Cloud Reader

Return visits are easiest at night. In a dark suit and high, stiff collar, he knocks softly on back doors and waits there like a grim windbreak. Sometimes, as now, they expect him. They sent a messenger out to his campsite shortly after he arrived. An urgent matter involving their daughter, and double his usual fee.

A nervous, withered woman opens the back door for him and leads him down the hall into the small parlor, where the father stands with fists stuffed deep in his pockets. The man neither greets him nor invites him to take a seat. He simply asks him to place a hand on the girl’s belly.

Curled into a chair, the girl brings her knees up and squeaks through pressed lips.

He’s not a bad man, the mother tells her as she coaxes her up.

Last year, he remembers, a brilliant after-snow nimbus revealed a suitable match for the girl in question. A boy with family money, and the father approved. Now, with the girl still two years shy of legal marriage, the family’s urgency can mean only one thing. He doesn’t need clouds to understand that.

She’s barely showing, offers the father. She’s got a tight women’s underthing to keep it in.

Will you be needing her to take that off? asks the mother.

He shakes his head. She’s brought to him, a child and not a child, with a tiny growing secret in her belly. The curls fall away from her small neck, and her shoulders shake in her mother’s arms. Behind a gloss of fear, her stare holds a frank strain of kindness, an understanding her parents lack. His own pain lets him see that more clearly.

To please the father, he places his unsteady fingertips on the pleated lavender cotton of her bodice and feels the stiff tight corset beneath.

A tiny thing encased. A growing shame. And it kicks.

He quickly withdraws his hand. This is beyond my talents, he tells them. I’m only a reader of clouds.

Tell us something! the father demands. We’ve paid once, and we’ll pay you again. Tell us the sex of it!

He remembers disliking the father. A small-town banker accustomed to the sway of money. The fact that the last reading met his approval only confirmed that he’d put his money in the right place. Now this, and the man’s sure he can buy his way out of it.

The girl sobs. Her pale brown ringlets coil and uncoil against her mother’s cheek, while the corset forces out her breath in sharp little gasps.

He feels the girl’s sense of loss. It occurs to him that if he’d followed another path he might now have a companion like her—daughter, wife, friend. Someone to know him, to keep him company on the rutted roads between towns. Someone to bear witness when he passes.

What does it matter now? Knowing what might have been is a skill of little value.

He agrees to one reading. For the daughter’s sake.

Pleased he’s gotten his way, the father retreats to the kitchen and returns with all the cloud reader has asked and more.

He refuses the extra. There’s a limit to what he can do, and the fee he’s asked is enough to press him uncomfortably against it.

Amen, says the mother.

That night, the wet breath of the plains grasses lifts out of the fields and descends on the town. Its citizens awake to thick gray blankets hanging heavy on the windows, the sunlight all but blocked. Neighbors haunt the streets. The known world diminished overnight, the encroaching mysteries a sudden reminder of the folly of knowing. Nothing, it seems, will ever be certain again.

The townspeople who cannot talk down the mystery look elsewhere for reassurance. Some stay inside. Others go to the preacher. Some inevitably connect the fog with the cloud reader’s arrival, and the braver of those come to him. In a copse of musclewood between a fallow field and a creek, he’s made a lean-to and a fire pit and strung a line to dry his clothes.

His visitors have ailments of body, mind, and soul. Some no more than insatiable curiosity. They want to know the curvature of their lives, and the angle of their demise, and if there’s a design, can it not be reworked in their hands?

He makes no promises. They need only look at the senseless gray obscurity to understand what he’s up against. The world has unlimited powers to conceal and confuse. When the time comes, he can only report what he sees. Meanwhile, he takes deposits, knowing that many will want them back when the fog clears and the need to know becomes less pressing.

As one day grays into the next, the slow-circling fog steps cautiously through the denuded limbs of late November. It rises and falls, brightens and darkens, a living thing. He tries to accept its presence as a reminder of his limits.

When the preacher comes, crackling through the hazy field and into the trees, he wears a black suit and hat. Here’s a switch, says the cloud reader, still in his long white underclothes. He’s seen the preacher on both of his previous visits, but they’ve never spoken till now. Nothing good can come of it. Preachers fight an airy turf war but aren’t so squeamish around muck. They spread rumors about the cloud reader’s upbringing and habits. They incite their congregations.

