I Will Send Rain (6 page)

“I should have an answer,” she said. “But I guess I'm just walking some.”

“Walking is good,” he said.

“The truth is I didn't want to go home just yet.” She felt lighter having said it, a new hollow in her gut.

“Can I walk with you? I'm in no rush to get back to my desk.”

She was pleased, but she knew it was not quite right for him to ask. Are you doing good by God, Annie? she heard her mother say before she could quiet the voice.

“Okay,” she said.

“Okay, Annie,” he said. “And you can call me Jack.”

She nodded and switched her groceries back to her front. They walked a few feet apart down the block and beyond where the buildings gave way to dirt and scrub and the blackened, crumbled remains of the old feed store, which had burned down last year.

“It's not like Chicago, I bet,” she said.

“No, it's not. But there are things I don't miss about the city,” he said.

Glad to be moving, Annie felt the motion settling her down.

“I miss it and I've never even been there,” she said, and laughed. “Not that I'd know what to do off the farm.” The reference to the farm made her feel better; it held the mention of her family, of Samuel. They passed the loading platforms of the deserted silos and crossed the train tracks. And then at the same time they looked up to the sky. Where had the sun gone all of a sudden on a cloudless day?

“No,” they said in unison to the darkness ahead. Another duster, this time, it seemed, thundering right toward the two of them.

Annie's hat lifted off her head and when she reached up to grab it, the bag fell from her arms, spilling thread and lard and salt and baking soda and the cherry drops she'd gotten for Fred and the red ribbon she'd gotten for Birdie and the coffee and stamps she'd gotten for Samuel, across the road that led east out of town. She stooped to salvage her purchases as the wind whipped her dress and drove dust into her face, took her hat straight up into the air.

“Annie,” Jack said, “leave it.”

He took her hand and they ran.

 

CHAPTER 4

What hath God wrought. Ever since the first duster hit, that was what Samuel heard like a hammer on tin, over and over in his head. Shovel the sand. What hath God wrought. Spoon up the beans and gravy. What hath God wrought. Pump the well. What hath God wrought. Insistent like a heartbeat.

He watched Annie sleep, the rise and fall of the sheet. He wanted to wake her when the dreams came. But he didn't. She was exhausted, too. Each breath a heavy sigh. The dust was never gone. In their ears and eyes. In the sheets. On their toothbrushes and coffee spoons. In the butter. A layer of gray on the milk.

Pastor Hardy couldn't say whether withholding the rain and showering them with dust was a condemnation by God, but how can we not feel cursed? Samuel thought. Our land is on the wind.

Before Eleanor, before Fred, he and Annie used to sit together at the kitchen table when Birdie had gone to sleep and hold hands and bow their heads for just a minute or two before moving on to the tasks still needing tending. Those few minutes of intimacy were grounding, a reminder. But when the baby died, Annie stopped praying with him. She never said anything about it, just busied herself in another part of the house. Now Annie was distant. Annie was beautiful. She closed her eyes in church, but Samuel was pretty sure it was not to pray.

When they had first arrived, sleeping in the wagon lined with the mattress she'd slept on as a girl, he had never felt closer to her, to anyone. “Samuel,” she'd say. “Samuel, tell me about the farm.” And he would describe the place he imagined it would be when it was done. He had thought about it every day—working the soil for Ben Gramlin until his hands split—every day since he was seventeen. A sea of tilled fields flat and dark. A timber house with dormered windows and a grove of locust trees to remind her of Kansas. Together they carved out the barely-there hill for the dugout and planked two rooms that would shelter them until they could build the farmhouse. Centipedes clicked in the earthen walls, but it was theirs. At the end of each day their arms quivered and their palms were ground with dirt. He'd look over at her, his Annie who'd never done more than housework, sweat darkening her dress, and he would praise God for his good fortune.

Samuel had about a quarter of the wheat left. Scrawny plants that uprooted with the slightest tug. He could count the cows' ribs. The last duster had clogged the well.

And yet. I cannot leave this land that is ours, he thought, any more than I can crawl back to Dickinson County to work another man's acres, making a dollar from dawn until I can't see my hands. Or get on the relief. On relief you might as well be dead.

