The Rain and the Fire and the Will of God Read online

  The Rain and the Fire and the Will of God

  Donald Wetzel

  With an introduction by Edward Abbey

  New York

  To David, Mia, Joseph and Naomi.

  About this book there is one thing I would like to make clear. None of the people in it is living or dead or real. The whole thing is my own. I have made it all up in my head.

  However, I believe that it is by and large the truth.

  The Big House

  Bon Secour

  Introduction

  by Edward Abbey

  The Rain and the Fire and the Will of God (splendid title!) has finally been ressurrected from premature burial and I am glad to be among those welcoming its return. For it really is a good, solid, honest piece of work, a novel worthy of being read and then re-read, many times. The word “classic” has been rendered nearly meaningless by abuse, over-use, and foolish misapplication—we now have classic automobiles, classic movies, classic shoes, classic television shows, classic rock and roll—and certainly this little novel, first published in 1957, has not been in existence nearly long enough to attain so exalted a status as that of “classic.” What is a classic American novel, anyway? Catcher in the Rye? No. Huckleberry Finn? Yes. The Rain and the Fire and the Will of God? Possible but not likely, and the author himself would be the last to present so immodest and extravagant a claim.

  But this novel does possess certain qualities traditionally associated with that vague literary term “classicism.” I mean Mr. Wetzel’s book is characterized by restraint in scope, dominated by reason, shaped by a good sense of form. There is unity of design and aim, conveyed through simplicity, balance, and clarity, with close attention to structure and organization. The style is severe, almost chaste in its fidelity to a single point of view (that of the fourteen-year-old protagonist, John Haywood) as told in the boy’s own words. Finally the boy’s view of life is based on respect for his own tradition, the innate and sensible conservatism of a native-born country boy, and he seldom loses the good sense that keeps him whole and healthy.

  Such a description gives only a dim notion of the pleasures of this novel, however. The mind of young John Haywood is a delightful place to visit, and his self-reliance, his shrewd understanding of character, his honesty, his never-failing humor, make him as admirable a hero in his way as Tom Sawyer or Huck Finn—those classic prototypes—were in their ways. Not that John Haywood is any kind of model of morality; there is a mean streak in him, as he learns to acknowledge, and an essential part of the simple drama in this novel concerns the boy’s growing awareness of his faults and his efforts to overcome them.

  The whole story takes place during one summer in one small rural backwater of southern Alabama. There is the land, the sun and the heat, the woods and the thunder storms, the animals and the neighbors and long evenings (before the curse of television) on the front porch of country farmhouses waiting for something to happen. There are long walks in the light of the full moon with a girl named Jenny, and young John’s first faint sensations of the magic of love and the dark mystery of sex. Though nothing, as we say, seems to happen. Nothing ever happens, as John keeps complaining throughout the book—but in truth some powerful and beautiful and dangerous things are taking place, within him and to those around him. Young John and his peculiar friend Rodney, though they hardly know it, are drifting toward the fadeout of the seemingly-endless dream of boyhood, bound for the harsh glare and the astonishing reawakening of young men.

  This novel might seem to be, on a superficial level, only an exercise in nostalgia, a lament for the vanished world of rural America. It is that but also much more than that: not a lament but a clear-eyed look back at the vanished youth of all of us, men and women both, a life we can only know once and which will never come again.

  Read this book.

  1

  Because Mr. Blankhard believes only in horses, my father had to drive up to the Junction to pick up Rodney, Mr. Blankhard’s nephew, from the train. It’s about thirty miles from the Hill to the Junction, and this was in June, and nobody in Alabama drives sixty miles in June by horse and buggy any more, even if they got the time, and if that’s all they got to drive by. Even if Mr. Blankhard could have took the heat, and he probably could have, the horse most likely never would have made it, being one of those high-bred horses that costs twice as much as other horses and dies twice as easy. So my father drove up in our pickup with Ma, leaving early in the morning, and leaving me home because there had to be a man on the place and because there wouldn’t be room for Ma and Pa and Rodney Blankhard and me, too, in the front of the pickup. And Pa never liked for me to ride in back by myself since the time when I was ten and fell out and got knocked unconscious when he stopped quick for a pig in the road. I was half asleep in the sun on top of a load of baled hay and just slid off into a ditch on my head. To tell the truth it hardly hurt, but it give Pa a scare. He could have lost me, he said.