He invites the preacher to sit against a tree while he pours him some of the coffee he’s just brewed. The man has a robust torso and thin limbs; if he’s going to do God’s work, he’ll have to do it with his stomach. He lowers himself with a groan and a thick exhale. When he removes his hat, he rubs his hand over his thinning black hair.

He says, You’re going to be blamed for this, you know.

Fog’s good for business, the cloud reader admits. The blame I’m used to.

I mean the boy. The father of the child.

When the cloud reader doesn’t understand, the preacher makes a sound through his nose as he sips his coffee. The steam of it sweeps over his cheeks. Of course, says the preacher. Without the clouds you’d never know. He’s dead.

The cloud reader shuts his eyes and sees the limits of his talent. He ought to have expected it.

Hanged himself last night, the preacher says. I’ve come from the funeral just now.

He senses the man’s satisfaction in delivering this news and remembers how much he dislikes preachers. In Ames last month there was a man who tried to trick him into helping him with a sale. When the deal fell through, the man complained to his preacher how cloud readers were bad for public morality. A public beating was arranged to prove it. And now this. A boy is dead; there will have to be a reason.

Are you any less to blame? he asks the preacher.

The man claws and releases his coffee cup on the ground beside him, one knee raised, black vest unbuttoned. Blasphemy won’t help your case, if it comes to that.

And you’ll let it, I suppose.

The preacher says nothing. He doesn’t have to.

He walks through the bleak obscurity miles beyond the town limits, beyond any hope of an accurate reading, just to comprehend the extent of the gloom. He finds weaknesses in its structure, coincidental separations of its layers glimmering with hope of sunlight. Then nothing. To look up and be denied even a shape! Sometimes the incommunicability of the world rankles him.

He made a promise to the girl’s family—to the girl, in whose eyes he saw what might have been. He’ll wait for the fog to lift, though he understands what it might cost him. A boy has died. The wound of it will have to be closed.

He feels his way into town in the black, moonless night, his footsteps cough in the quiet, the pain in his chest shortening his breath. The pain took hold these last few months, and now it grows by the day, a deep pit that swallows life’s convictions. Its searing advances peel back nerves till his hands shake. He knows he doesn’t have much longer before it takes him. He’s not even sure he’ll have the strength to turn his eyes to the clouds when the fog finally clears. And if he dies here, he’ll give the preacher the satisfaction of another Christian burial.

A lamp still burns at the house. The parents are waiting for him, and the maid lets him in.

She’s feeling poorly, the mother says. We’ve sent her on to bed.

Does she know? the cloud reader asks them. About the boy?

The father stands by the kitchen door, his jaw set and his eyes to the floor. The woman looks to her husband before answering.

We thought it best not to trouble her. In her condition.

I wish you’d been more careful, says the father. The whole town knows you’re here.

I don’t avoid it, he says. I have a living to earn.

Didn’t I pay you enough? You could have kept to yourself out by the creek. Now the boy’s dead and they’re asking questions.

The floorboards above them creak and the mother puts her nervous fingers to her lips. She’ll hear.

She’s bound to soon enough, the father says, folding and unfolding his arms. Tell us something! We’ve paid for it! Tell us the thing’s sex! If you can read clouds, you can read bellies.

What difference does it make?

My wife’s gone barren and I don’t have a boy of my own, the man says. He stares at his wife as he would a broken tool. I could send the girl and her mother of to her aunt’s in Minnesota for the winter.

And if it’s not a boy?

There’s something can be done. I’ve already been to Ames and asked about it.

The mother puts her face in her hands and has trouble catching her breath. The father stretches his neck.

The stupidity of someone like him deciding her fate, he thinks; there will never be an answer for that.

When the woman breaks into sobs, the father grows furious. Stop this, he tells her. You have only yourself to blame. I knew you were a fake, he says to the cloud reader. A wives’ tale. It was her idea to let you in the first time, and now look! None of this would have happened. If you can’t undo what you’ve done, I’ll find someone who will.

I made a promise and I’ll do the reading, he says. But not for your sake.

A tremor rattles the length of his arm. His chest burns. The cloud reader pulls their money out of his pocket and sets it on the desk under the stairs. It’s no good to him anyway.

