The Bullroarer

by Epiphany Ferrell

The air smelled hot. No rain for three months, almost four. None at all. Two counties south, they’d had a few drops of rain, but no more than a few drops. Not even enough to make things turn green. The broad leaves on the corn curled up on themselves, and the corn looked like thin, tall yucca plants, making a desert of the landscape. There was no escaping the heat. Even in the shade, it reached with insistent fingers, probing like a clumsy lover. They’d banned fireworks on account of the dryness, and so each day passed like the one before, nothing to mark this July day from that one.

Tyler lived in the bottoms. The sky was the same haze from horizon to horizon, the bottom of a bowl. He wondered if jar-trapped bugs felt as locked down as the oppressive air made everything around him. The brown grass crunched underfoot. He’d duct-taped his shoes where the hard grass had rubbed open the canvas. He wasn’t due for new shoes until a few weeks before school, so these would have to do.

The old men at the store talked about the drought, how the corn was struggling to survive, and the peaches were like stones on the trees, but the beans were hanging in, though just barely. The cattlemen talked about hay and how those that had made their first cuttings early had turned out to be smarter than the rest. Tyler stood in a corner and listened to the talk. His grandparents owned the hardware store where the old men came every morning to drink coffee. They never said much to interest Tyler, peering out at them from behind the plain black frames of his glasses. But if he stood there, he could drink coffee, too, and be in the air conditioning until his grandpa or his uncle made him leave. Go outside and play, they’d say. As if there was anything to do outside but wilt.

The newspapers were carrying a running tally of the days without rain. They listed it right next to the running tally of days left until firearm deer season. The man who wrote the folksy column reminisced about hotter summers and more rainless days, but eventually even he had to say this was the most rainless he’d ever seen. He suggested everyone hang laundry to dry, or schedule an outdoor community picnic, open umbrellas indoors, or have a car wash—something, anything, to bring rain. Then he started writing about rainmakers, and how to bring the rain for real.

The town paper announced a rain dance competition at the community picnic, and yes, it would be held outdoors. Everyone talked about it.

Tyler, despite his thick glasses and all, wasn’t much of a reader. But if he liked a thing, he’d read about it. He liked to read about the Aborigines in Australia. He liked the word. He was proud of being able to pronounce it. He didn’t have much available to read about Aborigines, just an old National Geographic from the used-book sale at the library. They didn’t have Internet at his house.

But in that old National Geographic, Tyler learned about the sacred bullroarer that represented the Rainbow Serpent and could be used only by men in secret rituals. He imagined himself waiting patiently at the community picnic while his classmates attempted, unsuccessfully, to bring rain by dancing. He saw himself coming up last, smiling, shaking his head to say no, he wouldn’t dance. Then he’d swing his bullroarer and the sacred sound would bring the rain. He saw himself swinging the bullroarer while the black clouds mounted in the sky, and swinging the bullroarer while the rain began to pelt down, and people would first dance in it for joy and then gradually creep off to their homes to watch from inside, and all the while he would swing his bullroarer. It would be grand.

The only problem was that Tyler had no bullroarer.

And no one else that he knew of did either. The bullroarer, after all, was sacred. And Aboriginal.

The community picnic came, and Tyler watched the rain dancers with his hands jammed in his cut-offs pockets. While everyone chuckled and made light of the rain dance competition, real disappointment hung on every pair of slumped shoulders when all that dancing, all that singing and pleading and praying and making up of rituals failed to produce so much as a cloud. The mayor said he thought he’d felt a raindrop at one point, but it turned out to be from a bird flying overhead, and no one even laughed it was all so desperate.

Tyler might have forgotten about it as any 11-year-old boy might have, but he felt responsible. He knew the bullroarer would work. There had to be a way to make one. He rummaged around in his uncle’s garage, eyeing the wrenches and the ratchets and wondering why anyone needed so many tools, but he found nothing that seemed capable of becoming a bullroarer.

He wandered into the hardware store, and his grandpa didn’t holler, it was that hot and miserable outside. Instead he set Tyler to work straightening up the little cards with paint samples on them. When that was done, he asked Tyler to bring a bucket of white paint to the desk so he could mix “Soft Rain Blue” for Mrs. Ashe.

The moment Tyler saw the flat paint-mixing stick, he knew it was just what he needed. He eased a stick out of the container where his grandpa kept them, he crept backwards with the silent skill of his beloved Aborigines, and then he turned and burst out of the store and ran home. Well, he ran part of the way home. Half way down the block. And then he had to walk because the sweat was stinging his eyes and he couldn’t draw a full breath.

Tyler retrieved a ball of twine from his uncle’s garage, and he tied a loop and a knot around the handle of the paint mixing stick. He added a few old washers for weight, and two different colors of Sharpie marker to draw meticulous designs, just like in the National Geographic picture of the bullroarer.

When it was done, he stepped out into the backyard. He peered around, making sure there were no women or children present because of the bullroarer being sacred and only for men. He began to swing it around his head, like a cowboy would swing a lasso. He wacked himself with it on the nose. Then the ear. Then he made several successful rotations and there was no noise, just a flapping.

“Please, please let me do this right!” he said to no one in particular. He began to swing the bullroarer. And he heard it. He heard the sacred sound of the bullroarer, a hum that throbbed, or a throbbing that hummed. It sounded like a bug, it sounded like wings. Tyler’s glasses slid down his nose, but still he swung the bullroarer.

This wouldn’t be much of a story if it didn’t end with rain. Because of course it did rain. And the twins Ethan and Emma, who were older than Tyler and both of them good at basketball, got credit for the rain because their rain dance was so good. Tyler got new shoes a few weeks early because the rain made the yard muddy and the mud made the duct tape come off his shoes, and his aunt saw the holes and took him to Wal-Mart. Tyler wanted to tell everyone about the bullroarer and how he’d saved the day, but that would have meant divulging the sacred secret of the paint-stirring-stick bullroarer, and Tyler was afraid to do that. If the bullroarer worked, after all, what else in this wide world might be true?