by Rae Meadows
* * *
SAMUEL DID NOT go to the Macks’ farm. Instead he turned toward town and drove past the church to Pastor Hardy’s small wooden house that the townspeople had built for him almost twenty years ago. The yuccas held the sand, but the elm they’d planted with the house was leafless and peeling. The pastor had lost his wife to diphtheria back in Arkansas soon after they’d lost their son in the trenches of the Great War. The pastor had answered an ad for a preacher needed on the High Plains, and had set off for Oklahoma alone.
Samuel turned off the car and waited while the engine knocked and settled. He would drop by to see Stew Mack on the way home, but he hadn’t been able to bring himself to tell Annie that he was first going to talk to Pastor Hardy. Just as he hadn’t been able to talk to her about the dreams, more disturbing and powerful as the summer wore on, afraid she might dismiss them as foolish. He could sense her impatience with the intensity of his prayers, his questions. She went to church, of course, but her Bible had been packed away for years.
Always now there was rain when he closed his eyes at night. Rain hurtling to the earth without letting up. But after the last roller he’d had a dream so lifelike he couldn’t shake its haunting grip. It wasn’t like the others, and it didn’t dissolve the next morning when he woke, his throat gritty and parched. Instead, it seemed to gain weight and dimension as he went about his day on the farm, sticking with him like a physical presence. Torrents of rain pouring from a dark and savage sky, a deluge that wiped out animals, houses, the railroad, the post office. His neighbors bobbed along in the rising water as trees snapped like matchsticks.
Pastor Hardy stood in the open doorway and beckoned Samuel inside. They sat on wooden chairs at a small table in a circle of yellow lamplight.
“I brought some cookies,” Samuel said, unfolding a butter-spotted napkin.
“Annie is sure a good cook,” the pastor said. “I miss the kitchen smells. The small things can wrench you into misery when someone’s gone.” He took a cookie, not bothering with a plate, and his first bite dropped crumbs to the table in a constellation. “I’m grateful for the congregation,” he said. “Keeps me busy.”
Samuel nodded. “Hard to outrun it sometimes, isn’t it?” He patted the pastor’s sleeve, and quickly withdrew his hand.
“What’s on your mind, Samuel? What brings you out?”
“I’ve been chewing on something. It’s got me all tied up.”
“Go on.”
“We had abundance out here and now we have nothing. Worse than nothing.” Samuel’s words began to spill from him. “People leaving their land, not enough to eat. Questioning God. I know I have, I can’t help it.”
“Slow down, son. Let me get the whiskey.”
The old man shuffled to the cupboard and pulled down a small jug and two cloudy glasses. Samuel took a sip and welcomed its calming effect.
“The jackrabbits, the grasshoppers. Even all the spiders. It just feels plain wrong,” Samuel said. “If it’s not retribution, this place we’re in now, if God isn’t punishing us for our sins, could it be a test, then?”
“When we return unto God, things will be changed for us,” Pastor Hardy said.
Samuel rolled his glass between his palms before the pastor filled it again.
“I’m afraid,” Samuel said quietly.
“We’re all afraid. These are frightening times. That’s why some leave. That’s why some stay. That’s why we ration ourselves to cured pork and cornmeal porridge.”
“No, it’s something else. Why I came tonight. To talk to you.”
“What is it, Samuel? Have you done something?”
Samuel shook his head and looked to the window, only to see the reflection of the lamp. It was ludicrous, this thought that wouldn’t leave him.
“Then what’s troubling you? Unburden yourself.”
“I’m afraid of what I’ve seen in dreams.”
“Dreams are difficult. They can feel like visitations, can’t they?”
“Could they be?”
The pastor leaned back in his chair and shrugged.
“Sometimes God speaks in thunder. Other times in silence. Only you can know the voice that speaks to you.”
“What if,” Samuel said. “What if God has spoken to me?”
* * *
ANNIE SAT ON the edge of the bed and, in the moon’s weak light, rubbed beeswax on her hands. In place of washing powder, she’d begun to use cheap lye, which left her hands rough and ugly.