What will he do when the fog clears and the clouds have more to say than he cares to know? If the clouds tell him the sex, will he listen? If they tell him the unborn is a girl, will he speak the truth? He’s always believed that his service is to see plainly and disclose all. The moment he intercedes, his talents are compromised, and he can no longer trust himself. If he lies to the father, who’s to say he hasn’t lied to himself? The conviction he’s built his profession on will fall into doubt, his life’s work reduced to a showman’s sham. And yet he cannot let himself be responsible for the death of the unborn child.

The fog has begun to thin, and he walks through flashes of lightly filtered sunlight painful to his unaccustomed eyes. He avoids looking up, afraid what he might see.

At night he keeps a small fire burning and sits with his back against a tree, absorbing its mute glow. Behind him, the creek gurgles under black skies. Currents of cool damp air finger through the fire’s dry heat and sweep across his skin like rags. He thinks about the boy. About the world the boy imagined where the birth of a child is worse than death. As he climbed the tree with his rope, what did he feel? Did he think of the kind-eyed girl? Of the child he’d never have, the small face of the future he wouldn’t see? He leapt into an abyss with blind faith in his rope—to stop his fall, to lift him into open skies. What answer could he have hoped for in that infinite muteness?

The cloud reader might have dozed. The fire has grown quiet. Then he hears noises with bobbing lights attached. They come through the field and stop under the trees, just beyond the dim firelight. A scouting party in the battle of doubt. They don’t have a clear leader, and each seems to wait for the others to talk. Their lamps light chins and noses and ribbons of light in their deep-set eyes.

A community request? he asks.

One clears his throat. No request in it. Either leave on your own or come with us.

He thinks he recognizes the speaker. The man had stood over by the tree one day while his wife sought a reading concerning the health of their twin boys. She brought the cloud reader half a cake as payment. Perhaps he spoke first for fear the cloud reader would bring this up.

He wouldn’t. Contradictions of faith and deed are the foundation of his profession, his bread and butter. And unlike the preacher, he doesn’t have a thick book to defend himself. He has only the clouds, who have yet to break a man’s fall.

I made a promise, he says. I intend to keep it.

Promises from swindlers don’t stand up, says one.

You preach lies, says another.

They bind his hands and push him through the darkness to the city jail, where a deputy stands waiting. They charge him with threatening public morality and disturbing the peace because they can’t legally charge him with making fog or doubt.

I don’t preach anything, the cloud reader says.

At night, in the blackness, nothing seems changed except his sleeping arrangements—colder than his campsite, the thin mattress less comfortable than a blanket folded beneath him. He isn’t used to sleeping indoors, and the thick walls seem false in their silence.

Before the sun grays the sky out his barred window, the room is lit and the preacher let in. He still wears his black suit.

The cloud reader leans up on an elbow. You dressing for me this time?

The deputy shuts the bars and the preacher grips the bench as he eases onto it. The silver buttons of his vest catch the lamplight. When he leans forward, his thighs cradle the hang of his wide belly, a grotesque pregnancy that will never reach term.

The law will run its course, the preacher assures him.

Looks to me a verdict’s been reached.

These are well-meaning people. They find their own ways to do what’s right. You ought to have left, but at least you’re safe. Things could have been worse.

The cloud reader laughs. I’d like to see a copy of your Sunday sermon.

I know the girl’s father, says the preacher. There’s one thing you can do to save yourself and the child.

I won’t do it.

Do you know the kind of man he’s spoken to in Ames? Do you know what he’ll do to the girl and her child? The father’s not a man comfortable in doubt.

A community trait, I’ve noticed. But I suppose it keeps us both employed.

Blasphemy again.

He’s got a plan to send the wife and daughter away, says the cloud reader. He could do that no matter the sex.

The risk is too great. People already suspect the truth. To him, only a son would justify the trouble. People will recognize that, and they’ll accept the lie in the interest of filling a void. You know how these towns work.

Too well, I’m afraid.

If you keep silent, he’ll choose the sure thing. Just to be rid of the trouble. But if you could tell him something. Tell him it’s a boy. You’d be preventing a mortal sin.

The cloud reader looks out the window. It’s as if the world has grown old and its eyesight dimmed. Look for yourself, he says. There’s nothing to say.

Just say what he wants to hear. All of this mess would clear up and you’d be on your way unmolested. I’d see to it.

Why don’t you tell him?

I’m afraid, in a matter like this, it’s you he’d trust.

