Free I Will Send Rain by Rae Meadows Page B

large gulp. “I had everything I wanted.”
    â€œExcept a roof.”
    â€œAh well.”
    â€œWe were so young,” she said. “I thought we could dig out the house in a day.”
    â€œYou were beautiful. Are still.” The alcohol was loosening him.
    â€œSamuel.” She reached across the table and covered his hands with hers.
    â€œWe need to talk about something,” he said.
    Her eyes widened.
    â€œI believe it’s going to rain,” he said.
    She felt a leaden relief pour through her. Here Annie had thought, in that terrible moment, that Samuel had found out about Jack Lily. She would not meet him again, would bury the giddy spark.
    â€œI hope so.” She felt herself return to Samuel, allowed herself to believe in what they had built together.
    â€œNo. I mean rain the likes of which we’ve never seen. Rain to end all rain. Rivers of it. A deluge.”
    â€œDeluge?” She let go of his hands and pulled hers to her lap. “What are you talking about? Out here?”
    â€œTo wipe out the ruined land. So we can start again.”
    He held her gaze trying to bring her with him, to carry her.
    â€œThe liquor’s got you going.”
    â€œNo.”
    â€œLet’s go back to bed.”
    â€œGod has shown me. In dreams.”
    â€œDreams, Samuel?”
    â€œIt feels like more than dreams.”
    Annie finished her drink and rubbed her face. Samuel waited for her to speak but she didn’t.
    â€œFred and I were talking,” he said.
    â€œFred?”
    â€œHe has an idea. About the rain. About how to protect us when it comes.”
    â€œFred is an imaginative little boy.”
    â€œI think he’s right,” Samuel said.
    She shook her head, trying to regain the clarity she had felt a moment before.
    â€œWe’re going to build a boat,” he said, feeling the idea solidify for the first time.
    Annie hid her eyes with her palms and dug her fingertips into her forehead.
    â€œI know how it sounds,” he said.
    â€œDo you?”
    â€œIt’s not crazy, though.”
    â€œPlease, Samuel. You are a farmer in a drought.”
    Her bitterness stung him.
    â€œPsalms 46, verse 10. Be still, and know that I am God,” he said.
    â€œPlease don’t quote Scripture to me.” She dropped her glass in the sink with an angry clang.
    Samuel sank into himself.
    â€œFred is right,” he said. “I know it. And I will do what I have to do to keep us safe.” His once tentative question about the rain, over the past weeks, had with Fred’s help crystallized into belief. With time, Annie would have to see the truth of it.
    â€œStop!” she shouted, covering her mouth quickly with her hands.
    â€œThere’s no harm in it. To be prepared.”
    Annie left him there at the table. Samuel seemed more lost to her than ever.
    *   *   *
    A NNIE HADN’T BEEN to the Woodrow house since the family had disappeared, and to see it now with its sagging roof and gaping door—how fast nature reclaimed itself when people weren’t looking—she stopped, her feet half buried in the sand. What separated the Woodrows’ ruin from their own was the finest of threads. Through how many bad harvests could they continue to piece together an existence? She realized in her haste and nerves that she was still wearing her oil-stained apron. The house had been her idea—meeting at the mayor’s apartment in town was not a possibility—but the physical emptiness of it now scared her, so she sat outside in the mesquite’s stingy shade to wait.
    As a girl she’d loved her father’s church. Bentonville had been a frontier town where Presbyterians held meetings in homes or shops before her own parents had arrived, fresh from seminary in Topeka. Her father had overseen the church’s design and construction, and its cool walls of Kansas limestone, its Gothic tower, and its turrets