  All I knew about Rodney was that he was fourteen, going on fifteen. I was fourteen, too, so this was good. Before Mr. Blankhard had bought the old Mills place, there hadn’t been nobody there since I could remember but old people. They wasn’t always the same, but they was always Millses and always old. I never knowed really where they come from or where they went, except that they would come from some city to retire and then give it up and go back to the city, and some others would come and try retiring for a while. In that house they had to heat it with wood and cook with wood and draw water from a well, and this can keep two old people pretty busy if what they have in mind is retiring. This was my pa’s idea, anyhow, about why they never stayed. Besides that, the roof leaked all the time, and except for cutting wood and drawing water, what was there for them to do? The Hill is about as far from anywhere as you can get.

  Mr. Blankhard changed a lot of that when he bought the place, though. He had butane gas put in, and plumbing, and fixed the roof, and even planted a catalpa tree out front. In a way, he even farmed. But he and Mrs. Blankhard didn’t have no kids either. They was richer than any of the Millses had ever been, but just about as old.

  And the only other neighbors we have, and they don’t really live on the Hill, are the Bays. A long way back they was French. Jimmy Bay is thirteen and big for his age, but kind of slow otherwise; and Andre Bay, only we called him Andy, is only five, I think. They was the only ones I was around with regular now I wasn’t in school.

  Up until a week ago I had been at Les Holmes’s regular, too, or at least as regular as I could seeing how far away it was that the Holmeses live. But I had got cut off from him so to speak by one evening knocking him into a flower bed in his own front yard. If he hadn’t been so sly I wouldn’t have done it, as I don’t mind somebody just being a poor friend most of the time, which Les was, not ever wanting to do what I wanted to do but then not wanting to do anything else either, just to go off somewhere away from the house and sit down and brag about himself, but he finally got too sly about me and Jenny, his sister. To begin with there was nothing for him to get sly about, as I have never once got closer to her than going past her on their front porch steps, and in daylight at that. Besides, they are very wide steps. I have never even sat next to her on the school bus yet. But Les was the sly one all right, and had to keep making out that what I always come for was to see her rather than him, always leaning over and whispering in my ear when Jenny was coming up, saying here comes Jenny, and then watching me when she went by and grinning like I was the one acting foolish, not him, until finally I got tired of it and told him so. Then he got real sly and laughed and backed around and said whatever give me such an idea, why he never meant such a thi
ng at all, and all the time laughing and acting like he had just found out the biggest secret in the world. He should have took me serious.

  So I warned him once, and then swung, and it caught him still grinning a little and right on the nose and he went back and hit the little fence Mrs. Holmes has there to keep people out of her garden and threw his arms up and sat down in the middle of a big bed of pansies, blooming. I was surprised, as usually when I fight nobody gets knocked down at all. He got up though and come at me, but I had bloodied his nose, and when he seen his own bleeding I guess it scared him, because I backed him all the way to his porch and then on up the steps without ever really hitting him once again solid.

  Then Jenny come and saved him. She grabbed him and he pretended to struggle with her a little like he wanted to rush back down off the porch and start the whole thing all over again, but then she took him inside and come back out right away with some of his blood brushed off on her white blouse and her chin stuck up mad and stood there on the steps in front of me and told me off. “John Haywood,” she said, “I seen it all. You never give Les no warning. You are nothing but a bully. And anyhow you should pick on somebody in your own grade.”

