A Gentle Rain

  Table of Contents

  Prologue

  Part One

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Part Two

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Part Three

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Part Four

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Praise for Award-Winning Author

  Deborah Smith

  "An extraordinarily talented author."

  -Mary Alice Monroe

  "A storyteller of distinction."

  BookPage

  "An exceptional storyteller."

  -Booklist

  "Deborah Smith just keeps getting better."

  Publishers Weekly

  "Readers of the novels of Anne Rivers Siddons will welcome into their hearts Deborah Smith."

  Mid west Book Review

  Praise for The Crossroads Cafe

  Winner

  - HOLT Medallion, Write Touch Reader's Award, Reviewer's International Award (RIO)

  Bronze medal

  Ippy Awards, Independent Publisher Magazine

  Bronze medal

  -Book of the Year Awards, Foreword Magazine

  "A top five romance of 2006."

  -Library journal, starred review

  "Unforgettably poignant."

  -Booklist

  "A perfect 10.'

  -Romance Reviews Today

  "The best romance of 2006."

  -The Romance Reader

  "A true treasure."

  -Romantic Times BookClub

  "A book that readers will open again and again."

  -Romance Designs

  Other Novels by

  Deborah Smith

  The Crossroads Cafe

  Charming Grace

  Sweet Hush

  The Stone Flower Garden

  On Bear Mountain

  When Venus Fell

  A Place To Call Home

  Silk and Stone

  Blue Willow

  Miracle

  Alice At Heart

  Diary of a Radical Mermaid

  The Beloved Woman

  Blush

  (Summer 2008)

  ~jctt/~#a

  CA

  Dedication

  To Mother You're still my best friend.

  Author Note

  Tiny crabs and periwinkles seem like the most exotic creatures in the universe when you're five years old and standing, for the first time, barefoot and pale-skinned, on a Florida beach. When I was a child growing up in the dull suburban foothills ofAtlanta, a week-long trip to the beaches of the vast, Atlantic surf along the cusp of northern Florida was an adventure beyond the wildest imaginings.

  It included an all-night-and-next-day drive in the family station wagon, a brand-new set of plastic beach toys from the dimestore, an aging metal ice chest filled with soft drinks and cold fried chicken to stave off hunger on the lonely highways, and a burning desire to bring back an entire paper grocery bag filled with stinky clam shells.

  Along the way I reveled in the colorful roadside stands, not just the ubiquitous Stuckey's of Southern highway fame but inventive Florida tourist lures with names like King Gator and Orange Mama's, all of which were stocked with seashell ashtrays, bags of fresh citrus fruits, and carved-coconut Indian heads.

  I craved the challenge ofwalking on burning-hot sand flecked with sharp shards of oyster shell. I stared in awe at flocks of seagulls and pelicans. Florida also promised me the jaw-dropping sight of palm trees, pink flamingoes, and Spanish moss.

  Long before Walt Disney arrived in Orlando, Florida was the Magic Kingdom to me.

  My husband, Hank, and I honeymooned on the Gulf coast in Clearwater, finding a rare, perfectly intact sand dollar on the beach the first day, which we have kept, just as dear as any stinky clam shell, ever since. We christened our married life with dinners at Tampa's ode to beef-andmartinis, the legendary Bern's Steak House, and gaped at flamenco dancers over paella at The Columbia.

  My in-laws retired to Florida a few years later, happily ensconced in the oldest, most historic city of the continental United States, St. Augustine.

  During my many visits there, I became enamored of the `other' Florida, home to four centuries of elegant, colorful and bawdy history: Seminole Indians, Spanish conquistadores, French pirates, British colonials, African slaves and African freemen, Civil War heroes, cattle barons and turpentine kings, the gilded age of Flagler and his railroads, the suave machismo of Hemingway at Key West, and, most of all, the acclaimed books of Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, Florida's Pulitzer-winning storyteller.

