When the rains came

A dispatch from the road home

The rain in the distance.

We were topping the first hill out of town when Isma realized that he’d forgotten his machete at his parents’ house. The sky had been going gray and bruised as our old ATV groaned its way out of town, but we didn’t worry about the clouds. They’d been doing that all week: gathering and spitting out a pittance of a drizzle and hanging like a taunt for hours at a time. 

That machete. Isma kept it on him whenever we were on the dirt road between our house and the town. No one had ever been assaulted on our stretch of back-country road, but it was common in nearby territory. Coming to blows via machete, unfortunately, was not unheard-of in our village, and most men kept one slung over a shoulder when they went to the countryside. By the time we’d doubled back to town, grabbed the blade in its embroidered leather sheath and hauled ourselves back up the first rise, the clouds were spitting a drizzle. By the time we reached the first big mango tree, the rain was steady. 

“Should we turn back?” Isma asked. 

I didn’t want to head back to my in-laws a second time just to shiver out the rain in their kitchen. I was dreaming of hot chocolate and clean pajamas. 

“It’s not raining that hard,” I said, pitching my voice over the patter. “Our things will be all right.”

“Are you sure?”

Sure I was sure. We pulled out from the protective shelter of the tree. The wheels kicked up mud. The bottom of my pants turned a slick clay red. The two cereal boxes I held in my left arm were softening like papier mache. Three minutes later, raindrops as fat as pearls and almost as hard pelted our faces and water streamed from our clothes. 

“Chingada madre,” Isma shouted as we bounced through another puddle that sloshed over our pants. “All this time waiting for rain, and now it has to happen?”

It was the end of June but we still hadn’t had our big rainstorm yet, the one that awakens the parched earth and pushes up the first maize shoots; the one that floods the tunnels of the leaf-cutter ants and triggers the yearly harvest of chicatanas¹. We’d hoped for it—and apparently it had decided to arrive, just in time for us to coax our three-year-old bottom-of-the-line ATV through another puddle. I wiped the grit from my eyes. As soon as I opened my mouth to spit, more water flooded in. 

“I’m still very glad for the rain,” I shouted, more for the sake of any gossiping Tlaloques² than for Isma, who was still cursing. After the heat bulb of the last two months, I wasn’t about to complain about the rain, even if it sat on me. 

There is a kind of soaked you get past which no other soaked matters, so that all the shivering, mud-caked inconvenience of it becomes its own blessing. Unexpectedly baptized, vibrancy returned to the world, which was how I knew I’d been missing it. The glowing green of mango leaves streaming water like a fountain. The musk of petrichor and wet clay and drinking plants. The tickle of water running down my arms and down the nape of my neck. 

I laughed. “This is nuts!” 

Isma grinned over his shoulder. “We wanted rain!”

The world was full of small presents. The cereal boxes had crumpled against my side but I cocooned their flakes as we bounced over rocks and swerved past just-made streams. Over the blackened stub-walls of cut away hills, waterfalls fell like vines, like roots running from the sky into the earth, like gods fucking. The ATV churned and rumbled. If we turned off the motor in this weather, we’d never get it to start again.

We passed a few lonely farmers heading back to town, covering themselves with a length of plastic or a tarp. One was walking and the other had hitched a ride on the back of a pickup. We waved and called greetings that no one could hear over the rain. 

By the time we got to the bottom gate of our cerro, the rain was tapering off. By the time the ATV lurched and groaned its way to the top of the hill, the sky was streaked with blue. The dogs, shaggy and wet, came out to splash us with water and salute our pants with their muddy paws. I stood beneath the gutter spout and let the fall of captured rainwater wash out tiny bits of mashed cereal box and a road’s worth of red clay mud and sand. The breeze was mild and fragrant. The little flying creatures they call palomillas or kinge’e in Amuzgo (which means “between-legs”) were swinging drunkenly between me and our grass-thatched hut in numbers that seemed to increase every time I blinked. These came out once a year after the first big rain of the season. They meant that the chicatanas wouldn’t be far behind. By the time I made it to the front of the house, my clothes were sprinkled with palomilla wings and bodies. I left them outside to dry.

“It always goes like this,” Isma said in the shower, which, though unheated, felt warm compared to our recent soak. “You never get drenched outside and come home and it keeps raining. No, it stops the second you’re at your door.”

“I don’t mind, Tlaloc!” I shouted.

We fed the dogs and did the dishes. I made myself hot chocolate with the cacao from my mother-in-law’s trees and put on my pajamas. My thoughts were clean and hopeful: The vultures that roost in the trees below will come back now that there’s water. The aquifer will fill. Outside, the sky was as clear as an icy stream; the stars arced above the lights of neighboring towns, sharp enough to cut. 

I thought, we’ll survive another year. I couldn’t know that. Nevertheless, I felt the reprieve.

1. Chicatanas are the queen leaf-cutter ants that fly out of their homes in giant swarms one morning each year. They are prized as a delicacy principally in Oaxaca and Chiapas. My mother-in-law makes an amazing salsa with their toasted and ground-up bodies.

2. “Tlalocs” in Nahuatl, otherwise known as small water deities that break water jugs in the sky to bring the rain. Tlaloc is the goggle-eyed, fanged and masked water deity himself.