Rain Village (2 page)

My father was silent for a long moment. “You know, girl,” he said then, as he reached down to grab a sack of vegetables, bringing it down on the kitchen counter with a thud. Bits of earth fell to the floor. “All that really matters is a handful of dirt and a perfect oval potato. The rest is just pie in the sky.”

“But I want to see what it’s like,” I said. I had never spoken back to my father before, and I saw his eyes slightly widen. “I can’t help in the fields anyway, and I can do my stretches at night.” It was true. The potatoes were so big I had to use both my hands just to hold one of them. Each kernel of corn was bigger than one of my front teeth. My brothers and sister could hold three ears in one hand, and I felt like I was surrounded by giants.

As my father continued to haul up the sacks, my siblings began scrubbing the potatoes and radishes furiously, tossing them into large
tin buckets, and my mother boiled a pot of potatoes and carrots for one of her famous stews. I was on the floor with corn strewn around me.

“Listen to me,” my father said, with a menace in his voice that hadn’t been there a second ago. No one outside my family would have even noticed it, but every single person in that room recognized his tone and what it meant. We caught our breaths and waited. “That place is
unholy.
You will not set foot in there. There’s enough for you to do here.” He flashed his face back at me, then breathed out heavily, relaxing. “Just
pay attention,
girl, and the husk’ll come peeling off like banana skin.”

He turned back to the sink and we were all silent then.

Usually my father’s disapproval could put a halt to anything brewing inside me. His disapproval could freeze up a river, it seemed, in the middle of June. But something had shifted in me, and that night I lay in my bed, listening to Geraldine snoring from the other side of the room, and I thought and schemed and reflected.

The next morning I dutifully hung from the bar. My muscles were so strong I could hang for hours, and on most days I just lifted myself up and over it or tried hanging from my ankles. That morning I hung still as a board, dreaming of my escape. Waiting. I stared out into the fields, at my parents’ and siblings’ bodies bent over the crops, the sun burning their backs. The corn jutting up.

When it came, lunch seemed to last for hours. I stood on a stool stirring the stew, as usual, while Geraldine set the table and my father and brothers rested in the den. At the table, I shoveled in my food without tasting it, trying not to stare at the clock or my family’s shrinking bowls of stew. I could barely sit still, and more than once my mother had to warn me to stop fidgeting.

“Yes, ma’am,” I said, my feet burning, my whole body straining toward that library across town.

As soon as the bowls were washed and the house empty, I hurried
outside, crouching down in the dirt road so my family wouldn’t catch sight of me. I scrunched myself alongside the corn and moved as quickly as I could toward open space. Once I was out of their line of vision, I ran and ran and nothing else mattered. The whole countryside smelled thickly of manure and growing vegetables and cut grass, but I ran so fast all I smelled was wind. It was exhilarating, breaking their hold like that. I could barely breathe, and my muscles burned from my shoulders down to my calves, but I laughed and whooped when I reached the main road that stretched through the farmland: the fields of crops and the creeks and rivers that crisscrossed our part of the world like veins. I followed the road through the country and into town, sweeping past all the people who stopped in their tracks and just gaped at me. I didn’t care. For a minute I thought: the world would be so beautiful, if it were just this, this feeling right now.

Finally the library loomed up in front of me. The air seemed to go cool and misty, all at once, as if a thunderstorm were about to burst on us. From the outside the place looked like a massive barn more than anything else, except for the piece of metal swinging from a stick out front saying “Mercy Library” and the fact that it had been painted stark white. There wasn’t much around it, just piles of overgrown grass and clumps of dandelions and some trees hanging down into the road, one with branches so long they scratched across the library’s roof. I stared up at the library, my heart pounding so hard it threatened to break through my chest.

It was the farthest I’d ever been from home. Already it felt like hours and hours had passed, though it couldn’t have been more than forty-five minutes. For a moment I considered turning back, but something inside me wouldn’t allow it. All the bravery buried within me seemed to push up to the surface, forcing me to take another deep breath and walk toward the front door. This is my chance, I thought. My one chance for something new.