  As a child, I devoured her classic novel, The Yearling, and still cried every time I watched the grainy, black-and-white Hollywood version starring Gregory Peck. As an adult, I made many pilgrimages into the heart of northern Florida's woodlands and blackwater rivers to visit the wonderfully eccentric communities around Marjorie's beloved Florida homestead at Cross Creek.

  I found the world of inland, "Cracker" Florida to be just as rugged, mysterious and fascinating as she'd said it was; I fell in love with the Florida of vegetable farms, beef-cattle ranches, wild Cracker horses descended from Spanish herds, and spring-fed lakes so deep that no one, not even a tough Cracker fisherman, could say where they ended.

  Over the years my love affair with Florida and all its many stories has grown and deepened even more. From shuttle launches at the Cape to fried 'gator tail and fresh oysters at a fish camp in Apalachicola, from Ponce de Leon's Fountain of Youth to the eternal youth of a South Beach nightclub, Florida is a kingdom of many faces, all of them a little sunburned, most a bit rebellious, and many with an appreciation for the lovably unusual.

  In Florida, we can all become cowboys and pirates and mermaids. The oceans on both sides of the world are just "over there," and even that ordinary little lake by your hotel parking lot may be a bottomless wonderland hiding the bones of dinosaurs.

  The vast grasslands and marshes of inland Florida harbor the memories of cattle drives and ancient native battles, of Seminole chickees and African basket-weavers.

  And even now, among the golf courses and resorts of modern times, if you look deep into the woods at night, their shadows draped in moss, their paths footed with sand and seashells brought there by the winds and waters of the world, you may see the heart of Florida looking back at you in the eyes of a wild Cracker horse.

  I wrote A Gentle Rain to share that heart, as I have lived and loved it so far, with others.

  ~erctf~

  CA

  Deborah Smith

  "Blood is inherited and virtue is acquired."

  -Venezuelan Proverb

  "A large income is the best recipe for happiness I ever heard of."

  jane Austen

  Prologue

  Kara

  My birth, 1974

  In my mother's innocent world of Saturday morning cartoons, babies wearing name sashes fluttered about a cartoon garden after being delivered by a heavenly stork. Lily Akens had no reason to doubt the obstetrics of a TV show.

  My teenaged father, Mac Tolbert, kn
ew better, since he often helped birth calves and foals at River Bluff, his family's northern Florida farm, but he didn't know how to warn my mother about the process. Besides, he wasn't certain human babies were born the same way as livestock.

  He could only assume a baby came out from the same spot where the boy put it in.

  "Lily, L-lily, don't c-cry," Mac stuttered, kneeling over her helplessly in the sweaty, sub-tropical darkness, swatting at mosquitoes that flitted in the beam of his shaking flashlight. Tall pines shifted above them in a swampy breeze. Bullfrogs chortled in the creek bottoms. Somewhere in a sumpy ditch, an alligator grunted. The dark forests of inland Florida breathe and talk at night, drawing mysterious memories from the porous limestone bedrock. Though far from either ocean, the air carries a fault hint of saltwater.

  "But it hurts!" Lily sobbed, pounding her palms on her distended stomach. Her cheap, flowery mumu was soaked with fluid and clotted around her thighs.

  "I t-think it's s-supposed to hurt," Mac told her. "Maybe you should stand u-up. Like a m-mare."

  "I don't think I can! Oh, Mac! It hurts so bad! Mac! Something's trying to come out of me down there!"

  Trembling, Mac pointed the flashlight between her legs. Horses and cattle were born front feet first, as if diving into the world. Mac looked closely but saw no baby hands, just the bloody pate of a tiny head. It terrified him, but he hid the emotion. He had to be strong for Lily. They were different from other teenagers; they had taken care of each other since childhood. "It's just the b-baby." He sounded more confident than he felt. He knew how to turn a breeched calf or foal but could not imagine sticking his big hand inside Lily.

