He lay by the forge in his blankets β he still slept there, though the reason had worn thin as old cloth and both of them knew it, and neither of them said so, because some arrangements are load-bearing β and listened to the wind, and thought about the word company, and how a man could have it and not have known it was the thing he was starving for.
Chapter 7
The rain came in the night like something that had been traveling a long time and had finally, finally found the right address.
Eli woke to it in the lean-to β first the smell, that ancient iron-and-dust smell of rain on dry country, rising off the yard before a drop even reached him; then the sound on the tin, irregular, then steady, then a true drumming. He sat up in his blankets and listened to Red Hollow drink. The creek would be up by morning. The tanks would fill. He had lived through six dry seasons in that place and his body knew the gratitude of rain the way it knew hunger β in the gut, wordless.
Then he heard the cabin door, and her steps crossing the porch, and then β unmistakably β going down off it into the mud of the yard.
He came out of the lean-to with his coat half on.
Sela stood in the middle of the yard in the dark and the rain, in her night-wrapped blanket and her bare feet in the mud, with her face turned up into the weather and her ruined-wristed arms held out a little from her body, palms up, like a person receiving something handed down from a height.
The rain ran off her hair and down her face and soaked the blanket dark, and she did not move, and she did not flinch from the cold of it β she stood there being rained on with the whole attention of her being, and then, in the gray just before dawn when he could finally see her properly, she laughed.
Once. Not loud. The laugh of a person ambushed by joy in a place where joy had not been expected to survive.
He stayed where he was, in the mouth of the lean-to with the rain sheeting off the edge an arm's length from his face, because he understood with his whole history that this was not his weather to interrupt. He had seen men weep at the first rain after a drought year and he had seen old women walk out of their houses to stand in it exactly as she stood, and there is a kind of worship that has no building and no book and asks only that nobody make a speech during it.
She turned her head at last and saw him, and did not startle, and did not cover herself or hurry β she stood there shining with rain and looked at him with an expression entirely unguarded, the first wholly unguarded thing he had ever seen on her face, and he felt it go through him like light through a crack in a wall.
"My grandmother," she said, "said the first rain of the season is the earth apologizing. She said you must stand in it and accept the apology properly or it will not come back next year, because even the earth does not apologize twice to people who turn away."
"Then we'd best stand here till it's satisfied," Eli said, and stepped out of the lean-to into the rain in his coat and his boots and his slept-in clothes, and stood a respectful distance off with his face up, getting thoroughly, ridiculously wet, while Sela laughed again β at him this time, openly, with her head back β and the rain came down on the roofs and the corral and the garden-that-wasn't and the east fence, hissing on the forge coals' cover, drumming the whole hollow like a struck skin.
Later, when it had eased to a drizzle and they were wringing out on the porch like a pair of drowned cats, she said, more quietly:
"I did not think I would laugh again. When I was tied to your post, Eli β I want this said once, the way your sentences are said once β I had finished. Not dying. Finished. There is a difference. A body can be alive and finished. The laughing was on the other side of the rope and I could not see the way back to it."
"And now?"
"Now I have been rained on," she said, "and it seems the way back was shorter than the rope." She wrung out her hair and looked at him with her scarred eyebrow raised. "You are wet through. A man who stands in the rain for a superstition not his ownβ"
"It isn't superstition if it works," he said. "Look at the tanks."
"The tanks," she agreed gravely, "are very converted."