In the Shade of the Shady Tree. John Kinsella

      I didn’t. Nothing. A blank.

      But my heart settled, and I stared at the ceiling. Then the alarm went off and the nurses started fussing. Foxes! I yelled. Nothing else. Though deep inside my head I could feel the mange at work—and I knew Mr. R. was out there already spreading the mange, sharing the love. It was his God-appointed duty.

       I have been a country boy as well, you know. I have known the dry . . . In the hard times when there was little work I went back out there, conjuring up a living . . .

      It had been a drier year than usual in a very dry place. So dry that farmers hadn’t even bothered putting in crops over the autumn and winter. The dams were empty, and wells drawn on, to the point of insolvency, windmills turning hard in the blazing easterlies that came in daily. House tanks were filled with water trucked from standpipes, and only the wealthiest had kept their patches of lawn green in defiance, standing their ground in the face of suffering. Herds of cattle and flocks of sheep had been culled to bare bones, to basal metabolic rate, as the town doctor joked—and he spent most of his time propping up the wettest place in town, the front bar of the pub. He had a sick wit.

      There was only one church in town, and that was Anglican, though it was hard to guess that because it did business for a number of creeds. Even Catholics turned up there occasionally—though they mainly traveled to a neighboring town also in the grip of drought, whose baptismal font was equally dusty. The few Church of Christ believers in the district worshipped in their houses—you could tell a prayer meeting was in swing by whose cars were gathered along the verges. The “C of C” tended to be town dwellers there, not so much farmers, though there were one or two C of C families with big spreads. When the meetings were at those farms, the others in town didn’t really know, or didn’t really care, because it’s true that gravel roads exact their own kinds of surveillance. But in town itself, gatherings were always kept an eye on, or out for, though none was sure why. Wherever and however they prayed, it was as dry for them as any other, as dry for each and every one of them. No prayers from anywhere would bring rain. The town had signed off on that with spiritual totality. It had ceased to believe in moisture.

      Then a lay preacher, a self-styled Man of God, turned up on a corner of the main street and began to proselytize. This corner was opposite the bank, just outside the hardware store. The preacher was full of the sins of the townsfolk, and full of humanity’s evil, making a clear link between the dry and their neglect of God. He might have been run out of town by all and sundry, but his promise of rain, of water, eventually struck a note. On the first day he was ignored; on the second he was abused; on the third he was listened to. A crowd blocked the main street, and traffic came to a standstill. He plied his message a fourth and a fifth and a sixth day.

      Where he went after he finished his preaching, no one knew. He arrived early in the morning and set off at sunset, subsisting on a bottle of water and little else. He never seemed to flag or weaken under the sun. His hat was gnarled. He always came from the north, and headed back that way. No one thought of going after him—at first. But curiosity and hope got the better of them, and at the end of the sixth day they started following him when his sermonizing came to an end. They followed him north to his bush camp about five miles along the road. And there they stood by him and watched his every action until he said: Return at dawn and I will show you the truth of water. The liquid science of God!