The Value Of Rain Read online

  The Value of Rain

  by Brandon Shire

  Copyright © 2011 Brandon Shire

  Cover Photo: Wojciech Wolak

  The Practical Group, LLC

  All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise) without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book. This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, people, places, schools, media, incidents, and events are either the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously.

  ISBN-13: 978-1-467990240

  ISBN-10: 1467990248

  In families there are no crimes beyond forgiveness.

  Pat Conroy

  “The Prince of Tides”

  Children begin by loving their parents. After a time they judge them. Rarely, if ever, do they forgive them.

  Oscar Wilde

  Contents

  Chapter One - February 1991

  Chapter Two - August 1971

  Chapter Three - February 1991

  Chapter Four - June 1975

  Chapter Five - June 1975

  Chapter Six - April 1979

  Chapter Seven - November 1980

  Chapter Eight - February 1991

  Chapter Nine - March 1981

  Chapter Ten - July 1982

  Chapter Eleven - August 1983

  Chapter Twelve - February 1991

  Chapter Thirteen - August 1986

  Chapter Fourteen - August 1986

  Chapter Fifteen - June 1989

  Chapter Sixteen - February 1991

  Chapter Seventeen - February 1991

  Chapter Eighteen - February 1991

  Chapter Nineteen - February 1991

  Chapter Twenty - February 1991

  Chapter Twenty One

  Chapter One

  February 1991

  There are dead people in my head. They keep squirming around and pulling at me just when I expect that things will get better; just when I hope that life will improve somehow. But it never happens like that, not in my world. Not in anyone’s really. I think that we all just kind of hope that somewhere amidst the flotsam in this shitty river we call life there will be a savior that comes along and lifts us from the stream of our relatives, our sanctity and our moroseness. It’s not religion or god I’m talking about; it’s that one soul that leaves its mark so deeply imprinted on you that your very breath seems short when it’s gone.

  What makes that impression?

  What soul has that much aura?

  More importantly, how can you replace it?

  I don’t think I have that answer any more, and I wonder if I ever did; if anybody ever did.

  *****

  I stood at the foot of my mother’s bed as she lay dying. I had no remorse; it was all I could do to not hurry her death with my own bare hands. I had come through every obstacle she’d erected, every barrier she’d put up before me, every indignity she’d laid upon me. And I was still here.

  I looked at her worn walnut features, her tarred over eyes and wondered… could it have been any different; could we have ever been that family?

  “No,” I said as I sighed out loud and looked around for the first time.

  The room hadn’t changed in my twenty year absence. It still had the same red felt wallpaper, the same early French relics, and the same floral carpet. Charlotte’s divan was still littered with laced pillows, and her vanity was still covered with the same ancient crystal decanters she’d worried me over as a child. With the exception of the indignifying stainless steel of her new hospital bed, it seemed she had finally accomplished the old New Orleans beau monde she’d always envisioned herself belonging to.

  “You’re here. Good. Don’t let them put their hands on me,” she said suddenly, as if we didn’t have all those iron-hammered years of antipathy between us. The hands she referred to belong to my relatives, whom I silently passed in the kitchen when I came into the house.

  “Who am I?” I asked. It seemed a reasonable question since she hadn’t opened her eyes yet.

  But she never answered. The flat mirror of her eyes said enough when it found me hidden in the shadows by the window.

  I breathed in deep, and loudly, and floated my nose in her direction. “Hmm. Death. Fear. Do you smell them, Charlotte?” I asked her slowly.

  “From your direction, yes. You’ve returned for your inheritance?” she asked me.

  I almost chuckled. “Exactly right, Charlotte. I came to get all this French shit you whored yourself out for. I think I’ll burn it in my cardboard mansion behind the VFW with your effigy.”

  Her fingertips came up slightly from the bed sheets to stop me as if she was wearied by the conversation. “Well, it’s yours anyway. Do what you want with it.”

  I grunted in disinterest. She had nothing I wanted but her final sense of peace. If the Buddhists were right, I wanted her next life to be as painful and mired as mine had been. Then maybe we could continue this charade through the next few lifetimes and really put a hurt on each other.

  “Don’t you think it’s time we mend our bridges?” she asked me.

  “No.”

  I turned to the window, opened its vertical slit and sucked in some fresh air before she could suffocate me with this ludicrous bid at a long lost peace. I hadn’t come here to attempt the familial harmony we’d never had in the past, nor to forgive her for what she’d done. She knew this.

  “Then why’d you come back?” she demanded.

  “Because you wanted me to.”

  “I never said...” she began.

  I made a sudden move to leave, betting that she believed that it wasn’t necessary for me to be here; that she would think that I’d concluded that we could end this debacle if I could just sit outside in the snowy fog, pack my good-lie smile away, and simply wait for her to die.

  Her hand shot out as if she could catch me. “Don’t go,” she murmured with a flicker of mixed emotion in her voice.

  I stopped and hovered before the door.

  “It’s over, Charles,” she offered quietly.

