A Small Request on a Cold Day in Hell

A Small Request on a Cold Day in Hell

Dear Sir, I’d be much obliged if you could see it in your heart to let it rain if only on the garden. I’ve never asked for a favor and I believe your records will show that.

With the stub of a carpenter’s pencil he’d sharpened for the occasion, the man scribbled these words. But unsure they were the right words, he scanned the empty horizon for any signs of clouds, his eyes thin slits against the unmerciful sun. Mouth turned down, he crumpled the letter into a ball and pulled the final slip of butcher paper from his pocket. Holding the pencil tighter between his fingers, he started again, this time with all the humbleness he could muster.

As you know, it has not rained all year. What corn that sprouted has wilted and we’ll be out of food soon. I’m not a spiritual man by any means I think you know that but this afternoon under a sun hotter than hell I ask you to reconsider. If you hate me too much then I ask you to do this for the children’s sake. They haven’t done anything against you and you got no good reason to make them suffer.

“What you doing, Daddy?”

The child appeared in the shadow of her father’s leg, clinging tight to avoid the sun’s rays. At six years of age, her body was more of a four year old, thin, drawn arms and legs more twigs than human.

“You get back in the shade, Merle, back in the house.”

“It’s too hot in the house.” The child’s lips pouted and the sweat glistened on her forehead.

“When I finish here, I’ll come in and wet some towels to hang over the windows. I’ll make it as cold as the North Pole.”

His large hand covered the child’s head, sheltering her damp curls from the light overhead.

“It’ll be so cold, it’ll snow inside.” He added.

Merle grinned and pulled her thumb from between her cracked lips, grabbed her father’s pants and tugged to get his attention.

“Can I make a snow angel?”

“Sure baby. Now get out of this sun before that cotton-top of yours catches fire.”

Merle walked toward the farm house raising her bare feet high like a crane, avoiding the burning ground. She stopped on the stone pathway and turned, hopping from one foot to the next.

Are you writing a grocery list? Can we get some canned peaches, the big yellow kind with syrup?

“Not today but when it starts to rain, I’ll plant you a hundred peach trees. Your belly will be so full, you’ll make the hogs jealous.”

“But Daddy, you killed the hogs.”

“Well, if we had any, I’m sure they’d be jealous.”

“How long will it take to make me peaches. A day or a day and a night. When I wake up in the morning, will they be here?”

“Not long but first I got to get it to rain.”

The man watched his daughter open the screen door and disappear into the darkness. He heard her telling her brothers about peaches in the snow and like all brothers, they laughed until she cried at the unfairness. Spreading the paper flat on the tractor’s fender, he wrote again.

“I know you’re a gambling man, taking chances the way you do with people’s lives. Maybe mine didn’t work out like it should have. At least, the way you wanted. But that’s all water under the bridge as far as I’m concerned. All I’m asking now is a chance for my children. Do with me what you will but I’m asking you to have mercy on them.

The man folded the letter into an envelope, marked the back personal and began the long walk to the county road where the mailbox waited. Behind him, the cottonwoods, bare as bleached skeletons, reached high toward the sun, competing for attention with the still windmill.

He looked into the sky where angels were said to live and then down at the baked earth, too hot for angels or even the devil, he guessed. He removed his pencil from his overalls and addressed his letter.

To whom it may concern -