Rain Village

  RAIN VILLAGE

  RAIN VILLAGE

  Carolyn Turgeon

  This is a work of fiction. The names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Unbridled Books

  Denver, Colorado

  Copyright © 2006 Carolyn Turgeon

  All rights reserved. This book, or parts thereof, may not be reproduced in any form without permission.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Turgeon, Carolyn.

  Rain Village / Carolyn Turgeon.

  p. cm.

  ISBN-13: 978-1-932961-24-9

  ISBN-10: 1-932961-24-0

  1. Girls—Fiction. 2. Short people—Fiction. 3. Farm life—Fiction.

  4. Difference (Psychology)—Fiction. 5. Women librarians—Fiction. 6. Mentoring—Fiction.

  7. Fathers and daughters—Fiction. 8. Circus performers—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3620.U75R35 2006

  813’.6–dc22 2006016142

  1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

  Book Design by CV • SH

  First Printing

  for my mother, father, and sister

  PART ONE

  CHAPTER ONE

  That tramp! Black-haired Jezebel!” My mother’s voice screeched into the house, from the yard. Up in my room, I thought a storm had come until I saw the bare windowpane, the butter-colored sun streaming in.

  I ran down the wooden steps and out the front door, peered through the railings on the front porch. My father was out by the hedges again, clipping as if some devil had possessed him, sweat streaming down his face and the shears sprouting from his giant body like antlers. For two days now all we’d heard were the sounds of metal slicing against metal, twigs being snapped through and dropping to the ground. The crops in the field were going to ruin, but my father didn’t care. Our front yard was already adorned with an elephant, a lion, and a peacock with a spray of leaves fanning behind it. The hedge he was attacking now was fourth in the line that hemmed in our yard, blocking it from the country road that stretched all the way to town.

  “STOP IT!” my mother screamed, beating on his back with an umbrella. My meek, religious mother who spent her days bent over in the fields and her nights bent over a Bible. “Stop that infernal clipping!”

  No one could so much as raise a voice to my father without his hand coming down on them. I winced for my mother and braced myself for the beating that would surely come, once my father went back to normal. If he ever went back to normal. I had never seen my father get himself into such a frenzy. Two days ago he’d returned from market with a basket half full of eggs, picked up the clippers, and started going at it. Now the slicing sounds had made their way into our dreams, and we didn’t know if he’d ever stop.

  I heard my sister Geraldine behind me, breathing loudly, hunkering down and pressing her face to the rails. “It’s that new librarian,” she whispered. “Mary Finn. The one that’s making all the men crazy.”

  “He sold eggs to her in town just before this started,” she said.

  I leaned back against the steps. Mary Finn. I knew exactly who Geraldine was talking about, of course. When Mary Finn had arrived in Oakley earlier that summer, farmers had suddenly started walking miles out of their way to pick up the classics of English literature, and a constant stream of women had started coming by to visit my mother, whispering about the new librarian’s wild gypsy past and the secret lovers who visited her after the library closed. Men wouldn’t be able to sleep for days after Mary Finn walked by, the old gossips said, and if her blue cat’s eyes met theirs, they were liable to start writing feverish poetry late into the night, or painting murals filled with flowers and beautiful women, set in places they’d never seen.

  “A woman like that is nothing but trouble,” my mother clucked, as if she were commenting on a bad harvest. But I saw her clutching her rosary beads, which she started carrying around everywhere even though we didn’t have an ounce of Catholic blood in us. I saw the way she began watching my father out of the corner of her eye.

  My mother turned and saw us crouching on the steps. “Get off of there!” she screamed, storming toward us. “Geraldine, get in the fields and help your brothers! Tessa, get back to your stretches!”

  Geraldine took off running. I turned to the house, but my mother reached me before I could get away and grabbed me by the collar. “You stay on that bar until supper, Tessa Riley,” she hissed, dragging me into the kitchen. “No wonder you’re not getting any better. You don’t even care that everyone thinks you’re a freak? You don’t want to improve yourself?”

