Nobody knows why the stranger had come there, but the downpour he created made the men stay inside and think, and then the plants began to blossom, so after they had first wished him away, they then saw he brought with him blessings. You couldn’t count on first impressions.

The rain continues. Not long ago there had been a new hill of earth deposited by dump trucks in a single night. It had been shaped by busy machines and explained away as the place of new buildings being planned by the tribal council. It washed down and exposed the body of a whale they’d lied about some time ago, saying it had washed up and that it hadn’t been killed. It had come to shore dead, they said, maybe hungry, a sign of overpopulation. But the people, once thinking it had drifted back to the sea and been eaten by sharks and swordfish, now go out to look at it with their umbrellas. Even Thomas comes out of his house and goes down to the place. He finds that the whale is riddled with bullets. Revelations. Near it is a crumpled empty pack of Marl boros and an empty bottle of whiskey. Thomas is not even wearing his rain clothes. He stands in the mud examining it and shaking his head, then casts a glance toward the House of Dwight, as they call it, and those additions to the homes of the other men on the council, his cronies who voted to pay themselves, and now it is all clear to him. Thomas goes over to Dwight’s and says, “You have never been honest.”

“What are you talking about, Bud?” Dwight is tucking in his shirt, as if preparing for a fight, his chest a bit larger.

“What have you done?”

“Shit, Thomas, you know what life’s like here.”

“Yes, and I want to know what you have done and why.”

Once the truth begins, it continues like the rain, one revelation after the other.

The women look at their men who have lied and taken from the others. Some of them are their brothers, their husbands, their fathers. Then they understand why the rain and ocean left them, why the fish had gone away, the sun ruined their homes and gardens. And they have questions. How had Dwight suddenly come up with money for a new Jeep and to work on his new home, even though he said he was doing it for a trade? “Yeah. Especially when so many of us are not living well at all,” says one old woman who, like most, was just scraping by.

Then, too, there was the long-ago past. The rain revealed even this. Not far from here another hill fell, mud sliding down into water in a great heave, and the old place was exposed, a harpoon of older times, rock carvings made with love and the human desire for survival. It is the truth that the rain revealed recent human wrongs, but now a history also opened up again. In this place, the mud fallen away revealed the buildings of shell they’d heard about, the seashell buildings that were written about in the old records, the ones they’d believed washed away—if they had existed at all—into the ocean some time in the distant past. They are buildings of art, homes the people of old once lived in. They shine and gleam, even without the sun. The rain washed away the earth and cleaned the dwellings and they shone with all the colors of the nautilus shells that rose up to the surface of the black sea at night from the bottom. These are a part of the beautiful shining worlds, the homes of their ancestors of long, long ago. The rain, through flooding, has returned the past to the people.