The Rain and the Fire and the Will of God

by Donald Wetzel

  Strange enough, that seemed to calm Ma down considerable. “You are far too young,” she said. “Not in years perhaps, but still too young.” She stopped and thought about it some, standing back and looking at me, and letting the other subject go. “Well, maybe you will learn a thing or two you don’t expect,” she said. And then much to my surprise she took up for me when Pa come home, and I was only bawled out some more.

  They was both right and I knowed it. The least I could have done was told them. But as far as my being too young for Jenny I could only figure that that was more or less a natural notion for Ma to have. Anyhow, the dumb things I have done so far in life was not with girls, which Ma knowed as well as me. I said nothing, but I did not like her idea that Jenny already knowed whatever it was that Ma was so sure would be learned me only by surprise. It looked to me like Jenny might come to be the only one to finally see that I wasn’t a kid no more.

  I was forgive, but under a cloud, Ma said, so for a while there wasn’t much I could do about getting over to the Holmeses’ again. Ma might have let me go if I had went ahead and asked, but I figured I better let some things be forgot first. And another thing, I like all the Holmeses all right, but why should I have got in the habit of going over there and listening to the rest of them and getting bit up by mosquitoes for three hours just so as to see Jenny for fifteen minutes with Les hanging around too except for maybe the last five? I figured next time I would ask her to a show.

  A couple of days later, Rodney come outside again. He looked like a dog with the mange and a bad case of worms and maybe other troubles. He come out about dark and walked around in his yard real stiff and slow and bent in, kind of, and then he seen me watching and went and sat on his back porch steps. I went and sat with him some and then left. He said he was not yet through peeling.

  He come out the next day again for a while and again the next. What it seemed was bothering him the most was that his face was peeling so. His nose especially. Peeled, it didn’t go back white again but stayed kind of pink and raw-looking. I asked him did it hurt and he said no, but it sure looked miserable. I went over to cheer him up some now and then, but he would just walk off from me and go around in the yard by his self with his head hung down and his hair messed out and acting like he wished he could have hid his face in a bag.

  I guess it was like this for about a week. When he was hurting I felt sorry for him all right, but this other thing come to seem kind of foolish. If he was worried about me he could have forgot it, as I had never cared for his looks particularly to begin with. It was like he was some pretty girl who had come down with boils and just couldn’t stand the shame of it.

  I was about to give up on him altogether when he come out of it. What he done was go into town one morning and get his curls cut off. He had finally seen it was the thing to do. He left with his uncle in the morning without saying nothing to me about it, and when he come back I was surprised, but as a matter of fact it didn’t make as much difference as I had thought it would. He looked like a girl with short hair. Particularly with his nose so pink-looking. Offhand I can not think of any other boy I ever knowed who growed to be fourteen and did not get a rougher look about him than Rodney ever got.

  That evening Ellen went over to see Mrs. Blankhard about something and when she come back she brung Rodney with her. At least he come along, and I am pretty sure he wouldn’t have done that without she brung him. We was all sitting up on the porch watching it get dark down by the creek and waiting for it to get dark up on the hill and noticing how Mr. Blankhard’s catalpa tree kept right on dying for all he done with it, when Ellen and Rodney come walking across the road together and up the steps, and then Rodney opened the screen door for her and they both come in.

  “I have brought us a visitor,” Ellen said.

  “Well,” I said, “I will go and get the tea things.”

  Ma and Pa both said “Jack!” at me at the same time, so I shut up and for a while Rodney just stood up against the wall like a salesman or something and then Ma asked him wouldn’t he like a seat. So because the only seat left—unless he would have sat on the swing with Ma and Pa—was on a kind of bench that Ellen was sitting on, he come and sat down next to her.

  It was hot and still and Pa was half asleep. The bull-bats kept diving down and going swoom when they swung up again, but that was the only sound. It was so hot and still that even all the stock was quiet. On a evening like this a whole henhouse full of chickens is apt to go to roost without making a sound. It’s the heat.

