I Will Send Rain (15 page)

He drove out to the western field, the dry rustle of the wheat lost to the din of the machinery. The stalks were patchy, but the Lord would provide. He set the combine wheel along the edge of the dirt and fired it up.

*   *   *

W
HAT HAVE
I gone and done? Birdie gulped fast and shallow through her mouth, unable to fully catch her breath. She set the glass churn onto the ground and kept her head down between her knees for a moment so she wouldn't faint. She could hear her mother clanking bowls and pans in the kitchen, preparing the midday harvest meal, preoccupied enough not to notice Birdie doubled over in a chair out back. For the first few days, Birdie had not truly believed Cy was gone, sure he was coming back for her. She listened for a pebble against her window and looked for him where they used to meet up at the trio of piñon trees behind the school; she checked the mailbox for a note.

“Did you know?” Mary Stem had asked, cornering her after church, the mix of glee and horror in her whisper barely contained.

“Of course I knew,” Birdie shot back. “You think he would just leave without telling me?”

“I heard they left on Saturday.”

“So?”

“You just seemed so cheery at the rabbit thing. For someone whose boyfriend had just flown the coop.”

Birdie didn't have the energy to pretend. She had just walked away, leaving Mary standing there lucky in her dowdy smocked dress, no baby growing inside her.

She took hold of the worn red handle of the old butter churn and started to crank it again, the butter, three quarts of it, finally starting to firm. She turned and turned the handle, a blister forming on her thumb. He loved her, but family came first. Everyone knew that.

*   *   *

A
NNIE WAS INVIGORATED.
Despite its probable dismal returns, harvest was harvest, and she delved into her preparations for the late afternoon meal. She had steeled herself not to see Jack Lily, had stuck close to home since he had come out to the house. Through work she would redeem herself, she thought, as she plucked the stray quills—Birdie had done a lackluster job, not doing the wings right out of the boil—cleaned the chicken and cut it up into parts. She had splurged on a young chicken from the McClearys, bartering with milk, carrots, and peppers instead of going with one of the old laying hens that went for less. She arranged the pieces in a deep skillet, added a chopped onion, parsley, salt, and pepper, simmering it all in just enough water to cover. The ham had been in for two hours and was close to done. The bread dough had begun to rise.

Chicken and corn pudding had always been one of Samuel's favorites, something he remembered his mother used to make. Annie took the knife and shaved the tender kernels from six cobs, the juice sweet and milky. It was a small gesture of atonement. She would be a better wife.

“Birdie?”

Annie found the churn outside the door and her daughter gone. She sat and worked the handle until it was done. Birdie would not talk about Cy now. She would not talk about anything. Time would chip away at the heartsickness, Annie was sure. For her upcoming birthday, Annie had been working on a dress from navy-and-white-striped fabric she'd saved for three years, with a tailored front and puffed half sleeves, a straight skirt and a red tie around the waist. A dress for a city girl.

She scooped a cupful of butter from the churn into another pan, and when it bubbled, added the corn and some salt. She whipped four eggs with a fork and stirred them in with some of the broth from the chicken, beating until it was a thick batter. She smeared butter in a baking dish, poured in the corn pudding, arranged the chicken pieces inside, and set it in the oven.

As she pulled the blue-and-white serving platters from the cupboard, peeling back the stiff brown paper she'd wrapped them in last year, Annie felt a sudden rush of baby longing, skin to her skin, the warm clean smell, the perfect heft, wrinkled tiny feet. These spells came on once every few months, making her, when they passed, feel like an empty bowl. She wondered, as she leaned against the counter to steady herself, if it weren't a kind of haunting, from the baby that was and then wasn't.

