Tremble (7 page)

Her accent jolted Dorothy’s memory. She had been Winifred’s one friend, the enigmatic stranger who had claimed that her great-aunt had been one of the ancient ones, a follower of Arianrhod, the goddess of time and karma. Dorothy pulled her hand away sharply. “What do you want?” It was hard to keep the resentment out of her voice.

“The mandrake root, do you still have it?” the woman whispered conspiratorially. The prison officer, standing beside the door, pretended not to hear.

“They confiscated it as evidence, then returned it later. It’s stored in a safety deposit box at the Abbey National Bank in Tunbridge Wells.”

“Good. I think both your aunt and I owe you an explanation.” Her voice was mesmeric. Dorothy felt as if she was being hypnotized into listening.

“I am also an Owen; in fact, your second cousin once removed. Like yourself and Winifred, I have never married. Most of us don’t, preferring to take the mandrake as husband instead. This tradition has gone back for hundreds of years. It all began with the hanging of Llewelyn the Fierce.”

Dorothy shuddered, struggling with a suffocating sense of history
being cyclical. “The same Llewelyn that was hanged from the walls of Shrewsbury Castle?” she ventured, finally finding enough saliva to articulate.

“The very same, executed by the vile tyrant Lord Huntington. They left Llewelyn hanging there for three nights and three days. By the time Gwen Owen came to claim his body the crows had already picked out his beautiful black eyes.”

Dorothy’s blood ran cold. “Gwen Owen? Was she—”

“Llewelyn’s mistress—yes, child, she was. An extraordinary human being and a wondrous sorceress. When she came to that cold wall and stared upon the body of her only love she did not shed one tear. Instead she swore to avenge herself on all future generations of Huntingtons, even if it took centuries. She then bent down and looked for the patch of earth where poor Llewelyn must have spilled his seed as he died. The mandrake root was already growing at the foot of the gallows. Gwen cleared the soil around it and harvested it carefully, gently pulling the root away and placing it beside her breast. From that day onward Llewelyn’s mandrake root was handed down the Owen line. So you see, your mandrake root was just carrying out its destiny, taking revenge on a Huntington. Its actions were the culmination of the very reason for his existence. Gwen finally had her revenge.”

The woman paused and reached into her handbag for a peppermint.

Dorothy tried to control the tears welling up in her eyes. “A man died!”

In refusing the offered mint, Dorothy knocked the tin from the woman’s hand. Peppermints flew everywhere. The woman ignored them. Her face softened and she stroked Dorothy’s hand again.

“Winifred should have warned you. But she was just thinking of your happiness.” She peered down at Dorothy’s hand. “You have a profound future, your magic lies in the Word.”

“So how is all that information going to help me now?”

“It won’t, but write the story anyway. It’s time we Owens were immortalized.” She left with a swirl of her long skirt.

Dorothy watched her go. Behind her, framed by the barred window, a fleeting shadow flew past. Set against the gathering night sky, it might have been a wild black-maned man entangled in the arms of his laughing mistress; then again it might not.

T
he tumbleweed twisted in the hot breeze as it rolled down Sandridge’s main street. It caught on the bleached stone steps of the church, then, as if disgruntled with the breaking of its flight, curled around a bent Coke can.

The tightly knit farming community was in its thirteenth month without rain and the wheat crop, visible beyond rusty barbed-wire fencing, was withered and sparse.

The gas-station owner, a skeptical man in his midfifties, looked up from his caramel milkshake and out through the window of the diner. Across the street the thin-faced widow everyone knew as Gracie was already peeping out from behind her nylon curtains. They both watched as a brand new Ford Bronco, gleaming in the sun, turned into the main street. It was the first visitor the farming community had seen for months, and this was a town that distrusted strangers.

