The Rain and the Fire and the Will of God

by Donald Wetzel

  When Rodney first heard a turpentiner hollering way off somewhere, he stopped where he was and listened until it quit. It’s a lonely sound, all right. They work way back in the woods alone, chipping the trees. When a couple of them is working close enough they will holler back and forth to each other, like they was sending signals, but half the time they just holler to themselves. It don’t last long usually, but you can hear it a long ways, and it keeps echoing. It’s like a kind of singing, way up, except with no words. The deeper back we went the more we could hear them, and then with the storm coming up and the woods getting darker they got going more or less steady on it, and Rodney said it were enough to give him the creeps.

  And if that wasn’t enough, Jimmy had to keep talking about the ’gator hole we was going to and Tom’s ’gator with teeth like a hay mower, trying to give little Andy a scare, like he always done. I could see that Rodney was worried some about it, though. But now and then the sun would come out from behind the cloud again and the woods would light up and it would just be a walk we was having through a heavy woods, nothing creepy about it.

  And at first, there is nothing scary about the ’gator hole, either. As a matter of fact it is a disappointment to me every time. You come on it right out of the woods, going down into a little marshy place that is too sour for growing anything but grass, and there is this creek coming in from one end of it and going out the other, and in the middle of it, out under the sky with nothing near it but a few bushes up along one bank, is the hole. If you didn’t know how deep it was it would look like nothing at all. Actually, you can swim all the way acrossed it without taking a breath. I have done it.

  I could tell Rodney didn’t think much of it. He stood back and looked at it for a while and then he looked around and then back at it again and finally he said, “I would never have knowed this was it.”

  “I have never seen a ’gator hole just like it myself,” I said. “But this is it, all right.”

  For a while Rodney and the rest of us just stood around looking at it and then I said I did not like the look of the clouds that was building up and if we was going to swim we better swim. So we stripped and then I said, “Who will be first and scare the ’gator? I done it last time.”

  This is a thing we done that none of us really believes in but do it anyhow, one of us going up and jumping in with a big splash, which is supposed to scare the ’gator. Makes him think it is something bigger than him, I guess.

  “I would do it,” Jimmy said, “but it hurts my ears.”

  “The splash?” I said.

  “No,” Jimmy said. “The water. Going down so deep, it makes them pop.”

  “You should see a doctor,” I said, “all this time you have probably been popping water into your brains right through your ears.” The way Jimmy does it is get way back and then run, if you can call it that, and then jump up as high as he can and come down on his back, which makes quite a splash all right and sends him a good ways down as well. He will not just stand there and jump, though. He is afraid he will miss and fall back on the bank. He probably would, too. He is no athlete at all. Anyhow, he would have to jump up and jump out at the same time, and this is doing two things at once, which is where the risk comes in it in Jimmy’s mind for sure.

  Andy, of course, we couldn’t ask to do it because of his size, and he is always scared at first and wouldn’t have done it anyhow. Then Rodney went up and stood at the edge of the bank and said he would do it, then. I guess he did not believe us about Tom’s ’gator none at all. We waited, and once he almost jumped but he caught himself back and waited again. He looked up and then down, and I knowed what it was he was feeling, because it is a strange thing to stand there just before you jump. Everything seems to have got suddenly big, the way you come on it sudden out of the woods and come out sudden under the sky at the same time, and the way the hole itself is just lying there for no good reason; it seems strange and half not real, yet the sky is real, all right, and the hole is real too, the deepness of it, and you are standing there looking at your own reflection in that black slick water, your own small face, and everything else looks too big and you do not just then want to jump at all.

  Then Rodney jumped. After once you have jumped it is not so bad. I jumped, too, and Andy hopped in, and Jimmy come in on his belly, which is what he thinks is diving, and we was all in. We swum around some and then Andy crawled out to rest, and Jimmy turned over on his back and tried to float, which he likes to do best, and me and Rodney had a contest seeing who could run and jump the farthest out from the bank. I would say it was me, but there was no real way of telling.

  Then Rodney got tired of that and went back to just swimming, and I waited and slipped under water and come up under and grabbed him by the foot, seeing if he would think it was a ’gator. I guess he knowed it was me, though, because he didn’t try to pull loose as he naturally would if it had been a ’gator, but instead kicked back with the other foot and like to knocked my head off. Caught me right up alongside the nose. Under water, it was like being hit with a club. When I come up he was turned around watching for me, but he didn’t say a word. I was a little sore about that kick so it was just as good he didn’t. It seemed to me like a kind of sneaky thing to do.

  So we swum some more. The clouds was dark ones and getting darker, the ends of them coming up slow and slanted and spread out like fingers, sliding out from the west like they was being pushed by something from behind, which they was, the real storm being back where we couldn’t see it yet. Then the sun come out between them again while I watched, and we got out and ate the lunch we had brung and lay back in the grass and rested while the sun stayed out for a while. I said that when we was dried we better start back, but then the sun went under again and we lay there cooling, and after a while Jimmy got itchy or something and sat up and looked around and seen something. I could tell by the way he just sat there, halfway up.