  Les is as old as me almost, but just enough younger so it puts him a grade behind, though we weigh about the same. Before I could answer she went back in the house. Then I sat around on their front porch awhile waiting to see if her or him was going to be friendly again, but nobody come to the door so I figured I wasn’t wanted no more and went home. It was getting near to supper time anyhow.

  Going home I thought about it—it’s a good mile and a half through the woods—and in a way I was proud of what I done, as Les is supposed to be tough, and yet I felt a little sorry for him, too, as I knew Jenny was right, that I had caught him by surprise. And to be honest, he was right, it was not him I had went to see, but Jenny. Only he should not have been so sly about it.

  I felt sorry, though. In a way I wished it had been me that had been beat and it had been my blood on Jenny’s blouse, although I would not like to have been knocked down on my tail like that into a bunch of flowers, not for Jenny or anybody else to see, ever. He looked like some kid that had fell there off his wagon.

  I thought about it all the way home, and coming out of the branch I decided it, that what I done was right. Things have to be settled. And if this was the way they was going to be settled with me and Les and Jenny, then they was settled. And Les I wouldn’t miss none anyhow.

  So I didn’t go back and Les didn’t come over, and whatever there might have been this summer with me and Jenny seemed settled for good by the first of June.

  So even if I didn’t know much about him, I was glad that Rodney was moving to the Hill. He would be company. Although I did wonder some about the name. Rodney. It didn’t sound right to me.

  But when I first saw Rodney, I had the feeling the name sort of fit. It was late in the afternoon, and I was out in back feeding the chickens when I heard the pickup rattling over the cattle guard, and when I got out front Rodney had already got out and was standing in the middle of the drive all by himself holding a big suitcase. Pa was helping Ma unload the stuff they had bought at the Junction. I guess Mr. Blankhard was on his way over, but right then Rodney was just standing there in the sun all alone. He was tall, taller than me by a lot, and skinny, with a big mess of blond curls on his head. I don’t mean he had what you call wavy hair, either; these was curls. It struck me right off that at least he could have had them cut. And he had blue eyes. And the main thing was how white he was. His face and his arms and even his hands was plain pale white; and for a minute I had the feeling that he must have just come out of the hospital, because my cousin Nat looked almost like that after they had took out his gallstones and then kept him in so long for observation. Or maybe I thought of it this way knowing Rodney’s mother had only died about a month ago. That’s why he had come to live with Mr. Blankhard.

  Anyhow, I guess I walked up and just looked at him. And he looked at me. We stood there looking for quite a while. Somebody else should have been there.

  To me there was something about him that looked wrong. He looked too much like a girl. I don’t mean only his curls. It was just the way he looked, thin and pale, and standing there with his head back somehow, like he was only resting and waiting and nothing else. I didn’t know what to say to him at all. So finally I said hello. I didn’t even have the sense to hold out my hand.

  He put his suitcase down in the dirt and held out his hand to me. “I’m Rodney Blankhard,” he said.

  I shook his hand and nodded. I knowed he was. I still couldn’t think of nothing to say, but Sister come down off the porch and told Rodney welcome to the Hill and asked him had he had a nice trip and all, and practically made out that he was kin. Ellen is seventeen. Then my pa come around from behind the truck and told him something about that my name was John but they called me Jack and we was going to be good friends. Mr. Blankhard got there about that time and thanked Pa and then took Rodney home.

  Finally just Ellen and me was standing there. We started toward the house. “Jack,” she said, “remember that Rodney is a stranger here.” She went through the gate and I put a hand on the post and went over the fence and we met on the path again.

  “He sure is,” I said.

  Ellen stopped and give me a hard look and I walked on by her. On the steps she said, “I sometimes wonder that you have a friend left in this world,” and then in the front room she said, “sometimes I think Mother must feel awful.” I had made her mad. “Go wash your hands and face,” she said. This is what she will say when she is trying to make me feel like dirt, like I am just a kid.

