by Rae Meadows
“I never did,” Samuel said.
“Think it’ll make the papers?”
“I think it will.”
Birdie wanted to talk to Cy about it, to see how he looked at her. His eyes were the color of an April sky before you started to wish for clouds.
Fred coughed and hacked up blackened phlegm and spat it into the dirt.
“Learn some manners,” Birdie said.
“Pill,” Fred thought, squinting his eyes at her. Bossy pill. Wash your hands, Fred. Fill the trough, Fred, Leave me alone, Fred. The rest of the time she only cared about Cy. He’d seen her slip out of the house last night.
“Birdie, go check on the cows. Take a rag for their noses. Fred, see to the coop.”
Fred tripped as he ran off and he narrowly missed the corner of the shed. He liked his sister, too. He could make her laugh. When they were smaller they would run into the fields and spin around to get lost and she would sing “Baa, Baa, Black Sheep” until he found her sitting, feet out in front of her, in the tall-as-him wheat.
Samuel watched Birdie walk away, her hair bleached like straw from the sun, and then started toward the fields to see how much had been destroyed.
* * *
THE PEA SHOOTS were lost, as if trampled by a horse. The pole beans hung limp, flopped over, pulled from the trellis and weighed down with dirt. Annie gently lifted a stalk and brushed the dust off its bruised leaves.
She refused to read the destruction of the garden as a larger sign. God doesn’t use weather as a weapon, she thought. Even her father would agree on that. But she wasn’t so sure about Samuel. With less to do on the farm, he had more time to pray, more time to listen for the still, small voice. “God is displeased,” he had said when she’d found him staring off from the porch a few days before. There was a time when she would have tried to shake him out of it, but his new searching look, his eyes wild and cast up, kept her from saying anything.
As she set to work tending to her wounded plants, Annie saw how the years out here had ravaged her hands—her skin creased and dry, her nails thick and short. They were capable hands, though, and she did not begrudge them. On the night she’d first met Samuel, she knew she would choose the soil, the sun, the work, over a steady life as the wife of a minister like her mother.
* * *
“ONE, TWO, THREE, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine,” Fred said in his head, counting the leghorns, their white feathers now dirty brown, as they bobbed around. “Where are you, ten?” He counted again, but still came up one short. The birds screeched and pecked at his skinny legs, agitated from the storm, as he scattered the kafir corn.
He wanted it to be like it was before. When Miss Miller taught his class and he gave her a box of chocolates for Christmas before she left to get married. In the fall he would have sour Miss Peterson and they didn’t have the money to give her anything and she would never leave because no one would ever want to marry her.
Where was that hen?
In back of the coop he found her on her side, dust clogging her eyes, panting through an open beak, her wattle limp against the floor. His lip quivered and he balled his fists to stop the tears. “Get up, get up, get up,” he thought. He wiped the hen’s eyes with the hem of his shirt. He loved these birds. He rubbed lard on their combs in the winter so they wouldn’t get frostbite. He kept meticulous counts of their eggs—some 230 apiece last year—on a yellow ledger pad under his bed. Leghorns were a nervous breed, and he knew how to hold them in the crook of his arm to calm them.
He looked at the ravaged bird and knew there was only one thing for him to do. He put his foot on its body, grasped its small quivering head in his hands, and yanked as hard as he could. The neck gave way with a pop. Fred kneeled down and cradled the creature to his chest like a gift.
* * *
BIRDIE SWEPT THE kitchen floor. Dust had made its way through every crack and window seam, settled on every surface. The counters, the clock, the sink, the table, the telephone. But it felt good to clean up the mess, she was strangely invigorated by the excitement of the day. As she wiped a wet rag across the windowsill, she wondered what it would be like if she and Cy lived someplace like Oregon, where she heard everything was green and blackberries grew in wild thickets.
Later, when the storms kept coming, she would think back on this day and try to recall the expectation she had felt when the kitchen was clean and she’d sat down with a fork and the mulberry pie.
She scraped the dust off the crust, and dug in.
