Rain In Its Season [Part 3]

The minutes eddied on the surface, the hours, circulating around his cell like gobbets of river foam, hope dithering in the darkness. Amos, the sheriff, would come back. He was brash and stubborn — hardly a civic lodestar — but he wasn’t sinister. He’d saved Elijah once, if begrudgingly. He’d do it again, Elijah was certain. The sheriff would come back. He yelled: “The sheriff will come back!” He whispered: “The sheriff will come back.” The sheriff was a bastard, a godless drunk who had likely turned a blind eye to worse. “He’ll come back!” Elijah swallowed his panic. Surely the sheriff would come back.

At some point the distant gurgling ceased, and when Elijah quit mumbling a sort of reverse synesthesia settled in, the total absence of noise and light burgling his wits. A crowd mingled down the hall, and later, the rumble of wooden wheels down a cobblestone alley, the whine of a rusty hand pump, a barking dog, a clap of thunder. The walls shook again and he saw a pale orb, just a pinprick, swaying pendulum-like in the distance. Elijah rubbed his sore eyes, squinted again. The silence returned, but the orb took two steps forward, and behind the glow he could barely discern the white nest of a beard, familiar somehow, the whisper of a collar, a bowtie, the white knuckles of a clinched fist at the light’s retreat. The lips moved slowly, the coarse, jittery filaments of his mustache, but nothing came out, or Elijah couldn’t hear him. 

“Hello?”

The glow snuffed out, and he felt embarrassed, a sudden shameful heat behind his ears, and he realized now the beard belonged to that old professor in Lincoln, the same whose tiresome lectures he’d so righteously dismissed, whose lab he’d robbed to bedeck his rainmaking wagon, whose name he’d long forgotten. The glow was gone but Elijah could still feel his presence, as if the professor were now peering over his shoulder, quietly grading his final hours. Elijah prayed but felt instead the slick blade of guilt sluicing his innards. God had taken many forms in his life, but never the cool eyes of his professor, and as he splashed about, yearning in vain to extinguish the unholy visage, to rouse his true maker, he realized with a sudden violent shiver he could no longer touch bottom. The waters were rising yet.

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