Read I Will Send Rain for Free Online

behind the church, her grave marked with a little pink stone. Birdie’s grandmother had come from Kansas—the first and last time Birdie had seen her—and had spoken in a low girlish whisper, as the heels of her shoes tapped against the wooden floorboards.
    Birdie missed Eleanor in a teenaged way of wanting a sister to whom she could talk endlessly about everything. A mute little brother didn’t quite suffice.
    She followed Fred into a bedroom, where there were an iron bed frame, a crude broomcorn broom wedged into a corner, a cheap empty armoire, its doors agape.
    â€œHow’d they take everything?” she asked.
    Fred shrugged and ran off to the other room. He sat and wiped the smudges from the doll’s face. He did not want to think about the Woodrows. In two years, things had gone from good to broken for the Bells, too. They used to sit on the porch at the end of the day and he would dance like a chicken, his elbows out like wings, and Pop would laugh. Now at night all his father did was look at the sky and look at his Bible and not talk and not talk some more. Fred had written his name in the dust on the windows and the kitchen table and Mama had gotten short and then said she was sorry because she was really just angry about the dust. He was mad about the dust, too, mad about leghorn number ten, too sad to eat her stringy meat at dinner the other night—and so he ate biscuits instead, about twenty, he thought, or maybe four.
    Fred heard an engine outside. The wheeze of creaking metal car doors.
    Birdie stood in the doorway of the other bedroom, which must have been where the children slept, the cradle left behind along with a torn mattress on the floor. She imagined being here with Cy, how they could pretend they were in a house of their own. It would be better than the barn, romantic and dangerous at the same time.
    Fred raced back in and pulled her arm.
    â€œWhat is it?”
    From the window she saw two men she didn’t recognize in dirty clothes and leather gloves, one carrying a crowbar, the other a hacksaw.
    â€œHey, McGuiness. What about the tin up here?”
    â€œCan you get an edge? Yeah, let’s pull it.”
    Birdie held Fred’s shoulders, unsure whether to run or hide. Fred covered his ears against the terrible shriek of nails giving way as the men peeled a sheet of tin from the front of the house.
    â€œLet’s go,” Birdie whispered.
    McGuiness stepped inside just as they reached the bottom of the stairs. He laughed a little, and Birdie was close enough to smell his beery breath. He was missing half his front tooth.
    â€œWell,” he said. “Looks like we was beaten to the punch.”
    â€œWe’re going,” Birdie said. She tried to walk around him, but he stood his ground, sucked his teeth at Birdie. She felt he could see through her pale pink dress and knew all that she and Cy had done together. Shame felt like thousands of tiny needles pressing on her skin.
    With an exaggerated bow, McGuiness moved to let them pass, and Birdie and Fred ran, leaving the scavengers to take what they would.
    *   *   *
    B IRDIE DIDN’T WANT to go home—the run-in with that man too fresh—so she followed Fred, who tugged her hand. He seemed to have something he wanted her to see. They walked north on Gulliver Road into the land vacated by the suitcase farmers, men who used to show up once for planting, once for harvest. Rain follows the plow, everyone said so. Tractors ran all through the night, disk plows slicing through the prairie. But the rain had stopped, the fields left fallow, and now it was a wasteland of bitten topsoil and sand dunes, the road itself barely discernible. It was early in the day but the eroded earth was hot underfoot. Birdie ran to catch up with Fred, who had scampered down an embankment into an irrigation ditch.
    â€œYou’re not taking me to see some silly animal bones or something, are