The Scent of Rain and Lightning (16 page)

She had wept while rehearsing them with Hugh Senior.

He had encouraged her, coached her, cried with her.

They’d heard of meanness in town, of Valentine and her boy being snubbed, or worse, and they had talked about it and decided mutually that they were the only ones who could put a stop to it.

Valentine broke down and began to cry.

Seeing her, Annabelle did, too.

The two women—wife of a convict, mother of a victim—leaned toward each other over the milk and cereal and embraced. Annabelle whispered in her ear, “You have to eat, Valentine. You’re too thin. You have to keep up your strength for the sake of your son.”

Valentine whispered back, sobbing, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, Mrs. Linder, I’m so so sorry,” while they held onto each other for dear life.

It was then that Annabelle realized that Jody wasn’t clinging to her anymore.

Annabelle broke away and looked around, but didn’t see her granddaughter.

Though she knew it was absurd, she panicked. “
Jody!”

And then she heard it: a little girl’s giggle. It was the most beautiful noise she’d heard in weeks, and her eyes welled up with tears again at the precious sound of it. She looked in that direction and spotted Jody standing in a corner of the store beside a card table where a boy was showing her something in a book. Jody pointed to a page and they both giggled.

“Who is that child?”

Valentine turned to see, and she gasped. “Collin!” She abandoned her post and ran toward the children. “Collin, come here!”

The boy and Jody both looked up with surprise on their faces as Valentine grabbed her son’s arm, and pulled him off his chair and away from Jody. “I’m so sorry,” she said to Annabelle as she came back to her counter with her son in tow. “I’m so sorry, Mrs. Linder. He doesn’t know who she—”

Byron George shook a finger in Collin’s face.

“Stay away from that girl,” he said. “You just stay away from her.”

Annabelle was horrified by their good intentions. The boy—a handsome, dark-haired child who reminded her sickeningly of his father—appeared stunned by the grown-ups’ actions and words. He looked back to where Jody was still standing. She wasn’t smiling or laughing anymore. She looked scared, and ready to cry, too. Annabelle saw the two of them look briefly at each other. Then the boy turned back around quickly and stared at the floor without saying anything.

“Please,” Annabelle said, patting the air. “It’s all right.”

She smiled—or tried to—at the child.

He looked at her with wide, somber eyes.

“Byron,” she said, “maybe Livia would like to give Valentine’s son that piece of candy that my granddaughter didn’t want.” Then, as quickly as she could manage it, she completed her transaction with Valentine Crosby, refused Byron George’s offer to carry the bag to her car for her, and gathered up Jody to go.

Grabbing Jody’s hand, she fled from the grocery store.

O
UTSIDE ON THE SIDEWALK
, they ran into a friend of hers.

“Why does she stay here?” Phyllis Boren said in her blunt way as she pointed into the grocery store. “Doesn’t she know that none of us want her here?”

“This is her home now, Phyllis.”

Her friend looked at her with surprise at her tone.

“I don’t think she has anyplace else to go,” Annabelle added, hoping Phyllis either wouldn’t notice her tearstained face or was so used to seeing her that way that she wouldn’t remark on it. “From what I understand, her family in Scott City won’t have her back. And I doubt she has the money to move even if she wants to.”

“We could solve that problem, Annabelle. You and Hugh Senior just say the word, and I guarantee you I’ll personally come up with her bus fare. It would be better for her,” she added in a virtuous, vigorous tone, “and certainly better for the boy if they started over somewhere.”

“How far away would she need to move, do you think?”

Phyllis didn’t catch the sharp tone in her friend’s voice.

“Far enough that you can’t run into her at the grocery store, Annabelle. Far enough that Hugh will never be tempted to take on Billy’s demon offspring as one of his rehabilitation projects—”

“Demon offspring? Phyllis, he’s just a little boy.”

“He’s Billy Crosby’s little boy, and you know what they say about apples and how far they fall from trees. If none of that convinces you, then let me say this. Val Crosby needs to move far enough away so that her kid and Jody will never cross paths in the same schools.”

Annabelle felt startled, having not thought of that probability before.

“That could happen—”

“Sure. He’s only four years ahead of her. When she enters kindergarten, he’ll be in fourth grade.”

Annabelle glanced down at Jody and saw that she was staring in the window at Collin Crosby, who was back at his corner table, his face determinedly pointed at his book.

“They’re just children,” she said softly.

“Well, you think about what I said, Annabelle.”

“I appreciate your good wishes for us, Phyllis.” She straightened her spine, which it seemed she’d had to do a great deal lately. “But I hope you will spare some kind wishes for that poor young woman and her son as well.”

Grandmother and granddaughter turned without saying goodbye.

They walked back to the Caddy to stow the groceries that nobody in their family would feel like eating.

C
OLLIN PEEKED UP
from his books and saw the little girl was staring in at him from the fancy black car as it pulled away from the curb. He wanted to raise his hand and wave at her, but he didn’t dare cause another fuss. This was where his mom worked. Everything depended on if she kept her job here, because probably nobody else would hire her because of his dad.