  "Mac! It's moving! "

  He grabbed her hands as she sat up. She rocked and he held her. The heels of her tennis shoes plowed furrows in the soft, damp loam. Lily began to yell. After what seemed like forever she went quiet and collapsed against him. "The baby fell out," she moaned. "Why doesn't it flap its wings? Something must be wrong with it. Oh, Mac."

  My father turned the flashlight between her thighs, again. He and my mother stared in horror. Neither had seen a newborn child, before. I was not a cute little doll or a smiling cherub. I was nearly purple. My head was misshapen. Bloody mucous plastered a feathery dab of red hair to my skull. I opened my shriveled mouth and took a big yawn of air. To them, the effort looked like a dying gasp.

  They bent their heads over me and cried.

  Searchlights pierced the woods. Mac's older brother, Glen, found them first. "What the hell have you done?" he said.

  Mac and Lily sobbed. Before they could hold me even once, before they could realize I was alive and normal, I was taken from them.

  I would be grown before I knew Mac and Lily existed. Grown before I knew they had birthed me in the wilds of Florida. Grown, before I knew they had wanted me.

  Grown and orphaned before I was born into my parents' lives, again.

  Ben

  The day my life changed, 1977

  My baby brother, Joey, was born smiling. I knew from the get-go it was just a matter of time before he died, but life is a long, slow river if you don't give up hope. The black cypress rivers of our Florida-of the real Florida, not the Mickey Mouse plastic-flamingo Florida-promise people they'll live forever. That's why so many old people move here.

  Pa and me sweated it out that day, waiting for Ma to give birth at a government clinic. We stood outside in speckled pieces of oalc shade under a flat-out blistering sun in the middle of the south Florida swamps, wiping cold dew on our faces as it dripped from the clinic's air conditioner. We spent the rest of our time slapping mosquitoes and dodging wasps that lived in the saw palmettos. It felt like there was nothing else around us but forest and gators. I tried not to complain because Pa said not complaining was the cowboy way.

  He'd driven Ma and me over two hundred miles due south from the beef ranch near Ocala where he worked as foreman-we lived there cheap, in a rusty double-wide dented by a tornado-just so she could get treated for free on the Seminole reservation.

  Pa was half-Seminole, so he could get Ma into the clinic for nothing, even though she was white. He had his cowboy pride, and taking handouts from Grandpa Thocco's people was better than taking hand-outs from strangers.

  Here was the crazy thing: There we were in the piss-poorest part of nowhere, where the Indians still lived in thatched huts called chickees, and tourists still paid to watch Seminoles like Grandpa wrestle gators.

  But drive northeast two hours and you could watch rockets head for the moon at Cape Canaveral. Drive southeast about an hour and you could sit on a beach in Ft. Lauderdale watching nearly naked college girls.

  I was nine years old, it was 1977, and I wanted to see me some college girls in string bikinis. But I was stuck outside that clinic, with Pa.

  "Look there," Pa whispered, thumbing his straw hat back from his forehead. He'd been pacing for hours. Pacing and smoking and looking at the clinic. I was glad something finally distracted him. "Yonder. At the edge of the oaks."

  I squinted under my palm and saw wild horses peeking at us from behind the trees' Spanish moss. They were lean little mud-daubers, but they sniffed the air with royal attitude. "Them bosses ain't much to look at," Pa went on, "but don't you forget the sight of `em, Ben. They're Crackers. Like us."

  In our part of Florida, lots of things were called Cracker: Fried gator tail, Indian cornbread, tin-roofed houses, tough little horses, longhorn cattle, wild pigs, and kiss-my-ass poor people. It wasn't about color, and it wasn't about creed. It was about survival. Survivors were Crackers.

  "Those bosses come from the old Spanish stock," Pa said. "Like Mustangs out west. There's nothing prouder or smarter or tougher on four hooves. Some of `em even got fancy gaits, like the Spanish bosses straight off ships way back, hundreds of years ago. Not many of `em are left now. They make fine cattle ponies, and some can run like the wind. It'll be a shame if they die out."