The cloud reader laughs to hear it. What a thing for a preacher to admit! It makes him more kindly disposed. But of course he can’t do it. Not to save himself some trouble; not even to save a life.

The preacher is pulling on one sideburn, and the cloud reader can see he has a struggle of his own. His prayers have failed. His sermons have failed. The pages of his book, with row upon row of crisp black signs, hold no more certainty for him than the billows and blurred margins of clouds.

The cloud reader says nothing more. He lies back on his cot with his hands behind his head and stares out the barred window. The fog has a flickering quality, the sunlight discovering its weaknesses. While it swirled before, now the fluttering curtains of it travel slowly in one direction. Perhaps that means it will soon clear up. Perhaps it means nothing.

The preacher stares at the floor for several minutes, then draws his feet in and stands. He motions for the deputy to let him out.

That night the air grows colder and the fog moves into his cell, into his breath. Only his chest is warm with pain, something digging its nails into his lungs, announcing its claim with a seductive whisper—that nothing matters now, that nothing ever has. Even the strength of his convictions will soon fall into that growing blackness in his chest. And then he’ll have resisted for nothing.

He shivers from time to time, but the mattress has grown more comfortable, the silence less stable. There are moments when he thinks he sees pinpricks of light through his bars. He blinks and they’re gone. Did he only imagine the breathy shush of the fog, its bodiless stream changing course?

Out of it at last grows a sound more distinct, edges forming as it moves closer. Halting steps. A pause. The whisper of clothes. Her form a single shade blacker than night.

He stands up, thankful for the small release of energy, and steps to the window. When the darkness falters, he sees the layers of clothes, the shawl. The slight lift of her belly, released from its corset. She sets a bag down at her feet and raises her chin to the window.

It’s as if she’s understood everything; if he can’t continue, she’ll walk his steps for him, a companion after the fact. Isn’t that the next best thing?

You’re a brave girl, he tells her. But you shouldn’t delay. There’ll be light soon.

I’m giving thanks where it’s due, she says, her clear voice a chime in the fog.

I’ve done nothing, he says.

Sometimes isn’t that enough?

He smiles in the darkness. He’s been right about her all along. She saw him and knew; she’s different from the rest. Where will you go? he asks her.

I have an aunt in Minnesota. By the time my father finds out, it will be too late.

It’s far, he says. You may not make it before the snow.

I’ll take my chances. She draws a deep breath and rests one hand on her belly. She reaches for her bag but changes her mind. Will you tell me... she begins. What do you see in the clouds that others don’t?

A child’s question. He’s never been asked it. The others only want answers to their needs and are too frightened or distracted to know more.

We all have our paths to conviction, he says, and lets it go at that.

At least now I know which way to go, she says.

He nods, though she might not have seen it.

If he’d followed another track, if the whims of his decisions had turned his eyes to earth like the rest of humanity, she would not be traveling alone. Knowing it is enough. He can take solace now in the possibilities of the past, a thousand unlived lives in a bag drawn tight at the top. His life is more than the one he’s lived.

He reaches into his pocket and takes the last of the money he received from the townspeople. You’ll need this, he says.

She accepts it in her small, gloved fingers. Thank you again, she says, and she picks up her own bag to leave.

He puts one hand on the iron bar, wet from their breath, and looks for her kind eyes in the darkness.

Here’s the answer to his pain’s bleak seduction. His life has mattered all along, in more ways than he has let himself know. And it matters now as she carries it away.

The children seem to know first. They approach his barred window through the thinning fog, call him names and run. Some throw clumps of icy clay that shatter against the bars and spray into his cell. He’s tired now and doesn’t bother to move from his bed or to brush the dirt from his face or clothes. He shuts his eyes but can’t sleep. It’s grown colder with daybreak, and it takes some concentration not to shiver. Then he hears men’s voices gathering in the street. He tries not to discern the words but instead to concentrate on the sound as if it’s a building wind. And it does build. It gains force and direction until the impediments mean nothing. It won’t be long now. The deputy in the next room understands; the cloud reader can hear him pacing. Pausing and pacing. At last the deputy opens a door and leaves.

The wind diminishes and the street quiets. And then the sound builds rapidly until the door bursts open again. He keeps his eyes closed and listens while they find the key. The cell door opens. They’re cursing him. The pain in his chest seems to rot him from inside. He keeps his mind on the wind. Ages seem to pass before they lay hands on his arms and yank him up. Pairs of hands grip him tightly on each side, and another hand claws his shirt between the shoulder blades and twists, exposing his lower back to the frigid air.

