Rainwater (6 page)

He expelled a long breath, looking regretful. “This is my first night in your house. I’ve failed to make a good impression.”

“You shouldn’t be concerned about impressing me, Mr. Rainwater.”

“I want you to think well of me.”

“I thought well enough of you to rent you the room. Beyond that—”

“You have no opinion of me,” he said, finishing for her and further fomenting her irritation with him and the entire conversation.

“That’s right, Mr. Rainwater. I don’t think too much about you or about any of my boarders, because, in return, I don’t want you thinking too much about me, or Solly, or our circumstances.”

He studied her a moment, then said, “You should allow yourself to get angry more often. I think it would do you good.”

His candor robbed her of words. Taking umbrage, she just stood there and stared at him.

“Good night, Mrs. Barron.” He stepped around her and went upstairs.

FIVE

A week passed. Ella saw little of David Rainwater other than at breakfast and dinner. During mealtimes, he showed remarkable forbearance for the Dunne sisters’ chatter and ill-disguised curiosity.

The spinsters began “dressing” for dinner, each night coming downstairs arrayed in their Sunday best, wearing pieces of jewelry and explaining this sudden affectation by asking, rhetorically, what good was having nice things if one never used them? Ella even caught a whiff of cologne one evening and suspected Miss Pearl, who played the coquette whenever in the company of the new boarder.

Mr. Hastings returned one afternoon, barely having time to wash up before dinner. As Ella was serving the salad course, the sisters made the introductions.

“Pleased to meet you, Mr. Rainwater,” the salesman said. “It’ll be nice to have another man in the house. Do you play chess?”

“Not too well, I’m afraid.”

“Excellent! Maybe I can win a game for a change. Ah, Mrs. Barron, I’ve missed your cooking. Nothing like it where I’ve been.”

“Thank you, Mr. Hastings. Did you have a productive trip?”

“Nothing to boast of, sorry to say. My vendors don’t buy what they used to. In fact, nothing even close to what they used to, because they can’t sell the inventories they have. Nobody can afford notions these days. People are lucky if they can eat regularly. Despite Mr. Roosevelt’s optimistic speeches, times seem to be getting worse, not better.”

“Which should make us all the more grateful for our blessings,” Miss Violet intoned.

After dinner that night, the two men played chess in the formal parlor while the sisters listened to the radio in the informal parlor. Ella could hear strains of music as she worked in the kitchen. Occasionally she detected a male voice coming from the front room.

Mr. Hastings stayed for two days, then doggedly carried his sample cases down the stairs and out to his car. “I should be back next Tuesday,” he informed Ella. “I’ll call you if for any reason I’m delayed.”

“Have a good trip, Mr. Hastings.”

He tipped his hat to her and set off. That evening Mr. Rainwater excused himself immediately after dinner and went up to his room. He hadn’t spent any more evenings sitting on the porch, at least none that Ella knew about.

Their encounters were polite, but brief and stilted, as though each was being careful not to offend the other. As she’d requested, he no longer stood up when she entered a room or extended any other overt courtesy. It felt to her as though they had quarreled. They hadn’t. Not exactly. But she avoided being alone with him, and he made no attempt to seek her out.

Which was as it should be.

He’d been in residence for two weeks when they had their next private conversation. She’d been cleaning upstairs while Margaret was in the front parlor mending a drapery and watching Solly as he played with spools of thread, which was one of his favorite pastimes.

Ella was toting her basket of cleaning supplies down the stairs when she heard a scraping sound she couldn’t identify. She followed it through the kitchen, out the back door, and around the corner of the house.

Mr. Rainwater was applying himself to a garden hoe, using it to chop the dry soil between rows of tomato plants. With his coat and vest draped over a fence post, he was in shirtsleeves, the cuffs rolled to his elbows. Suspenders crisscrossed his back, forming an X over the spot where sweat had plastered his shirt to his skin.

“Mr. Rainwater!”

Her exclamation brought him around. “Mrs. Barron.” Resting one arm on the top of the hoe handle, he pushed back his hat and used his sleeve to wipe sweat from his forehead.

“What are you doing?” she asked.