The Ford Bronco itself was unremarkable, except that it was pulling a 1960s Airstream trailer. The silver oblong with its curved corners shimmered like a forgotten prop from a sci-fi movie. But it was the design painted on the side that made it particularly bizarre: a gaudy rainbow arching up into a gray cloud from which a shower of rain fell in glistening blue dashes. The word
Rainmaker
stretched proudly above it in calligraphy of purple and gold.

Jacob Kidderminister pulled up outside the town hall. Same tedious routine, same flat-topped buildings, and same size place, he thought, reading the sign that proudly declared the population of Sandridge to be:
Five Hundred Souls and Growing.
Somebody had scrawled
White
between the words
Hundred
and
Souls.
Jacob shook his head in disgust. If there was one thing he detested more than drought it was racism. “Welcome to paradise,” he said to himself bitterly.

Just then a huge turkey vulture emerged out of a nearby tree and flapped its way lazily across the road to perch on the signpost. Hissing, it cocked its head toward him. Jacob wound down his car window. “Hello, Mr. Birdie,” he said.

The creature looked him straight in the eye, giving Jacob the uncanny feeling it was reading his mind. Suddenly it turned in the direction of a tree on the other side of the street. Jacob followed its gaze, to see dozens of starlings sitting silently on the branches staring back at him. Immediately the hairs on the back of his neck rose—he had never seen so many starlings during a drought. He had the strong impression the
birds had been waiting for him. The turkey vulture flew off. With a great rustling of wings the starlings lifted from the tree en masse. In a plunging arc the bird of prey flew in the direction of the church, the starlings following in a tight swooping cloud, and all disappeared into the belfry.

Jacob studied the church. A brick wall with curled barbed wire along the top ran around it; a decidedly unChristian sight. In the wall stood a large iron gate bearing a notice reading:
The Aryan Fellowship of Jesus, Oklahoma.
The bile rose in the back of Jacob’s throat; he’d come across the Aryan Fellowship before, in a town a hundred miles west. They were a nasty bunch of bigots and Jacob had been forced to flee after they’d nailed one of his coyotes alive to a cross. Every cell in his body pulsed with the desire to run. But as he squinted up at the bell tower, the way the sunlight caught the edge of the brass bell reminded him how there was beauty and hope in even the ugliest places. And, for the first time in his life, the rainmaker ignored his instincts.

He pushed back his long chestnut hair and rested his forehead on the steering wheel. He had the type of beauty that only becomes apparent after a few minutes; his sensual face had a satyrlike quality that oozed into the psyche like a subtle perfume. In other words, he was the kind of man that women found irresistible and men dreaded. At forty-six Jacob was at the height of his powers. But at this precise moment he felt anything but powerful. He was exhausted. He’d been on the road for twenty years, traveling from one settlement to another, one dustbowl to another, wherever he was needed—but in every place he’d ended up being run out of town. His was a thankless task, he thought, a gift that had become a curse.

Rainmaking was a talent he had been born with, one that had been handed down over generations. His father had been a diviner, famous for finding water in the most remote parts of the American wilderness. Jacob used to accompany the garrulous bearded man as he scrambled possessed over gullies and ravines, his forked branch twitching, often followed by a mob of jeering disbelievers. But those same farmers, real-estate developers, prospectors, would all stop in their tracks, gasping, hours later when the drill released a gushing spout of fresh clear water from exactly the location the diviner had predicted. Jacob could never understand why his father didn’t stay and reap the rewards, financial or otherwise, the townsfolk offered him. It was only later, when Jacob was
older and inflicted with the same gift, that he realized his father had been unable to dwell in one place. For as soon as the diviner found water, the restlessness would be upon him again and he was immediately summoned by another drought. It was a slavery that had held Jacob’s family in bondage for generations.

Moon, the silver-gray coyote sitting beside him, whimpered. They’d been driving for ten hours straight and she was desperate for some exercise.

“Okay, girl, I hear you. Let’s say welcome to what is gonna be home for a few weeks.” And with world-weariness evident in every aching muscle, Jacob pushed open the door and climbed out.