Samuel had come home late, smelling of alcohol, but Annie couldn’t bring herself to ask. Compared to what she’d done—her thoughts returned to Jack Lily in the car again and again—a night of drinking with Stew Mack was nothing. He’d mumbled something about cows and had then gone straight to bed, where he now slept, legs out, mouth open. This image of him—helpless, vulnerable—repelled her.
It is you, Annie, she thought. Don’t blame this on Samuel. It is you and Jack Lily and what has taken root in you. Lust was new to her, a darker pull than she’d ever felt with Samuel, a barbed vine that snaked its way around every thought, gently squeezing everything else out.
Life was not good and fair. God had taught her this, hadn’t he? She harbored this belief like a shard of iron lodged in her gut. Her baby, her baby. Beautiful and alive with her gurgling milky breaths and tiny pink hands and eyes dark like obsidian. Ten years and she could not forgive God for what he had taken. Jack Lily did not remind her of what she’d lost. What they were losing day after day.
Annie brushed the fine dust from her pillow and pulled back the sheet. She curled herself around her husband’s slack body in apology.
CHAPTER 5
The next duster came quickly on the heels of the last, and the Bells scurried about trying to cover the beds, to wedge wet towels around the windows and under the doors. Wind burst two windows of the empty school. After the dust had followed the faintest black drizzle, which left only a smattering of drops on the dry ground before stopping. Fred and Birdie spent the storm’s aftermath sweeping, wiping, cleaning, and tending to the farm’s anxious animals. Annie tried to keep Fred inside as much as possible—his cough had turned deep and phlegmy—but he could not stand being trapped in a handful of hot rooms, so she gave up.
Samuel’s boots crunched on grasshoppers as he toured the fields. There was so little to harvest. Enough of the feed crops had grown to see the animals through the winter, but the wheat was dismal—five bushels to an acre, maybe—a yield not worth the gas for the tractor to pull the combine. Last Sunday a farmer out near Beauville had come home from church and hanged himself from a beam in his barn. It’s the waiting that will drive you mad, Samuel thought. Watching it all go, bit by bit.
The dream about the rain came to him every night now, and he’d awaken in ravaged sheets damp from sweat. The power and the horror of all that rain.
“What do you want me to do?” Samuel said into the wind. “I am listening.”
* * *
IT HAD BEEN a few days since the storm, the sky again high and bright, but dust still hung in the air, a gossamer haze over everything. After his chores, Fred went to the gulch near the Woodrows’, remembering the frogs he used to catch, but of course found it parched and empty save for what looked to be the thick webbing of a black widow’s nest. He dragged a stick through the filaments and they made that telltale crackle, but he didn’t see any spider. Webs were everywhere now, in every corner, crevice, and ditch, undisturbed by animals or rain. How long could spiders go without water? How long could anything? Where was God? The question nagged at him, though it scared him a little to even think it. Maybe you weren’t supposed to ask something like that. Round and round he went in his head. It just seemed like it would be pretty easy for God to make it better.
He didn’t notice Birdie until she was right beside him.
“Don’t tell Mama you saw me,” she said. Fred covered his eyes with his hands. She stopped and squatted next to him.
“She doesn’t
understand,” she said.
Fred was confused by the arguments lately between his sister and his mother. You don’t understand no you don’t understand no you don’t understand.
“You like Cy, don’t you?”
He nodded and handed her the stick.
“I do, too,” she said. Birdie raked the stick across the silk. “It kind of sounds like paper being ripped, doesn’t it?” She dropped the stick with a shudder. They stood, dust aswirl at their feet, and Birdie brushed the front of her dress, which the wind flattened against her legs.
“See you later, alligator,” she said.
Fred squinted and tugged at his ear.
“What?”
He dug a smashed notebook and pencil nub from his pocket.
“Can’t God make it rain?” he wrote.
Birdie shrugged. “I don’t know. He doesn’t seem to be doing much, does He. He makes it rain in California. I hear carrots are the size of baseball bats out there.”
