If It Rains

by Jennifer L. Wright

Ignoring the protests from my foot, I pushed out the front door, coughing as dirt filled my lungs. But I could breathe out here. Somehow, in the dirt, I could breathe.

“Now, Kath, listen. You can’t talk and listen at the same time.”

I’d known she wouldn’t really leave. She never left. But still I would cry out, beg her to stay, read a few more pages. I’d be quiet and listen, I’d promise. If only she’d stay and read just a little more.

The house quiet, I retreated from Oz to dig yet another hole in the parched earth near the fence line.

She was six years my junior, and I’d taught her everything I knew. Starting with reading.

She made me realize the truth: my foot didn’t make me special; it made me a problem.

When you all come back. Somehow she still had it—that irrational faith. I believed in God, sure. But He was distant, judgmental, maybe even just a little bit mean. I didn’t understand Melissa’s God. To her, He was Someone bigger, Someone there in the room with us, Someone not contained in words on a page or the walls of a church, awesome and powerful and loving.

Someone in whom she had enough faith to say words like when you all come back.

But the sound of that slap. Of skin on skin. I would never forget it, even after the bruise faded. It burned into the walls of our kitchen, echoed like his footsteps as he climbed the stairs without giving me a second look.

I scowled. My heart wasn’t broken over Ma or Melissa or Oklahoma. It was angry.

“Because even against all that blackness, they’re there. The darkness doesn’t scare ’em. In fact, you notice ’em precisely because of the dark. Because they keep going. In a dark, scary, noisy world, they shine out bright, quiet, and brave.”

Melissa Mayfield was beautiful. I felt glamorous. I felt loved. It was different when I put it on the morning after our first fight.

And my aching, deformed foot was still in that cursed boot. If I was dead, then I must not have made it to heaven.

And why does it rain after military battles? Why?” “I don’t—” “My dear, it’s called the concussion theory.

A world in need of a faith like hers. A faith of sacrifice, of service, of loving others before self, no matter the cost. I remembered her prayers, every morning, every evening, short, quiet . . . and powerful. She never left those prayers sitting on her Bible; they went with her all through the day, draped over her like a shawl, opening her eyes to things others couldn’t see, giving her strength to charge forward when others shrank away.

But when it came down to it, the one I was most angry with was God. If all Melissa’s preaching about how good He was, how much He loved me, how He’d made me special, was true, then why did He pick on me so much?

Where was God in this place? The God of my mother, of my youth—I could no longer see Him or feel Him here. He had abandoned this place. Abandoned me. And I had never, in my entire life, felt so alone.

“And another thing!” Annie slopped her mop back into the bucket. Dirty water splashed over the sides. “What’s all this nonsense about ‘he was a good man, even if he was a bad Wizard’?” I closed the book again and sighed. “It means just what it says.” I was not prepared to have a literary debate.

No, a great story. That had always been enough for Kathryn. And it was enough for me. “He was not a good man. He was a liar and a cheat and a swindle.”

I was clumsy. I was way offbeat. I pinched Pa’s toes and mangled his hand. But I danced. Oh, how I danced. I giggled as Pa continued to sing and spin. “‘But if you meet with the darkness and strife, the sunny side we also may view.’”

That was always the first sign. Nature knew what was coming before we did.

Everything I’d seen, everything I’d done. I’d thought fixing myself would help. Then the rains would come and make things right. But the truth was bigger than my foot. Bigger than the drought, bigger than dust. The truth was right here. In this train car, in Bert’s words, in his stupid, heartbreaking pictures. The truth was in the ruin, in the failure, in the abandonment I could never shake.

“You folks out east, you think it’s so easy just to quit. To walk away. But you can’t see the stars because you ain’t never seen the dark.” I leaned against the wall and scratched at a scab on my knee. “This drought, this depression . . . we’re in the blackness. We can either shine in the dark or be overcome by it. Sometimes shining means staying. Other times it means going. But it never means to quit.”

“You came for your pa, Kathryn. And now he’s gone.” The dam burst. I couldn’t hold it any longer. He’d said it with such finality, such truthfulness. I’d come for my pa. And he was gone. He was gone.

For so long I’d focused on what I’d lacked, what had been taken from me—my mother, my father, my sister, even my home—while God had been trying to show me what had always and would always remain: Him.

“I was never yours,” I whispered. “I am His.”

The reason my father hadn’t allowed me to have the surgery wasn’t because he didn’t love me. It was because he did. Because Ma had loved me. Because he had just lost her and couldn’t lose me, too. And because, if I’d had it, everything would have been different. Pa would have been different. Melissa would have been different. I would have been different. His choice had molded us, shaped us, defined us.

If I’d had the surgery, who we were—and were supposed to be—might never have been.

A father’s love. And a Father’s love.

This trip had been hard and full of grief. But all along the way there had been stars—stars I’d misunderstood but whose light now shone bright in the recesses of my mind.

This whole journey was not a punishment from a mean, spiteful, distant God, a way to emphasize my weakness. Rather, it was...

Because I’d had it all along—and it came from Him and who ...

And just because it was hard to come here didn’t mean I shouldn’t. Because God’s there in the hard things, too.

And I swore I had died. There was no way my sister was here in Dalhart. But her callused hand had slipped into mine, much like it was now, and I’d known the entirety of it all without her even telling me.