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

  She come over to me and come into the moonlight, and I stood there holding the moss and we looked at each other. And suddenly I seen again how small she was, standing in the moonlight under this big old tree and looking up at me, and I said, “Jenny, it is bright as day here. There is nothing to be scared of.”

  “I would not have come with you if I was scared,” Jenny said. She looked down at the moss I was holding. “What was it you was looking for in all that moss you jerked down?”

  “Look,” I said, and we stood there looking through it and finally I seen one of the little flower things and I pulled it loose from the rest of the moss and showed it to her. “I bet you never knowed Spanish moss had a flower,” I said.

  Jenny took it in her hands and looked at it. “I have never seen it before in my life,” she said.

  “I never did either,” I said. “They are so small and so much like the moss you would hardly notice it.”

  “It has brown in it,” Jenny said.

  “In daylight,” I said, “it is more a red.”

  Jenny held it up close and looked at it some more. “It shines,” she said. It was true. There is a kind of silver to it and it shines, small as it is. Then Jenny looked up at me and I could see she was all right again. She was smiling and I noticed even how perfect her teeth was, which I had never noticed before. They was somewhat crooked—I mean the middle ones crowded up a little—but they was perfect. It come almost as a shock to me; like I had never really knowed her before in my life until that minute. I guess I must have showed it.

  Anyhow, she stopped smiling so much. I guess no one likes standing there having their teeth stared at that way. “Jenny,” I said, “you sure are perfect.”

  It was a dumb thing to say, I suppose, but it was true. But dumb or not, I could see it hadn’t made Jenny mad. The way she looked at me you would have thought it was the nicest thing that had ever been said to her. It was nice at that, I suppose. “I am hardly growed yet,” Jenny said.

  “That don’t matter,” I said.

  We stood there looking at each other for a minute. I couldn’t think of nothing to say, and I guess that Jenny couldn’t neither. So finally we turned and walked back out from under the tree and over to the road.

  “Well,” I said, “unless you want to go around it, we have got to go back through all them mosquitoes again.”

  “Yes,” Jenny said, “it’s getting late for sure.” Then we stood there and looked around at things once again, and Jenny looked over at the oak and said, “That is sure a thing I never knowed,” and then I seen her look down at her hand and I seen she still had that piece of Spanish moss.

  I took Jenny’s hand and we went back through the branch. We come out on the other side and went on down the road toward her place until finally we seen the lights was on and we figured it couldn’t be too late after all so we slowed down some.

  It never seems so long coming back to a place as it is going out from it. Not to me, anyhow. Even walking slow and not talking much it was no time at all until we come to their gate. We walked in under the dark of the pecan tree and looked up at the porch but it was empty.

  “They must have not come back from town yet,” Jenny said.

  “Was they gone?” I said.

  “They went in right after supper,” Jenny said.

  We stood there in front of their gate. “Well,” I said, “we never did find that little dog of yours.”

  “That’s right,” Jenny said. “In fact I never seen him since I sent him back home when he started following me down to the Strattons’.”

  “Well,” I said, “I am sure glad we didn’t look too hard for him.” We stood there, close, and I reached down and got Jenny’s hand again. It sure was small. Like Jenny said, she was hardly full-growed yet.

  “Jack,” Jenny said, “this was the nicest you ever been to me.” I started to say something back, but then she kind of pushed my arm out of the way where I was holding it out in front of me holding her by the hand, and come up against me quick and soft, but then stayed there long enough to reach my head down and get my face mixed up in her hair for a minute and then kiss me. It sure was sudden.

  And then she was gone just as quick, hardly saying good night and then slipping through the gate and closing it and going up the path through the light and into the house. I stood there for a minute, mostly surprised. Then I started for home myself.

  Going back the old way through our branch the whole thing come back to me just like it happened. I practically slowed to a stop. One thing had give me the biggest surprise of all—how quick and strong she was, for so small a girl.

  For the rest, all I could figure was maybe the moon makes some difference after all. Yet that hardly explained it. It seemed more a thing that could hardly be explained, just a natural thing between me and Jenny that maybe Jenny knowed more about than I did after all.

  13

  The next morning I got up and the spell for doing things had not went away yet. So I went looking to find where Rodney was hid. I tried the branch first this time, and Rodney was at his hide-out place, playing his guitar. I figured a few redbugs wouldn’t hurt me none and I sat on the ground and just listened for a while. He had got so he could play a song so you could recognize it. He sung along with it, of course, or I might not have knowed it at that, but to me it sounded fine. Finally he quit and fished around in his pockets and got out some cigarettes and straightened one out and lit it up and smoked.

  “I guess by now you must know all the chords there is,” I said.

  “Nine,” he said.

  “Is that all there is?” I said.

  “No,” Rodney said, “that is all the ones I know.”

  “You had me fooled,” I said. “I thought you knowed them all.”

  “There is probably thousands,” Rodney said.

  This seemed like a lot, but I said nothing. “Whatever the number,” I said, “you have got yourself good at it.”

  “I have quit for the morning,” Rodney said.