  She pushed me to the window, and I scrambled up and grabbed the curtain rod she had rigged for me, back when she still thought my body could pull and stretch out like taffy. Hanging there, I could see Geraldine and my two brothers bent over the corn outside. The sun seared into their skin. As my mother slammed out of the room, I closed my eyes and listened to the sounds of metal against metal, of twigs snapping and falling to the ground. Tears slipped down my face. I was not a normal child: I was twelve years old but just barely cleared four feet; the kids I passed on the way to market called me a munchkin or a freak; my hands were shaped like two starfish and as small as plums.

  Mary Finn, I thought. I honed in on the idea of her, grabbed on to it as if she were a talisman. I just couldn’t imagine anyone—or anything—that beautiful. My mind set to wondering about it, about what she was like. If she would be as mean to me as all the rest of them, or if maybe there was something different about her, that same thing that set all the old hags on edge. The more I thought, the more I felt something crack open in me. Before then I had always kept to myself. I had gone whole days without touching another human being or making a sound.

  One morning a few weeks later, long after the hedge incident we’d vowed never to speak of again, my entire family except me left to look at the pumpkins a farmer had grown two miles down the road—so big, they had heard, that two people could fit into each one. I waited half an hour before dropping down from the curtain rod and heading to the town square. With a pounding heart, I sat on the curb in front of the Oakley courthouse to watch the people pass. I sat stiffly, self-consciously, and tried to ignore the kids who walked by laughing. After an hour, my back and legs were starting to ache, and I wondered if I should go to Mercy Library itself to find her, though I had never been there before and the idea filled me with terror.

  It was then that I looked up and saw her, and I knew right then and there what all the fuss was about. There was no mistaking her—nor was there any mistaking the old women who crossed themselves as she passed by, the men who stopped right in their paths and were moved to dance or song or tears. She carried a straw basket filled with red and yellow vegetables, with some papers and books poking over the side, and she walked through the square with her head up, her black hair glittering in the light, so wild it was like a field of weeds. She wore silver earrings that hung to her shoulders and a bright skirt that swished around her feet as she moved. The other townspeople scurried past or loped along, but Mary walked calmly, like a dancer, her back perfectly straight. I gazed up at her and thought she was the most beautiful woman I’d ever seen, with her blue eyes and brown, freckled skin; she was the kind of woman that adults are wary of and children love—you could just imagine that she had cabinets filled with candy when your own parents had only milk and grain.

  When Mary turned her cat’s eyes on me and then started walking toward me, I gasped out loud. I didn’t even know where I was. I felt like I was traveling up and down a muddy river on some long, open boat, or slashi
ng my way through crazy branches and trees in some huge rain forest. The funny thing was, I’d never even known those other kinds of places existed before I saw Mary Finn walk toward me with that hair no earthly comb could ever get through trailing out behind her, smile at me, and sit down by my side.

  She smelled of the spices my mother baked oranges in. Her wrists jingled with bracelets. I felt myself enveloped in her scents and by her hair that brushed my bare shoulders and made me shiver as she sat down.

  For a few moments she just sat next to me, stretching her tanned legs into the street, smoothing her skirt over her knees. I could only sit and stare. I watched her hands and her calves and thought how her skin seemed warm, like a blanket, or bread just out of the oven. When she turned to me and smiled, I felt like I’d been struck.

  “What a perfect little girl you are,” she said. “Why are you sitting here alone?”

  I stared at her. I could barely believe that she was sitting right there in front of me. Mary Finn, who was the closest thing to a movie star Oakley had ever seen.

  But she just rubbed her brown arms and stuck her hand in her hair the way other women stick combs.

  “Did you know that stars die?” she said. “They burn themselves out and they fade from the sky, but they are like ghosts.”

  I looked at her.

  “There are no ghosts,” I said quickly, then felt my face grow as red as the radishes my parents bent over to pick each day.

