The Rain

Before they departed for the funeral it rained, the heavy drops lashing the rocky drive along the edges of the parked cars even as the sun shone eerily in the distance, the rain stopping a few minutes later as quickly as it began, the water that a moment earlier ran down Young Street toward the railroad trestle abruptly rising in curling waves of steam. The heat mingled for some minutes with the smell of the wet earth, the departing storm moving rapidly eastward as the water that had pooled on the ground slowly retreated into the thick clay. But by the time they departed with the old woman to drive to the church the sun shone high within a sapphire and cloudless sky, the sudden cloudburst already a distant memory. And yet she would remember the brief storm even if the viewing of the body and the funeral would be soon forgotten, her seasons planting and harvest, her calendar the sun and the rain.

She remembered the rain, but the image of Lassie Boy’s sallow face as he rested peacefully within the puffy satin or the sweet caramel tones in her middle child’s voice as he spoke in loving memory were quickly and uncharacteristically forgotten, the brief thunder strokes and the bright skies after the clouds sped away the only eulogy truly remaining. She remembered him living during the silent drive home, his former passions hanging heavily in the air surrounding them, the abruptness of his death making it difficult to believe he had forever departed. And yet save for the old woman, the face the others remembered was still brightened by rouge as it rested within the casket, the face they wished to remember as fleeting in the moment as a butterfly fluttering across a sun dappled field.

She remembered the rain the whole of the quiet ride home, the sound of its gentle patter still echoing in her thoughts many hours later, the late afternoon light glimmering in her kitchen window as she stood absently among dishes of food that well-wishers had left behind. But an unexpected scent lingering in the air lit up a distant corner within her memory, the rain surrendering briefly to an image of her father playing 'I’ll fly away' on his fiddle with eyes tightly shut, her heart briefly skipping, the music so fine and free that her feet began to beat the remembered rhythm on the tiled floor, her back stooped and bobbing as she buck-danced awkwardly in place, the joy of the happy sounds carrying her briefly back to her childhood home. The sound of her children’s murmuring voices was slow to rouse her from the blissful dream, the remembered music gradually fading as her feet finally came to a halt.

Looking about in surprise the present moment came as something of a shock, she could not remember if she was about to prepare dinner or if it was already eaten – the table cleared and the kitchen scrubbed with everything put back in order. Entering the dining room her eyes wandered helplessly about till they caught the dark and empty table staring longingly back, her fingertips reaching out to touch its once glossy finish in answer. She always loved this room, her eyes moistening at the memory of the day the furniture first arrived. After they put it in place and surrounded it with the matching ladder-back chairs, she gazed in uncharacteristic stillness, its shiny surface filling her with awe. The very idea that she owned something so beautiful still profoundly moved her.

But the house was heavy with labored sadness, the emotion in the surrounding atmosphere stabbing uncomfortably in her belly, her hand gesturing weakly, trying to wave the feelings away, the words that once described them so distant they seemed irretrievably forgotten.

“Are you alright Mama?” her eldest son asked unexpectedly, wrapping his arm gently around her tiny shoulders.

“Uh huh,” she answered distractedly, something in her thoughts reawakening memories from Lassie Boy's birth. Weeks after his delivery, a neighbor told her what the Doctor had said in passing later that same night: ‘I just delivered the nearest thing to nothing I ever saw.’ But the laws governing life and death were somehow suspended that night, as if angels from heaven hovered above her mama as she stacked bricks warmed in the oven in the shape of a crude incubator and then helped her daughter wrap the tiny boy in swaddling clothes like baby Jesus in the manger. They took turns watching him through the terrifying nights and days that followed, their tender devotion keeping a boy alive who should not have lived even if given the emergency care they could not afford.

Her eldest son thought about an episode in his brother's tender youth, a pained look coming into his eyes as he remembered his father whipping Lassie Boy’s bare buttocks for playing in the rain. No sooner had his father put him down than Lassie Boy hiked up his pants and bound out of the house and back into the storm, the old man hollerin’ in outraged pursuit, the consequent whipping once he caught him the most painful memory of his older brother’s childhood. Fixed and memorial, even with the passing of fifty odd years, the vision of his daddy bellowing in anger and frustration was still impossible to put out of his thoughts.

