Rain and Revelations

TW: Drunk driving reference.

“Gonna be a big storm this afternoon,” Big Jim mumbled in his thick voice, pausing to swipe his forearm over his brow before going back to mucking out the stall. It wasn't even 9 o'clock yet, but the heat was radiating up from the scorched ground.

I rolled my eyes at him, but I made sure his back was turned to me first. I was raised to act respectful towards adults, even if I didn't always feel it had been earned. And at 17 years old, I figured I was practically an adult myself. The world was laid out before me like offerings at a buffet. What could some old, illiterate, hired hand tell me that I didn't already know? The sky above was a bright azure, the August breeze that set the delicate mesquite leaves dancing did absolutely nothing to quell the sweltering heat of late summer in Texas, and there wasn't a cloud to be seen, making it feel like we were trapped in a bubble. A really hot bubble.

I leaned on my pitch fork and pulled my phone out of my back pocket, swiping the screen several times until I found the weather app and jabbed the icon with my finger. “Says here there's only a 7% chance of scattered showers later,” I read out, feeling superior in every way to the leather skinned old man I'd been tasked with helping for my last week of summer vacation before my final year of high school started.

Big Jim just shrugged noncommittally and continued to dig out dirty hay, loading it into the wheelbarrow one forkful at a time. I frowned at his sweat stained back, feeling cheated out of the argument I wanted to have. If nothing else, it would've given me an excuse to take a break from the tedious work of cleaning out the barn. I tried to think of something I could say that would rile Big Jim up, but nothing I'd tried over the past couple of days ever seemed to get under his skin. It was slightly disconcerting, to be honest. I'd always thought of it as my secret talent- being able to find the comment that someone couldn't help but argue with me about. Big Jim was either immune to my charm or just too stupid to think of anything to say.

Probably the second one, I thought to myself with a smirk. With a long suffering sigh, I slipped my phone back in my pocket and gripped the handle on my pitchfork. As much as I wanted to complain about the work, I knew it wouldn't do any good. Big Jim would just keep on with the chore, and I would catch hell from my father in the evening. My mood soured with every scoop of filthy hay I dumped in my wheelbarrow and every trickling drop of sweat that ran down my back. By the time the bell sounded to bring us in for lunch, I was soaking wet, covered in gods knew what, and plotting my escape from the farm that had been in my family for three generations. One more year and I'd be off to college and then I'd be damned if I ever set foot back here!

With the exception, possibly, of Thanksgiving. The promise of my mom's pecan pie could bring just about anybody back.

My mom and little sister had lunch laid out for us on the big picnic table in the shade of the centennial oak tree that had presided over the land for longer than the farmhouse had. Thick sandwiches with homemade bread, potato salad, deviled eggs, watermelon, and a pan of fresh brownies were all arranged on the ancient red checkered tablecloth.

I dutifully washed my hands and face at the old pump well before taking my place at the table and loading up my plate. My mom placed a large glass of fresh squeezed lemonade in front of me and I gulped it gratefully. The cold, tart liquid slid down my throat and revived me enough that some of my discontentment with working on the farm evaporated.

“How's the morning been?” she asked no one in particular.

“Hot,” I replied around a mouth full of bread and deli ham.

My mom shot me a warning look that said, you were not raised in a barn, young man. I just shrugged and took another too big bite of my sandwich. I'd worked up an appetite, and I knew the afternoon would only be hotter with even more physical labor to endure.

Instead of addressing my manners, or lack there of, my mom simply poured another glass of lemonade and handed it to Big Jim with a smile. “So, Big Jim,” she said, “you think this weather's going to hold?”

“No, ma'am,” he replied, accepting the cool glass from her. “Gonna be a big storm this afternoon.”

I scoffed and my mom sent me another warning look, but I avoided her eyes and dug into my potato salad like I hadn't eaten in three days.

“After lunch, Junior and I will get started on strapping everything down,” Big Jim continued, oblivious to my disbelief. “Reckon we'll have a couple hours before it hits.”

My mom nodded like he was a wise sage and sat down to eat her own meal. “Guess I should pull the laundry off the line in that case,” she said, ignoring my look of amazement that she would believe such a ridiculous idea. “In this heat, it should already be dry anyway.”

I shook my head, but kept my eyes on my plate and my skepticism to myself. It seemed I was the only one smart enough to download the modern wonder of a weather app to my phone.

After we'd finished lunch, Big Jim stood and smiled at my mom. “Ma'am, thank you for that. It really hit the spot.”

I grabbed the last brownie before my sister could, shoving the whole thing in my mouth while she stuck her tongue out at me. “To slow, loser,” I tried to say, but my mouth was so full it came out as more, “Boo tho, oo-ther.” My mom sent me another warning look, but I just smiled and followed Big Jim back to the truck to drive to the barn at the far end of the property.

We hauled feed bags and stacked them on pallets, fixed a couple of latches on some windows, and even trimmed a branch that was hanging too close to the chicken coop according to Big Jim. By mid-afternoon, I was once again dripping sweat and in a murderous mood.

“Alright, let's fill these sandbags and get 'em into place in front of the barn door,” Big Jim drawled, hauling a stack of burlap sacks out of a cupboard.

It was the last straw.

“No,” I said definitively. I'd never dared to flatly refuse a chore assigned by an adult, but this had gone too far. “There is no storm coming! There's a 7% chance of scattered showers! This is stupid!”

Big Jim just shrugged and said, “Suit yourself,” before grabbing a shovel and walking out of the barn to start filling the bags.

I followed him, still fuming. “Big Jim, stop! There is no reason to fill up sand bags! There's no-” I was interrupted by a low rumble in the distance. Incredulous, I rounded the barn and stared at the ominously dark sky. Another rumble of thunder rolled around as though saying, yeah, this is really happening. I pulled my phone out of my pocket and opened the weather app, comparing the sight of the black clouds in front of me with the radar image that clearly showed a large storm system heading directly for us.

