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

  The thing is that Mr. Blankhard actually come from a long line of well-off Blankhards, and he had actually been a rich banker himself once, in Memphis; or a banker, anyhow. And rich enough so that when the retiring notion and this breeding business took him, he could buy up the Millses’ place and fix it over and then load it down with some of the best-bred pigs and cows and chickens—and one big white horse—such as people around here has only seen at the State Fair, if at all.

  But he was not so rich that he could go on buying feed for them animals forever, and when he tried growing some of his own, a lot of his fine-bred animals took to looking poorly awful quick. You can not feed a pen full of pure-bred foreign imported pigs on corn nubbins, rotten potatoes and table slop from two people; this, and give them no shade at all, not in Alabama. Them what didn’t die the summer of the year Mr. Blankhard really started farming looked like piny-woods stock by the middle of the winter, and was twice as wild. They was wild for food, Pa said. So the pigs went, that is they died, mostly of hunger, and then the chickens, due to filth—good breeding don’t hold up against filth no time at all—until by now there was still left only that big white horse, two Guernsey cows, and a prize bull calf which Pa said cost enough to feed the whole blue-ribbon bunch for a year.

  But none of this bothered Mr. Blankhard none that I could tell. He kept neat and cool and calm through it all, probably figuring that some day, by proper breeding, a kind of chicken could be brought about that would just naturally do the same, and for the time laying it up to God that even the best-bred chickens will make a mess where you keep them, and sometimes even die from it. He took quite a loss that year, Pa said, but he took it well. It may have bothered Mrs. Blankhard some, the whole business, I mean, but you couldn’t tell about that because she never said nothing about the farm at all. She’d talk about Memphis now and then, but that was it.

  And one thing I knew when I seen Rodney finally come out of his uncle’s house about nine in the morning was that he sure wasn’t no more of a natural farmer than his uncle was. He, or somebody, had got him a regular Western outfit, including high-heel boots and a imitation Stetson. You see a real Stetson once in a while in Alabama, and we got a lot of cows, but nobody ever said we was West. In that outfit he looked more unnatural than he had the day before. And worst of all, he had got himself a lasso, the real thing.

  I stayed on my porch and watched him awhile, and he walked up and down the yard a few times trying out the hat and boots and then he got busy with his fancy rope. He caught tall weeds and fence posts and small bushes with it. After a while I crossed our road and leaned on his gate and watched him up close. He was pretty good at it. But I could see trouble coming, from the lasso to the hats to the boots. None of it had no place here.

  I stayed by the gate and talked to him awhile about lassoing, and then Jimmy and Andy Bay come up, and I told him who they was, and then we all three leaned on the fence and watched him for a while. He stayed real cool, hardly noticing we was there, though every so often his hat would slide down over his eyes and give him trouble seeing what it was he was trying to catch. Jimmy give him a hard looking over, but he didn’t say nothing. Jimmy don’t always know what to think and he don’t say anything until he does, and even then he is usually about half the time wrong.

  But finally Jimmy turned like he had just noticed I was there and asked me what was I doing. This is what Jimmy will usually say instead of hello, but I guess he had been so took back by the sight of Rodney he had forgot. He will ask this even if it is plain to see that I am either sitting on my tail doing nothing or else busy cutting wood, or like now standing there with him watching at Rodney. He has come and woke me up when I had went to sleep on the front porch swing and sat there looking at his hands until I was woke up good and then said, “What you doing?” Just that. The only thing is, when he asks that, he’s not just asking it; he wants to know. I mean it seems he ain’t ever positive until you tell him. It can be a nuisance.

  “Watching Rodney,” I said, and we went back to watching him some more. Then little Andy asked me was Rodney ever in a circus, and I told him no, he was from up North. Andy let it go at that. Then Rodney must have figured he had lassoed enough weeds for the morning and he coiled up his rope and looked over at me and said shouldn’t we go down to the corral now. The first friendly thing he had said yet.

