Page 56 - James Rodger Fleming - Fixing the sky

Converse is a true believer in his rainmaking process. He came to the desert
on a mission: to use his skills to atone for the death of his father, who died of
thirst near this very spot some thirty years before. But Converse has much more
to confront than just the desiccated sky. His wife, Linda, who thought she was
marrying a prosperous entrepreneur, has become super-critical of his idealistic
quest, which keeps her cooped up in a tent with a smoky stove, frying bacon and
potatoes: “You’ve gone and thrown up a perfectly good contract in Grass Valley,
a thousand sure, and more if your luck held, and you’ve dragged me off to this
God-forsaken spot, with not a soul in thirty miles to know whether it rains or
not. I want to know what you mean by it” (503–504). The high-minded Con-
verse, like a modern-day Job, is seeking “to bring rain in the wilderness” by lifting
his voice to the heavens as his father did on the night of his death. He receives
no support from the vulgar, vain, and greedy Linda, though. She drives him
from the tent into the night with her cutting remarks about how she no longer
believes in him, and perhaps never did.
“Driven by an animal’s blind desire to escape its tormentor, Converse
stumble[s] down the rocky path toward the tower” (506). Devastated by her ver-
bal assaults, he realizes that Linda has managed to shatter his faith in himself. He
trips over something in the sand, and “a hot pain dart[s] through his ankle . . . it
must have been a snake” (507). Pitiful and increasingly delirious, he collapses in
the dry waterhole where his father met his demise. Even as he nears death, his
gaze is fixed on the black and brooding sky, with its great masses of clouds sink-
ing lower until a soft hiss, a pitter-pat of rain on the sand, informs him of “his”
success: “Rain! . . . Rain in the wilderness. . . . I’ve not failed, after all. . . . I must
find father and tell him” (509)—an impossible quest for his paralyzed body but
not for his triumphant spirit.
Jingling in the Wind (1928), by Elizabeth Madox Roberts, is a stylistically com-
plex and multivocal tone poem, “a fantasy of weather control.” Here we meet
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Jeremy the rainmaker, a man who participates in the pure sensation of nature and
“gives it a point.” For Jeremy, interior feelings and reflections trump the mere wet-
ness of the rain, which is the “least significant part”: “He had brought the rain
into the sky. With his science and his apparatus he had engendered the rain and
now, as rainman, reve of the rain, he looked about and saw his work was well
done, saw his work take purpose in the clods and the parted loam.” 17
Using Jeremy’s techniques, the commissioners of rural Jason County, Ken-
tucky, in conference with the farmers, set the rain schedule for the month, but
only in their own local jurisdiction. The process is so precise that if you wish
for fine weather on a scheduled rain day, you merely need to cross into the next
county. Much like the Kansas and Nebraska rainmakers of yore, “retorts, clouds,

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