- Post Script:
It rained incessantly in the forest. Each drop larger than the previous, yet soft enough to fall on the ancient undisturbed ground without noise; when rain stopped to take a break, dew fell from the trees to fill the void that the respite from rain created. She loved to sleep at night with her windows open, with rain falling outside, and desire springing inside. That is how all her four children were conceived, on a mattress right beside the open window, with the sound of rain falling outside, with reflected rain drops mixing with Jim’s sweat on his back. With hands sliding on his back in the dark; love, rain, love, rain; until all of it became just a moan punctuated only by happiness and the full knowledge that another life was growing in her. She always knew it too, right after the moment, every time. That is how country girls were, attuned to the rhythms of nature.
Carbon colored acrylic paint covered the little blemishes on the back of the old country store. Between the mountains and the country store stood her homestead, and somewhere in between, hidden from public view with a military gray screen were portable potties, five in all, for the use of the needy passerby. Her benevolence shone through them, what a way to show kindness to strangers, driving feverishly into the forest for hiking or gawking, filled with Gatorade or Pepsi loaded from the town miles away, rushing into the store in hope of a bathroom. She pointed them to the back of the store quietly, with those thin pale fingers, smiling but without many words, until after they find themselves empty of fluids and happy to return to the store with good cheer enough to buy the knick-knacks or an odd tee-shirt emblazoned with the name of the forest.
At other times, often in evenings or early mornings in winter, when business was slow and the only patrons were the rangers and their families, she sat inside and watched over her domain with resignation and loneliness. She knew where the shotgun was kept, left exactly where Jim dropped it last after he returned from hunting for Elk for the last time, deep inside the forest, beyond where she herself had ever dared to go. It was her land, and all this rain and these mossy dreams were hers; he was but a boy from the desert downwind, without trees or rain and yet it was he who made this home, hunted and fished and made distinct prints on the mud with his rubber boots and taught his kids how to read bird calls. She stayed back in the background, cutting and cooking the meat he hunted, occasionally prodding him to take her to the town for a movie or the county fair. But that was a long time ago, before Jim heard the cries of dissolution in the rain and his eyes were blood shot from insomnia; before Jim grew a moustache and dyed his hair a young shade of brown and took to driving to the town for overnight trips to talk business with someone she had never heard of, only she knew deep inside that his friend was a her, another her in her place who understood his need for dry land and dry air.
The memory of Jim as a young man, with a clean smile and wide teeth, with earth-red arms of a desert man tickled her. She remembered their first encounter, behind the store, then just a little shanty four-pillar stop for buying cigarettes. He was looking at the mountains and she was running to the store from the homestead. She ran past him at great hurry almost bumping into him, not even smiling her usual smile reserved for strangers and scarcely with an apology. It was only until later that night that she actually noticed him when he showed up at the dinner table with her father. . He came from a hardworking emigrant family, he said between generous helpings of mashed potatoes and roast beef, his father and uncles were mechanics, each passing their trade to their sons and nephews just as they had learned it from their own fathers and uncles before them. He said he was proud of what he did, tinkering with cars, spreading motor grease on his finger tips and burying his head inside an open hood with seriousness and concentration. She never heard him asked why he had come to these parts and if he said it to her father, she never heard it. She was too shy to ask, or to make any conversation with the handsome stranger. .
This was before the rain forest became a great attraction and tourists started trekking in. No one ever visited these parts and her father seemed thrilled with the company of the stranger at supper, and later, to light a cigar.
