days later he was down on his knees in the back of a flatbed farm truck, cruising slowly along the highways and byways of central Oklahoma, dressed in a black coat and a preacher’s low-crowned hat, praying for rain through a pair of loudspeakers hooked up to a Delco tractor battery. People turned out by the thousands to get a look at him.
The end of the story was predictable but satisfying. The skies grew cloudy during the afternoon of Greg’s second day on the job, and the next morning the rains came. The rains came for three days and two nights, flash floods killed four people, whole houses with chickens perched on the roof peaks were washed down the Greenwood River, the wells were filled, the livestock was saved, and The Oklahoma Ranchers’ and Cattlemen’s Association decided it probably would have happened anyway. They passed the hat for Greg at their next meeting and the young rainmaker was given the princely sum of seventeen dollars.
Greg was not put out of countenance. He used the seventeen dollars to place an ad in the Oklahoma City Herald. The ad pointed out that about the same sort of thing had happened a certain rat-catcher in the town of Hamlin. Being a Christian, the ad went on, Greg Stillson was not in the way of taking children, and he surely knew he had no legal recourse against a group as large and powerful as the Oklahoma Ranchers’ and Cattlemen’s Association. But fair was fair, wasn’t it? He had his elderly mother to support, and she was in failing health. The ad suggested that he had prayed his ass off for a bunch of rich, ungrateful snobs, the same sort of men that had tractored poor folks like the Joads off their land in the thirties. The ad suggested that he had saved tens of thousands of dollars’ worth of livestock and had got seventeen dollars in return. Because he was a good Christian, this sort of ingratitude didn’t bother him, but maybe it ought to give the good citizens of the county some pause. Right-thinking people could send contributions to Box 471, care of the Herald.
Johnny wondered how much Greg Stillson had actually received as a result of that ad. Reports varied. But that fall, Greg had been tooling around town in a brand-new Mercury. Three years’ worth of back taxes were paid on the small house left to them by Mary Lou’s mother. Mary Lou herself (who was not particularly sickly and no older than forty-five), blossomed out in a new raccoon coat. Stillson had apparently discovered one of the great hidden muscles of principle which move the earth: if those who receive will not pay, those who have not often will, for no good reason at all. It may be the same principle that assures the politicians there will always be enough young men to feed the war machine.
The ranchers discovered they had stuck their collective hand into a hornets’ nest. When members came into town. crowds often gathered and jeered at them. They were denounced from pulpits all across the county. They found it suddenly difficult to sell the beef the rain had saved without shipping it a considerable distance.
In November of that memorable year, two young men with brass knucks on their hands and nickel-plated .32s in their pockets had turned up on Greg Stillson’s doorstep, apparently hired by the Ranchers’ and Cattlemen’s Association to suggest—as strenuously as necessary—that Greg would find the climate more congenial elsewhere. Both of them ended up in the hospital. One of them had a concussion. The other had lost four of his teeth and was suffering a rupture. Both had been found on the corner of Greg Stillson’s block, sans pants. Their brass knucks had been inserted in an anatomical location most commonly associated with sitting down, and in the case of one of these two young men, minor surgery was necessary to remove the foreign objects.
The Association cried off. At a meeting in early December, an appropriation of $700 was made from its general fund, and a check in that amount was forwarded to Greg Stillson.
He got what he wanted.
In 1953 he and his mother moved to Nebraska. The rain-making business had gone bad, and there were some who said the pool-hall hustling had also gone bad. Whatever the reason for moving, they turned up in Omaha where Greg opened a house-painting business that went bust two years later. He did better as