  We sat there awhile. As far as I was concerned he could have quit right then forever. Finally he finished his cigarette and flipped it off and I got up and went and stamped it out, and then we sat there some more. “Was there something else you was going to do?” I said.

  “Like what?” Rodney said.

  “How would I know?” I said.

  “I thought maybe you had thought of something,” Rodney said.

  “I thought maybe you had,” I said.

  We sat there and thought about it some. “I can’t think of nothing,” I said.

  “Neither can I,” Rodney said. The heat was coming up by now and the mosquitoes was coming around for their breakfast. We both begun swatting at them.

  “Well,” I said, “I guess we could sit on our porch some.”

  Rodney got up then, and I could see he had about give in. “I guess we could,” he said.

  So for the rest of the morning we done that. Sat on our porch. I doubt if we said ten words between us. Then Rodney went home for dinner, and later I heard him practicing his guitar again. I stayed on our porch and stretched out on the swing and around two o’clock he come over and come up the steps and come in and sat down again. Ellen come and sat with us awhile, and him and Ellen talked some. And without even knowing it, I went to sleep while they was talking.

  When I come awake again I was dripping wet with sweat and itching from redbugs and Rodney had went. I guess he must have gone somewheres for a smoke.

  I could hardly say we had done much. But for the Hill, I guess we had done the best we could. And that night I went to see Jenny. I got there early, and Jenny and her ma and pa and Les and me sat around on their porch until after ten some time. Mostly we sat there and swatted at mosquitoes. Her folks was tired, they said, and Les never has much to say now anyhow. Just sits and watches. And for Jenny and me to talk by ourselves was more or less impossible.

  I stayed on despite of the mosquitoes, figuring they might get too much
for the rest since they was sitting there for nothing anyhow, but they never did. Seemed more like it was the mosquitoes kept them there—swatting—like that was the thing they liked to do best, the whole bunch of them. Just sit and wait to get bit and then swat. Except for Jenny, I never would have stood it so long. Then finally like someone had rung a bell they all got up. All except Jenny. But then her ma said Jenny better get up, too, and get to bed, so Jenny got up and they all went in and went to bed.

  There was nothing left for me to do but come on back home. Coming home I looked back from the top of the ridge above Mr. Holmes’s pasture and the house was already dark. I guess Jenny was sound asleep by the time I had went through the branch.

  The next day I seen my spell was wearing off. There was too much against it. But I tried the Holmeses’ again that night, and when I come up the road and looked over the gate there weren’t no Holmeses at all on their porch, just that dog of theirs. So I went around to the back and Mrs. Holmes and Jenny was in the kitchen doing dishes. “The men is down at the cow barn,” Mrs. Holmes said, like I had naturally come to see the men.

  Les and his pa was down there all right, up to their ears in torn-apart milking machines. At the time I come up they was just sitting there looking at it all. I went up to Les. “That is quite some mess you have made,” I said.

  Mr. Holmes looked up and I could see I had said the wrong thing that time. “This mess,” he said, “is two busted milking machines that was busted by your Cousin Nat, though if he was any kin of mine I would never claim it.”

  “Cousin Nat?” I said. He was nowhere around. “I just seen him yesterday.”

  “Since then,” Mr. Holmes said, “he has become an inventor and failed at it. If he took my advice he has left the state some hours ago.”

  “Most everything he tries is a failure,” I said.

  “I would not care about the failure,” Mr. Holmes said, “if he had not in the meantime busted both these machines.” I looked at them. What I think Nat meant to have done was speed them up. What he done, it looked like, was burned them out. There was a burnt-rubber smell about them, and I have never smelled that around a milking machine before anywhere.

  Nat being kin, I asked if I could help. Mr. Holmes said I could. So I got down there with them and helped. There wasn’t no way out of it. And it took a long time. Finally I seen Jenny again. Once. She come to the far end of the cow barn and stuck her head in the door and looked back at us. I looked up and give her a wave. “Ain’t you done with that yet?” she said.

  The next time I looked she was gone. And finally around ten or so Mr. Holmes said he guessed we was finished.

  We had run out of parts anyhow, so I guess we was. I went up to the house and sat on the porch with Les and Mr. Holmes—he had give me a glass of milk which I drunk to be polite—but Jenny was either sulking around inside the house or else had went to sleep, for she never come out. In a way I couldn’t say I blamed her none. But what else could I have done? So finally I give Mr. Holmes back his empty milk glass and left.

  And then the next day it rained, all day and again that night, too, and I could not have tried seeing Jenny again if I had cared to. I believe my luck would have been no better anyhow, rain or no rain. So I give up altogether for a time.

  It was good to see the rain at that. It was long overdue. And it was nice to have the day quieted down for a change. I mean, not always the hot sun and everything bright and shiny in it wherever you looked. The gray looked good for a change.

  It cleared about ten the next morning. I took a walk around the place with Rodney and the rain was still dripping from the leaves and from the weeds and bushes along the road, and the shed where he milked his uncle’s Guernseys was solid mud. The floor was, I mean.