  “It’s not over! It will never be over! You think you’re forgiven just because I came back?”

  “I can’t change the past, Charles. It’s gone.”

  “Well, how very fucking convenient, Charlotte. In another week it will be nothing but tragic memories and do-you-remember-whens,” I spat, my knuckles white around the doorknob.

  “Any message for granddad?” she asked.

  My eyes cinched in the silence that followed her question. “You are such a bitch.”

  I could see her hidden smirk but, despite myself, the threat of violence within me ebbed away with the memories of the one bright light of truth in my childhood. I leaned my brow against the door and let my hand relax and slip down to my side. My eyes closed and I settled that way as I recalled the images of the grandfather I had lost at fourteen.

  “Can’t we set the past at rest, Charles?” she asked again. “Please.”

  “Why?” I demanded; repulsed at her assumption that she could so easily pacify me by summoning my memories of Francois. “So we can forget everything that happened? So it’s not so goddamned messy, Charlotte? Are you afraid of the shit-stained walls that raised me; is that it?”

  I crossed back to the window and let my ire throw its own glare out onto the dark snow. I could see Charlotte in the reflection glaring at my back.

  “You won’t do this for your own dying mother?” she asked as if she had really expected it.

  I turned and look at her fully. “Mother?
Everything you have ever said to me was a goddamned lie, Charlotte. And when I needed you most, you let Jarrel cart me off to the nuthouse and then pretended that I never happened. Where do you find mother in that? ”

  I stalked closer to the bed, “Don’t even talk to me about being a mother. You were never a mother! Just the psychotic twat I lived with for the first fourteen years.”

  Tears started piling up and leaking down her face. I rolled my eyes at this patently conjured display and walked back to the window. “Charlotte, save that bullshit for someone else. I’ve got too much experience behind me for that.”

  I glanced over my shoulder and watched her shrug and wipe her face on the sheets. As a child I had seen many a man cave in to those tears. I had done it a few times myself, but no more.

  “Happenstance!” Charlotte bellowed suddenly. Her shout startled me but I kept my eyes on the fog outside, knowing this could only be another scheme.

  Happenstance was my sister’s proper name. Like my own, the accident of Penny’s birth had been carried in her name like a second squelch of misfortune. Everyone except Charlotte called her Penny, as in shiny, new, and revoltingly insecure in her small worth. She was a typical northern girl; big-boned and raw; a leftover from the colonial stock of hardworking seafarer’s wives. She had a hard odor of the body, perpetually chapped hands and the ruddy face of a drunk. She came in with a brisk and heavy walk and immediately sought out Charlotte’s instructions. As I’m sure she had done every day of her fat and pathetic life.

  “Apologize to your brother,” Charlotte commanded her.

  “Charles...” Penny began.

  “Go fuck yourself.”

  “I’m sorry Charles, I really am,” Penny persisted.

  I turned on her. “About what? Are you her fucking mouthpiece?” I demanded, pointing at Charlotte.

  “Charles! That’s your sister.”

  “And?” I asked Charlotte.

  “She’s apologizing.”

  “She doesn’t have a goddamned thing to apologize for!” I yelled, suddenly realizing that it was true.

  “You want me to apologize?” Charlotte asked, astonished at the idea.

  A wide crooked grin floated up to my face as hatred pushed against my chest like a sledge-hammer. “No Charlotte, I just want you to fucking die. But before you do,” I lowered my voice and leaned in closer, “I want you to know that your little note didn’t do a goddamned thing. I survived anyway.”

  “What note? What are you talking about?” Charlotte asked me.

  My fists clenched as I stare at her. I had no idea how I was keeping myself from rushing forward and strangling the lying bitch.

  Penny, cautiously watching us two war, flinched when I brought my gaze to her. I held my finger up and motioned for her to wait while I searched myself for this long held possession.

  I read Penny the letter that I had gotten about a month after Charlotte’s one and only visit to Sanctuary, the first asylum I was confined to.

  “‘You will continue to live in the shadow of my cloud,

  Struggling under my darkening weight,

  Trembling at what I pour down on you,

  Cowering when I storm.

  Covet the constant hope that I might allow sunshine.

  ‘Charlotte.’”

  I could have recited it from memory, but the malicious barbarity of it was better confirmed on paper. To Penny’s credit, she appeared truly shocked; her mouth open slightly, her eyes wide and full of empathetic pain. “Jesus,” she muttered with a quick glance at Charlotte.

  “You don’t know the half of it,” I told her.

  Charlotte blinked twice, and let silence pile up between us like fallen leaves. I had expected her to be busy with a hot rebuttal, but she wore a look of stunned confusion instead.

  “You don’t remember it.”

  She looked up at me, defiance spreading slowly across her face.” Oh, but I do,” she assured me.

  “Does it make you fear death, Charlotte?”

  “I fear nothing,” she replied confidently.

  “Except the truth.”

  Charlotte hooked her eyes on me and snorted. “Even that can’t touch me now, Charles. It’s too late. You should have come back ten years ago. You might have made something of it then.”

