The Meaning of Rain

I was with my young grandson, standing in the rain.

I said, “I hate the rain.”

“Why?”

“I had to stand three days in the rain.”

Again he asked, “Why?”

He had grown beyond the age when a boy asks Why? Why? Why? to everything, the age when my answers to his questions were fantastic, when the answer to his question, Why does it rain? was: Angels are weeping. I answered realistically.

“In the war.”

“You had to do guard duty for three days in the rain?”

“Constant rain.”

I felt, suddenly, that this was the first time I was talking with my grandson on a level because he had heard, I didn’t know where, of military guard duty.

I said, “I began to have hallucinations about the rain.”

“What hallucinations?”

“That the weather had some meaning.”

“What meaning?”

I put my hand on his wet hair, water dripping down his smooth forehead, and he looked up at me.

His mother—my daughter whom I did not see on her own—came, and the three of us sheltered from the rain.

Sheltered, I heard the distant thunder and saw the lightening flash, and I wondered at the secret of the weather, and if anyone understood.

Oh, I had seen the dead, the dead lying among the rubble in the rain pelting through a broken dome.

And in the rain I still see their spirits risen, pleading:

“A prayer for the dead, a prayer for the dead, a prayer for the dead.”

Their voices are the weather, which no one understands.

Read David Plante’s introduction and other Essential Stories.

© 2009 by David Plante