  “Go soak your head,” I said, and went into the bathroom and washed for supper. I got soap in my eye and it hurt. It was beginning to look like maybe I had no friend in this world at that, not even myself. Then I forgot about everything and went and ate.

  2

  The Hill is home and I love it, I guess, but the main thing about it is that nothing ever happens here. Nothing. For miles around there is only land. It is either woods or fields and here and there a farm and on the farm people and that’s it. Except of course roads and rivers and fences. The Hill is in the middle of it. From the Hill it is, anyhow. And nothing happens. The frost gets the fruit trees or it don’t. We make a crop or we lose one. The price is good or it is bad. Mr. Blankhard’s cats has kittens, for all he wishes that they wouldn’t, but he has yet to get a calf from his oldest Guernsey, for all he wishes that he would. And about once every fifty years Pa buys a new pickup. Our tractor we have had forever. What I mean is nothing happens.

  We have trouble with the weather and with bugs and maybe with illness in the stock, but this is nothing. If somebody on a farm ten miles away has a sister in Montgomery who has a baby, or a grandmother in Mobile who dies, this is something. This is news. This is excitement. Only it is ten miles away plus forty or two hundred and forty and as far as I am concerned there has still been nothing happened on the Hill.

  Sometimes I watch a big thunderstorm come up out of the Gulf—the Gulf is thirty miles away—and finally hit the Hill, lightning striking everywhere and the rain making the roads into mud and everything hanging back from it, people and stock both, and this is exciting. I will stand for half an hour on our front porch at the worst of it just watching the top of the Millses’ old barn, waiting for it to finally get struck. Pa says it would burn like a match. But it never has. Lightning has never come near it even once. And then the storm goes on, and if it has been a good one with strong winds there may be a big sea bird of some kind has got blowed in and will go flying back slow the next day, low down over the pines, wondering where the ocean went, I guess, and that is a strange sight. But the Millses’ old barn has stayed unstruck and there just isn’t much else except a tornado that actually could happen here. What a good tornado could do to that barn would be something to see. I would like to see that. The thing is about to fall down anyhow. Even Mr. Bla
nkhard when he bought the place could see that there weren’t nothing could be done to save it, and he is the kind of man who goes around picking up old nails. Probably some habit he got into from being a banker all the time before, like nails was close to pennies.

  And so I was curious about this Rodney, curls or no curls. Not that I expected him to change things on the Hill much. At least he didn’t look like no world changer to me. And even if the Hill is not the world, I don’t hardly expect it will change unless the world itself does, so I was mostly just curious. If nothing else, I could see for certain that the Hill was bound to change Rodney up a bit.

  I was up early next morning watching for him. He’d stayed in at Mr. Blankhard’s all evening, but I knowed that sometime he’d have to come out, if only to get past his uncle. He had probably spent all evening listening to him. Mr. Blankhard is the sort of man who generally will not even pass the time of day with somebody, but another time he will get you in a corner and talk an hour and a half without ever taking time off to spit or scratch or to let you do the same, and it will be breeding or God, and absolutely, and positively and plain to see, and you are a fool for not having knowed it all before; and then he will let you go and maybe not speak to you for a month again at all, letting it sink in probably.

  Pa says Mr. Blankhard has gave it a lot of thought all right, but that he still seems to have got breeding and God somewhat confused, that whereas breeding will generally hold true for dumb beasts, with a man it is not so certain. The fine man Mr. Blankhard got to be from the way he was bred not exactly proving the thing either, while good breeding also did not get him so close to God that he could speak for Him personally, which he seems to do, explaining why one man is a shiftless failure is because of breeding while he himself if he fails at something, like he usually does with farming, he says it is nothing more nor less than the will of God, like that is the answer for anything he don’t just happen to know. Anyhow he has got these notions and now and then it seems he has got to tell people; and maybe that was what had kept Rodney in there all evening. Listening, I mean. Best all at once though, I suppose.