If It Rains

by Jennifer L. Wright

  Pa had died seven years ago—a farming accident with a wayward bull. His brother, Hershel, had returned from California and moved into the casita not long after, sulking but dutiful, his temper and bad mood a cloud the ranch had never quite been able to shake since. I couldn’t help thinking that if Pa were still alive, none of this would be happening. It wasn’t true, of course—my father’s presence couldn’t stop the war any more than his absence—but I clung to the fantasy anyway.

  “Olive, you grab that pile there and take it to the casita. Avery, that stuff goes in the barn.”

  Avery grunted as he lifted two boxes at once. “You sure they’re okay with us storing this stuff in the barn?”

  My mother lit another cigarette, inhaling deeply before answering. “The barn is still ours. At least according to the papers they gave us. ‘Eminent domain’ or not, we still have to make a living, and we need that barn to do it. Though heaven knows how we’re going to—”

  “It’ll be fine, Ma.” A look passed between my mother and brother, fleeting, before Avery shifted the boxes in his arms and strode from the room.

  My mother stared after him, the smoke from her cigarette curling around her gaze for a long moment before she finally blinked and smiled weakly at me.

  I punched at a pile of blankets, trying to force them into a ball small enough to carry in one trip, and stalked from the house. I didn’t want to look at her. Or Avery. And I sure as anything didn’t want to hear the words eminent domain again. The government kept using that term over and over. As if naming a thing made it right.

  I stomped over to the casita, ignoring Uncle Hershel and Sergeant Hawthorne, who stood next to the Army truck laughing and talking like old friends. I stuck my nose in the air, not caring as the blankets began to slip and drag in the dry New Mexico dirt. Let Mama sleep in dirty blankets tonight. At least she’d still be here at our ranch. Yes, the Army would be here. The land would be smaller, the big house no longer our own. But even in the casita, she’d still fall asleep to the coyotes howling, to the smell of the sagebrush floating on the breeze. Tomorrow morning, she’d still wake up and watch the sun wash over the Jornada, the gray of night giving way to reds and browns and yellows, before stepping outside with Hershel, doing their work, playing their part, just as they’d always done.

  And Avery? In a few days Avery would be shipping out, his duty finally realized, his restless anxiety now fused with purpose and a plan. With meaning.

  But tomorrow morning, I’d be in Alamogordo, opening my eyes to the pale-blue wallpaper at my grandmother’s house on Delaware Avenue. The one with the cracked chimney that made the whole house smell like smoke and the fenced-in front yard that wasn’t even big enough to grow a row of corn. The one where the mountain view was obstructed by rows of other houses just like hers and where, instead of painted desert sunsets coloring the walls, there were portraits of Jesus in every room.

  Sixty miles away but it might as well have been a million.

  I should have been grateful. We all had a role to play in the war effort, all the posters said, and this was mine. We’d get our land back eventually, the Army had promised, when the war was over and the government was done. I should be proud to sacrifice in such a way.

  And I was. But I didn’t understand why my sacrifice meant moving while they got to stay. Why my work at the ranch for the war effort wasn’t enough, why I was being pushed out instead, treated like an in-the-way toddler rather than the adult I practically was. Why the need for help was great . . . but not the kind I could offer.

  I threw the blankets on the floor of the casita, not bothering to take them all the way to the back bedroom, and returned to the main house, my grief and anger rising with each step. The living room was empty, voices coming from the back part of the house.

  No, not just the back part of the house. My part of the house. No. No, no, no.

  I ran toward the sound, skidding to a halt in the doorway. Avery was pulling books off my shelf, tucking them into a box labeled Alamogordo.

  My mother, perched on the corner of my bed, was the first to see me. “Now, Olive, it’s the last room. We’ve waited as long as we could—”

  I didn’t bother to listen to the rest of her words. I flung myself across the room at Avery, something between a scream and a wail erupting from my throat. The book in his hands—Treasure Island, one of Pa’s favorites—landed with a thud on the floor as he raised his arms, shielding himself from my blows.

