Rain
by W.A. Smith
These things:
the cat, long ill with a stomach disorder and blind
in one eye, dropped dead on the back porch in the
middle of his dinner.
One of the rose bushes opened into audacious
crimson while the other, standing right beside, sharing
the same old nutrients and encouragement, refused
comment.
Two children, twin daughters of the
young Korean couple up the street, fell from the roof
where they'd been playing astronaut. One girl cracked
her left leg, the other her right. Both were clean,
ingenuous fractures.
An earthquake shuddered and rolled,
and the ramshackle mansion so long seated on the hill
at the end of the street disappeared. Only the hand-carved
front door remains, abandoned on the sogged green
slope amid bricks, glass and boards.
The mailman twice delivered letters
that were clearly intended for my father, a retired
Marine aviator who lived in this house during peace-time
years and left one evening in a pine box draped with
the flag.
A friend of mine, despondent over lost
love and too much cocaine, telephoned at 3am to say
he was considering suicide. He wondered if I had any
novel ideas. I figured suicide ought to be a confidential
sort of arrangement and added that perhaps there was
no such thing anymore as a novel one—but finally
I did suggest he nail himself to the curvy, soaring
maple in his backyard. My friend was persuaded auto-annihilation
should have a personal, self-igniting touch to it,
observing that crucifixion would require outside help
with the hammering. The idea was therefore discarded.
Some mob or organization in one of the
Latin American principalities put an explosive device
in a bus and snuffed out four American nuns who had
traveled to that tropical wonderland to spread the
word.
Friday it rained. Saturday the same.
Sunday, early, the sun flared up like Christ come
back—then side-stepped into a black cumulonimbus
shaped like a 1968 Buick, and the sheets of articulate
rain which immediately followed gave Friday and Saturday
the cast of summer postcards.
In other words, it didn't have the texture
of a time when I should be laying any plans. I read
a little: Hamsun's Hunger and Oë's A
Personal Matter. And I made a cake that fell as
if it had been foretold in the directions on the side
of the box. Flat Brown Cake they might have called
it.
I also read my father's mail with genuine
interest. One letter was from the Social Security
Administration, said he had some benefits headed his
way. The other was a curious note, handwritten in
forthright, devoted language, from a lad who had read
a newspaper article about the old Marine. The kid
said more than anything he yearned to be an excellent
aviator when he grew up. His chief concern was how
to get to it, how to make his lucid inspiration into
wings. I typed a reply: Flying is for doves and fools,
I said, yet it can be elevating. The Marines, on the
other hand, are no joy at all. I was forced into it
by a jingoistic, diabolical father and a half-witted
mother who honored Doris Day above all else. If you're
dead set on flying, try one of the commercial airlines.
The stewardesses are mostly pretty, the meals aren't
bad, kamikazes are few and far between.
I read and reread my response, considering
I had done my dead father a service, not to mention
his young apprentice. Then I walked in the rain to
the P O. It seemed to me the envelope in my pocket
was singing its sound advice.
Later, the Korean girls are healing
well enough. The mansion is still missing from the
end of the street, and officials of the local Preservation
Society, in an effort to soften the fact that they
were unable to preserve this one, will be fastening
a commemorative plaque to the deserted lot, soon as
the rain lets up. The four nuns—most of them—have
been returned home and buried in the USA; parts were
necessarily left in Latin America. Their names were
Rebecca, Sarah, Mary and Shirley. It is absolutely
the first time I have ever heard of a nun named Shirley.
A great commotion is brewing over their murders, the
act has been called barbaric. The international press
is in a lather. A church spokesperson has confirmed
that these women were servants of the Lord, their
work will go on. I wonder if this continuing labor
will be accompanied by more disintegrating buses,
but I keep it to myself. Walter, the cat, with his
turquoise cornea, has also gone to ground. He was
seventeen years old for a day. His work will not go
on. One of a kind, old Walt was, and I've nearly decided
not to get another cat for a long time. The rose bushes,
one vibrant and the other dormant, I leave to the
rain.
My friend tried to hang himself and
found it resistibly painful. He called to tell me
suicide is not all it's cracked up to be. He says
he'll take the harder road, life, and write stories
instead.
"Too young to die," he remarks,
quite without humor, snorting routinely to hold his
nose together.
