Rain Village (3 page)

“I have a sister named Geraldine,” I began, “and two brothers, Matthew and Connor. Geraldine and I share a room and the ceiling is as high as the stars. My mom’s name is Roberta, and my dad’s name is Lucas. They don’t notice me much, though. They’re always busy in the fields.”

“Really?” Mary asked.

I nodded solemnly. I’m not sure what possessed me then, but for the first time in my life my mouth just opened and everything came rushing out. I told Mary about the wooden house and the fields, and the rows of gem-hard corn we based our livelihood on. I told her about my favorite log and my father’s terrifying hands. I told her about how my mother made all my clothes out of the scraps of my sisters’ and brothers’ jumpers and dresses and pants. And I told her about how my mother laughed at me as she stitched my skirts and blouses, how she called them “clothes for a baby’s doll.”

Mary leaned toward me and touched my arm. “They just have their own vision,” she said. “For people like you and me, the world is different.”

I thought of the world outside my window, and the one I dreamt about when I was out in the fields alone. Not knowing what to say, I just looked up at her and smiled.

She stood and stretched. “I’m making some tea. Want a cup?”

“Yes, please,” I said, though I wasn’t quite sure. She winked at me and started walking to the open space beyond the stacks, on the left side of the room. Her sandals clacked dully on the floorboards. Alone, I stared at her desk, trying to memorize everything on it before she got back—the glossy cards and scattered notebooks, the rumpled papers for her cigarettes, a discarded silver bracelet, a tiny clown figurine painted
red and yellow. I wanted things like that someday, I decided. Things of my very own.

Soon the whole place smelled like herbs. When Mary reemerged with two steaming cups of tea a few minutes later, it seemed like the most exotic thing in the world. I peered into my cup, staring at the greenish water with the herbs floating at the top.

“It’s my special recipe,” Mary whispered. “It will make you
irresistible.
”

When I took a sip it was like drinking grass and sage.

“I have an idea,” she said, setting down her cup. “Why don’t we write out your name? It’s such a good name; it’s a shame not to set it down somewhere.”

We grabbed our tea and she led me out the door, over to a pile of wood stacked against the building. The sun, low in the sky now, made the landscape blaring and golden. I shielded my face with my hands and stared into it: the mountains hovering in the distance, the sun seeping through them like melting butter.

“Here we go,” Mary said, pulling a long twig from the pile. And she did the most amazing thing. She knelt close to the ground and began drawing shapes into the dirt.

“That,” she said, pointing, “is a T. For Tessa. Do you hear that? Ta.” Her mouth moved slowly over the sound, then spat it from the roof of her mouth.

“Ta,”
I said.

As the sun dipped lower and lower into the horizon, Mary carved into the ground and broke my name into a stream of sounds and shapes: the crossing lines of a T and an E, the two snake shapes spinning out next to them, the shape of a swing set when you see it from the side. The letters seemed to swarm through the dirt, sparkling as if they had a life of their own.

“Your turn,” she said. I grabbed the twig and Mary guided me through each letter, slowly, until my name lay across the dirt twice—once in her elegant hand, and once in my own scrawl. When I was done putting my name there, I don’t think I had ever seen anything so astonishing.

“I did it! I can do that!” I cried.

“By the end of this month, little girl, you’ll be able to read words straight from the page. Why don’t you come back tomorrow and I’ll show you some new letters? In the afternoon?”

“There are more?” I asked, and then I thought about our name at Riley Farm, set out for the world to see. It was all so overwhelming to me, but Mary just laughed.

“I’m not sure what my parents will say,” I said. My heart began to sink then. I had no doubt this would be my first and last visit to Mercy Library, and that I would pay for it as soon as I got home.

“I know they don’t believe in schooling, but wouldn’t they like you to learn to read and write?”

“My father doesn’t believe in it. And my mother wouldn’t want me to learn here, from you.” I clapped my hand over my mouth. “I’m sorry,” I said.

“You know, Tessa,” Mary said, bending down to me. Her earrings swung back and forth and made a tinkling sound. “There have been more popular women than me in the world—among the womenfolk, that is. It’s all right. But it’d be a real shame for you to go through life without any words. You’re a smart girl.”