  “Get out of my room!” I screamed. My nails dug into his flesh as I swung. “Get out! Get out!”

  “Olive! Olive, stop that!” My mother’s voice was far away, muted inside my anger.

  Blood sprouted across Avery’s arm. I kept swinging anyway. It was immature, childish, as if we were kids again and he’d broken my favorite toy. But I didn’t care. Surprise shone in his eyes as he wriggled and dodged, trying to both block me and escape. I moved to connect with his cheek and felt my arm jerked painfully back.

  “Knock it off!” The stink of sweat and tobacco pressed into me. Uncle Hershel pinned my wrist to my spine with one hand, the other digging into my bicep. “What in Sam Hill has gotten into you?”

  My mother stood to one side, hands in front of her mouth. Sergeant Hawthorne was in the doorway, that stupid smile finally gone from his face, shiny black shoes covered in dust. At the sight of him—this stranger, this intruder, standing in my bedroom as if he owned it, because he did—the blood drained from my limbs. My body deflated.

  Avery wiped at the scratches on his arms and puffed out his chest, snatching the book from the ground and shoving it unceremoniously into the box, ripping the cover. He sneered, daring me to say something, to come at him again.

  But instead of inciting me, that rip—that small rip in the cover of a book I hadn’t read since childhood—broke me. I wrenched from Uncle Hershel’s grasp, barely registering the tears on my mother’s face through my own, and fled from the room. Momentarily blinded by the sun, I kept running, past the casita and the barn, past the corral, out into the open desert.

  Ragged sobs choked me as the ground began to slope upward, stealing my breath but not my grief. I dodged the yuccas and prickly pears easily despite my blurry vision. The path up the mesa was as familiar to me as my own hands. I didn’t stop until I came to the top, to the corner where the big boulder split, a cleft in its side shaped like lightning, opening into a secret space no one ever bothered to notice but us.

  The burrow. My brother had called it that because we’d had to pretend to be small animals just to fit inside. Through the lightning-shaped crack, a hidden ledge jutted like a makeshift balcony in front of a shallow cave that was really nothing more than a crawl space. We’d outfitted it with a door made of rotted wood and stuffed the inside with old moth-eaten blankets and pillows, comic books and dime-store novels scattered over the dirt floor.

  It had been our spot, Avery’s and mine. Back before Pa died and Hershel moved in. When we were still friends and life was still fun. But now it was my spot, my safe spot, a place to escape from Mama’s grief, Avery’s sullenness, and Uncle Hershel’s temper. A refuge and release. A remnant of childhood I refused to let go. Because up here, among the rocks and the shrubs, the bare earth and the cloudless New Mexico sky, I could still pretend life made sense.

  From this spot, I was perfectly hidden yet could still see our ranch hundreds of feet below, shimmering in the heat. In the distance rose the ragged top of Oscura Peak. Across the drabness of the desert floor, the dark stain of the ancient lava field to the east and the faint glint of the gypsum dunes to the south. I slid to my knees as a fresh wave of sorrow washed over me.

  The ranch had been in our family for over half a century, before New Mexico was even New Mexico. Since my grandparents had emigrated from the motherland with their two small boys in tow. Back then, no one wanted a piece of the Jornada del Muerto. And why would they? The “Route of the Dead Man” was nothing but a wasteland, a ninety-mile stretch of desert b
etween Socorro and El Paso with no water, little vegetation, and summer temperatures hot enough to boil your blood.

  But the land “called” to my grandparents, or so the story went. Grandpa built the adobe walls with his bare hands, forming each brick with soil and straw gathered right here. The pitched roof, the chicken coop, the barn, the horse corral . . . everything here bore his mark. As a teenager, Hershel had fled, claiming he was going back home to fight in the revolution. Pa swore he never made it out of California, his mouth being bigger than his courage—a rumor I learned not to bring up in my uncle’s presence, lest I wanted to be on the wrong end of his violent rebuttal. But my father had stayed in his adopted homeland, his Russian blood thawing in the New Mexico sun. My grandfather added the casita, attached to the house by a courtyard wall, a year after my parents’ wedding, he and my grandmother planning to finish out their days there while my parents started a family of their own in the main house.

