The Rain Barrels on Foma Ryabov’s Roof

Eleven mornings now I have watched Foma Ryabov climb the short ladder to his own gutter and look down into the barrel that catches it. Eleven mornings the barrel has held the same three inches of standing water, greening slightly at the rim, nothing added.

He patched that roof’s north slope three days before the month took its name — cold harbor air and a memory twelve years old, no rain in sight then either. The patch holds. It was never the roof that needed the water. It was the barrel underneath it, and the barrel does what barrels do: waits.

This morning he came down the ladder, looked at the cabbages his wife keeps along the south wall, and carried two buckets from the well instead — the long way, the arm-aching way, past the second shrine and back. He did this without complaint and without hurry, the way a man does a thing he expects to keep doing for a while yet.

The month is called Rainmonth. Nobody asked the sky first. Down at the bend they are still arguing, I am told, about what a name is worth when nothing underneath it has changed to earn it — a child, a corner, a fare nobody claimed. I don’t know what any of that is worth. I know Foma’s barrel is dry, and his cabbages are watered anyway, by hand, twice a day, because a name on a calendar does not carry water and a man’s arms do.

Twelve days, the old dockhands say, is when to start listening for thunder. Foma isn’t listening. He’s already carrying the buckets.