  Jimmy looked around like he thought maybe Rodney had brung a corral along, too, but I thought he probably meant the lot, so we all went into Mr. Blankhard’s yard and down the path under the pear trees and past the fallen-down grape arbor to the barn. I went first and Jimmy and Andy was behind me and Rodney come last.

  When we got there he come up and stood beside me and I started to explain things to him. “This is not a corral,” I said, “this is your uncle’s lot and it’s a mess.” It was all old plows and leaned-over posts and boards come loose from the barn and left lying, and weeds.

  Jimmy looked around like he was seeing it for the first time. “It sure is,” he said.

  Rodney didn’t say nothing. He just looked. I put this to his favor. “That barn,” I said, “has been trying to fall down since I was a baby and it will make it sure before I am a man.” I was not trying to run down his uncle’s place to Rodney, I just wanted him to get things straight. Otherwise he might have thought that was the way a barn was supposed to be. “It was a good barn once,” I said. We walked around it and then in it and back out again and all Rodney said was that he never knew before that barns don’t have windows, which was something I hadn’t thought of myself until he said it. “Some barns do,” I told him, but his uncle’s didn’t, and I could think of others I knew of that didn’t either.

  Jimmy listened close to all this and looked hard at the barn and then left us and went over and sat under the chinaberry tree and started looking for slivers in his feet. He goes barefoot except to school. He likes to. I even think he likes to get slivers and then have to look for them and dig them out. Gives him something to do.

  So me and little Andy and Rodney went and looked at where Mr. Blankhard had kept his pigs when he had pigs and where he had kept his chickens when he had chickens and then we come back to the lot and all sat down next to Jimmy. “Well,” Rodney said, “it’s not exactly the way I figured it would be.”

  I didn’t know what to say. I felt almost sorry for him.

  “Let’s build a corral,” Andy said, and I just looked at him and he knew to shut up.

  Then Rodney said, “Well,” again, and got up and walked off by his self, and I let him. I didn’t even watch to see where he went, and I guess I should have, because the next time I looked he was standing looking at Mr. Blankhard’s prize bull calf which had wandered in from the pasture and was now standing and looking at Rodney, face to face, so to speak, and Rodney was swinging his lasso in great big circles over both their heads. If I’d of seen it sooner I’d of stopped it, but there weren’t no time. The calf stood there and let Rodney rope him. He just weren’t expecting such a thing.

  The bull calf, better than a yearling, too, stood for a minute. Then Rodney give a jerk with his end of the rope and the calf give a jerk with his, and Rodney’s big Stetson come down over his face and hung there. Then Rodney jerked again, and the calf took off. Then I seen that the rope was wrapped around Rodney’s wrist so that he was fixed to it just as good as the calf was.

  Like in his yard, there is a lot of tall weeds in Mr. Blankhard’s lot, too, so I couldn’t always tell when Rodney was running or when he was being bounced or being drug. A rope around a bull calf’s neck don’t calm him none when it starts getting tighter, and making it tighter was about all that Rodney was doing. With them high-heel boots and that Stetson down over his face, it must have felt to Rodney like he was being drug through a train tunnel. And I don’t suppose it was much better when the hat come off, because then he got to take a look at the things he was fixing to get run into next. I don’t know if I was helping any either, but I was moving around try
ing to head the calf into a corner where we could maybe get him down. I guess Jimmy was just watching.

  Rodney was taking a beating, though. He hit some posts and one time the barn and was drug through a small briar patch, and finally even lost both boots; and them Western boots can be hard to get off. Once or twice I seen his face, and I swear I think that for a while he thought he was holding that calf, that he was winning. At least he didn’t look scared. Surprised maybe, but serious, like this was the way he supposed it always was, and if it was tougher than he had figured, he wasn’t letting on.

  But nobody can be bounced over old plow stocks and nail kegs and banged into posts and drug through weeds like he was without it starting to hurt; and finally, still serious, I could see the tears start coming down his face through the dirt.

