I Will Send Rain (2 page)

*   *   *

“M
AMA
!
”
B
IRDIE CRIED,
the door snapping shut behind her. Inside the farmhouse it was hot and close, the windows covered against the sun.

“Now what is it, Barbara Ann?” Annie said. A lost button? A dress she'd seen in town? A splinter in her thumb that would keep her from milking? Her daughter found drama everywhere, her emotions so quick to bubble up to the surface. “I'm in the kitchen,” Annie said. “No need to yell.”

The ivy wallpaper Annie had put up five years before was curling away from the wall in the corners. The green leaves, the indulgence, felt mocking now, bumpy under her hand. She felt as if she had faded along with the ivy print, all the work and the wait had slowly leached her of color, too.

“Mama, come out. Come quick.” Birdie was breathless.

Annie untied her apron in the doorway. She'd traded three dozen eggs for a last quart of mulberries from the Jensens, which she'd just finished baking into a pie. It was a rare extravagance. Her garden was still strong, at least. She watered it each night, bucket by bucket from the well.

“What's all your clatter about?” she asked.

She wondered if Birdie would finally tell her about Cy Mack. Annie already knew the girl was moony for him, that much was obvious. She had sensed for a while that Birdie had her eye on something beyond Mulehead. She would press for details about Kansas City, where Annie herself had only been once. Did the women have red-painted fingernails? Were the buildings taller than the grain elevator? When the radio had worked—the oiled-walnut box now on the floor shoved next to the sofa—Birdie would lose herself to the stories of
Ann of the Airlanes
or
The Romance of Helen Trent
, always eager for news of places far away. So the idea of Cy Mack courting her daughter needled at Annie, concerned her more than she wanted to admit. He was a farmer's son, already farming full-time. No matter what he might be telling Birdie now, Annie knew that Cy would never leave.

“Rain, Mama. It's rain,” Birdie said.

Annie felt her face soften and rise. At last.

They ran outside together, mouths agape when they saw the wall of thick black clouds headed their way. Annie put her hand on Samuel's shoulder, a gesture of relief and solidarity both. Birdie noticed. It was more than she had seen pass between her parents in months.

“Where's your brother?” Samuel asked.

“Maybe over in that gulch near Woodrow's place,” Birdie said. “I don't know.”

“What if there's lightning?” Annie asked.

“He'll come when the rain starts,” he said. “It seems it'll be hard to miss.”

“We should celebrate,” she said. “No need to wait for supper.”

Birdie loved the musty, sweet fruit and larded crust of mulberry pie. Before she turned toward the house, though, she saw what her father now saw. The clouds were not gathering overhead as they should have been, they were instead moving at them like a wall, the sun lost in a hazy scrim, the winds picking up, dry and popping with electricity, biting and raw against her skin.

“What in God's name?” Her father squinted against the darkening sky, which turned brownish and then dark gray, even green in places where the sun was trying to burn through. It was midday but it looked like dusk, the sweep of an otherworldly hand.

Birdie started to cough.

“Fred,” her mother said.

“I'll go,” Samuel said. “Get inside.”

He nodded his head to the old dugout, two rooms they'd gouged from the earth, where he and Annie had first lived when they'd arrived as newlyweds. Almost fully underground, it was the closest thing they had to a cellar.

He ran east toward Woodrow's place, hoping the boy had sense enough to head for home. If he even saw the clouds. Samuel knew his son could spend all day counting cow chips or following coyote tracks, oblivious, his face as open as a sunflower.

“Fred!” he yelled, though it was pointless given the wind. Dirt began to blow. The world had gone dark and haywire. Dear God, Samuel thought, what is this ugliness?

*   *   *

F
RED RAN IN
from the fence, scared. How close was he to home? Was that the barn up ahead? His spindly legs took him blindly forward, his flailing arms searching for anything solid around him. His name, faint and carried by the wind. Louder this time.

He barreled into Samuel, jolting them both with a zinger of a shock, a hundred times what he could get from rubbing his feet on the rug and then touching the doorknob. The dust generated electricity all around them. He held onto his father's hand as they ran, the wind whipping their clothes and burning their eyes, to the dugout door.

