Them Dad-Gummed Dioxide Crystals

My friend Noel said his friend Ronnie could run circles around me telling tall tales. One look at Ronnie, and I knew he was right. His is the perfect yarn spinner’s face — unprepossessing, unassuming, and as innocent as a newborn babe’s. Listeners believe a man with a face like that.

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“Ronnie, our mutual friend Noel and I were having breakfast together not long ago, as we often do, at which time we solve all the nation’s problems, and he gave me a few snippets of your rainmaker story. Tell me the rest of it.” Here’s the yarn Ronnie spun. A bunch of Mississippi Delta cotton farmers were in a panic. Their crops had come up to a perfect stand, and with a little rain, the plants would grow quickly. But no rain came. The dry spell became a drought. In town one day, the farmers were commiserating over cups of coffee, when a feller settin’ nearby spoke up. “I can help — I’m a rainmaker.” The farmers asked how much he charged.

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“It depends on how many bags of dioxide crystals y’all want me to spread from my airplane,” he answered. “That’s what I use to salt the clouds, which make them suck in moisture, which initiates condensation — rain, in other words. The plane will haul three bags, but one bag, which runs $500, does the trick. I won’t make no guarantees about what’ll happen with more than one bag. Might cause too much rain.” “Shoot, one farmer answered. “As dry as it is, ain’t no such thing as too much rain. We’ll pay for two bags.” The next day, the rainmaker pulled up with a tall cylinder standing on a tripod, attached to a butane bottle, and placed it where two field roads crossed each other. “By mid-afternoon there’ll be a few clouds building. When I swoop down over y’all, light the jet in the cylinder. It’ll shoot up a hunnerd foot flame. Then, I’ll fly above the clouds and sprinkle the dioxide crystals. The flame and the crystals work together.” At four o’clock, the farmers heard the airplane coming and lit the flame. The pilot wagged his wings at them, did a few dippity-doos, ascended above the clouds, and spread the crystals. Toward sundown, the sky was as clear as could be, and the farmers were certain a gypsy had gypped them. But along about midnight, thunder and lightning like that which the Lord has in mind for Judgment Day set in, and a roaring, torrential rain poured down without cease. This was no normal rain … it was even more than a gully washer, or a chunk floater, or a frog drowner — it had all the makings of a levee breaker! When daylight came, the farmers huddled around the burner and stared at their flooded fields. Only a few cotton plants peaked above the muddy water. Finally, one farmer spoke up. “Thank God we didn’t ask that feller to spray out three bags of them dad-gummed dioxide crystals.”

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