I Will Send Rain (23 page)

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.

*   *   *

A
NNIE 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.

*   *   *

I
T WAS
B
IRDIE
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.

*   *   *

J
ACK 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.

“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.

*   *   *

B
IRDIE DUG
F
RED
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.

*   *   *

“T
HE CHILDREN,
S
AMUEL.
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.

*   *   *

S
AMUEL 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.

*   *   *

“T
HERE'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.

*   *   *

B
IRDIE 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.