“‘I do not make rain. What I do is attract clouds.’ That’s what he said.”

1914, thought Agnes, had been a very bad year—but 1915 was already shaping up to be worse. San Diego was parched, a desiccated patch of desert on the California coast. Too long the city had thirsted for rain that never came, and now its reservoir levels were running on empty.

Every day Howard came home from his city council job with the tie Agnes had fixed that morning yanked out of shape, and sighed more heavily than the day before.

“We can’t go much longer without rain,” he said each evening.

The first sign something was different was his tie. When Agnes looked up from washing cabbage she saw it: as straight and neat as she had tied it that morning. When she looked up, Howard was smiling.

That was when he told her about the rainmaker.

His name was Charles Mallory Hatfield, and he claimed he could cure San Diego’s drought.

“We’re saved!” said Howard, reaching out to Agnes for a kiss. She offered him her cheek.

+

Hatfield was poker-backed and straightlaced. There was no color to the man, all paper white skin and black hair and a grey tweed suit, but for his bright blue eyes. Like two lapis lazuli gemstones stuck into the deep hollows of his eye sockets, Agnes thought.

“It’s not magic or luck,” Hatfield said, with an easy smile. “Just simple science. I create a brew of chemicals, and when they burn, the clouds come. And then, after the clouds comes the rain. Thank you, Mrs. Nelson.”

Agnes set a cup of coffee down for Hatfield and another for Howard. For herself, nothing—they couldn’t afford to waste the water. Not yet. Howard had taken the comfy chair, the tall leather wingback he sat in every night after work, and Hatfield perched on the little couch as though it was his first time sitting down. It would be improper to squeeze in next to Hatfield, so Agnes simply stood, hovering at the coffee table with her tray pressed to her chest.

“And you’ve done this before?” said Howard, staring at Hatfield with wide saucer eyes.

“Oh yes, sir.” Howard was older than Hatfield—older than her too—and Hatfield talked to him the way Agnes imagined he must have talked to his private school teachers when he was a boy. “Texas, Alaska, Los Angeles—I’ve been all over. Mrs Nelson, this coffee is marvellous. How do you make it this way?”

“Oh, that’s just some newfangled instant thing. German. She just added water,” said Howard. Agnes offered Hatfield an apologetic smile.

+

It happened quickly.

Hatfield disappeared deep into the woods sixty miles east of San Diego, and built a tower near the reservoir. From the Nelsons’ bedroom in Mission Valley Agnes could see its wooden spire rising above the pine trees, stretching up to meet the sky.

She loved the little window next to the dressing table in their bedroom. When she sat at the table and curled her hair in the morning, when she dusted the surface during her afternoons, when she secreted spare change from the weekly groceries shop into her jewellery box, she would gaze out of that window at San Diego and beyond.

If she left now, just stepped out of the front door and kept walking straight, she could get there before midnight. Hatfield would be waiting for her—“Mrs. Nelson, I’ve been thinking about you”— and she would put her fingers to his lips and say no, call me Agnes.

While Howard snored in bed, Agnes stood at the window, watched the skies. Smoke spiralled from Hatfield’s tower, sinuous wisps of it gathering over the reservoir. The smell of it was overpowering, drifting from the forest all the way to her window and into her nightgown and hair. It made her throat burn.

She’d never seen such enormous clouds—huge black tendrils covering the heavens, twisting in loose wisps. A coven of silken snakes blotting out the moon.

Deep in the forest, she imagined she would ask Hatfield about it. Why are the clouds so big?

For a lot of rain, you need a lot of clouds, he would say, pale eyes fixed on her. You need to go big. These clouds will cover San Diego before I’m done.

Far from him, Agnes could still see the city beneath the clouds, but there among the trees they would be blanketed by a sheet of cirrus and cumulus. Nobody would see them.

Not that Howard could see her now either, where she stood just a few paces away from him while he pushed his face into his pillow like he was trying to see to the other side. Agnes took one last glance at the clouds trailing across the horizon and padded back to bed, tucking the blanket around herself like a fortress.

Beside her, Howard rolled over. Behind his eyelids Agnes could see his eyes moving. What did Howard dream about? Tax returns, maybe. A limitless annual budget for the city council. A wife who made coffee from whole beans instead of Dekafa from the grocery store on the corner.

