The Rain and the Fire and the Will of God by Donald Wetzel

Author:Donald Wetzel
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The Permanent Press

10

We would have been late enough getting home as it was, but due to Rodney’s smoking we was even later. Every time he’d light a cigarette he’d have to stop to do it, and Ellen and me would stop, too. He would smoke it about one inch and then flip it away the way Pa always done. If the woods had been dry he would have burned them down. By the time we got home I guess he had got the habit.

I had never heard Rodney talk before like he done that night coming back through the woods. He talked about this and that having to do with up North where he come from, and said he figured later to go to college and be an engineer and build bridges. Said he liked the way bridges looked. Probably he seen a lot of big bridges around White Plains, as the biggest that can be seen around here are the ones going into Mobile, and they are so small that they have to be lifted up or turned around to let the boats go by. I have sat there with Pa and waited while they done it. And then some little tugboat all by itself would go through. Seemed like an awful waste of people’s time.

Myself, I put the whole night from my mind as soon as I could, and naturally I stayed away from the Holmeses’ for a while. Cousin Nat come over the next evening, and I said nothing about our long walk home and neither did he. Instead, he went and got into an argument with Mr. Blankhard.

Every so often he does this. There is a thing between him and Mr. Blankhard that is practically a feud. No two people was ever more different. About the only way they are the same is that both of them does things that don’t make sense to no one but themselves. Like Nat, with his drinking and foolishness. Or like Mr. Blankhard, going around picking up old nails and saving them, when no one has yet even seen him nail two things together. The habit of thrift, Mr. Blankhard calls it. Even the bent ones he will save, throwing them all in a bucket as he finds them, and then in rainy spells he will go down and find a dry place in the barn and sit there straightening out the crooked ones on a piece of old railroad iron for hours.

Yet different as they are they have come to be almost friends from all the arguing they have done. It begun one day when Nat decided he needed the loan of Mr. Blankhard’s typewriter. For the purpose of being a newspaperman, I think. Anyhow, Nat come riding up to Mr. Blankhard’s house in a borrowed car and stopped out front where Mr. Blankhard was fooling around with his catalpa tree, which looked like it was dying then and since has, and he leaned out the window of the car and hollered, “Hey, Charley,” at him.

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