CHAPTER III
1992
RAIN
As she drives to the rest home Sally remembers the first storm she made, some ten years ago. She had been picking raspberries with her grandfather, in the thickets down the gravel road to the marsh, so it must have been June. She was wearing her twin brother’s purple rain boots and the new dress her mother had gotten her from the thrift store in Modest Town, and she stopped every dozen steps to twirl a bit and feel the cotton skirt slap satisfyingly against her legs as it wound up. Mitch, who was ensconced on the living-room couch with his cast-encased foot propped up on mounds of pillows, had seen her going out in the boots and screamed that he could walk just fine, that Grandpa Tom could carry him, that those boots didn’t belong to her and she’d better put them back or he’d drown her Barbies while she slept.
Mitch was lucky to have only one broken foot. Pierce, their older brother, had gotten him to jump off the balcony with her Rainbow Brite bedsheet as a parachute the week before by telling him it would make him fly. Now he was immobile for six weeks and she had his boots. She’d just grinned in the face of his whining and followed Grandpa Tom out the kitchen door.
If she looked back the way they’d come she could see the house, with its thick columns and sagging porch, where the oyster-shell road joined the gravel road out to the highway. If she looked hard she could track the white smear through the potato field, like a snail snot trail, to where it turned off into the woods to go down to the dock. The seam where the shells met the gravel was stark, the line of demarcation beyond which she was not allowed to wander alone. There was a tiny house past the very end of that oyster-shell road; Grandpa Tom had just rented it out to Mr. Bo and Miss Ellie, distant cousins who were expecting a baby, and she hoped that the embargo would be lifted enough to let her wander down and visit, when it got born. She liked babies, and her little sister Lilly was walking and wiggly and didn’t like being held anymore.
Her mother had said that the people that lived down there were no-accounts, but no matter how she grumbled about it, Grandpa Tom rented to them just the same. They were family, he said, far back but still family, and even if they hadn’t been they needed help. Daddy might manage the planting and harvesting now, but Grandpa Tom still owned the land, decided who could and couldn’t rent the outbuildings scattered on the edge of the property and park their trailers on the boggy land by the creek that was too wet to farm. Daddy said he was a soft touch for hard-luck cases.
Grandpa Tom was waist deep in the brambles, his bucket already half-full, whistling “South Wind,” and she squatted down to get the berries he couldn’t reach because of the arthritis in his knees. The shade felt good; the leaves of the potato plants in the field across the road looked like they were frying. The chickens had followed them, and were scraping for worms in the dust of the road and the weeds of the ditch. A breeze came along, the thin, wafery kind that lasts for minutes at a time, and Grandpa Tom had said, “Go along, try with this one.” She’d reached out her hands, like he’d shown her, and felt the breeze between her fingers like long strands of dried grass, only this time she felt it in her mind too, as if her head was an empty room with all the windows open and the breeze was wandering through it. She’d grabbed hold and twisted, and the breeze twirled in on itself, picking up the cut grass on the road, spinning a confused chicken around a few times, then straightening back out.
“Very good! I am impressed,” Grandpa Tom had said, and she hadn’t been able to stop grinning. She reached out again, and the breeze felt firmer, more substantial this time. She gave it a wrench.
Wind whipped the raspberry bushes, plucked the chickens, tore their buckets from their hands, threw her against her grandfather’s legs like a wave at the beach. There was a silent pop in her jaw as Grandpa Tom yanked the breeze straight again, and just as suddenly everything was calm. She looked up at him. Raspberry juice splattered his face, and his shirt, and dripped down his mustache into his beard. “Always gentle, little bit. Messes are hard to clean up,” he’d told her, and scrubbed her face with his blue paisley pocket-handkerchief.
She was seven.
There has been no rain in weeks. The creeks are sandy paths, the cornstalks wither in the sun, the air itself sizzles. The long black road down to Parksley looks wet in the afternoon light, reflecting back ghost images of the woods and houses; the double yellow line up its middle is blinding. Sally drives slowly, avoiding the drooping chickens milling about the shoulder of the road. People don’t like it if you kill their chickens, even if they’re pecking at roadkill on the double yellow when you do it.