They closed themselves in and Fred scampered to his mother's feet. She smoothed her hand over his wiry hair. He is safe, she thought, be thankful for that. But she could not hold on to her relief. Surprise—she swallowed dryly—things can always get worse.

They sat atop sacks of surplus wheat from three years ago. Outside the wind groaned, grating against the roof. Birdie knew she should be ashamed for feeling excited, but her heart thumped, loud in her ears, like the time they'd waited out a twister in the Macks' cellar after a Sunday supper, she next to Cy, then sixteen to her thirteen. He'd leaned over and said, “You're safe down here,” and her ears had burned.

“Samuel? What is this?” Annie asked. She pulled her dress over her knees and rocked her feet against the floor.

“I don't know, Ann. I don't hear any hail, though,” Samuel said. “I suppose that's a good sign.”

Annie stood and straightened the canned beets, parsnips, and beans, the dugout now their makeshift storehouse. When had he stopped calling her Annie? They had become more formal with each other, more careful. She could feel herself retreating. Today, though, standing next to him when she'd seen the clouds and, thinking they held rain, felt the tightness in her jaw ease, she had imagined again a carpet of wildflowers, trumpet vines, and pale green buffalo grass all around them, and she'd felt an old tenderness swelling. You and me and this family, she had wanted to say. She had offered her silent hand instead.

“Seems to have passed,” Samuel said. “I don't hear much.”

“How could there be no rain with clouds like that?” Fred thought. He was disappointed. There would be no bicycle.

*   *   *

S
AMUEL DISLODGED THE
old door with his shoulder and climbed out into the light. The sun was out again, that much they could see. A moment later Birdie and her mother followed through the door, Fred trailing behind.

“Dust,” Samuel said, as if they couldn't see for themselves.

The world was buried under it: the garden, the window ledges, the wheat. Birdie wiped her hand across her face, trailing a mix of sweat and grit. The wind blew the fine sand over her shoes. She could feel it in her eyes and in her throat. Her father looked dolefully out at his buried fields, but he seemed unable to move, unwilling yet to acknowledge what had befallen his land. Annie trudged straight to the garden.

“You ever hear of a dust storm before?” Birdie asked.

“I never did,” Samuel said.

“Think it'll make the papers?”

“I think it will.”

Birdie wanted to talk to Cy about it, to see how he looked at her. His eyes were the color of an April sky before you started to wish for clouds.

Fred coughed and hacked up blackened phlegm and spat it into the dirt.

“Learn some manners,” Birdie said.

“Pill,” Fred thought, squinting his eyes at her. Bossy pill. Wash your hands, Fred. Fill the trough, Fred, Leave me alone, Fred. The rest of the time she only cared about Cy. He'd seen her slip out of the house last night.

“Birdie, go check on the cows. Take a rag for their noses. Fred, see to the coop.”

Fred tripped as he ran off and he narrowly missed the corner of the shed. He liked his sister, too. He could make her laugh. When they were smaller they would run into the fields and spin around to get lost and she would sing “Baa, Baa, Black Sheep” until he found her sitting, feet out in front of her, in the tall-as-him wheat.

Samuel watched Birdie walk away, her hair bleached like straw from the sun, and then started toward the fields to see how much had been destroyed.

*   *   *

T
HE PEA SHOOTS
were lost, as if trampled by a horse. The pole beans hung limp, flopped over, pulled from the trellis and weighed down with dirt. Annie gently lifted a stalk and brushed the dust off its bruised leaves.

She refused to read the destruction of the garden as a larger sign. God doesn't use weather as a weapon, she thought. Even her father would agree on that. But she wasn't so sure about Samuel. With less to do on the farm, he had more time to pray, more time to listen for the still, small voice. “God is displeased,” he had said when she'd found him staring off from the porch a few days before. There was a time when she would have tried to shake him out of it, but his new searching look, his eyes wild and cast up, kept her from saying anything.

As she set to work tending to her wounded plants, Annie saw how the years out here had ravaged her hands—her skin creased and dry, her nails thick and short. They were capable hands, though, and she did not begrudge them. On the night she'd first met Samuel, she knew she would choose the soil, the sun, the work, over a steady life as the wife of a minister like her mother.

