Tremble by Tobsha Learner Read Free Book Online Page B

its curved corners shimmered like a forgotten prop from a sci-fi movie. But it was the design painted on the side that made it particularly bizarre: a gaudy rainbow arching up into a gray cloud from which a shower of rain fell in glistening blue dashes. The word
Rainmaker
stretched proudly above it in calligraphy of purple and gold.
    Jacob Kidderminister pulled up outside the town hall. Same tedious routine, same flat-topped buildings, and same size place, he thought, reading the sign that proudly declared the population of Sandridge to be:
Five Hundred Souls and Growing.
Somebody had scrawled
White
between the words
Hundred
and
Souls.
Jacob shook his head in disgust. If there was one thing he detested more than drought it was racism. “Welcome to paradise,” he said to himself bitterly.
    Just then a huge turkey vulture emerged out of a nearby tree and flapped its way lazily across the road to perch on the signpost. Hissing, it cocked its head toward him. Jacob wound down his car window. “Hello, Mr. Birdie,” he said.
    The creature looked him straight in the eye, giving Jacob the uncanny feeling it was reading his mind. Suddenly it turned in the direction of a tree on the other side of the street. Jacob followed its gaze, to see dozens of starlings sitting silently on the branches staring back at him. Immediately the hairs on the back of his neck rose—he had never seen so many starlings during a drought. He had the strong impression thebirds had been waiting for him. The turkey vulture flew off. With a great rustling of wings the starlings lifted from the tree en masse. In a plunging arc the bird of prey flew in the direction of the church, the starlings following in a tight swooping cloud, and all disappeared into the belfry.
    Jacob studied the church. A brick wall with curled barbed wire along the top ran around it; a decidedly unChristian sight. In the wall stood a large iron gate bearing a notice reading:
The Aryan Fellowship of Jesus, Oklahoma.
The bile rose in the back of Jacob’s throat; he’d come across the Aryan Fellowship before, in a town a hundred miles west. They were a nasty bunch of bigots and Jacob had been forced to flee after they’d nailed one of his coyotes alive to a cross. Every cell in his body pulsed with the desire to run. But as he squinted up at the bell tower, the way the sunlight caught the edge of the brass bell reminded him how there was beauty and hope in even the ugliest places. And, for the first time in his life, the rainmaker ignored his instincts.
    He pushed back his long chestnut hair and rested his forehead on the steering wheel. He had the type of beauty that only becomes apparent after a few minutes; his sensual face had a satyrlike quality that oozed into the psyche like a subtle perfume. In other words, he was the kind of man that women found irresistible and men dreaded. At forty-six Jacob was at the height of his powers. But at this precise moment he felt anything but powerful. He was exhausted. He’d been on the road for twenty years, traveling from one settlement to another, one dustbowl to another, wherever he was needed—but in every place he’d ended up being run out of town. His was a thankless task, he thought, a gift that had become a curse.
    Rainmaking was a talent he had been born with, one that had been handed down over generations. His father had been a diviner, famous for finding water in the most remote parts of the American wilderness. Jacob used to accompany the garrulous bearded man as he scrambled possessed over gullies and ravines, his forked branch twitching, often followed by a mob of jeering disbelievers. But those same farmers, real-estate developers, prospectors, would all stop in their tracks, gasping, hours later when the drill released a gushing spout of fresh clear water from exactly the location the diviner had predicted. Jacob could never understand why his father didn’t stay and reap the rewards, financial or otherwise, the townsfolk