So much for a 7% chance of scattered showers!

“Dang,” I jumped a little at the sound of Big Jim's voice so close. “It's coming even faster than I thought.”

I turned to look at him, questions bumping into each other as my brain tried to catch up to all the new information, leaving me unable to utter a sound. If he noticed, Big Jim didn't make it obvious, he just quietly went back to filling the sand bags. With a sigh of defeat, I followed and quickly tied off the bags after he filled them and started stacking them in front of the barn door to divert the rain water and prevent the barn from flooding. It was the storage barn, and if it flooded, it could ruin the feed and equipment we kept in it.

The wind was whipping the branches into a frenzy and fat drops of rain were beginning to fall by the time I took the last bag from Big Jim and put it in place. A loud crack of thunder, loud enough to make me jump, sounded too close.

“In the barn,” Big Jim ordered, an authoritative edge to his voice I'd never heard from him before made me scurry into the barn without questioning it.

“Shouldn't we head back to the house?” I asked, my own voice sounding small to my ears.

“Too dangerous,” Big Jim replied, standing at the barn door like a sentinel on duty. The words had barely crossed his lips when the sky seemed to split apart with lightning so close it nearly blinded me, followed almost immediately by thunder loud enough to make the ground shudder beneath my feet, and the rain came down in a torrential cascade, so heavy that it looked like a curtain had been pulled on the world outside the safety of the barn. I shivered as the temperature plummeted, my shirt still damp with sweat clinging to my now chilled skin, and went further into the building, looking for a pocket of left over warmth.

My heart was beating wildly and my stomach was churning, making me feel slightly queasy. It's not that I was afraid of storms normally, but this one felt like a reckoning. The tempest raged outside, a beast searching for someone to answer for the crimes of humanity, real or imagined. There was a tiny, feral part of my brain that was afraid I was the one it was searching for.

“So, why are you called Big Jim?” I blurted out suddenly. I didn't really care where or how he'd gotten the nickname, I was just desperate for something to distract me from being trapped in my own imagination. “Was there a Little Jim?”

“Yeah, there was,” Big Jim nodded from his post at the door.

The silence stretched between us, the seconds ticking by like molasses. The storm continued to howl, but the unease I'd felt only moments before had been replaced by a deeper disquiet I couldn't define. Subtle changes in Big Jim's stance made me realize that maybe my talent for finding people's weaknesses was still in affect, and I'd just accidentally stumbled onto a subject that would crack Big Jim's unwavering serenity.

Big Jim's head dropped and he sighed before turning and walking away from the door, sitting on a pile of old blankets and motioning for me to join him. There was a sadness in his eyes I'd never seen before, something so deep that it would never fully go away.

“You remind me of him a lot sometimes,” Big Jim began. “LJ thought he knew everything there was to know about anything worth knowing, too.” His lips twitched slightly, a fond memory clearly playing in his head but the sadness remained fixed in his eyes.

I felt like I was intruding on a private moment, but curiosity got the better of me. “What happened to him?” I asked softly.

“Drunk driver,” was the over simplified answer. After a few elongated moments of silence, he ran a hand over his face and let out a long sigh. “LJ was on his way home after a football game his senior year of high school. It looked like they were going to make the playoffs, and he was thrilled. He'd worked so hard to get where he was. They all had.”

He lapsed into another introspective silence, but this time, I stayed quiet, letting him tell the story in his own time. It was already more words than I'd heard from him all week, and I figured maybe he was out of practice with real conversation.

“The man ran a stop sign. Plowed into the driver's side of LJ's car. The cops pronounced him dead when they got there.” His voice was monotone, almost robotic as he said the words. “The judge was lenient, three years of community service for a first offense.”

Anger was swift as his words seeped into my brain. “What? That's outrageous! For killing a kid?” I seethed on his behalf. Big Jim flinched a little, a small movement, but it was enough to make me refocus my sudden fury. “You must hate him.”

“Yeah, sometimes I do,” Big Jim agreed sadly. “Most of the time, though, I try to live the way I think my son would've wanted to. I figure it's the least I can do. And of course, I haven't touched alcohol since that day.”

I was rendered speechless once again by the quiet confession. The realization that, despite having spent nearly twelve hours a day for the better part of a week with this man, I still didn't really know him hit me like a ton of bricks.

“Were you married?” I asked tentatively, immediately regretting such a lame question in light of what I'd just learned.

“Yeah,” Big Jim almost smiled. “She was a good woman. It was too much for her, though, losing LJ like that,” his smiled faltered with the memory. His sad eyes found mine and I guess the horror I felt over what he'd been through was apparent on my face because he quickly shook his head and added, “She just left me. I think she's married to a dentist now. She always did have the best smile.”

I blew out a relieved breath. The story was still horrible, but at least his ex-wife was presumably happy somewhere. A small mercy, but an important one.

We watched the rain through the open door and listened to it pounding on the roof as the lightning and thunder punctuated the afternoon. There was a leak in the corner of the barn and the slowly dripping water began to form a puddle. Big Jim got to his feet and set a bucket under the drip. I didn't need him to tell me that one of our jobs in the morning would be to repair that section of the roof.

I sighed and pulled my phone out, but the storm had knocked out the internet and the weather app just showed a rotating circle as it tried, and failed, to load. I frowned at the screen before slipping the useless technology back into my pocket. “How long do you think the storm will last?” I asked. He'd known it was coming before the phone did, maybe he'd know when it would stop, too.

“Not long,” Big Jim said thoughtfully. “Anything this intense can't last forever.”