  So we was all mostly quiet, waiting for the breeze to start if we was going to have one. Only the bullbats kept going, climbing up to where you could see them clear against the sky and circling a while and then tipping and heading straight down again, coming down so fast and low at the end you couldn’t tell if they was busting down into dirt or just darkness; and then, swoom, you seen them shooting up again into the light. It’s nice to watch and they catch mosquitoes.

  Dark come and the bullbats quit but still there wasn’t no wind. Ellen and Ma talked a little between them once in a while and one time Pa and Rodney had a conversation of about six words apiece, but there weren’t much being said by anybody. Then finally I guess Ellen decided that there wasn’t going to be no wind at all, and she leaned around Rodney and shook Pa’s arm a little in case he was asleep and asked him would he drive us all down to the Gulf for a swim. Ellen can drive, but Pa don’t like her driving at night. He struggled against it but Ma said that she would like to go herself just for the sight, so Pa said he would.

  So Rodney got up and said he guessed he better go home now.

  “Rodney,” I said, “I have got an extra pair of trunks I outgrowed if that is what is bothering you.”

  “No,” Rodney said, “I have got some of my own.”

  Ellen give him a little push. “Well, go and put them on,” she said, and he left and when we was changed he come back wearing his trunks and carrying a big one of Mrs. Blankhard’s towels and ready to go.

  He sure looked funny in them trunks, even in the dark. They was those tight rubbery kind, and you might have knowed it, they was white. So was his legs, whiter than Sister’s, only hers was not so skinny. In a dress you would call Ellen skinny but in a bathing suit you would not. I have noticed this is true of many girls. And the other way around with men. I mean a fellow will look big walking around school and then you see him in a bathing suit and the first thing you notice is how knobby or bent his legs is. You would certainly notice it with Rodney anyhow. I said nothing of it, though, and we all got into the pickup and sat way in the back to get the wind and Pa started off with us to the Gulf. Ma rode up front.

  We had got through Loxley and Robertsdale and was well on toward Foley when Rodney said I suppose the Gulf is ocean, and I said it was.

  “I have never swum in an ocean,” he said.

  “Just stay by me,” I said.

  “Still as it is,” Ellen said, “I expect there will not be much waves. And you will like the sight.”

  Rodney thought awhile. “Do they have lights?” he said.

  “There is nothing there but sand and water,” I said. “But there will soon be a moon.” And by the time we had passed through Foley we could see the moon coming up off to the east of us, and there was moonlight.

  Pa drove out onto the sand, which is risky but he always does it, and when he stopped the sound of the surf was clear. Rodney stood up in the back of the truck and looked around. It was quite a sight.

  “Big, ain’t it?” I said.

  “I have seen an ocean before,” Rodney said. “I have just never swum in one.”

  Then we got down from the truck and walked through the sand on down to the water. Pa put a blanket down and said there was a nice breeze and no mosquitoes at last thank God and he would sleep, and Ma said she would go and walk by the water, and we swum. There was breakers, but not big, and the water was so full of phosphorus you could see little schools of fish going by, all lit up, El
len said. Rodney had no trouble at all, diving head first right through the first breaker that come on him and then swimming straight out a ways, until Sister and I got a little worried. Finally he turned around and come back to where me and Ellen was.

  “Just because there is a whole ocean,” I said, “you do not have to swim in it. There is also sharks.”

  “Rodney,” Ellen said, “you swim good.”

  We went in toward shore and Ellen tried to show us how to ride the waves in, catching them just as they break over and giving a little push and going on in with them. She done it good and now and then Rodney got it, too, and they went floating on in together like a couple of corpses, their hands stuck out in front and their feet in back and foam all around them and them right on the top of it. I never made it once. My heavy weight, I guess.

  Then we come out and Rodney and Ellen sat on the sand and rested and I run up and down on the sand where it is hard and wet, spurting, just to be doing it and get in shape, and then when they was rested we went back and swum some more and then come out.