But the lure of it on the shelf had been too great. Just in, they had said. It’s a new thing. Might not take off. Just add water—but not the way Howard had said it.

Agnes closed her own eyes, pulling the blanket up to her chin. The odor of burnt matches and sewer gas still lingered in her nightgown. Hatfield’s olfactory embrace from beyond the trees. She smiled to herself as she drifted down, down, down into oblivion.

+

Rainmaker Hatfield Induces Clouds to Open!

There he was, Hatfield shaking hands with Howard’s boss on the front page of the San Diego Union. His image was dyed in ghostly white and grey, practically translucent next to the bushy black moustache and beady eyes of the man Howard called The Tyrant. Agnes lingered near the newspaper stand, rubbing her fingertips against the dimes in her palm. The newspaper was thirty cents. Eggs would be fifty, and milk twice as much. And Howard did love his scrambled eggs in the morning.

Agnes palmed three dimes into the hand of the salesboy, grabbing the newspaper from the stand and pressing it close to her chest.

Above her, the sky trickled a constant dribble of rain, leaving a little wet patch on Agnes’s headscarf. It wasn’t nearly enough rain, Howard had complained that morning, but it was something. Agnes smiled as a droplet inched down her forehead and off the tip of her nose, her own little Chinese water torture taster session, just like Harry Houdini and his Berlin show.

But she had to get inside quickly, before the raindrops ruined her newspaper. Even one droplet landing on Hatfield’s face simply would not do.

Agnes ducked into the nearest store without checking its sign, blinking owlishly when she found herself in a tailor’s store, surrounded by racks of ready-to-wear suits. She hadn’t been noticed, not yet. The salesmen were occupied, measuring inseams and straightening ties. Agnes slotted herself between two racks, blending in amongst the beige wool and linen.

That was when she saw him. Hatfield, walking straight towards her through the racks, a thin smile stretched across his face.

“This is a surprise,” he said when he came to a stop in front of her, grinning down at her. “What brings you to Brooks Brothers, Mrs. Nelson? A new suit for Mr. Nelson?”

Agnes nodded mutely. Why not—it was a better reason than the real one.

“They’re very good here,” said Hatfield. Even in the dim lights of Brooks Brothers, his eyes were a shocking electric blue. There had been nights where Agnes had told herself she must have misremembered the color of his eyes, had let her memory exaggerate the blueness of them, but no, from a few inches away she realised her recollection had been accurate after all. “I have trouble with off-the-rack. Need longer sleeves. One of these fine suits would stop right at my elbows.” He nodded towards the rack of ready-to-wears bashfully.

Agnes could see what he meant. Hatfield was unnaturally long-limbed, as though his arms and legs had been stretched out like taffy. Even his fingers, brushing against the sack suit hanging beside him, were long. Agnes wondered how those fingers would feel on her skin.

“Howard has some suits that are far too long in the arms for him,” she said suddenly. The sound of her own voice was too loud in her ears, too abrupt. She worried it would puncture the soft and secret bubble that seemed to cover them here in Brooks Brothers, but Hatfield’s eyes glowed at her through the gloom. “You could…” Agnes continued, encouraged by the pair of eyes intently trained on her, “try some on. If you liked.”

Hatfield’s smile stretched wide across his face. “I would like that very much.”

+

I’ll show you real rain.

“That’s what he said when he called us,” Howard whispered behind Agnes. She stood at their little bedroom window while he dressed for work, feeling the downpour pelting against her palm. “He said he would show us. That he wasn’t nearly done yet.”

Agnes wondered how Noah felt from the upper deck of the Ark when the floods licked up around his ankles. Fearful? Triumphant? Within days, San Diego had been overwhelmed by Hatfield’s gift. Seventeen inches of rain, Howard said. The reservoirs were full to bursting. The San Diego river lapped dangerously at its banks, threatening to spill over. And rumours were brewing that on the peaks of Mount Soledad, mud was beginning to ooze down towards the roofs and roads below.

“You asked him for rain,” Agnes murmured.

“We didn’t ask to be drowned!” Howard snapped. “What now, must we pay him to stop too? The man is unhinged, sitting out there in the forest all day and night.”

He blew his nose loudly. Agnes noted with distaste the way that he opened his handkerchief to inspect the contents afterwards, as though the answer to Hatfield’s rain might be inside it.