  By this time I had worked the calf pretty well down to one corner of the lot, and it looked like he was winding. Then I heard Jimmy, and I looked back. Jimmy was sitting under the chinaberry tree holding one foot in both hands like he had meant to let go of it but had forgot. “Rodney,” he hollered, “you better turn that bull calf loose; yonder come Mr. Blankhard.”

  If I’d had a rock I would have flung it at him. By the time Mr. Blankhard got there, I had got the calf by the head and Rodney had come up and between us we had dumped him. I was sitting on his head while Rodney got his rope back, when Mr. Blankhard walked up to us.

  “Is he hurt?” he said.

  I knew he meant the calf, so I didn’t say yes or no.

  “I lost my boots,” Rodney said. “I think I done it wrong somehow.”

  I sat there on the calf’s head, waiting for just about anything, but Mr. Blankhard seemed to take it calm. “We’ll discuss this later, Rodney,” he said, and then to me, “and I believe that you can get up now, Jack.” I did, and the calf did, too, and Mr. Blankhard watched him trot off, and then he and Rodney walked back up the path. I looked around the lot until I found both Rodney’s boots—they was bad scuffed up—and then Jimmy and Andy and me went out by the lot gate and up our road to the house.

  I took Rodney his boots back after dinner. He sure looked a mess. He was sitting on the back steps and he got up and thanked me real polite for the boots and then sat back down. I could see he didn’t want to talk none. He crossed one leg over the other and held his knee with his hands and sort of rocked back and forth and looked out at the old chicken run like he was enjoying the view. His eyes was a little red from crying, and he had a big lump over one eye and a lot of scratches, but it was like he was sitting there trying to act like none of it had ever happened. I guess his pride was the most hurt of all. But it was a funny way he had about it, just sitting there, sort of rocking, and not saying anything. He’d combed his hair real nice again, which made the scratches and the lump look even worse.

  Then my sister Ellen come over. I guess she had come to borrow something. When she come around the corner and seen Rodney she stopped and I could see how quick she felt for him. She sort of stood back for a minute and then she give me a hard look, like maybe I done it, and I told her he got drug through the lot by Mr. Blankhard’s prize bull calf.

  Then she done a strange thing. She plopped down on the step right below him, even in her nice dress, so that her face was near even with his, and then she reached up and touched the big lump over his eye, which was still getting bigger. “How awful,” she said. The way she sat there he had to look right at her. I think she was going to say something else, but all of a sudden he jerked his hands up to his face and started in crying. And for a minute I thought Ellen was going to put her arms right around him, but she didn’t. She got up and picked up his boots and looked at them, and then went on into the house.

  He was hardly making any noise at all, but he was crying hard, so I went back home.

  For a while I sat around on our porch until Ma came and said why didn’t I go play with Rodney—she still thinks everybody but grown men go play if they go anywhere—so I told her what had happened.

  “Maybe there is something you can do,” she said.

  “It’s too late,” I said. “There is nothing will help him now but time.”

  “Jack,” Ma said, “I wish you would not be so proud of having so hard a heart. It is no more a thing to be proud of than being mean.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” I said.

  “It is something you will get over,” she said. “I know you will. But in the meantime try and not be proud about it. Because you will have to be proud all by yourself.” Then she left me.

  It was like it had been me that done it all. When if it hadn’t been for me Rodney might still have been being drug around by that prize bull calf, by this time hollering his head off. So I got up and went down past Rodney’s house to the creek and got a stick and went looking for snakes. You wade along by the shore and poke up under the rooty places and back in the holes and you can scare out a lot of things including snakes. I have got two moccasins that way. A moccasin can be fatal, Pa says.

  It looked to me like Rodney was not going to be so much company after all.

