He hopped off a step where he’d been sitting while everybody else played at recess and ran after them. He worried it was a trick, at first, that they’d kick the ball around him and laugh at him or kick it at his head, but they didn’t. A couple of other boys came over and kicked it out of his reach, and called out insults when they ran away. But his new friends didn’t do that-they just kicked it to him as if he were like any other boy.

It felt so good to be included that Collin almost cried the way his mother had when their neighbor mowed their lawn. When he happened to glance at his teacher, Mrs. Davidson, he saw that she was watching their game. Collin saw her dab at her eyes with her fingers as if she’d gotten bits of dust in them.

20

THE NEXT WEEK, storm clouds showed up on the horizon at the ranch and Jody went into a panic over them, just as she had over every storm since her father died and her mother vanished. As the child screamed and sobbed in her arms Annabelle exclaimed in despair to Hugh Senior, “What are we going to do?”

They were on the side porch just outside the kitchen.

The air already smelled like rain. Lightning periodically lit up sections of clouds as if somebody were turning a reading lamp on and off inside them. The three of them, grandparents and Jody, had come outside to look at the new paint job on the porch, without realizing a storm was visible to the west. As soon as Jody saw it, she went to pieces. Annabelle was holding her granddaughter and getting ready to rush back inside. Jody was clutching her and crying as if assassins on huge black horses were galloping toward them with rifles drawn. Hugh Senior was patting her back comfortingly to no effect.

“I’ll take care of it,” Chase said, striding past them.

“What?” Annabelle asked over Jody’s screams, but he was already walking out into the side yard.

Her curiosity piqued, even while her tears flowed, Jody craned around in Annabelle’s arms to see her uncle.

Chase stopped mid-yard with his legs apart.

He raised a pistol in his left hand, pointed it at the clouds, and shot them.

On the porch, his mother gasped at the crack of gunfire, and his father started.

Only Jody stared without flinching. Her crying stopped with a hiccup.

Chase turned around and walked back toward them.

“I killed it,” he said with dead seriousness, looking into Jody’s eyes.

She hiccuped one more time. “Really?”

“Really. Watch, if you want to see it go away.”

As if he took the result for granted, Chase walked back into the kitchen.

Within half an hour the storm blew southeast, away from them.

A little while later the sky over the ranch was a perfect cloudless blue.

“How did you know?” his mother asked him later.

“I called the weather service.”

“You’re a genius.”

“You do what you have to do,” he said in a somber tone that convinced her that her middle son had changed more than any of them since his brother’s murder. He had taken over the duties that Hugh-Jay once performed, and most of Bobby’s as well, and he was growing both leaner and harder as he folded himself into the daily routine of ranch work that he had left behind in college. His handsome face was beginning to look sculpted out of golden rock, all cheekbones, long nose, and stern mouth, as if he were becoming one of the Testament Rocks himself. In profile he looked forbiddingly grim, but also compelling, and it was hard for people to look away from him. He was attentive to his mother, respectful to his father, and affectionate but increasingly tough with his niece. He shot off hectoring notes to Bobby to tell him to call home, and he stopped teasing their sister. He grew increasingly bossy with the ranch’s employees. His mother missed her flirting, charming, laughing boy, even while she saw that he was becoming an impressive man. She grieved for the cost of it. She wished she could shoot the clouds away from him.

Chase had to “kill” the next storm, too.

Fortunately for his plan, though not for local agriculture, that storm kept to the south/southeast wind pattern and bypassed them. When the one after that showed up and Jody asked him to make it go away, Chase said-knowing it was headed straight at them, “This is a different kind of storm. It’s the good kind that we need to give us water and give the animals water and all the crops on all the farms. It’s going to be loud and noisy, like Mr. George at the grocery store, but it has a good heart, like him. It’s blustery, that’s all, big and blustery like Mr. George, but it would never hurt you, any more than he would. It’s a good storm. It’s our friend. We need it.”

“A good storm,” Jody repeated doubtfully.

She had seen how Mr. George had spoken to the boy in the grocery store, and so she wasn’t sure about how nice he really was.

“That’s right,” Chase said, seeing her skepticism.

He sent up an order to God: no tornadoes.

That storm came and poured, boomed, and flashed, with no damage done.

Jody sat on Chase’s lap on a couch against a wall far from the windows and watched it with him. “Do you have your gun?” she asked when a crash of thunder scared her.

“Of course,” he said, and lifted the next cushion to show her where he’d tucked it underneath. Jody nodded, reassured, and resumed watching the rain come down.

“What’s that?” she said at one point, huddling into his chest.

“Hail,” he told her. “You know what hail is. You’ve heard it before. It’s just ice, like we put in iced tea.” It was, thank God, only pea-sized, and not the softball-size stones that had taken roofs apart a few years ago. As the storm was easing down, Chase lifted his niece in his arms and strolled casually to a window, and they stood there looking out together, her cheek pressed to his, her arms wrapped around his neck.

“I like rainy days,” she said, as if remembering a forgotten fact.

“You’ve always loved them.”

“I do?”

“Yeah. Personally, me, I like blizzards.”

She poked him with a finger. “No, you don’t! You hate snow.”

“You remember that?” The previous Christmas break from school he’d cursed at all the times he had to drive out to break ice in ponds so the cattle could drink. “You were only two.”

“I ’member lots of stuff.”

I hope you don’t, Chase thought.

“Let’s go outside and smell the rain, Josephus,” he suggested.

“That’s not my name!”

“It is now.”

“Rain doesn’t smell!”

“Oh, yes it does.” He didn’t try to explain ozone to her, or how raindrops hit rocks, releasing the fragrance of oils that plants had rubbed on them, or how spores in the ground give up their own earthy scent in the rain. He just took her out and let her sniff and sniff until she admitted that, yes, it smelled good outside after a thunderstorm. Then he removed Jody’s shoes and socks and set her down so she could run around in the wet, golden grass.

“You do it, too, Uncle Chase. Come on!”

“My feet stink in these old boots.”

She giggled and then ran circles around him yelling, “Uncle Chase’s feet stink! Uncle Chase’s feet stink!”

And that was mostly that, when it came to storms.

There were either good or bad storms now, depending on whether the weather service said they were going away or coming toward. Chase continued to shoot the bad ones away from the house, while Jody agreed to allow the good ones to approach and bring their rain as long as they behaved themselves, and so long as Chase kept a gun nearby in case they acted up. She began to be able to bear them, even enjoy them, without hiding in a bathroom or clinging to a grown-up.

Other fears started to fall away then. The little girl they used to know began to reemerge, the one who chased rabbits and lay down in the hay with dogs, who ran out into the yard by herself, who wanted to be swung “higher!” who giggled when a calf slobbered on her arm, and who didn’t cover her ears at the sound of fireworks. On the day she asked her grandfather when she was going to get her pony, they knew that at least in some ways Jody was going to be okay.