Fred blinked, not entirely sure if she was kidding.
“You’re such a kid,” she said, knuckling his head before he scooted away. She walked into the wind in the direction of the Mack farm, her hair whipping behind her.
Fred gathered a small stash of rabbit bones and hammocked them in his shirt, setting off for the pond.
The cottonwood at the edge of the dry pond swayed in the wind. He dropped the bones onto his growing pile. He stood in the tree’s shade and ran his hand along the deep fissures of the bark. The seeds with their cottony tails had blown away a month ago, and Fred wondered if any of them had landed and taken hold. He saw his father top the small ridge.
“Your mother sent me to find you,” Samuel said. “Figured you were going out to the bones again.” He handed Fred a small tin of petroleum jelly. “Wipe it in your nose.” Fred shook his head with distaste. “Go on. It’ll keep the grit out some.”
Fred smeared the goo inside his nostrils, disgusted by its cool sliminess. He wiped his hand on his shirt and then pouted, picking at the cottonwood bark.
“You okay?”
Fred pulled out his notepad and flipped to a page.
“Can’t God make it rain?”
Samuel couldn’t help but smile a little.
“I ask myself the same question. I mean, yes, I suppose God could make it rain. But why He doesn’t, I don’t know.”
Fred found his pencil. “Noah?”
“Noah? You know that story. God was saddened by the wickedness of man who he created.”
“God sent rain,” Fred wrote.
Samuel nodded. “He did.”
“He’s sad again?” Fred wrote. He coughed and wiped at his nose. When He was done punishing them with drought, would He punish them with rain?
“It will come again,” Samuel said. “The rain. I’m sure of it.”
They sat together for a long while, the shade shifting, the sun hot on their necks.
Fred thought about rain, the rising water. He found a clean page in this notebook and began to draw. When he was finished, he held it up to his father.
It was a picture of a boat.
* * *
SAMUEL, WRENCHED FROM sleep, found himself dry-mouthed and shaken, alone in the bed. He had the momentary, sleep-gauzed panic that Annie had deserted him. He careened into the kitchen. She was sitting at the table with a cup of tea gone cold.
“I was worried,” he said, “when you weren’t there.”
“I couldn’t sleep.” Her hair was messy, her prominent collarbones visible above her nightgown. She looked away.
“I’m sorry if I kept you up. A bad dream,” he said. “Another one.”
He wanted her to ask him about it, but she was quiet and suddenly he felt shy about sitting down at his own table. He had not told her about his visit to Pastor Hardy the week before. In the light of day there never seemed a good time to bring it up. He pulled out a chair, the scrape loud against the floorboards in the night quiet. She recoiled, the slightest retraction of her shoulders. And Samuel had the awful urge to slap her.
Annie smiled at him as he sat, and he was grateful for that.
“Hungry?” she asked.
“Yes,” he said, though he wasn’t. “Or a little brandy maybe?”
She nodded. “I’ll get the glasses.”
Samuel reached behind the sack of cornmeal on top of the icebox and got down the bottle, pulling out the cork with a satisfying thwop. He poured a finger for her and two for him.
“Remember that first night?” he asked. “There was that tear in the canvas of the wagon and if we scooted to one side we could see the moon through it?”
She nodded and smiled, hands around her jelly jar of brandy.
“I was scared we’d get eaten by coyotes. Or the horses would run away and we would be stuck in the middle of nothing,” she said.
They had arrived at their parcel, marked by a small stake with a number painted on it, barely visible in Indian grass two feet high. Their horse-drawn wagon was lined with a mattress, and around it were packed tools and jugs of water and boxes of canned food. Roped to the back was a trunk filled with dresses, linens, and dishes her mother had insisted they take. It was 1916. The wind carried the cow stink from the ranches over miles of grassland. They had been jittery from the bumpy trek south over the plains. The next day they would start digging out their house. But they could do little in the dark. So they lay together in the wagon, and as he held his wife in the cool spring evening Samuel had felt blessedness swell deep in his chest. Annie Bell, he had said. Annie Bell.
