I Will Send Rain Read Online Free PDF Page A

buffed.
    William had taken her to the dance, she in her yellow crepe dress with roses around the collar and he in a black wool suit—a suit!—as if it weren’t July in Kansas. All she could think about was how hot his hand was on her back, a smoldering lump of coal, burning a hole through the fabric. He kept his hand there while they danced and even when the music stopped. Please move your hand, she thought, please move your hand or I will have to run away or scream. Sweat moistened his hairline and his lip. It was the approach of her father—he needed her help at the refreshment table—that finally made William drop his hand, leaving her lower back blessedly cool and damp.
    She hadn’t noticed Samuel. He blended in with the other young farmers with their awkward postures and mud-covered boots.
    â€œLemonade?”
    â€œYou squeeze these lemons all by yourself?” Samuel asked.
    She laughed and handed him a small glass cup. “I had a little help from the church ladies.”
    He had mournful eyes, brown as molasses. His hands were tough-skinned working hands.
    â€œSamuel Bell,” he said. “Ready for lemon duty whenever you need my services.”
    â€œAnn Stokes.”
    â€œNice to meet you, Annie.”
    It was bold of him to be so familiar, particularly in her father’s church, but she liked it. Samuel had a quiet sureness about him, no matter his frayed collar. Standing next to him she felt as if she had time and space to breathe. She did not need the burning hands of William Thurgood, and this was a revelation, that she could choose something different.
    Samuel was a more rough-hewn sort and, in those early days, his talk of homesteading made something rise up in her. She leapt for the wildness of the unknown, saw herself reborn as a farmer’s wife. And Samuel’s vision, his conviction, had been exciting, hadn’t it? Even then she’d known she was tough; she just hadn’t had a chance to prove it yet.
    *   *   *
    B IRDIE WALTZED UP and slid into the backseat with Fred. Her color was up, her eyes inward and dreamy. Do not marry that boy, Annie thought. Get yourself out of this place.
    â€œMama, Fred ripped his pants,” Birdie said. “All the way down the seam.”
    Annie heard her, but didn’t respond, afraid of what her voice might give away.
    â€œAnn?” Samuel said.
    She walked around the car and got in the front seat next to her husband. Annie looked at her family in the dirty old Ford and she was grateful, then, for what she had. But rain or no rain, she couldn’t shake the sense that on this searing June afternoon, the man from Amarillo had changed her life, had left a little tear. Her faithlessness had been exposed, however briefly, and try as she might to forget it, it was there, held back by a few loops of thread.
    Samuel reached for her hand but only got ahold of three fingers. She tried to readjust, but he thought she was pulling away, and then their hands returned to their laps as if they had not touched.
    Samuel started the engine.
    â€œHome,” he said.

 
    CHAPTER 3
    The Woodrows, all eight of them, left sometime in the night, two weeks after the man from Amarillo drove off leaving little more than sunshine in his rearview. Jack Lily went out to their place for some eggs and found the front door flapping against its post, a one-legged crow hopping from empty room to empty room. The Woodrows were not the first—the Morgantowns, the Nickelbaits before them—but he was surprised that Jonas Woodrow, beaten down so long by that spit of land, had the gumption to simply pack up and go.
    Of course they hadn’t told anyone they were going. No one wanted to admit defeat, Jack thought. Just yesterday he had seen one of the boys digging out fence posts half-buried by sand drifts. Desperation, he knew, though, was not something you make a plan for.
    He tilted his chair back onto two legs