Collin felt horrible because of what had just happened in the store.

He hadn’t recognized the little girl, hadn’t known, didn’t mean to—

His sensitive antennae picked up a new conversation going on between the man and woman who were his mother’s bosses, Mr. and Mrs. George. They were talking softer than they usually did when they discussed his father around him, but Collin listened hard and heard most of it anyway.

“That poor child,” the woman said, and for a moment Collin thought she meant him. But of course she didn’t—she was talking about the little girl who’d just been in, the Linder granddaughter, as people called her now. “She used to be so friendly and happy, and now she acts like a chocolate bar would scare her to death.”

“She’ll feel safer with him in prison,” Mr. George said with an air of authority.

“Like we all do,” his wife said, and Collin heard a shudder in her voice.

“They should have killed him.”

“But then he’d never tell where Laurie is.”

“I’d like to get hold of him. He’d tell then.”

“He dumped her body somewhere, and we’ll never know where,” Mrs. George said in the same tone of voice that Collin had heard people talking about scary movies. “Not unless he talks, and why would he? If he admits he killed her, he’s in trouble all over again. Lord! Imagine being her child and having to grow up with that question hanging over you all of your life.”

“He’s a real son of a bitch, that one. Cold. Heartless.”

“Well, he’ll never do any more harm around here, that’s one good thing.”

“The only one.”

Their voices stopped. Collin heard their footsteps going in different directions, one of them to Produce, the other to Dairy.

He looked over at his mom at work at the checkout counter—where a few more people than usual were lined up now.

It was his dad they were talking about.

It was his dad who was the reason that little girl was so scared and sad.

Collin felt as if he was going to throw up right there in the store.

W
HEN HE AND HIS MOM
walked home that night after her shift, Collin was the first to notice something different about their home.

“Mom, look!”

Valentine turned her head quickly, expecting the worst.

Instead, she saw, as Collin already had, that somebody had mowed their grass. The yard had been springing up in weeds because their hand mower was broken and they didn’t have enough money to get it fixed, much less buy a new one. Collin had felt embarrassed that their overgrown lawn called even more attention to their house and made them look like even worse people than folks already thought they were, and he knew it made his mom feel terrible, too.

“Who would do that?” she said, sounding stunned.

Collin looked around and spotted a neighbor down the street just putting his mower away. The neighbor looked up at the same time and, after a moment of hesitation, waved.

Collin waved back, a big wave, a thank-you wave.

“Mom, I think it was that guy.”

When she looked, the neighbor gave her a wave, too, and then hurried on into his garage, pushing his mower in front of him.

“Why’d he mow our grass?” Collin asked his mom.

“Because of Mrs. Linder,” she told him, sounding on the verge of tears again, but this time for nicer reasons.

T
HINGS BEGAN TO CHANGE
at Collin’s school, too.

At recess the following Monday two boys approached Collin to ask if he wanted to kick a ball around. He’d never really noticed them all that much before, but now they looked like the best people he’d ever seen in his whole life.

He hopped off a step where he’d been sitting while everybody else played at recess and ran after them. He worried it was a trick, at first, that they’d kick the ball around him and laugh at him or kick it at his head, but they didn’t. A couple of other boys came over and kicked it out of his reach, and called out insults when they ran away. But his new friends didn’t do that—they just kicked it to him as if he were like any other boy.

It felt so good to be included that Collin almost cried the way his mother had when their neighbor mowed their lawn. When he happened to glance at his teacher, Mrs. Davidson, he saw that she was watching their game. Collin saw her dab at her eyes with her fingers as if she’d gotten bits of dust in them.

T
HE NEXT WEEK
, storm clouds showed up on the horizon at the ranch and Jody went into a panic over them, just as she had over every storm since her father died and her mother vanished. As the child screamed and sobbed in her arms Annabelle exclaimed in despair to Hugh Senior, “What are we going to do?”

They were on the side porch just outside the kitchen.

The air already smelled like rain. Lightning periodically lit up sections of clouds as if somebody were turning a reading lamp on and off inside them. The three of them, grandparents and Jody, had come outside to look at the new paint job on the porch, without realizing a storm was visible to the west. As soon as Jody saw it, she went to pieces. Annabelle was holding her granddaughter and getting ready to rush back inside. Jody was clutching her and crying as if assassins on huge black horses were galloping toward them with rifles drawn. Hugh Senior was patting her back comfortingly to no effect.

“I’ll take care of it,” Chase said, striding past them.

“What?” Annabelle asked over Jody’s screams, but he was already walking out into the side yard.

Her curiosity piqued, even while her tears flowed, Jody craned around in Annabelle’s arms to see her uncle.

Chase stopped mid-yard with his legs apart.

He raised a pistol in his left hand, pointed it at the clouds, and shot them.

On the porch, his mother gasped at the crack of gunfire, and his father started.

Only Jody stared without flinching. Her crying stopped with a hiccup.

