The Collected Stories of William Humphrey (43 page)

“Yes? What happened?”

“Why, be denied if that old buck didn't turn out to be a deacon in the Presbyterian church! Called us a pack of heathens and run us off his place. As we was piling into the truck to leave another one come up, claimed he was the medicine man and could make it rain pitchforks and nigger babies, but he never looked like he could even make water. The only spirits it looked like he had been in touch with was liquid all right but not water. So it sure looks like you have come to the right place all right, Professor.”

“Just when was the last time you folks had rain around here?” Prof. Simms asked.

“Last is right. Last it's ever going to, I was beginning to think. Before you came along, that is.”

So he never even had to go to them. All he had to do was drive into town (it was called Arrowhead—he hardly noticed the name, though he was never to forget it) and leave the truck sitting in front of the feed and grain store, and when he came back from the diner picking his teeth half an hour later they were there waiting for him, some two dozen of them.

At first he gave them a flat no. Said he was just passing through their town on his way to another one where his services had been contracted for. He had to agree when one of them said they couldn't need rain over there any worse than they did right here. And furthermore, he said, he never guaranteed a thing. He had his methods, and his methods had been known to work. To work where prayer and witchcraft had failed. Because his were scientific methods. But they ought to know that rain did not come down just whenever you stood up and snapped your fingers. He knew a few more things to do than just snap his fingers. Still, he never guaranteed a thing. He had been known to fail.

Because that was the way to do it: rush right in instead of waiting for some skeptic in the crowd to sneer. This he had learned, as he learned everything, the hard way. At first, when he was just starting out, he had tried to sell himself to the doubters. A big mistake. Once you had done that you had painted yourself into a corner. Then the only way out was to produce. The thing to do was, act as if nobody knew better than you what the odds were against your succeeding. Laugh at them if they even hinted that you set yourself up as infallible. Make them look like fools. Rain? Hardest thing in the world to produce on demand. Yes, that
was
his business. It was a doctor's business to get you well, too, wasn't it? But sometimes you died, didn't you? And when they said they had not had rain in six months, or twelve, and had begun to think it was never going to rain again and didn't see how he or anybody else could hope to make it, say, that's what I think myself. If you folks haven't had rain in all that long a time it looks to me like you ain't never going to get no more, and make as if to leave. Then it was they trying to convince him that he could if he just would, saying, yes, they understood how hard it was, the odds were all against it, they didn't expect the impossible, they would have no kick coming if he failed, only just take their money and do his best for God's sake, try.

But this was the driest, dustiest, thirstiest-looking crew he had ever struck across yet! And the trustingest. They gawked at him as if to say, yes, we understand you don't want to brag. We appreciate it. But you've made your point and shown your manners and so would you please just take our money and say the charm and start the rain, we've been waiting a right long spell. No doubters here. He doubled his usual fee. They swallowed hard all around and looked at one another and licked their lips, and promised to have it for him in the morning—in advance, that is to say, of his performance. A site was fixed upon, one answering to his specification for a windmill or a silo, or some similar elevation. In parting he reminded them again that he didn't promise a thing. As a matter of fact, having consulted
Miles' Almanac
he knew that light showers were forecast for the morrow. He hoped
Miles
' was righter for once than it generally was. He pitied these folks, and his pity was heightened by the thought of what he himself was doing to them. He knew what it was like. He had been a farmer once himself. And he knew what it was to be taken in. His old farm had sat just far enough inside the Arkansas-Oklahoma line to justify the sign that hung on the gap-toothed paling fence, which, once the s's and the e's and the n's and the y's had been unreversed, read:

TRy yOUR LUCk

HUNt fOR OZARk DiMoNds

Big 1s HAVe BeNN FOUNd

1$ peR. HR.