But the two whippings were not enough, the little boy running from his father’s arms before his tears had even ended, something drawing him into the terrible flashing night as the raw power of the storm cruelly beckoned. Lassie Boy could not know how his daddy feared for his health; he could not know that his life was an even greater miracle than the terrific thunder crashing above their heads.

The third whipping did not stop him either … but it stopped the old man, something snapping inside, his lifted hand abruptly turning to cover his eyes as his own tears began. It was the first time the eldest boy ever saw his daddy weep, the sudden illumination of his father’s humanity both distressing and deeply moving, the realization that nothing short of brutality would ever stop his brother from being who he was filling his own eyes with tears. His daddy carried the little boy out onto the porch where he could watch flashes of lightening illuminate the darkened skies and feel the mist from the driving rain on his skin.

His brother’s will to live was a hunger burning brightly in his belly, his frail husk bravely bearing it like an endless, raging fever. He drew the same air into his lungs, ate the same food, slept in the same room as his brothers and sister, and yet he was filled with such life he always seemed about to burst, his spirit threatening to wear out everyone who loved him, worrying every authority into submission even as his own father had yielded to him when he was barely three. He was awake and alive, the world surrounding him lethargic and numb in comparison; his expressive reactions to the people and events flowing in and out of his life magnified a thousandfold.

It was part of the reason his eldest brother loved and missed him so strongly, and yet also why he never understood him. His life had seemed needlessly reckless, the mechanism that in most people keeps the more dangerous emotions at bay tragically absent.

“Mama?” His sister’s piercing call jolted him back to the present, “Why don’t you come and set a spell?”

“D’rectly,” the old woman mumbled.

Squeezing his Mama’s shoulder, he looked down at her face with a sad smile, but she didn’t notice, her thoughts stubbornly clinging to the remembered energy of her skinny, brown eyed Lassie Boy even as the memory of pattering raindrops returned once more to her thoughts. Pressing her fingers nervously over her dark skirt she turned toward the sitting room as her son pulled his hand slowly from her shoulder.

Pausing in the archway between the rooms in slight confusion, the shared sadness meeting her caused a brief intake of breath, unspoken feeling chasing the heaviness in the atmosphere like an invisible eddy of wind, the unfolding silence in response to her appearance briefly suspending her sense of time and place. The consequent emotion came as something of a surprise – robbing her children of the impetus of speech – not from a lack of coherent thoughts or even an inability to communicate sadness or loss, but from something residing so deep within, that its arrival at the door of consciousness struck them briefly dumb.

The lone sister’s eyes reddening with tears reinforced the melancholic silence, random fragments of the past tumbling out of their memories like a storm racing across the sea, the fondly remembered with the hurtful, the grandiose with the simple, some with sound and fury signifying nothing, and others the unadorned tales pluming the depths of the simple folk they came from and who in consequence they were. Certainly, it was only a passing moment, the old woman’s son wrapping his arms around her and holding her close, the seconds ticking away with unnatural languor, much longer in the telling than the actual experience of it, the prolonged silence an unnatural state for the talkative folk gathered together in that room of all rooms.

But for the stillness, the sound of the porch glider creaking softly in the breeze might not have penetrated the surrounding walls and given the moment renewed life – its long dead master unexpectedly returning to hold court in the cool and quiet of the evening, the ashes of his cigar glowing in the remembered darkness.

The sound of the glider unconsciously drew the sibling’s minds to a like gathering seventeen years earlier when they were five instead of four, their eyes gazing at one another with somber expressions that did not require utterance to be understood. Like a moon lit blossom unwinding in the shadowy darkness, it was the essence of what their absent brother spent his life chasing. Master the moment, and life unfolds in all its visceral and sensuous glory; master the moment and your spirit might ride on the back of the wind; master the moment and you might uncover the secrets of existence in a single drop of dew or the haunting song of the lark.

But the old woman, her head briefly held to her son’s breast remembered the rain, its distant tinkling fingers moving so gingerly that the resultant music was almost too fragile to hear, its beauty enriching the surrounding silence rather than drowning it, the ephemeral sounds transporting her to a place she had never before experienced, the remembered drops speaking a language her heart understood even as her thoughts were mute with incomprehension, some hidden and powerful spark bringing it to pulsating life.