Her mother had come a week after the baby died, the only time Annie had seen her since she'd left Kansas. Her hair gone white, her dress starched stiff, her small hands as dry as paper. Annie had wanted her mother to make it better. What she got was “God decides what's right for us” and a butter cake she'd packed from home, made by someone in the congregation. Maybe something truthful, some real emotion from her mother, might have been a small bridge Annie could have crossed. But hers had been a family of hidden feelings, held tongues. “Life is so hard out here,” her mother had said, unable to wipe the sigh from her voice, the disapproval, as if the Panhandle—Annie's choice—was somehow to blame for the baby's death. Annie had been too grief-tired to get angry, but she had had the thought, when she looked at her mother's stolid face, that she would probably never see her again.

Fred had arrived two years after Eleanor, and Annie had felt so full, restored for a time. With a baby, she knew who she was supposed to be. The needs immediate, her importance absolute. As the years went by, though, it became clear that there wasn't going to be another child, as much as she had hoped for one.

Annie went to the garden to dig out potatoes. They were small still but would mash up well with butter and salt. As she worked the pitchfork to loosen the soil, and the sweat ran down her sides, she remembered Jack Lily's hands on her waist, his lips on her ear, his breath that tasted faintly of peppermint. She pushed the thought away. She sank to her knees and dug her hands in the dirt.

*   *   *

J
ACK READ THE
letter again. His father was sick, his brother wrote; it was time to come home. He hadn't seen his father in eleven years. He wrote birthday cards and Christmas letters and called on the telephone once a year, but Chicago was far away and he was afraid of getting pulled back into a life he didn't want. And now there was Annie.

His father was a quiet man with tobacco-stained fingers and a raspy laugh. He made a decent living with the creamery, supplying the city with milk and butter. His mother had been a tall and handsome woman who was quick with a smack of the wooden spoon. She'd spent her days talking to the neighbors over sugary, cream-filled coffee, where she died one summer morning from a heart attack. Jack had been his father's favorite, but when he had refused to work at the creamery, his father wore his disappointment every day, his shoulders humped, his mouth downcast. They never spoke of it. And now it had been so many years since they had seen each other. He knew he must go home.

Jack had not seen Annie in over a week and it scared him. She had looked away from him that night with Samuel there, had not given him the slightest sign. As the days passed, he feared he might have made their relationship into something it wasn't. Before Annie, it had been so long since he had held a woman. Longing sent a kick of energy through him. Had he been too eager?

Yesterday he'd seen Samuel in the old McCracken lot, kicking through the remains of rotted wood, looking for scrap. Jack had forced himself to go talk to him, as he would have otherwise.

“Sorry I haven't come up with anything for you yet,” Jack said.

“Got some to start with from that fallen-in shed out on 287.” Samuel picked up a length of wood, gauging its softness with his thumbnail.

“Still at it, then?”

“Can't do much else,” Samuel said.

“It will be something to see.”

Jack had felt a little shriveled inside, encouraging Samuel as if the boat were the most normal thing. He'd quickly taken his leave and ducked into the welcome shadows of Ruth's.

Styron backed into the office balancing a stack of books and dropped them with a thwack on the desk.

“Municipal projects,” he said.

“Did we get a windfall I don't know about?”

“Something to pitch the WPA folks. Get some of our guys working. I wouldn't mind a public swimming pool with wages paid by the feds.”

For someone who didn't get more than a stipend, Styron was sure industrious. Jack Lily would give him that.

“Say, I have a question for you. If you needed a fair amount of old lumber, where might you go looking for it?”

“Building a tree house, boss?”

“Not quite.”

“The rail yard out at Herman. Where all the old boxcars die. I saw it the other day. Heaps of wood. Some painted and such.”

“I think you're going to like this one,” Jack said.

“What's that?”

“Bell. He's building a boat.”

*   *   *

F
RED WOULD GET
to steer. That was what his father had told him. The rains would come fast and hard, the likes of which they had never seen, and the water would rise up and up and spill into the house and carry off the coop and knock down the barn. Fred had decided he would bring the chickens and the cows even if the boat was only for the family. Noah had brought two of every animal on the earth—even cheetahs even hippos even boa constrictors—so Fred thought they could make room for their own. They couldn't just leave them. They didn't know how to swim. Two winters ago, one of the cows had gotten stuck in the pond when the water was too cold and they couldn't get her out even pulling her with a rope and the tractor. The water had frozen around her and she died. A frozen cow in the pond all winter long. Now that the pond was dry he'd found her bones right where he'd seen her last and added them to his stack for the bone crusher. His father said he didn't know if they were paying anymore since there weren't many takers for the meal. Maybe next year. Everything was maybe next year.

