Read Online I Will Send Rain by Rae Meadows - Free Book Online Page A

but he had not been invited. He jumped off the porch and ran behind the chicken coop to check his trap, which he’d fashioned from an old crate. If it worked, a rabbit would hop in through the door he’d cut, nibble at the piece of cabbage—stolen from his mother’s garden—and the movement would knock loose a gate of chicken wire, which would fall and capture it. He didn’t know what he’d do with it after he caught it, but maybe he could fashion a leash out of twine.
    Fred panted, unable to get a breath in deep. He came around the henhouse to find the crate knocked over and the cabbage gone. This was his third failed contraption. He wandered toward what was left of the old grazing land around the dry pond to look for bones. There was a bone market out near the railroad, bone meal being the cheapest way to fertilize. They paid by the ton, he’d heard, and he was pretty sure he was getting there now that there were all kinds of bones to be found: coyotes, rabbits, birds, bats, raccoons, squirrels. He’d hauled a whole cow skeleton, piece by piece, from the middle of what was left of the pond. His pile of bones formed a white tower in the dying light.
    He picked up a cow skull, heavy in his hand, still warm from the day’s heat. He hurled it with both hands as hard as he could at the lone cottonwood on the pond’s edge. The crack of breaking bone felt clean and good. He gulped in a not-quite-full breath and yawned.
    Sugar cookies would make him feel better. Birdie was right. He scampered off, in the direction of home.
    *   *   *
    S AMUEL 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.
    â€œI brought some cookies,” Samuel said, unfolding a butter-spotted napkin.
    â€œAnnie 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.