CHAPTER 2
The man from Amarillo wore a bone-white suit and a matching ten-gallon Stetson low on his forehead. He lifted the hat—his hair as slick and full as an otter’s pelt underneath—to fan himself. Not that it wasn’t windy already, and not that it would do any good, but he kept at it, every five minutes or so. Birdie moved closer through the crowd to get a better view, to see if the man was, in fact, handsome or if it was just the getup. Yes, handsome, she decided, if a little untrustworthy, particularly his ink-pool eyes, which he cast beyond the dell. He was lucky it was bright. It made it hard to see the dirt-edged cuffs of his jacket, the yellow smear on his lapel, the droplets of sweat that hung from one end of his long mustache.
“My friends,” he said, replacing his hat. His voice was deep and slow, with a sharp Texas twang. Confident or cunning; Birdie couldn’t be sure.
The crowd, most all of Mulehead and plenty from over in Texas County, quieted. In back of the gathering, Fred perched on his toes and peered into the man’s straw-padded truck. Boxes marked “Dynamite” in big red letters.
“Are we ready?” the man asked.
The mayor, Jack Lily, glanced around and gave a small nod. He was skeptical of this man, the way he peddled hope, but the farmers were desperate.
The man from Amarillo had two other men with him today, burly fellows with rolled-up sleeves and work boots, and they had assembled a cannon aimed straight up at the sky. One of the men’s hands ended in two bulbous knuckle stumps.
Some of the women had brought umbrellas, just in case the effect of the explosions was immediate. The Hollisters, faring better than most with family money from the sawmill, sat on a quilt and ate ham sandwiches and lemon cake and sipped iced tea. Samuel and Annie Bell stood close to each other in a piñon tree’s meager shade, their hands heavy at their sides. Annie’s soft curls lifted from her face in the hot breeze and the mayor had to look away.
Jonas Woodrow whipped his head around as if flies were darting at his face. Jack Lily wondered how Woodrow had possibly come up with his share of the man’s fee. People used to say, Well, that’s Woodrow, bad luck and all. Arriving too late for the boom years. Over-borrowing. The thresher taking his pinkie clear down to the palm. Now he was feeding his cows ground tumbleweed and salt, and his wife was feeding their six children fried dough and wild nettles. But these days everyone was hurting, and no one said anything about Woodrow’s luck anymore.
Birdie glanced back at her parents, to see if they were watching her. They were almost the same height, their stances solemn—like two fence posts, she thought. She rolled her shoulders back and pushed her chest out, which made her look older than fifteen she was sure. As she set off to find Cy, she almost ran smack into the mayor.
“Miss Bell,” Jack Lily said, as he inched out of Birdie’s path.
“Lovely day for rain, isn’t it?” she asked.
“From your lips to God’s ears,” he said.
She noticed with displeasure that dirt now covered her shoes and smudged her socks. There was a thread hanging from the hem of her skirt. Why wasn’t Jack Lily married? He had a fine face and, in this town, a girl could do worse.
Fred ran by in pursuit of a zigzagging rabbit, and a moment after Fred came Cy’s little sister, a flash of black hair and patched dress. Cy is here, then, Birdie thought. She straightened her blouse and strolled along the edge of the crowd near a murder of crows that had settled on the weedy bank along the dry creek bed. The birds cawed throu
gh green-black beaks, a hundred of them or so, more nervy as the villainous drought wore on.
Birdie and Cy had finally done it in the Macks’ barn three days ago, and she felt different, better, as if she had blossomed, or as if they had.
“My sweet little bird,” he had said.
“I’m not that sweet,” she had said, even though she loved hearing him say it.
She knew they were supposed to be married first, but surely they would be married soon enough, so she didn’t see it as any great sin. She was only fifteen but her mother had married at eighteen and what was the difference really? Cy didn’t have to do much convincing. Love made it all okay, she told herself. She’d grown up around animals. She knew how they did it. It hurt, of course, but she didn’t blame Cy. He kissed her. He whispered, “I love you,” in her ear. He dipped a bandanna in cool water from the well and swept it across her forehead. She had skipped the three miles home, fueled by the glow of choosing and being chosen, each cheek a rosy nimbus.
