Assume the Rain

     Danny Wilson stood transfixed on the sideline of Concord High School football field. He was watching his little brother Scot's practice. He loved watching his little brother play football; Scot was a good little player, the team's quarterback. But another reason he liked it so much  was a sense of regret that they didn't have sixth grade football when he had attended Mark Twain two years before.

     Occasionally a drop of rain from the approaching storm would interrupt his rapt attention, and he would look up and take notice of the foreboding sky. Then suddenly the whole sky would rumble with loud thunder and a sharp whip of lightning would light up  piece of the night way to the south. It wasn't unexpected, Danny had to talk his mother into letting them attend practice in the first place. The local weatherman had made her waver on letting them out of the house, but he had also mentioned that the storm would arrive in the area at a much later time.

      Danny and his family lived not even a mile to the south of the stadium.  Him and Scot had made their usual trek through the alley ways between their home and the high school. It always made the trip a lot more interesting and even slightly menacing, like they were walking through a dark forest inside a fairy-tale. In the summer, after baseball, there would be a lot of fruit trees overhanging the back fences, and they and their friends would help themselves to plums, grapes, or apples. Tonight, the journey home would prove a lot more troublesome if it started raining like it looked like it was  about to do.

     Danny watched as Coach Bobby Anthony, a local football legend, huddled his small charges around him and gave them directions on how to run a play. When the ball was snapped, Scot tucked it and ran around the right side for a seven yard gain. The sky thundered again, and Coach Anthony looked up at the sky, took stock of the situation and finally waved his arms to indicate that it was over. Danny immediately started making plans in his head on how they were going to handle the trip home as he saw Scot take off his helmet and start jogging his way.

      He yelled, "Great run, Scot. Now get your butt over here, and see if you can run that fast going home!"

     Scot just laughed and yelled back, "See if we can get these guys to chase us."

      As soon as they turned and headed for the gate on the east side of the field, they spotted their mom parked and waiting. They gave out a roar of relief and signaled for Dean Jones, who lived three houses down from them, to join them. They were so happy as they piled in they almost forgot to tell their mom thanks.  When they got home, Danny was the first out of the car and he ran into the house in order to beat Scot to the bathroom.

    But as soon as he entered, he saw something that knocked the wind clear out of him, his father sitting in the middle of the couch that faced the door, with the light from a bulb in the kitchen forming a halo about his head, and he was crying, and Danny knew his dad never cried.

    Scot came running in the door right behind Danny and such was the abruptness of Danny stopping, that Scot's forward motion almost knocked them both over. Then Scot looked up and saw his dad too. Both boys turned immediately to look to their mother for answers, and it was the first time they even noticed that she was crying too. It took more than a moment for their Dad to get the story out, he choked on the words a lot. There weren't that many of them to tell, but every one of them seem to weigh a ton, and put together one after another they were enough to alter the history of their small family forever.

     Danny and Scot's mother worried about her boys being caught out in a lightning storm after hearing one clap of thunder too many and rushed out of the house to go get them. In her haste, she forgot that the family's beloved dog, a shaggy little poodle named Pepe liked to sleep in a rut behind driver's side rear wheel. She only remembered when she felt the sickening thud that brought it to her attention.

    Mr. Wilson, was a Dirt Bowl Okie, a battle hardened man who held the highest degree in Dirt Bowl Okiedom, a man who squeezed every dime as though his family's very survival depended on it, a man who never wasted a motion or even an emotion if it could be avoided. Danny never told his father this, but when he sat in church back then and listened to the lectures about the severity of Jehovah's judgement, it was his father's face he usually saw. On that night, he would have been hard-pressed remembering the last time he had seen his father smile. But he had never seen his father cry.

   He had heard stories about his father being informed of the death of his baby sister in a car wreck while he was in basic training, but he had only thought about how the news had effected his Grandpa Joe who had reluctantly let her attend a barn dance that fateful night.

     When his wife had came inside crying frantically, Danny's dad had acted swiftly and decisively. He calmed her down by reminding her that her sons were still in danger of being caught in lightning storm, and told her that it was over and done, too late to change the tragedy into something else. Then when she left, he grabbed a shovel and an old towel, dug a hole in corner of their lot, wrapped the body and buried the past swiftly without so much as a wasted stroke.

     Danny and Scot weren't having none of it though. They both knew their dad was just trying to shield them from the gruesomeness of the night, the sight of death incarnate, but the wounds were far too deep, the pain far to real to shunt aside like it was just a bad dream. It was decided later that night when everyone was all cried out that nothing short of a proper burial would do. Their dad told them that he would exhume the body the next morning after it stopped raining and they would give Pepe the funeral he deserved. That night, as they sniffled in bed, the boys could hear their dad sawing and hammering as he constructed a coffin. They could hear the soft sobs of their mother, cutting up a blanket to sew into a proper shroud.