She passes the Perdue plant, slows down at the speed-limit sign and holds her breath as Parksley slides by—the Foster processing plant usually reeks—turns off Route 13 above Onancock, then pulls into the long driveway of the Tasley Assisted Living Facility and Rest Home. It winds artificially through a long stretch of bright green turf, a man-made lake peppered with mangy ducks twinkling from between the trunks of manicured oaks. The home itself spreads out in front of the lake like a bunker, a dark, squat three stories of cement and reflective windows, with a scatter of private cottages for the more mobile residents behind it. It’s on the bay side, so that the residents can get a view of the glinting water of the port, and the boats sailing in and out. She and Grandpa Tom both like the sea side of the island better, with its peanut-butter smear of barrier islands at the horizon, but rich people like the bay, so the home is on the bay. The cousins have pitched in to get Grandpa Tom into the home; he’s rich on paper, but all of his money is in the land, and he wouldn’t sell a square foot of it, even if it meant being able to afford a room of his own.
Their family is large, if loosely connected now, the descendants of Grandpa Tom’s grandmother Medora and her two husbands. Grandpa Tom’s three cousins have already passed on; Helen and Kathy in their own homes, but Mark, the youngest of the three, and his wife Letty had both died in the rest home some years earlier, rather than in their red-floored house in Belle Haven. It was supposedly a more modern, civilized way, but Sally wasn’t so sure she agreed.
Mark and Letty had had one daughter together, and desperately wanted more. Rachel had been a sweet little girl but when she got older she’d fallen in with a bad crowd, then run off and gotten married, then come back to Accomack Island for a while before running off again and abandoning her husband and two daughters. The daughters had never been allowed to meet their grandparents. Cousin Letty had a son from her first marriage that the family had also never met; when she’d sued for divorce her husband had accused her of abandoning their child and been granted custody. He’d kept her from seeing her son when he was young, and so thoroughly poisoned the boy’s mind against her that by the time he was old enough to choose for himself he had no wish to see her.
Kathy and her husband had also had one daughter, Nancy, who had been so anxious as a child that by the age of fourteen she refused to leave the house. Grandpa Tom had taken them to visit her a few times when they were young; Sally only remembered a quiet, mousy woman, the apartment over Kathy’s dressmaker’s shop cool and dim and smelling of face cream and zwieback. Kathy’s son had fared much better, and between him and Helen’s four children there were more cousins than they could count or keep track of, and since they were all much older or much younger than her and Mitch, Sally never bothered.
She sits for a moment in the parking lot, soaking in the damp chill of air conditioning before cutting off the motor. She can see Mitch in one of the shallow alcoves in the face of the building, crouched with his back against the cement. He works selling imported wine at Morgan’s Specialty Foods in Onancock and walks over to the home when he finishes in the afternoons. It’s not until she gets close that she sees the phone at his ear, the crooked smile even though he’s slowly rubbing his eyes with two fingers in the way that he does when he’s had enough. She catches him in her shadow, and he mumbles a hurried goodbye before clicking off the phone.
“How’s Brian?” she asks as she takes his hand and pulls him up. They’re of a height still, though Mitch is barrel-chested and she’s what her dad describes as “wiry as a polecat.”
“What makes you think I was talking to Brian?”
“You only get that smile when you’re talking to Brian. What are you doing out here anyway?”
“Grandpa Tom kicked me out when my phone went off for the third time. Said he wasn’t going to die in the five minutes it took for me to answer it.” The tinted doors open with a pneumatic hiss, and the glassy-eyed receptionist nods at them as they turn toward the elevators. There are couches and coffee tables and, for some reason, potted poinsettias in the reception area; the ceiling goes three stories up to a skylight but still the room is dingy, the furniture trying and failing to look homey. There’s a litter of outdated magazines across the tables, and everything smells like orange furniture polish and dust.
“I didn’t think you were allowed them in here, because of the pacemakers and things. Do you think Grandpa’s figured it out?”
“Maybe. It’s not like he’d say anything.” Mitch met Brian at service camp two summers before, building houses for poor people in Appalachia in between praying and singing hymns. They’d stayed in contact over the winter, phoning and meeting up every so often, then went again to the same service camp the next summer. He’d come home with the smile, a smile Sally had never seen before, and though he kept it put away most of the time it always popped out when he’d been talking to Brian, or talking about Brian, or sometimes for no reason at all when he was sitting still and thinking. Their mother still points out pretty girls at mass and asks him if he doesn’t want to date more, and their father tells her to leave him be, Mitch is a good, responsible boy that others would do to take notes from, Pierce being one. Sally suspects that he plans on getting through his entire life without ever bringing up the fact that he’s just not interested in girls that way.