He looked down the handle of the hoe to the freshly tilled soil and uprooted weeds withering in the sun. When he raised his head, he looked at her with the barely contained amusement that was now familiar but no less perturbing. “I’m hoeing the vegetable garden.”

His calm statement of the obvious made her even angrier. The weeds he had chopped were evidence that the struggling garden needed attention, but his presumption was untenable. “I was going to weed it myself tomorrow.” She glanced up at the blistering afternoon sun. “Early. Before it got too hot.”

He chuckled. “It is hot. Almost too hot to breathe.”

“Which is my point, Mr. Rainwater. Besides doing my work for me, which you shouldn’t be, especially not before asking me first, strenuous work like hoeing a garden can’t be good for a man in your condition.”

His amusement evaporated, and his face became taut, the skin stretched tightly over the prominent bones. “I promise not to drop dead on your tomato plants.”

His tone struck her like a slap to the face. She may even have flinched, because immediately he let the hoe drop from beneath his arm and took a step toward her. “I’m sorry.” He whipped off his hat and ran his fingers through his hair, pushing it back before replacing his hat. “Please forgive me. That was uncalled for.”

She was still too taken aback to speak.

“You think because I took it upon myself to hoe the garden that I’m suggesting you’re not competent to do it?” he asked. “Nothing of the sort, Mrs. Barron. I didn’t stop to think how you might misread my intentions. In fact, I didn’t stop to think at all. It was an impulsive decision, and, the thing is, I didn’t do it for you. I did it for me.”

She tilted her head up and looked into his face.

“I want and need something to do. I haven’t done anything constructive since I moved in, and I dislike the inactivity. It makes the days and nights pass very slowly.” He flashed a rueful smile. “You would think I’d welcome the slow passage of time, but I deplore being idle. I want to keep busy and active for as long as I possibly can.”

He stared at her for several beats, his aspect intense, as though he was willing her to understand. Then he released a sigh, his shoulders sagging slightly. He bent down and picked up the hoe. “I’ll replace this in the shed.”

He retrieved his coat and vest from the fence post and stepped through the rickety chicken-wire gate that sometimes, but rarely, discouraged rabbits from ravaging her garden.

As he walked past her, she said, “I didn’t mean to sound so cross.”

He stopped and faced her. She was on eye level with his exposed neck, where he’d loosened his tie and unbuttoned his collar button. His skin was slick with sweat. He smelled of its saltiness, of sun and summer heat, of freshly turned loam.

It was almost too hot to breathe, she thought. In any case the breath she inhaled seemed insufficient. “My boarders shouldn’t do my chores.”

“Not even if doing a chore makes one happy?”

She raised her eyes to his.

In a soft voice, he asked, “What’s the harm in it, Mrs. Barron?”

“The harm in it is, I don’t want any upset of my routine.” Sounding desperate, almost afraid, she took a deeper breath before continuing. “If I allowed every boarder to do what he or she pleased, when he or she pleased it, the house would soon be in chaos. I can’t let—”

She was shocked into silence when he placed his hand on her shoulder. But before she could fully register that he was actually touching her, she realized his attention was no longer on her. He was looking beyond her. He dropped his things to the ground, at the same time gently, but firmly, pushing her aside and rushing past. “Brother Calvin?”

Ella turned to see the preacher sitting astride a mule. Legs dangling against the animal’s sides, Brother Calvin was slumped so far forward, his forehead was almost touching the animal’s stiff mane. As she watched in astonishment, he let go of the rope serving as reins, keeled to one side, and slid off the mule onto the ground.

When Mr. Rainwater reached him, he knelt down and gingerly turned the young preacher onto his back. Ella gasped at the sight of the preacher’s face. It was bloody and swollen. Mr. Rainwater hissed through his teeth. Ella, reacting to the emergency, did an about-face and ran to the kitchen door. She shouted through the screen for Margaret, then hurried back and dropped to her knees beside the two men.

“What happened to him?”

“Looks to me like he’s been beaten,” Mr. Rainwater replied.

Brother Calvin was bleeding from several cuts on his face and scalp. His clothing was torn. He was wearing only one shoe. He was conscious, but he was moaning, and his head lolled when Mr. Rainwater slid his arm beneath his shoulders and levered him into a sitting position.

“Help me get him inside,” he said to Ella.

