Enter the Rainmaker
He arrived in town on May 2, 1932. Rugby, North Dakota. Tall and slim, with curly black hair and twinkling brown eyes; a gregarious manner. His name was Russell Jameson, but he called himself: the Rainmaker. And by the end of that summer, so did everybody else in Pierce County.
“Had maybe two inches of rain all last year. And not a drop so far this year,” the local farm equipment dealer told him.
Not that Russell had to be told. He had eyes; parched countryside, some of the richest farmland in all of the 48 states, lay hard and cracked and barren in all directions.
He let his presence become known. And by the 4th, a group of desperate farmers and townspeople had agreed to pay for his services, half upfront, half on delivery. He stayed out at Henk Larsen’s farm and began ‘sizing up’ the land and sky and wind, the few wispy clouds that ventured out into the already searing heat.
And when there wasn’t a crowd of apprehensive men and curious kids watching his every move, he studied the weather charts and almanacs, scouted out a crop duster for hire. And couldn’t help but notice Britta Lindgren, Henk’s eighteen-year-old cousin who’d lived with the Larsens since she was five.
The girl was tall and lean, long, smooth limbs bronzed by the sun. She wore her straw-blonde hair loose around her shoulders, and a threadbare cotton dress filled out to bursting in front. Her pale blue eyes met Russell’s whenever he looked.
On the 6th, the Rainmaker put on a real show for the locals out in a fallow field. Setting ablaze bonfires and setting off explosions—to coax the clouds. At the end of it all promising rain, soon. And that night, delivering. Just shortly after he’d stepped out of the crop duster he’d used to sprinkle the promising clouds with his ‘secret chemicals’.
It started as a trickle, at midnight. By one, it was pouring. Coming down in big, fat, wonderfully wet drops and soaking the thirsty ground. Drumming on the rooftops and rattling against the windowpanes, music to people’s ears. Silver in the moonlight; a hundred times more valuable.
Russell found Britta behind the barn, standing out in the storm with her head tilted back and her arms outstretched, golden hair streaming down her back, cotton dress flush to her ripened body. Her full breasts heaved under the thin, saturated material, hard nipples surging almost through.
Russell grabbed her in his arms and kissed her damp, slender neck, her dripping chin and wet lips, drinking in the pure, lush dewiness of the girl. She shuddered like the thunder, and he pushed her up against the slick, weathered boards of the barn and filled his grasping hands to overflowing with tit, squeezing and kneading the succulent flesh. She whimpered when he tore her sodden dress apart, moaned when he gripped her bare, brimming breasts and swam his tongue all over her shimmering nipples.
Then she cried out with all her roiling heart and soul when he plunged like lightning inside of her, deep into her inner wetness, bursting the dam of her desire. The force of his pumping hips splashed her up against the barn over and over, making her head swim, flooding her body with a liquid heat.
They gushed their ecstasy together, bathing one another in their steaming juices. The warm rain washedb over them in waves.
As Henk Larsen watched from behind the tool shed, cock in one hand, axe in the other. Beady eyes burned bright in the jungle rain of the night with the lust and rage of the man who’d vowed to be Britta’s first.
The girl pulled her dress together and ran for the house. And her cousin oozed in behind Russell, using the rain as cover. He brought the axe up over his head. Then crashed its sharp, gleaming blade down onto Russell’s skull. Cleaving it in two.
Henk buried the body in some brush ten feet away from the bank of the trickling creek that bordered his property. Some townsfolk wondered where the Rainmaker had gotten to. But the farmers didn’t care—they had their rain. And more rain.
All through May and into June. By late June, the fields were flooded, the struggling crops drowned.
It rained just about all summer long. And by early September, the normally docile rivers and creeks were dangerously swollen, filled to their banks with ugly, brown, churning waters.
Henk Larsen was crossing the short wooden bridge over the creek and onto his land the night of the 7th, the surging water making the bridge tremble. He was almost to the far bank, when it suddenly gave way upstream, earth and brush and trees sliding into the raging current in a crumbling shelf.
A wall of water welled up over the bridge and slammed into Henk’s Model T pick-up. The truck shimmied sideways in the rushing tide, the man inside gripping the wheel and watching in horror as the body of Russell Jameson slithered down the broken bank and slid into the angry water, bobbed up and rode the crest, landed with a jarring thud against the cab of Henk’s pick-up.
The terrified farmer stared at the split skull gleaming ethereally in the sheet lightning, its jaw chattering with the torrent of the current, calling to Henk out of the pounding rain. He scrambled to the other side of the cab, clawed the door open, and jumped out. Right into the cold, muddy, charging, debris-choked water.
Britta attended Russell’s funeral only. Along with various women from various other States who brought with them children bearing more than a passing resemblance to the man. Britta was five months along, herself.
And when they finally laid the Rainmaker to rest in the moist earth, the sun was shining. Not a cloud in the sky.
Copyright © 2008 by Landon Dixon. All rights reserved.
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