brown on her nightshirt sleeve, and she began to suck the sweet stain out.
“I wish it was that simple, little bit, that I could just give them rain whenever they thought they needed it. Reach farther.”
She did, stretching her mind until it ran thin as watercolor paint, until it bumped against a massing, angry wetness far out to sea.
“Feel that? That’s coming in a day or two, and none of them know it yet. I’m not going to be able to stop it, but I can calm it down and spread it out enough so that it’ll be more good than harm, if the ground isn’t waterlogged when it gets here. We have to give people what they need, not what they think they need.”
Sally remembers this now, and she thinks that she understands.
She thinks about the moment the day before, when he looked at her and his eyes focused. When he said her name. Then she turns her thoughts upward, into the heavily laden air. Moisture. Cloud, even: mare’s-tails. She remembers a phrase from grade school, and stretches out across the bay, to the city where her grandfather once drank away the memory of rain. Condensation nuclei. And there it is: auto exhaust and smoke and coal dust, hanging lightly in the air. She finds a breeze, gives it a twist, and pulls the particles across the bay like teasing knots out of her sister Lilly’s hair. It is a gradual process, and her pace slows as she waits. The ambient moisture begins to bead and grow heavy, a million pregnant bellies. Then, she brings it down.
The first drop she catches on her tongue, and then the million others plummet after. Suddenly the wind is whipping by like the gale she raised when she was seven years old, and the raindrops are falling like hailstones, stinging her face. She breathes deeply. It smells like her grandfather.
CHAPTER IV
1876
O UT OF E DEN
I t was June, and the air in her father’s house in Franklin County, Kentucky, was thick with unfallen rain, had a physicality to it that made breathing difficult. It was the sort of day for which porch sitting had been made, but her father had dragged Medora up to her room by the hair just after breakfast—she’d managed to say something, or do something, or not do something, that riled him. At eighteen the dragging was quite undignified, but preferable to the other physical manners in which he sometimes expressed his temper.
Her room was more pleasant than his company, in any circumstance.
When it had become clear that he wouldn’t be coming back to let her out for a good while she had stripped nearly naked, skinning off dress, shoes, stockings, and layers and layers of petticoat until all that was left was her thin muslin chemise, so that she felt peeled and, if not new, at least not so hot. She’d displaced her masses of curling green potted plants, morning glory and English ivy, columbine, aloe, clematis, and the trailing philodendron that threatened to pull the curtains down, so that she could roost on the broad windowsill. The anemic breezeserved only to make her chemise stick to her gleaming skin, but one of her grandfather’s books was open across her legs, with more stacked from the floor to her hip yet untouched. She spent an inordinate amount of time in this room, in this manner; she often thought that her father might as well brick her up like a nun, for all the time she was given the run of the place; at least then they’d keep from touching off one another’s tempers.
The sound of an unfamiliar voice outside made her look up, twitch the edge of the curtain aside just enough to let her see without being seen.
He was a tall young man, younger than most of the men that came to see her father on business, and dressed more expensively as well, in city clothes with the stiff and shine of newness still in them. Her father walked beside him, leading his stallion Mercury with ease and comfort in his shoulders, even though he had to be stifling in the double-breasted waistcoat and jacket that he wore. Watching
“I wish it was that simple, little bit, that I could just give them rain whenever they thought they needed it. Reach farther.”
She did, stretching her mind until it ran thin as watercolor paint, until it bumped against a massing, angry wetness far out to sea.
“Feel that? That’s coming in a day or two, and none of them know it yet. I’m not going to be able to stop it, but I can calm it down and spread it out enough so that it’ll be more good than harm, if the ground isn’t waterlogged when it gets here. We have to give people what they need, not what they think they need.”
Sally remembers this now, and she thinks that she understands.
She thinks about the moment the day before, when he looked at her and his eyes focused. When he said her name. Then she turns her thoughts upward, into the heavily laden air. Moisture. Cloud, even: mare’s-tails. She remembers a phrase from grade school, and stretches out across the bay, to the city where her grandfather once drank away the memory of rain. Condensation nuclei. And there it is: auto exhaust and smoke and coal dust, hanging lightly in the air. She finds a breeze, gives it a twist, and pulls the particles across the bay like teasing knots out of her sister Lilly’s hair. It is a gradual process, and her pace slows as she waits. The ambient moisture begins to bead and grow heavy, a million pregnant bellies. Then, she brings it down.
The first drop she catches on her tongue, and then the million others plummet after. Suddenly the wind is whipping by like the gale she raised when she was seven years old, and the raindrops are falling like hailstones, stinging her face. She breathes deeply. It smells like her grandfather.
CHAPTER IV
1876
O UT OF E DEN
I t was June, and the air in her father’s house in Franklin County, Kentucky, was thick with unfallen rain, had a physicality to it that made breathing difficult. It was the sort of day for which porch sitting had been made, but her father had dragged Medora up to her room by the hair just after breakfast—she’d managed to say something, or do something, or not do something, that riled him. At eighteen the dragging was quite undignified, but preferable to the other physical manners in which he sometimes expressed his temper.
Her room was more pleasant than his company, in any circumstance.
When it had become clear that he wouldn’t be coming back to let her out for a good while she had stripped nearly naked, skinning off dress, shoes, stockings, and layers and layers of petticoat until all that was left was her thin muslin chemise, so that she felt peeled and, if not new, at least not so hot. She’d displaced her masses of curling green potted plants, morning glory and English ivy, columbine, aloe, clematis, and the trailing philodendron that threatened to pull the curtains down, so that she could roost on the broad windowsill. The anemic breezeserved only to make her chemise stick to her gleaming skin, but one of her grandfather’s books was open across her legs, with more stacked from the floor to her hip yet untouched. She spent an inordinate amount of time in this room, in this manner; she often thought that her father might as well brick her up like a nun, for all the time she was given the run of the place; at least then they’d keep from touching off one another’s tempers.
The sound of an unfamiliar voice outside made her look up, twitch the edge of the curtain aside just enough to let her see without being seen.
He was a tall young man, younger than most of the men that came to see her father on business, and dressed more expensively as well, in city clothes with the stiff and shine of newness still in them. Her father walked beside him, leading his stallion Mercury with ease and comfort in his shoulders, even though he had to be stifling in the double-breasted waistcoat and jacket that he wore. Watching
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