I Will Send Rain (7 page)

“Looks wonderful,” Samuel said.

“At least we'll always have potatoes,” she said. “Elbows off the table, Fred.”

He grunted, a yes of a kind, one of his few noises. Annie didn't pray anymore, but sometimes she would stare at Fred and try to will him to speak. Talk to me, she said to herself, you can talk to me. She already knew his voice, heard it in her head whenever he wrote.

Birdie pushed around a carrot with her fork before nibbling on a square of cornbread. Annie spied a mark on her daughter's neck, even obscured as it was by her hair. For now, Annie held her tongue. Gathered there with her family, she couldn't help think of her own transgression. She bowed her head.

When the storm had hit, what followed her initial fear was the undeniable thrill of Jack Lily's confident hand leading her to the closest parked car. Inside they had huddled side by side in the backseat as the car was rocked by gusts, dust scratching against the windows. They breathed into the crooks of their elbows. When she realized they were still holding hands, she didn't pull away. The heat of the car, stifling, flushed her cheeks.

“Thank you,” she said, when the wind subsided. Light filtered through the haze and she returned her hand to her lap.

“Annie.”

Dust had coated his hair and shoulders like talcum powder, but there he was, smiling. She couldn't help smiling, too.

“I suppose I can make it to the car now,” she said.

“Maybe best not to drive quite yet.”

She knew it was probably fine—she was not some delicate rose, and the worst of the storm had passed—but she stayed, she wanted to stay, and she was glad to have the pretext. Who am I? she wondered as her heart drummed its erratic beat beneath her rib cage. Jack Lily had crisp brown eyes, steady and direct, and black hair that hung boyishly across his forehead. He was younger than she was by a few years, she guessed, but he was sophisticated, knew about a different kind of life. She was drawn to this man, liked the excitement she felt next to him. She had stayed sitting close.

“You hear that?” Samuel asked.

“What?” Flustered, Annie sipped her milk.

“Fred. When he breathes. There's a whistle.”

Fred exhaled theatrically, and a wheeze constricted the tail end of his breath.

“Be serious,” Birdie said.

He laughed silently and did it again. He had always had fragile lungs; his colds would settle in his chest and last for a month, with a tight barking cough that yanked Annie from sleep like the blast of a shotgun. Some things helped a little. Hot water and honey. Steam. That the dust was taking its toll she could hear now in his ragged-edged breathing.

“Feel okay, Freddie?” she asked.

The doctor over in Herman cost five dollars for the visit alone.

“The boy has asthma,” the doctor had said last year when they took him. The liniment oil in his wavy dark hair made his collar greasy. “Pull down his trousers.”

Annie didn't know what asthma was and didn't care just then. She did as she was told and whispered into Fred's ear, “It's okay. The doctor is going to help you.” Fred had smiled even through his strangled breaths. Her good boy Fred.

The doctor jammed a syringe of epinephrine into Fred's thigh, and he shot up to sitting, shaking and sweating, but breathing.

“Doctor? What can we do for him?” Samuel asked.

“They say it's a psychosomatic illness.”

“Psychosomatic?” Samuel asked.

“In his head. Psychological causes. Fear, stress, feelings of hopelessness perhaps. From the Greek verb
aazein
, meaning to pant.”

Annie hated this man, his condescension. She ran her palm over her boy's clammy forehead.

“He couldn't breathe,” Samuel said thinly.

“Oh, the symptoms are real. But most likely brought on by some strong emotion. Something upsetting you, son?”

Fred looked to his mother, confused.

“He can't speak,” she said.

“Can't or won't?” the doctor said.

Annie felt Samuel squeeze her hand, and she half hoped her husband would up and knock the doctor down.

“Well. Nothing much to be done, I'm afraid, except watch for symptoms. And don't let it get this bad before getting him help.”

The doctor turned to Fred. “Tell your folks if it gets hard to breathe, okay?” He had leaned down close to Fred's face. “You can do that, can't you? I'm pretty sure you can.”

And that had sent Annie spinning.

Birdie reached for her third piece of cornbread. “I'm sure he'll be just fine with a plateful of sugar cookies and strawberry preserves,” she said.

