Study a Complete Story: Miss Ivy's Rain

This is a complete original story, written for this platform, followed by a commentary that shows where each of the moves you have been studying does its work. Read the story first, without the commentary, and notice where you feel the ground shift. Miss Ivy's Rain The rain came up the valley the way it always did: first as a smell of wet stone, then as a sound like a broom on the roof, then as water everywhere at once. Nella stood at the window with the curtain pulled over her head and watched the breadfruit trees lean. 'Come from that window, child,' Miss Ivy said from the kitchen. 'You know what happens to people who stand where the draught catch them.' Nella came, but slowly. She liked the storm. It was the only thing in the house that made a noise besides the radio, and the radio had been saying the same thing for two days: rain, rain, and more rain, and do not cross the river. They ate rice and the last of the saltfish, and Miss Ivy talked about the roof. She talked about the roof every time it rained hard, as though the roof were a relative who could be discussed into better behaviour. Water came through over the bed. They had moved the bed once already, and put a basin under the drip, and the basin filled in the night. Nella emptied it in the morning into the yard, and the yard gave it back to the sky. That evening, looking for a dry place to put her school books, Nella pulled a suitcase out from under the bed. It was brown, with a strap, and the strap had been buckled so long that the leather had kept the shape of it. 'Nella.' 'I'm only moving it.' 'Put it back.' But she had already opened it. Inside were letters, dozens of them, tied with the same kind of string Miss Ivy used on the market parcels, and under the letters, a photograph of a woman in a blue dress, young, laughing at something outside the frame. Her mother. Nella had three letters from her mother, and she knew them the way you know a hymn. They said Kingston. They said soon. They said be a good girl for Miss Ivy. They had come at Christmas, and at Easter, and at the start of the summer. These letters were different. There were more than fifty of them. They were dated every month for four years, and after the first few they stopped being from her mother at all. Nella could see it in the way the letters leaned on the page. The early ones were quick and crowded, written by someone in a hurry, in a room with other people in it. Then the handwriting loosened. Got rounder. Learned to take its time. She read one from last month. 'Nella is growing tall. She is quick with figures and slow to bed, like you were. She asks for you.' Nella sat on the floor with the letters around her and the rain going on, and she was not crying, which surprised her. She was thinking about the pen. In the morning she found it in the sewing basket, under the tin of buttons: a green pen, and a pad of paper with three pages torn out. Miss Ivy's thumb, when she poured the tea, was stained at the side where a left-handed person holds a pen. They ate breakfast. The rain had thinned to a grey mist and the yard was full of leaves. Miss Ivy said the river would be down by Friday and they would need the market. 'I want to write to my mother,' Nella said. Miss Ivy put down the cup. 'You have paper in your book.' 'None of the letters say anything new.' 'There is nothing new in Kingston,' Miss Ivy said. 'Kingston is the same as it was.' 'I want to write to her today.' 'The ink finish.' Nella looked at her grandmother's hands - the whole of them, the way they sat on the table, the thumb with the stain on it - and she said, 'Is your hand, Miss Ivy.' The rain went on outside. Miss Ivy did not move. She looked at Nella for a long time, and what came into her face was not surprise; it was the tiredness of a person who had been carrying something heavy for four years and had been asked, at last, to put it down. 'Your mother,' she said, 'is not writing.' 'I know.' 'She in Kingston and she is not writing, not since before you came to me.' 'I know that too.' Miss Ivy nodded slowly, as though Nella had answered a question in school correctly. Then she got up and went into the other room and stood there a while, and came back with the brown suitcase and set it on the table between them like an offering. 'You want to write her,' she said. 'Then write her.' Nella took the green pen out of her pocket and the pad out of the sewing basket and put both on the table. She was eleven years old and she had never written a letter in her life. 'Tell me what to say,' she said. Miss Ivy sat down. The rain went on, quiet now, steady, the kind that keeps you in the house but does not frighten you. For a while neither of them spoke. 'Start with the truth,' Miss Ivy said. 'That is the only correspondence worth keeping.' And she reached over and turned the pad around so that the lines were facing the girl. The commentary The opening. The story begins inside a storm that has already started, and the first line gives the reader a whole world: a valley, a season, a way of knowing weather by sound. Two lines of speech in the second paragraph do the work of a page of description - we know the household, the relationship, and the way these two people talk to each other before we know anything about their history. The conflict. The want is small enough to be seen: Nella wants a letter that says something new. The obstacle is her grandmother's silence, which is protective rather than cruel. Notice that the obvious scene is withheld - there is no argument, no shouting, no accusation. The pressure comes from what is not being said at a table where two people are eating breakfast. The development. The suitcase, the fifty letters, the loosening handwriting, the green pen, the stained thumb. Each detail raises the cost. By the time Nella reaches the breakfast scene she has already lost something - the letters that arrived every month - and gained something harder: the knowledge that her grandmother lied well because she loved her. The turning point. 'Is your hand, Miss Ivy.' Five words, flatly stated, three quarters of the way through. After this line the story is no longer about whether Nella will learn the truth. It is about what she will do with it. The turn is earned because the pen and the thumb were planted two scenes earlier, where they looked incidental. The ending. Nella does not ask for an apology. She asks to be taught, and her grandmother passes over the one thing she has that is worth handing on: the instruction to begin with the truth. The last action - turning the pad so the lines face the girl - is a choice rather than a statement, and it answers the opening. The rain returns in the final paragraph, quieter, which lets the same image mean something different: it is no longer a thing happening to the household but a room the two of them are inside together. Study questions Read the story again and mark the exact line where you understood something you had not understood before. What had the writer planted earlier to make that moment possible? What would be lost if the story ended with the suitcase on the table instead of the pad turned around? Where is the story's last physical action, and what does it say that dialogue could not?