‘Pardon me,’ Elise said at last. ‘I don’t understand any of this. Is it some sort of local joke?’ This time Henry Eden and Laura Stanton exchanged the glances, then sighed at exactly the same moment, as if on cue.
‘I hate this,’ Laura Stanton said, although whether to the old man or to herself John Graham had no idea.
‘Got to be done,’ Eden replied.
She nodded, and then sighed. It was the sigh of a woman who has set down a heavy burden and knows she must now pick it up again.
‘This doesn’t come up very often,’ she said, ‘because the rainy season only comes in Willow every seven years…’ ‘June seventeenth,’ Eden put in. ‘Rainy season every seven years on June seventeenth. Never changes, not even in leap-year. It’s only one night, but rainy season’s what it’s always been called. Damned if I know why. Do you know why, Laura?’
‘No,’ she said, ‘and I wish you’d stop interrupting, Henry. I think you’re getting senile.’
‘Well, pardon me for livin, I just fell off the hearse,’ the old man said, clearly nettled.
Elise threw John a glance that was a little frightened. Are these people having us on? it asked.
Or are they both crazy?
John didn’t know, but he wished heartily that they had gone to Augusta for their supplies; they could have gotten a quick supper at one of the clam-stands along Route 17.
‘Now listen,’ the Stanton woman said kindly. ‘We reserved a room for you at the Wonderview Motel out on the Woolwich Road, if you want it. The place was full, but the manager’s my cousin, and he was able to clear one room out for me. You could come back tomorrow and spend the rest of the summer with us. We’d be glad to have you.’
‘If this is a joke, I’m not getting the point,’ John said.
‘No, it’s not a joke,’ she said. She glanced at Eden, who gave her a brisk little nod, as if to say Go on, don’t quit now. The woman looked back at John and Elise, appeared to steel herself, and said, ‘You see, folks, it rains toads here in Willow every seven years. There. Now you know.’
‘Toads,’ Elise said in a distant, musing, Tell-me-I’m-dreaming-all-this voice.
‘Toads, ayuh!’ Henry Eden affirmed cheerfully.
John was looking cautiously around for help, if help should be needed. But Main Street was utterly deserted. Not only that, he saw, but shuttered. Not a car moved on the road. Not a single pedestrian was visible on either sidewalk. We could be in trouble here, he thought. If these people are as nutty as they sound, we could be in real trouble. He suddenly found himself thinking of Shirley Jackson’s short story ‘The Lottery’ for the first time since he’d read it in junior high school.
‘Don’t you get the idea that I’m standin here and soundin like a fool ‘cause I want to,’ Laura Stanton said. ‘Fact is, I’m just doin my duty. Henry, too. You see, it doesn’t just sprinkle toads. It pours.’
‘Come on,’ John said to Elise, taking her arm above the elbow. He gave them a smile that felt as genuine as a six-dollar bill. ‘Nice to meet you folks.’ He guided Elise down the porch steps, looking back over his shoulder at the old man and the slump-shouldered, pallid woman two or three times as he did. It didn’t seem like a good idea to turn his back on them completely. The woman took a step toward them, and John almost stumbled and fell off the last step.
‘It is a little hard to believe,’ she agreed. ‘You probably think I am just as nutty as a fruitcake.’ ‘Not at all,’ John said. The large, phony smile on his face now felt as if it were approaching the lobes of his ears. Dear Jesus, why had he ever left St. Louis? He had driven nearly fifteen hundred miles with a busted radio and air-conditioner to meet Farmer Jekyll and Missus Hyde. ‘That’s all right, though,’ Laura Stanton said, and the weird serenity in her face and voice made him stop by the ITALIAN SANDWICHES sign, still six feet from the Ford. ‘Even people who have heard of rains of frogs and toads and birds and such don’t have a very clear idea of what happens in Willow every seven years. Take a little advice, though: if you are going to stay, you’d be well off to stay in the house. You’ll most likely be all right in the house.’
‘Might want to close y’shutters, though,’ Eden added. The dog lifted his tail and articulated another long and groaning dog-fart, as if to emphasize the point.
‘We’ll… we’ll do that,’ Elise said faintly, and then John had the Ford’s passenger door open and was nearly shovelling her inside.
‘You bet,’ he said through his large frozen grin.
‘And come back and see us tomorrow,’ Eden called as John hurried around the front of the Ford to his side. ‘You’ll feel a mite safer around us tomorrow, I think.’ He paused, then added: ‘If you’re still around at all, accourse.’
John waved, got behind the wheel, and pulled out.
There was silence on the porch for a moment as the old man and the woman with the pale, unhealthy skin watched the Ford head back up Main Street. It left at a considerably higher speed than that at which it had come.
‘Well, we done it,’ the old man said contentedly.
‘Yes,’ she agreed, ‘and I feel like a horse’s ass. I always feel like a horse’s ass when I see the way they look at us. At me.’
‘Well,’ he said, ‘it’s only once every seven years. And it has to be done just that way. Because…’
‘Because it’s part of the ritual,’ she said glumly.
‘Ayuh. It’s the ritual.’
As if agreeing it was so, the dog flipped up his tail and farted once more.
The woman booted it and then turned to the old man with her hands clamped on her hips. ‘That is the stinkiest mutt in four towns, Henry Eden!’
The dog arose with a grunt and staggered down the porch stairs, pausing only long enough to favor Laura Stanton with a reproachful gaze.
‘He can’t help it,’ Eden said. She sighed, looking up the road after the Ford. ‘It’s too bad,’ she said. ‘They seem like such nice people.’
‘Nor can we help that,’ Henry Eden said, and began to roll another smoke.
So the Grahams ended up eating dinner at a clam-stand after all. They found one in the neighboring town of Woolwich (‘Home of the scenic Wonderview Motel,’ John pointed out to Elise in a vain effort to raise a smile) and sat at a picnic table under an old, overspreading blue spruce. The clam-stand was in sharp, almost jarring contrast to the buildings on Willow’s Main Street. The parking lot was nearly full (most of the cars, like theirs, had out-of-state licence plates), and yelling kids with ice cream on their faces chased after one another while their parents strolled about, slapped blackflies, and waited for their numbers to be announced over the loudspeaker. The stand had a fairly wide menu. In fact, John thought, you could have just about anything you wanted, as long as it wasn’t too big to fit in a deep-fat fryer.
‘I don’t know if I can spend two days in that town, let alone two months,’ Elise said. ‘The bloom is off the rose for this mother’s daughter, Johnny.’
‘It was a joke, that’s all. The kind the natives like to play on the tourists. They just went too far with it. They’re probably kicking themselves for that right now.’
‘They looked serious,’ she said. ‘How am I supposed to go back there and face that old man after that?’
‘I wouldn’t worry about it – judging from his cigarettes, he’s reached the stage of life where he’s meeting everyone for the first time. Even his oldest friends.’
Elise tried to control the twitching corners of her mouth, then gave up and burst out laughing.
‘You’re evil!’
‘Honest, maybe, but not evil. I won’t say he had Alzheimer’s, but he did look as if he might need a roadmap to find his way to the bathroom.’
‘Where do you suppose everyone else was? The town looked totally deserted.’
‘Bean supper at the Grange or a card-party at the Eastern Star, probably,’ John said, stretching.
He peeked into her clam basket. ‘You didn’t eat much, love.’