He eventually showed up at the dinner table more frequently, until it was taken for granted that four places were set at the table on Sundays, for her, her father and younger brother and Jim. He never explained why he decided to stay back leaving behind the clear starry nights of his desert town and its cars that were in need of repair. It was better that way too, for she had begun to like his presence around the house, and once in a while she discovered her eyes resting comfortably on her while he conversed with her father who fixes his own gaze on the food. On one of those rainy afternoons after lunch, she came to know the scent of his aftershave and the grip of his hands. No one seemed surprised, least of them her father, when one evening she wore her best party dress and drove with Jim to the town for something or the other that she could scarcely remember now; the only memory that stayed with her was that of rain falling on the windshield, his arms around her and on her flat soft stomach and a heady feeling of exhilaration. In weeks they were married in a simple rain-drenched ceremony where the pastor tripped and hell on a puddle ruining his best suit, then conducting the wedding in his slacks. She smiled at herself. The wet hem of her dress was nothing unusual, except this time Jim lifted her up and carried her all the way to their bed in his arms.
Her father had invited Jim to move in with them. There were no houses nearby and he still needed the daughter to run the duties of a woman around the house, though he could not admit it; a stubborn man who wore the misfortune of losing his wife with silence and reticence.
Then she understood the depth of Jim’s love for her one night soon after when he turned to her in the sleep and mumbled how much he hated the rain and would have left this place if it was not for her. She felt it within her and her insides became moist to know the stranger from the desert had stayed back with his new gear of raincoat and rubber boots for her, the girl who grew up with rain and felt it inside her even when it was not raining. She had reached out and hugged him tighter that night, holding on to his arms until she too had fallen asleep dreaming of floating away with Jim into a distant wonderland.
Jim asked her in all earnestness if she would relocate with him to his desert town. He had talked to his uncle about a place in the family business and they would have a nice little house with cacti lining in the front for a fence, whitewashed stucco walls and tamales and desert flowers growing in the little garden. She was so confused that she asked him for time to think it over; the nightmare of rainless nights coming to haunt her every night she thought about it. The prospect of Jim’s sweaty back without the cool raindrops on it made her feel sad and withdrawn. She did think seriously though, even though most of her thoughts were interrupted by dreams of scorpions and desert snakes. Then on an afternoon when the rain had gathered unusual strength, she tore off a page from a notebook and wrote a bold "no and left it for him over the cash register of their store. No explanation was necessary and none was offered.
It was a long and bittersweet affair with rain for Jim. He loved the novelty of working around the shop first, the novelty of being a homesteader, and the young wife. He was hardworking, taking care of the little things that needed to be taken care of, lending a helping hand to her father and feeling all in all a good domesticated husband. Then, when she least expected it, he got depressed about the rainbow-colored sunsets of his native town, of sitting on an automobile in the middle of nowhere, drinking beer and watching the twilight fade out to complete darkness, resplendent with a tiara of colors and accompanied by an orchestra of crickets. These were foreign images to her, so she filled in the blanks with rain and clouds and moss in the desert and consoled herself to sleep with altered psychedelic dreams of rainy, forested deserts. She encouraged him to go back and visit the desert when all he did all day was to stare at the dark, damp sight of the mountains outside the windows with not so much as a word spoken or a morsel of food eaten.
"Go," she pushed him with compassion, " and find what you are missing."
And he left. She had not really wanted him to go, she had hoped he would stop hating the rain and loving the earth soaked with moisture; how could he love me and hate the rain at the same time, she wondered, doesn’t he see I am rain? Why would anyone want to leave this place, she had wondered then, she will not trade it for the world.
But she had asked him to go out of kindness and devotion and he took her upon it. He left for months and wrote long letters in slanted handwriting written on paper with motor grease stained edges. He missed her, but the letters never mentioned the rain or the beautiful desert sunsets. Then without warning, he returned one day, smiling and with a cherubic tan as if nothing had changed. The table was set for four again and he worked extra hard to make up for the lost time in repairing and enlarging the store and tending to the pasture.
She remembered how she had felt a little distant from him that time. She still loved him no doubt, but there was something missing. His firm grip and large smile lacked moisture and she felt he brought with him the aridity of his town, harboring in his thoughts scorpions and venomous snakes. When he claimed her the first time after she returned, she yielded a little less willingly.