Pulling slowly away from her son’s grasp, the old woman clutched her elbow with one hand as the other reached nervously for her mouth, her head shaking helplessly with age, something in her forlorn appearance at odds with the comfort of their surroundings as her middle son's heart was privately breaking, the image of his mother seemingly lost in her own home cutting him to the bone.

A sudden memory misting his eyes, he remembered the penetrating stare of his school band director as he offered to sell a used trombone to his mother for 20 dollars. Standing nervously in a dilapidated and reworked army coat, his Mama quietly insisted on buying a new horn as the man’s sad gaze drove home the realization of how poor they really were. Looking up from the memory at his three remaining siblings, he smiles wistfully at the camaraderie they have long shared. But for the absence of one, this room would have echoed with laughter as it had so many times in the past.

The youngest sat alertly on the white lazy-boy, his heavy brown beard bristling, his eyes narrowed in concentration and concern on his mother’s nodding features. But something stirring deeply within his unconscious, the ghost of his father appeared in a raggedy pair of long-johns as he leaned on Lassie Boy and their mother, slowly staggering across the room, his eyes red and weepy from a two-week drunk. The remembered image of his old man piteously clinging to the toilet still retained the power to revive the terrible emotions of that faraway day, like a haunting from which he might never fully recover.

Gazing quietly at her brother on the lazy boy, his sister remembered holding Lassie-Boy as a baby, his wide brown eyes gazing with wonderment into her own. She was barely ten when he was born, but when he nestled in her arms, she felt the first tug of desire to hold a child of her own.

But as the old woman’s head continued to shake, something in her expression suggested a deep and worrying exhaustion, breaking into her children’s private thoughts to finally confront the awkward stillness of the extended moment, the silence gaining energy as the nervous seconds ticked slowly by. The natural urge in a family who loves conversation to fill the air with sound growing stronger, they began to reconnect as an astonished embarrassment filled their faces with unexpected mirth, the old woman’s daughter exclaiming, “Why … have you ever heard such a thing!” as each began to nervously chuckle, the old woman smiling as her head continued to tremble and nod.

Her eldest son placing his hand on her shoulder caused her to start. “Mama … why don’t you set a spell?”

“Oh, I’m fine here,” she answered with a pale smile, “I need to get dinner started d’rectly.”

Her youngest sat up in the lazy boy with sudden irritation, “Mama,” he admonished her, “We’ll take you out for dinner tonight … don’t trouble yourself.”

Her voice rose excitedly, “It aint no trouble!”

“Mama!” her daughter joining the youngest scolded, her face a mixture of concern and righteous indignation, “I won’t hear it!”

But the old woman didn’t hear them anymore, her mind drifting backward into a hazy vision of a long-forgotten field of flowers, the soothing sound of the morning rain still pattering against imagined windows as she struggled to bring the distant memory into focus.

A flickering apparition appearing in her mind's eye, she recognized the diminutive figures of her three oldest children with white lilies in their hands as they bent over a dog lying in the hole they had scraped out for it. “Poor, sweet dog,” she whispered, even as something within the memory seemed out of place.

“Well,” the eldest brother said, “if we’re eating out, maybe we better get goin’.”

But as they gathered at the door to leave, the scene finally came into complete focus. She remembered the baby she held in her arms as they said their final goodbyes to their old dog.

“Wait,” she interrupted in a plaintive voice. “Where’s Lassie Boy?

“Mama,” her eldest son answered with reddened eyes, “He died.”

“Why didn’t anyone tell me?” she asked, a look of profound hurt abruptly transforming her features.

Her children exchanged uncomfortable glances before the eldest son’s wife answered gently, “But Mother … you were with us at the funeral.”

With a shuddered “Oh,” she lifted her hand to her lips, trying to remember Lassie Boy's pale face within the open casket and her final, whispered goodbye. Her voice filling with anguish, she cried out -“I can’t call it,” her children’s eyes welling with tears. She stood mutely in the open doorway for several moments before moving in painful slowness across the porch, a katydid’s rasping song mocking her lost memory in the falling darkness. But when she finally stepped into her eldest son’s car the old woman remembered the rain.