Tremble (14 page)

Afterward she lay in his arms, tracing the tear that ran down one of his cheeks.
Is this what the island will be like?
she asked silently.

Jacob kissed her bruised wrist. “It will be like this every day and every night. We will spend our days on a small boat winding our way through the Delta, fishing for catfish and crab, and then at night, after we’ve eaten, we’ll lie in front of a fire and I’ll hold you in my arms and you’ll know that nothing terrible will happen to you ever again.”

Miranda shut her eyes and saw them standing together in front of a wooden house on stilts. Jacob is kissing the side of her face as she squints up at the sun. In her arms is a baby, a light-brown laughing infant.

Two hours later the sheriff was woken by an ear-splitting peal of thunder. The sky lit up with a display of lightning that made him wonder whether the military base a hundred miles away had exploded. The rain grew heavier. Yet at dawn, everyone in Sandridge was jolted out of their sleep by a sound they hadn’t heard in weeks—silence. The rains had stopped. A second later the sun broke through the clouds and the ground began to steam.

People ran out of their houses screaming with joy. Delirious farmers danced in the fields, wildly shooting guns into the sky. Men kissed their wives and forgave everything. Only one man stayed in the shadows of his house: the preacher.

Now that the rains had stopped no one took much notice of the silver trailer that stayed parked at the edge of town. Everyone was too busy
fixing fences, reviving their crops, and fattening their livestock. Everyone except Rebecca.

Following her pledge, she locked herself in her bedroom and cried straight through three boxes of tissues and three showings of
Sleepless in Seattle
. Afterward, after drinking another miniature bottle of vodka, she went down to the cultural center, logged on to the Internet, and entered a chat room entitled “Hot spinsters over forty.”

Walking home, heartened by a very lively conversation with Mr. Big of Massachusetts, she noticed Moon the coyote waiting patiently on the doorstep of the trailer, looking starved and bedraggled. Rebecca suddenly realized that the rainmaker hadn’t been seen for over a week. She approached the canine, murmuring tender words of encouragement. The bitch lifted her head and looked at her with liquid eyes that spoke of terrible loss.

Rebecca surprised herself by picking up the starving creature. With the beast cradled firmly in her arms, she headed toward the sheriff’s office.

At the same time Abigail Etterton was watching a small flock of starlings hovering over an indiscriminate patch of flooded ground. It wasn’t the birds themselves that disturbed her so much—after all, the rain had brought up thousands of worms—it was the fact that the night before she had seen a gathering of nightingales suspended over that same patch of ground. And nightingales, as all good countrywomen know, are solitary birds. What was it about that particular part of the field, she wondered.

Just then she noticed a figure dressed in a long black robe picking its way across the pasture. As it drew closer she realized it was the preacher. Not seeing her, he stopped just short of the birds and, with a shocking guttural cry, began to fling stones at them. Very unChristian behavior, Abigail thought, wondering about the sanity of the minister.

She was about to call out when she heard one of the farmhands shouting her name—her favorite mare was foaling. Abigail wiped her hands and ran toward the stables, forgetting all about the birds and the preacher.

The search party drove down every dirt trail and poked into bushes; they peered into the shimmering dam and contemplated dredging it.
They combed through the waving fields of wheat and ransacked barns…until the sheriff called off the search. The rainmaker was missing, but not before he’d done his job, and, besides, it wasn’t as if he was a local, Jeremiah rationalized. One week was a respectable time to spend looking for a stranger, especially one who had gone out of his way to seduce all the womenfolk in town.

The sheriff had his deputy pin up notices declaring that Jacob Kidderminister had left voluntarily due to family circumstances and in the rush had left behind his trailer and his possessions. No one questioned the law enforcer’s assessment.

The water receded; Rebecca adopted the coyote; the Kaufmann brothers towed away the silver trailer to sell for recycled aluminum; and life went on.

The preacher resumed his sermons and gradually his congregation trickled back. But Bill Williams appeared a destroyed man. The stoop was more pronounced, the thin lips were curled in a permanent sneer of disapproval. But what was most noticeable was that the old fire and passion had completely disappeared from his preaching. During one sermon, delivered in a barely audible whisper, he fell into loud sobbing. Embarrassed, the organist petered into discordance and the congregation began to snigger.

The subject was raised at the knitting circle. The postmistress (who had flown into Dallas for a face-lift since the incident of the rainmaker) put down her needles. “I say he is losing his wind,” she declared defiantly.

The other women rattled their knitting needles in agreement.

The mayor’s mother spoke up. “Why don’t we swap him for a young sexy one? You know, one of them that talks in tongues. You never know, he could turn out to be a useful contributor to the mental health of the women of this town, just like the rainmaker!”

The room dissolved into giggles.

The rivers became streams again, frogs returned to the wetlands, and the wheat rippled fatly under the hot sun. Life was bursting with fecundity. Bill Williams recovered and slowly the fervor began to creep back into the Sunday sessions at the small church—with one difference: he never mentioned race again.

All returned to normalcy. Except the townsfolk seemed to take more joy in their everyday tasks, as if the drought and the floods had given them a greater understanding of the vulnerability of life.

And so it was that the mayor and his mistress again found themselves in Abigail’s back paddock, with Abigail’s face buried between Chad’s legs. The mayor, having just reached orgasm, pulled her up and gazed into her eyes. He had never felt more emotional. Divorce proceedings were under way and Cheri had already begun her campaign trail to run against him in the next council elections. All of which Chad was treating with supreme equanimity. He was in love and had reached a momentous decision. He was going to ask Abigail to marry him.

He’d barely got the words out when she emitted a loud scream.

“Hey, I didn’t expect that kind of reaction,” he muttered, crestfallen, but then noticed that Abigail was pointing to something in the field. He turned and gagged on a wave of nausea.

Beneath a tree in which a flock of starlings were roosting, sticking up out of the mud, were two human hands entwined. One, fragile and dark, was obviously female. The other was large and white. Twinkling on its index finger was a large sapphire ring, which Chad instantly recognized.

They lay tied to a rusting brass bed, his muscular body curled around her darkly luminous flesh. It was a posture of infinite tenderness, a petrification of the moment when two people collapse into each other in love. The dead couple, miraculously preserved, were raised out of the earth like a glorious classical statue suspended in its own time bubble. The stunned onlookers removed their hats in respect, lowered their eyes in hushed shame. The silence was broken by a lone nightingale that perched itself on the bed frame and burst into song.

Jeremiah, in an attempt to hide his clenching heart, adopted an air of professional detachment. He pointed to a single bullet wound visible in Jacob’s back. “I would say that one bullet was responsible for both the deaths, having passed through the male’s body and into the female.”

He paused, visibly shaken by the clouded gaze of the dead girl who, despite her black skin, looked vaguely familiar.

“Who is she, by the way? Anyone here know?” He turned to the
small group of farmhands and officials who had helped drag the bed from beneath the mud.

The youngest Kaufmann brother, the shyest, spoke up. “I don’t know who she is, but she’s got the very same birthmark as the preacher on her hand. Why, I’ve seen that mark a thousand times!”

The men all leaned forward to look. There it was, as clear as day, a star-shaped wine-colored mark.