For which in all the years it hung there the only taker he ever got, and this was after he had scratched out the 1$ and made it 50¢, was one wiseacre in a car with a Missouri license tag who stopped one day, and then said on second thoughts he believed he wouldn't after all, because he could tell just by looking that he, Simms, had done already found all the real big ones. Nor had he ever had any much better luck with his other attraction, the cave. Because nobody could stand to set foot inside it and he always had to refund their dime. Even before you stuck your head in, even from fifty feet away, the smell was enough to knock you down. It was the smell of guano, though he learned to call it that only after he had sold out and was packing to leave. The first to call it guano was the man who had bought the place from him, a stranger whom he had taken to be the second diamond prospector, and the first one to think he could tell by looking that he, Simms, had not already found all the big ones, until the man said (this after he, Simms, had tried everything, including drilling another dry hole every time a fresh breeze blew up from Texas with a whiff of petroleum on it, including even farming the damned place), “Diamonds? You trying to be funny? I'm going after that guano. There must be half a million tons of it in there.”

“That what?” said Simms.

“Bat shit to you. Most valuable fertilizer in the world. My God, you have got a gold mine in that cave. I mean, I have got a gold mine in it.”

And so, feeling sorry for these Arrowhead folks, he determined to give them a good show for their money. The rainmaker's art, as Prof. Simms had been quick to learn, consisted entirely in this: to make the audience forget what they had come to see, then get away before they recollected. Providentially it worked out that the people most willing to pay for rain were those who were the easiest to beguile, being the ones to whom amusements and spectacles were the greatest rarity.

The production, or as Prof. Simms preferred to style it, in order to stress its experimental nature, “the trial,” was set to take place on a farm known as the old Maddox place, chosen because it answered to the Professor's stipulation for a windmill, and because it stood on what passed in those parts for a hill and thus served as a signal beacon and center for community gatherings. From his overnight campsite on the edge of town Prof. Simms set off the next morning bright and early—and a very bright morning it was, with the sky glowing behind the sun like the reflector of a heater—to find the place. He did not have to ask the way. He had only to fall in with the traffic already clogging the road. The line included passenger cars and pickups, motorcycles with sidecars, buggies and wagons, more than one of them its bed loaded with empty barrels, oil drums, washtubs, to catch the rain and carry it back home in. This testimony of simple faith in his powers touched Prof. Simms. Seeing his van, the drivers of the vehicles pulled off into the ditch, the people on foot stood aside to let him pass. Kids sitting along the tailgates of the wagons dangling their rusty bare feet gaped at him as he went by, the women ducked their chins in a quick shy curtsey, the men bared their heads. They were certainly a dry-looking bunch! Their lips chapped and cracked from constant licking, mouths hanging open, their expressions fixed, baked on, they looked like those characters in the moving pictures shown stumbling across Death Valley towards some mirage of an oasis. Near the head of the procession he passed two wagonloads of people dressed all in white nightgowns. In his or her hands each of them clasped a small black book. Even more like wanderers in the desert, their eyes trained on a vision, these folks in their nightgowns looked. Converts, believers in total immersion, they had been a long time waiting for baptism; now beatific smiles wreathed their parched and peeling lips. Prof. Simms was moved, and he renewed his vow to put on a good show for these folks, take their minds off their troubles for one day, at least.

Waiting on the site already were still more. Some looked as if they had spent the night there. Prof. Simms had barely arrived when, passing among the crowd on his inspection of the grounds, he overheard the following exchange:

“When is the rain going to start, Papa?”

“In a minute, son. Give the man time.”

“Brung along the family, have you, Dunc?”

“Just this'n here. He ain't never seen rain. Not that he remembers.”

Looking down, Prof. Simms saw a boy of four, going on five. He was dressed for the outing in a new yellow oilskin slicker, with a matching sou'wester, and a pair of rubber boots. The slicker having been bought three or four sizes too big, so that he might grow into it, the little boy rattled around inside it like the clapper inside a bell.