*   *   *

“O
NE, TWO, THREE,
four, five, six, seven, eight, nine,” Fred said in his head, counting the leghorns, their white feathers now dirty brown, as they bobbed around. “Where are you, ten?” He counted again, but still came up one short. The birds screeched and pecked at his skinny legs, agitated from the storm, as he scattered the kafir corn.

He wanted it to be like it was before. When Miss Miller taught his class and he gave her a box of chocolates for Christmas before she left to get married. In the fall he would have sour Miss Peterson and they didn't have the money to give her anything and she would never leave because no one would ever want to marry her.

Where was that hen?

In back of the coop he found her on her side, dust clogging her eyes, panting through an open beak, her wattle limp against the floor. His lip quivered and he balled his fists to stop the tears. “Get up, get up, get up,” he thought. He wiped the hen's eyes with the hem of his shirt. He loved these birds. He rubbed lard on their combs in the winter so they wouldn't get frostbite. He kept meticulous counts of their eggs—some 230 apiece last year—on a yellow ledger pad under his bed. Leghorns were a nervous breed, and he knew how to hold them in the crook of his arm to calm them.

He looked at the ravaged bird and knew there was only one thing for him to do. He put his foot on its body, grasped its small quivering head in his hands, and yanked as hard as he could. The neck gave way with a pop. Fred kneeled down and cradled the creature to his chest like a gift.

*   *   *

B
IRDIE SWEPT THE
kitchen floor. Dust had made its way through every crack and window seam, settled on every surface. The counters, the clock, the sink, the table, the telephone. But it felt good to clean up the mess, she was strangely invigorated by the excitement of the day. As she wiped a wet rag across the windowsill, she wondered what it would be like if she and Cy lived someplace like Oregon, where she heard everything was green and blackberries grew in wild thickets.

Later, when the storms kept coming, she would think back on this day and try to recall the expectation she had felt when the kitchen was clean and she'd sat down with a fork and the mulberry pie.

She scraped the dust off the crust, and dug in.

 

CHAPTER 2

The man from Amarillo wore a bone-white suit and a matching ten-gallon Stetson low on his forehead. He lifted the hat—his hair as slick and full as an otter's pelt underneath—to fan himself. Not that it wasn't windy already, and not that it would do any good, but he kept at it, every five minutes or so. Birdie moved closer through the crowd to get a better view, to see if the man was, in fact, handsome or if it was just the getup. Yes, handsome, she decided, if a little untrustworthy, particularly his ink-pool eyes, which he cast beyond the dell. He was lucky it was bright. It made it hard to see the dirt-edged cuffs of his jacket, the yellow smear on his lapel, the droplets of sweat that hung from one end of his long mustache.

“My friends,” he said, replacing his hat. His voice was deep and slow, with a sharp Texas twang. Confident or cunning; Birdie couldn't be sure.

The crowd, most all of Mulehead and plenty from over in Texas County, quieted. In back of the gathering, Fred perched on his toes and peered into the man's straw-padded truck. Boxes marked “Dynamite” in big red letters.

“Are we ready?” the man asked.

The mayor, Jack Lily, glanced around and gave a small nod. He was skeptical of this man, the way he peddled hope, but the farmers were desperate.

The man from Amarillo had two other men with him today, burly fellows with rolled-up sleeves and work boots, and they had assembled a cannon aimed straight up at the sky. One of the men's hands ended in two bulbous knuckle stumps.

Some of the women had brought umbrellas, just in case the effect of the explosions was immediate. The Hollisters, faring better than most with family money from the sawmill, sat on a quilt and ate ham sandwiches and lemon cake and sipped iced tea. Samuel and Annie Bell stood close to each other in a piñon tree's meager shade, their hands heavy at their sides. Annie's soft curls lifted from her face in the hot breeze and the mayor had to look away.

Jonas Woodrow whipped his head around as if flies were darting at his face. Jack Lily wondered how Woodrow had possibly come up with his share of the man's fee. People used to say, Well, that's Woodrow, bad luck and all. Arriving too late for the boom years. Over-borrowing. The thresher taking his pinkie clear down to the palm. Now he was feeding his cows ground tumbleweed and salt, and his wife was feeding their six children fried dough and wild nettles. But these days everyone was hurting, and no one said anything about Woodrow's luck anymore.