When the Rains Came

17 MELISSA LAMBERT WHEN THE RAINS CAME I t was hot the night before the storm, which is not a difficult thing to recall. It always got hot right before it rained: not the bone-warming heat of the dry season, but a damp, encompassing heat, thick as a teakettle’s steam. When the air was hot like that—wavering right before our eyes—the buzzards would start to circle high in the piercing blue sky. We never knew if they were waiting for creatures to die from the heat or from the floods that were surely coming. Those buzzards could predict the rain better than any weatherman, and we knew that when the black shapes took wing, like dark angels, the rains would come soon after. That night, our mother came home as daylight was fading. She arrived tired from a long day cleaning an office building in the city, her face greenish from the artificial light of her hourlong bus ride home. She brought with her a bag of jabuticaba fruit that she had picked off a tree on her way home. The dark glossy fruits were slick in our palms, gelatinous in our mouths. We joked that they tasted like eyeballs, but we ate them greedily . As we passed the bag around, our mother stood in the little kitchen and made rice. She carved lines into the onion, left to right then top to bottom, and sliced off little cubes to fry with the rice in oil before she added the water. Our father wasn’t home yet, which was not unusual. He was working late, we knew, standing in the dim light pasting red bricks together—or perhaps he had stopped to drink a few glasses of musty alcohol at the bar down the street where two card tables were set up in the courtyard and a single lantern swayed from a tree branch. He was seldom home in time to eat dinner with us or watch us go to sleep. We only half-noticed his absence; it was not unusual. Our mother was worrying about the roof, which had taken a beating during a rainstorm a few days before. She was afraid the roof would cave in when it rained again, that the whole house would Winner of the 2009–10 AWP Intro Journals Project, selected by Crystal Wilkinson colorado review 18 be destroyed. We asked if our father would come home to repair the roof before the rains came. Our mother said, “Se Deus quiser,” which meant, we knew, that things would happen as God intended them to happen. The people of our street used these three words to explain everything . If there was a death, if someone lost their job, if a house caught on fire, if a bicycle broke, if there were droughts or floods or hailstorms—everything that happened on our street was God’s will. “Se Deus quiser, the man will come home tonight,” murmured our mother, trying to reassure herself as her knife sawed back and forth across the onion. “He knows that there will be rain tomorrow.” We ate dinner, the nine of us and our mother. The kitchen was too small for us to eat together inside, so we scooped up bowls of rice and ate them, squatting in the dusty courtyard behind the house while the chickens pecked around our feet. There were only three small rooms in the house: the cramped kitchen and two bedrooms full, floor to ceiling, with bunk beds and graying mattresses. The house had a single decoration: a frayed picture of a blue-eyed Jesus taped to a wall in the bedroom . In the courtyard there was space for all of our elbows as we ate, and sometimes fragrant breezes blew through, rustling the leaves of the mango tree that sheltered the courtyard. After dinner, when it was fully dark, we argued over our sleeping places. Our house was a maze of beds, and at night we twisted and turned on the mattresses while the smallest children slept with their feet nuzzled in the crook of our mother’s neck. We took turns sleeping on the top bunks, coveting them on...