By eight o'clock it looked as if everybody had come who was going to come. Gathered on the field were five to six hundred people, young and old, white, black, and red. From the top step of his van Prof. Simms, his fee in his pocket, addressed the crowd in these words:

“Folks, if we're all here I will ask you now to give me your attention, please, while I explain just what we are going to do.”

From the audience arose a silence so profound that he could hear the regular breathlike swish of the palm-leaf fans with which the ladies fanned their faces. Before him were ranged five hundred open mouths, as though awaiting the consecrated host.

“I will tell you everything,” he continued. “I mean to keep nothing from you. There is no mystery, no magic, to making rain. It is a science, and science has no secrets. I am not here to mystify you good people with a lot of hocus-pocus. I am not going to lead you all in prayer. I am not going to daub myself with paint and dance around in a ring rattling a gourd. All that is known of the science of rainmaking I mean to put to use here today for the benefit of you folks; any man who claims to know more is either fooling you or fooling himself.”

Prof. Simms paused to wipe his forehead with his bandana. Lord, it was a scorcher of a day! Imagine anybody simple enough to believe that anybody else could make rain fall from a sky like that!

Rain, the Professor mused; what was rain? Not being scientists, they perhaps thought that rain was water. Well, they were only partly right. There was something else in rain besides water, as anybody could testify who had ever let a bucketful of rainwater settle for a while: dirt. And he proceeded to explain how, according to the findings of science, every drop of rain contained, was formed around, a single grain of dust. So the first thing they were going to do this morning was to raise a little dust.

He turned and disappeared into the recesses of his van. When he came forth again some moments later he was carrying a crate on which in large red letters was stenciled
DYNAMITE
, and on top of the crate a detonator and several coils of wire.

Prof. Simms directed the digging by volunteers of four holes, one at each corner of the field, and the placing therein of half a stick of dynamite each. Wires were then laid from these to the detonator. Even as he went about this first number on his program, Prof. Simms was mindful to raise an occasional glance to the bright, blank heavens, and to follow this with a slow, slight shake of his head. This show of doubt cost you nothing of your expert standing; it lent you a human touch, meanwhile it opened, by a crack, the door out by which you were going to have to excuse yourself later on.

When the charges had been laid, capped, and fused, the crowd was advised to draw close together and to sit down on the ground. Children were gathered to their mothers. An expectant hush settled over them. Prof. Simms pushed the plunger. Four simultaneous muffled booms went up, raising four geysers of red dust. Gravel rained down upon the people's heads. Pebbles rattled on the hard ground. As the dust cleared Prof. Simms studied the faces of his audience. Usually the dynamite blasts could be counted on to loosen a crowd up, enliven them, begin to distract their minds. This bunch just lifted their dust-powdered heads and gaped at him, waiting to see what was coming next. Among five hundred faces scarcely half a dozen smiles were to be counted. Even the kids were a solemn lot. It was a very single-minded crowd.

Having astonished his audience with the information that rain was something more than water, Prof. Simms next informed them that water was really a gas, in liquid form. Rather, two gases: hydrogen and oxygen. H
₂
O. To make this go down he employed another homely illustration. When you boiled water on the range, what happened? It went off into the air in the form of a gas, steam. And when you put a lid on the pot it condensed back into a liquid. Now they had the dust that was needed for the drops to form around up there in the atmosphere; the next thing was …

Again he went inside the van, emerging this time with three cylinders of cooking gas on a hand truck, two of them labeled
HYDROGEN
, the third
OXYGEN
. He went inside once more and came back with a carton of rubber balloons. For the next three quarters of an hour Prof. Simms was kept busy inflating balloons and tying their necks and passing them to the kids who had volunteered to hold them. When all the balloons were blown up he again went inside his van, returning this time with an automatic .22 rifle. He called for a volunteer from the audience who was a crack shot. Nominations closed upon a single name, and after some coaxing a cross-eyed youth of twenty came forward dragging one foot and grinning bashfully. Prof. Simms gave him the rifle and a box of cartridges.