Tomorrow’s Sun

The year I was to turn fifteen I was sent to live with my maternal grandmother in Picayune, Mississippi–the kind of place that time moved slow on, drug a long finger across her skin, left a smudge. I had never known such a place.

They have something down here called a stink bug, claimed to possess as its special power the ability to put off a stifling odor, meant to warn other stink bugs of impending danger–but only after it’s been squashed. I've come to think of myself as a sort of stink bug, cast from my home to serve warning for my two younger sisters who were left to endure whatever threat I was supposed to be fleeing. How the perils in Mississippi are meant to be any less than those in New York is beyond me.

My first full day in Picayune, two of the local boys got it in their heads to wet me with their water guns. Their eyes gleamed with the thrill of each squirt aimed in my direction. The sound of their taunts filled the air: “Enhhh, Enhhh, Enhhh!” I stood staring, wondering what those boys meant to accomplish by wetting me until my dress was a tattered mass of jet stream tears, my hair lifted in several places, water dripping down either side of my face from make believe wounds.

The boys eventually grew tired of me–a moving target that wouldn't seem to move–and continued on their way shooting streams of water at the ground, at each other, into the wind. My grandmother, who witnessed the attack from her porch window, told me to warn those boys the next time they attempt to squirt me that I will lift my dress and make it rain on the whole world. She sent word by way of their mothers or grandmothers or whoever most held sway over the root of their devilment. Batted her eyes against a persistent sun, hung the message on the edge of a tilted sky listing from the weight of the burden it was sent to carry.

By nightfall that evening, the sky was alive with the spectacle of events leading up to a storm: the low rumbling of thunder that escalates to a bone-rattling clap, the scent of rain as yet unseen transported on steam-drenched billows of wind. A hollow brightness filled the sky giving some hint as to the celestial whereabouts of the storm’s inception. Together the storm's way of proclaiming, ‘Ready or not, here I come.’

A flash of light ruptured the soft underbelly of swollen cloud cover and the rains began to fall, in gargantuan droplets at first: sphitt, splok, splook–obviously from a common source yet strangely isolated in their onset. The rain eventually settled into a steady rhythm, the downpour having worn smooth the frayed edges of ruptured sky.

I screwed up my nerve to pose the question through Gram’s cracked bedroom door as she and I settled down for the night. “Was all this my doing?” I asked above the patter of raindrops keeping time on the rooftop.

“Silly girl,” she replied, the titter in her voice showing the faintest hint of delight at the prospect that her words had carried, that her eldest granddaughter had grown to consider another person’s way of seeing the world, an outlook that had eluded my mother’s grasp under the same teaching.

“Magnificent forces exist out there,” she explained. “Lightning, sunshine, drops of rain; the rainbows they conspire to produce. Vital forces, as undeniable as you and me. Yet none of them is small enough to fit between the tips of your fingers. The sky might on occasion heed your wishes, but it will never bow to your will. It’s best you flush any such notion from inside your fertile mind.”

She switched off the light resting on her bedside table before I can manage a response. The night air placed a hush over the space surrounding us signaling it was time for sleep, not time for any further question asking about sunshine or rain or the sky's regard for my wishes one way or the other. I lay in the darkness contemplating my connection to those magnificent, outside forces. Had I been older, I would have recognized the coincidence between the timing of the threat Gram prescribed and the start of the rainy season in the Mississippi Bayou. Any younger and I wouldn't have appreciated the kind of mojo a threat like this–mired in sexual innuendo–would have on the locals, the men especially.

“Evening, Miss.” The man tipped his hat, resting a foot on the porch step, a lazy arm stretched along the length of the handrail. “Is the sun going to shine tomorrow?” he asked, his eyes as wet as any part of the sky, the brim of his hat, the tip of his boot.

“It didn't shine today,” I replied. “Might not shine tomorrow either,” I told him, reciting the words Gram had scripted for me.

Each night, somebody stopped by to ask about tomorrow’s sun. Not always the same somebody, but every night without fail somebody came to ask.

Midway through the summer, with the soybean crop in jeopardy not to mention the little league baseball season, a coalition of townsmen descended on Gram’s tiny three room house stamping mud from their boots as they made their approach. The racket echoed off a sky held low by days of endless cloud cover beckoning Gram and me onto the porch before the men could get themselves fully organized. They seemed small standing down around Gram’s front porch, heads bowed, hats twisting by their sides between nervous fingers like a gathering of school children assembled before an unyielding headmistress. Gram obliged them in this role standing steady on her perch, peering at and beyond them with the same glance.

I stood silent by her side studying the horizon for some cosmic event to intervene and calm the situation brewing between us. The sky seemed on the verge of another outburst, Mother Nature still unsettled by the water gun assault launched against me. Fast moving streaks in silver and gray circled the heavens twisting into one another as if bullied by a common adversary. The treetops disappeared in a mysterious haze giving the impression that an angry sky might at any moment open up and consume the earth leaving Picayune to spend the rest of eternity locked in bitter turmoil.

Eventually one of the men mustered the nerve to speak shaking me from my daydreaming–they’d come to see if I would remove the curse. After much conjecture and posturing, Gram instructed me to step to the edge of the porch, to hold my arms outstretched pointing skyward. She had me speak to the sky like a mother would a restless child.

“Be still,” I said. “Be still.”

Within days the rains stopped and the clouds began to part leaving the townsfolk forever in my debt.