The Collected Stories of William Humphrey (45 page)

V

The day fixed upon for his performance was just the worst sort of day. With no assistance from Prof. Simms, the sky had clouded over and now thunder commenced to rumble. It was going to rain. You could smell it, could read the signs: birds bunched together along electric wires, leaves of trees showing their undersides, smells sharpening, sounds deepening. After three unbroken years of drought, today it was going to rain, and before he could lay claim to it. He pitched in frantically, trying to get set up and going before it actually started coming down, make it look as if he had a little something to do with it; but even as he tore around, the first drops fell, fat warm drops that struck the hard, unabsorbent earth with a
spat
and scattered in droplets like quicksilver. Prof. Simms only hoped there were others in the audience like the one he overheard say, “Well, if this feller ain't a cutter! He don't even hardly have to do nothing to make it rain, does he?”

The elevation this time was the tower of the county courthouse, seven stories tall. The crowd, biggest he had ever drawn, was gathered on the courthouse grounds. It was to have been the grandest production Prof. Simms had ever staged: a Texas-sized production—was he not being paid a Texas-sized fee? What a stupendous plan he had devised for the dynamite blasts! What a store of skyrockets he had provided! Magnet, inconsiderately tossed inside the van by the mob at Arrowhead, had been refurbished, improved by the addition of a spark-plug tester and something else found on the town dump which Prof. Simms judged to be part of the works of an X-ray machine, and which, when a current was sent through it, reacted with a most impressive crackle. He had been looking forward to the show himself. Was anything on earth as undependable as the weather?

There was no postponing it: no rainchecks on a rainmaking. The timing was set. Ready or not, rain or shine, on the stroke of ten from the courthouse clock things would get under way with a bang. Four bangs, to be exact.

Observing that the signs looked promising, Prof. Simms, face dripping, soaked to the skin, began his address to the crowd. He disavowed magic and mystery. His was a science, he said, and science—here he had to raise his voice to make himself heard above the patter—had no secrets. It was coming down harder every moment as he explained the origin and composition of raindrops, the need to raise some dust. The clock overhead wound itself up to strike. Prof. Simms brought down his upraised hand and the earth shook as sixty sticks of dynamite, fifteen to each of four charges, went off outside the city limits. But instead of the cloud of dust that was to have arisen, down fell a torrent of rain.

Just my luck, thought Prof. Simms, looking down from the top of the courthouse steps upon the umbrellas popping up like mushrooms all over the grounds. Maddening to think that those umbrellas, faded from disuse, dotted with holes, had been brought there out of faith in his powers. His hand stole to his pocket and fondled regretfully the fat roll of bills nestled there. For a moment he toyed with the thought of absconding with it. For only a moment, though; then he remembered the tales he had always heard about Texans, how mean they were, how dangerous it was to trifle with one of them. In tones forlorn he silently chanted, “Rain, rain, go away, come again another day, little Orville wants to play.”

“Will wonders never cease!” Prof. Simms exclaimed to himself when the rain promptly complied with his request. The sky brightened by several shades. It was probably as well, however, that precipitation did not cease entirely, just slackened off to a steady drizzle; for Prof. Simms was not there to prevent rain, after all, as to some credulous minds he might appear to have done. Moreover, this was only a lull in the storm; from the west fresh battalions of clouds were moving up, dark as the one in the sign on his van. Could he—perhaps by dropping one act, say the skyrockets, from his program—be ready for it when it got there? Nothing ventured, nothing gained.

In his race against the advancing storm clouds, Prof. Simms explained the molecular structure of water while at the same time inflating his balloons. For the occasion three instead of the usual one marksman were recruited and armed with rifles. The first release of balloons numbered nine, in proportions proper to the valence of the elements. But before a shot could be fired, even as the word “Fire!” was already in Prof. Simms's mouth, such a cloudburst poured down it was enough to make a person wonder whether God had broken the promise He made to Noah of old.

