THE RAIN IT RAINETH EVERY DAY
It’s raining out, a cold insistent rain of little pellets that keep pattering off the dry leaves and leaving a scatter of mica chaff on all the blackened tree limbs. This is the sound of nothing happening. It’s monotonous, and harangues you with idle chitchat. It’s the rhythm of eternity, something the mountains dance to when the season is about to end in dense fog and numbing inertia. The rain filling in the bottom land of long open fields, until they shimmer like cheap silverware. A tractor might be stranded out in these wastes, speckled with mud and caked with hay dust. And beyond, a dark, gloomy farmhouse with narrow windows and a chimney dribbling white smoke into the soggy air.
The rain falls into the indifferent earth like small talk. There’s no drama in it, no surprises. It’s just a pulse, a muddy heart beat from under the surface, a sound of blood thumping over buried rocks and worm tunnels, gopher holes and rotting weeds. I’m standing behind the house gazing up into the endless curtain of scrim as if a play were about to begin, act one, the initial dialog, the brief pause as a girl walks by and nods cautiously to the young man delivering the mail. They don’t speak. The script hesitates before the door slams and a suspicious woman stands on her porch observing the possibilities of love in the dead of winter. Her daughter keeps walking, school bag on her shoulder, a lunch box with a sandwich and apple rattling around. The young man shifts the bag of mail on his shoulder and nods to the woman as he passes. No one seems aware of the wars raging in the Crimea, in south Sudan, the Gaza Strip, the shredding of the Amazon rain forest, the shuffle and panting of migrants headed for Mexico and the American border.
An old friend of mine has died of cancer. I was in the house when he was heard in the bedroom coughing, spitting up phlegm, groaning from the pain. He had told no one that he was in the final stages of his disease. He wasn’t heroic, he was afraid to admit what was taking control of him. He had smoked all his life; his teeth were dark with the stains of nicotine. He was charming, and hard working, and fiercely independent, but helpless and unable to sleep a whole night. His cancer was like the slow, rhythmic insistence of a winter rain.
When I was getting ready to leave, he was in a chair by the fire place. He was putting on his shoes and he looked up with a gaze that stripped me bare of all evasions. It was the look of death, the pale, empty stare of a man dying who cound’t tell anyone, but he could tell me through the deaf mute language of his eyes and mouth. It would be useless to try to put words into my emotions. He didn’t want me to speak them. He merely shared a secret that was meant to be kept from everyone else. It was our code, a pact that bonded us together in a fellowship of mortality. We were animals in the field, our fur wet and matted, our bodies shivering from the inarticulate cruelty of the ground we crawled on. We were divorced from the consolation of speech. He was barely able to move and I was being pulled away from him, severing my ties to him in order to survive and get home. The stumps of carrots and stunted potatoes lay around us, among the scattered rocks. They were not meant to be eaten. They possessed no life-restoring powers. Instead, there was the rain, falling in a repetition of pants and gasps like a broken record caught in a gap in the vinyl grooves.
In winter, the furniture grows larger and even menacing in the twilight of a living room. Big sofas, an enormous chair as cumbersome and joyless as an outcrop of ice-caked granite. Only the crows were near, eyeing the ground for moles and chipmunks, the occasional bird on its last flightless struggle to stay alive. The kitchen could not br aroused by the dim ceiling light. The atmosphere of the rooms was like the desolate malaise of a town leveled by artillery bombarbments and the occasional sortee of a war plane. The sheer numbness of their presence was a reminder of the ruins of apartment houses collapsed by a drone raid. The rubble of pans and skillets, the disarray of soiled dishes in the sink were part of the collateral damage of wandering death squads and tank fire. Even the coffee pot was like some inert torso left to decay on the battle field. And everything was bathed in an insistent silence, as abstract as rain falling on the asphalt of a driveway.
To be old in such a landscape is to be slow to think, to move, to find comfort in the glow of a table lamp. A watch ticking on my wrist was the voice of time counting toward the moment I would let go my own grip on existence. But it was also a nasal whisper in my ear that I was still alive, and that I should stand up and turn on more lights, heat up a pot of water and begin my dinner. I should crush a can of tomatoes through a sieve and add oregano, three cloves of garlic, dice up an onion and sautee it before adding to the sauce. I should choose a shape of pasta to boil, perhaps elbows or spaghetti, tubes, the curicued edges of lasaga strips. I should open a bottle of wine, toast some bread with butter and garlic, sit under the table lamp and eat slowly, enjoying the music of my fork scraping the bottom of my bowl. It was this irreducible sacrament of dinner that I should observe in the gloom before going up to bed. It was all the soul required to keep me hoping that spring would come and bless me with golden waterfalls of sunlight and warm breath from the fields below me.
Eternity may be nothing more than the solemn emptiness of space, the appalling indifference of planets and stars hanging in the darkness with no purpose or consequence. The great hall of the universe was a museum of the boundless vacuity of time itself. It was the human spirit that cried out for meaning, for consolation in this barren infinity. The starry orchards never dropped their fruit into the Lucretian void; the vast descent of atoms and dust keep falling forever, like the dim sparkles of the rain being milked from the clouds overhead. The earth turned in its robes of oxygen and nitrogen, and folded the abundant life that thrived on its surface under its wings. And as we turned in the silvery irridescence of the falling rain, the battlefields glittered and fulgurated with phosphor bombs and missiles, machine gun fire and flame throwers, with the flashes of rifles spreading their strange fiery haloes of rubies and diamonds into the night sky. It is how we live, how we go on with our tormented lives, how we huddle under the rain as it comes down like tiny promises of renewal and messages of hope.