  But for the rest, the rain had done things good. You could see it. All except the gully down the middle of Mr. Blankhard’s corn. You could see that, too, but it hadn’t done it no good at all. Just dug it deeper and spread some more red dirt around in the field below. Me and Rodney went and looked at it. The rain had cleaned out the weeds and other trash that had blown or grown in it for a time, and it looked fresh and new and like the whole thing had just been dug over night. And there was new little gullies, as well as the old ones, leading down into it, all up and down the field, from either side. Rodney said it looked like pictures you see on a map of a river with all the other little rivers coming into it, and I guess in a way it did. To me it looked more like a nice stand of corn about to get washed from the side of a hill.

  That afternoon around two the rain come back again, only this time it come in out of the south and was blowed along by a wind and come in spells mostly, raining all the time but sometimes easy and sometimes hard and being blowed around a lot. It brought Mr. Blankhard’s stock all up to the barn by midafternoon, though what good that barn could have done them could only have seemed that way to a cow. They could have done better out under a tree.

  I went down at milking time and watched Rodney milk. The rain leaking down through the roof of the barn and dripping all around had a sound more wet and soggy about it than rain just beating down on the ground. If I had of been Rodney I would have just as soon milked them cows outside.

  In the morning the wind had let up but the rain was still coming down steady. I got up and looked around at the sky and it looked like the rain had hardly got started good. It don’t take much rain, raining steady, for it to get to be enough for me. By noon I had the feeling I had been sitting and watching it rain for at least a week. And hearing it. You get tired of the sound of it, like somebody rapping on a door somewhere and too dumb to quit. And when it rains, there is even less to do on the Hill than when it don’t, though you would think that was impossible to begin with.

  So about three in the afternoon I figured I might as well get all the way wet as just sit around feeling wet, and I put on some rain clothes and went over to Mr. Blankhard’s place to get Rodney. I figured I would show him what that gully of his uncle’s looked like being dug. In fact I was curious to see the thing myself.

  Rodney was sitting on their back porch trying to drown out the sound of the rain on the roof by playing his guitar. That must have been what he was doing because he was beating away at the thing real hard, but with the sound of that rain you could not make out the chord of C from the chord of F if you tried.

  “Rodney,” I said, “if you don’t mind getting wet some, I expect that gully is quite a sight right now.”

  “We will sure get wet, all right,” Rodney said, but he went in the house and come back with a raincoat and we went.

  We went out through his uncle’s front gate and down toward the creek. The rain had made the road mostly mud, and when we come to the creek we seen it was high, and also mostly mud, from the dirt washed into it from the road and elsewhere. We stopped and leaned on the rail and looked at it. “That is the reddest-colored water I ever seen,” Rodney said.

  “It is more a matter of being mud,” I said, “but take a good look at it because there goes some of your uncle’s corn field for sure.”

  Rodney turned and looked up the road toward the Bays’. You could just see his uncle’s field from the bridge. From this far away it just looked like some corn doing fine up there on the side of a hill. “You mean it come this far?” Rodney said.

  “If you went to fill that gully back up,” I said, “you would have to have dirt brung in in trucks or a hole dug somewhere around there to get it from. So where has it went?”

  Rodney turned and looked back at the creek and then up at the rain and then around and back at the creek again. I could see it was coming clear to him. “This must have come from some place, all right,” he said.

  So we stayed and watched the creek some more, and then we went on up the road toward the field. By this time we was soaked. That rain just kept raining, steady and hard and heavy.

  Half the time we was walking in mud, so we come up on it slow. From far enough off it looked all right, but when yo
u got closer you seen how the hill was cut down the middle by the gully. And then when you got closer yet you seen the little gullies coming in from each side, all crooked and running down across each other, and every which way you could think of except maybe up. In a way the whole thing looked like a spread-open book that some kid had scrawled on with a crayon. It looked practically ruined, even though you seen the corn. Then we come up even with it and went through the fence and walked over to the bottom of the gully and stood and watched it.

  You couldn’t see exactly where all of it come from, but down near the end of it next to us the muddy water must have been running three feet deep. It just spilled out into the weeds around like it was being poured from barrels. I mean it come in waves like that, one after the other. And looking up, all you could see was the little trickles coming in up near the top and then all the way down it, more of them, getting bigger, and all of it adding to what was already there until in the end it come out at the bottom deep enough and thick enough with mud so that if you had went and tried to walk up it it would have knocked you down. At least neither me nor Rodney tried it. We just stood and looked.

  Standing there looking at a thing like that, it gives a different feeling to the rain coming down on you all the time. I mean you notice it more. I seen Rodney look up once and then kind of draw in, the way a person will do when the rain is cold, only this one wasn’t, and I knew why he done it. I felt the same way myself. Like a simple thing like rain, even, is not so little a thing at that.

  “Well,” I said, “now you have seen it being dug.”

  All Rodney done was nod his head. Then he pointed up the hill. “What is that corn leaning crooked from?” he said. I had noticed it myself. Where some of them smaller streams was running they had loosened up the corn. There was none of it down, but looking straight up the rows the way we was we could see some of it leaned clean over into the next row. It never should have done that.