The elevator smells like vomit, Lysol, and cold medicine, and Sally mashes the button to the third floor until the door rumbles closed. As they lurch upward, her stomach is left somewhere in the lobby. She leans back on her hands on the waist-high handrail that runs along the wall, then kicks her feet up onto the one catty-cornered across from her and suspends herself above the antiseptic floor. Elevators make her nervous. Rest homes make her nervous; they’re too much like hospitals, which also make her nervous. She suspects that one of the uniformed nurses will pull her into a padded room, strap her into a straitjacket, and no one will ever see her again.
When she was six, Sally came down with bacterial pneumonia. She had started feeling bad one afternoon and fallen asleep on the living-room couch while Mitch and Grandpa Tom played Chinese checkers in the kitchen; Lilly hadn’t been born yet and Pierce was grounded to his room for doing something stupid. She’d woken up after dark with a raging fever. She remembers enjoying the fuss, as her parents always seemed so terminally busy. Her dad had bundled her into an old blanket that he didn’t know had been set aside for rags and hauled her to the car, her mother running frantically after. She’d been wedged between them the entire drive to Salisbury, her father hunched over the steering wheel, muttering, her mother whispering that maybe he should slow down, just a little.
She hadn’t been to Salisbury, which was off the Island and across the state line in Maryland but still the nearest city to home, since she was born. She hadn’t been to a hospital since she was born, either, and craned around to see everything as her father carried her in. They’d filled out forms, talked to nurses, then set her down on a paper-covered table until a doctor could look at her. He came in with his hair all tufted up on one side, eyes dark with lack of sleep, and immediately told her to open her mouth. She’d cooperated, swinging her feet so they bounced against the rubbery cushion of the table, holding absolutely still while the nurse stuck her and filled little glass vials with thick dark blood for testing, until they brought out the medicine in glass eyedroppers.
“What are you giving me?” she’d asked.
“Excuse me?”
“What are you giving me, what does it do?”
The doctor had looked at her for a few moments as if she were a chair that had suddenly started speaking.
“Little girls should be seen and not heard. It will make you better, that’s all you need to know.”
She’d opened her mouth for the dropper and swallowed, then made faces at his back as he’d left the room. He was a nasty adult; all she’d wanted to know was what he was giving her.
It was just a hazy memory now, though Sally still felt a strange annoyance whenever she thought about that doctor too hard. The impetus had been planted then. She had no interest in medicine particularly, or the workings of the human body, but she loved chemicals and was dying to know what you could do with them. How they worked. How they cured people.
Grandpa Tom said, whenever she brought it up, that the world could always use another pharmacist or three, or, failing that, someone that knew how to make bombs and mix napalm. But what she hadn’t mentioned, because she figured that he knew, was that you didn’t get to be a pharmacist without school, and there was no school for pharmacology on the Shore, or even in Salisbury.
Grandpa Skip, her father’s father, who lived on the mainland and didn’t have all his money tied up in property even though he had several farms all through Virginia, had promised before she was born that he’d pay the way for any of them to go to school, so long as they worked hard and made good. So far, few of her cousins had taken him up on the deal. Most of them were content to stay where they’d been put, could not uproot feet that had been planted since birth in the thick, rich soil of the Shore. She liked to think that she felt even more deeply the thrum of tide in her veins, the pulse of the land, that the islands were more hers, and she more part of them, than any of the other souls who called them home could ever be. But even that pride could not scratch her traveling itch, make her want to stay forever. She wanted there to be a greater destiny, a more important role in her future than just filling in her grandfather’s empty footsteps.
The door rumbles open, and they nod to the nurse at the desk as they go by. The family has been in and out since Grandpa was admitted. Mama and Daddy come when work lets them, and bring Lilly, because the tubes and machines scare her and she won’t come with anyone but Mama. The cousins come in shifts and batches, solemn and respectful, and Grandpa likes seeing them though they don’t know quite how to talk to him, since they didn’t grow up around him. Pierce tries not to come, but his girlfriend Becky does, because Grandpa likes holding her baby and he’s one of the few people in the family that doesn’t scare her silent. Sally and Mitch drop by almost every afternoon; they’ve been in and out so many times and the staff seems so apathetic that they doubt anyone would stop them if they walked in buck naked and had a picnic in the lobby.
