Send Down the Rain

by Charles Martin

You can kill my body and you’d be doing me a favor, but kill my soul and there’s no remedy for the pain. And when you’re in that place, and the pain is real bad, and you’ve been leaning into the thing causing it so long that you don’t know how to do anything other than lean, hope and hopelessness blur and you lose sight of who’s trying to hurt you and who’s trying to help. Sometimes you need somebody to stand between you and the sharp thing that hurts. To lean for you.

Hope has a funny way of cracking people down the middle. Cutting through the tough places.

When people become afraid on a soul level, when the terror of their lives has taken up residence in their belly, it becomes the wall behind which they sequester themselves. The only way through is to tunnel under. Meet them inside their perimeter. Problem is, the depth of their pain determines the thickness of the wall.

“Hate is a powerful weapon. But it is powerless when it comes to cutting chains off the human heart.”

“Sir, I’ve had the experience of being in a country where people were trying to kill me. Every day. That simplifies life a good bit. In matters of the heart, we have only two options. Hate them or love them. That’s it. That’s all we got. There’s no middle.”

“I’d seen what evil could do. Evil never gave itself for anyone. It takes what it doesn’t own. Holds your head under the water. Rips your head off your neck and dangles it from the city wall. Evil dominates. Controls. Eradicates. Evil is a sniveling punk, and if you let it inside you then you spew hatred, which is just another name for the poison we drink hoping it’ll hurt someone else.” I glanced around the courtroom at Allie, Catalina, Gabby, Suzy, and finally at the cameras. “But not love. Love rushes in where others won’t. Where the bullets are flying. It stands between. Pours out. Empties itself. It scours the wasteland, returns the pieces that were lost, and it never counts the cost.” Despite a packed house, the room was silent. After a minute, I continued, “Love walks into hell, where I sit in chains, where the verdict is guilty, grabs you by the heart, and says to the warden, ‘Me for him.’” I turned and glanced at my brother. “Sir, we live in an angry, evil world. Where stuff doesn’t always make sense. Where hope seems like something we did when we were kids and the love we cling to slips through our fingers like cold water, but”—I tapped my chest—“nothing that happens here today changes the fact that love heals the shattered places.” I shook my head once. “It’s the only thing that can—” The faces in the courtroom held steady on mine. “It’s the only thing worth fighting for,” I finished, then turned to Bobby. I’d like to think my eyes smiled. “So, no, sir, I don’t ...