I Will Send Rain

by Rae Meadows

  “She okay about moving out here?”

  “She’ll be glad to give up her job. Set up house for us here. I have my sights on that fine Victorian of old lady Hollister’s. She can’t live forever.”

  Jack shook his head and laughed. The house had been built with sawmill money. Three floors, ornate wooden detailing, painted blue, white, and pink, like a house Mrs. Hollister had once seen in San Francisco. The storms had taken off much of the color, but it was still impressive, and Jack couldn’t help but feel a little embarrassed by his modest apartment. Styron had balls, money, and enthusiasm, which was more than he could say about himself.

  “It’s a nice house,” Jack said.

  “You staying up there until your father…”

  His father was speaking to the dead, his brother had said on the phone. “He says, ‘Elaine, I’ll have cinnamon toast with my oatmeal,’ as if she’s in the other room,” his brother said. “He talks to you, too.”

  Jack swept dust off the desk and into his other hand.

  “Yes, I suppose that’s right,” he said.

  His thoughts returned to Annie, where they’d spent most of the day. She had read the letter by now, of course, and the waiting and wondering made his mind seesaw. What if he had gone too far? What if she said yes? He would leave for Chicago in two days. Oh, to have Annie come with him. Or to join him later, arriving at Union Station, her bright country beauty against the city’s hard gray angles. Yes, his father was dying, but Annie would make it better. Her sun-freckled collarbones.

  “How long’s your guess?”

  “A few weeks most likely. So don’t clean out my desk just yet.”

  Styron laughed, his cheeks colored. “I hope you don’t miss the flood. Or I guess I hope you do miss it. We’ll all be swept away. Except for the Bells.”

  Jack’s stomach clenched.

  “Sun is out,” Styron said.

  And so it was.

  * * *

  BIRDIE DUG FRED out of the dirt and got his shirt back on. She did not want to leave him for the hovering crows, did not want to leave him alone. She funneled all her effort into dragging him home. It was awkward, his body both floppy and heavy. It would have been easier to pull him by his feet but she couldn’t bear the idea of his head bumping along the ground. She grabbed under his arms and had to rest after a few yards, her back screaming from hunching over, the baby in her belly kicking its tiny feet. Trade the life in here for this one, she willed. Please? His boy smell. His goddamn pile of bones. Stop crying, she told herself, swiping her eyes with her sleeve.

  Sand filled her shoes. Fred’s splayed legs left two grooves in their wake. Her parents didn’t know yet. She envied them. Dear silent Fred with his stubborn cowlick and eager smile. Uncle Freddie. Life without him already felt small and cold.

  As she rounded a hillock of sagebrush, the sky a cheerful, mocking blue, Birdie knew that there was nothing left for her here. She didn’t know how or when, but she would go, even if it meant picking someone else’s potatoes, even if it meant going it alone.

  * * *

  “THE CHILDREN, SAMUEL. Where are they?”

  Samuel started awake, and squinted against the harsh light. “They know what to do by now when the dust comes.”

  Annie turned away and yanked the sheet from the window.

  “Fred shouldn’t have been out. Condition he’s in.” Her balled fists hit her thighs.

  “He’ll be fine, Ann.”

  There was someone out there, she saw now, shielding her eyes from the glare, a lurching figure coming over the crest. Birdie’s yellow sweater.

  “Here they come”: her words out just as she realized that she only saw Birdie, who was dragging something, dragging someone, dragging. A quiet wail escaped just before the world shrank to the point of a pin.

  * * *

  SAMUEL WENT TO the barn as the light sank. He breathed shallow gulps through his mouth and tried not to look at the boat’s hull, the crate Fred had positioned as a seat, the notebook that read: “Ever row a boat?” “Will it rain for 40 days?” “What’s this called?” “Why do I need to go to school?” “I can hold my breath for half a minute.”

  He pulled planks from the stack of boxcar wood, five-footers about, some painted red, others green, black, blue. He couldn’t bring himself to measure Fred’s shoulders, so he guessed two feet would accommodate him. With each pass of the plane, he thought a chant so as not to think—Water, soil, light, water, soil, light. A seed is both the beginning and the end. A seed, a seed, a seed.

