I Will Send Rain (27 page)

“Sure, sure,” Styron said, unsure of where to direct his energy. “You built a goddamn ark, man!”

*   *   *

“I
MEAN, IS
it too much to ask to have the house ready for our wedding reception? They said the curtains would be ready last week. I ordered this gorgeous rose damask print they had to ship from Philadelphia. Can you imagine? All the way from a big city in the East?”

Annie let Hattie chatter on. She patted the biscuit dough onto her floured board. Hattie had brought a green bean casserole and was now slowly, arduously, peeling apples for a pie. Her pace will change, Annie thought, when she has children.

“I'm sure they will be lovely,” Annie said.

She thought of Fred and how he used to run and skid into his seat at the table, his smile revealing the chipped corner of his front tooth, from when he was six and it wasn't even in all the way and he slipped climbing into the bathtub.

Birdie came in from the chickens, her big belly stretching her dress—one that had been her mother's—tight.

“Oh,” Hattie said.

Birdie stood with her hands on her back, chin thrust straight out, refusing to demur.

“Hello, Miss Daniels,” she said. “Looks like a boat is getting born out there.”

Hattie, at a rare loss for words, merely nodded, a smile lagging.

“Birdie, help with the table,” Annie said.

*   *   *

I
T TOOK HOURS
of lifting and maneuvering to get the boat atop the two old tractor axles Samuel had rigged. He tried to chain the front axle to the truck, but the boat kept slipping, so they pushed and adjusted, pushed and pulled, little by little, bringing the boat out into the sharp light of the day.

“Where you want it?” Ford huffed, leaning against the stern. “I think we can get it rolling now that it's out.”

“Over there beyond the barn will be fine,” Samuel said.

Annie, Hattie, and Birdie set out supper in the locust grove. The wind was light, the air dry and warm. The men washed up and joined them.

“Maybe the dust is all finished with,” Hattie said. “It feels like a fresh start, doesn't it? Today is as bright as Christmas. Wouldn't that be wonderful, if it went back to how it was and we could forget all about that terrible dirty time?”

“It would, Miss Daniels,” Samuel said.

Annie didn't sit to eat, moving back and forth from the house with pitchers and platters. Birdie stayed in the kitchen, happy to wash dishes away from the chitchat.

“He did it,” Birdie said.

Annie wiped her hands on her apron and leaned for a moment against the icebox.

“He did it,” she said.

“Do you ever hope the flood actually does come? Even a little bit?”

It would prove Samuel not crazy. It might save the land. It would change the way she thought about God.

“I wouldn't wish for destruction like that,” she finally said.

“It would change everything,” Birdie said. “It's always the same around here. Everything just goes on like always.”

“Well, not quite like always,” Annie said, nodding to the baby, with the slightest flash of a smile.

*   *   *

T
WO NIGHTS LATER,
the sky lit up with jagged flashes, thunderheads bunched and boomed, nearing from the north. Samuel rubbed his chin and watched from the porch. This certainly was rain, and the wheat was already a little ahead of where it had been last year. Lord, Lord. The boat, with its flat bottom, sat sound where they had set it down, visible when the lightning streaked the darkness. Bring the rain, he thought. Let it come.

Annie and Birdie, unable to sleep through the growing rumbling, soon joined him, and the three of them heard the rain start, thwonking against the wood of the boat. And then, as if a giant bucket had been tipped, the rain fell in torrents. Samuel stuck his hand out and it felt like nails against his skin. Water pooled on the still-droughted ground, running down the eroded grooves. It sounded like a freight train, the downpour deafening. And it kept coming, hard and fast, covering the dirt first in puddles and then in streams. Thunder cracked and Birdie scampered back toward the door, but Annie held fast beside him, the wind whipping her nightgown.

For a moment, Samuel felt himself rise up, lifted by awe and belief. Could this be more than rain? He felt a warmth pulse in the center of himself. My God, you are here, he thought. I have built a boat and you are here. He closed his eyes and felt waves crashing in his head. You were right, Freddie, you were right.

