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The crowd yelled encouragement and Cheri, staring at the elated face of her friend, suddenly realized with absolute clarity what her bright new future was to be: politics. But outside the rain kept falling.
That night Jeremiah stood beside his patrol car, clutching a silver hip flask as he prodded the sodden ground with his boot. There was more water now than mud and he was deeply worried. He looked up at the moon; it was almost full. At this time of year they should be preparing to harvest. He’d thought of arresting Jacob but he was convinced the rainmaker was connected to some newfangled criminal cartel. “Probably Islamic terrorists,” Jeremiah muttered to himself and spat on the ground.
He flicked open his pocket watch. It was nearly midnight, and, as far as he was concerned, the rainmaker hadn’t left his trailer in two days.
Jacob sat on the floor in the center of the trailer, meditating in the moonlight that filtered through the clouds. He focused on one elusive image: Miranda, free in his arms. His heart was hollow with longing. He hadn’t eaten in two days and he knew that if he was to save himself he should really leave town.
The whiskey was making Jeremiah drowsy. Tired of the incessant drizzle down the back of his collar, he climbed into the car and turned on the heater. He stared out of the rain-blurred window; the silvery blob of the trailer became smaller and smaller until it disappeared completely as he fell asleep.
A second later the flock of starlings hovered above the trailer. Their shadow fell across Jacob’s face. He didn’t have to open his eyes to know that he’d been summoned.
Magic is something we often don’t recognize until after the event. Perhaps this inherent elusiveness adds to the mystery. The terrible truth is that magic and tragedy are sometimes interchangeable. Jacob Kidderminister was painfully aware of this as he climbed out of the skylight and onto the roof. But, as we all know, foreknowledge is defenseless in the face of love. Surrendering to the inevitable, Jacob opened his arms wide to the sky and allowed the birds to fasten themselves to his arms. A second wave of starlings lifted up his legs and then the flock took flight, carrying the prostrate lover across the fields to the preacher’s daughter.
The starlings took him to the top of the tower. As they hovered there Jacob reached out and grabbed the huge bell. For a second he dangled precariously, his arms wrapped around the curved bronze circumference. “Please, please, don’t make a sound,” Jacob prayed, hoping that the metal tongue wouldn’t clash against the sides. Miraculously it didn’t. Carefully he rocked himself so that the bell tilted toward the floor of the belfry. When it was safe he dropped down. He crouched, waiting.
I’m here, below you. Miranda’s voice sounded clearly in his head. Jacob ran his hands across the floor, searching. He found what he was looking for—the edge of a trapdoor. He lifted it and there she was. Her hair matted, blood still staining her shoulders and face.
“What has he done to you?” Shocked, Jacob spoke out loud. He jumped down into the room and in an instant she was in his arms, touching his face, his hair, covering him with kisses.
None of it matters now that you’re here, her mind sang to him, and we will be free. Her mouth drank him in, and Jacob realized that it was possible to desire with one’s heart and soul. So this is love—this blinding feeling of familiarity and, at the same time, of mystery, this sense of coming home, his mind rambled, forgetting that she could think with him.
He pushed open her dress and kissed her scratches. Her breasts were high and round; she pushed them against his chest, longing to experience the sensations he had sent to her through the bodies of other women. He stared down at her, momentarily overwhelmed by the contrast between the delicacy of her body and the violence wrought upon it.
Very gently, as if he were caressing the air itself, Jacob ran his fingers across her skin, reading the quivering nerves beneath. He circled the dark nipples that covered most of her small breasts; she felt like a child beneath his large hands. He cupped her hips, the fragility of her gleaming like ivory. Her pubic hair curled out; a lush thick black bush startling against the dusk of her thighs. Carefully he played her until he knew that every millimeter of her thirsted for more. It was only then that he buried his face in her breasts and collapsed for a second, overtaken by an intense sensation of fear and excitement. Projected desire became reality and with it came the crushing intuition that in all beginnings there is inevitably an end, but with her he did not want the moment to finish but, impossibly, to stretch on forever.