  Then he said, “There he is.”

  “Who?” I said.

  “Tom’s ’gator,” Jimmy said.

  And so we all sat up, and there he was. All we could see was the snout, but see a ’gator’s snout once and them two big sideways eyes, and you never forget it. He had come up in about the middle of the pool, like maybe he had rose straight from the bottom, and there he was, the snout and them two eyes sort of floating there and the whole thing twisting a little this way and that like the way a stick will bob along on a river. Only here there weren’t no current, the water hardly moved at all; but the snout kept bobbing and twisting and sliding along like down underneath it the water was running heavy. But it weren’t the water doing it. What was down underneath, and I knowed it, was Tom’s ’gator, the rest of him.

  Without no sun, the water was as black, as heavy-looking as old burned oil; and real slow the ’gator drifted or swum or whatever it was right from the middle of the pool toward the place where we was sitting. Like he seen us. And then all of a sudden he was gone. He just sunk. It hardly made a ripple.

  For a while we sat there, looking at where he had went down, at that black slick water; and then little Andy jumped up and started putting on his clothes, and the rest of us did, too, and we left.

  We got back in the woods and I still couldn’t think of a thing to say. Little Andy tugged at me and asked did I think it was really him and I said I guessed it was all right, and Jimmy said him or another anyhow, and I couldn’t see that it made much difference. It was a ’gator all right.

  The storm was moving up—I could feel it—and I wished we had taken off sooner than we did. I did not like the look of it. Way off I heard the first thunder.

  Rodney stopped then. I would have liked to kept going. “Jack,” he said, “tell the truth; how bad is an alligator anyhow?”

  “Well,” I said, “you hear different things. But Pa says he knows of no case where an alligator has ever went after a full-growed man in the water.”

  With that storm coming up we stood there and waited while Rodney give t
his some thought. Then he shook his head. “I ain’t full growed,” he said.

  I didn’t have no answer for him.

  So we started up again. We was still in the heavy woods and around us there was that quiet you notice when a storm is coming. Once, somewhere close, a bird sung a little, sudden, and then stopped, like it was confused. Then we seen a fox squirrel, which is rare, and he just lay out on a high limb and seen us go by and didn’t move, which I have never seen at all before. And not far from that we come on a bunch of bluejays and they left and curved off into the woods without making a sound. They have a complaining sound they make that is like the sound of a rusty pulley, but this time there was nothing. Now and then to the west of us we could hear the thunder, moving nearer. It sounded like a wagon rumbling on a bridge.

  We was just about out of the heavy woods when little Andy started crying. I mean he really cried. I couldn’t get what was wrong with him for the noise he was making, so we was stopped again. I figured it was the storm coming up and the woods so dark and us so quiet, and I told him so long as he stayed close to me there was nothing to be afraid of. Then Rodney and I both talked to him and finally he quieted down enough to tell us what it was.

  “I could have had both my legs bit off,” Andy said, and then he started hollering again. I guess he had been thinking about it all that time and had figured out finally that he was the least full growed of any of us. So I carried him awhile and we got going again and Rodney told him he knowed for a fact that a ’gator eats nothing at all except at night and comes up in the daytime just to look around, and I swore this was true myself. And finally Andy seen for himself that he still had his legs and he got down again and walked. Myself, I thought that was pretty smart of Rodney. Otherwise Andy might have hollered the rest of the way back home. And who likes to see a kid bad scared?

  We went up a long slow hill and then we was on the logging road again and the worst of the woods was behind us. I called a stop. “Rodney,” I said, “there is one thing I want you to understand. I swear to God that neither me nor Jimmy nor little Andy ever knowed there was an alligator in that hole.”

  “I know it,” Rodney said.

  “I am glad that is settled then,” I said. “And I will tell you what it shows. It shows that you can’t never trust nothing told you by a hired hand. Because for all these years Tom has been telling me the truth and making me believe it were a lie.”

  We stood there and the skies overhead was dark and not a one of us moved, and right then the first close shot of lightning come, bright as a plow blade catching the sun, slicing down quick through the air and going crack like the sound of a ball against a bat; and then there was nothing. It was like the wing of a bird had brushed real close in the dark; like I had felt the wind and knowed what it was. Then the thunder come. It shook the woods.

  You may have felt a house being shook from thunder, but it is another thing altogether when what is being shook is a whole big woods. Then it stopped, and a few big drops of rain come down among us.

  “We better get moving,” Rodney said.

  “There is sure no sense in just standing here on this hill,” I said, and so we started up again. We went faster and stayed on the logging road until it dipped down by the last big branch we had come through over the logs, and then up behind us the lightning shot again and struck like before, only not so close. Then a idea come to me, and I called a stop again.

  “How come we keep stopping out here in this rain?” Rodney said. The truth was, the rain had hardly commenced good yet.

  “Rodney,” I said, “this rain is nothing, and anyhow there is little we can do about it but get wet. But this lightning is not a thing to be foolish about.”

