I Will Send Rain (10 page)

Samuel had heard the men down at Ruth's, who'd been able to scrape a few pennies together for a splash of whatever Ruth might have to offer, their desperation shoved to the side for the slimmest of moments. They laughed and coughed and nursed the last in their glasses until Ruth shooed their jaw-flapping selves out to flounder home to angry wives and broken-down fields and all the hours of wait. The choice was California or WPA, and $22 a month couldn't hardly hold a family.

We stay, Samuel thought, because we remember how it was.

*   *   *

F
RED FILLED A
bucket with rodent bones and added them to his collection. He dug out a cow femur half-buried in a drift of sand and the exertion brought on a spasm of coughing he couldn't shake. His chest felt constricted, a belt cinched around his lungs. It was all the time now, this hard work of breathing, and he tried to tell himself it was getting better, that maybe it wasn't as bad as yesterday. If he didn't run and stayed away from the cattle and went inside when the dust was up, he could manage. He had to rest up for the rabbit hunt. He was set on going. All those bones! And all the boys were going with their slingshots and bows and arrows and he didn't want to be left out, even if he'd never been that kind of boy.

After a spell the coughing subsided, and he decided to take a detour to the Woodrows' place on the way home. He hadn't been back since the run-in with the scavengers, and he wanted another look. The sole of his right shoe was coming loose and it flapped like a mouth as he walked. He wondered if glue would hold it, or maybe a rubber band. The soapweeds' spearlike leaves scratched his bare legs. He stopped and pulled apart the petals of one of the few flowers, loosing the yucca moth vibrating inside. At night the flowers would open and moths would fly out into the darkness in search of other soapweed flowers in which to lay eggs and pollinate. Fred had a sudden urge to pop open each flower and pluck out the moths, but he let them be. “So whoever knows the right thing to do and fails to do it, for him it is a sin,” his father was fond of reciting. Fred walked on.

The roof of the Woodrow place sagged in the middle like the body of an old mule. Critters had moved in, taking up shelter in various nooks and corners, and spiders had taken over the bathtub where water no longer ran through the pipes. He crunched over dust-buried glass in the kitchen and found a box of matches under the sink, which he slipped into his pocket. His shoe slapped against the stairs, which set off a click click click of little clawed feet somewhere above him. In the old children's bedroom, the mattress had been dragged nearer to the window and the room had been swept with the broom now leaning against the doorframe. He suspected Birdie and Cy came here, though he didn't really understand what they might be doing. And then he saw on the floor, half underneath the mattress, familiar faded red gingham. He held up the apron. The red square patch and the embroidered yellow “A” in the corner. It was his mother's. How it had gotten there, he had no inkling.

But he was sure she would be happy he had found it.

 

CHAPTER 6

I am not pregnant, Birdie thought. I am fifteen and eleven months old and I am going to marry Cy and we will leave the wind and dust and go west to where it's green or to a big city like St. Louis where we'll ride streetcars and go to clubs where people play jazz music and smoke cigarettes and I'll wear lipstick in a color like poppy red.

She hadn't told Cy because each day she thought maybe the blood would start tomorrow and there was no reason to worry him. She thought it was her fault somehow. Really she hadn't thought about getting pregnant at all. Cy never said anything about it either. He had slid her green ribbon between the pages of his Bible, and that was enough for her. How weird, Birdie thought, that lying with a boy and having a baby were connected. They didn't feel like they should be the same thing at all.

She cleaned out the troughs and shoveled the shit and spread the hay—already dipping into winter stores—and then she drew a bath, not bothering to heat the kettle to warm it. She lowered herself into the cold, dust-rimmed water.

God makes no sense, she thought. He took baby Eleanor, whom her mother wanted, and gave other people babies that they didn't. She stared at her abdomen and willed the blood to appear. Please, God, make the blood come.

Maybe she would tell Cy and he would lift her up into the sky and say, “Birdie Bell, be my wife,” and she would be happy. Maybe she would have a baby girl and dress her in a pinafore dress and push her around in a carriage on the shady sidewalks of some town far from Mulehead. Birdie and Cy and a baby girl would make a little family. It didn't sound so bad.