“When the rain stops?” Fred wrote, and Samuel said he didn't know what would happen but that God would show the way just like he had always shown the way. They would plant again, and there would be no more dusters. “Other people?” Fred wrote. “You ask good questions, son,” his father said. “I wish I had good answers but I don't.” Fred thought he would be sad if the flood washed Caroline Hawlings away because she smelled like honeysuckle and took the chalkboard he wrote on at school and drew flowers on it before giving it back. He wrote, “Thanks,” and she took it back again and wrote, “You're welcome.”

Fred wore his mask out of the house, but then he took it off. Who wanted to wear a mask when other kids weren't wearing them, especially when you were already the one who didn't talk? He was tired all the time, like he'd been running through the night when he woke up in the morning. The mask just made it harder to get the air in.

He wondered if his father was going to tell everyone about the flood. Fred thought he should warn them. It seemed like something people would want to know. It was probably good the Macks left, Fred thought, even though Birdie was sad all the time and even he was a little sad because he liked Cy and his little sister. He wrote to Birdie, “What are you going to take with you?” And she just rolled her eyes like he had said they were going to fly to the moon. “You think all of a sudden it's going to rain from the heavens?” she said. “Have you been outside lately? A boat can't float on dust. Pop isn't thinking straight with the heat and the crops and people leaving. He'll come to his senses.”

But Fred thought his father had come to his senses. He would build the boat, and Fred was going to help him. He read:

The lumber should be largely free of knots. Wood won't bend properly if there are knots of any size, although knots smaller than a pencil eraser should be fine. Secondly, the grain should be as straight as possible. Watch for areas where the grain runs off the board, which will affect the strength and bending properties of the wood. Third, the material should take and hold fasteners strongly. Wood that is too hard to drive a nail in, or too soft to accept a screw without splitting, is not right. Last, avoid warped boards. Softer woods like spruce, pine, fir, cedar, cypress, and juniper are good options.

The only thing that grew out here was juniper and sometimes ponderosa pine, but felling those wouldn't yield enough. Fred hoped his father had already figured that part out.

They couldn't get to work on the boat until harvest was done, so he just kept reading and thinking about it. Today it felt like he was breathing through a straw. Tomorrow would be better.

Birdie didn't believe it about the rain, but Fred did. He knew the flood was coming because he'd heard the rabbits scream.

*   *   *

T
HE BARBED-WIRE NEST
the crows had built was still there, but the tree trunk now leaned, its roots jutting out of the sand. A crow took flight with a whoosh of wings as Birdie approached. She sat in the shade of the nest and watched the skimpy puffs of clouds drift overhead. The breeze carried the sounds of tractors, harvest time. There would be a baby and she would be a mother without a husband and she would live in her parents' house milking the cows and scraping grit from her fingernails. Stop thinking, she told herself, stop thinking about any of it. But the loop continued: Cy gone; baby; life, or any real life, over. The baby was the weight that would keep her here forever. A crying, flailing baby that was hers alone. She wondered if she could hurt herself enough to lose the baby and not die. She'd heard of a pregnant girl in Herman who'd drunk kerosene. Birdie imagined the fire in her throat, the fumes tearing her eyes, the terrible pain in her belly. There had to be another way. She stood on the roots of the tree and reached for a knot, finding a depression for her foot and hoisting herself up. The tree was smooth, its bark long gone, and her other foot couldn't find a wedge. She groped for another handhold until she found a nub of a branch, her free foot searching blindly until it caught a small ledge. She was four feet off the ground but as she looked to check her progress, her hand slipped and she fell back off the tree, landing without enough force, she knew, to do anything other than give her a sore backside.