  Pa had woke up and said we should go home, and pretty soon Ma come back with a bunch of shells she had found in the moonlight and we admired them some and then we loaded up and left.

  Ellen could have rode in front but she stayed in back with us. We was dry again by the time we hit Foley. The moon was low and three-quarters full and it seemed to follow behind us like we had tied it to the tailgate with a string. Like it was day almost we could see the stock in the fields and the houses way back in the clearings. In the moonlight, a tin-roofed house looks as good as any other house. Better, even. When we got almost to Robertsdale, Ellen started singing, to herself, sort of. Then she stopped and asked Rodney did he sing.

  “Some,” he said.

  “You know ‘Harvest Moon’?” she said.

  “Yes, ma’am,” he said.

  This was probably the first time him and Ellen ever really talked. So Ellen started singing “Harvest Moon” and after a minute he started, too. His voice was more like a girl’s than hers was. Except it was so low I could hardly hear it.

  “I see you know part singing,” she said.

  “Some,” he said.

  Then she crossed over from the other side of the truck and sat down between us and begun again on “Harvest Moon.” They sung it through. Then they sung “We Were Sailing Along.” They went on singing. Rodney knowed them all. Finally I moved to the other side. For one thing I can not sing and for another, even if it didn’t seem to bother Rodney none, I finally got tired of Ellen’s long wet hair blowing around in my face like it was.

  They sung all the way home. At the top of the hill, they stopped singing and Pa cut the motor like he always does at night so maybe our dogs won’t get to barking, and we coasted down into our road and stopped. For once it worked.

  Ellen got up and jumped down to the ground. “Rodney,” she said, “you sing real nice,” and then she left, running barefoot up the road to the house, risking that she’d hit a cocklebur or two, but missing them I guess, with Rodney standing in the middle of the truck and watching her run like he wanted to holler something after her but didn’t, so finally real quiet he said, “Thank you, ma’am,” though by this time Ellen was in the house and probably in bed, and in the truck there was just him and me.

  “You’re most welcome,” I said.

  He didn’t even seem to hear me. He climbed down from the truck and went on up the road to his house without ever saying a word to me. So I went on up to the house alone, watching for cockleburs.

  8

  I don’t know why, but I had somehow never stopped to figure that maybe Rodney could swim. I should have knowed that with arms and legs like Rodney had, if he moved them at all he’d have to swim. Why he had not said something about it before was a mystery. Swimming don’t amount to much, maybe, but still, when there is something you can do, what is the point in running it down? Like Rodney had all along been trying to keep it hid. Myself, I’m not much on swimming as water just don’t seem the natural place for me somehow. There is nothing in it to brace against or grab hold of, so to speak. And for that matter it is not by nature but only by a kind of trick that a man can swim at all. Anyhow, I am not built right for it.

  On the other hand I am without fear of water anywhere. When Pa learned me to swim he showed me once and said now try it and if you are not afraid you will find that you can swim, and he was right. I lay down in the water and swum. That is half the trick of it, because I can see how if a man got scared and didn’t believe he could do it he probably couldn’t and would sink. But that is all the trick of it I ever learned. However, as a thing against the heat I will go along with swimming every time.

  So when Rodney come over the next morning I said, well, now that I see you can swim, we will not have to stand this heat so much all the time.

  “Jack,” Rodney said, “if you are thinking of us swimming in that little brook you call a creek down there then forget about it. I am not no mud swimmer. And I have give up wading some time ago.”

  You would have thought he had never swum in nothing but oceans all his life. “No,” I said, “such a place is not for no swimmer like you all right, but that creek is not what I had in mind.”

  “No?” Rodney said.

  “No,” I said. “If you don’t mind a walk through some woods I will be glad to take you to a place where you can not only not see the bottom from the bank but where no one has ever dove in from it either and come up with bottom.”

  “That must be quite some creek,” Rodney said.

  It was plain he did not believe me. “No,” I said, “it is a hole. There is a creek comes into it and later goes out of it but the thing itself is nothing but a hole.”

