Nancy Pickard - The Scent of Rain and Lightning

“She’ll feel safer with him in prison,” Mr. George said with an air of authority.

“Like we all do,” his wife said, and Collin heard a shudder in her voice.

“They should have killed him.”

“But then he’d never tell where Laurie is.”

“I’d like to get hold of him. He’d tell then.”

“He dumped her body somewhere, and we’ll never know where,” Mrs. George said in the same tone of voice that Collin had heard people talking about scary movies. “Not unless he talks, and why would he? If he admits he killed her, he’s in trouble all over again. Lord! Imagine being her child and having to grow up with that question hanging over you all of your life.”

“He’s a real son of a bitch, that one. Cold. Heartless.”

“Well, he’ll never do any more harm around here, that’s one good thing.”

“The only one.”

Their voices stopped. Collin heard their footsteps going in different directions, one of them to Produce, the other to Dairy.

He looked over at his mom at work at the checkout counter-where a few more people than usual were lined up now.

It was his dad they were talking about.

It was his dad who was the reason that little girl was so scared and sad.

Collin felt as if he was going to throw up right there in the store.

WHEN HE AND HIS MOM walked home that night after her shift, Collin was the first to notice something different about their home.

“Mom, look!”

Valentine turned her head quickly, expecting the worst.

Instead, she saw, as Collin already had, that somebody had mowed their grass. The yard had been springing up in weeds because their hand mower was broken and they didn’t have enough money to get it fixed, much less buy a new one. Collin had felt embarrassed that their overgrown lawn called even more attention to their house and made them look like even worse people than folks already thought they were, and he knew it made his mom feel terrible, too.

“Who would do that?” she said, sounding stunned.

Collin looked around and spotted a neighbor down the street just putting his mower away. The neighbor looked up at the same time and, after a moment of hesitation, waved.

Collin waved back, a big wave, a thank-you wave.

“Mom, I think it was that guy.”

When she looked, the neighbor gave her a wave, too, and then hurried on into his garage, pushing his mower in front of him.

“Why’d he mow our grass?” Collin asked his mom.

“Because of Mrs. Linder,” she told him, sounding on the verge of tears again, but this time for nicer reasons.

THINGS BEGAN TO CHANGE at Collin’s school, too.

At recess the following Monday two boys approached Collin to ask if he wanted to kick a ball around. He’d never really noticed them all that much before, but now they looked like the best people he’d ever seen in his whole life.

He hopped off a step where he’d been sitting while everybody else played at recess and ran after them. He worried it was a trick, at first, that they’d kick the ball around him and laugh at him or kick it at his head, but they didn’t. A couple of other boys came over and kicked it out of his reach, and called out insults when they ran away. But his new friends didn’t do that-they just kicked it to him as if he were like any other boy.

It felt so good to be included that Collin almost cried the way his mother had when their neighbor mowed their lawn. When he happened to glance at his teacher, Mrs. Davidson, he saw that she was watching their game. Collin saw her dab at her eyes with her fingers as if she’d gotten bits of dust in them.

THE NEXT WEEK, storm clouds showed up on the horizon at the ranch and Jody went into a panic over them, just as she had over every storm since her father died and her mother vanished. As the child screamed and sobbed in her arms Annabelle exclaimed in despair to Hugh Senior, “What are we going to do?”

They were on the side porch just outside the kitchen.

The air already smelled like rain. Lightning periodically lit up sections of clouds as if somebody were turning a reading lamp on and off inside them. The three of them, grandparents and Jody, had come outside to look at the new paint job on the porch, without realizing a storm was visible to the west. As soon as Jody saw it, she went to pieces. Annabelle was holding her granddaughter and getting ready to rush back inside. Jody was clutching her and crying as if assassins on huge black horses were galloping toward them with rifles drawn. Hugh Senior was patting her back comfortingly to no effect.

“I’ll take care of it,” Chase said, striding past them.

“What?” Annabelle asked over Jody’s screams, but he was already walking out into the side yard.

Her curiosity piqued, even while her tears flowed, Jody craned around in Annabelle’s arms to see her uncle.

Chase stopped mid-yard with his legs apart.

He raised a pistol in his left hand, pointed it at the clouds, and shot them.

On the porch, his mother gasped at the crack of gunfire, and his father started.

Only Jody stared without flinching. Her crying stopped with a hiccup.

Chase turned around and walked back toward them.

“I killed it,” he said with dead seriousness, looking into Jody’s eyes.

She hiccuped one more time. “Really?”

“Really. Watch, if you want to see it go away.”

As if he took the result for granted, Chase walked back into the kitchen.

Within half an hour the storm blew southeast, away from them.

A little while later the sky over the ranch was a perfect cloudless blue.

“How did you know?” his mother asked him later.

“I called the weather service.”

“You’re a genius.”

“You do what you have to do,” he said in a somber tone that convinced her that her middle son had changed more than any of them since his brother’s murder. He had taken over the duties that Hugh-Jay once performed, and most of Bobby’s as well, and he was growing both leaner and harder as he folded himself into the daily routine of ranch work that he had left behind in college. His handsome face was beginning to look sculpted out of golden rock, all cheekbones, long nose, and stern mouth, as if he were becoming one of the Testament Rocks himself. In profile he looked forbiddingly grim, but also compelling, and it was hard for people to look away from him. He was attentive to his mother, respectful to his father, and affectionate but increasingly tough with his niece. He shot off hectoring notes to Bobby to tell him to call home, and he stopped teasing their sister. He grew increasingly bossy with the ranch’s employees. His mother missed her flirting, charming, laughing boy, even while she saw that he was becoming an impressive man. She grieved for the cost of it. She wished she could shoot the clouds away from him.

Chase had to “kill” the next storm, too.

Fortunately for his plan, though not for local agriculture, that storm kept to the south/southeast wind pattern and bypassed them. When the one after that showed up and Jody asked him to make it go away, Chase said-knowing it was headed straight at them, “This is a different kind of storm. It’s the good kind that we need to give us water and give the animals water and all the crops on all the farms. It’s going to be loud and noisy, like Mr. George at the grocery store, but it has a good heart, like him. It’s blustery, that’s all, big and blustery like Mr. George, but it would never hurt you, any more than he would. It’s a good storm. It’s our friend. We need it.”

“A good storm,” Jody repeated doubtfully.

She had seen how Mr. George had spoken to the boy in the grocery store, and so she wasn’t sure about how nice he really was.