I do not have the moolah for cocaine,
and the lost love of my life was lost so long ago,
it is difficult to remember the attraction. I am alone
but not lonely. I am young. If the sun will show its
face for a day or two, everything could be turned
around and redesigned—a new way of seeing might
be attempted.
I am immovable. The weather seals me
in. The nuns' death and the cat's death are surely
connected somehow. My father stalks this hushed place
whispering, shouting, things like: The Marines
are a sharp bunch who make it safe for you to be the
fool you are. This ghost has a way about him,
and what he says is not entirely lost on me—plus
I feel rotten for reading his mail.
It's the rain holding me. It carries
every voice I've heard or overheard, the fabric of
a cocoon. I am bathed in information. I don't think
I'm making this up, these are voices to be reckoned
with—coding as random and substantial as the
furniture in this room. No wind. Only rain coming
straight down, crystal drops striking the tree limbs
and bleeding roses in exactly the same way each time.
The water is very clean, and this clarity is significantly
enhanced by what has become a cloudless sky, almost
bright, although the hermit sun is nowhere to be seen.
How is it water seeps constantly from a cloudless
sky? And how are voices carried for such duration?
My daddy says his father was understandably
jingoistic, never diabolical. He remarks bitterly
that his mother had more wits and sensitivity in her
pinkie finger than I've got in my whole-entire body.
You have no right, he tells me. It's true, I believe
him. They were my grandparents, after all. Their blood
runs in me. Still it rains as if there were no yesterday.
Sometime soon I intend to go out and see if the voices
are the same out there as they are in here.
My lost love insinuates I did not care—and
I say I cared too much, far too much. Clearly and
emphatically I state nobody could love the way I wanted
to love. Clear as a madman talking to himself; emphatic
as a politician barking promises in just about any
town you've got.
Most pilots were fly-boys once,
my father informs me. I'm certain he's right. The
rain howls low like Walt wanting to be let in. I do
not move toward the door or away from it.
She says, Can't we just wash each
other's wounds and walk away? She says it several
times; she doesn't think I listen to her. I don't
want to walk away. I'm tired of leaving one spent
venture and moving on to the next.
Unsuddenly the mailman is at the door,
something's in the box. I cannot get up, although
I might like to. Perhaps the enthusiastic lad is sending
me half-fare tickets to Hawaii, or he's personally
going to fly me to the rain forests of the Amazon
where voices come in foreign tongues and do not speak
directly to me. That would be a pleasant change. The
unopened rose bush I observe so closely trembles without
a motion, effortlessly clenched.
The earth has turned to mud and there
seems to be no turning back. I almost expect the truant
mansion to reappear, carried whole and set down again
on its hallowed hill by the water flowing so purposefully
through the streets. The Korean family just ripped
by on a large raft. They looked fed-up with the naturalization
process. They had their refrigerator with them, the
twins' hard white legs were sealed and glistening
in clear plastic wrap. This neighborhood may be coming
apart at the seams.
The friend who considered suicide says
he's begun a short story, speaking by way of the rain
because the phone lines have been down for some time.
He tells me his story concerns a place where it never
rains, the people pray for a downpour. “Any god
who satisfies their craving will be the one they choose,”
he says. I suggest he stick to what he knows, and
his voice becomes hollow, serene, as though the lynching
finally took.
"Sometimes you go too far,"
the new writer says.
The nuns swoosh by in four inner tubes
lashed together with rope. Shirley is in the lead
tube, her short dark hair is blown back. Her face
blurs as if she's still in the newspaper, yet she's
gallant and determined. All of them are grinning and
lifting their legs up high so their sharp little black
shoes won't touch the churning water. I think they
have grenades hooked to their habits. They don't utter
a word, but I can tell they're bound for the principalities
of Latin America, coursing downstreet with divine
momentum.
"You could use this Marine aviator!"
I scream, but they're gone.
Softly a grizzled voice in foul-weather
gear says, Latin is a dead language and so is America.
The pronouncement of this sentence has the cadence
of water pouring into a funnel.
Is the sky dark because the mind of
the rain has changed, or is it night coming on? I
can't see the clock from where I am. I'm trying to
remember going to high school or college, attempting
to recall parties and weddings and class reunions,
talking with other people, maybe getting a little
drunk, running a risk or two. But I can't remember
much. Whatever voice I hear, the information remains
unchanged.
So it's come to this: speaking only
of itself, tirelessly chanting the one fertile word:
rain.