  “Oh, but there are,” she said, smiling at me with her crooked teeth and lifting my right hand into her own. “You see this pinky right here? This little half-moon on the bottom of your pinky nail? It was once a star, you know, a star burning in the sky, but when it came time for the star to disappear, it just fell to the earth instead. Every part of your body—the moon on your pinky nail, the blue rim in the center of your eye—was once part of a star.”

  Not even my own mother had ever been kind to me like this. I felt all lit up and almost glowing, imagining my body spread across the night sky like an explosion, sparkling down to the half-moons on my fingernails.

  “And so the stars come back to haunt us,” she said, “the way everything else does, sooner or later.”

  That night I couldn’t stop thinking about it—me, Tessa Riley, sitting in the town square in front of everyone, talking to her. I stared at my flat body in the mirror, wondered what it’d be like to have that sort of presence in the world, to curve and slope and glide. Later I could barely focus on my stretches, and just swung listlessly from the curtain rod. I had to visit Mary Finn’s library, I decided. I convinced myself that my mother would understand, and as soon as my family came trooping through the house, ducking through the doorway and smelling of sweat and roots, I crossed my fingers and asked her if she would take me to Mercy Library for the first time.

  The walls trembled as they slipped the great sacks from their shoulders and dumped them onto the long wooden counters. “What?” my mother said, whirling around to look at me. “You are not going anywhere near that witch. Absolutely not.”

  My father was silent for a long moment. “You know, girl,” he said then, as he reached down to grab a sack of vegetables, bringing it down on the kitchen counter with a thud. Bits of earth fell to the floor. “All that really matters is a handful of dirt and a perfect oval potato. The rest is just pie in the sky.”

  “But I want to see what it’s like,” I said. I had never spoken back to my father before, and I saw his eyes slightly widen. “I can’t help in the fields anyway, and I can do my stretches at night.” It was true. The potatoes were so big I had to use both my hands just to hold one of them. Each kernel of corn was bigger than one of my front teeth. My brothers and sister could hold three ears in one hand, and I felt like I was surrounded by giants.

  As my father continued to haul up the sacks, my siblings began scrubbing the potatoes and radishes furiously, tossing them into large tin buckets, and my mother boiled a pot of potatoes and carrots for one of her famous stews. I was on the floor with corn strewn around me.

  “Listen to me,” my father said, with a menace in his voice that hadn’t been there a second ago. No one outside my family would have even noticed it, but every single person in that room recognized his tone and what it meant. We caught our breaths and waited. “That place is unholy. You will not set foot in there. There’s enough for you to do here.” He flashed his face back at me, then breathed out heavily, relaxing. “Just pay attention, girl, and the husk’ll come peeling off like banana skin.”

  He turned back to the sink and we were all silent then.

  Usually my father’s disapproval could put a halt to anything brewing inside me. His disapproval could freeze up a river, it seemed, in the middle of June. But something had shifted in me, and that night I lay in my bed, listening to Geraldine snoring from the other side of the room, and I thought and schemed and reflected.

  The next morning I dutifully hung from the bar. My muscles were so strong I could hang for hours, and on most days I just lifted myself up and over it or tried hanging from my ankles. That morning I hung still as a board, dreaming of my escape. Waiting. I stared out into the fields, at my parents’ and siblings’ bodies bent over the crops, the sun burning their backs. The corn jutting up.

  When it came, lunch seemed to last for hours. I stood on a stool stirring the stew, as usual, while Geraldine set the table and my father and brothers rested in the den. At the table, I shoveled in my food without tasting it, trying not to stare at the clock or my family’s shrinking bowls of stew. I could barely sit still, and more than once my mother had to warn me to stop fidgeting.

  “Yes, ma’am,” I said, my feet burning, my whole body straining toward that library across town.

