A Gentle Rain (2 page)

"Blood is inherited and virtue is acquired."

-Venezuelan Proverb

"A large income is the best recipe for happiness I ever heard of."

jane Austen

Prologue

Kara

My birth, 1974

In my mother's innocent world of Saturday morning cartoons, babies wearing name sashes fluttered about a cartoon garden after being delivered by a heavenly stork. Lily Akens had no reason to doubt the obstetrics of a TV show.

My teenaged father, Mac Tolbert, knew better, since he often helped birth calves and foals at River Bluff, his family's northern Florida farm, but he didn't know how to warn my mother about the process. Besides, he wasn't certain human babies were born the same way as livestock.

He could only assume a baby came out from the same spot where the boy put it in.

"Lily, L-lily, don't c-cry," Mac stuttered, kneeling over her helplessly in the sweaty, sub-tropical darkness, swatting at mosquitoes that flitted in the beam of his shaking flashlight. Tall pines shifted above them in a swampy breeze. Bullfrogs chortled in the creek bottoms. Somewhere in a sumpy ditch, an alligator grunted. The dark forests of inland Florida breathe and talk at night, drawing mysterious memories from the porous limestone bedrock. Though far from either ocean, the air carries a fault hint of saltwater.

"But it hurts!" Lily sobbed, pounding her palms on her distended stomach. Her cheap, flowery mumu was soaked with fluid and clotted around her thighs.

"I t-think it's s-supposed to hurt," Mac told her. "Maybe you should stand u-up. Like a m-mare."

"I don't think I can! Oh, Mac! It hurts so bad! Mac! Something's trying to come out of me down there!"

Trembling, Mac pointed the flashlight between her legs. Horses and cattle were born front feet first, as if diving into the world. Mac looked closely but saw no baby hands, just the bloody pate of a tiny head. It terrified him, but he hid the emotion. He had to be strong for Lily. They were different from other teenagers; they had taken care of each other since childhood. "It's just the b-baby." He sounded more confident than he felt. He knew how to turn a breeched calf or foal but could not imagine sticking his big hand inside Lily.

"Mac! It's moving! "

He grabbed her hands as she sat up. She rocked and he held her. The heels of her tennis shoes plowed furrows in the soft, damp loam. Lily began to yell. After what seemed like forever she went quiet and collapsed against him. "The baby fell out," she moaned. "Why doesn't it flap its wings? Something must be wrong with it. Oh, Mac."

My father turned the flashlight between her thighs, again. He and my mother stared in horror. Neither had seen a newborn child, before. I was not a cute little doll or a smiling cherub. I was nearly purple. My head was misshapen. Bloody mucous plastered a feathery dab of red hair to my skull. I opened my shriveled mouth and took a big yawn of air. To them, the effort looked like a dying gasp.

They bent their heads over me and cried.

Searchlights pierced the woods. Mac's older brother, Glen, found them first. "What the hell have you done?" he said.

Mac and Lily sobbed. Before they could hold me even once, before they could realize I was alive and normal, I was taken from them.

I would be grown before I knew Mac and Lily existed. Grown before I knew they had birthed me in the wilds of Florida. Grown, before I knew they had wanted me.

Grown and orphaned before I was born into my parents' lives, again.

Ben

The day my life changed, 1977

My baby brother, Joey, was born smiling. I knew from the get-go it was just a matter of time before he died, but life is a long, slow river if you don't give up hope. The black cypress rivers of our Florida-of the real Florida, not the Mickey Mouse plastic-flamingo Florida-promise people they'll live forever. That's why so many old people move here.

Pa and me sweated it out that day, waiting for Ma to give birth at a government clinic. We stood outside in speckled pieces of oalc shade under a flat-out blistering sun in the middle of the south Florida swamps, wiping cold dew on our faces as it dripped from the clinic's air conditioner. We spent the rest of our time slapping mosquitoes and dodging wasps that lived in the saw palmettos. It felt like there was nothing else around us but forest and gators. I tried not to complain because Pa said not complaining was the cowboy way.

He'd driven Ma and me over two hundred miles due south from the beef ranch near Ocala where he worked as foreman-we lived there cheap, in a rusty double-wide dented by a tornado-just so she could get treated for free on the Seminole reservation.