    And it did stop raining and the Sun surprised them al by rising as if nothing had ever happened, so they gathered in the north-east corner of the yard in front of a small hole in the ground. Their older brother Glen helped their dad place the tiny coffin into the hole and Scot and Danny help shovel in the dirt.  Their Mom read a passage from the Bible and then their dad mixed up some cement in his wheel barrow. He had already created a wooden form to pour the cement into. Then after it had set a while, he gave their mother one of his sharp tools, and she scratched the words Our Beloved Pepe and the date he died into the headstone.

     Many years later, Danny asked his mother about how bad she had felt that night. She had responded that it was the worst moment in her life and was made even worse when she looked in the family Bible and found out that Scot had taken a red crayon and written in the date that, "Mama Killed Pepe!" Then they got to talking about the past, and she told him  about the one time that his father had struck her after she had a knocked a glass of whiskey out of his hand in front of his brother.

    "I told him if he touched me again, I'd leave him. He never did. Looking back, I was as much to blame as he was. He had just gotten home from the war, and I was a just a silly little girl craving attention." She went on to relate how that night had changed her husband, "He cried the whole night. Something broke loose inside of him. He got religion right after that, quit drinking, the whole bit.'

   "Dan, hey Danny? You done there? Or, you want another one?"

   Danny's reverie was broken by his friend and bartender Frank Loo. As Frank waited for Danny to answer, he wiped down the bar in front of Danny with a rag.

   Danny looked at his half-filled glass of Coors Light and determined that he was done for the night, "Naw, Panch. I'll drink the rest of this one and head on home."

   "Man, you were out of it there for a long while, like you were staring off in the distance. Anything you need to talk about?"

    Danny shrugged, "Man, it's just this weather, Frank. Whenever I hear thunder and lightning, I go back in time to the night my mom ran over my dog Pepe."  

    A long awkward pause ensued with Frank wiping at the bar before speaking, "Danny, I can't tell you how sorry I was to hear about you and Jennie. I know it don't help none, but I been there, know how it feels."

     "Yeah, I know. Shit, you had to deal with that and what your own damned brother did."

   "You got that right! That broke my family into pieces. Even my mom and dad took different sides. Phil was always such a mama's boy. I don't think my dad ever spoke to him again. My mom had to threaten to divorce Pop if he didn't go to Phil's funeral." Then after another pause, "How long were you guys married, if you don't mind me asking?"

    "Thirty-one years, if you can believe that. Came home one evening, and she said she didn't love me. After she left, I found newspaper ads six months old that told me she was looking for a place way back then, working up the nerve, I guess. Least the girls were gone by then."

     "That's good. I was wondering about that."

     "Yep, Maria's in Freeburg and Annie's in San Diego."

     "See 'em much?

     "Funny you should ask. I just back from talking to Maria. I went to see her because she was thinking about moving to Portland and wanted to talk to me about it.  When I left the house, I was pretty anxious about what I was going to say. Then, I got two miles outside of town and had to pull over. I had this feeling, an epiphany come over me all of sudden, and I understood about five, six damn things in a flash."

      "Like what?

     "Well, first of all, I knew not to worry, that no matter what I told her, it would be the right thing to say, as long as I spoke the truth, words from the heart."

     "What did you tell her?"

    "I said. move if you gotta, but don't take Freeburg with you."

    "How did she respond to that?"

    "She started crying. I think she had already decided but wanted to bounce it off of somebody."

     "You said, you understood other things, like what?"

    "Oh, yeah, mainly literature things.  You know I taught The Hobbit for thirty years in my class. Well, I was always disturbed by the fact that the wizard dude shows up out of nowhere, at  random, at Bilbo's door. It ruined the whole damn book for me. Well, I suddenly understood that there wasn't anything random about it. He told Bilbo. 'I come to bring you what you wanted.' Thing is Bilbo had never said he wanted that adventure. He'd never said a thing to anybody about wanting to go on a trip much less a hero quest."

    "Then how'd the Wizard know?"

    "Bilbo didn't have to say it. It was just assumed. You see, Frank, we all want our live's to mean something more than we think it does. Deep down inside, we all want to find a pot a gold and overcome a dragon."

    Frank mulled over what his friend was saying for a moment, "Even when the pot of gold is reconciling with your ex-wife, and the dragon is punching that big fucking bully George Porter in the nose?"

   Danny smiled ruefully and shook his head, "Especially then, Frank. Especially then." Then he stood up, stretched his legs, slapped the bar and headed toward the door. Frank was already heading toward the opposite end of the bar where the predatory and perpetually angry Mitchell sisters had staked out their usual spots.

   He heard Frank call out, "And how about you ladies? Got time for one more?"

   Danny opened the door, looked out at the rain, zipped his coat up and stepped out into the cold, windy darkness. He heard a voice come out of the shadows, "There you are. I've been waiting for while."