What are they yelling? He tries now to understand, to pick out a word or two that might anchor him. He can’t. His senses have dulled. The sounds are warm mists on his cheeks and neck. Outside, the fog’s wet motes glow like a billion miniature crystals collecting the faint light. And they move; a space is opening for him.

Clumps of people brave the cold and gather outside shops and houses as he passes, their steaming faces little concentrations of warmth, losing themselves breath by breath. The men pushing him along wheeze as if they’ve run a great distance. Do any of them struggle with what they’re about to do? Is his public walk part of their own path to conviction? He knows how doubts are resolved in small increments. Can you find a way to take a man from his cell? Can you find a way to lead him through town? To put a rope around his neck? And once you’ve done that, the last step is easy. It has the force of pattern behind it, a swirling wind gathering strength and direction. The paths to conviction are always circular.

They pass the church, a small but impressive structure with a steeple rising two stories above the sanctuary and two small panels of stained glass in the heavy doors. Only those colored panels show any signs of light.

Beyond the last building, his escorts angle him through a field to the base of an oak tree. A man with a noose stands waiting. The cloud reader’s wrists are yanked together and tied. He raises his head and assesses the thinning fog, breaking now into soft-edged shapes with faint traces of blue. Even if there’s time, will he still have the strength to see?

He knows his gift is a fragile blessing, a thing he grasped only in the months long ago after his mother died and his father left. He was fourteen and alone then; the farm was failing. He went out to the field day after day intending to plow, to plant, and day after day he lay in the dirt and weeds and stared into the clouds. Not looking for answers at first. Just staring. Until he began to recognize patterns, familiar shapes and motions. He admired the way they built themselves, seemingly out of nothing, clawing up to overtake the sun. Others like pale daggers thrown at the horizon. Or black banks of night’s angry castoffs, rumbling and spitting over the land. Their smooth skin would boil on hot days, their edges fade as it cooled. They marched together. Or overrode each other at surprising angles. They shrank before his eyes, vanished and reappeared. It all had to mean something, didn’t it?

The thought made him laugh, there on the dirt on his family’s dying farm. Of course it didn’t have to mean anything. But why couldn’t it? The thin high clouds, cold and faceless, depressed him. The low white puffs gave him hope. There was a connection. Wasn’t that enough?

Of course not. But what else was? His father had awoken each day long before sunrise and read from his Bible, and when he left, the thick black book was the one thing he took with him, the thing that mattered more than his son.

He remembered his father in the days after his mother’s death, reading the book day and night, flipping the thin pages, searching for something in the crisp black signs. What had he found? What path through those pages led him to leave his only child and his farm and walk away in the middle of the night? The strength of that conviction was a thing to admire.

The son would find his own conviction in clouds. He stared harder. It was a joke and not a joke, like everything else he could think of. And then one day the weather turned cold and it was too late to plow and plant and there was no reason to stay. He followed the dried ruts for days until a man on a wagon stopped him just outside a small town. The man had been looking for a farmhand; did the boy know his farming? No. He was thinking of building a new barn; did the boy know building? No. Well, was he a hard worker and quick learner, at least? Not especially. Won’t be easy for a boy like that to make his way in this world; did he have any kind of useful skill at all? Yes. I’m a reader of clouds.

The man laughed. He shook his horse’s reins and the horse carried him away, still laughing. The boy went on into town, and when he found no business, he went on to the next, and the next, until the sheer strength of his conviction caused someone to want to know. A tiny scrap of certainty, he learned, was a valuable commodity in an uncertain world. And also a threat.

Beside the oak’s thick trunk, his head is dipped into the noose. The rough hemp scratches at his Adam’s apple. They’re quieter now. They don’t need the yelling to convince themselves anymore.

He’s led to a ladder and forced up its steps. Two pairs of hands steady him while the other end of the rope is thrown over a thick branch above.

He waits. The rope is pulled tight, and he has trouble swallowing. He can hear them breathing.

A patch of warmth at the top of his head makes him open his eyes and look. The fog has split, and the sky opens above it. It’s the first blue he’s seen in weeks. And there, moving through his narrow line of sight, is a small white cloud, smooth-skinned and frayed at the edge.

It’s a girl, he thinks.