  He framed out the casket quickly, his hands at home now with wood and nails. It would be a patchwork coffin, but it would be sound. Fred’s own little boat.

  * * *

  “THERE’S NO POINT in asking why things happen. We don’t get to know why.” Pastor Hardy sounded angry, unconvinced. He blustered on, his Arkansas drawl like quicksand. “It is one of the terrible mysteries of faith. Even Jesus in his darkest hour asks his father, ‘My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?’”

  There was no wind, no clouds, no trees.

  Annie didn’t hear any of it, thankfully, or she might have run at him. She was made of tin, hollow and rusted, stuck on her feet, knees rigid. Samuel reached for her hand, but hers hung stiff at her side. The coffin he had made was colorful from the boxcar lumber, cruelly festive. Small. Her quilt, the one she’d made for Fred as a baby, padded the box, and the thought of all those stitches made as her belly had grown, finally, a full two years after the death of Eleanor, was what brought the sting to her eyes. She started to cant forward and would have keeled over onto her face had Samuel not locked her shoulders in the grip of his arm to hold her up.

  She looked straight into the sun, her eyes a blur of hot light.

  “We need not ask where our home is, because in the end we all come home to God.”

  Birdie cried into her hands. Everyone was there, damn near the whole town. Annie’s people had not come—her father’s rheumatism made travel impossible—and Samuel, his parents long dead, had lost track of any family that remained. They stood alone, the three of them, a small slouched huddle.

  “God is never not there for us—hah—every minute, every hour, every day—hah—the light, the Lord—hah—the way, the Word—every minute, there to lift us—hah—God is our strength—hah—May the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, and the love of God, and the fellowship of the Holy Ghost be with us all, evermore.”

  With a nod from the pastor, Samuel released Annie and stepped forward.

  Annie could not stay to watch her son go into the ground. She would not listen to the pastor reduce him to ashes and dust. She turned around and walked, past her neighbors, past Ruth and Jeanette, past the Jensens and the Hollisters, past Styron and the chatty woman who would soon be his wife. Past Jack Lily, who raised his hand in greeting or sympathy or farewell.

  She looked past him, stumbling on the hard-bitten terrain, and kept walking.

  * * *

  BIRDIE TOLD HERSELF to remember how Fred would sit across the table eating his peas one by one with a fork, but it didn’t work. It had been forty-nine hours. We have been left alone, she thought. All those times she had wanted to be left alone and now that was all she had and she would give anything for it not to be true.

  The baby pushed her belly out some now, her dress tight, the black dress she hadn’t worn since the Jensen girl died of fever a year back. The child had been laid out on her bed for a viewing, her skin eggshell white. Birdie had touched the girl’s black curls when no one was looking, hoping they might feel different. They didn’t.

  She would go to school next week and try to forget everything. The dirt crumbled under the shovel, a dry splash against the coffin her father had made. Another shovelful and another. She would fill in the hole herself. Her father was on his knees grabbing the dirt with his hands. Get up, she thought. Get up.

  Where was her mother going? No one went after her. Birdie watched her get smaller until she thought she would
disappear.

  Last night Birdie had heard sounds and had gone downstairs and there was her mother in her nightgown at the window. Birdie could see the outline of her body and it made her breath catch, like she hadn’t thought of her as a woman before and here she was exposed. Her mother had secrets too, she now knew, like why had she gone to Woodrow’s and taken off her apron? The mayor, the mayor. But there was nothing to make of it now, was there? Birdie wanted to say, “Mama, there will be a baby,” but she didn’t. Her mother’s hand was flat against the glass, and then she turned around and her eyes darted shiny and Birdie said, “Mama,” in case she couldn’t see her, “are you all right?” She didn’t say anything but turned back to the window and Birdie went up to bed where she listened to the muffled hiccups of her father crying into his pillow.

  Ashes to ashes. Pastor Hardy could barely bring himself to say dust.

  Birdie had the chickens now and she didn’t care about them the way Fred had and they knew it. They scratched and rooted at her ankles when she filled the water. She wanted to kick them because he was dead.

  Somewhere west the colors were bright. Green like she hadn’t seen in forever.

