One day he shot a chicken hawk and hung it head downward high in the branches of the oak tree. And he took to watching the horses and the chickens closely.
Thomas laughed at him. “You won’t bring it any quicker. You’re watching the kettle, Joe. You may keep the rain away if you’re too anxious.” And Thomas said, “I’m going to kill a pig in the morning.”
“I’ll hang a cross-bar in the oak tree by my house to hang him on,” said Joseph. “Rama will make the sausage, won’t she?”
Elizabeth hid her head under a pillow while the pig was screaming, but Rama stood by and caught the throatblood in a milk bucket. And they weren’t too soon, for the sides and hams were hardly in the new little stone smoke house before the rain came. There was no maneuvering this time. The wind blew fiercely for a morning, out of the southwest and the ocean, and the clouds rolled in and spread and dropped low until the mountain tops were hidden, and then the fat drops fell. The children stood in Rama’s house and watched from the window. Burton gave thanks and helped his wife to give thanks, too, although she wasn’t well. Thomas went to the barn and sat on a manger and listened to the rain on the barn roof. The piled hay was still warm with the sun of the summer slopes. The horses moved their feet restlessly and, twisting their heads against the halter ropes, tried to sniff the outside air through the little manure windows.
Joseph was standing under the oak tree when the rain started. The pig’s blood he had dabbled on the bark was black and shiny. Elizabeth called to him from the porch, “It’s coming now. You’ll get wet,” and he turned a laughing face to her.
“My skin is dry,” he called. “I want to get wet.” He saw the first big drops fall, thudding up dust in little spurts, then the ground was peppered with black drops. The rain thickened and a fresh wind slanted it. The sharp smell of dampened dust rose into the air, and then the first winter storm really began, raking through the air and drumming the roofs and knocking the weak leaves from the trees. The ground darkened; little rivulets started to edge out across the yard. Joseph stood with his head uplifted while the rain beat on his cheeks and on his eyelids and the water coursed into his beard and dripped into his open shirt collar, and his clothes hung heavily against him. He stood in the rain a long time to make sure it was not a little piddling shower.
Elizabeth called again: “Joseph, you’ll take cold.”
“No cold in this,” he said. “This is healthy.”
“You’ll sprout weeds, then, out of your hair. Joseph, come in, there’s a good fire going. Come in and change your clothes.”
But still he stood in the rain, and only when the streaks of water were running down the oak trunk did he go in. “It will be a good year,” he said. “The canyon streams will be flowing before Thanksgiving.”
Elizabeth sat in the big leather chair; she had put a stew to simmering on the airtight stove. She laughed when he came in, there was such a feeling of joy in the air. “Why, you’re dripping water on the floor, all over the clean floor.”
“I know,” he said. And he felt such a love for the land and for Elizabeth that he strode across the room and rested his wet hand on her hair in a kind of benediction.
“Joseph, you’re dripping water down my neck!”
“I know,” he said.
“Joseph, your hand is cold. When I was confirmed, the bishop laid his hand on my head as you are doing, and his hand was cold. It ran shivers down my back. I thought it was the Holy Spirit.” She smiled happily up at him. “We talked about it afterwards and all the other girls said it was the Holy Spirit. It was a long time ago, Joseph.” She thought back to it, and in the middle of her long narrow picture of time lay the white pass in the mountains, and even it was a long way back in the picture of time.
He leaned over quickly and kissed her on the cheek. “The grass will be up in two weeks,” he said.
“Joseph, there’s nothing in the world as unpleasant as a wet beard. Your dry clothes are laid out on the bed, dear.”
During the evening he sat in his rocking-chair beside the window. Elizabeth stole glances at his face, saw him frown with apprehension when the rain’s drumming lightened, and smile slightly with reassurance when it continued again, harder than ever. Late in the evening Thomas came in, kicking and scraping his feet on the front porch.
“Well, it came all right,” Joseph said.
“Yes, it came. Tomorrow we’ll have to dig some ditches. The corral is under water. We’ll have to drain it.”
“There’s good manure in that water, Tom. We’ll run it down over the vegetable-flat.”
The rain continued for a week, sometimes thinning to a mist and then pouring again. The drops bent down the old dead grass, and in a few days the tiny new spears came out. The river rumbled out of the western hills and rose over its banks, combing the willows down into the water growling among the boulders. Every little canyon and in the hills sent out a freshet to join the river. The water-cuts deepened and spread in all the gullies.
The children, playing in the houses and in the barn, grew heartily sick of it before it was done; they plagued Rama for methods of amusement. The women had begun to complain about damp clothes hung up in their kitchens.
Joseph dressed in an oilskin and spent his days walking about the farm, now twisting a post-hole digger into the earth to see how deep the wet had gone, now strolling by the river-bank, watching the brush and logs and limbs go bobbing by. At night he slept lightly, listening to the rain or dozing, only to awaken when its force diminished.
And then one morning the sky was clean and the sun shone warmly. The washed air was sweet and clear, and all the leaves on the live oaks glittered with polish. And the grass was coming; anyone could see it, a richness in the color of the farther hills, a shade of blue in the near distance, and right at hand, the tiny green needles poking through the soil.
The children broke out of their cages like animals and played so furiously that they became feverish and had to go to bed.
Joseph brought out a plow and turned over the soil of the vegetable flat, and Thomas harrowed it and Burton rolled it. It was like a procession, each man eager to get his claws into the soil. Even the children begged a bit of dirt for radishes and carrots. Radishes were quickest, but carrots made the finest looking garden, if only they could wait that long. And all the time the grass pushed up and up. Needles became blades, and each blade sprang apart and made two blades. The ridges and flanks of the hills grew soft and smooth and voluptuous again, and the sage lost its dour darkness. In all the country, only the pine grove on the eastern ridge kept to its brooding.
Thanksgiving came with a great feast, and well before Christmas the grass was ankle-high.
One afternoon an old Mexican peddler walked into the farmyard, and he had good things in his pack; needles and pins and thread and little lumps of beeswax and holy pictures and a box of gum and harmonicas and rolls of red and green crêpe paper. He was an old bent man and carried only little things. He opened his pack on Elizabeth’s front porch and then stood back, smiling apologetically, now and then turning over a card of pins to make it show to better advantage or prodding the gum gently with his forefinger to gain the attention of the gathered women. Joseph, from the barn door, saw the little crowd and sauntered over. Only then did the old man take off his tattered hat. “Buenas tardes, señor,” he said.
“—Tardes,” said Joseph.
The peddler grinned in extreme embarrassment. “You do not remember me, señor?”
Joseph searched the dark, lined face. “I guess I don’t.”
“One day,” the old man said, “you rode by on the way from Nuestra Señora. I thought you were going hunting and I begged a piece of venison.”
“Yes,” Joseph said slowly. “I remember now. You are Old Juan.’
The peddler tipped his head like an aged bird. “And then, señor—and then we spoke of a fiesta. I have been way down the country, below San Luis Obispo. Did you make that fiesta, señor?”