Drenched Page 16
The matrons called it witchcraft, and they blamed Sarah, and refused to use the water.
“It’s driven my husband mad,” they whispered to one another, and shared stories of men who’d taken one sip of the miracle water with its earthen tang and lost their minds. Women who drank it appeared more youthful. Their smiles were broader and their frowns disappeared. They abandoned the stiffness of their petticoats and let the curve of their hips sway as they walked.
But most called it an act of God, proof that He could cause the rain to fall and the crops to grow again if they served Him right. Tom’s sermons drew larger and larger crowds as religious folk from the communities around them abandoned their own churches in favor of the man who could give them water. They called him the new Messiah, and they filled all of the pews, lined the sides of the walls, and even stood outside, listening through the windows.
Tom began to undertake baptisms at home, in the bathtub. He baptized new followers, and he encouraged older converts to renew their vows of faith and be drenched again in God’s water. The river water that they had been baptized in was unclean, he said, and the drought was a sign from God that their sins had not been washed away. Now God had given them water, a sign that they should use it to wash their sins away again.
He undertook these rituals privately. Even the individual’s family were not permitted to watch.
“The moment you offer yourself to God,” he said, “should be a private affair, not one witnessed by a herd of curious onlookers watching as though they’re at the cinema.”
“Double dunking,” muttered some of the older members of the church, those who had known Tom’s father. But they came to him anyway, because everything seemed strange these days and what else did they have to put their faith in?
And so it was that instead of gathering on what had been a blanket of grass in front of the church steps by the river and was now a cracked, dusty platform of baked earth, the congregation gathered in town, at the foot of the hill and looked up at the red-roofed house waiting for Pastor Tom to bring down the newest member of their faith, or an existing member, renewed.
Yet when they appeared, the faces of the converts were not flushed with the innocence of the sinner reborn. They bore a different kind of glow. The glow of the desirous, the steady, radiant light that thrums from the hearts of those who have discovered longing and welcomed it. They were a people who had quenched one thirst and replaced it with another, a thirst for earthly things.
Those who had been baptized in this new water stopped going to church. At first they tried to explain it when they were asked why they had lost their faith.
“Because I’d rather feel the sun on my face,” one said.
“God exists in the stars,” said another.
But the words sounded hollow even to their own ears so before long, they just ignored the question.
They hungered for the elements. For the breath of wind on their skin and the moisture of rain on their hair, the sweetness of a strawberry bursting between full lips. They hungered for each other. Husbands kissed their wives in the streets, and they kissed other wives’ husbands.
Even Tom began to change. He ignored the complaints of the steadfast parishioners who came to him and said that Sarah was a she-devil and this fountain that had appeared in his yard was cursing the congregation, turning them all into sinners.
“Drink,” he said, and he filled them a glass. “Let all ye who are thirsty come, and drink from the fountain of the river of life.”
They accused him of misusing scripture and he ignored them, and gulped the contents of the glass down himself.
She found him, one afternoon, naked and swimming in the rainwater tank. He wore the unknowing, untroubled expression of a child, simply glorying in the joy of being wet.
But all of this was not enough for Sarah. She wanted the river to return and for blankets of grass to cover the fields, for the ground to crack open and spout geysers of hot mud.
She woke Tom in the night. Or at least, she woke his cock. Whether or not he thought the rest of it was a dream, she wasn’t sure. As soon as he was stiff, she slid onto his shaft, and she rode him with all of the energy of a woman possessed. She took hold of his hands and placed them upon her breasts and she held onto his hips and drove her mound against his groin so that his flesh repeatedly grazed her clitoris. Faster and faster she rocked, and outside, the wind began to rise in gusts that rattled the windowpanes, and rain began to fall.
When she came, her cunt ran a river over his shaft. She collapsed on top of him, spent, at last, rolled away, and fell asleep.
The next day, she got out of bed and put her yellow dress on and took the car keys and drove. The gravel crunched, but this time she didn’t hear it, because the sound of streams rushing was everywhere. Rain still fell, but in most places, the earth was so dry and cracked that the water seemed to just spill over, as though the dirt were oil.
It took a while for the moisture to seep back into the ground, for the mud to come, for things to grow again in the way that they always had.
But grow they did, and so did she, far away from the town where the river now ran again, bubbling through the long grass as though it had never been dry.
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