He stood staring at the cloudless sky for a moment then wiped the sweat from his hands on his creased leather pants and sauntered up to the door of the town hall. It was locked. He turned to look down the street. Although there was no one visible, he could feel hidden eyes burning holes through his shirt.

“Go on, stare as much as you like, for I am the alchemist and your world will never be the same again,” he muttered defiantly, then realized that he was completely devoid of inspiration. Sighing deeply he tucked a business card under the door’s brass handle and whistled for the coyote.

The Ford Bronco headed over to the empty trailer park at the edge of town. Preacher Williams watched it go, staring after it from his office alongside the church. A thin-lipped man, who wore his misery in the stoop of his shoulders and hollowed cheeks, the preacher had a particular hatred of anything that smacked of handcrafted faith, cults, or sects. He had convinced himself that devilry, a corruption of the human soul, had seeped slowly but undeniably into the last half of the twentieth century and now into the twenty-first. It was a global corruption from which he was determined to save his corner of the world.

“Rainmaker indeed,” the preacher muttered and reached for the phone, the wine-colored star-shaped birthmark on the top of his hand becoming visible for a second.

Chad Winchester, sitting high up in a tractor in the middle of a ruined dry field, heard his cell phone ringing but couldn’t remember where he’d placed it. Understandably the florid mayor was distracted—Abigail Etterton, wheat farmer and the most glamorous widow in the
state, had his erect penis in her mouth. Chad glanced tenderly at Abigail’s beautiful mouth sliding up and down his glistening organ. They’d been lovers for over two years and there had been many occasions when he’d considered divorcing his wife. Political astuteness, however, always overrode the exigencies of love. He moaned quietly, deeply regretting his ambition in that instant. Sandridge was a fiercely religious town and his wife, Cheri, cheerleader of Sandridge High 1976 and head of the Wheatgrowers’ Wives Association of Oklahoma, was a popular woman. But a woman who had never achieved orgasm, and not for want of trying on Chad’s part.

His own climax was proving uncharacteristically elusive, not helped by the ringing cell phone. The thought that it might be some disaster he should deal with gnawed at the edge of his mind.

“Oh, for Christ’s sake, you might as well answer it,” Abigail remarked from between his legs. Embarrassed, Chad tucked away his rapidly diminishing penis and reached for his cell phone.

The rainmaker looked out of the window of his trailer. When he’d parked it in the dusty trailer park the place had been empty. Now, the locals had started to gather in bunches. There were two sprawling Mexican families, their children chasing each other with handfuls of black dust. There was the gas-station owner, holding a pitchfork in one hand, glaring at the trailer as if he were expecting battle. Next to him, six young farmers, obviously brothers, lounged over a brand new tractor. From their high cheekbones and strong features Jacob guessed they were of Germanic descent. Finally, there were the women.

“All women have their own beauty, if you look at them long enough,” Jacob observed, fascinated by the way one, who looked like a librarian, moved her hands in fluttery gestures. Next to her was a buxom blond matron in a hat. Obviously an official’s wife, Jacob thought, assessing her body with the practice of a connoisseur. “Or how about the virgin aching for experience?” he murmured, gazing at the gauche schoolgirl in the short skirt who rubbed her legs together like a restless colt.

“Gals, I’m here for you. I am everyman. I will fulfill your every fantasy while none of you, not one, will ever be able to move me.” He
smiled painfully. “I am as arid as the land I’ve come to liberate.” The declaration made his heart suddenly ache.

He pulled the shutters down, overwhelmed by an exhaustion that was spiritual rather than physical, and leaned wearily against the wall of the trailer. Stuck to the refrigerator were photographs of his four exwives and an article torn from
Life
magazine about a horrific British murder involving a vegetable root. Jacob had a fascination for bizarre murders and the description of the Welsh spinster murderess had captivated him. One day he was going to meet her. Smiling at the thought, his eyes wandered to a pink garter embroidered with the name
Charlene
that hung on the fridge door handle.