“Birdie Bell.”
She turned, the wind making it hard to tell where the voice had come from, and squinched her eyes against the glare.
“Over here.”
Cy Mack sat sideways in the open front seat of his father’s truck, his boots resting on the running board, his large sun-browned hands laced between his knees. He smiled, showing his slightly overlapping front teeth, which Birdie thought tempered his handsomeness with a hint of little-boy mischief. His hair was as black as boot polish. His eyes, blue and water clear.
“Hello there,” she said. She felt an odd coolness settle on her skin, as if his presence alone could dissipate the afternoon heat.
“Looks like the show’s about to start,” he said.
“What’s that?” she asked. She had forgotten, in the moment, why they were here.
He pointed up, but kept his eyes on hers. She laughed. Who cares about rain, she thought. I love you, I love you, I love you.
Cy hopped down.
“We could sit on the back of the truck if you want.”
“I’d like that,” she said.
He sat and reached his hand out to help her up. She held on even when he tried to pull it away.
* * *
PASTOR HARDY, HIS thin tufts of pale hair afloat in the wind, took in the sight of the scraggy crowd, most of whom were members of his congregation at the Church of the Holy Redeemer. “Is it God or the devil withholding the rain?” they had asked him, each worried it was his own sins that had done them all in. “God’s sending of the plagues upon Israel is not merely to punish,” he had told them, “but to call his people to repentance.” His answer had not satisfied anyone, including himself.
The pastor stepped up on a wooden crate.
“Such a momentous occasion requires deference to our maker,” he drawled, his Arkansas accent more pronounced when he took to the pulpit. “Bow your heads and open your hearts.”
As he did at the closing of Sunday meetings, the pastor closed his eyes and transformed, his voice booming, holy-rolling.
“I’m talking now about the Holy Ghost—hah—the third person of the Trinity—hah—let the Holy Ghost come into your lives—hah—He will show you a new light on your experience—hah—the Holy Ghost will help you to see you have all those things in the Book—hah—you have faith, hope, and charity—you will see your experience by the light of the Holy Ghost.”
He opened his eyes and looked up, blinking against the sun.
“Amen.”
Birdie and Cy dutifully mumbled, “Amen,” with the others, their sweaty hands intertwined.
“He thinks we’re sinners,” she said.
“We are.” He squeezed her hand. She giggled, heat rising in her neck and cheeks.
“I mean all of us. Trying to make rain.”
“He thinks chewing gum’s a sin. You can’t win.”
They watched the pastor step down and trundle off toward town. The man from Amarillo stubbed out his cigarillo on the sole of his boot and flicked the butt away.
Birdie felt the metal of the truck bed like a spitting frying pan against her thighs, but she was content, waiting here next to Cy. Her brother slid his feet through the gravel and stopped at the truck.
“Freddie,” Birdie said. “Your hair’s sticking up.”
The man in white straightened his tie and stepped up on the crate the pastor had vacated.
“We’ll blast and reload, ten times,” he said. “Ladies, you may want to cover your ears. Rain is in your future, my friends. Might not be today, mind you. But it’ll come.”
Fred couldn’t get a good view, so he scampered up onto the truck bed and squeezed himself between Cy and Birdie.
After the first shot of the cannon there was a strange quiet, a collective held breath, as all eyes followed the bundles of dynamite through the air, their fuses flickering. Everyone stared into the sky until it erupted in thunderous bursts. The explosions panicked the crows, which took to the air in a mass of riotous wings, soon lost in sooty billows of smoke. The second wave of dynamite quickly followed the first, taking out the crows and sending down a shower of ash and oily black feathers.
Birdie gasped, sure her father would see the birds as some kind of sign, like in Exodus, when the frogs fell from the sky. Mary Stem, a girl from her class, screamed as she brushed black detritus from her hair. The Hollister women put up their umbrellas. Birdie wrapped her arm around Fred’s shoulders as the booms continued to shake the ground and blacken the sky. Fred’s upturned face was a canvas of awe, his mouth open, his eyes glassy. It was wondrous and scary, Fred thought, like the comics but real. The birds, all the birds.