  Fred won’t wait for the bus with me, she thought, won’t bounce along on those terrible wooden benches nailed into old Farlow’s truck as he picked up every last farm kid. Fred won’t be an uncle. Fred won’t stumble and right himself and smile, always smile, even when kids teased him, even when he couldn’t breathe.

  Now they were less. The hole was filling with dirt. Someone had taken the shovel from her hands.

  * * *

  JACK LOWERED HIS hand. What he had meant by the gesture he wasn’t sure, but now it seemed a wave goodbye. The window to Annie had been shut, he knew, and he would never know if there truly had been a way in. He could not offer comfort. He could not offer escape now.

  ’Tis better to have loved and lost, he thought, though he couldn’t remember who had written it. Some poet who didn’t know a thing. He watched her walk, her beat-up shoes against the scabrous ground, her arms wrapped around herself. He couldn’t go after her, he knew that much.

  Samuel insisted on lifting the coffin down by himself. The awkward weight and angle of the box made a corner drop hard into the hole. But leave it to Bell to have made a solid and handsome vessel for his son. Samuel climbed out and shoveled in dirt with his bare hands until Hardy helped him to his feet.

  Jack knew it was all over. There was no reason to delay. He would leave for Chicago this afternoon. He would get in the car and drive away.

  * * *

  MCGUINESS COULD SEE the funeral from where he sat in the shade of a scrub juniper. The sad lot of stooped figures reminded him of toadstools. His jar of corn whiskey—Ruth had cut him off—was down to its fiery dregs. It was radiator distilled, probably full of lead, but McGuiness didn’t bother burning it to find out. Since Joe had told him about the kid dying, McGuiness had drowned himself in hooch.

  That serves you right, Bell, how do you like your great God now?

  But he felt pity deep in his gut, like a quivering mound of gelatin. That poor son of a bitch with his conviction.

  A prairie falcon circled above, eyeing a jackrabbit twice its size.

  Fuck it all, he said. Everybody dies. Everyone’s children die. Life goes on. He emptied the jar down his gullet, sediment and all, and came up wheezing. He coughed and spat. Now was the time to rob the old broad’s place. Hurl the jar right through the window, make out with at least two fists of whiskey, if not the till.

  But he’d gotten too drunk and had let himself feel bad for Bell and now he’d lost sight of the anger that usually pushed him to do such things. The falcon dove, and its beak speared the rabbit’s neck just as its talons grabbed hold of skin and fur. The bird rose, unsteadily, its muscled wings working fiercely against the weight of its prey whose legs thrashed against the air.

  And then there was Bell’s wife—too skinny, but a looker nonetheless—no more than fifty yards off, walking toward him. He tried to scramble to his feet, but his boots skidded in the dry dirt and he fell hard, his back against the rough bark of the tree as he slid down. He was only up on his unsteady knees by the time she was upon him. She really was a waif of a thing—her black dress hung off her bony shoulders. McGuiness’s swimming head kept him stuck there in his ridiculous prostration, afraid if he got up now it would frighten her.

  “I’m sorry,” he said, looking at the ground, his words thick and growly.

  She looked at McGuiness for the first time, her faced scrunched, eyes vacant. She stopped walking.

  “Can you drive me someplace?” she asked.

  CHAPTER 14

  McGuiness eyed his vehicle: the fender gone, the door rusted through and secured with rope. How long had it been since a woman had been in his truck? The seat was strewn with the evidence of his life: bits of copper pipe, an oily crowbar, wire cutters, an empty whiskey bottle, a filthy towel. How did he smell? Not good, he was sure.

  “Let me just move some of this,” he said, pushing it all onto the floor. “Okay. There you go.” He thought he should help her so he stood with his hand out, but she didn’t acknowledge it and climbed in, tucking her skirt under her as she sat.

  Annie wanted to be away from that terrible digging. Away, away. From convention and expectations and everyone she knew. No one else’s sorrow mattered. She focused on the crack in the windshield and then beyond to a vacant field where dust swirled in small billows, back to the broken glass, and then the distance, again and again. She would not allow herself to see her son’s face.