  She turned to Penny, her eyes dismissing my anger with a suppressed twinkle of delight. “Happenstance, get some coffee.”

  Penny’s glance darted between us, skimming over the virulent charge of electricity Charlotte and I generated in each other’s company. “Sure, Mom,” she said as she went out, obviously relieved at being allowed to flee.

  “Mom?” I exasperated. “What’d you do, sew up her twat?”

  Charlotte’s eyes flared. “I will not be spoken to like that, Charles. Have at least some semblance of respect, even if you don’t feel it.”

  “Those gentrified Southern manners, huh?” I taunted her. She was no more Southern than I was.

  Concern suddenly softened her face, immediately rousing my suspicion. I felt my eyes tighten before she even spoke a word. “I know you’re in pain, Charles. And I know you’re hurt, but ...”

  “You don’t know shit, Charlotte. Just shut the fuck up and die already. Will you?”

  She sighed and stared at the ceiling. “Maybe I don’t know anything, Charles. Maybe I don’t. But I tried my best, and that’s all I can tell you.”

  “Your best?” I almost laughed. “Charlotte, you are so full of it.”

  Penny faltered her way into the room with a tray and three cups. She filled them silently and put one on the bedside table for me.

  “Take the damned coffee,” Charlotte barked. “Lord knows you could use it. Look at you. They say you’ve become a drunk, is that true?”

  “Just a bum, thanks. Alcohol is for those purposeless wandering souls of our fair town. I have a purpose,” I answered emphatically.

  “To destroy our good name, no doubt.”

  “Good?” I laughed. “White trash is still white trash, Charlotte, no matter how you dress it.”

  Penny smirked but said nothing. She also knew of the tight suspicion the retired Yankees of Potsham held for someone claiming to be of Southern aristocracy. And Charlotte had made that claim every single day of her existence.

  Charlotte pursed her lips together in annoyance, the bevel of irritation increasing in her forehead as she scowled. “Go,” she ordered Penny.

  Penny’s smirk shriveled to a stiff line of umbrage as she bustled out. I got the distinct impression that she wanted to witness Charlotte’s undoing as much as I wanted it to happen.

  “Drink the coffee,” Charlotte said.

  I moved to the bedside and took a sip. “She can’t make coffee,” I said.

  “I know," Charlotte replied, cocking her head slightly, her nostrils aflare. “Couldn’t you have bathed at least?”

  “And ruin my entrance?” I asked with a glance down at the bum’s layers of clothing I wore to keep me warm.

  Charlotte conceded my point with a nod. “Will you be alright when I pass, Charles?”

  I lowered myself into the French chair beside the bed, wishing I had a cigarette.

  “There’s a pack under the bible in the drawer,” Charlotte said automatically. “Matches too.”

  I stopped and looked at her. I hated it when she did that. “I thought you quit.”

  “For what? Six months more won’t make any difference. Might as well enjoy it.”

  After shuffling the contents of the drawer around, I finally lit up and inhaled. It had been quite a while since I’d had a fresh factory rolled cigarette. I put one to Charlotte’s lips and she did the same. It was a habit we both hated and enjoyed. There was nothing like a good smoke to punctuate conversation and abhorrence.

  “I’ll survive, Charlotte,” I said, finally answering her question. “I always have. Through everything,” I added as I blew out a cloud of blue smoke.

  “But what will you do?”

 
“The truth?”

  She nodded hesitantly, seeming slightly afraid of the answer. “Go to the city and sell my ass.”

  She closed her eyes with a wince as I smiled around the cigarette. “This family won’t know how to handle it, Charlotte.” I snickered in delight at the thought of it.

  “Please Charles, I’m asking... Call it a last request.”

  My face went dead. “Forget it. You used your last request years ago.”

  Her body was suddenly rigid, the claw of her finger jumping off the bed and pointing at me in accusation. “You’d defile my memory like that?”

  I rose from the chair slightly and leaned toward the bed. “Charlotte, I’d piss on your grave if I thought someone would care, but nobody does and nobody will.”

  She looked at me for a long moment, put her hand back atop the sheet and propped a sneer on her face to hold back the pout that would keep her silent for a short time.

  “I never meant for you to hate me, Charles,” she said after I got up and went back to the window.

  I glanced at her irritably and shook my head at her tedium as I flicked my spent cigarette into the darkness. I could have returned the volley and told her that I didn’t, but that would only have perpetuated the inane. And if she really believed it, then she’d spoken it many years too late.

  “Hate is the only thing that keeps me alive, Charlotte.”

  “And what’s left?”

  I held my arms out parallel to the floor. “This, Charlotte. This is it. Nothing more, nothing less.”

  But she was suddenly asleep, the cigarette dangling from her mouth and a slight snore emanating from within.

  I went over, took the cigarette from her lips, and took a drag as I scrutinized her and our past. Was there a time when I had loved this woman? There must have been. How else would my passion have slipped so far to the other side of love?