I don't want a baby, she thought.

The water in the tub started to shake and soon it was too dark to see anything. She cursed, knocking her shin on the edge of the tub, and grabbed her dress from the floor, yanking it over her head. She stumbled out of the bathroom to join her mother in trying to get wet sheets over the windows in time. She called outside to Fred though she knew he wouldn't be able to hear above the din. They were all getting used to these, and she figured he would be fine out there in the henhouse with the birds. She didn't get it about the chickens—they smelled bad and pecked her feet—but Fred would put leashes on them if he could.

Samuel came in bringing with him a rush of dirty air and helped get towels under the door, without a word to Annie. Birdie thought it strange how this had been going on, something between her parents that was quiet, heavy.

The storm was a smaller one this time, brief, the dust reddish so Samuel said it must have come from New Mexico. He got a candle lit and they sat at the table and waited until the sun came back outside. Annie stood at the window and looked through the crack the sheet didn't cover.

Birdie thought of Cy's slightly crossed front teeth, the rough skin of his hands, a cowlick at the whorl of his hair that he ran his hand over when he had something to say. When she saw him she felt it in her fingers and toes, a tingle in her scalp, like she couldn't feel anything before and now she could feel everything. Her mother thought she was too young, frivolous. She doesn't remember what it's like, Birdie thought. Birdie did not want to spend her days weeding a garden and washing clothes, a Sunday trip to church the only thing breaking up the drudgery. She eyed her mother's frayed, ill-fitting dress and wondered when she'd started looking so weary. Her mother had bought the dress—a cotton floral more ornate than she usually wore—years back when the crop was good, on a whim one afternoon trip to Beauville. When did Mama ever do anything on a whim? Must have been the only time ever.

Cy said he didn't want to be a farmer, but he didn't know what he wanted to be or how to be anything else. Birdie didn't know what she wanted to be, either, but she knew she didn't want to be her mother, nice and regular and bound up by the farm and this cruddy town. Where was the fun in that? That felt like giving up. Birdie wanted to be with Cy and she wanted something bigger, and knowing that was something.

I am not pregnant, she thought.

*   *   *

T
HE SITE OF
the roundup was northwest of town, out toward Black Mesa, at the base of the small hills above Mulehead. Styron busied himself with the chicken-wire fences, which he'd fashioned into a large three-sided pen. People could take what they wanted, and the rest of the animals would be carted away and buried in a pit he'd had dug two miles farther west.

He'd fashioned a banner, clothespinned to a barbed-wire fence, which he'd painted in red, white, and blue: First Annual Mulehead Rabbit Hunt. The mayor was still not on board, he knew, even though a fellow over in Texas County had told them that each jackrabbit could account for $10 worth of farm damage, and hundreds of them had come down from the hills looking for food. Styron saw the roundup as a community unifier, a way to give folks agency who felt they had none. He'd gladly take credit for it. He was a leader, he knew he was, and each day he felt that self grow inside him, like the luna moths he remembered from his youth wiggling around in their silk cocoons, and when they did finally emerge from their drab pouches, there they were with their ethereal wings sweeping around at night, flashes of pale green and haunting eyespots in the lamplight. So he was not humble, but great men rarely were. He wished he'd planned to have more water. The ladies of the church were bringing lemonade, but they weren't arriving until noon. Styron sat on the open front seat of his car and wiped off his hands with a towel.

He'd been seeing Hattie Daniels for six months. She was a genial woman with an attractive enough face helped by wide-set gray-blue eyes, but she was a little more ample than he preferred—her body the shape of a bell—and a little too chatty. She lived nearby in Herman, where she was a schoolteacher, and sometimes he found himself saying nothing more than “uh-huh” for minutes at a time as she told him about her students' antics. But a lack of eligible women was one of the major drawbacks to life on the Plains.

