Tremble (9 page)

When the coyote nudged the rainmaker awake he was sobbing. Jacob touched the wetness in wonder, unable to remember the last time he had cried. He lay on the expensive Belgian bed linen, dread clawing at the pit of his stomach, the beauty of the young woman troubling him in an entirely new way.

He opened the door of the trailer and sat for a time on its steps. The coyote began a long desperate howl at the sun. As Jacob watched a line of fire ants divert around the cracks in the burned earth, he started to wonder whether there wasn’t a seam of heroism in his soul after all? Who was she? What was her connection to the preacher? Why hadn’t he seen her with the other townsfolk? Trailing his finger in the dust he found himself haunted by the thought of seeing her again. The question was—how?

His reverie was broken by a loud screech. The turkey vulture watched him from the top of the fence, its eye a swiveling raisin in the plucked anger of its head.

The sun shone and the drought continued. A dozen more of Jeremiah’s cattle keeled over, the tarmac began to melt and crack along the edges of the main street, and Chad was obliged to reduce water rations to one shower a week. It was miserable. The townsfolk despaired; three more farmers committed suicide; and several families packed up and headed east. But still the rainmaker continued to camp at the edge of town.

Jacob had taken to sunbathing on the roof of his trailer, naked except for a leather thong. His long lean body was like a panther’s. Reflected countless times in the mirrored surface of the trailer, he was an erotic deity filling the sky. Many of the women found themselves watching him. Each secretly found time to spy on the rainmaker as he applied coconut oil to his glistening flesh in languid studied gestures, his massaging fingers promising a sensual knowledge that made them tremble in anticipation.

As he lay there, the sun heating his flesh, he sensed the rising hostility of the menfolk. The drought would go on, for as long as he let it. This was a fact as true as his knowledge of the woman the preacher kept hidden. The image of her had begun to possess Jacob and he found himself conjuring impossible schemes: he would use the rain to distract the preacher and then he would rescue her. His mind whirled dangerously as the sun fried his skin.

The outrageous nature of Jacob’s demand had swept through the town and was debated at the bar and at every fireplace. One precocious seven-year-old even wrote a school essay about him. The whole community was in a fever. Publicly the town closed its ranks and condemned him; privately opinion was divided. The men wanted rain and the women…Well, the women had begun to want the rainmaker.

Cheri Winchester, the mayor’s wife, found herself dreaming of swimming naked with the bronzed stranger. One morning there was actually a little moisture staining the sheets, as if her body had retained and then released a liquid trace of the slow salty dance that haunted her nights. While in other beds, in other streets, other women twisted around those muscular limbs in somnambulant passion like ballerinas under water, to wake disappointed, their bodies still clenching around a void, beside their sleeping husbands.

At the book clubs and knitting circles the women’s vitriol knew no bounds. At the same time they blushed, terrified that the others might guess how they had been occupied during the night.

“Have you seen the way he struts up and down in that thong? He might as well be buck naked!” the postmistress hissed through her false teeth and dropped a stitch.

“You’ve got to admit, he’s a fine-looking fella,” replied the mayor’s mother, a well-preserved sixty-seven who wasn’t above a little sexual dalliance herself.

“I wish he’d lose the thong, then we’d be able to judge his wares, turkey neck and all!” cracked the schoolteacher, and the whole knitting circle, whose combined ages totaled over five hundred years, burst into raucous laughter.

Jacob managed to strike up a friendship with the postman, an irrepressibly cheerful Latino who delivered the mail on a huge Harley Davidson with a racoon skull strapped to the handlebars.

“So tell me about the preacher—has he got a woman?” the rainmaker asked casually.

“No, man, that unholy bastard lives alone. And I’ll tell you something else, ever since he moved into his house no one has been inside and he has it rigged up like a castle. High security—I’m telling you, the guy is one nasty gringo.”

Through the iron gate Jacob could see the bell tower rising up from the neat brick church. Under one of the eaves, hidden in the shadows, was a diamond-shaped barred window. It fascinated him. He turned in the direction of the preacher’s house and scanned the building, the tendrils of his intuition curling like invisible smoke across the walls. Regardless of sensing the girl’s presence, he couldn’t locate her.

On the other side of the brick wall the preacher sat crouched over his desk composing his sermon for the week. Its theme was the dangers of charlatans during times of natural disaster. Despite the dryness of his everyday speech, Bill Williams was a powerful orator. He had a certain charisma and his smooth manners were attractive to sectors of the ravaged rural community. His thinly disguised racism provided a convenient scapegoat in hard times. Three African-American families had left the town since his arrival; there had been an incident where masked men had severely beaten a young Mexican boy; and a “KKK” had been burned into the wooden walls of the local schoolhouse. Neither the sheriff nor the mayor had been able to catch the perpetrators. It was as if the town had closed ranks in a great wall of silence. Bill Williams relished such support. He knew the town officials were secretly frightened of him and he was determined to undermine their power.

