undays, they went to church. / The minister talked to his congregation about hope and prayer and the mysterious ways of the Lord, and each week the pews grew more crowded with anxious, parched faces. Sometimes they drove down over the county line to visit their married sister. Going along the river, they could plainly see how it had shrunk. New islands rose up in the middle and the inky pools, shaded by withering willows, were turning to stagnant marshes, the marshes turning to yellow clay. Once, Brother stopped the truck along the bank and got out. He bent down to scoop up a handful of the clay, but the earth was so hard that his fingers couldn’t pierce the surface. In town one Saturday afternoon, he bought a panama hat that he could fold up in his back pocket when he went indoors, and Dolly picked out a red scarf to keep the sun off her scalp and a pair of wrap-around sunglasses that looked like two oval mirrors balanced on the narrow bridge of her nose. No one could look in, and when she wore them, sad-eyed shopkeepers disappeared into cool shadows. There was practically nothing left to do on the farm, so Mondays through Fridays, they mostly crouched down close to the linoleum floor in the kitchen, the coolest room in the house. Dolly made pitchers of lemonade with ice cubes and Brother would take the big glass pitcher, decorated with handpainted water lilies, into his thick hands and rub it back and forth across his forehead. Dolly sometimes ran a dishrag under the faucet, cooled it in the ice box, then tucked it up under her dress and kept it there, squeezed between her thighs. In the fourth month of the drought, Brother drove a man up from the valley to the north who could, it was said, find water with a willow branch, but the man ran his bowed divining rod up and down across their property, scratching the skin of the earth with its sharpened tip, without finding anything. “Point it up to heaven,” Brotner yelled in rage when the man z gave them back their money. “Why don’t you point the goddamn thing up to heaven and make it rain?” Dolly was frightened for all of the blood drained out of Brother’s face and she watched his big hands shake. She did almost nothing for the next few months except try to keep him calm. “Sit easy,” Dolly would say. “You’ll be a lot cooler if you just stay still.” Dolly would stand in back of Brother’s chair and rock him back and forth like a baby while he read from the Bible. She would hum all the church songs she knew, but it never rained. Each morning, the sky stretched tighter and tighter and, when they drove the pick-up truck up to the rise each night after supper, it was clear as far as they could see. The first time they brought a boy home, it was a Friday night and they went into town for a meal at the Italian restaurant. Brother ordered them a full bottle of red wine and he grew loud, said, when Dolly proU tested, that they deserved a little pleasure for putting up with this drought, didn’t they? That first boy was a hitchhiker on his way home from a date with a town girl and he was willing right away for Dolly, but it wasn’t until later that night he found out Brother would want him, too. Dolly, herself, was surprised, for Brother was always quiet about those things. But when they were finished and they walked out to the truck, drops of rain speckled the dirt in the front yard. It was only a small shower, hardly enough to wet the surface. It didn’t help the crops and the river paid it no attention at all. But Brother, he was convinced, and when it happened the second time, with the blue-eyed boy from over in Willows, well, then, Dolly herself prayed like crazy in church, and from then on, she kept a lookout for boys. It was mostly she who found them while Brother stayed back at the farm, and even with all their efforts and praying, it wasn’t certain to work. The drought didn’t break and the occasional showers they did wring out of the sky brought nothing but false hopes. l/w hen Dolly first noticed him, V * she didn’t dare say anything to Brother, but for three Saturdays running she drove the pick-up truck into town to the ice cream parlor. She drove with the windows shut, for the wind the truck stirred up singed her face and the dust settled on her cheeks and in the hollows below her eyes like talcum. All around her, the arid land was bleached white and nothing stirred in the afternoon sun. The boy dipped down into the frosty case, his smoothly muscled arm disappearing and then coming up with scoop after scoop of the rich, hard ice cream. French vanilla. Caramel. Dark chocolate. Sherbets: lime, lemon and coconut. Like a drink of sinfully sweet water when they burst on her tongue. She prodded him with questions as he scooped, and he invented fanciful sundaes for her with too much whipped cream and, really, more chocolate sauce than was necessary. She coaxed him: school, cars, basketball. Girls. Dolly watched and listened enthusiastically, ate her sundaes with real gusto. “My, what a perfect, perfect name for a handsome boy in an ice cream shop,” she laughed when Jonathan Pink first introduced himself. There were no customers in the store at the time, and Dolly leaned her elbows on the damp marble counter, rested her heart-shaped face in her hands. Outside, fugitives from the sun slinked along the sides of buildings, careful to keep in the shade of the storefront awnings along Main Street. Dolly was wearing her best: a sleeveless cotton that had grown tight over the years. But the flowers hadn’t faded—she took care—and so, she was all wrapped up in an endless chain of yellow daisies. The boy blushed and she laughed again. “Jonathan Pink. With pink, pink cheeks, like roses.” “Yes, ma’am,” the boy said. “It’s a hot one, isn’t it? Wonder if it will ever rain again?” “Oh, it will,” Dolly said. “ It will. I can feel it in my bones.” She smoothed her dress, ran both hands slowly down the front, careful that the boy saw her large breasts pushing against the thin cloth. “Too hot to wear any clothes at all, really. Why, this morning, I just slipped this little thing right over my head. And not a thing on underneath, either. It’s so light I feel like I’m stark naked.” Jonathan Pink stared outright at her breasts and Dolly felt her nipples grow hard. “Everyone tells me I look younger than my age,” she said, and then she ran a small finger round and round one nipple, practically hypnotizing the boy right there in the ice cream parlor. “It’s my figure,” she said. “Everyone tells me I got the figure of a high school girl. Don’t you think so?” “You’re big as a full-grown man, Jonathan Pink,” Dolly said when she felt the boy inside of her. And then, grabbing on tight to his slippery child’s buttocks, she pulled him in even further. The room should have been dark, but the window was pushed wide open for the small breeze, and moonlight from a cloudless sky dropped right in, filled the small bedroom with the night heat and the sounds of the country. Dolly purred like a cat, clucked like a hen, whimpered like a trapped jackrabbit. But young Jonathan Pink didn’t make a sound. His face hobbed up and down above Dolly’s Illustrations by Dana Hoyle Clinton St. Quarterly 37
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