Prologue– Wrapped in Rain

When the ache woke me, I poked the tip of my nose out from under the covers and pulled my knees hard into my chest where my heart hung pounding like a war drum. The room was deep with shadows, the moon hung high, and I knew Rex would never let me out of bed at this hour. I inched my head out from under the covers, my hair sticking up from the static, and looked down from my second-story perch, but my breath had fogged the window and wrapped a hazy halo around the moon. Car-size hay bales wrapped in white plastic lined the far fence and framed the backdrop against which three or four horses—their backs covered with blankets—and one or two deer fed silently in the ankle-high winter rye. Blue-moon glow lit the back porch and barn, and the pasture floated beneath a wave of slow-moving fog. Even then, if I could’ve saddled that fog and ridden out over those golden fields, I’d have sunk in my spurs, pulled the reins skyward, steered for the sun, and never looked back.

I slept like this—wrapped up like a cannonball—because he noticed me less. When he did, my backside got the brunt of it. About a year later, when we found out I had a brother, I thought maybe I’d start getting half-whippings because now he had twice as many targets, but I was wrong. He just gave twice as many.

I wiped my nose with my flannel pajama sleeve, uncoiled, and then slid off the top bunk where the moon spilled around me and cast my shadow on the floor. Me and Peter Pan. Miss Ella knew I needed room to grow, so she had bought my one-piece pajama suit a few sizes too big. The built-in feet made a scratchy, sliding sound as I tiptoed across the floor to the chair where my two holster belt hung. Holding my breath, I strapped the belt around my waist, checked my six-shooters to make sure the caps were in place, pulled my cowboy hat down tight, and poked my head around the door. An arm’s reach away, leaning in the corner, stood my baseball bat—a twenty-six-inch Louisville Slugger. Hitting chert rocks had dinged and cut the barrel, leaving it splintery and rough, but Moses had sanded the handle smooth, thin enough to fit my little hands. I grabbed it, lined up my knuckles, and rested it on my shoulder. I had to walk past Rex’s door and I needed all the help I could get.

I never knew if he was home or not, but I wasn’t taking any chances. If he was here and he so much as moved, I’d crack his shins, blast him with both cylinders, and then run like a bat out of the basement while he screamed the “third commandment word.”

In the last few weeks, I had been wrestling with a few things that didn’t make any sense: like why I didn’t have a mama; why my dad never came around; why he was always yelling, screaming, and drinking when he did; and what this hurting was in my stomach. Stuff like that.

Rex’s room was dark and quiet, but that didn’t fool me. So were storm clouds just before they thundered. I got on all fours and belly-crawled, one elbow in front of the other like a soldier under fire, to Rex’s cavernous door, and then quickly past, never pausing to look inside. My flannel pajamas slid almost silently on the polished wood floors. Most of the time, when Rex had spent the last several hours, or even days, looking through the bottom of a crystal glass, he didn’t always get the light turned on. I didn’t know much, but I did know that a dark room didn’t necessarily mean no Rex. I began crawling again. The thought of him in there, sitting in his chair, watching me, rising now to come for me . . . was almost paralyzing. My breathing picked up and sweat beaded my forehead, but above the deafening sound of my own heart beating, I heard no snoring and no shouting.

Clearing the door frame, I wiped the sweat from my forehead and pulled my heels away from danger. When I didn’t hear foot-steps, didn’t feel a hand on my back, didn’t feel myself yanked off the floor, I hauled myself to the banister of the stairway, kicked one leg over, and slid all the way to the marble landing on the first floor.

I glanced over my shoulder, saw no sign of Rex, and started running. If he was home, he’d have to catch me. I ran through the library; the smoking room; the den; the room with the fireplace big enough to sleep in; through the kitchen, which smelled like baked chicken and biscuits and gravy; off the back porch, which smelled like mop water; through the pasture, which smelled like fresh horse manure; and toward Miss Ella’s cottage—which smelled like a hug.

The way Miss Ella told it, my father, Rex, put an ad in the local paper for “house help” the week I was born. There were two reasons for this: he was too proud to advertise his need for a “nanny,” and he had sent my mother—his late-night office clerk—to file elsewhere. A couple dozen people responded to the ad, but Rex was picky . . . which made little sense given his affinity for random clerks. Just after breakfast, Miss Ella Rain—a forty-five-year-old, childless widow and the only daughter of the son of an Alabama slave—rang the doorbell. The chime rang for almost a minute, and after an appropriate wait—so as not to appear either hurried or in need—Rex answered the door and gave her a long look over the top of his reading glasses. He could read just fine, but like most things in his life, he wore them for effect, not function.

Hands folded, she wore a white nylon working dress—the kind worn by most house help—knee-highs, a pair of white nurse’s shoes with the laces tied in double knots, and her hair tied up in a bun and held together with six or eight bobby pins. She wore no makeup, but if you looked closely, you could see freckles scattered across her light brown cheeks. She extended her references and said, “Good morning, sir. I’m Mrs. Ella Rain.” Rex eyed the tattered documents through his glasses, periodically studying her over the tops. She tried to speak again, but he held out his hand like a stop sign and shook his head, so she folded her hands again and waited silently.