  "Let's catch us some," I whispered. Like Pa, I was keen on saving what we could be proud of.

  He nodded. "When I earn up enough money to buy us a ranch, we'll get us a whole herd of Cracker horses."

  That promise stuck in my mind. His dreams were mine. If he couldn't make `em come true, I would. "We'll sure do that," I agreed. "Us and the new baby. Hope it's a boy. Or a girl who likes bosses, at least."

  "Mr. Thocco," the doc called out.

  Me and Pa went running. The doc stopped us at the clinic door. He was a big, chunky dude with thin, blonde hair and a raw mole on his cheek. Blonde and fair-skinned is a bad combination under the Florida sun. He wiped sweat off his face despite the air conditioner. He faked a smile at me. "Son, why don't you take a little walls while me and your daddy talk?"

  I gave Pa a determined look. Cowboys didn't take walks.

  "Naw," Pa said. "Ben's a man. He knows how to listen."

  "All right." The government doctor didn't beat around any bushes. "Your wife's fine. But you've got yourself a baby son with a lot of medical problems."

  Pa lost some color under his dusky skin. It went from oak to pine. That scared me. "What kind of problems?"

  "He's got a heart condition. It'll get worse as he grows up. I'm sorry, but my best guess is he won't live more than a few years."

  My knees went weak. Pa put a cigarette between his lips and lit it with a lighter shaped like a horse's head. His hand looked steady but the flame shimmied. "That the worst news?"

  "No sir, I'm afraid not. Your son's ... he's what we call a Down Syndrome child."

  Pa pinched the cigarette between a thumb and finger. "What the hell is that?"

  "He's ... retarded. Feeble-minded. `Mentally handicapped' is the polite term for it now. The retardation could be severe, or it could be mild. Either way, it's not good."

  I thought my heart would stop. A retard. I knew about retards. I'd seen `em at the shopping centers in Ocala. Retards drooled on themselves and made stupid faces. You had to work hard not to stare at them. It was rude to stare
, Mama said.

  But everyone knew a retard was something to hide away so normal people weren't forced to look at it. Retards weren't real people. If one was born in your family, it meant something was wrong with your whole bloodline. If you were a horse or bull, no one would want to breed their mares or cows to you, after that.

  Pa slowly dropped the cigarette on the sandy ground then crushed it with the scuffed toe of his boot. "I gotta see for myself"

  The doctor ushered us in. There was just a cramped front office and three little rooms off a narrow hall. A Seminole nurse with blotchy brown skin and tight black hair glared at us from a cluttered desk. After all, we were kin to a retard.

  The floor was linoleum and everything smelled like cold metal and liniment. I wanted to vomit. The doc pointed toward one door. "Your wife's in there." He pointed at another door. "The baby's in there."

  "Wait here," Pa told me. He headed for Ma's room with the doctor behind him.

  I walked toward the second door. "Don't you go in there, boy," the nurse called. "You don't want to see that poor little ugly baby."

  "He's my brother, lady, and you shut the hell up."

  I'd never spoken to a woman like that, before. I'd been raised right. But I'd never been the big brother of a feeble-hearted idiot before, either. Shame and pride fought it out inside me. I started defending my baby bubba from the first, even when I wished he'd never been born. I went in his room.

  He was wrapped in tight sheets inside a small metal crib with a see-through dome. An oxygen tank fed air into it, hissing like a snake. I clutched the crib's side, swallowed my bile, and slowly, squinting in fear, peered down at him.

  He looked back, or tried to, as best any baby can focus.

  His head was too big, and his face was flat. His eyes slanted like the eyes of a Chinese boy I'd seen at a rodeo in Tallahassee. He was scrawny. His skin had a weird blue tint.

  But he wasn't ugly. He had mine and Pa's black Seminole hair. He had Ma's cute, brunette-white-girl nose. He had my serious look on his face. And he smiled. He smiled at me.