For days after his return, as if on cue, her father died, after losing his voice and turning in his bed all night as if contracting a sudden reaction to the rain. And Jim metamorphosed into storeowner, and readily filled his father-in-law’s shoes as the local merchant. He brought in his on touches; he decorated the store with desert paintings right across from the pictures of the local attractions. He kept a little cactus on a pot right next to the cash register that stood there silently as a protest to the rainforest. He was the one who came up with a name for the store; “Hard Rain Café” and he painted it on a blackened old door panel with white paint and hung in front of the store. She liked the name and soon, he installed portable potties in the back, added seating and cleared the brush around for a little gravel parking lot. The family grew bigger and she lost herself in the chores of domesticity.
She remembered the birth of her last child, the ever-smiling Ava. She knew it was a girl when she carried her, feeling the movements inside her and waiting impatiently for their first meeting. That was the only time she gave birth in the hospital away from the homestead, in a sterile room painted in teal and white with no windows. There was no rain and no sound except for the rustle of surgical gowns and her own screaming. She equated the unpleasantness with the dryness of the land that brings out the harshness in people, showing off all the roughness, the sanitary politeness of hospital staff and the strangeness of being naked in front of strange men. She had a big smile and big eyes just like her father. She was to grow up to be the most sensitive of all, She tried to be the replacement for all losses, felt and imagined. Another woman in the house, another keeper of the rainforest. Yet, she was daddy’s little girl, going on hunting trips with him deep into the forest and helping him cut up gory pieces of elk meat. Ava grew up with a cherubic face and muscular arms, for a girl at least anyway, tomboyish, always standing up to her bully brothers and being quite proud to be daddy’s girl. There was something strange about Ava, she thought; she didn’t like rain. The first time she learned about it, she was astonished and terrified, as if the scorpions and snakes of Jim’s far away homeland has finally come to conquer her family. Ava liked the sun, the wonderful dryness of the town where she could walk without getting her clothes wet and her hem dirty. She liked her hair open and flowing and not imprisoned by rain gear or umbrellas. But she too, like her father, braved it all to go deep into the womb of the forest; deep where the moss is thick and the ground is soft with thousands of years of unspoilt forest building. She had hoped that Ava would be her companion, the sharer of her dreams, the lover of rain, the only other female in the household, a miniature of her own image. She wanted to live vicariously though Ava, reaching out to the nature in a feminine way, as an infant all over again, trying to touch the forest softly like Jim could never do. But Ava was a warrior, she cut into the forest with her shearing knife and her shotgun, trying to conquer and collect.
Ava also was the first to leave for college. She chose a college far away, near the desert and heat and where sun shone every day. Ava wanted her mother to help her with the move to the distant campus housing, but she had refused, content to fill her moments with dreams than the reality of the world outside. She stayed back, watching Jim and the boys share the responsibility of migrating her across state lines. She drank loneliness and sought refuge in staring at watercolors of wolves and elks. Even after the men returned with safe stories and weekly phone calls became routine, she never got used to the loss, losing weight and thinning her already thin fingers to a fine line of paleness. She spoke less and less and smiled more and more in lieu of things she no longer wanted to say to make them understand.
She remembered how it didn’t worry her so much when the boys went away. Granted, they didn’t go too gar, just far enough to be out of her reach, working jobs in town, around the corner, so they could come home for dinner in their shiny pickups when they were too tired to cook. She always cooked extra with the hope that they come and they came frequently at first. Then slowly, they found other women to cook meals for them, and keep them company and on Sundays they came with their women. They had already become strangers, men who were tall and manly, with women she could not relate to. She had also learned that all was not well with her and Jim also with the same country girl instincts that had allowed her to predict her own pregnancies. Somewhere along their marriage, one night she felt Jim’s cold hands searching her in the dark and she felt trembling and guilt in his fingers. She removed his hands from her body with gentle protest, and rolled off to a restless sleep. That was the last night those hands came searching for her the way they always did for over two decades without fail, but she never forgot the smell of tobacco on her shoulders and the heat of his body. She watched with detachment as Jim regressed to being the stranger, bearing the faint smell of jasmines when he returned home from the town and she knew that she had lost the battle. But she asked nothing and he offered up little. They built a nest of unspoken dreams where each checked in and checked out at their respective times and built colonies of fantasies in them. Hers were about the rain and about the bright green moss in the forest and he dreamt about jasmines and cactus flowers on the hair of another woman with younger flesh and warmer blood and their little stucco house in the desert. They smiled a lot at themselves and observed each other with curiosity. And in rainy nights they comforted themselves with warm brandy and think blankets and the house stood curious witness to this strange and calm estrangement.