The man’s size made it an effort. Mr. Rainwater draped one of the preacher’s arms across his shoulders, and Ella did the same. Each wedged a shoulder into an armpit, then they managed to heave him up as they struggled to stand. Moving slowly, they half carried, half dragged him to the back steps.

Margaret pushed open the screened door and, upon seeing her beloved minister in that condition, began to shriek.

“Stop that!” Ella ordered. “We need your help. Get his feet.”

The maid was struck silent. She clambered down the steps, tucked one of the preacher’s feet under each arm, then backed up the steps. All three staggered and stumbled beneath his weight, but they got him through the doorway.

Mr. Rainwater said, “Lower him to the floor.”

They did so as gently as possible, but Brother Calvin continued to moan, making Ella fear that his worst injuries were internal. “Get some towels and a washbasin of water,” she told Margaret. “And fetch the Mercurochrome from my bathroom. Where’s Solly?”

“Right behind you. I was sure to bring him with me when you called.”

Solly was sitting on the floor, his back braced against the pantry door, his legs at a right angle to his body. He was staring at his shoes and tapping them together, seemingly unaware of what was taking place.

Ella turned back to Brother Calvin, who groaned when Mr. Rainwater’s fingers probed a large lump on his temple. “Should I call Dr. Kincaid?” she asked.

“And the sheriff.”

“No!” Brother Calvin’s eyes sprang open. In his right one, the black iris floated in a pool of solid red. “No. No, please. No doctor. No sheriff.”

As he spoke, he shook his head emphatically, which must have caused him great pain because he squeezed his eyes closed again and groaned. Margaret brought the basin of water. As gently as she could, Ella bathed his wounds with water, then dabbed them with the antiseptic.

Eventually his groans subsided, but he never ceased thanking her for her kindness. Despite his condition, he fretted about the mule.

“What about it?” Ella asked.

“Doesn’t belong to me.” Between gasps of pain, he told them he was afraid the animal would wander off, so Mr. Rainwater went out to tie it to a fence post, then came back and reassured the preacher that the borrowed mule wasn’t going anywhere.

Brother Calvin convinced them he was capable of getting up, so they helped him into a chair at the table. “Do you hurt anywhere inside?” Ella asked him.

“Ribs. A few may be cracked.”

“Could you be bleeding internally?”

He shook his head. “No, ma’am. Nothing as bad as that.”

But it was bad enough to frighten Miss Violet. She ventured into the kitchen for something, but seeing a bleeding Negro man seated at the table brought her to a dead stop. She pressed an age-spotted hand to her bony chest and cried out, “Oh my!” then quickly backed out.

Whatever was going on, apparently the elderly woman wanted no part of it. Which was just as well with Ella.

Margaret slid a glass of tea within the preacher’s reach. He picked it up with both hands and sipped from it. Ella noted that his knuckles were scraped and bloody. He must have landed some hurtful punches of his own.

“What happened? Who did this?” Mr. Rainwater asked. His white shirt was streaked with the other man’s blood, but he seemed not to have noticed.

“They were shootin’ cows.”

“Lord have mercy,” Margaret wailed.

“Government men? From the Drought Relief Service?” Mr. Rainwater asked.

The preacher nodded.

“Whose herd was it?” Ella asked.

“Pritchett, his name is.”

She looked across at Mr. Rainwater. “George Pritchett. His family has been operating that dairy farm for at least three generations.”

The federal government program had been formulated earlier that year to protect farmers, dairymen, and cattlemen from total ruin. The worst drought in a hundred years had earned the Plains States the nickname of Dust Bowl. Land once farmed or used to graze cattle was now a vast wasteland, ravaged by wind and hordes of insects.

Responding to the worsening emergency, Congress had allocated millions of dollars with which to buy animals from dairy farmers and cattlemen whose herds were literally starving to death. Agents were authorized to pay up to twenty dollars a head, which was far below market value during normal times but better than nothing in the crisis situation.

It seemed a viable program. Livestock deemed healthy enough for consumption was shipped to the Federal Surplus Relief Corporation for slaughtering and processing. The canned meat was then distributed to transient communities, soup kitchens, and breadlines. Farmers and ranchers earned something; hungry people were fed.