Their grandfather is awake when they come in, sitting up in the hard railed bed, pale blue blanket tucked up to his armpits, sketching glacially on a thick pad of paper propped against his knees, the hose bringing oxygen to his nose buried under his thick white mustache. Sally avoids touching the IV tube as she wraps her arms around his shoulders and kisses his hard cheekbone: he’s shriveled since they brought him here, the rubbery Jell-O, tough meat, watery salads failing to stick to the bones that seem ready to poke through his papery skin. The sound of daytime TV from the other side of the privacy curtain cannot completely drown out the whirs and beeps from the heart monitor. He pats her arm and puts his pencil down; the sketch is of a very confused-looking rooster, mobbed by a clutch of chicks.
“Think your mother will like it?” he asks.
“Grandpa, I’ve never looked at a wall and thought, ‘That wall needs more rooster.’ It’s a good drawing, though.” It is, nearly photorealistic despite his feathery, rough style.
“Your mama has.” His voice is slow. “She thinks everything needs more rooster. Sometimes I wonder if the fairies didn’t leave her.” Their mother is the oldest of his three daughters, and they suspect his favorite, for all that he doesn’t quite understand her.
He hands the pad to Sally, and she puts it down on his bedside table, next to a plastic pitcher of ice water, a dozen or so cheap “Get well” cards, and the tin of Werther’s in powdered sugar that has always sat on the dashboard of his red truck. He’s not happy about the cards, says it’s silly to send pictures of teddy bears saying, “Get well soon!” when they should say, “Hope you have a pleasant death!” but the nurses refuse to throw them away.
“Hasn’t rained since May,” Mitch says. Someone broaches the topic every visit, but not usually this early. He’s pulled the chrome-and-plastic visitor’s chair out of the corner behind the door and turned it back to front so he can straddle it like a horse.
“And what do you expect me to do about that?” Grandpa whips back. Sally has settled on the edge of his bed, and is shuffling a pack of cards on her leg. Mitch doesn’t answer right away.
“Mama’s garden is still putting out zucchini too fast for us to eat,” she offers.
“That is the nature of zucchini,” Grandpa says, and accepts the cards that Sally hands him.
“Tomatoes and eggplant too,” Mitch adds.
“Your mama doesn’t know what she’s capable of.”
“Are you sure you can’t teach Pierce?” Sally asks. “It’s not like he has any other place to go.”
“Your brother doesn’t know his behind from his own head,” Grandpa snaps.
Sally hands Mitch his cards, and gives him a pointed look. This is the general opinion of Pierce, though as far as they can gather Grandpa was the first to hold it. Their older brother teased them, broke their toys, egged them on for years to fight each other or do stupid things like lick frozen metal or touch the electric fence, but he is still their older brother. When he turned eighteen he wandered off with Dad’s old white Chevy and the wad of just-in-case money Mom kept in the blue willow teapot in the china hutch and bummed around Virginia for a year or two, always meaning to strike out west but never getting farther than the Blue Ridge Mountains. When he ran out of money and luck he wandered back with his tail between his legs, nothing to show for his fortune-seeking but Kermit the Frog tattooed upside down on his thigh, at least two warrants for his arrest, and a sheepish and silent girlfriend who, a few weeks after their arrival, gave birth to what they have to assume is his baby. Even if he hadn’t run off, stolen, dealt drugs and been what Grandpa called “an all-round little pissant,” he wouldn’t have been any good. As children, when Mitch and Sally had gone to bed with crying headaches from the weight of the rain in the sky or walked restless up and down the front porch waiting for a storm so far out at sea that no one could see it, he’d run around like nothing was happening. If anything, growing up had further deadened whatever connection he had to the natural world.
“What about Lilly?” Mitch asks.
“You’re joking, aren’t you?” Grandpa scoffs. “She’s eleven years old, and she’s yet to show any sign of talent or gift. Enough of this. Start the game before I die of impatience.”