She was not the least upset when he finally left. On his pick up, just the way he had come twenty seven years ago, but he was much older and his hair less shiny, his skin less even, his teeth less regular. She stood by the window and watched as he drove away, slowly away from the front of the house, past the portable potties and the store on to the road and followed the pick up until it shrunk in size and disappeared into the thick vegetation somewhere.
"I am leaving," he had said, "I hope you understand." A luminous halo of moist temperance rose from behind her and blocked his path. From here to the beginning, erase as it grows, she thought, all pain, all intemperance and mirth and gait.
She didn’t want to ask him for her name or where they were going. She knew. Desert smell rose from his mouth as ardence, and the cactus made his words home. Rain had stopped falling in his heart and the deep red of a powdery desert advanced in its place, covering her in its unpardonable harshness.
Jim came close to her, attempting to touch her one last time before he left, a consolation, an empty solace, transferring his guilt and sleeping scorpions to her memories. She moved away deftly, sitting down before he could get closer. Their shadows met half way and the darkness of insincerity wore her down. Go, she thought, before I ruin your memories with this dry parched shadow before me. He stood around for a little while unsure of what to do, uncollected and awkward pushing what had to be done to a near infinity, he had to leave, but the modalities of this transgression bothered him.
"I don’t want to hurt you.." he coughed.
She held out her hand and smiled as if to stop him and nodded.
The house felt empty and cavernous after that. Ava returned from her arid haven with a kitten. A cat as consolation for the treacheries of her father. She said that Jim was in the desert, but mumbled out the part that she had met him and his younger companion, a university worker. She called the cat Jag, her rain-loving Jaguar, like the wild cats in the forest; he will grow big and strong and go deep in the forest and hunt elks. Then Ava went back to her world; dry and red-faced, seeking her salvation from rain and her mother, leaving behind Jag and a fistful of memories in the mist that always hung around after sunset.
She felt the barrier between her and the rain outside grow thicker as if the nature had suddenly abandoned her. All these walls are suffocating me, she thought. I need to be outside, drenched, bedraggled, and kissed by rain and cold northern winds. The soft moss grew unseen first, and then with all vigor of the rain and life all around the house, growing around the walls and on the windows until all she saw of the outside from the windows was the sallow and green of life. She was happy with that, the darkness of the rainy days got deeper and darker from the darkness of the green growing all around her. I am rain, she whispered, and I give you life. She breathed the green in and gave out rain and filled the valleys and lakes with water and in her dreams she gave birth to many more children, three hundred feet trees and little birds to sing on them.
Her children wrote letters that arrived like little presents of anxiety or neurosis and remained unopened over the fireplace collecting moisture. The envelopes grew fat in the humid arrogance of the inside air and swelled from the bottled up feelings of guilt and shame. She didn’t need to open them; she knew the solitude and sadness of their words. The sky darkened like hard lichens and poured out frequently, her clothes grew shabbier from lack of care and her hair grew matted and dark. The house drooped with yet another coat of mossy green.
Finally the moment of truth arrived. The artist removed himself from the painting and let it fall as it would, to blend in with the nature that was all around it, waiting to be absorbed. Her death was gentle and unobtrusive. Rains fell hard that night and the kitten wailed gently and then ran off into the forest and disappeared.