  As soon as the bowls were washed and the house empty, I hurried outside, crouching down in the dirt road so my family wouldn’t catch sight of me. I scrunched myself alongside the corn and moved as quickly as I could toward open space. Once I was out of their line of vision, I ran and ran and nothing else mattered. The whole countryside smelled thickly of manure and growing vegetables and cut grass, but I ran so fast all I smelled was wind. It was exhilarating, breaking their hold like that. I could barely breathe, and my muscles burned from my shoulders down to my calves, but I laughed and whooped when I reached the main road that stretched through the farmland: the fields of crops and the creeks and rivers that crisscrossed our part of the world like veins. I followed the road through the country and into town, sweeping past all the people who stopped in their tracks and just gaped at me. I didn’t care. For a minute I thought: the world would be so beautiful, if it were just this, this feeling right now.

  Finally the library loomed up in front of me. The air seemed to go cool and misty, all at once, as if a thunderstorm were about to burst on us. From the outside the place looked like a massive barn more than anything else, except for the piece of metal swinging from a stick out front saying “Mercy Library” and the fact that it had been painted stark white. There wasn’t much around it, just piles of overgrown grass and clumps of dandelions and some trees hanging down into the road, one with branches so long they scratched across the library’s roof. I stared up at the library, my heart pounding so hard it threatened to break through my chest.

  It was the farthest I’d ever been from home. Already it felt like hours and hours had passed, though it couldn’t have been more than forty-five minutes. For a moment I considered turning back, but something inside me wouldn’t allow it. All the bravery buried within me seemed to push up to the surface, forcing me to take another deep breath and walk toward the front door. This is my chance, I thought. My one chance for something new.

  Just then an old couple pushed out past me.

  “I saw the way you were looking at her!” I heard the woman hiss to the man under her breath.

  “I was getting book advice, Meg, book advice. . . .”

  Startled, I slipped out of their path as they barreled by, then stepped into a vast, almost
church-like space with old wood floors and a breezy high-beamed ceiling. Light streamed into the space from the huge windows on either end, illuminating the dust in the air. Towering shelves divided the room, all painted different colors. Books poured from every box, every shelf, every basket, and every drawer. To my left was a large desk with books and cards spread over the top, an ashtray filled with half-smoked cigarettes. People milled around with books in their arms, but quietly, as if afraid of making a sound. I could have sworn I heard the sound of rain, but when I glanced out one of the long windows on the far wall, the sun was flaring and the sky bright blue. The whole place smelled like smoke tinged with spices and must.

  I realized I was standing there with my mouth open, so I snapped it shut and forced myself toward the shelves. I picked an aisle without even looking and began wandering through it, running my fingers along the spines of the books. I stopped and plucked one off the shelf, stared at the black markings inside until I grew dizzy. I heard a sound then and looked up to see a couple standing at the end of the aisle, kissing. When a man turned in and started toward me, I nearly fell over with fear—until I realized he wasn’t paying me any mind at all, but was staring intently at something through a gap on one of the higher shelves.

  Suddenly I heard the faint sound of sobbing. I looked around, startled, then tiptoed over, as far away from the man as possible, to peer through one of the openings myself.

  I saw a woman with a scarf pulled over her face, sitting at the table and crying. Mary Finn sat across from her. I heard the shush of whispers but could not make out what they were saying. The two women were almost opposites: the one hunched over and covered from head to toe, the other awash in color, her black hair coiling down her bare arms, her tanned, freckled shoulders glimmering as if with oil. Mary’s eyes were intent on the woman across from her, and she reached out her hand to the woman, patted her arm. I moved closer, out of one row and into another, and another, where I could hear. It was one advantage of my size: I could move quietly, as if I were not there at all. By the time I was able to see again, Mary had set out a deck of cards—tarot cards, I would learn later—and was explaining them to the woman. Then, for a moment, the woman’s scarf slipped and I saw her face in profile, only for a split second before she quickly covered herself again. It was Mrs. Adams from down the road, I realized, shocked. But she was different now, rubbed raw and bare. I could see her sadness, slipping off her body like smoke.