They roll the tray table over so that it hovers above Grandpa’s midsection and lay out the deck and discard pile on it, Sally sitting carefully on the bed near his feet, Mitch kneeling on the chair nearer to his head, all guarding their cards. The first round of rummy is played silently, except for the beeps of the machines and the hum of the TV on the other side of the curtain. None of them like the room—it’s small and Grandpa says it smells like old people—but they can’t take him out in the heat the way they did in the first weeks of his residence at the home: he has too many wires and tubes to drag along. They ignore the heart monitor, the dialysis machine expectant in the corner, the painkiller drip and bundle of tubes and valves taped to his forearm. They ignore the scratch of the blankets, the thick, plastic feel of the mattress and the creak it makes when Grandpa shifts to lay down three aces, the wheezing breath of the man on the other side of the curtain, the click of nurses’ heels in the hallway. They are back at home, at the kitchen table in the yellow house where they’ve grown up and their mother grew up, playing cards to pass the time while the rain pours down the windows, their parents at a church meeting or harvesting potatoes or across the water in Salisbury getting saw blades.
“You’re saying it’s up to us, aren’t you?” Mitch asks as he lays down a run and three sevens, then gathers up the cards to shuffle again.
“No, I’m not saying it,” Grandpa says. “You’re smart enough between the two of you to have figured it out for yourselves by now.” Sally blows a raspberry to indicate what she thinks of that.
“Your daddy and I were talking about setting up a little distillery—state of Virginia’s selling licenses for that sort of thing now. They used to make it out here on the sly during Prohibition, used anything that would ferment. We thought a little romance like that could go a long way, make people want to try it. Those white sweet potatoes you two like, they’d probably make vodka that tastes like sugar cookies. A body could make a lot of pocket money out of something like that.”
“Are you trying to bribe us to stay on the Shore?” Mitch asks as he deals.
“Not ‘us,’ just one of you,” Grandpa says. “Y’all have always lived on the farm, and y’all always will be allowed to, but I have to deed the place to someone, and I want to deed it to someone that I know is going to be staying.”
They stay until visiting hours end, then reluctantly go down to Sally’s car. Mitch has failed the driving test twice, but Sally passed as soon as she was old enough; their father rebuilt an old white Toyota for her to use, but only because she’d gotten all A’s in the first three years of high school, and only because he’d promised, and if she ever gets into trouble with it they’ll both be right back to walking.
While waiting at the stoplight to cross Route 13, she leans back in the driver’s seat and tentatively reaches her mind up into the sky. The air is thick with humidity; she can feel it aching to come down, but instead it continues to build and roll away, to drop over the ocean and the coastal cities, leaving their broad stretch of farmland dry. She can tell that Mitch is doing the same thing.
“Remember that story Grandpa told about the time he went to the mainland?” Mitch asks as the light turns green.
“Did it have a tattooed lady and a bottle of Jameson in it?”
“Nope, after his grandpa died, the one about how he met his wife.”
“He probably told me one time or another. Remember it to me anyway.”
“Well, when he was about as old as we are now—” in his stories Grandpa always seemed to be about as old as they were now—“he found that he’d got pretty sick of dirt farming and dirt farmers and dirt farmers’ daughters, so he decided to make out for the mainland and see if things weren’t better there,” Mitch begins, in fair imitation of their grandfather’s story voice. “His daddy and grandpa had died by then, but he left his ma and brothers and sister behind, figuring between the lot of them things would get tended to. He put the things he couldn’t do without in an old mending bag, got in his beat-up pickup truck with the rust hole in the bed, and started heading south. When he got to the southern point he paid a fisherman to take him across the bay in a Carolina skiff.”
“Less detail, more pith, we’re almost home,” Sally cuts in as she turns onto the gravel road by Matthew’s Market. Miss Ellie is walking along the shoulder of the road swinging bags of groceries, her daughters following after, and Sally veers wide to avoid hitting them. Miss Ellie is thin but broad-shouldered, her kinky hair hanging past her waist, and she raises her hand in greeting as they go by; she and her husband still rent the little house on the edge of the marsh. The younger daughter, Renee, small for her age but maybe five or six, walks in step behind her, both hands clinging to her back pockets. The older daughter, Chloe, almost ten now, jogs along behind them, a grocery bag banging against her leg. Sally never did get to hold them when they were babies; now that she can cuddle Pierce’s kid all she wants she finds that she doesn’t crave the warm weight of a baby in the way she did when all she had were dolls.
“He spent two weeks in North Hampton and Virginia Beach, getting drunk with Navy men and getting to know a lot of lonely women, and when he sobered up he heard that a hurricane had nearly wiped the Shore off the face of the map. So he took the loneliest of the lonely women, got her to marry him, and came back in a hurry, and that was the last time he left the Shore.”
