Rainsinger (23 page)

Drawn by the growing sound of the storm, all four of them met at the wide kitchen window, which showed the longest view. Wind-whipped rain slammed into the glass as if thrown in buckets, making the scene gray and blurry, and hard, booming cracks of thunder rattled the doors. Percival yelped and barked, as if to warn the humans of danger.

Daniel whooped suddenly. “Let it rain!” he cried. “Isn’t it beautiful?”

Winona silently agreed, mesmerized by the roar and the crisp feel of the air, and the smell of ozone. She’d learned to love these gully washers as a child, for they often came on suddenly like this, torrential and violent. Her uncle told her the Navajo called these male rains, the wild ones like this that held the energy of a warrior. The drops were as big as shields, and in minutes, the dusty yard was puddled.

It was only then that she became aware of Joleen, pale and hollow-eyed as she stared at the scene. Winona touched her shoulder. “Are you okay, sweetie?”

Joleen nodded, but Winona could feel the shivering in her body, and when a crack of thunder sounded, Joleen started violently.

Winona almost suggested Joleen go down to the basement, but then she remembered her resolve to let the girl face her demons. “Sit and watch,” she said. “I’ll make tea.”

“Don’t turn on the stove,” Daniel warned. “Not until the lightning stops.”

As if to emphasize his point, a sizzling, blinding flash lit the whole kitchen just then, an eerie greenish blue light followed by a deafening explosion. Winona jumped.

Joleen screamed, slapping her hands over her ears. Before Winona could move, Daniel was with her, easing her into a chair. “It’s okay, honey,” he said quietly, as if gentling a spooked horse. “It’s okay. I’ll sit with you and you can hold my hand.”

Giselle sat on Joleen‘s other side and spoke to Daniel in Navajo. He nodded, and Giselle began to sing, softly, rubbing Joleen’s arm. Another blinding, deafening flash rocked the room, and Joleen started to cry, shaking all over, but Daniel simply continued to hold her hand, and Giselle sang the strange words. Winona wondered what the song was.

And then Daniel began to sing, too, his bass resonant and unutterably beautiful. Winona stared at him, a sharp pain in her heart. In the murky, shifting light of the storm, his voice sounded eternal, steady, strong, cutting through the chaotic noise of the storm with a relentless, quiet, steadfastness.

In some odd, deep way, the sound of that voice illuminated a thousand things for Winona. It was so beautiful she felt tears welling in her eyes, but it was deeper than beauty. The simple steadfastness of the sound suddenly seemed to her to symbolize all the things he’d been saying about his fight for those trees, now being nourished by the violent but life-giving rain. His voice was the undying, relentless, persistent survival of his nation in spite of all odds, against all the violence. That he should stand upon the land for which his great-great-grandmother had died, strong and whole and willing to fight again, was akin to a miracle.

How could she have been so blind and arrogant to have refused to see that until now? Not see that Daniel, above and beyond all else that he was, was Indian. Not only just Indian, either. Diné, as they called themselves. Diné, who long ago had laughed and dreamed and loved—and died—among those trees.

A brilliant, violent flash of lightning filled the room, and on its heels came a ripe, ear-splitting crack that was quickly followed by the sound of an explosion. Daniel stood up, peering outside.

“What was that?” Giselle cried.

A vivid, uncertain light burned from the orchard and Daniel cursed, moving toward the door. “Lightening hit one of the trees. It looks like one is on fire.”

He reached for his coat on a hook by the door. Winona moved, suddenly fearful. “You can’t go out there, Daniel,” she said, holding on to his ann. “The rain will put out any fire that comes.”

He looked at her with a bleak expression in his eyes. “I have to.” He shrugged into his coat.

“You’ll be struck by lightning!”

“Daniel.” The word was plaintive and heartbreaking from Joleen’s mouth. “Please don’t go. I’m afraid.”

He paused with the open door in his hand, and Winona saw that some terrible struggle was going on in him, that somehow he was as unbalanced by the storm as both Joleen and Winona were.

It was only then that Winona heard the strange pattering coming through the open door. She frowned, listening. “What is that?” She lifted her head to look out the window.