After three or four minutes of reading, he said, “Wait here.” He shut the door in her face and returned with me a minute later. Inviting her into the house, he extended me at arm’s length like a lion cub and said, “Here. Clean this house and don’t let him out of your sight.”

“Yes sir, Mr. Rex.”

Miss Ella cradled me, stepped inside the foyer, and looked around the house. That act alone explains the fact that I have no memory of ever not knowing Miss Ella Rain. Not the mother who bore me, but the mother God gave me.

. . .

I’m pretty sure Miss Ella never knew a day in her life that did not include hard work. Many nights, I watched her put her hand on her hip, push her shoulders forward, arch her back, and look to Moses. “Little brother, I need to soak my teeth, doctor my hemorrhoids, get some Cornhuskers, and lay my head on the pillow.” But that was just the beginning. She’d get her cap on, get greased up, and then kneel down. That’s when her day really started, because once she got going, she might be there all night.

The thought of Rex drew my eyes back to the house. If Rex was home and simply had not made it upstairs to his room, chances were good that he could see Miss Ella’s front door from any window on the rear of the house, so I ran around the back of the cottage, in the shadows under the eave. I turned the mop bucket upside down, pulled up on the window, and hung my chin on the ledge while my socked feet made a kicking and scratching sound on the cold brick wall.

Inside, Miss Ella was kneeling beside her bed. She was like that a lot. Head bowed and draped in a yellow plastic shower cap, hands folded and resting on top of her Bible, which spread across the bed in front of her. Come what may, she maintained a steady diet of Scripture. She quoted it often and with authority. Miss Ella seldom spoke words or phrases that weren’t first written in the Old or New Testament. The more Rex drank and the more Rex cussed, the more Miss Ella read and prayed. I saw her Bible once, and much of the current page was underlined. I couldn’t read too well, but looking back on it, it was probably the Psalms. Miss Ella found comfort there. Especially the twenty-fifth.

Miss Ella’s lips were moving, her head was nodding just slightly, and her eyes were narrowed, closed, and surrounded in deep wrinkles. Then and now, that’s the way I remember her. A lady on her knees.

. . .

I let myself back down onto the bucket, lightly tapped the window with the handle of my baseball bat, and whispered, “Miss Ella.” It was a cold night and my breath looked like Rex’s cigar smoke. I looked up and waited as the cold crept through the pores in my pajamas. While I danced atop the mop bucket, she wrapped a tattered shawl tight around her shoulders and lifted the window. Seeing me, she reached through and pulled me up—all fifty-two pounds. I know that because one week prior she had taken me for my five-year checkup, and when Moses put me on the scale, Miss Ella commented, “Fifty-two pounds? Child, you weigh half as much as me.”

She shut the window and knelt down. “Tucker, what are you doing out of your bed? You know what time it is?”

I shook my head. She took off my hat, unbuckled my holster, and hung them both on her bedposts. “You’re going to catch your death out here. Come here.” We sat down in her rocker in front of the fireplace, which was little more than red embers. She threw on a few pieces of light kindling and then began rocking quietly, warming my arms with her hands. The only sound was the slow rhythm of the rocker and the pounding in my chest. After a few minutes, she pushed the hair out of my eyes and said, “What’s wrong, child?”

“My stomach hurts.”

She nodded and combed my hair with her fingers, which smelled like Cornhuskers lotion. “You going to throw up or need to go to the bathroom?”

I shook my head.

“Couldn’t sleep?”

I nodded.

“You scared?”

I nodded a third time and tried to wipe the tear away with my sleeve, but she beat me to it. She snugged her arms about me tighter and said, “You want to tell me about it?”

I shook my head and sniffled. She pulled me back toward her warm, sagging bosom and hummed in rhythm with the rocker. That was the safest place on earth.

She put her hand on my tummy and listened like a doctor for a heartbeat. After a few seconds, she nodded affirmatively, grabbed a blanket, and wrapped me tight. “Tucker, that hurting spot is your people place.”

My eyebrows lifted. “My what?”

“Your people place.”

“What’s it do?”

“It’s like your own built-in treasure box.”
I looked at my stomach. “Is there money in it?”

She shook her head and smiled. “No, no money. It holds people. People you love and those that love you. It feels good when it’s full and hurts when it’s empty. Right now it’s getting bigger. Kind of like the growing pains you sometimes feel in your shins and ankles.” She put her hand over my belly button and said, “It’s sort of packed in there behind your belly button.”

“How’d it get there?”

“God put it there.”

“Does everybody have one?”

“Yes.”

“Even you?”

“Even me,” she whispered.

. . .

That night, in direct disobedience to one of Rex’s loudest spit-filled and bourbon-inspired orders, I curled up and slept next to Miss Ella. And it was there, in her warm bosom, that for the first time in my life, I slept through the night.

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