Leaves go whipping by, and Sally sits up straighter so she can see the scrubbed white tombstones in the middle of the masses of thick green soybeans. “And the moral of the story is we’re stuck here?”
“Either that, or if you get drunk in North Hampton you’ll meet your one true love and lose your crop to hurricane,” Mitch says.
“But there was only one of him,” says Sally. “There’s two of us. Together we can make things work—”
“Can you see me bringing Brian to live here? It would be a disaster.”
They park by the house, behind a truck with its engine in pieces, and sit for a moment in silence. “Think he was serious about the farm?” she asks.
“And the vodka. Completely. I saw the paperwork on Dad’s desk.”
“Sounds like he’s trying to bribe us.”
“Sounds like whoever stays behind is going to be set for life.” Mitch hops out and slams the door. “Just not exactly in the way they would choose.”
After her first try and the resulting whirlwind in the raspberry patch, Grandpa had gotten Sally to practice whenever they had a chance, to reach out and tug at the wind, drag out the tide, pull rain down from the sky in little patches, just to see what she could do. Most times she had pulled too hard, drowned her mother’s tomato patch or blown the chickens all across the yard, but he’d never seemed disappointed or frustrated with her.
After Mitch’s broken foot had healed, Sally had triumphantly shown him how she could raise a wind; he’d tried to outdo her and sent one of the hens straight through the toolshed window. Crying, he had brought what remained of the chicken to Grandpa and, after the funeral, lessons had involved both of them. They had always spent a lot of time together, just the three of them, but after that Mitch spent more time at Grandpa’s heels and less time sitting in the corner by the oven under maternal instruction to think about what he’d done wrong this time. Perhaps it was because, after the parachute incident, he was wary of taking Pierce’s advice on any matter.
They’d raised baby whirlwinds, and made pillow-sized rain clouds, but nothing big, nothing serious. Grandpa had made it plain from the start that playing small was a good thing, and would give them practice, but anything bigger than their pocket storms would throw the entire Shore out of whack. If you were going to mess with the weather, you had to be able to control it, keep an eye on it at all times, calm it down or rile it up as people needed, not just pull and tug when you felt like it and forget about it the rest of the time.
They go to see him again the next day; the drawing pad is still on the bedside table. He’s staring out the window, and doesn’t move when they come in. The machines beep quietly, regularly, like breath. Sally goes up and touches his arm—his skin is cold—and he turns his head toward her. His eyes are unfocused, searching, but after a few moments they lock on her, and he smiles. It’s a dialysis day: he’s always worse on dialysis days.
“Hey, little bit,” he says.
“How you feeling?” she asks.
“I been better.”
Mitch pulls out the pack of cards, but Grandpa shakes his head.
“I was thinking,” he begins, “about when your mother was a little girl.” His breath is a wheeze, and comes in bursts. “I tried to teach her, I really did. But she didn’t want anything to do with the wind and the rain and the snow. She was like your grandmother, always with her hands in the dirt.”
They think there is a point to this story, but they aren’t certain what it is. So they pull the stiff-backed chairs up to his bed, and tell his own stories back to him all afternoon.
He has always told them stories. Family stories, about his childhood and their mother’s childhood and how they all came to be, and more private, half-mythic stories that they know instinctively are not to be shared; people knew vaguely what they could do, but it didn’t help anyone to strew reminders about.
The story of his grandmother Medora was of both types, and they did not know how much of it was strictly true. She was a come-here, he said, and a wise woman, the mixed-race daughter of a Shawnee Indian and a white landowner, who knew native herbs as well as she knew medicine. They got their gift not from her, but from her second husband Thomas, who passed it down to his son Michael, who Mitch was named after, and Michael’s son who was their Grandpa Tom.
Her first husband built with her inheritance the house in which they still lived, with its broad, sagging porch and thick peeling pillars, but he despised her for the color of her skin and soon took up with another woman. She avenged herself—she hadn’t killed her husband, but their grandfather always skipped over the details of that part, saying they were too grisly—and then ran out to the marshes to take her own life. Instead of dying, she was found by the first Thomas Lumsden, who had a European father but a native mother. This man, who could heal the ground and the sky the way she could heal the body, fell in love with her and hid her in the trackless marsh.