She turned to fix Howard’s tie, brushing down the front of his work suit for him. She could smell sulphur and earth on the wool. She hoped he could not.

“Council’s in uproar,” he sniffed. “The Tyrant’s out for blood. Make sure dinner’s on the table when I’m home tonight, won’t you—meatloaf, or maybe a roast.”

Agnes waited until Howard’s automobile grumbled out of the driveway, then padded, barefoot, into the garden. The soil was wet and sticky between her toes, sifting over her feet in sodden clumps.

I’ll show you real rain.

The rain came from the sky thick and fast, lashing against her skin like the snap of a rubber band. Agnes turned her face to heavens, letting the rain wash into her eyes, her nose, her mouth and it tasted foul and dirty but it would wash her clean, she knew that much. Standing here with her mouth open and her arms spread, she would be washed clean by Hatfield’s rain and born again.

And Howard would not get his meatloaf. Agnes laughed as she put one muddy foot in front of the other, twirling in the flowerbeds. She would sit in the comfy chair and count the cash in her jewellery box and sip instant coffee and when Howard came through the door and said, “Where is my meatloaf?” she would say, “You know how to work the stove, don’t you?”

The rain thundered in her ears and her foot slipped in the mud, sending her down towards the petunias, but Agnes planted one palm flat in the earth and pushed herself upright. And then she was careening in wild unsteady circles with the wind and the rain pushing at her back and her breath snatched away. And she laughed and laughed and when she heard the screams and the creak and groan of metal and the rush of water like a train heading straight for her she did not stop laughing.

When Agnes looked up, above the identical grey roofs of Mission Valley, she saw it: the tide of water surging forward, bringing fences and lampposts and trash cans with it. The water was twenty, thirty feet tall, eating everything in its path.

She could hear her neighbours. Mrs. Harris from next door was screaming at somebody, “The dog, the dog!” and Agnes imagined a bedraggled Boston Terrier clinging to somebody’s arms, and Mrs. Harris frozen in horror as the wave swallowed them all alive.

The windows of her house shook in their frames. Three silver slates fell from the roof, landing in the mud at Agnes’s feet.

Agnes gathered her skirts and ran, heels kicking high through the mud and puddles. She fumbled with the catch on the garden gate, fingers trembling as she finally wrenched it open and flew into the street. And then she was running and her eyes were pointed straight ahead, never behind, and her blood was thundering in her ears and she felt her face split open into a frenzied howl of laughter as the water grabbed at mailboxes and cladding and porch posts and pulled them back into its heart.

And the wave was on her and around her and above her, and all was raging water, but Agnes stood still. Her feet planted firmly into the earth like roots burrowing deep below, and even as the houses of her neighbours began to rip from their foundations and break apart into the water, Agnes did not move.

Within the water, Agnes saw the flotsam of her neighborhood floating by. There went the Kleins’s blue Ford, with its steering wheel missing and its windows shattered. Mrs. Harris’s mailbox followed close behind, followed by Mrs. Harris’s Boston Terrier with its little legs paddling helplessly against the tide and then Mrs. Harris herself, with her rollers still in.

When Agnes saw her jewellery box glide by she grabbed at it and snatched it from the water’s grasp, relieved to see its golden latch had not given way.

The water did not cease. It carried gates and doors and clothing lines through the street, and as Agnes looked around to see if it had brought any more of her own belongings to her, she saw him: Howard, drifting some eight or nine feet away from her. His arms and legs were buffeted by the push of the water, flopping lifelessly each time the tide swelled. A gash on his chin leaked red all over the collar of his shirt. And his eyes were closed.

Clutching her jewellery box, Agnes began to walk. She walked until Howard was close enough to touch, but she did not touch him.

Maybe, if she focused on his chest, she would see it rise and fall. Maybe she would see his eyes flicker behind his eyelids, or his fingers twitch. And then maybe she would drop her jewellery box and rush to his side, and he would cough up dirty water and together they would walk back through the ruined street and find the remnants of their lives together in the wreckage. Maybe.

Or, Agnes thought as she turned her head away, maybe not.

The rain slowed to a gentle trickle as she walked away.

+++

Daisy Ravenel (@daisy_ravenel) is a Leicester-based writer. She has previously been published by the Leicester Literary Review and Black Hare Press.