Pa was half-Seminole, so he could get Ma into the clinic for nothing, even though she was white. He had his cowboy pride, and taking handouts from Grandpa Thocco's people was better than taking hand-outs from strangers.

Here was the crazy thing: There we were in the piss-poorest part of nowhere, where the Indians still lived in thatched huts called chickees, and tourists still paid to watch Seminoles like Grandpa wrestle gators.

But drive northeast two hours and you could watch rockets head for the moon at Cape Canaveral. Drive southeast about an hour and you could sit on a beach in Ft. Lauderdale watching nearly naked college girls.

I was nine years old, it was 1977, and I wanted to see me some college girls in string bikinis. But I was stuck outside that clinic, with Pa.

"Look there," Pa whispered, thumbing his straw hat back from his forehead. He'd been pacing for hours. Pacing and smoking and looking at the clinic. I was glad something finally distracted him. "Yonder. At the edge of the oaks."

I squinted under my palm and saw wild horses peeking at us from behind the trees' Spanish moss. They were lean little mud-daubers, but they sniffed the air with royal attitude. "Them bosses ain't much to look at," Pa went on, "but don't you forget the sight of `em, Ben. They're Crackers. Like us."

In our part of Florida, lots of things were called Cracker: Fried gator tail, Indian cornbread, tin-roofed houses, tough little horses, longhorn cattle, wild pigs, and kiss-my-ass poor people. It wasn't about color, and it wasn't about creed. It was about survival. Survivors were Crackers.

"Those bosses come from the old Spanish stock," Pa said. "Like Mustangs out west. There's nothing prouder or smarter or tougher on four hooves. Some of `em even got fancy gaits, like the Spanish bosses straight off ships way back, hundreds of years ago. Not many of `em are left now. They make fine cattle ponies, and some can run like the wind. It'll be a shame if they die out."

"Let's catch us some," I whispered. Like Pa, I was keen on saving what we could be proud of.

He nodded. "When I earn up enough money to buy us a ranch, we'll get us a whole herd of Cracker horses."

That promise stuck in my mind. His dreams were mine. If he couldn't make `em come true, I would. "We'll sure do that," I agreed. "Us and the new baby. Hope it's a boy. Or a girl who likes bosses, at least."

"Mr. Thocco," the doc called out.

Me and Pa went running. The doc stopped us at the clinic door. He was a big, chunky dude with thin, blonde hair and a raw mole on his cheek. Blonde and fair-skinned is a bad combination under the Florida sun. He wiped sweat off his face despite the air conditioner. He faked a smile at me. "Son, why don't you take a little walls while me and your daddy talk?"

I gave Pa a determined look. Cowboys didn't take walks.

"Naw," Pa said. "Ben's a man. He knows how to listen."

"All right." The government doctor didn't beat around any bushes. "Your wife's fine. But you've got yourself a baby son with a lot of medical problems."

Pa lost some color under his dusky skin. It went from oak to pine. That scared me. "What kind of problems?"

"He's got a heart condition. It'll get worse as he grows up. I'm sorry, but my best guess is he won't live more than a few years."

My knees went weak. Pa put a cigarette between his lips and lit it with a lighter shaped like a horse's head. His hand looked steady but the flame shimmied. "That the worst news?"

"No sir, I'm afraid not. Your son's ... he's what we call a Down Syndrome child."

Pa pinched the cigarette between a thumb and finger. "What the hell is that?"

"He's ... retarded. Feeble-minded. `Mentally handicapped' is the polite term for it now. The retardation could be severe, or it could be mild. Either way, it's not good."

I thought my heart would stop. A retard. I knew about retards. I'd seen `em at the shopping centers in Ocala. Retards drooled on themselves and made stupid faces. You had to work hard not to stare at them. It was rude to stare, Mama said.

But everyone knew a retard was something to hide away so normal people weren't forced to look at it. Retards weren't real people. If one was born in your family, it meant something was wrong with your whole bloodline. If you were a horse or bull, no one would want to breed their mares or cows to you, after that.