The poor knew where to find them when cures or rain were needed, and she stayed hidden from the rest, biding her time. Before Michael was born her first husband’s history caught up with him: a wanted confidence man, he was traced to his grand house and arrested in the middle of the night. She had come out of hiding then, and since she could prove that all of their estate was in truth her inheritance, to which he had no claim, her husband’s creditors could not touch it to cover his debts. Her revenge never came to light, Grandpa said most likely because the man was too ashamed of what she’d done to him to make it generally known.
They still live in her house, still keep the dark wood of her medicine chest oiled, but even though they have these tangible reminders of her she has a mythic quality in their eyes. They cannot trace their lineage any farther back; Thomas had been part of a vast but loose tribe, his wife had come to the island with no familial ties. Perhaps, once before, their cousins would have also inherited the gift, would have shared out the duty. Now they are the only ones left.
There’s a dry wind blowing the next day, some cooler than it has been all summer. Sally scuffs her feet in the dirt on the edge of the turtleback road. A call has just come through from the rest home: her grandfather is in a coma. Mitch went straight to his room when he heard, Mom went to the home, no one else was around. The greenheads are swarming; she isn’t sure why she went for a walk.
She remembers something that happened, when she was eight perhaps. Grandpa had a little cottage of his own, and she would sit on the countertop in the morning and watch the coffee to keep it from boiling over while he did other things. She remembers the sharp smell of the coffee, and the rising foam of bubbles around the edges of the pot, and her grandfather’s voice in the background. He was on the phone, walking up and down across the kitchen, stretching out the spiraling cord like she and Mitch would stretch their slinky between them. His voice was strained, tight.
“I really am sorry, Vince, but I can’t do anything about it. There is no water up there—the sky is bone dry clear out to the mainland. I know your irrigation pond is empty, mine is too, but I can’t do anything about it right now.” The voice on the other end bled through, and he stopped his pacing to bend against his hand, as though his back were hurting him, and listen. The voice was harsh, angry, almost panicked, and Sally thinks it may have been the first time she ever heard a grown man sound truly afraid.
As he listened to the voice on the other end of the phone, she reached up into the sky, felt around a bit, and found that what he’d said was mostly true—there wasn’t enough water in the air for a storm. Curious, she reached out farther, and bumped the coffee saucepan. Her hands jerked to the handle to keep it upright before she realized that she’d only bumped it in her head: the part of her that felt the wind had found the water in the coffee. It had begun to steam gently, and she dipped her mind into it. Her grandfather had his back to her, so she poked at it some more, bullied the coffee until it began to climb reluctantly into the air, forming a soft cloud like a ball of molasses candy over the pot. Her grandfather mumbled apologies into the phone, hung it up, and turned around to see a tiny brown rain shower falling neatly into the saucepan from two feet up, Sally smiling guiltily.
“And what do you think you’re doing, missy?” he’d asked.
“If you can put the water in the sky, why does it matter that there’s none there now?” she’d asked. The cloud had sprayed a fine mist of brown on her nightshirt sleeve, and she began to suck the sweet stain out.
“I wish it was that simple, little bit, that I could just give them rain whenever they thought they needed it. Reach farther.”
She did, stretching her mind until it ran thin as watercolor paint, until it bumped against a massing, angry wetness far out to sea.
“Feel that? That’s coming in a day or two, and none of them know it yet. I’m not going to be able to stop it, but I can calm it down and spread it out enough so that it’ll be more good than harm, if the ground isn’t waterlogged when it gets here. We have to give people what they need, not what they think they need.”
Sally remembers this now, and she thinks that she understands.
She thinks about the moment the day before, when he looked at her and his eyes focused. When he said her name. Then she turns her thoughts upward, into the heavily laden air. Moisture. Cloud, even: mare’s-tails. She remembers a phrase from grade school, and stretches out across the bay, to the city where her grandfather once drank away the memory of rain. Condensation nuclei. And there it is: auto exhaust and smoke and coal dust, hanging lightly in the air. She finds a breeze, gives it a twist, and pulls the particles across the bay like teasing knots out of her sister Lilly’s hair. It is a gradual process, and her pace slows as she waits. The ambient moisture begins to bead and grow heavy, a million pregnant bellies. Then, she brings it down.
The first drop she catches on her tongue, and then the million others plummet after. Suddenly the wind is whipping by like the gale she raised when she was seven years old, and the raindrops are falling like hailstones, stinging her face. She breathes deeply. It smells like her grandfather.