  McGuiness felt oafish and self-conscious, neither sober nor drunk enough, as he passed around to the driver’s side. She bounced as he heaved himself behind the wheel, and he was hit with his own sweat-and-liquor stench. The funeral service had not yet concluded and here was Bell’s wife beside him. He could think of nothing to say.

  “Ma’am?”

  She stared ahead, her gaze glassy and unfocused. He wiped his palms against his trousers and cleared his throat.

  “Mrs. Bell? Did you have someplace in mind?”

  She shook her head, so he started the engine with its chug and roar and pulled out slowly toward town.

  “I’m sorry for your loss,” he said, barely recognizing his tight, formal voice.

  She turned away, unable to be polite, unable even to ask this brutish man’s name. When Eleanor had died, Annie thought grief would snuff her out, thought it would close in like a sodden blanket, heavy over her face until she could no longer see or breathe. But her body didn’t give in. She kept waking up. Her lungs took in air and let it out. Her heart went on with its callous rhythm. So here she was again with an ache and anger that pulled her skin taut. She knew better than to think death might relieve her. She would live on and on.

  McGuiness drove past town, glancing at his passenger, checking to see if she might come to and ask him to stop.

  “Time will pass,” he said, trying again.

  “I don’t want to go home,” she said.

  Just drive, she thought. She didn’t want to go anywhere. She didn’t want to be seen. Where was there to go in a town where everyone knew you? She wanted to be swallowed by the open plains, the bitter glare of late sun, the inexhaustible sky.

  “Oh, okay.” He slowed the truck and spun around in a U, the rear tires dipping into the ditch until he gunned it back onto the road. He looked at her, waiting, but she still did not speak. He drove west because he liked it better.

  They drove and drove, a brown expanse in every direction, the truck rumbling, the wind loud through the open windows.

  McGuiness sniffed. “Fall’s coming,” he said. He’d forgotten for a minute about the boy and then remembered and shook his head. He needed more whiskey.

  “You’re not a farmer, are you?” she asked.

  “I ain’t a farmer, no.”

  And then Annie was quiet again for miles. Fields gave way to ranchland, and flatness to small rises. Dried-o
ut thistles, stubborn wild sunflowers, and soapweed yuccas held ground along the road amidst the grasses not broken out by plows. She had never heard Fred say her name, but it didn’t matter. It had always felt to her as if she knew his voice in her head. Mama, the moths are buzzing in the yuccas. Let’s take a lantern and go out and see them tonight. Yes, my love, let’s do that. She ground her knuckle against the corroded door of the truck, the sting quick and sharp.

  They came to a small sign with an arrow pointing the way to Black Mesa, the highest point in Oklahoma.

  “You ever been up there?” he asked, slowing to a stop. She didn’t answer. “Want to see it?”

  It was a nod, he thought, the slight bob of her head, so he turned north, hoping there was enough gasoline in the truck, the gauge long busted.

  As they drove, small buttes began to interrupt the open plains, and groves of cottonwoods appeared, the most trees Annie had seen in years. Prairie dogs scooted into holes, a fat bullsnake lazed in the sun. The road looped and turned; down and then up again they climbed, surrounded by canyons carved deep into the sandstone. Annie had seen this place from afar, the high mesas in the distance, but there had never been reason to see it up close, and now it seemed the only place she could be, lost in this strange wilderness that went up and up. McGuiness jerked to a stop at the base of a steep slope, the truck’s tires spinning gravel, until all was quiet except the scolding call of the chickadees in the juniper trees.

  “Can’t go no further,” McGuiness said. “Except on foot. Must be five miles or so to the top.”

  Annie unknotted the rope holding the door closed and felt the marked coolness of the air, tufts of grass at her feet. She started walking.

  “Mrs. Bell?”

  McGuiness spilled out from behind the wheel, sober enough, and ran his hands through his greasy hair. Even he knew it was not a good idea to set out this late in the day—What about water? What about snakes?—but hell, here was a woman, a fine woman.

  “Wait up,” he said, as he hitched up his pants.

  She didn’t wait, walking fast, her mourning dress like a ghostly shroud ahead of him. He was soon winded, but he pushed on, keeping her in his sights. He wondered if his hands could fit all the way around that slender little waist.