“This is more than rain,” he said finally, his voice loud and strange.

Annie had forgotten what a real rainstorm was like, how it boomed to life with its cymbals and snare drums. Like those tantrums Birdie used to throw as a toddler, fists to the floor. Her face was wet. But she would not move away from it. Grief had made fear a powerless object she could hold in her hand. One child had not been enough for God, He had to take two, she thought. We know everyone we love is going to die, but we don't know it, can't possibly believe it, she thought, or long ago I would have gone and started digging until I had a hole big enough to lie down in.

In a flash of lightning, Annie glimpsed the water rushing below the porch, like those summer storms when she was a girl and the saplings would bend all the way to the ground, the runoff from the roof a waterfall against the front steps. Her mother would worry the edge of her apron, fretting over her peonies.

Fred oh Fred my little Fred, Annie thought. Her anger was still there, red and shapeless, but it had settled some into a bone-deep sadness. There were moments now too that dug out a little space. Like the ruby blooms of Texas paintbrush that had begun to appear. Or Samuel's gentle hand on her back when she was at the sink. Or even the boat. It was a thing of beauty. Even she could see that.

Birdie went into the house to get dressed. The girl was ready to burst. But Annie forgot it sometimes, her mind distracted. Haul the water and turn the soil and plant and weed and coax and tend, keep going another day. There would be a baby and wasn't that a wonderful thing? She knew she should tell Birdie that. She should tell her that all the other mess didn't matter.

Annie stood next to Samuel on the porch. He would never know her cruelty of heart. Samuel, Samuel. His kindness and his faith. Here she was. She took his hand.

I will come back to you, she thought, if you come back to me.

 

CHAPTER 16

Birdie returned to the porch with a cardigan, its buttons straining over her bulging nightdress. She clutched a small suitcase she'd found days before in the dugout, one her mother had brought out from Kansas, its clasps rusted, the leather ripped along the seam. She held her shoes in her other hand.

“Are you going somewhere?” Annie asked. She still did not believe a flood was coming.

“I figure it's now or never for the boat.” Birdie had packed a few things, underwear and socks and the dress her mother had made her, which wouldn't fit now but would fit then, after, when she was herself again. She didn't really believe a flood would wipe out the land, either, but she felt excited by the gathering water. Here was something different. And just maybe her father had been right.

Now that the moment was upon him, Samuel didn't quite know what to do. He'd imagined them dashing aboard for safety. The water was rising, but it was a slow ascent, only up to the first porch step.

“It's just a rainstorm,” Annie said, but she had to yell over the din.

Birdie held her palm out into the pummeling rain.

“It looks like a flood to me,” she said to her mother. Jack Lily is not here anymore, Mama, she thought then, and we are. “Better to be together, isn't it?”

Annie didn't answer, but she knew Birdie was right. These were the two people she had left.

They looked at Samuel, his shirt soaked through. It was his moment and he looked unsure, his eyes darting from the rain to Annie to the darkness where the boat waited for them. His feet felt shackled to the splintered boards of the porch. Above them a gutter yawned and snapped free of the house.

“We can stay dry under the roof there.” He pointed, even though he couldn't see the boat. “I built a bench under it.”

He had not thought about how to get the milk cow onto the boat. Should they get some of the chickens? Fred would have insisted.

“I'm going inside,” Annie said.

“Annie,” he said.

“I'm getting on,” Birdie said, and walked down the steps and into the water and stinging rain.

“Barbara Ann!” Annie tried to reach her hand but Birdie was off, stepping carefully, water over her ankles, wading toward the boat with her suitcase.

“Go get some clothes,” Samuel said.

“I'm going to bed,” Annie said. It was the one last fight she had in her, but it didn't take.

“No, you're not,” he said. “Come with me.”

