into a series of scraps. Truancy, fighting, hustling snooker downtown, maybe hustling stolen goods uptown, although that had never been proved. In 1949, when he had been a high-school junior, he had pulled a two-day suspension for putting a cherry-bomb firecracker in a locker-room toilet.
In all of these confrontations with authority, Mary Lou Stillson took her son’s part. The good times—at least for the likes of the Stillsons—had ended with the war work in 1945, and Mrs. Stillson seemed to think of it as a case of her and her boy against the rest of the world. Her mother had died, leaving her the small frame house and nothing else. She hustled drinks in a roughneck bar for a while, then waited table in an all-night beanery. And when her boy got in trouble, she went to bat for him, never checking (apparently) to see if his hands were dirty or clean.
The pale sickly boy that his father had nicknamed Runt was gone by 1949. As Greg Stillson’s adolescence progressed, his father’s physical legacy came out. The boy shot up six inches and put on seventy pounds between thirteen and seventeen. He did not play organized school sports but somehow managed to acquire a Charles Atlas body-building gym and then a.set of weights. The Runt became a bad guy to mess with.
Johnny guessed he must have come close to dropping out of school on dozens of occasions. He had probably avoided a bust out of sheer dumb luck. If only he had taken at least one serious bust, Johnny thought often. It would have ended all these stupid worries, because a convicted felon can’t aspire to high public office.
Stillson had graduated—near the bottom of his class, it was true—in June, 1951. Grades notwithstanding, there was nothing wrong with his brains. His eye was on the main chance. He had a glib tongue and a winning manner. He worked briefly that summer as a gas jockey. Then, in August of that year, Greg Stillson had gotten Jesus at a tent-revival in Wild-wood Green. He quit his job at the 76 station and went into business as a rainmaker “through the power of Jesus Christ our Lord.”
Coincidentally or otherwise, that had been one of the driest summers in Oklahoma since the days of the dust bowl. The crops were already a dead loss, and the livestock would soon follow if the shallowing wells went dry. Greg had been invited to a meeting of the local ranchers’ association. Johnny had found a great many stories about what had followed; it was one of the high points of Stillson’s career. None of the stories completely jibed, and Johnny could understand why. It had all the attributes of an American myth, not much different from some of the stories about Davy Crockett, Pecos Bill, Paul Bunyan. That something had happened was undeniable. But the strict truth of it was already beyond reach.
One thing seemed sure. That meeting of the ranchers’ association must have been one of the strangest ever held. The ranchers had invited over two dozen rainmakers from various parts of the southeast and southwest. About half of them were Negroes. Two were Indians—a half-breed Pawnee and a full-blooded Apache. There was a peyote-chewing Mexican. Greg was one of about nine white fellows, and the only hometown boy.
The ranchers heard the proposals of the rainmakers and dowsers one by one. They gradually and naturally divided themselves into two groups: those who would take half of their fee up front (nonrefundable) and those who wanted their entire fee up front (nonrefundable).
When Greg Stillson’s turn came, he stood up, hooked his thumbs into the belt loops of his jeans, and was supposed to have said: “I guess you fellows know I got in the way of being able to make it rain after I gave my heart to Jesus. Before that I was deep in sin and the ways of sin. Now one of the main ways of sin is the way we’ve seen tonight, and you spell that kind of sinning mostly with dollar signs.”
The ranchers were interested. Even at nineteen Stillson had been something of a comic spellbinder. And he had made them an offer they couldn’t refuse. Because he was a born-again Christian and because he knew that the love of money was the root of all evil, he would make it rain and afterward they could pay him whatever they thought the job had been worth.