The last day of Ferguson’s life, August 10, 1960, began with a brief rain shower just after dawn, but by the time reveille sounded at seven-thirty, the clouds had blown off to the east and the sky was blue. Ferguson and his six cabinmates headed to the mess hall with their counselor, Bill Kaufman, who had finished his sophomore year at Brooklyn College in June, and during the thirty or forty minutes it took them to eat their oatmeal and scrambled eggs, the clouds returned, and as the boys walked back to the cabin for cleanup and inspection, rain was beginning to fall again, a rain so fine and inconsequential that it hardly seemed to matter that no one was wearing a poncho or carrying an umbrella. Their T-shirts were covered with dark specks of moisture, but that was the extent of it — the mildest of mild dousings, water in such small quantities that it didn’t even make them wet. As they started in on the morning ritual of making their beds and sweeping the floor, however, the sky continued to darken, and before long the rain began to fall in earnest, hitting the roof of the cabin with larger, ever more accelerated drops. For a minute or two, there was a lovely sort of off-key syncopation to the sound, Ferguson felt, but then the intensity of the rain increased, and the effect was lost. The rain wasn’t making music anymore. It had turned into a mass of dense, undifferentiated sound, a percussive blur. Bill told them that a new weather system was heading in from the south, and with a cold front simultaneously coming down from the north, they could expect a long, hard soak. Get comfortable, boys, he said. It’s going to be a big storm, and we’ll be sitting in this cabin for most of the day.
The dark sky grew even darker, and inside the cabin it was becoming difficult to see. Bill switched on the overhead light, but even after the light came on it still felt dark in there, for the seventy-five-watt bulb was too high up in the rafters to illuminate much of anything down below. Ferguson was on his bed, flipping through a back issue of Mad magazine that had been circulating around the cabin, reading with the aid of his flashlight and wondering if any morning had ever been as dark as this one. The rain was battering the roof now, a full-bore assault, pounding on the shingles as if the liquid drops had turned to stone, millions of stones were falling from the sky and hammering down on them, and then, far off in the distance, Ferguson heard a dull basso rumbling, a thick, congested noise that made him think of someone clearing his throat, thunder that must have been many miles away from them, somewhere in the mountains, perhaps, and this struck Ferguson as odd, since in his experience the thunder and lightning of electric storms had always come in tandem with the rain, but in this instance it was already raining, raining as hard as it could possibly rain, and the thunder was still nowhere near them, which led Ferguson to speculate that perhaps there were two storms going on at once, not just a storm and a cold front, as Bill had said, but two separate storms, one directly overhead and the other approaching from the north, and if the first storm didn’t play itself out before the second storm arrived, the two storms would crash into each other and merge, and that would create one hell of a mighty storm, Ferguson said to himself, a monumental storm, the storm to end all storms.
The bed to the right of Ferguson’s was occupied by a boy named Hal Krasner. Since the beginning of the summer, the two of them had kept up a running gag in which they impersonated smart George and stupid Lennie, the drifters from Of Mice and Men, a book they had both read earlier in the year and found ripe with comic possibilities. Ferguson was George and Krasner was Lennie, and nearly every day they would spend a few minutes improvising crackpot dialogues for their chosen characters, a steady round of nonsense that would begin with Lennie asking George to tell him what it was going to be like when they got to heaven, for example, or George reminding Lennie not to pick his nose in public, idiotic exchanges that probably owed more to Laurel and Hardy than to Steinbeck, but it amused the boys to indulge in these shenanigans, and with rain now pouring down on the camp and everyone stuck inside, Krasner was in the mood to have another go at it.
Please, George, he said. Please make it stop. I can’t stand it no more.
Make what stop, Lennie? Ferguson asked.
The rain, George. The noise of the rain. It’s too loud, and it’s beginning to drive me crazy.
You’ve always been crazy, Lennie. You know that.
Not crazy, George. Just stupid.
Stupid, yes. But also crazy.
I can’t help it, George. I was born that way.
No one’s saying it’s your fault, Lennie.
Well?
Well what?
Are you going to stop the rain for me?
Only the boss can do that.
But you’re the boss, George. You’ve always been the boss.
I mean the big boss. The one and only.
I don’t know no one and only. I only know you, George.
It would take a miracle to pull off a thing like that.
That’s all right. You can do anything.
Can I?
The noise is making me sick, George. I think I’ll die if you don’t do it.
Krasner put his hands over his ears and moaned. He was Lennie telling George that he had come to the limit of his strength, and Ferguson-as-George nodded in sad commiseration, knowing that no man could stop the rain from falling, that miracles were beyond the scope of mankind’s power, but Ferguson-as-Ferguson was having trouble keeping up his end of the act, Krasner’s sick-cow moans were simply too funny, and after listening to them for another few seconds, Ferguson burst out laughing, which broke the spell of the charade for him although not for Krasner, who assumed that Ferguson was laughing as George, and therefore, still posing as Lennie, Krasner removed his hands from his ears and said:
It ain’t nice to laugh at a man like that, George. I might not be the smartest guy in the county, but I got a soul, just like you and everyone else, and if you don’t wipe that grin off your face, I’ll snap your neck in two, just like I done to them rabbits.
Now that Krasner-as-Lennie had delivered such an earnest and effective speech, Ferguson felt obliged to force himself back into character, to become George again for Krasner’s sake and the sake of the other boys who were listening to them, but just as he was about to open his lungs and shout out an order for the rain to stop—Enough with the waterworks, boss! — the sky blasted forth a piercing clap of thunder, a noise so loud and so explosive that it shook the floor of the cabin and rattled the window frames, which went on humming and vibrating until the next burst of thunder rattled them again. Half of the boys jumped, jerked forward, twitched involuntarily in response to the sounds, while others called out by pure reflex, the air shooting from their lungs in short, startled exclamations that seemed to be words but were in fact instinctive grunts in the form of words—wow, whoa, waw. The rain was still coming down hard, lashing against the windows and making it difficult to see anything through them — nothing more than a wavy, watery darkness lit up by sudden spears of lightning, all black for ten or twenty heartbeats and then a moment or two of blinding white light. The storm that Ferguson had imagined, the vast double storm that would fuse into one storm when the air from the north and the air from the south collided, was upon them now, and it was even bigger and better than he had hoped it would be. A grand tempest. An axe of fury tearing apart the heavens. An exhilaration.