As he wrote, a flock of finches nestling in the desiccated tree outside
his window burst into song. Without turning around Bill Williams knew that his daughter had entered the room.

“It will be ready to type in half an hour,” he growled, then, mistaking her silence for sullenness, he turned. Bill’s daughter was as exquisite as he was ugly. At twenty she had the kind of beauty that sucked the breath away like a sudden punch to the diaphragm. Long curly dark hair cascaded down to her waist. She had deep brown eyes that shone violet in a certain light. Their slanted length and heavy lids gave her an Oriental appearance and heightened the impression of remoteness. She had an angular face softened by youth, but the sharpness of her cheekbones emphasized her fragility. On closer inspection a buried intelligence spoke of a wisdom far beyond her years—which was just as well, for Miranda, the preacher’s daughter, could not speak. She was mute, and had been since birth.

If Preacher Williams had one defining secret in his life it was this: the existence of a daughter who, to his great chagrin, resembled her mother so exactly that every time he looked at her he experienced the same intense mortification he’d felt on the one occasion he’d faltered morally.

It had been his first job, in a poor neighborhood in South Chicago. In those days he had been a shy, awkward youth. His father, whom he adored, had lost his job as a stockkeeper to an immigrant and drank himself to death by the time Bill was thirteen. The boy, whose sensitivity had already made him a target for the local kids, sought refuge in books, particularly the Bible. He soon discovered that if he voiced the racist fears of his community and spiced them up with some religious polemic, he gained a captive audience. It was heady stuff for an adolescent who’d had little love and no respect up to that point in his life. It was only a matter of time before he became a lay preacher and then joined the Aryan Fellowship.

Late one night he came across a young African woman who had been hired to clean the church. As she bent over the pews, polishing the brass rails, the preacher couldn’t help noticing how shapely her behind was, how high her bosom. The poor girl had barely realized that he was standing behind her when suddenly his pent-up anger and frustration exploded. He grabbed her, covered her mouth with his hand, and raped her. Afterward, too terrified to speak, she fled, leaving the preacher drenched in shame, his trousers still around his ankles, curled up on the stone floor like an aberrant child.

Months passed and he’d almost forgotten the incident, until one night a pale brown infant appeared at the foot of the altar, wrapped in an African shawl. As he looked into the baby’s face, she reached up to him, revealing an identical birthmark to his own in exactly the same place on the top of her tiny hand. There could be no doubt. Terrified that his secret might be revealed, the preacher hid the baby in his car. As he drove around aimlessly he thought about all the places he could abandon the baby, but the fear of that telltale birthmark exposing him as a rapist as well as a hypocrite forced a momentous decision. He took her home that night and placed her in a cardboard box for a crib, vowing to keep her hidden from the world.

The baby never cried, and as the child grew older he realized, with a certain amount of relief, that she was mute. Finally he named her Miranda, after Shakespeare’s heroine, deluding himself with the notion of himself as her Prospero.

He looked at his daughter now, sensing a change in her. She was staring at the window that faced the main street. He followed her gaze and, to his intense irritation, saw the rainmaker walking on the other side of the street.

Watching his grace Miranda thought of sunlight catching the top of the ocean’s waves, which was puzzling as she had never seen the sea. So that’s him, the girl thought, the one I felt approaching over the desert, her heart racing with recognition.

The preacher pulled the blinds down with a snap. “If I catch you looking at that abomination again, I’ll blacken the windows in your bedroom for a week,” he threatened, grabbing her wrists. She nodded silently and he let go.

If he had been more observant, he would have noticed that, as she walked out of the room, her hips undulated with the exact same rhythm as the rainmaker’s distinctive gait.

The church was packed. Sweat poured off the overdressed parishioners, running in rivulets under the women’s hats, staining the backs of the men’s crisp white shirts, collecting in beads across the children’s faces. Condensation started to drop from the ceiling. No one noticed; they were all leaning forward in concentration, gathered there for one
reason: to hear the preacher pass judgment. Word of the rainmaker and his terms had spread to the more isolated farming communities, which, in better days, used Sandridge as a market for their cattle and wheat. There were faces the preacher hadn’t seen for years, except at funerals and weddings. Even the local hermit, the most famous misanthrope in the state of Oklahoma, had turned up. The church had never been so crowded.

At the back, a row of bachelor farmers sat on the low pews. As they knelt heavily to pray, dust from the burned fields puffed up in to miniature clouds above them like momentary halos. The wooden kneeling boards groaned with their weight. The preacher lifted his arms into the silence that resonated with collective despair as the entire congregation, from infants to great-grandmothers, prayed for rain.

Hidden in an archway behind the altar, concealed by a curtain, sat Miranda, her face pressed against the wooden divide.