“Thank you,” I whispered, wondering why I felt like crying. I was so afraid I would never see her again, that I would wake up and realize I had only dreamt this. Fear clenched my chest as I imagined endless days surrounded by giant corn, the smell of earth on my hands, my family towering over me and stomping through the fields. It was like flying through the clouds one minute and dropping back to earth the next. I looked
down at my name carved in the dirt, and I leaned down, snatched it from the earth, and dumped it in my pocket.

“Now give me a hug and get out of here,” she said, and leaned in and gathered me up. For a second the strong spice scent was everywhere. “I hope I’ll see you again soon, Tessa Riley. Come visit me anytime at all.”

Walking back through town, past the fields and farmhouses, I felt like a completely new person. I grasped the dirt in my pocket with my fist, felt it tingle in my palm, and stared up at the black star-speckled sky. The dirt crunched under my feet. I closed my eyes, listening to the rhythm of my walking, the lusty sounds of crickets and frogs in the distance. It was August, and the nighttime just made the heat seem thicker and more wet, like a substance I had to wade through. My heart pounded. The world was bursting with life. I took my time getting home, breathing the night air in and out, stretching out my arms to take it all in. Even if my father beats me black and blue, I thought, this day will have been worth it. No matter how bad things get, I will have
this day.

When Riley Farm appeared ahead of me, I squashed the dirt in my hands, steeling myself, preparing for anything. I crept across the front lawn, deafened by the sounds of the crickets and cicadas, and pushed through the front door as quietly as possible. The house felt so stark and prim against the lush night. I felt a knot form in my throat and stay there. I stood for a moment in the dark, empty hallway, barely breathing, then heard the clattering of silverware coming from the kitchen. I stood for a few minutes longer, suspended between two worlds, before I tiptoed into the kitchen, to the round oak table we all crowded around.

My father and brothers shoveled bread and stew into their mouths, not even looking up. I took my seat next to my sister, and my mother handed me a bowl without saying a word.

“Where have you been, child?” my father asked.

I froze. “I’m sorry, sir,” I said, staring into my stew. “I was doing my stretches outside.”

I felt his eyes on me and winced.

Tessa,
I thought, squeezing my eyes shut and focusing on the dirt, the shapes, the sounds pulsing from Mary’s tongue.
Ta.

“Eat your stew,” he said, in a voice so tight I thought it might whip out and lash me. Later, I knew, he would make up for whatever he was holding back now.

I came from a long line of farmers whose lives were controlled by seasons and whose skin was hard against the wind. My family had been on that Kansas land longer than anyone could remember, and our name was Riley, a name marked on our front gate and on the windowsills, we were so proud of it. The Rileys were a strong clan, my mother always told us. We came from the earth and our arms hung heavy at our sides.

When I was born the midwife lifted me into the air and screamed; she thought my mother had birthed some kind of rodent, I was so small. Once they’d finally cleaned me off enough to see that I was a normal baby—though I was about a third of the size of the usual kind—my mother decided not to call me Geraldine after her sister, as she’d planned to do. “Geraldine is no name for a munchkin,” she said. “Geraldine is a name that’d stretch two city blocks.” So my mother plucked a name out of the sky and called me Tessa, and I got a Geraldine for a sister two years later—a baby sister as big as a tree stump.

I don’t think it’s any stretch to say that my mother hated having such a strange creature emerge from her body, but she tried her hardest to challenge fate and whatever devil had played such a trick on her. She taught me to do backbends and headstands and cartwheels, and made
me do stretches every day in the kitchen window, but while Geraldine grew and grew till her head bumped the ceilings of the shops in town, I remained what I was: a terrible mistake.
Please,
I whispered into air every night, holding the word on my tongue like sugar, but when I got to four feet, time stopped for me and the world went on and left me behind.

