The Rain of Mississippi

The telephone rang in the small house on Bayou Road, and Meridian Beauregard reached past her sleeping body with a trembling hand to answer it, her mind still caught in the dark tangles of a dream she could not quite remember.

"Hello?"

"Miss Meridian, the managing editor is expecting the manuscript by five-thirty. Before five-thirty, you bring it to me, otherwise I will carry explosives to your house and you will all perish together!"

She put the phone down, and the calendar reminder chimed: "Urgent, eat dinner!"

She had just sent her resume out when the phone rang again. It was Miss Etta May, her aunt.

"You want to find a job?" Etta May asked.

"I want to find a job," Meridian said.

"You want more money?"

"Etta May, one who wishes to do a good job must first sharpen his tools."

"A good job is the worker's business, not yours. Just type, don't think about messy things."

Meridian smiled silently. Her cursor stayed on the computer screen at the recruitment notice for "Social Psychology Activity Investigator."

Dinner time came, and her mother called. "My precious child, are you ready?"

She thought for a moment, and pretended to be innocent: "Ready. I'm about to go out!"

"This one - he's just past thirty. You've seen the photo, right? You must bring home a partner for the New Year, or don't bother coming back to this house!"

"No need to pick me up. I'm already at the 'Four Root Pork Ribs'," Meridian said.

"Good."

A laugh came from behind her. Meridian turned to the side: "Is it Mr. Li Qing?"

After dinner, Li Qing laughed with genuine delight and asked tentatively: "When was that photo you gave me taken?"

"When I was twenty years old."

Li Qing comforted her: "Being a little fatter is good, looking fortunate. I prefer a soft, plump wife."

Meridian said nothing. She looked down at her plate.

Her mother had arranged this meeting.

But it was Cade Harlan who spoke next. His voice was low, slow, and heavy like the Mississippi itself.

"Miss Beauregard," he said, "I've been watching your family's land. The river is rising. The soil is washing away. And nobody is doing anything about it."

Meridian looked at him. Cade stood in the doorway of the little store, water dripping from his hat brim, his clothes dark with rain. He was not a handsome man - not in the way that magazines showed handsome men. He was the kind of man who carried weather in his bones.

"What are you doing about it?" she asked.

"Nothing. That's the point." He looked at her then, and his eyes were the color of the river after a storm - brown and churning and full of things that wanted to be said but couldn't. "Your father won't sell. Your uncle won't leave. And the river doesn't care what either of them wants."

She had sent a resume. She remembered doing it that morning, sitting at her mother's kitchen table with her mother watching like a hawk, waiting for her to do something useful. She had typed her name, her address, her brief employment history, and she had hit send.

To where, she wasn't sure. Somewhere far away. Somewhere that was not here, where the water rose and took everything and people just stood on their porches and watched.

Her cousin Clara Belle was leaving for the North next month. Already married to a man she had met only twice. A man with kind eyes and thin hands and a story he told differently depending on who was listening.

"Clara," Meridian had said at the farewell dinner, "don't you want to know him better first?"

"Knowing him better won't change anything," Clara said. "He's leaving. I'm going. That's the knowing."

Preacher Josiah Whitmore came to the house on Sundays, as he always did, bringing scripture and honey cakes and a smile that didn't reach his eyes. He was past thirty. He was pious. He was, by every measure that mattered to the people of this town, a good match.

"I've been praying for you, Miss Beauregard," he said, and the way he said her name made it sound like a prayer too.

Meridian poured him tea and nodded and thought about the resume she had sent and the river that was rising and the land that was washing away and the way Cade Harlan had looked at her in the store, like he knew something she didn't.

Something about the way the rain fell in Mississippi. It didn't fall like rain elsewhere. It fell like judgment. Like the sky itself was angry at the earth and wanted it to remember something it had forgotten.

That night, she dreamed of water. Not the gentle bayou water of her childhood, but a roaring, terrible flood that took everything - the house, the land, the memories, the names of people who had lived and died on this soil.

She woke with a start. The rain was still falling. And somewhere in the dark, Cade Harlan was watching the river rise.

She got up. She put on her boots. She walked out into the rain, and she walked to the riverbank, and she stood there with Cade Harlan, and together they watched the water take what it was going to take.

Some things, in Mississippi, you cannot stop. You can only witness them. And in witnessing, find something that looks almost like grace.