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. I touched her hand. “It’ll be okay.”

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.

Cape San Blas Road.

Healing comes in both the telling and the hearing. Maybe that is Suzy’s greatest contribution.

“Long time ago, a friend gave me a gift I can never repay. The longer I live out the reality of that gift, the more I come to understand the enormity of what I owe and what is required to wipe the slate.”

“Watch over my boy . . . all the days of his life . . . and let him live to see the rain.” She closed her eyes. “Send down the rain.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.’”

“For giving me what I needed.” He swallowed and dug his hand into the package. “And not what I deserved.”