RAIN IN ITS SEASON [PART 1]

They used what they could find — bailing twine, tent ropes, horse reins — kept circling until he looked like a nesting bird. He could wiggle his toes and spread his fingers, crane his neck from side to side. He could piss himself and he did, the warmth filling his drawers and dribbling into the dirt below. If it’s rain they want.…They cursed the goddamn hornswaggler, the shyster sumbitch, the rain-faking bullshitter with his secret potions and wafer-thin scripture. Sweat ran black down the bridge of his nose, stung his eyes. 

He quoted Leviticus when he first arrived: “I will send you rain in its season, and the ground will yield its crops and the trees their fruit.” But that was weeks ago, and Hall County, Nebraska, looked as if God had never heard of it: barren fields, dry wells, soot coughing through keyholes and cracked windowsills, silent farm wives nursing foxtail and rabbitbrush, the only green still rooted on their quarter. They said Abel’s missus swung from the rafters when the orchard finally quit, though Abel himself — they all agreed — must have been a devil to live with no matter the drought, half-witted, half-drunk. 

Holed up beside the crik, what once was, Rev. Sickler fed countless sermons to the fire, each one stubbornly returning to Genesis: “Now no shrub had yet appeared on the earth and no plant had yet sprung up, for the Lord God had not sent rain on the earth and there was no one to work the ground …” Of course there were plenty, most of them former congregants, pious and civicminded, and after five fruitless years — so many hollow Sundays — the inertia threatened to consume them.

“Hell, if you can’t make it rain,” one of them now barked from below. The blurry figure trailed off from the herd, the rest of his grievance swallowed in a cloud of dust that peppered Elijah’s cheeks and rattled the glass of the opera house behind him. His skin burned. It hurt to breathe — worse not to. He blinked twice, squinted at the mob below, still growing, boots sanding the wooden sidewalk: farmers and waddies and businessmen, the serious young school biddy fresh from Philadelphia, her pleated dress flowing like memories of bluestem. 

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