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This got Isaiah excited. Why not? Maybe together, he and Sarah Beth would turn out to be more powerful than any of the others. Maybe they would be the key to saving the world. They might even get a parade out of it! Isaiah quite liked the idea of that. He pictured riding in the back of a touring car down Fifth Avenue under a snow of paper streamers, the crowd cheering his name as if he had won the World Series.
“Come on,” Isaiah said, gentling the kitten next to its mother again.
He and Sarah Beth sneaked into their special place in the dried-up cornfield.
“Here,” she said, holding out her hands.
Isaiah looked around nervously. It was daylight now. Somebody might see him. He would be in trouble.
“Isaiah!” Sarah Beth st
omped her foot.
Nervously, he took hold of her hands.
“Rain, rain, rain…” Sarah Beth chanted.
Isaiah joined in. “Rain, rain…”
They turned their faces up toward the sun and waited for a wet kiss of hope across their noses. Waited for proof of their magic.
“Try again,” Sarah Beth said.
“Rain, rain, rain!”
But it was no use. On the fifth try, Isaiah accidentally burped. They broke into a fit of giggles and couldn’t get serious again. Their mission abandoned, Sarah Beth said, “Come on. I want to show you the river.”
Isaiah dutifully followed Sarah Beth until the river was in sight.
“Sometimes I can catch a frog or some tadpoles here,” Sarah Beth called out over the burbling of the water as they neared the tributary that bordered the far edge of the farm. She took off her shoes and stockings and walked to the snaking water’s edge. The embankment sloped down to slick rocks and a slow-moving, white-gray current. “It’s down some ’cause there hasn’t been any rain.”
It looked plenty deep enough to Isaiah. He hadn’t learned to swim yet, so he kept a respectful distance. But he could see the marks on the sides of the bank where the water had been and knew that Sarah Beth spoke the truth.
“Mother won’t let me in the water. She’s afraid I’ll catch my death of something. But I get as close as I can anyway,” she said, giving a naughty smile.
Isaiah liked that they had yet another secret, but he was also afraid of getting in trouble with Mrs. Olson. His mama and Aunt Octavia had raised him to be respectful of rules, and he was envious of the way Sarah Beth didn’t seem to worry too much about that. Sarah Beth showed him where she kept an old tin pail tied to a branch with a twist of rope. He helped her lift it up out of the shallows. A school of minnows scurried back and forth along the pail’s flat bottom. “We’ll feed these to the mama cat so she can make milk for the kittens,” Sarah Beth said, and it made Isaiah happy to think about that.
They spent some time playing along the river’s edge. Sarah Beth showed Isaiah how to skip stones properly, advising him on how to angle his throw to make the most jumps possible before the stone sank out of sight.
“Your friend is really sick, isn’t she?” Sarah Beth asked as she skipped a pebble across the rippled back of the river.
“Yeah. I s’pose she is,” Isaiah said.
“Let’s moon glow,” Sarah Beth said abruptly.
“But we couldn’t bring on rain.”
“No. Let’s moon glow to see if we can find out anything about your friend.”
Isaiah agreed that this was a good plan. But he didn’t want to hold her hands out here where anybody could see them, so they curved around out on a jetty that Sarah Beth said was usually underwater.
“Not too close,” Isaiah said, mindful of the river.
“Let’s really go all in,” Sarah Beth said. “Let’s see what we can do together when we truly put our minds to it.”
“All in,” Isaiah agreed.
They joined hands. The pleasant, warm sensation enveloped Isaiah. He was in that dark place he was coming to know as the in-between space where he and Sarah Beth would meet.