Probably my mother tried loving me as long as she did out of disappointment, pure and simple. Geraldine, despite her gift for growing, was an ill-tempered, dumb child at best, one who snorted and cried when she didn’t get enough to eat, and my brothers were not good for much besides hauling in our crops and trampling down everyone else’s. Of course, when it came down to it, my siblings were far better children than I and kept that farm running and food on our plates, but I think my mother could have used someone to talk to sometimes, someone with a bit of soul in them. I guess it’s an easy thing for me to say now, when seeing my mother again is about as likely for me as sprouting fins, but I think my mother could have found a friend in me back then if I hadn’t shamed her so much. Some things aren’t ever meant to be, I guess. All I know is that it’s a terrible thing to be born someone’s failure in this world.

When all is said and done, though, maybe that was what saved me. I was so light my feet barely made dents in the moist earth outside. Sometimes I passed a mirror and wasn’t sure whether I was reflected back in it. And little by little I just slipped away; people have a habit of doing that sometimes—just falling away, out of some lives and into other ones, out of one world and into the next. I ate dinner with my family every night, and I slept in the bed my father had carved for me when I was less than a year old, but little by little they just stopped seeing me is all. By the time I was twelve, plenty of times my parents didn’t even notice whether I was in a room or out of it, and more than once my mother ran right into me because she didn’t know I was there.

Once I stopped staring out the windows and longing to feel the ceilings of buildings with my head, the world took on a different shape. I stopped even pretending to do chores. The days became silent and mine, and I began to think that maybe there were other things besides rows and rows of corn and radishes, and I began listening to the silence in the house, wondering at what lay beyond the fields and the trees that marked out our land.

And then the world opened itself to me like a mouth.

The next day, as soon as the dishes were washed and dried, I sneaked out into the early afternoon and set off running, as if I couldn’t get to the library fast enough. I didn’t even look at the landscape around me or slow down for breath when a gaggle of teenaged girls laughed as I ran past.

“Weirdo!” they called. “Freak!”

I didn’t pay attention. Everything in the world that mattered to me was reduced down to that library across town.

But the moment I burst in the doors of Mercy Library, I became shy, and nervous. I stood by the door, unsure what to do next.

“Tessa,” Mary said, looking up from the front desk. Her eyes immediately dropped to my arms and legs. “Your parents weren’t too mad? You’re okay?” She walked over and put her hand on my shoulder, looked at my neck and face.

“No, it was fine. I’m fine,” I said. I smiled up at her.

She breathed out. “Good,” she said, laughing. “You look like you could use some relaxing. Why don’t we make some tea? They’ll be lining up any second, so we have to hurry.”

She rushed through the stacks, pulling me after her, back to an old stove tucked in the corner. I was so excited I was practically skipping.
When we came to the makeshift kitchen, I laughed out loud. Everything with Mary was a great adventure. I loved the little stove, the jars of dried herbs lined above it. I loved the elaborate locked box made of ivory sitting on a table to the side.

“What’s in here?” I asked.

“More herbs,” Mary said, “for every kind of ailment. Powders and vials.” She leaned in to me, put her face next to mine. “You can cure most anything with these herbs, you know. Sprinkle them into tea and soup. Bite down on a clove for a toothache, brew up mixtures of mint and nettle and fireweed to soothe a broken heart.” She held up a small bag and let me peer into it: the herbs glimmered and shifted inside, and a faint whiff of smoke drifted into the air.

“You
are
a witch!” I said.

“I’m gonna get you and make you ride my broomstick!” She reached out for me and I screamed and laughed. “Here, we’ll need a stool for you, won’t we?” she said then, standing up. “So you can make tea, too.”

I beamed up at her, unable to imagine anything more exciting.

Mary pulled up a stool from one of the stacks and set it in front of the stove, then pointed out all the various herbs on the shelves above. I could just reach them from the stool, my belly pressed into the front of the stove. We set a pot of water to boiling. As we waited, we wrapped two small piles of herbs in two cheesecloth pouches and dropped them into two mugs. “Now you just pour the water over and let it brew,” Mary said, ruffling my hair.

Tea in hand, we made our way back to the front desk. I couldn’t take my eyes off my cup and walked slowly, deliberately. With relief, I set it down on the desk and breathed in the hot herb scent.

Suddenly the door slammed open. I turned to see a woman walking hesitantly into the room, someone I didn’t recognize from the farm or square.