Hard Rain Falling Read Free

out to the ranch to see him.
    Annemarie Levitt didn’t come to live with the Indians until late in the following spring, 1930, after she had gone up to Bend and had her baby at one of those homes for unwed mothers. She came back to Iona without the baby. No one knew which drove Harmon crazier, not knowing where or what his child was, or seeing the mother of his child living with the Indians. Maybe it wasn’t either of those things; maybe it was what she did to his face.
    She did not love Harmon any more; she proved that one afternoon not many weeks after she got back to town without the baby, and Harmon stopped her on the street. He was carrying a bottle of whiskey and was half drunk already, even though it was only the middle of a gray winter day; stopped her, said something to her nobody else could hear, and then laughed and tried to give her the whiskey bottle to have a drink, and she took it and swung it in a wide arc, upward, hard, and smashed it against the side of his face and sent him flying. The snow that had been plowed off the street and scraped off the boardwalk was lying in hard dirty heaps, and Harmon tumbled over the snow and left a bright smear of blood on the crust and ended up face down on the hard ice of the street; and Annemarie stood there with the neck of the bottle in her hand, laughing at him, and then threw the neck down on top of him and walked off, leaving him there in the street with his jaw broken, his cheek cut open, the blood pouring out hot and then freezing to the street. There were a few people who saw the whole thing from across the street, but nobody stopped to help Harmon; his reputation in town was already too bad for him to expect any help, and finally he got up himself and staggered down the street to the Wagon Wheel. Some hands finally took him to the doctor and then drove him to the hospital. No, she did not love him any more. Maybe she hated him. Maybe that was strong enough to bring her back. Then, when she hit him with that whiskey bottle and laughed to see him helpless and his blood freezing to the street, she stopped hating him and started hating herself.
    Portland had driven her crazy. Even at sixteen she hated it; she was the despair of her family, the only child; wild, already in trouble with the police once or twice before she met Harmon and on impulse ran off with him; she would sit in her room upstairs after her parents had sent her to bed and wait for them to go to sleep and then get dressed again and go out the window and catch a streetcar downtown; but when she came back she would come right in the front door, and if they were waiting up for her she would lose her temper and tell them to mind their own business, and if her father tried to slap her or spank her she would hit him and scream at him until he just stopped trying, and then she would go back upstairs and into her room and lock the door. She must have met Harmon on one of these expeditions downtown because one night she just didn’t come home.
    Harmon’s face was ruined; he lost all the teeth on the left side, and there was a scar running from just under his left eye through his lip and down his chin; his face now had a caved-in look to it, and his blue eyes lost all their brightness, and he was just plain mean from then forward until he died; living the life of a good hardworking cowboy, maybe not the kind of life he might have dreamed about in Oakland, California, but, for him, good anyway: eighteen hours a day when the cattle were on the range, half the anger cooked out of him by the sun, the dust, the hot acid smell of his horse under him; the work, even in winter, the thousand irritating must-be-done tasks attendant to cattle, drawing his surplus energy out through his arms and legs until there was barely enough for one yelling Saturday night a month left in him, one night to drink and smash windows and batter any face that presented itself.
    He used to write letters, and come to the post office every