“Nothing your mother's cookies can't fix.” Samuel grinned.

His compliment nettled her, so easy and bland. As she and Jack Lily had waited in the hot backseat, the light diffuse through the dirty windshield and cloudy air, she had felt outside of time, transported. Like someone else.

“I sure wouldn't have imagined myself here in No Man's Land,” Jack said with a laugh.

She found she loved his voice, smooth and clear, laced with bits of his Chicago accent. They caught glances and turned away.

“Who would have?” she said. “I hoped Mr. Darcy would find his way to Kansas.”

Jack Lily raised his eyebrows. “Austen?”

She reddened, caught showing off with the little she remembered from high school English.

“You are lovely,” he said.

And there it was.

Annie stared straight ahead. She felt electric.

“I should go,” she said, avoiding his eyes. She touched her fingertips to the scowl lines between his eyes before opening the door.

Her hat had been caught, wedged under the car's front tire, crushed. She had done nothing and she had done everything.

*   *   *

F
RED HAD KNOCKED
his glass of milk to the floor with one of his unruly elbows.

“Get a towel, Fred,” Samuel said.

“I'll get it,” Annie said, leaping to her feet.

He would never suspect. Never be jealous.

“No use crying over spilled milk,” Birdie said. Fred stuck his tongue out at her.

“I'm going over to the Macks' place after supper,” Samuel said. “He's got a bunch of sick cows. Needs to figure out what to do.”

“Is there anything to do?” Annie asked as she sopped up the milk.

“I think he'll take the dollar a head. They herd them over to Fairview gulch.”

Annie looked up. “It's awful.” All of it, she thought.

“Don't I know it.”

*   *   *

A
NNIE HANDED
B
IRDIE
the last pot to dry, and took a rag to wipe down the table.

“You were with Cy. Earlier.”

Birdie silently dried the already dry pot.

“Birdie.” Annie turned to face her. “Barbara Ann.”

“What?”

“Don't go sneaking around.”

“I'm not sneaking.” Birdie shoved the pot on the high shelf until it clanged against the wall.

Annie pushed the hair from her forehead, that stubborn curl that never stayed back. “It's becoming,” Jack had said in the car, “how it always falls like that.”

“You think you know everything there is to know, Birdie.” She knew it was the wrong thing to say, but she couldn't help herself.

Birdie crossed her arms and clamped her lips together. “So you've said before,” she muttered.

Annie took a breath, evened her voice, and tried to start again.

“Cy's a farmer like his father,” Annie said.

“So what? You married a farmer.”

I know I did, Annie thought. I know, I know. Jack in his rolled-up shirtsleeves. His clean cut-grass-and-mint smell.

“I'm not saying a farmer is a bad thing,” Annie said, lowering her voice. “I chose this life.”

“Besides, Cy doesn't want to stay here forever. You don't know anything about him.”

“I know that you like him. And that's a wonderful thing. But you don't need to decide on someone yet. You're only fifteen.”

“You don't know what it's like,” Birdie said, her voice gone quiet. She bit her lip and shook her head, giving up trying to explain it.

I do know what it's like, Annie thought.

“Be a little careful with your heart. That's all I'm saying,” she said.

“I'm not like you, Mama.”

I'm not like me, either.

*   *   *

F
RED WATCHED HIS
father set off toward the Mack farm, his steps quiet in the dust, and then the car chugging down the driveway, finally small against the horizon. The evening brought a light breeze, the clouds plum in the west. He would have liked to go along, but he had not been invited. He jumped off the porch and ran behind the chicken coop to check his trap, which he'd fashioned from an old crate. If it worked, a rabbit would hop in through the door he'd cut, nibble at the piece of cabbage—stolen from his mother's garden—and the movement would knock loose a gate of chicken wire, which would fall and capture it. He didn't know what he'd do with it after he caught it, but maybe he could fashion a leash out of twine.

