Chain Lightning
A short story about an old man, a young man, the checkout line, and small things that feel like justice.
The old man, like every old man, carried a drought in his eyes.
He had lived long enough to know that sometimes the rain just quits. And he knew doubt grows and fears get loose at 3 a.m. He came to expect the ache in his back and trust in his sweat to be a different kind of rain. Like there was a storm in him. A kind of dry lightning.
He had seen droughts before. But this year seemed different. The ground was harder. So was living. His wife, so sick, smiled once like she was remembering him on one knee, promising to give her everything he would ever have. But here he was, doubling up, both knees now, begging God for Time.
And though God listens, Time never will.
After she was gone, the drought felt like it would finally dry up the last drop of his dreams. The corn went dry, then so did hope. It cracked down the middle. Like it was all stalk.
But after every dawn-to-dark day, he would clear away his one dish and step out the front door. He’d walk into the rows until it was just him and the scorched earth. And he would call up to whatever was holding back the rain.
“Tell me where you hide the lightning. Show me where the thunder goes.”
Then he would listen to the wind carry the only answer a drought knows how to speak.
So the old man stood and thanked him. He would thank a man in a tie for a kick in the teeth, because that’s just what a working man does.
Eight weeks in the bank already started calling. Missing payments will do that. He had been paying on that note for twenty years, refinanced twice, and over time the loan officer became someone who didn’t know him from John Deere.
“It’s just business, you know,” he said, apologizing for the rate increase.
“They tell us what it has to be. Can’t really dance it lower.” Then looking away, “Sure do hope it rains.”
That Friday afternoon the old man put his overdue notices in his hip pocket and walked like a man weighed down by more than debt and drought. At the bank he asked when the asking made his pride ache as much as his back. Then he closed his eyes and listened for the answer.
The stranger with soft hands and hard eyes whispered, “There really is nothing we can do, sir.” So the old man stood and thanked him. He would thank a man in a tie for a kick in the teeth, because that’s just what a working man does.
The old man stepped out into the late afternoon heat and thought about the simple solace of a cold beer. All he had at home were two tins of tuna and a gallon of store-bought milk that like everything else had gone bad. He felt for his wallet, then stepped across the street into the grocery.
A boy, pushing 19, slender shoulders and tired eyes, wore paint stains on his hands. His steel tips carried sawdust and the remains of footer mud. He had just two items on the checkout. Diapers and formula.
The boy had emptied his wallet of singles, fanning them out trying to hope more into not enough. The cashier looked at the line behind him, took a deep breath and decided not to mutter out loud about how long her day had been.
As the boy furiously fished through his work pants for change, the old man looked into his face. Same old worry and doubt. Same old certainty that he would come up short no matter the price. Same old drought.
He felt his own pocket for the debts he carried with him now. For the electric, the water, the mortgage, all overdue. Then he remembered the embarrassed look of the loan officer as he tried to explain that droughts always end. That he was good for any debt, even the kind that kept him shifting in his bed trying to find a few hours’ rest from trouble.
And for the first time since the drought began, he felt right, the way a man does when he knows he’s done something bigger than himself.
The checkout girl counted the pennies on the belt, then shook her head. The boy was trying to decide, diapers or formula, when the old man felt some flash like dry lightning at the bottom of himself. He stepped closer, touched the boy’s arm and whispered, “Let me get this, son. Been there too.”
The boy looked up, alarmed. He started to protest, then looking into the old man’s eyes recognized something he had felt in his own. The old man retrieved his sweat stained wallet, then gently shook loose enough.
The people behind, who had been muttering about the traffic and why it took so long cause ‘wasn’t this was the express line,’ were suddenly humbled and silent.
Like God had walked through Aldi on his way to a miracle. The boy thanked him and silently promised himself to remember what mercy felt like. Then he hustled out and away.
The old man paid for a pound of ground chuck and a six of Black Label and stepped into the lot.
The air was dry and still and the stars were starting to peek through the dusk. And for the first time since the drought began, he felt right, the way a man does when he knows he’s done something bigger than himself.
Something that if he stood it back-to-back with his own trouble would be head and shoulders above it. Trouble always talks big. It’s always a mile high and an inch wide, but there isn’t a bit of kindness in any heart that can’t make it crumble like a bad foundation.
That night a baby was bathed in a sink by a worried mother. He was diapered and fed and slept the peaceful sleep of the young, who believe the world is a just place. A place of only love and majesty.
His father, just a boy himself, knew there would be hunger and sleepless nights, that uncertainty would rise and fall with each breath. But he knew too that the baby was loved and would grow and so become his parent’s bounty.
The boy touched his wife’s hand and thought once more about someday owning a place of their own. Then he thought about trouble and coming up short at the grocery. He thought about the old man and prayed to himself that when he was gray and nearly through with living, the kindness passed to him that day might find its way through the years to another.
Someday, he thought, when he was finally past wanting, he would, like that old man, rain away some other drought. He would let some other stained hands and work boots feel that lightning and hear the echoed thunder of mercy.
That night, once more, the old man walked into the fields. Standing in the ruin of the corn rows, he listened hard to the sound of dry stalk. He listened to his own heart beating, like Morse Code, against every unfairness it ever knew. And he remembered that same sound in the boy and the feel of that flash at the bottom of himself.
Then once more he raised his arms and cried out, “Show me where you hide the lightning. Tell me where the thunder goes.”
And from above he heard the quiet answer of a distant rumble.
Men work and pray, grow old and die. The fields grow and ripen. They fail and wither and grow again. And drought, like rain, pours on the just and the unjust.
Diapers cost more than you have. The bank always wants its money.
And trouble settles like dust.
All any of us can hope is to be someone else’s lightning. Someone else’s rain.
That night the boy turned to the window, sure that he had been changed somehow. Like he had been passed something. Something moving like chain lightning between the old man and himself.
And looking out over the dark countryside he listened as it started to rain.
Will Maguire is a songwriter and writer living and working in Nashville. His stories have appeared in a variety of magazines—most recently, the Saturday Evening Post and Well Read Magazine.
Great story and great writing by Will Maguire!
Wow! Chuck, that one was earthy, impactful! I thought of my own great uncles; one in NW FL and one in W. KY both hard-working farmers and now long-gone. Thanks. / Berkeley
Maybe it’s the agrarian in me, or the girl raised on a junkyard, but a story about poverty seems like the most honest story we could be writing right now. Thanks for this one, SS.
Here is Will Maguire at his best. Readers who are unfamiliar with his exquisite stories are in for a treat.
This story is like a soulful song. I admit, I cried a couple of times when the melody reached down an touched my heart.