She was crying now, relinquishing her position, relinquishing everything. She went into the house and grabbed a dress and some shoes from the wardrobe that had been hers as a girl, the one that had made it out in the wagon all those years ago. She didn't bother with her small box of keepsakes—she couldn't really believe the world was being washed away—but she did take the picture Fred had drawn of the barbed-wire crows' nest. They would not get to start over, but there was a relief, she admitted, in the rain, in something she didn't understand. She let the tears come to a hiccupy end. Who knew what would happen now, but she might as well wait it out with what remained of her family.

The water was up to her knees when she stepped in, surprisingly cold, and it pulled at her with an insistence that teased her balance. Her feet slipped in the mud below. Rain pelted her head and ran into her eyes. Samuel held her arm and led her to the boat where Birdie waited, hair matted to her head, her hands resting atop her belly, a borrowed tabletop. Looking at Birdie, it struck Annie that something wasn't right, hadn't been right for a while. The girl seemed divorced from her condition, neither anxious nor hopeful, as if her body were not her own. She squeezed next to her daughter on the rough-hewn bench, and the smell of wet wood and pitch made her nose itch. The rain went on and on, but there they were, Annie thought, safe. She took Birdie's hand, rigid at first and then limp.

Samuel could not stand straight in the boat's shelter without knocking his head, but neither could he sit, his restless feet dancing forward and back. His hands jittered at his sides. He stuck his head out the doorway and brought it back in, water running off his chin.

“I've water and some food below,” he said. “But it's too late for a ramp to get Greta up. Water's too deep.”

The water curled around the boat, swirling in eddies, and splashing up the sides.

Part of Annie wanted the water to rise and rise. If Samuel was right, she would have to believe, would have to find peace. She couldn't tell how high the water was, but it seemed threatening, gaining strength. Something banged into the hull, but whatever it was disappeared in the rushing water. And then she felt it. A lurch.

“Pop?”

Samuel scrambled out to the bow and stood in the rain, his eyes outward to the darkness.

The boat moved again, and then the front began to slide a little back and forth with the current.

“You did it, Pop!” Birdie shouted, laughing. “You were right.”

Annie stood in the doorway looking toward the house, her body hard and still, as if she were carved from some pale stone.

The boat slid forward an inch and then stopped, slipped again, dragging against the ground.

Samuel felt himself expand, filled with a joyous kind of light. The boat lifted, starting to float. The land would be wiped clean, they would be wiped clean. They would be saved. “Praise,” Samuel said. “Praise be.”

The boat inched its way atop the water, yawing and pitching in the storm. The water swallowed the ground and the bases of the locust trees, flooded the dugout up to its roof. They couldn't make out the house through the darkness; it was as if it had already floated away. Samuel had a pole he'd fashioned that he tried to use to steer, but the boat was too heavy in the current and it listed one way and then another. They were moving, really moving, and Samuel grabbed the gunwale just before slipping off himself.

“Samuel,” Annie said, a new force and clarity in her voice. She held her hand out to him.

He scrambled back to where she and Birdie sat soaked, despite the roof, and wedged himself between them.

*   *   *

N
OW THAT THEY
were on the boat, he feared the destruction that was to come. The house he had built would be brought down. Mulehead would be gone. There was room on the boat for others. But he knew they were miles from anyone. There would be death and ruin. It was too much to think about.

He had felt such lightness only moments before, but now he was falling hard, dread dragging him down. I have done what you asked, he thought. But what about everybody else? How is that right?

The stern got stuck and the boat pivoted a quarter way around before spinning back. Annie, drenched and oddly calm, waited for Samuel to tell her what was next, or just waited for where this vessel would take them. She could see no further than the rain. The night was black. She braced herself against the frame of the hutch as the boat jerked back some, then forward.

There they sat, Samuel, Annie, and Birdie hand in hand in hand on the small bench, when the boat crashed headlong into the barn, taking out part of the wall and narrowly missing the milk cow whose distressed cries could barely be heard over the rain against the roof.

The ark was grounded, half in the barn and half out, its brief journey at an end.

*   *   *

T
HE RAIN BEGAN
to ease soon after, as if on command. The Bells righted themselves, but they did not speak. They sat for a long while on the boat as the storm dripped to a halt. They watched the water slowly recede.