A farmer needs a farm. Didn't he know it.

The rains would come. The rains would come and God would show them the way back. Samuel had to believe that.

*   *   *

C
Y ROLLED AWAY
from Birdie with a sigh. She poked his side, and he squawked and fell partly onto the floor, legs splayed.

“Hey now,” he said, laughing a little and repositioning himself on the torn mattress.

The scavengers had picked the Woodrows' house clean, but they'd left the mattress, Birdie had been pleased to discover. She stared up at the mottled ceiling. Sepia water stains bloomed from the cracks, vestiges of rain. His sweat left her front slick so she waited to dress, thankful for the breeze that crisscrossed through the tumbledown house.

“You know it's my birthday coming up,” she said.

“Oh yeah?” Cy propped himself up on his elbow. “When?”

“Two months. I'm giving you ample notice.”

He laughed and lay back down. “Thanks for letting me know.” He turned to the window and watched a gauzy cloud scud by.

Her birthday meant sixteen. And what she hoped for was that Cy would ask her to marry him. They had not talked about it yet, but they had confessed love, and to Birdie, this was as good as any promise. He made her feel like a new person, no longer just a daughter and sister, no longer a child. He was like a lantern held high, letting her see what might be possible just ahead. When he said, “I love you,” she swallowed those words whole and they spread out through her limbs until she felt fortified, sated, as if she could live forever on love alone.

She sat up and pulled on her underthings. As she buttoned up her blouse, she saw one of the buttons had cracked and another was missing. She'd have to find some replacements. There were no new clothes now, only the mended and remended.

He laced his fingers with hers, and then lifted her hand to kiss it. His eyes went back to the window. Birdie recognized his searching look. She'd seen it in her father, in the other farmers. Worry had reeled him out of the room.

“What's wrong?” she asked.

“We lost two head of cattle, this last one. The others are sucking air. Wobbly on their legs.” He let go of her hand and sat up. “Things aren't going so good.”

How he could think of cows when they'd barely just caught their breath was beyond her. She scooched closer to him where the mattress was dry.

“It'll take them a while to clear it out. They'll be okay.” She patted his arm, but he didn't look at her. What did it matter, she wondered, when they would go away, start somewhere else together soon. A porch swing and honeysuckle and big, leafy trees.

“And that patch we worked to save after the first one? Gone. Done.” He rubbed the sides of his face with his hands. “I don't know, Birdie. It's a lot.”

She was so sick of hardship. She just wanted life to return to regular. The last storm had taken two more hens and her mother's pole beans and had buried most of the wheat shoots in the east field. She knew the government was paying a dollar a head to kill starving and sick cows, although it made her squirm to think of it. Can't sell them so they shoot them instead. Everyone was losing everything. It was awful. It was boring.

“You got me, right?” She pounced on his chest and knocked him back, wanting to shake him out of it, wanting to be enough to change his mood.

“Right-o,” he said, planting a kiss on her forehead. He sat up again and pulled on his overalls. “We best be getting on. It's late.”

She knew he was right, but it dug at her still. A wolf spider made its way across the floor. She stood and zipped her skirt, felt a rush of dampness in her underpants.

“We'll live somewhere else,” she said, surprised by the resolve in her own voice. “Someday. Away from here.” She wasn't too concerned with the details. She would work in a café in a town near the beach. Or she would see Cy off to work each morning and pick fresh flowers for the dinner table. Away, away, was all that mattered. Like Ann of the Airlanes in the radio show she used to love, “over valley and mountain, river and plain,” buzzing about as the world spun.

Cy nodded, but busied himself with tying his boots. “Sure we will. It'll be good.”

He smelled of dirt and hay and sweat and she leaned into his big warm chest. He held her hair in his fist, and a kiss to her neck sent a jolt to her toes.

“Maybe we should live on a boat,” she said.

“Aye, aye, Captain.”

“And listen to the water all day long.”

“And sleep under the stars.” Cy put his heavy hands on her shoulders and shook her gently. “I have to go.”