This was no passing shower, this was the real thing, good for all day and into the night, if Prof. Simms was any judge. “Well, old hoss,” he consoled himself, “you did your best. The elements were against you. Better luck next time.” Giving the bankroll one last feel, peering through the gaps in the curtain of rain, he searched the crowd for the faces of the men with whom he had contracted for today's performance, intending to refund their money. He could not discover them. What Prof. Simms discovered instead was one of those insights that can change the lives of men and alter the shape of history. He saw all those faces looking up at him, streaming wet, waiting patiently to see what he was going to do next, cupping their ears to hear him, hushing up their children whining to be taken in out of the wet, their heads still nodding in conviction, comprehension of his last-spoken words. Modesty, and a lifelong inclination to think too well of people, almost made Prof. Simms deny the moment of his greatness. Nobody could be that stup—Through a momentary parting in the curtain, he looked again. You could have heard a pin drop in the silence of Prof. Simms's mind.

“Orville, my friend.”
he said to himself in an awestruck whisper,
“if you had just half the belief in yourself these folks have in you, you could be governor of this state.”

By seven o'clock in the evening the county records had been twice removed: first from the flooded basement to the ground floor, thence to the second floor of the courthouse. Since half past four the building had been without electricity, at six telephone service was disrupted. To have stepped outdoors would have been to commit suicide by drowning; therefore those who had taken shelter and were now trapped inside were resigned to going supperless and to spending the night sleeping on the floors, the women and children in the offices, the courtrooms, and the judges' chambers, the men in the corridors.

By that hour Prof. Simms had for some while felt himself to be the target of resentful looks and the subject of discontented mutterings. So when the committee of three men who had contracted with him for his services came seeking him out, he was expecting them. One look at their faces and Prof. Simms thought he detected the odor of warm tar, and he felt himself break out all over in goose feathers.

“Well, Professor!” said the first man, and stood waiting for an answer. He was a burly six-footer whose bone-crushing grip Prof. Simms remembered from the handshake with which they had sealed their agreement.

“Kind of let things get out of hand, ain't you, Professor?” said the second.

“Rain, we said,” said the third. “But this—!”

All were silent, Prof. Simms in expectation of violence, they awaiting some practical proposal from him. This was revealed when, none forthcoming, they made their own. Speaking one after the other, the three said:

“So without further ado, maybe you better climb back up the tower—”

“—and put that machine of yours into rearverse gear—”

“—and de-magnetize things, 'fore you drownd us all.”

He had learned his lesson, and in commending himself to his Maker, here is what Prof. Simms said:

“Dear Lord, listen to a con man's prayer. Looking to the future—if I am allowed to have any—please show me the way to some other part of Your creation where You distributed a little bit more sense. Some place where—how does it go?—where you can fool some of the people all of the time and all of the people some of the time, but deliver me, Lord, from a place where you can fool all of the people all of the time. Amen.”

VI

The river, after three days and nights, had returned to its banks and on both sides the roads to the ferry landing were now passable. But anybody who thought he was going to buck that current for fifty cents or for that matter fifty dollars had another think coming to him. They could sit there honking till their arms dropped off.

A ferryman's life was just one blamed thing after another. A week ago you couldn't see to blow your nose for the dust; now this. Not a drop of rain for three blessed years, then all of a sudden floods. It was like God had been out of the office all that while and returned to find all those prayers for rain piled up on His desk. It did seem like He might have used a little better judgment than to answer them all at once.

What a time it had been! Rain rain rain—you couldn't see to blow your nose for the rain. River rising and the banks crumbling in, levees washing out. Cabins coming floating down, some with families sitting on the rooftops, black and white, men, women, children, babies at the breast, old grandfolks. One with a nanny goat astraddle of the peak. Later, town shanties with street numbers on the doors. Trees. Wagonbeds. Chicken coops. Barrels. Cows. Hogs. Mules. And there were people who expected him to ferry them across this! Like the one idiot this morning who came dashing up, said he just had to get over to Texas, and asked how much it would cost. “Two hundred dollars,” he had replied. “Then you'll own the boat and can ferry your own self across.” Like that one in the truck over there right now—truck or van, bus, whatever the hell it was with a sign painted on its side—honking as if his life depended on it.