And suddenly, the house was engulfed in a horrific, roaring maelstrom. Joleen screamed again, and Winona acted without thinking, dragging both girls away from the windows as enormous ice stones pelted the glass.

Hail.

Daniel slammed the door closed against it and dashed to the archway between kitchen and living room, where Winona held both girls. They were all transfixed. The noise was incredible, pounding like a thousand hammers on the roof and walls and ground. Bits of green leaves stuck to the window, and Winona knew a sinking feeling.

The orchard.

She looked at Daniel, but his attention was fixed on the windows and she saw only his profile. His mouth was hard in the angled face, but nothing else showed. Whatever he thought, whatever he felt, was buried below his rigid privacy. Holding the girls close to her, Winona tried to see the loving, teasing man who’d made love to her last night with such abandon, and could not. This man was far from all of them, wounded but unreachable.

Sorrow ached in her. The gilded, beautiful time she’d spent with him was over. She had fallen too deeply in love with him to be able to stay and accept whatever crumbs he thought fit to offer her. She would let him have the orchard as long as he could give her the money she’d invested in this year’s taxes. Later, when she was a little calmer and less emotional about all of it, she would go talk to someone about a fair price and payment schedule that would be equitable to both of them.

It was the right thing to do.

* * *

The hail lasted twenty minutes or more. Long enough that Winona was fairly certain any crop that might have been possible was now destroyed. When the rain finally ceased an hour afterward, all four of them crept outside to examine the damage.

The sky was still heavy and dark, casting a bleak light over the scene of destruction that greeted them. They stood on the back steps, stunned.

“Holy cow,” Joleen breathed. “I’m going to see if my rabbits are okay.”

“I’ll go with you,” Giselle said, and both of them jumped off the porch, landing in mud that sucked at their feet when they tried to move. Struggling, they headed for the worn barn, where the rabbits’ hutch was. They finally reached a patch of ground where buffalo grass held the dirt in place, and started to run.

Daniel and Winona still did not move. She was still too stunned. In an hour, the trees had been nearly stripped bare of their leaves, and the ground was covered with their debris—shredded green leaves and twigs and even a few larger branches. She eyed the orchard, but could see little from her vantage point. It didn’t look quite as bad there, but—“We may as well go look,” Daniel said heavily.

Winona followed him to the orchard. The going was slow, thanks to the mud, and she was glad she’d put on a thick sweater, for the air was chill and wet.

At the orchard they paused, both of them struck dumb by the devastation. Leaves carpeted the ground below the trees much as the shed blossoms had the first day Winona had come there. Overhead, the remaining leaves were tattered. Some limbs were stripped bare, but others had barely been touched. Toward the bluff, she noticed many of the trees had escaped damage at all, probably due to the protection of the high shelf of land. Her spirits rose, and she eagerly moved through the trees, unmindful of the way her feet squished in her shoes or the slap of wet branches on her arms.

Birds, subdued by the weather, began to sing quietly as Winona stopped again and again to examine this branch, this tree. A great many of the peaches had been stripped off by the leaves, but a great many more remained. Jubilantly she turned and called Daniel’s name.

There was no answer, only an eerie silence. “Daniel?” she called again. She circled the knot of trees that had been spared. As she ducked under the low-hanging branches of a young tree, she emerged in the meadow at the center of the orchard.

And there was Daniel, his arms hanging limply at his sides, his head bowed before the mother tree.

Or what was left of her. This was where the bolt of lightning had struck with fierce and annihilating power, which only made sense. The mother tree had been the tallest of all of them.

The bolt had struck hard, and the tree had exploded. Broken limbs were scattered in a wide radius on the ground, along with bits of bark and leaves. The stump smoked, black and forlorn in the gray light.

Winona closed her eyes for one tiny moment, aching as if a beloved pet had been killed, then she steeled herself and walked toward the unmoving Daniel. Nearby him, she bent and picked up a strangely unharmed branch, the leaves green and clean, with a tiny knot of a peach on one.

And still he only stood there, staring at the smoking ruin of tree. “Are you all right?” she asked, coming up to stand beside him.