“I know.”

Hand in hand they walked out into the arid evening. To the west the sun cast its copper glow on the barren remains of the Woodrow farm.

“Glad school's out?” he asked.

“What do you think?”

“I saw Miss Francis in town yesterday. Looks like she's still a nervous Nellie.”

“On the last day she teared up because Billy Trotter threw an eraser at Tom McGuane but it hit her by accident and left a white rectangle of chalk on her backside.”

“I never thought I'd miss it. But I do sometimes.”

Cy wagged his head and looked away. He was only a year out of school, but it might as well have been ten.

“It's a large backside. It's kind of hard to miss,” she said.

He laughed and latched his thumbs on his pockets. “See you soon, Birdie girl.”

In his mind Birdie was like sunshine, the early spring kind that got the chickens laying and the robins nesting and coaxed the grass green. Or used to. What do people do when there's nothing left to farm, nothing left to eat? Cy felt his stomach seize. Lately he'd been saving some of his dinner for his sister, who got last dibs. He took measured breaths and steps, his boots sliding in the dust. He couldn't stop for fear that Birdie was still watching. Birdie wasn't the kind of girl you could tell your troubles to. She was like a swift sparkling creek, flowing right over the sharp rocks to a place where the current ran smooth.

It calmed him to think of it, him and Birdie running off somewhere like she talked about, to think of her beside him. He pictured them on a train, an open boxcar, with rucksacks and apples in their hands. But he didn't have a rucksack and neither did she and she was fifteen, a schoolgirl still, and there was his father and mother and sister and the dying cows and the dying land. He was a son first.

*   *   *

S
TEP, STEP, STEP,
hop. Step, step, step, hop. “Look out, hoppers,” Fred thought. “You better scatter while you can, because here I come, a giant boy with a sack of poison bait.” He didn't really want to kill the grasshoppers, but he did what his father asked. Fred coughed and his breath felt grainy; the air was getting a little stuck on the way in and then again on the way out. When he ran, his lungs were heavy like sponges full of water. It annoyed him to have to walk all the time.

Even if he washed his hands twice, the stink of grasshopper bait still clung to them. Pop said the bait didn't do much, so Fred didn't know why they kept putting it out, but he couldn't ask him and it didn't seem worth it to write out all the words. So he did what he was told even if he got bored and took a break to follow tracks that could be bear tracks that led to a secret forest where the shade was cool and dark and smelled like moss and toadstools.

He heard his mother calling him in.

*   *   *

B
IRDIE WAITED UNTIL
Cy had disappeared over the drift of sand east of Woodrow's before running for home. By the time she rounded the fence she saw the sun going low and she knew she was late for dinner again. She stopped outside the front door, trying to settle herself, make sure her buttons were done up right, her skirt straight. She brushed her hair with her fingers, fishing out a twig.

“Where you been at?” Samuel said as she opened the door.

Her parents and Fred sat around the table, the stew and boiled potatoes untouched in the middle.

“Answer your father, Barbara Ann.”

“Out walking,” she said.

Fred made a kissing face across the table as she sat. She scowled at him and reached for a piece of cornbread as she sat.

“Birdie,” Samuel said, his voice harsh. “We will say grace.”

She looked down at her plate; a fine gray layer was already settling on the white porcelain. Even when the sky was clear, the dust never left them. There was no such thing as clean.

“Bless us, O Lord, and these, your gifts, which we are about to receive from your bounty. Through Christ, our Lord. Amen.” Her father kept his eyes squeezed shut even after “Amen,” and Fred kicked Birdie's foot under the table.

Annie folded her napkin in her lap and watched her husband's face, his eyes tight, his mouth twitching. It was irksome to her, how he held them captive after the prayer. And there her daughter was, running in from doing who knew what with Cy Mack and making them all wait.

Samuel cleared his throat and picked up the stew pot, exposing a white ring on the tablecloth. In the last storm, with Annie stuck in town, Samuel and the children had hung wet sheets over the windows to keep out the dust, but even in the house they still inhaled it with each breath, cobwebby in their noses.