Review by Gage Saylor
Hub City Press / October 2021 / 196 pages
Water is always rising in Andrew Siegrist’s Tennessee. It builds and builds until, finally, it floods. The characters in We Imagined It Was Rain come from damaged and broken families, all in a state of mourning over the past, the never-to-happen or soon-to-happen future. A man feeds crows and builds an heirloom chest amidst grieving his dead son. The child of a fire swallower longs to know the mother he was too young to remember. Local legends reappear and find themselves altered, reimagined, like the hanged circus elephant, the girl with braided eyelashes, the miracle-maker that sends candles down the river and out to sea. The folklore has a unique and appealing Appalachian flair, enriching the color of Siegrist’s already lush prose, but it’s also an insight into his characters, their moral compasses, their innermost feelings. “Told a hundred different ways by a hundred different people,” Darcy in “Beneath Dark Water” says, a line that ripples throughout the collection like debris floating down the Cumberland River.
Characters picture better, different versions of their lives, and as the title suggests, they long for the rain, for a flood, for rebirth. People often go unnamed in these stories, becoming the boy, the father, the preacher. Yet this never flattens or reduces. Instead, it hints at such a deep closeness and knowledge to verge on taxonomy. The same way that Siegrist can characterize a sugar maple and how “all those red leaves quivered like kaleidoscope fire in the breeze,” he can render a preacher who’s lost his congregation and his wife, who questions what it means to be a preacher when there’s no one to preach to, when there’s no wife to inspire his sermons. In “Shouting Down the Preacher,” he wades through the flooded grounds of his church and collects soaked hymnals to dry atop gravestones. Meanwhile, along the flooded riverbank, children throw rocks at a pair of overalls caught in a tree, convinced the overalls are a dead man. The preacher calls his estranged wife for help. “The preacher lifted the window and listened to his wife talk to the children. She touched each of them on the back of the neck and told them drowned man was sleeping. She told them he’d climbed the tree to see a robin’s egg crack, to see new wings shiver for the first time.” We Imagined It Was Rain is strongest in surreal and dreamlike moments like this, reaching toward the sublime through deep pain and regret.
As most of these stories are about families, or the remnants of families, the relationship dynamics occasionally feel too similar, but those concerns are often alleviated by the memorable and ever-lucid imagery. We Imagined It Was Rain is abundant with lines and images that linger long after reading. “Rae imagined whole towns sunk beneath dark water. She saw baby snakes slithering through keyholes, wrapping themselves around the handles of refrigerator doors,” Siegrist writes in “Beneath Dark Water.” In the all-too-short “Rainpainting,” children stay with their father for the summer and learn about a strange, lonely man who collects berries to dye sheets. “The strange rain dripped from our hair and down our faces. Reds and blues and purples. We opened our mouths and tasted it. Some sheets were heavy with the weight of picked berries. Others colored with the dust of crushed creek pebbles.” At the turn of nearly every page, an arresting image leaps out like a cottonmouth from a dried creekbed.
Although this collection’s stories are linked, there are no surprise second appearances and no greater arcs to follow. But the consistent tone and mood of We Imagined It Was Rain is unmistakable. Tennessee is everywhere, in the shape of driftwood floating down the river, in the pencil-darkened faces of children on Halloween singing “trick or treat, the coal miners hungry need candy to eat,” in the hiss of cicadas, and of course, in the rain. The organization of the collection helps make the stories fresh; where one story ends, a reversal of another story begins. The collection opens with the surreal and captivating “Whittlebone,” in which a father recreates the events in his daughter’s dream journal, followed by the darkly humorous “Satellites,” where a brother and sister aid in their father’s suicide plot. Families are falling apart in Siegrist’s Tennessee, always wondering when things went wrong, or anticipating the next storm.
We Imagined It Was Rain is a significant contribution in the endeavor to capture the rural, under-represented lives of Appalachia. Tom Waits, on listening to the Virginia-born musician Mark Linkous, once said, “It’s like opening your eyes underwater at the bottom of a stream. You go, ‘Jesus, look what’s down here.’” And although Siegrist is writing in a different part of Appalachia, it’s hard not to recognize the beauty and the decay at the depths of these rivers. Thanks to Siegrist’s masterful prose, we don’t have to imagine the rain. We can feel a warm summer drizzle, an oncoming storm, a flood.
Gage Saylor is a Ph.D. student in Fiction at Oklahoma State University. He received his M.A. and M.F.A. at McNeese State University in Lake Charles, Louisiana. His fiction has been published in Sonora Review, Passages North, Blue Earth Review, and elsewhere.