noticed first. Mary Louise VanTramp. Birdie Bell.

  * * *

  “I WAS THINKING I’d go home for a visit.” Annie stood at the sink and rewashed a bowl.

  Samuel looked up, but she didn’t turn around.

  “See Mother and Father. It’s been a long time. They’re getting on.”

  “Oh.” It was confusing to him, this sudden request. She never talked of Kansas. And it was an indulgence from a woman who asked for very little.

  “Do you think I shouldn’t go?”

  “I’m just surprised is all.”

  “Just me. For a few days or so. Birdie can keep watch on the garden. As long as Fred is better. Seems as good a time as any. I know there’s the money part. For the train.”

  “Of course you can go,” Samuel said.

  Annie felt a lightening all over her body, as if she might levitate off the floor. How easy it all now seemed.

  “I’ll make plenty of food before I go.” Slow down, Annie, she told herself, breathe. “The children will be fine.”

  * * *

  FRED FIGURED BIRDIE had taken off for the Woodrow place. He had time before lunch to search her out, and then he would go to check on his bone pile, see what else he could add to it. Even though the bone meal grinder had gone away, someone would come back after the rains came and everyone needed fertilizer again. It occurred to him that the flood might wash the bones away, but by then he probably wouldn’t care so much.

  He trudged around to the back of the house and collected some pebbles, which he threw at the upstairs windows. Plink, plink, plink. Birdie appeared on the fifth throw.

  Upstairs he found her darting about, madly pulling at the windowsill with both hands, her fingers bleeding as she grabbed at the edge of a warped wallboard.

  “I want to smash something,” she said. Fred stood with his hands in his armpits, unsure of her mood. “Oh, this’ll work,” she said, reaching for the broomstick lodged in the corner. “Go find something. It’s going to be fun, you’ll see.”

  Fred went into the other bedroom, where the windowsill was hanging from the sash. He kicked his foot against it until it splintered some.

  “That sounded promising,” Birdie called out.

  He wrestled the wood free and held it in his hands like a baseball bat, tapping it against the window. It felt good and solid in his hands and he went back to his sister, whose face was pink and angry, and all at once he felt it too, that anger, at the dust and drought and his lungs and Cy Mack and God even, for how He let it all happen.

  “One, two, three,” she said.

  She swung the broom handle into the window, first one crack and then another, and the third swing brought the glass down in a rain of shimmering triangles. “Go on,” she said, panting. “Your turn.”

  Fred ran to the other room and put wood to glass with a power he didn’t know he had. One shot and the window shattered into a spiderweb of cracks, which hung for a moment before collapsing to the floor in a heap.

  “Nice one,” Birdie said, leaning in the doorway. “You should do okay this year with the piñata.” At the end of school festivities, Fred had famously yet to make contact with the papier-mâché animal—last year a pig—made by the older kids for the younger ones.

  He smiled, speckled light on his face from the broken glass.

  “It felt a little good at least,” she said, a
nd he nodded. “I wish we had some whiskey or cookies or something.” She sat and he sat next to her.

  It seemed impossible to him that she could be someone’s mother. She was not one of those kids who seemed like a grown-up, like Betsy Meyer in his class at school, who quilted and studied her Bible. Birdie was just Birdie, running around the fields, churning the butter, always the first to jump from the mow no matter how much hay was below.

  “Your breath still smells like kerosene,” she said.

  “Dragon,” he wrote in the dust on the floor. He pulled a half-eaten lollipop wrapped in paper from his pocket and held it out to her.

  “Root beer?”

  He nodded and she took it, popped the sucker in her mouth. Fred reached over and took her hand in his, and, with only the faintest of resistance from his sister, held it in his lap without looking at her. They passed the lollipop back and forth between them.

  He wrote “apron” on the floor.

  “Apron?” Birdie asked.

  “Mama’s,” he wrote. He pointed to the mattress. “Found it.” There. What a relief it was to free the secret, to hand it over to Birdie. He thought he could even feel his lungs expand, just a little.