The Pump

F
OR WEEKS
Jordan Terry had been down on his knees promising God to drink the first barrelful if only they would go on drilling and not give up; but they were about ready to haul out the rig and call it another dry hole, when at fifty-nine hundred feet they brought in a gusher. Jordan was digging turnips in a field that he was being paid by the government not to grow anything on when he got the news, and though he went out and drank a barrelful all right, it wasn't oil.

A day or so later old Jordan was rocking on his front porch and smoking a White Owl when he saw a couple of men of the drilling crew up on top of his derrick with hammers and crowbars taking it apart. Barefoot as he was he jumped out of his rocker and tore down to see what the hell was going on. They told him they were fixing to cap his well.

“Cap it?” cried Jordan with a white face. “Put ere a cap on it? Why? For God's sake, Misters, let her come! Don't go a-putting ere a cap on it!”

They explained that the derrick was just for the drilling. Like a pile driver. There was no further need of it now. They were fixing to install a pump.

“Pump? What do we need ere a pump for?” asked Jordan, remembering how it had shot up in the air, like Old Faithful. “The way it spurted out?”

“It's like opening a bottle of beer, ol' hoss,” said the chief engineer. “That first little bit that foams over comes by itself. The rest you have to work for.”

Work! Hah! Set on your ass in a rocking chair and knock down two bits on every barrelful! That kind of work suited old Jordan to a tee.

So the derrick was dismantled and taken away and in its stead the pump was set up. It was like an off-balance seesaw, a beam the size of a crosstie set off-center in the notch of an upright post. To either end of the beam was attached a rod which disappeared into the ground. Up and down it went, up and down, bowing in frenzied, untiring obeisance. Yes, sir, it said to Jordan, you're the boss! Yes, sir, you're the boss! Yes, sir! Listening with your ear to the ground you could hear, or could fancy that you did, a sound like a seashell makes, of endless vast waves lapping the shores of a vast underground sea. And in the pipe you could hear the mighty surge, like the pulse of a great artery drawing up a steady stream of rich, black blood. Day and night the pump went, night and day, working for him: rocket-a-bump, rocket-a-bump, rocket-a-bump.… In the daytime it went at about the same trot that Jordan went at in his rocking chair, at night as he lay awake grinning in the dark each stroke of the cycle matched a beat of his heart: rocket-a-bump, rocket-a-bump, rocket-a-bump.…

“How much you reckon she draws every time she goes up and down?” he asked the engineers.

They told him how many barrels it pumped per day. Jordan worked it out from there. He wanted to know just how much he was worth by the minute, how much richer he had grown with each rock of his rocker, each beat of his heart. He got twenty-five cents a barrel. A barrel held fifty-five gallons. It averaged twenty-five strokes a minute. Call it half a cent a stroke. Rocket-a-bump: half a cent. Rocket-a-bump: that makes a penny. Rocket-a-bump, rocket-a-bump—the last thing he heard at night, the first thing he heard in the morning. Sixty times twenty-five was fifteen hundred. Twenty-four times fifteen hundred times three hundred and sixty-five …

Jordan—though he was far from being its first owner—had for some years been driving a 1921 Durant. Driving it, that is to say, whenever it felt like going. And only now did he possess somewhere about the amount of oil it demanded. Naturally a man in his position couldn't be seen around in that old flivver anymore. As even the hungriest car dealer was not going to allow him anything for it on a trade-in, it occurred to Jordan that he would be doing a mighty fine deed by making a present of it to his next-door neighbor, Clarence Bywaters. Poor son of a bitch. It must be hard on a man to have oil struck right next door to you. Like a canary bird in a cage hung out of a window, and having to watch a fat sassy old blue jay hopping about in the trees and plucking juicy worms out of the ground. They had begun drilling on poor old Clarence's land even before Jordan's, and they were still at it, but only because they had poured so much money down that dry hole that they just hated to call it quits. They were talking about pulling out any day now. Jordan remembered what he had gone through. He didn't think Bywaters would take exception to his offer. Poor son of a bitch, with all that raft of kids he wasn't in any position to despise a little charity.