Fred panted, unable to get a breath in deep. He came around the henhouse to find the crate knocked over and the cabbage gone. This was his third failed contraption. He wandered toward what was left of the old grazing land around the dry pond to look for bones. There was a bone market out near the railroad, bone meal being the cheapest way to fertilize. They paid by the ton, he'd heard, and he was pretty sure he was getting there now that there were all kinds of bones to be found: coyotes, rabbits, birds, bats, raccoons, squirrels. He'd hauled a whole cow skeleton, piece by piece, from the middle of what was left of the pond. His pile of bones formed a white tower in the dying light.

He picked up a cow skull, heavy in his hand, still warm from the day's heat. He hurled it with both hands as hard as he could at the lone cottonwood on the pond's edge. The crack of breaking bone felt clean and good. He gulped in a not-quite-full breath and yawned.

Sugar cookies would make him feel better. Birdie was right. He scampered off, in the direction of home.

*   *   *

S
AMUEL DID NOT
go to the Macks' farm. Instead he turned toward town and drove past the church to Pastor Hardy's small wooden house that the townspeople had built for him almost twenty years ago. The yuccas held the sand, but the elm they'd planted with the house was leafless and peeling. The pastor had lost his wife to diphtheria back in Arkansas soon after they'd lost their son in the trenches of the Great War. The pastor had answered an ad for a preacher needed on the High Plains, and had set off for Oklahoma alone.

Samuel turned off the car and waited while the engine knocked and settled. He would drop by to see Stew Mack on the way home, but he hadn't been able to bring himself to tell Annie that he was first going to talk to Pastor Hardy. Just as he hadn't been able to talk to her about the dreams, more disturbing and powerful as the summer wore on, afraid she might dismiss them as foolish. He could sense her impatience with the intensity of his prayers, his questions. She went to church, of course, but her Bible had been packed away for years.

Always now there was rain when he closed his eyes at night. Rain hurtling to the earth without letting up. But after the last roller he'd had a dream so lifelike he couldn't shake its haunting grip. It wasn't like the others, and it didn't dissolve the next morning when he woke, his throat gritty and parched. Instead, it seemed to gain weight and dimension as he went about his day on the farm, sticking with him like a physical presence. Torrents of rain pouring from a dark and savage sky, a deluge that wiped out animals, houses, the railroad, the post office. His neighbors bobbed along in the rising water as trees snapped like matchsticks.

Pastor Hardy stood in the open doorway and beckoned Samuel inside. They sat on wooden chairs at a small table in a circle of yellow lamplight.

“I brought some cookies,” Samuel said, unfolding a butter-spotted napkin.

“Annie is sure a good cook,” the pastor said. “I miss the kitchen smells. The small things can wrench you into misery when someone's gone.” He took a cookie, not bothering with a plate, and his first bite dropped crumbs to the table in a constellation. “I'm grateful for the congregation,” he said. “Keeps me busy.”

Samuel nodded. “Hard to outrun it sometimes, isn't it?” He patted the pastor's sleeve, and quickly withdrew his hand.

“What's on your mind, Samuel? What brings you out?”

“I've been chewing on something. It's got me all tied up.”

“Go on.”

“We had abundance out here and now we have nothing. Worse than nothing.” Samuel's words began to spill from him. “People leaving their land, not enough to eat. Questioning God. I know I have, I can't help it.”

“Slow down, son. Let me get the whiskey.”

The old man shuffled to the cupboard and pulled down a small jug and two cloudy glasses. Samuel took a sip and welcomed its calming effect.

“The jackrabbits, the grasshoppers. Even all the spiders. It just feels plain wrong,” Samuel said. “If it's not retribution, this place we're in now, if God isn't punishing us for our sins, could it be a test, then?”

“When we return unto God, things will be changed for us,” Pastor Hardy said.

Samuel rolled his glass between his palms before the pastor filled it again.

“I'm afraid,” Samuel said quietly.

“We're all afraid. These are frightening times. That's why some leave. That's why some stay. That's why we ration ourselves to cured pork and cornmeal porridge.”

“No, it's something else. Why I came tonight. To talk to you.”

“What is it, Samuel? Have you done something?”

Samuel shook his head and looked to the window, only to see the reflection of the lamp. It was ludicrous, this thought that wouldn't leave him.