Chase turned around and walked back toward them.

“I killed it,” he said with dead seriousness, looking into Jody’s eyes.

She hiccuped one more time. “Really?”

“Really. Watch, if you want to see it go away.”

As if he took the result for granted, Chase walked back into the kitchen.

Within half an hour the storm blew southeast, away from them.

A little while later the sky over the ranch was a perfect cloudless blue.

“How did you know?” his mother asked him later.

“I called the weather service.”

“You’re a genius.”

“You do what you have to do,” he said in a somber tone that convinced her that her middle son had changed more than any of them since his brother’s murder. He had taken over the duties that Hugh-Jay once performed, and most of Bobby’s as well, and he was growing both leaner and harder as he folded himself into the daily routine of ranch work that he had left behind in college. His handsome face was beginning to look sculpted out of golden rock, all cheekbones, long nose, and stern mouth, as if he were becoming one of the Testament Rocks himself. In profile he looked forbiddingly grim, but also compelling, and it was hard for people to look away from him. He was attentive to his mother, respectful to his father, and affectionate but increasingly tough with his niece. He shot off hectoring notes to Bobby to tell him to call home, and he stopped teasing their sister. He grew increasingly bossy with the ranch’s employees. His mother missed her flirting, charming, laughing boy, even while she saw that he was becoming an impressive man. She grieved for the cost of it. She wished she could shoot the clouds away from him.

Chase had to “kill” the next storm, too.

Fortunately for his plan, though not for local agriculture, that storm kept to the south/southeast wind pattern and bypassed them. When the one after that showed up and Jody asked him to make it go away, Chase said—knowing it was headed straight at them, “This is a different kind of storm. It’s the good kind that we need to give us water and give the animals water and all the crops on all the farms. It’s going to be loud and noisy, like Mr. George at the grocery store, but it has a good heart, like him. It’s blustery, that’s all, big and blustery like Mr. George, but it would never hurt you, any more than he would. It’s a good storm. It’s our friend. We need it.”

“A good storm,” Jody repeated doubtfully.

She had seen how Mr. George had spoken to the boy in the grocery store, and so she wasn’t sure about how nice he really was.

“That’s right,” Chase said, seeing her skepticism.

He sent up an order to God:
no tornadoes.

That storm came and poured, boomed, and flashed, with no damage done.

Jody sat on Chase’s lap on a couch against a wall far from the windows and watched it with him. “Do you have your gun?” she asked when a crash of thunder scared her.

“Of course,” he said, and lifted the next cushion to show her where he’d tucked it underneath. Jody nodded, reassured, and resumed watching the rain come down.

“What’s that?” she said at one point, huddling into his chest.

“Hail,” he told her. “You know what hail is. You’ve heard it before. It’s just ice, like we put in iced tea.” It was, thank God, only pea-sized, and not the softball-size stones that had taken roofs apart a few years ago. As the storm was easing down, Chase lifted his niece in his arms and strolled casually to a window, and they stood there looking out together, her cheek pressed to his, her arms wrapped around his neck.

“I like rainy days,” she said, as if remembering a forgotten fact.

“You’ve always loved them.”

“I do?”

“Yeah. Personally, me, I like blizzards.”

She poked him with a finger. “No, you don’t! You hate snow.”

“You remember that?” The previous Christmas break from school he’d cursed at all the times he had to drive out to break ice in ponds so the cattle could drink. “You were only two.”

“I ’member lots of stuff.”

I hope you don’t, Chase thought.

“Let’s go outside and smell the rain, Josephus,” he suggested.

“That’s not my name!”

“It is now.”

“Rain doesn’t smell!”

“Oh, yes it does.” He didn’t try to explain ozone to her, or how raindrops hit rocks, releasing the fragrance of oils that plants had rubbed on them, or how spores in the ground give up their own earthy scent in the rain. He just took her out and let her sniff and sniff until she admitted that, yes, it smelled good outside after a thunderstorm. Then he removed Jody’s shoes and socks and set her down so she could run around in the wet, golden grass.

“You do it, too, Uncle Chase. Come on!”

“My feet stink in these old boots.”

She giggled and then ran circles around him yelling, “Uncle Chase’s feet stink! Uncle Chase’s feet stink!”

And that was mostly that, when it came to storms.

There were either good or bad storms now, depending on whether the weather service said they were going away or coming toward. Chase continued to shoot the bad ones away from the house, while Jody agreed to allow the good ones to approach and bring their rain as long as they behaved themselves, and so long as Chase kept a gun nearby in case they acted up. She began to be able to bear them, even enjoy them, without hiding in a bathroom or clinging to a grown-up.

Other fears started to fall away then. The little girl they used to know began to reemerge, the one who chased rabbits and lay down in the hay with dogs, who ran out into the yard by herself, who wanted to be swung “higher!” who giggled when a calf slobbered on her arm, and who didn’t cover her ears at the sound of fireworks. On the day she asked her grandfather when she was going to get her pony, they knew that at least in some ways Jody was going to be okay.