Just then an old couple pushed out past me.

“I
saw
the way you were looking at her!” I heard the woman hiss to the man under her breath.

“I was getting book advice, Meg,
book advice. . . .
”

Startled, I slipped out of their path as they barreled by, then stepped into a vast, almost church-like space with old wood floors and a breezy high-beamed ceiling. Light streamed into the space from the huge windows on either end, illuminating the dust in the air. Towering shelves divided the room, all painted different colors. Books poured from every box, every shelf, every basket, and every drawer. To my left was a large desk with books and cards spread over the top, an ashtray filled with half-smoked cigarettes. People milled around with books in their arms, but quietly, as if afraid of making a sound. I could have sworn I heard the sound of rain, but when I glanced out one of the long windows on the far wall, the sun was flaring and the sky bright blue. The whole place smelled like smoke tinged with spices and must.

I realized I was standing there with my mouth open, so I snapped it shut and forced myself toward the shelves. I picked an aisle without even looking and began wandering through it, running my fingers along the spines of the books. I stopped and plucked one off the shelf, stared at the black markings inside until I grew dizzy. I heard a sound then and looked up to see a couple standing at the end of the aisle, kissing. When a man turned in and started toward me, I nearly fell over with fear—until I realized he wasn’t paying me any mind at all, but was staring intently at something through a gap on one of the higher shelves.

Suddenly I heard the faint sound of sobbing. I looked around, startled, then tiptoed over, as far away from the man as possible, to peer through one of the openings myself.

I saw a woman with a scarf pulled over her face, sitting at the table and crying. Mary Finn sat across from her. I heard the shush of whispers but could not make out what they were saying. The two women were
almost opposites: the one hunched over and covered from head to toe, the other awash in color, her black hair coiling down her bare arms, her tanned, freckled shoulders glimmering as if with oil. Mary’s eyes were intent on the woman across from her, and she reached out her hand to the woman, patted her arm. I moved closer, out of one row and into another, and another, where I could hear. It was one advantage of my size: I could move quietly, as if I were not there at all. By the time I was able to see again, Mary had set out a deck of cards—tarot cards, I would learn later—and was explaining them to the woman. Then, for a moment, the woman’s scarf slipped and I saw her face in profile, only for a split second before she quickly covered herself again. It was Mrs. Adams from down the road, I realized, shocked. But she was different now, rubbed raw and bare. I could
see
her sadness, slipping off her body like smoke.

“But how can I make him stay faithful?” I heard her whisper, her voice all twisted up from any way I’d ever heard it.

“I have no mind for vision or prophecies,” Mary whispered then. “I just know what the cards say. But if I were you I would wear a yellow skirt and toss yarrow root in his tea before bed. It will keep him close to home when he wants to wander.” She reached down and held up a handful of something green and glittering, then quickly wrapped it in a kerchief and slid it to Mrs. Adams.

“Thank you,” the woman whispered, wiping her face. Mary looked up then, straight at me, through the books. Her eyes like cat’s eyes, blue as sapphires. I ducked. A moment later I heard Mrs. Adams shuffling away, and prayed Mary was following her.

My heart pounded.

“What are you doing, little girl?” I heard Mary’s smoky, low voice over me and looked up. The scent of gingerbread wafted down the aisle.

“I’m sorry,” I whispered, but she just smiled and beckoned for me to come toward her.

“Have you come to visit me?” she asked. “These women, they always want my advice. They think I’m some kind of
witch.
” She made a spooky face and I laughed without thinking. “Then they ignore me on the streets, pretend they haven’t come by to tell me their heartbreaks and woes. They’re embarrassed that they have hearts at all, I think.”

I smiled. “I sneaked out of my house. I’ve never been here before.”

“Come,” she said. “There’s probably a line out the door by now.”

I began following her through the stacks to the front of the library, staring at her multicolored swirling skirt.

“Have you come for some books, too?” she asked, looking back.

I blushed. “I can’t read,” I said.

She looked at me with surprise just as we came to her desk, where three people stood waiting for her return. All old farmers, I realized, with their hands full of books. I expected them to be angry, having been made to wait like that, but they all lit up and practically shone as Mary came near them.