Why had he invited her today? It was the excitement of the pending event that had gotten him, and last night as his hand had reached under her skirt as far as her girdle, he'd blurted out, “Come with me tomorrow.” She had looked so pleased, her eyes shiny with tears even, that he'd felt terrible and had vowed to be kinder to her. But here he was today, the morning of the roundup, wishing she weren't coming at all. He would have to leave soon to drive all the way to Herman to pick her up and be back before the townsfolk arrived. There was no way he would miss his chance to fire the opening pistol.

*   *   *

A
NNIE HAD FOUND
her apron hanging with the potholders next to the stove. She was reluctant even to touch it at first—how in the world?—before looking around the empty kitchen. Last night she had considered slipping out of bed and over to the Woodrow place, but she feared Samuel might wake up. Now here was the apron, as if she'd sleepwalked to retrieve it. She couldn't ask. She wiped the dust from the counter again, floured its surface, and turned out her biscuit dough.

She had told Fred he could not go today—too young, too sensitive, and too curious about what would happen to all the rabbits once they were trapped—but after Pastor Hardy preached last Sunday about supporting your neighbors, how the only way to survive this mess was to pull together, she and Samuel had decided they would all go. Jack Lily would be there, of course. It had been three days. For three days she had felt like her body was filled with tar, a hot and heavy ooze. Yet somehow she carried on, outwardly unaffected, working to exhaustion. Outside the window, white sheets baked in the sun, snapping in the wind like flags of surrender.

“We really need to go to this fool thing?” Samuel smiled, since he was the one who had insisted. He had changed from his work clothes into a clean shirt and navy trousers, which were held up with a belt and hung loosely from his whittled frame.

“You dressed up for the rabbits,” Annie said, putting biscuits in the oven. “I'm sure they'll be pleased.”

“You don't look so bad yourself, Mrs. Bell.” Samuel was trying for lightness. He sat at the table and retied his shoes, unsure of what to do while he waited. His dreams were getting more frightful—rising black swirls of water, cars floating by like river bugs—but he didn't know much about how to build a boat. The steam box was a start, even if he couldn't tell Annie, even though the line between faith and becoming unhinged seemed perilously narrow.

“I redid the ribbon around the hem,” she said, hand brushing against the fabric of her dress. “Changed out the faded blue for a red I found in the bottom of my sewing basket.”

He nodded. “It's pretty. I've always liked that dress on you.”

Annie turned back to wipe the flour from the counter, her head in a bashful tilt, a gesture that charmed him.

“Saw Cy ducking away the other day. Strange he doesn't even come by to say hello. Don't you think it's strange?” Samuel asked. “He's always seemed a polite young man. You'd think he'd want to keep up the good impression.”

“Birdie doesn't say peep about him to me. I worry about it, though,” she said, thinking of the mattress at the Woodrow place. “About what they're doing. What do you think they do together?”

“Do?”

Annie glanced through the kitchen window before turning back and lowering her voice. “Do.” She widened her eyes.

Fred came bounding in from outside and began coughing wildly, his hands on his knees. He was pale, despite the heat, and noticeably thin, his knees knobby—his feet looked too big for his body. When the last storm had rolled through, Samuel had found him huddled on the floor of the coop with a hen in his lap, the others bobbing and squawking fearfully around him. He was covered in the reddish dirt, his hair matted, his eyes white against his stained face, and he was gulping for shallow tugs of air. Annie had mixed kerosene with lard and rubbed it on his throat. It had taken a full day for his airways to ease.

“Sit, son,” Samuel said, guiding him to a chair. Annie placed a glass of milk in front of him. Fred drank and then coughed some more. She patted his back until he could get some breaths in.

“We're taking you to the doctor,” Annie said. “Day after tomorrow.”

Fred shook his head.

“No fussing,” Samuel said. “It's decided.”

Fred slumped. “I will try harder,” he thought, “walk not run, breathe slowly, stay in when the dust comes, say prayers, be better.” He felt the familiar tickle in his chest and tried to stifle a cough.

“You best go get cleaned up,” Samuel said. “We're all going today to see the rabbits. That means you, too.”

Fred perked up and slapped his palms against the table.

“Go on,” Annie said. “Oh, and let Birdie know we're leaving at noon.”