  “Sounds more to me like a well,” Rodney said, “but if you say it can be swum in I am for it.”

  “I have swum in it many times,” I said, which was true. It is somewhat north and east of our place, back up on some land belonging to the Tennessee Coal and Iron people, I believe, and not many people know about it, only Jimmy and Andy Bay and me and maybe some others. Tom, the man that works for us, has family back in the woods on past there and it was from him I found out about it. He called it a ’gator hole. Swore there was an alligator there. He’d go see his family and then next day he’d tell me he seen him again. I was just a kid then. He was yawning, Tom would say. According to Tom that alligator was always yawning and had teeth like a hay mower. Being a kid, it scared me some. But finally I went with Jimmy Bay where Tom told me it was and we found the hole all right and we sat there quiet for half a day watching but we never seen nothing but a few small turtles. Finally we swum there. It got so it didn’t scare me none at all, mostly because I had Tom figured for a liar. But we called it the ’gator hole all the same, and talked a lot about Tom’s ’gator, and it used to get little Andy pretty upset sometimes.

  So Jimmy and Andy Bay come down soon after Rodney and me had finished talking, and I got Ma to pack us some lunch and we went and got Rodney again and we went.

  To get there, you have to walk. We went into the branch in back of Mr. Blankhard’s place and come out of it and went up a little hill where there is no path and then finally come out on an old logging road there. I have done it many times, but I am never certain just where I am going to come onto that logging road until I do. You can never see it until you’re on it. It is just two old tracks that look like they could have been made by some car that got lost a year ago, twisting back and around through the pines and up and down where there are hills and going slantwise up the steepest places, which I finally figured out was done to make it easier, as it is even easier walking, easier than going straight up; and then in the bottoms where it was wet you could see it was a road after all and not just where somebody had got lost, because there would be big logs laid side by side right through a swamp just like a bridge, most of them rotted through, but still good to walk on, however. Or in some of those places we would have been walking in
muck to our knees. It was the deepest back in the woods that Rodney had ever went yet.

  I would say it is altogether five or so miles from the Hill. Ma don’t like for me to go there. I always thought it was a tough one for little Andy, too, but I never seen him once give out. They are funny brothers all right, Andy about as quick as they come and Jimmy about as quick as a cow. Like when I noticed Rodney had brought his trunks. They was stuck in his back pocket and going under a fence they got caught on a wire and got pulled out. “Well,” I said, “I doubt if you will need them but there may be some female birds fly by at that,” and Andy he laughed right away but Jimmy not until later on, when the picture finally come to his mind of Rodney trying to hide his naked self from some birds going by. Rodney said he had not known, he had brung them just in case.

  Back in about three miles or so the logging road give out and we went on along a turpentiners’ trail. The woods get thicker here, having never been cut yet, and is like what woods is really supposed to be. Rodney noticed right away how it darkened things down. It was true. But then it got darker even yet and I seen that the sun must have went behind some clouds, and I figured we might be in for a storm. Just a rain is nothing, but a real good thunderstorm way out in the woods is a thing to see. Seems they get wilder in the woods than is possible where houses are, though it may only seem this way, of course. I have seen it, though, and the woods get really dark and quiet before it breaks, like everything was bracing for it, and the turpentiners start to hollering back and forth to each other steady, like the way it is in a jungle movie and the drums start going and you know there is trouble coming, and if a person is not used to this it can make them pretty jumpy. Makes you feel like the woods has gone back to being all the way wild again. And then when it finally comes, the rain by itself, even without the lightning when it hits nearby, or the thunder, makes a sound through the woods like it was tearing them to pieces, particularly if things has been dry for a time before. In that first big rush you can get the feeling there is danger in it. After, you come to see there wasn’t none, though, except maybe from the lightning. With lightning in the woods there is nothing you can do but take your chances. And not stop under any trees or follow along by barbed-wire fences. Get by a bank or a rock is best, I guess, or just keep moving.