  * * *

  THE STORMS HAD buried the bones, now a large gray mound like an elephant, cow femurs protruding like tusks. If he didn’t uncover them, Fred wondered if they would be found years later like dinosaur bones, leaving the diggers to wonder why all these bones were in a heap in the first place. Maybe he should write a note and bury it as a clue. He ran his hand down the cow bones warmed by the sun and brushed back the sand, cool underneath, grabbing hold to pull the first one out. But the effort brought on the coughing and he fell to his knees, waiting until a little air got in. Maybe he could use the bones to build a fort instead, the larger ones as supports, the smaller ones in piles to shore up a doorway.

  He sat to rest, and then he noticed it was getting dark, which meant he should head home. Then he remembered it wasn’t even noon and he looked up to the green-gray sky, at the clouds of dirt churning across the plain.

  The dust was back, the wind blasting him and swirling about, disorienting and vehement in its insistence. He was out near the old pond, but he couldn’t see the cottonwood near its edge, couldn’t see past his arm really, the air like webs, clogging his nose and mouth. The mask was still in his pocket. He got it on but it didn’t help, so he yanked it off. He pulled his shirt off to cover his face, the grit stinging his chest like tiny pins.

  He would do what the animals did and dig a burrow and wait it out. He wished he had a shovel. The sand slipped through his fingers and the bones were lodged deep. His eyes were going black around the edges, tunneling. There was no air getting in and he sucked hard and the black went away for a spell. He tried to yell, but if any sound came out, it was swallowed whole by the wind.

  “Look at the crows,” Fred thought. Where did they come from, and how could they fly around in the swirling dust? There were two and then more and then a hundred at least, all black wings and sleek heads, cawing their warning cries above, and he closed his eyes and flew with them far above Mulehead, his arms out, soaring and swooping, and it was as if he’d been flying all his life. There was Woodrow’s place where Birdie was hiding out, a baby in her belly that would be a girl, he now somehow knew. Up here, Birdie! She had shoved the mattress up against the window to block the storm and she looked sadder than a motherless calf, all folded up on herself, but he knew she would be okay so he flew on and there was the farm, his father pushing the door of the barn closed to keep the boat from getting walloped. The boat! The boat with ribs like a sleek and mighty animal. Maybe it would flood and maybe it wouldn’t but, Pop, it is beautiful, and Mama, what was she doing, he thought, wedged into the corner of her bedroom under a quilt. He wanted to go to her, to hug her because she was crying and there was nothing worse than seeing your mother cry. Some people carried the world and didn’t let God take any of the burden and they trudged on and on, minute, hour, day, until it started again and their shoes were a little more worn but they still laced them up each morning. Mama, Pop, Birdie—he wished he could lift them up so they could see what he saw. He swallowed all their secrets and they were gone.

  He missed them all so hard it felt like he might fall to the ground, but he was still a crow and he was being pulled along with the others. One led him to the barbed-wire nest and inside it was deep and cozy, so different than it looked from the outside. It would last these storms, last the winter for three new eggs in the spring, but he couldn’t stay even though he wanted to. He felt the tug of the earth and heard the roar of the duster’s wrath and he was heavy and he squinted his eyes open to see he was on the ground, back to the bones. His legs were getting buried and he couldn’t move. He watched the dust build up around his knees. “I am here but I am not here,” he thought. “I am somewhere in the middle.”

  He didn’t remember what it felt like to be angry or sad or scared and they were just words, black letters on paper that didn’t mean anything and the wind took them anyway and left him with something that was warm and still. His chest was pulsing as fast as a crow’s and he stopped hearing the wind at all. There was no more air.

  He would miss the chickens—“Goodbye, girls”—and oatmeal cookies and school that started next week and splashing in the Cimarron when it was a river and laughing and marbles and quiet snowy nights and even brushing his teeth and driving the tractor and spring and the clouds and his family, oh his family.

  He would miss everything.

  He must have fallen over, because when he looked up it was through a lattice of bones, and beyond was the bluest sky, and then the sky opened up, cracked in two, and disintegrated into a million wings. The wind had gone quiet, replaced by a barely audible murmur, and he took a breath as clear and big as the sun.