  “Who is the one being foolish about it?” Rodney said.

  “It ain’t bad yet at all,” Jimmy said.

  I have never seen Jimmy be afraid of anything, man or beast, but it is my opinion this is due to dumbness. It just don’t ever occur to him to be scared.

  “Jimmy is,” I said, “as he has just showed. But what I am talking about is the lightning still to come. I don’t like us going up and down over all these hills in it, and there are a lot of them left between this branch and Mr. Blankhard’s place.”

  “What is wrong with hills?” Jimmy said.

  “The tops of them,” I said. “If you stop and think about it you will discover they is closer to the sky than their bottoms is.”

  Jimmy didn’t say nothing, though whether he seen my point or not I will never know, as even if he didn’t Jimmy wouldn’t have argued it none. Problems is not for him.

  “Well,” Rodney said, “I suppose you have thought up a better way then.”

  He had read my mind. “Unless I am wrong,” I said. “But I believe this branch is the same that runs all the way back of Mr. Blankhard’s woods. If I am right we can follow down beside it and then cut through about where we figure is right and come out in that swampy low place back of where the Millses once tried to raise bullfrogs. Then we can follow up along that until we come to the branch in back of Mr. Blankhard’s place and then we will be home. This way we will be taking the least chances, as there will be no hills to go over, while there will be a hill most of the way on the one side of us and a branch on the other and the lightning can choose between them. But we will be more or less in the clear.”

  This made good sense and there was no argument from nobody, and we went back a little and then cut off the logging road and started south along the branch, staying out from it a ways but yet keeping it near. There was no path to follow so I led the way and made one. Now and then a shot of lightning come, most of them far enough away so as not to have mattered where we was anyhow, but they was in every direction and the thunder followed quick, so I knowed the storm was all around us. The rain had still not come like I knew it was bound to. You do not get clouds that black and then just a sprinkle.

  Then it come without warning. Just one big rush of hot air first, and then we was walking along in a full-out rain and it was crashing away down in the branch and on our heads and all around us, and by the time we was used to the noise of it we was soaking wet and had not even noticed. Little Andy was worst of all. He kept brushing his hair back from his eyes and the rain kept banging it down over them again until finally he give up and just let it hang down across his face however it would. Myself, I have never believed in long hair for men even when they are kids.

  We got used to it, though, and went along without trouble, following the branch the way I had planned and the lightning picking up and blasting all around us in the branch and up on the hills, and I was glad we was where we was and not there. Sometimes we could hear a crack when it struck and sometimes not. When you hear that crack, it is close. There is no other sound I know of just like it. And because it is so close the thunder will follow quick then, too, sometimes going whap itself before it really tumbles, but there is no mistaking the sound of the two. One could have killed you; the other is just a sound.

  The way it was coming down, I knew it couldn’t be for long; and since we was as wet as we could get already I seen no point in rushing. So we went along slow through it, and the lightning got worse for a time. I seen a dead pine get hit, down in the branch. It was sticking up higher than the rest and was probably dead from being struck before, but this time it took the top out. Anyhow I seen it hit and then was blind from it the way you will be and when I looked again to see what it done, it was gone. It had been a good ten feet above the tops of the others, and now it weren’t there at all.

  Well, I thought, it sure don’t always pay to be a giant, and I asked back and Jimmy said he had seen it, too, and then we went on.

  If I was right about this branch, then it was the same one I had come onto out possum hunting one night last fall with Les Holmes, only we had come north up it and then followed the dogs through and they had brung us out right where I was hoping to bring us out now. What I thought I would do was keep going south without trying to guess
how far we had came or anything and just wait until the branch begun to look familiar, which would mean I had met the place where Les and me had got to working north, and then just go into the branch somewhere along in there and see what we seen when we come out on the other side. I was trusting in my senses of remembrance, which can tell you you are at a place where you have been before without you have even been watching for it. In fact if you are going on such senses as that it is best not to be watching for it, or you will get confused every time. You just have to trust. But I could see I had give my senses quite a test, all right. Particularly if it happened we was all the time going down the wrong branch.

  We were sure soaked. All of us. The lightning eased up some but the rain just kept coming, and walking along through it like that, where none of us had ever been before, and not sure just how we was going to get out of it, we was a pretty quiet bunch. We just slopped along and said nothing.

  Then I called a stop. Down by the edge of the branch I seen the roots of a blowed-over oak, one that had gone down into the branch and pulled up grass, dirt, and everything along with its roots, so that if you stood up close to it it looked not like the roots and general underside of a tree, but like the side of a bank. I knew when I seen it it was the same one Les and I had come to just before we turned, because we had not seen it in the dark until we was on top of it, and when we turned the light on it I had thought that was what it was, a bank.

  Then we had seen it was a giant blowed-down oak. I had forgot all about it. But now I knowed pretty much where we was. “We have went a little past the place,” I said.

  “You should have watched,” Rodney said. “I am tired of this being rained on.”