Page 57 - James Rodger Fleming - Fixing the sky

equations, antennae, derricks, vats, and acids” play their symbolic, if nondescript,
roles in the rainmaking scenes. So does the hall of the rainmen, where licensed
practitioners confer and visitors thumb charts, prod apparatus, and inscribe their
names in the guest book.
of greater rhetorical significance, however, are the debates over the morality
of the technique. Half the population, led by the Reverend James Ahab Crouch
(“Make the World Safe for God”), oppose rain control as a “device of the devil,” blas-
phemous or pagan. He champions a bill in the legislature designed to crush the rain-
men and preaches from his great tent how terrible it is “to subtract from the omnip-
otence of an omnipotent God” (179). others, more open-minded or daring, look
on it as a great benefit (25–27, 74). They plan a carnival with “a great rain display, a
model rain, predicted, arranged, conducted by some rainman, controlled” (185).
Like Frank Melbourne at the Goodland County fair (chapter 3), Jeremy,
known popularly as the “rain bat” for his tight-fitting black rain suit, is invited
to the carnival and promises the expectant crowd a deluge by two o’clock. He
works feverishly, tuning his instruments, mixing the proprietary chemicals, and
conjuring up and battling with the clouds, which fight back like dragons. Finally,
“out of the great rent in the beast rolled a stream of rain and the gutters were run-
ning flush, running over” (213–217). Jeremy’s success is celebrated with a parade,
with the rain bat riding in a convertible at the head of a motorcade as music plays,
drums beat, men cheer, women swoon, and skywriters pay homage overhead. At
the time the book was written, Charles Hatfield was still active in the field, and
the Rock Island Railroad rainmakers persisted in memory.
N. Richard Nash’s romantic comedy The Rainmaker (1955) is set in Three
Point, Texas, “on a summer day in a time of devastating drought.” Lizzie Curry’s
family worries more about her marriage prospects than about their dying crops
and livestock. Suddenly, a charming stranger arrives, a Texas twister of a man
named Bill Starbuck—Rainmaker!—a charlatan, but not essentially a crook,
who promises, for $100, to make miracles, to bring rain. As the summer storm
clouds gather overhead, lonely and plain Lizzie, too, has her love life “seeded” by
the confidence man’s machinations.
How to make rain? Starbuck mocks the scientific voice of the charlatan when
he cries, “Sodium chloride! Pitch it up high—right up to the clouds. Electrify
the cold front. Neutralize the warm front. Barometricize the tropopause. Magne-
tize occlusions in the sky.” But Starbuck, like faith healers, has his own method,
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“all my own,” that begins with him brandishing his hickory stick and exuding con-
fidence. After inviting himself to supper and collecting $100 in advance, Starbuck
puts the family members to work for him in a test of their faith—beating on a
big bass drum, painting arrows on the ground to direct the lightning away from

40 | StorieS of Control