  And that’s what happened. Grandpa died in the casita’s back bedroom and was buried in the far corner lot.

  My grandmother followed soon after, and Pa took over, making the ranch his own by adding a second bedroom onto the main house for his daughter. Me. Every memory I had—of him, of my family, of my life—centered around this ranch.

  New Mexico. Our home. My home. Only it wasn’t mine anymore.

  I wept for what seemed like hours, until my eyes burned and my cheeks cracked beneath dry tears. Until the sun lay only a finger length above the mountains and the shadows began to stretch, dappling the landscape with previews of the coming night. Until I heard the sound of crunching rocks and Avery’s face appeared through the crack in the boulder.

  I swatted at my face, wiping away the grit of evaporated grief.

  “You look awful,” he said, crawling through and dropping down beside me. His long legs stretched in front of him, draping over the edge of the mesa.

  I scooted away, scowling. “At least my clothes match.”

  He let out a loud laugh, which echoed in the desert air, and glanced down at his outfit. “Mine don’t?”

  A pair of jeans and a faded white shirt matched well enough, but Avery had been color-blind since birth; making fun of him for it was stupid but routine. A pathetic grasp at normal when the world was anything but.

  “I’m sorry about your book. It was an accident.”

  I scrunched my face. It was my turn to apologize; the welts on his arm looked painful, and I knew I’d landed at least one hard blow on his cheek. But I still couldn’t bring myself to do it.

  After a moment, he sighed. “You know, you can’t hide up here forever, Olive.”

  “I wasn’t hiding. I just wanted to be alone,” I added pointedly.

  He rubbed at his arms. I pretended not to notice the welts my nails had sprouted. “Ma’s worried about you.”

  “Good.”

  “Now, stop it. That ain’t no way to be.”

  “Ain’t no way to be? You don’t have any right to tell me which way to be. You’re leaving.”

  “Just because I’m leaving don’t mean I don’t care about what happens here.”

  I stared at my boots. The laces were frayed, the toes scratched. Memories of a place that no longer existed. I pulled my elbows into my sides. “Why are they making me go?” I had thought my tears were spent but here they were, springing up once again. “It’s not fair. Especially with you gone. I can help! They can’t do this all on their own.”

  “Olive . . .”

  “Why don’t they want me here?”

  Beside me, Avery shifted, his discomfort obvious. “Olive, there are some things in this world that are bigger than us. Bigger than our family, bigger than our home. I know you don’t understand that yet—”

  “Oh, just shut up, will you?” That was another thing Avery had started doing. Only three years older than me, but acting like it was ten. Like he was so wise and worldly, when the farthest he’d ever been was Albuquerque. “I know there’s a war going on, same as you.”

  “I ain’t talking about the war.”

  I turned to look at him, but his face remained forward, staring out toward the rapidly setting sun. He rubbed his temple with one hand, pushing away the dark hair matted to his forehead.

  “I mean, I am talking about the war. But there’s more to it than that. There are some things . . .” He stopped and sighed deeply, chewing a moment on his lip before continuing. “There are some things even bigger than the war, Olive. I . . . I can’t explain. But I hope one day you’ll understand.”

  I scrunched my eyebrows, tilting my head to one side. “What do you mean, Avery?”

  He blinked several times and shook his head, pressing his lips into a small smile before glancing at me. “Nothing, Olive. It’s nothing. Just . . . just know that I do care, okay? No matter what you think, no matter what you see or hear. I do care. About you, about Ma, about this.” He took my hand, pressing one finger into the dirt. Up to a point, then down again. An upside down V. It was the same symbol carved into the rock behind us. The one we’d sign in the air when Hershel got ugly, write on papers slid under each other’s door when we’d been sent to our rooms, leave written in the dirt when Mama’s incapacitating grief made the chore load overwhelming.

  The three points representing the only stable things in a world of instability: me, Avery, the mesa. Home.