And so, with all the courage of a man who finds himself suddenly free-falling against all the knowledge he has armed himself with, Jacob took her flesh into his mouth. He drank a path down her body in hungry kisses—until he was buried in the very core of her. She tasted like honey; she tasted like the sea he knew as a boy. And the beauty of her would have shamed the most exquisite orchid.
He made love to her with his mouth until she was writhing, and then, very gently, he placed himself between her legs and eased himself into her. All the while he held the gaze of those mauve-black eyes, losing himself deep in the color until he forgot who he was and who she was, and, wrapped in an intimacy he had never experienced before, a profound burden lifted from the top of his head, a writhing knot of fear that unraveled and evaporated above him with each delicious thrust.
Squalls of rain lashed the steeple and the flock of starlings sheltered beneath the bell, silently ruffling their feathers. Outside, under the gray sky, the owl swooped and circled in a wild frenzy of joy.
Jacob’s lovemaking grew faster and faster as Miranda gasped in pleasure, until finally, reaching that moment when all perception melts, both were caught in shuddering ecstasy together.
Afterward she lay in his arms, tracing the tear that ran down one of his cheeks. Is this what the island will be like? she asked silently.
Jacob kissed her bruised wrist. “It will be like this every day and every night. We will spend our days on a small boat winding our way through the Delta, fishing for catfish and crab, and then at night, after we’ve eaten, we’ll lie in front of a fire and I’ll hold you in my arms and you’ll know that nothing terrible will happen to you ever again.”
Miranda shut her eyes and saw them standing together in front of a wooden house on stilts. Jacob is kissing the side of her face as she squints up at the sun. In her arms is a baby, a light-brown laughing infant.
Two hours later the sheriff was woken by an ear-splitting peal of thunder. The sky lit up with a display of lightning that made him wonder whether the military base a hundred miles away had exploded. The rain grew heavier. Yet at dawn, everyone in Sandridge was jolted out of their sleep by a sound they hadn’t heard in weeks—silence. The rains had stopped. A second later the sun broke through the clouds and the ground began to steam.
People ran out of their houses screaming with joy. Delirious farmers danced in the fields, wildly shooting
guns into the sky. Men kissed their wives and forgave everything. Only one man stayed in the shadows of his house: the preacher.
Now that the rains had stopped no one took much notice of the silver trailer that stayed parked at the edge of town. Everyone was too busy fixing fences, reviving their crops, and fattening their livestock. Everyone except Rebecca.
Following her pledge, she locked herself in her bedroom and cried straight through three boxes of tissues and three showings of Sleepless in Seattle. Afterward, after drinking another miniature bottle of vodka, she went down to the cultural center, logged on to the Internet, and entered a chat room entitled “Hot spinsters over forty.”
Walking home, heartened by a very lively conversation with Mr. Big of Massachusetts, she noticed Moon the coyote waiting patiently on the doorstep of the trailer, looking starved and bedraggled. Rebecca suddenly realized that the rainmaker hadn’t been seen for over a week. She approached the canine, murmuring tender words of encouragement. The bitch lifted her head and looked at her with liquid eyes that spoke of terrible loss.
Rebecca surprised herself by picking up the starving creature. With the beast cradled firmly in her arms, she headed toward the sheriff’s office.
At the same time Abigail Etterton was watching a small flock of starlings hovering over an indiscriminate patch of flooded ground. It wasn’t the birds themselves that disturbed her so much—after all, the rain had brought up thousands of worms—it was the fact that the night before she had seen a gathering of nightingales suspended over that same patch of ground. And nightingales, as all good countrywomen know, are solitary birds. What was it about that particular part of the field, she wondered.
Just then she noticed a figure dressed in a long black robe picking its way across the pasture. As it drew closer she realized it was the preacher. Not seeing her, he stopped just short of the birds and, with a shocking guttural cry, began to fling stones at them. Very unChristian behavior, Abigail thought, wondering about the sanity of the minister.
She was about to call out when she heard one of the farmhands shouting her name—her favorite mare was foaling. Abigail wiped her hands and ran toward the stables, forgetting all about the birds and the preacher.