He didn’t seem to hear her. Winona touched his arm. “Daniel?”

That was when she realized that on his face was the bleakest expression she’d ever seen. All hope, all life were drained way. Below her hand, his arm trembled, as if there were some internal instability, one that would gather and gather until it exploded. In a brief, graphic moment, she saw Daniel as devastated as the tree, and she couldn’t bear it. “Daniel,” she said, tightening her hands.

Slowly he turned his head and looked at her, as if only just now becoming aware of her. The vast emptiness in the dark irises frightened her, but she couldn’t think of what to say to heal it, to give him back what he’d just lost. Not just a tree, but all his hopes, all meaning. His whole quest had centered on the symbolism of this tree.

Without a word, he looked at the tree again, then turned and walked away, moving faster and faster as he neared the house. Winona stared after him, unsure what she should do.

It was only when she heard the sound of his truck starting that she knew she’d lost him, that any opportunity she might have had to help him was gone. Forever.

* * *

He drove mindlessly over the rutted, muddy roads, a howling pain in his veins, so vivid he didn’t dare even take a deep breath for fear the stabbing would kill him. He drove and drove, west to the reservation, where there were fewer and fewer cars, fewer buildings. Off in the mesas and along the arroyos, he’d find hogans and houses and sheep and humanity, but he did not seek them.

Under cover of darkness, he at last reached the destination he must have realized he sought. Coatless, still damp from his tramp through the orchard, he took a blanket from the seat of the truck and got out. Wrapping the blanket around his shoulders, he sat on the cold, wet ground. His grief was dried and tight inside him, and he faced east, from whence the morning would come.

* * *

Winona worried about him, and worried about what the girls would think. She struggled with what to tell them as she fixed a simple meal of macaroni and cheese and cups of hot chocolate to soothe their nerves. Joleen wanted to bring the traumatized rabbits inside, to the basement, just for the night, and Winona wearily agreed.

It turned out to be simpler than she could have hoped. They asked after Daniel, and she said he’d had a phone call from the liaison for the computer setup project and had had to drive out to Albuquerque immediately.

Giselle nodded knowingly. “He swore about that man today in town when we got the mail.” She took a sip of chocolate. “Did he give you your letters? I think he might have left them on the living-room table.”

* * *

“No.” Winona fetched them and, as the girls cleared the table around her, read them. A social-security check for Joleen, and two job offers. One in Scottsdale, which meant she’d probably be working with landscaping for wealthy landowners and condo developers. Not exactly her cup of tea, but the salary was more than generous.

The other offered the position of a greenhouse supervisor in Albuquerque. It was a little outside her area of expertise, but not so far that she couldn’t do it, and the salary was decent. If she possibly could, she wanted to stay in New Mexico. She loved it here—and every little thing would help ease the next few months of recovery.

A screaming stab of sorrow insisted she would never recover—that Daniel was the only man for her, that he was the other half of her, and she might as well resign herself to being single, because no one else could possibly measure up.

But that was a foolish sentiment. In fact, to the superstitious side of her, the job offer seemed almost a sign from heaven. She would leave Daniel to his trees and build herself a life somewhere else. Perhaps she’d even start an orchard of her own someday, in tribute to these trees.

As she stared into space, mulling the logistics of getting to Albuquerque, the phone rang. Winona found herself running to answer, sure it was Daniel, calling to tell them where he was.

Instead a warm female voice said, “Winona? This is Jessie. Ate you guys okay out there?”

“More or less. It was a pretty bad storm, but we have power and none of the windows were broken.”

“Good. We stopped in Raton when we saw the clouds coming, and it hit there pretty hard, but they opened the highway right afterward. Then we heard on the radio about the way it hit the border towns, and Luke wanted to make sure everything was fine there.”

“Where are you now?”

“I don’t know. Some little gas station on the highway. We’ll probably be at the ranch in an hour or so. Is Daniel there?”

Her stomach tightened. It was one thing to obscure the truth with the girls to avoid upsetting them—another thing entirely to lie to Luke and Jessie. “No.” She took a breath, trying to sift quickly through the facts, a way to tell them—