The Man Who Rained by Ali Shaw Page B

between her eyes, as he would have done had she four legs and dainty
hooves.
    She screamed when she saw him, and the noise stayed his trigger finger and made him blanch.
    ‘Please!’ she cried out. ‘Please don’t! Please just don’t!’
    When he realized it was the gun she was frightened of, and that she had completely misread his intent, he dropped it and stood up slowly with his hands raised. He wasn’t a man of words,
but a man of doings. People often mistook him for a simpleton, thinking the same had been true of his grandfather and all the Fossiters before him, but he had his father the Reverend
Fossiter’s mind and his father’s thinkings. Indeed, it was thinkings that hampered his tongue. So thick and flavoursome that when they came down to his mouth to be spoken it was hard to
make the sounds of them, like talking with a mouthful of honey.
    He managed, after stumbling over and over, to tell her his purpose. ‘This gun is only for goats, ma’am.’ He pointed to himself. ‘I am a goat culler.’
    She laughed. So lightly and freely that he sensed it was all right to smile back, then laugh too. On such rare occasions when Daniel started laughing, out came a great booming laugh that rocked
back his shoulders and bent his spine and opened wide his big bearded jaw to let the deep bass laughter out, like the noise of an avalanche echoing in a chasm. They laughed together for several
minutes, and later he would try to conjure that sound in his head again and again.
    A friendship began between them. Unlikely, someone at church remarked. For Betty was at odds with Thunderstown, while Daniel had it in his bones. Betty often said that the place was so
provincial, so small that she couldn’t understand why she didn’t return to the metropolis she’d come from. As for Daniel, he was so rural he found even Thunderstown’s size
intimidating. But this was the thing they had in common, this displacement. Two people who found it hard to belong wherever they found themselves.
    Daniel had been her confidant. He had been there to listen in giant silence when she told him of the urges affecting her. She wanted a child, she would say, then would say it again. She wanted a
child wanted a child wanted a child. Someone she could raise right, make fit in right, fit into the world and live a full life because of it. In response he would scratch his head and try to
explain that he wished she wouldn’t talk as if she were some botched job. He feared it when she talked like that, because she made it sound like all she longed for was to replace herself. He
could never convey how queasy it made him, for the slowdown between his thinkings and his speakings always let the proper moment slip. All he could do was listen, confused by his sympathy, as she
told him of her attempts at pregnancy, and of all the subsequent ways in which her body and medicine had failed her.
    She looked as fragile as a thing made from bird bones when she told him what the doctors had said. Infertile. She spat out the word like blood and Daniel at least understood, as he watched the
sobs make her jerk like a marionette, that it would have been far better for her to lose a limb, or an eye, or all her teeth than to lose this thing. Then she stepped into Daniel’s arms as if
walking over a cliff, and he’d wrapped them around her and sensed that if he squeezed her even in the slightest she’d be crushed to salt.
    After she had confessed all this to him he climbed up on to the Devil’s Diadem with just his rifle and his thoughts for company. It was a day of mists: he could see barely a stone’s
throw through the cloud.
    Then he’d glimpsed for the first time the roamy goat, the one with silver eyes and horns like flint. The one that trod with a gentleness of spirit other goats did not possess. The one
whose bleat was like an infant crying. It emerged from the mist with a faint breeze blowing in its blue-hued fur. Its eyes twinkled and its fur