  We hadn’t used the symbol in over two years. But the weight of it now beneath our entwined fingers made the lapse evaporate, the world at large seeming to vanish at the power of our unity. I leaned against him, truly seeing my brother for the first time in months. He squeezed my shoulder and I felt his chest rise and fall in a weary sigh.

  “That’s why I’m going, Olive. And that’s why you have to go, too.”

  He left after that, words hanging in the air between us, disappearing back through the crack of the burrow with a sad, resigned smile. My shoulder was cold at the memory of his touch. Although I knew he was only going back to the ranch, it felt as if he were already a thousand miles away. Because he was; he had been for months. And no amount of childish reminiscing was going to change that.

  Below me, clouds of dust rose from the desert floor as three more Army trucks made their way up our long drive. As I watched them, Avery’s words hung over me like a fog. I should have felt something like pride. Camaraderie. Duty. The honor of sacrifice, of being a part of something bigger.

  And I tried. Because he was right—all of that stuff was meaningful, more important. All of that stuff mattered.

  The only thing that didn’t matter was me.

  DISCUSSION QUESTIONS

  The Wonderful Wizard of Oz serves as a touchstone for both Kathryn and Melissa. In what ways does Kathryn’s journey to Indianapolis parallel Dorothy’s journey to Oz? What nods to that classic story (both the book and the movie) did you spot along the way?

  When did you first begin to suspect what kind of man Henry Mayfield was? When does Melissa start to acknowledge that he’s not the man she believed him to be? How does she try to hold on, to believe in his love for her?

  Why do you think Kathryn and Helen dislike each other so much? At the start of the story, did you feel sympathy for Helen? Did your view of her change by the end?

  Despite the drought and all the hardships they’ve experienced, Melissa and Kathryn both feel a deep connection to Oklahoma. Did you understand their love for the land, or would you have counseled them to leave for somewhere more hospitable? Do you have the same kind of deep roots in any particular place?

  Like the Scarecrow, the Tin Woodman, and the Cowardly Lion, many of us find ourselves thinking we’d be better off “If I only had a _____.” For Kathryn, that something is a normal foot. How does her view of her clubfoot shift over the course of the story? What did you think of her eventual decision regarding her foot? What has the longed-for something been in your own life?

  Melissa begins the story clinging to the faith she learned from her mother, whereas Kathryn thinks G
od picks on her and becomes increasingly convinced that He can’t be good. Which perspective did you most identify with? How does each sister’s faith change by the story’s end?

  As Frank Fleming employs his method to bring rain, Kathryn watches while “rocket after rocket fizzled, and still Frank tried. Because the world needed fixing, and he honestly believed he could do it.” Do you agree with her view of Frank, or did you see him as merely a charlatan? Can you think of times when you’ve witnessed similar desperate hope—and anger, like the crowd’s, when that hope is disappointed?

  Looking at Annie Gale, Melissa recognizes, “The woman was me. Me several years in the future. Me without this new dress and my new last name. Me in another life, another world, another twist of fate.” How does identifying with Annie in this way inspire Melissa’s actions? Do you believe she goes about helping Annie in the right way?

  Kathryn tells Bert, “This drought, this depression . . . we’re in the blackness. We can either shine in the dark or be overcome by it. Sometimes shining means staying. Other times it means going. But it never means to quit.” How do you see characters in this story attempting to shine light in the darkness? In times of darkness, when you’ve felt helpless against the wrongs in the world, what has your response been—to stay or to go? To you, did that represent quitting or shining in the dark?

  Considering the women of the church, Melissa observes, “Even these women, for all their love and faith, for all their respect within the community, were still just pawns in the game, powerless to change the rules, so intent on enforcing them instead.” Have you observed this within a community—that those who can’t change the rules instead work to enforce them?

  Annie and Melissa argue over Dorothy’s characterization of the Wizard: “He was a good man, even if he was a bad Wizard.” What does Annie ultimately conclude about this line? Do you think this mix of good and bad is true of human nature? How do you see it reflected in characters throughout this story?