“You okay, Freddie?” Birdie asked, but he could not hear her for the ruckus.
The man rocked on the heels of his boots and checked his watch. He looked up and caught Birdie staring. A slight tug of a smile pulled up one side of his mustache, and he touched the rim of his hat in her direction. He held her gaze and raised an eyebrow and she quickly looked away.
There was a lull in the noise.
“That it?” Cy asked.
Fred put up seven fingers.
“You sure?”
Fred nodded, just as the cannon went off again.
Cy took Birdie’s hand again and she felt her shoulders soften. She could be anywhere as long as he was there next to her.
* * *
WHEN SAMUEL AND Annie had finally arrived in Oklahoma, the land didn’t look anything like the brochure had promised. There was no river except for the Cimarron twenty miles to the north, no tree-lined streets—not even much of a town to speak of. But a homestead was a little piece of something, even if it was in No Man’s Land on the western edge of the Panhandle. As a young man Samuel had been a tenant farmer in Kansas, but here he got a quarter section, 160 acres of sandy ground under a thick turf of prairie sod. And it was free. For years he kept, tucked in his Bible, that torn piece of newspaper with the parcel number scratched on it, as a reminder, he told his children, of what they had.
And now here they were shooting bombs into the sky. How had it come to this? He knew it wouldn’t work, this hocus-pocus. One couldn’t make God do something. He had his own schedule, his own reasons for man’s suffering.
Samuel remembered the pale green glow each year of the first shoots in the spongy, dark soil, how they grew into laden honey stalks. Their pungent sweetness. The dull plops of rain on thirsty dirt. The thwuck of tractor tires in wet mud. Rain had even seeped into his dreams now, thundering bountiful storms, an exhausting loop of want and wish.
Next year will be better, because it sure can’t get worse.
“Ann,” he said. “Let’s go home.”
But his wife did not seem to hear, her eyes cast upward at the chaos.
They’d met at a church dance. She had served him lemonade, and he was struck by the wide plains of her face, which made her look kind and solid, pretty but unaware of it. She had a delicate narrow waist, and as he watched her box-step with another
man, Samuel knew he’d do whatever he could to win her.
In their second Oklahoma spring, before the house was up, they’d dragged the mattress from the dugout—Annie never liked the feeling of being underground—and had slept in the barn, amidst the crisp smell of pine, the sighing of the horses. They pulled open the door and in that milky celestial light they would sleep, her leg over his, her head on his chest, her hand held in his. They had nothing, but with her body fused with his, Samuel had felt they had the world.
Lately, though, Annie had grown remote, edged herself out of his reach. He feared that all these years later, a seed of regret had sprouted in the preacher’s daughter. He watched her sometimes when she was in the garden, her arms whip thin, her back a graceful curve toward the plants she was tending. Gone was the softness in her hips she’d had when they married. She was carved now, sinews over bone. It startled him sometimes how much she had become part of the land, shaped and scarred and bound by it. But it scared him, too, how she didn’t need him like she once did.
“Ann,” he said again.
There was the slightest hesitation before she turned to him. The sun lit the ends of her hair like fire.
“This is an awful thing,” she said. “Let’s go home.”
The explosions were finished and the smoke had begun to clear. A mosaic of charred feathers and remains now covered the ground. The man from Amarillo was already behind the wheel of his truck.
The chattering festive mood of earlier was gone. Samuel watched his neighbors pack up their picnics. Now it was time to wait, and waiting, it seemed, was all they ever did these days.
“There’s Birdie,” Annie said.
Samuel looked to where she was pointing and saw Birdie sitting with the Mack boy. His daughter was reedy still, though now nearly as tall as her mother. She was laughing, her head thrown back, at something the young man said, and Samuel saw, even from here, the sparks charging the air between them.
“Well, now,” he said.
“I had suspected something,” Annie said.
“She’s just a girl.”
Annie laughed. “She’s fifteen, Samuel.”