  CHAPTER 13

  After coming in from the barn, pushing a towel under the door—the windows were still covered from the last storm—Samuel fell into the sofa, his eyes stinging, his hangover a vise at his temples. Where was everyone? Upstairs, probably. “Annie?” he called out. But the wind took the sound away and his mind slid. He needed water, but couldn’t lift his boulder head. The boat came to him as it would look finished, hulkish but cleanly built, bobbing on dark water. His family was safe, lit intermittently by lightning, their faces somber, searching.

  His calling. He’d heard the words, hadn’t he? Now he couldn’t summon exactly what he’d heard. He shouldn’t drink, that much was certain, the blood a gong in his head.

  * * *

  ANNIE SQUEEZED THE folded letter in her fist and let herself cry, muffled as it was by the wind outside. The storm was a kind of answer. Three days away. She could do that. Even if it were lie upon lie, a visit to her parents in Kansas as cover. A hotel room for Mr. and Mrs. Jack Lily. Champagne in the thinnest glass flute. A big white bed with a feather duvet and the electric city outside the window. She looked at the blue dress. It was too dark to find a decent button, let alone sew, so she shoved it back into the armoire.

  She heard the door slam downstairs. Birdie was back. Samuel would have retrieved Fred. She’d left out potato salad and bologna sandwiches she’d covered with a towel, and there was leftover vanilla pudding in the icebox. The storm bit at the house, but it didn’t seem to have the same venom as the one that preceded it. The sheets would hold over the windows well enough. Annie was pretty certain that what was left in the garden—broccoli, carrots, pumpkins, potatoes—was hardy enough to weather the wind.

  She drifted again, this time to thoughts of a baby, a girl, with a dewy face and tendril fingers and plump limbs, in the crook of her left arm. Maybe with Jack Lily there could be another baby. Healthy. One who would never know a dust storm.

  The dust hung in the air, filtering the light like fog. She slipped the folded-up letter into the bottom of her shoe. When the storm passed, she would go to town and find Jack. Gusts of wind whined and shook the walls, yet she felt as alive
as a hummingbird. She closed her eyes and imagined Jack’s soft hands on her face. A collision of lips and bodies, a breathless tangle. She felt her face flush as a bead of sweat ran down her side. Love or not, he made her feel like she could be a different woman.

  She pulled a small suitcase from under the bed.

  * * *

  IT WAS BIRDIE who found him. She’d known somehow that Fred had never made it home, an instinctual hollow dread. When the winds had finally calmed she’d run, her feet sinking in sand, toward where the pond used to be, yelling for her brother.

  He looked as if he had fallen asleep, reclined with his arms crossed over his chest—his bare chest, she saw as she got closer—and in a moment of irrational hope she tried to convince herself he could be napping, his head on his balled-up shirt. You had me so worried, Freddie, you little weasel. But it wasn’t true. Her words were a false front, a wobbly cardboard façade, his legs almost fully submerged in dirt.

  She clawed at his arms and slapped him across the face, that little-boy face as pale as bone. His head lolled back, his eyes not quite closed, the whites, their terrible blankness, even under a seam of dust. She willed another storm, the biggest anyone had ever seen, a blizzard of black and grit and death, which could go ahead and bury them together.

  * * *

  JACK WATCHED THE sky from the window, snatches of blue through the detritus the clouds left behind.

  “Short, at least,” he said. “If you can be thankful for something.”

  Styron brushed off a binder. “And we ate already. Don’t forget about that. Good thing, too. I was dying for that hamburger. Hattie’s on a new modern-lady thing in the kitchen. Some Moroccan dish last night with raisins in the rice. Went to bed famished.”

  Styron was comfortable now mentioning Hattie to his boss. His stories usually cast him in some hapless husband role. Last week he had asked her to marry him in an intimate moment at the close of the evening, hoping she would reconsider her ironclad undergarments. She hadn’t, but here they were, engaged.