Samuel finished his drink with a large gulp. “I had everything I wanted.”
“Except a roof.”
“Ah well.”
“We were so young,” she said. “I thought we could dig out the house in a day.”
“You were beautiful. Are still.” The alcohol was loosening him.
“Samuel.” She reached across the table and covered his hands with hers.
“We need to talk about something,” he said.
Her eyes widened.
“I believe it’s going to rain,” he said.
She felt a leaden relief pour through her. Here Annie had thought, in that terrible moment, that Samuel had found out about Jack Lily. She would not meet him again, would bury the giddy spark.
“I hope so.” She felt herself return to Samuel, allowed herself to believe in what they had built together.
“No. I mean rain the likes of which we’ve never seen. Rain to end all rain. Rivers of it. A deluge.”
“Deluge?” She let go of his hands and pulled hers to her lap. “What are you talking about? Out here?”
“To wipe out the ruined land. So we can start again.”
He held her gaze trying to bring her with him, to carry her.
“The liquor’s got you going.”
“No.”
“Let’s go back to bed.”
“God has shown me. In dreams.”
“Dreams, Samuel?”
“It feels like more than dreams.”
Annie finished her drink and rubbed her face. Samuel waited for her to speak but she didn’t.
“Fred and I were talking,” he said.
“Fred?”
“He has an idea. About the rain. About how to protect us when it comes.”
“Fred is an imaginative little boy.”
“I think he’s right,” Samuel said.
She shook her head, trying to regain the clarity she had felt a moment before.
“We’re going to build a boat,” he said, feeling the idea solidify for the first time.
Annie hid her eyes with her palms and dug her fingertips into her forehead.
“I know how it sounds,” he said.
“Do you?”
“It’s not crazy, though.”
“Please, Samuel. You are a farmer in a drought.”
Her bitterness stung him.
“Psalms 46, verse 10. Be still, and know that I am God,” he said.
“Please don’t quote Scripture to me.” She dropped her glass in the sink with an angry clang.
Samuel sank into himself.
“Fred is right,” he said. “I know it. And I will do what I have to do to keep us safe.” His once tentative question about the rain, over the past weeks, had with Fred’s help crystallized into belief. With time, Annie would have to see the truth of it.
“Stop!” she shouted, covering her mouth quickly with her hands.
“There’s no harm in it. To be prepared.”
Annie left him there at the table. Samuel seemed more lost to her than ever.
* * *
ANNIE HADN’T BEEN to the Woodrow house since the family had disappeared, and to see it now with its sagging roof and gaping door—how fast nature reclaimed itself when people weren’t looking—she stopped, her feet half buried in the sand. What separated the Woodrows’ ruin from their own was the finest of threads. Through how many bad harvests could they continue to piece together an existence? She realized in her haste and nerves that she was still wearing her oil-stained apron. The house had been her idea—meeting at the mayor’s apartment in town was not a possibility—but the physical emptiness of it now scared her, so she sat outside in the mesquite’s stingy shade to wait.
As a girl she’d loved her father’s church. Bentonville had been a frontier town where Presbyterians held meetings in homes or shops before her own parents had arrived, fresh from seminary in Topeka. Her father had overseen the church’s design and construction, and its cool walls of Kansas limestone, its Gothic tower, and its turrets felt castlelike. He wanted a beacon, he had said, to attract worshippers from all over the Plains. In the stained-glass sanctuary, awash in sun and color, she would close her eyes and feel the warmth of the spirit, as the staccato of her father’s stern voice lulled her.
Once when she was eleven, she went to call her father home for lunch. The day was bursting with the earliest hints of spring, the snow melting in rivulets down the sidewalk. Her unbuttoned coat flapped as she bounded up the church steps. She was early. Inside the dark vestibule, which always smelled of books and must and candle wax, she heard the murmur of voices, a woman’s laugh. Annie rested her ear against the office door.