Pa slowly dropped the cigarette on the sandy ground then crushed it with the scuffed toe of his boot. "I gotta see for myself"

The doctor ushered us in. There was just a cramped front office and three little rooms off a narrow hall. A Seminole nurse with blotchy brown skin and tight black hair glared at us from a cluttered desk. After all, we were kin to a retard.

The floor was linoleum and everything smelled like cold metal and liniment. I wanted to vomit. The doc pointed toward one door. "Your wife's in there." He pointed at another door. "The baby's in there."

"Wait here," Pa told me. He headed for Ma's room with the doctor behind him.

I walked toward the second door. "Don't you go in there, boy," the nurse called. "You don't want to see that poor little ugly baby."

"He's my brother, lady, and you shut the hell up."

I'd never spoken to a woman like that, before. I'd been raised right. But I'd never been the big brother of a feeble-hearted idiot before, either. Shame and pride fought it out inside me. I started defending my baby bubba from the first, even when I wished he'd never been born. I went in his room.

He was wrapped in tight sheets inside a small metal crib with a see-through dome. An oxygen tank fed air into it, hissing like a snake. I clutched the crib's side, swallowed my bile, and slowly, squinting in fear, peered down at him.

He looked back, or tried to, as best any baby can focus.

His head was too big, and his face was flat. His eyes slanted like the eyes of a Chinese boy I'd seen at a rodeo in Tallahassee. He was scrawny. His skin had a weird blue tint.

But he wasn't ugly. He had mine and Pa's black Seminole hair. He had Ma's cute, brunette-white-girl nose. He had my serious look on his face. And he smiled. He smiled at me.

I put my forehead against the clear dome that separated him from me, and I cried. It was the first and last time I'd let him see me shed tears over him. That's when I realized: He's a Cracker horse. I have to see him as special, and that means tivorth saving.

Pa came in eventually, looked the baby over without a word, then finally spread one big, callused hand on the crib's dome. He put the other hand on my shoulder. I felt a tremor in it. "What d'ya think, Ben?"

"He's a Cracker," I said hoarsely. "If we don't give him a chance to prove hisself, who's gonna?"

Pa squeezed my shoulder. "Then we're agreed. Your Mama'll be proud of you. Proud of us both. She loves him."

"Then so do we," I said.

"There are places you can send this baby, Mr. Thocco," the doctor said behind us. "The state runs some institutions where he'll be cared for. There's no cost, if you put him there. Would you like to discuss a place for him to ..."

"His name's Joseph," Pa said. "It was my granddaddy's name."

"A place for Joseph . . . "

"Joey," I said. "He's got enough to do without toting a long name. Don'cha think, Pa?"

"Joey," Pa agreed. Pa and me traded another nod. Joey would need all the help we could give him. It'd take two men and a Mama to carry Joey along. I steeled my spine. We could do it. It was the cowboy way.

The doc kept trying. "A place ..."

"Yeah," Pa said. He turned to the doc with a face that could set concrete. "We call that place 'home."'

We took Joey and Mama home to Ocala the next day. We made the best of it. And you know what? Joey was worth the best. Even though me and Joey would end up alone in the world a lot sooner than I knew. Even though finding a home for us would take more sacrifice than I realized.

I never again wished he hadn't been born.

But sometimes, I wished I hadn't.

Part One

"Until and unless you discover that money is the root of all good, you ask for your own destruction. When money ceases to become the means by which men deal with one another, then men become the tools of other men. Blood, whips and guns-or dollars. Take your choice-there is no other."

-Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged

Chapter 1

Kara Dos Rios Preserve, Brazil

I loved the story of my birth. Mother and Dad told it to me so many times, it became a fable. The fairytale of my own life.

There they were, Charles and Elizabeth Whittenbrook, a wealthy and esteemed couple, two of the world's most acclaimed environmentalists, credited with saving large sections of the rainforest.

They'd married "late in our youth," as Dad liked to say, and they were finally pregnant with their long-awaited and much anticipated first child, yours truly. They were extraordinarily happy at their Brazilian refuge, Dos Rios, deep in the heart of the Amazon, awaiting the birth.

A radio call came to the preserve's office. The child of a local Indian family had been injured. Could my parents help? Naturally, though Mother was nine months' pregnant, she and Dad packed medical supplies and set out on horseback. They saved the child's life and prepared to return home.