  3

  The next morning I went out and fooled around in our front yard and watched for Rodney, but his shame was too great, I guess, and he stayed hid. Besides the shame of it he must have been hurting some, too. The way it is with me, I get in a fight and at the time nothing hurts much at all and right after the fight if I win or lose I am proud, and if my nose is swoll up so big I can see it with both my eyes, and there is still some blood smeared on my clothes and maybe I have sprained a finger bad where I swung high and hit a head, well, it is nothing to me the rest of that day, and I’ll admit it. There is no doubt that something has happened then, and I have been right in the middle of it, and for that it is a small price to pay, as they say.

  But the next day it is clear that it is all forgot by everyone but me and I suppose the other fellow, but speaking for myself it is the next day after I have slept and all the rest have forgot that I hurt. I will go around school all day practically crying over my swoll-up nose if I so much as bump against somebody, and my finger will hurt so I can not button my shirt or squeeze down on a pencil, and I will just kind of limp around and hold back, and the world it seems will go right on without me, no one even knowing how I hurt, and I would just as soon not be there at all. So I can see how Rodney may have felt, because he had took on that calf like a man but got whipped like a boy, and the day after such a thing as that I could see how he would do best to stay by himself.

  So I just watched for him awhile, curious to see the damage now that it had set, but finally when it started getting hot I went and got my rifle and left.

  Ma don’t like me to hunt but Pa says let me, so sometimes when there is nothing else to do I take the .22 bolt-action single-shot Pa got me last Christmas and go looking for things with it, but not too often, as it don’t do to push a win against Ma too far, even if Pa is on my side. I have told Ma it is just in case of snakes and she says there is more to be feared of one boy with a gun than a whole woods full of snakes, and Pa said, what if my life is at stake, and she says the lives that have been saved by guns are nothing to all the lives that have been lost by them and she would sooner trust me in the woods to God or keep me out of them altogether than to send me in there to slaughter songbirds and for all she knowed have a hunting accident myself, in the name of defending myself from snakes. She and Pa have argued this plenty. Pa understands, but Ma, she just don’t like the sight of blood in any form.

  So what I do is, I usually sneak the gun out if I can, even though I don’t actually have to. Anyhow, I am still trying to use up the special bargain shells Pa got with the gun from the catalogue, which about one-third of them don’t fire at all while another third go piff instead of whap and you can practically see the bullet fall out the end of the gun, and with the other third I usually miss what I am shooting at anyhow, so for a while yet I don’t see where either me or no songbirds is in any special danger.

  I did a dumb thing with th
at gun, though, the day I got it, Christmas. I took it down by the branch and tried it out, and them shells that didn’t work I kept, and when I come home everybody was sitting around celebrating Christmas and the front room was full and somebody asked me how was the gun and I said fine but half those shells was blanks, and then I throwed the blank ones in the fire in the fireplace.

  In no time at all that room was empty, the womenfolk bolting for the kitchen and the men for outside, Pa sort of knocking me out the door first and then the rest following. Outside we stood around listening to the women hollering back in the kitchen and them blanks going off in the empty room, like firecrackers, and Pa tried to count them, but they was too fast and too scattered and it wouldn’t have done no good anyhow because I never knowed how many I threw in there in the first place. A whole pocketful. So we had to stand around and wait until the fire went down, until finally Cousin Nat, who was drinking as usual despite it was Christmas, said he would go in and recapture the fort, which the others let him do. What he done was taken out the ashes. There was no way else to be sure. Them blanks can be tricky. Then we all went back in and all there was was a hole in the ceiling and a few burned places in the rug where the ashes had been scattered.

  Surprising little damage, Pa said.

  I was not allowed to use the gun again until my birthday, in April. That’s why I still had so many of those dud shells still to go.

  This morning, though, I took the gun without Ma seeing me and went down the road past Mr. Blankhard’s and across the creek bridge and then was out of sight of the house. Then I cut over onto Mr. Blankhard’s land and started working back toward the branch, which goes behind Mr. Blankhard’s house as well as ours and is a good place for squirrels in season. Except when it rains, when it’s worse to walk in than a swamp. It’s like trying to wade through a creek full of trees.