“Well, we’ll have to fix that,” she said, winking at me, before taking her seat behind the desk. “Why don’t you sit next to me while I help these gentlemen?” She smiled up at the first man in line as I sat on a stool nearby.

“Shakespeare, I see,” Mary said to the man. “The sonnets. They’ll make a romantic of you yet, Joe.”

I swear that old farmer blushed all the way down to his collarbone. “I liked
Troilus and Cressida,
” he said. “You were right about that’un.”

Mary smiled, then picked up another book and put it in with the one he was holding. “You’ll like this even better.”

I watched Mary check out books for at least half an hour before the library began emptying out. I stared at her mass of hair, so black it seemed to glint blue in parts, and her brown shoulders. My sister had brought home a movie magazine once and I had felt the same way then,
looking at the women with pale hair and dark lips, their eyebrows like swooping lines across their foreheads. I touched my hair with my hands, imagined my body stretching up and filling out, covered with swishing fabrics like the ones Mary wore.
This is what it means to be a woman,
I thought. She picked up each book and thumbed to the cards in the back, and I watched her strong, sure hands.

I sat on the stool, praying she wouldn’t tell me to leave.

After a while, when the library had cleared out, Mary turned to me. “It’s busiest in the mornings and evenings,” she said. “Mostly I have the afternoons to myself.” She smiled. “So tell me, why don’t you know how to read? Aren’t you in school?”

“No,” I said softly. “My folks don’t believe in schooling. I’m supposed to work in the fields with the rest of them, but they don’t want me on account of my smallness.” I could feel my face growing red and lifted up my hands to cover it.

“Don’t believe in schooling?” she said. “What do they have you do all day, then?”

I looked up at her, nervous, but saw she wasn’t laughing. “I used to have to do chores but my house is so big, I couldn’t do much. I can’t do anything right is what my mama says. Sometimes I sneak out and hide in the fields or come to town to watch people. My mama wants me to eat potatoes and stretch my body in the window so I’ll get bigger. Then I can make my contributions, she says.”

“Well, you should have visited me sooner because
that
doesn’t sound like much fun at all.” She laughed. “That’s the craziest thing I’ve ever heard, in fact.”

I took my hands slowly from my face and rested them in my lap. I looked up at her and smiled.

“You know,” she said, leaning in closer, “I didn’t get along with my family either.”

“Really?”

“Yes,” she said. “My father was not a nice man. I left home as soon as I was able.”

“Oh, one day I would like to do that.” All of a sudden it seemed possible that I could leave Oakley some day, just like that.

“You will,” she said. “There’s a big place for you in the world, no matter what you think now. You’re like I was when I was your age, back when I thought I had no place at all.”

I just looked to the floor, my heart beating wildly.

“What do you love to do, Tessa?”

I looked up at her, afraid she was making fun of me. “Me?” I asked.

“Of course.”

I scrunched up my mind and thought hard about her question. I could barely think of anything I
liked,
let alone loved. I knew I didn’t like farming or shucking corn. I knew I didn’t like Oakley, or my giant, ravenous family, or the vegetables that spilled from the counter and sink and onto the floor. I knew I didn’t like the way I felt all the time, so freakish and small, so scared of everything.

“I don’t know,” I said, finally, watching the light streaming in from the windows and slanting through the air. “This is the only thing I’ve ever loved, being here right now.” It came up on me just like that, the realization that there was nowhere I’d rather be, that
this
was as close to happiness as I’d ever been.

She smiled. “It’s a good place, this library. Like entering another world. You can open up any of these books and just forget about the fields and rivers outside, the farms and horses. The past.”

“It’s so different here,” I said. “You’re so different.”

She peered into me and shook out a cigarette from a pouch beside her. The tobacco and paper crackled as she lit up. “Tell me about yourself, Tessa Riley,” she said.

I stared at the crazy-quilt skirt my mother had sewn for me, fingering the hem. I felt paralyzed, convinced I could never speak of my own life out loud, but I still felt the stories beating at my throat and lips.