Christmas

Christmas in The Rainmaker marks a sharp change in Rudy Baylor’s life: a holiday first bound to romantic hope and debt returns a year later as a solitary journey devoted to work, reflection, and the Black case. The contrast is not simply between two Christmases, but between the life Rudy expected to have and the one he is learning to build.

The holiday of borrowed hope

During the Christmas season before the novel’s later trial preparations, Rudy was still expecting to graduate into a good job and was in love with Sara Plankmore. With his available credit suddenly increased, he bought her a gold-and-diamond tennis bracelet for $1,700 and antique silver earrings for $1,100. He also bought champagne, foie gras, caviar, fine cheeses, and other food for a Christmas feast, spending another $300. He calculated that the purchases were manageable if he made the required monthly payments until summer.

The planned celebration collapsed when Sara told him she never wanted to see him again. On Christmas lunch, Rudy sat alone in his dark apartment, eating cheese and drinking champagne. The foie gras had spoiled after he left it on top of the refrigerator during a bout of drinking; the caviar remained untouched, and the jewelry lay across the room. The expensive gifts became emblems of a future that would not happen, and he wept over them as he ate.

Between Christmas and New Year’s, Rudy arranged to return the jewelry. The attempt to undo the purchases did not erase their cost: the day after New Year’s, he came home to find his apartment burglarized. The thieves had forced the door and taken his television, stereo, a jar of quarters, and the jewelry intended for Sara. After showing the police his credit-card receipts, he was told to contact his insurer. The purchases had left him with more than $3,000 in debt, now part of the financial crisis that brings him to bankruptcy.

A different Christmas approaching

By the next holiday season, Rudy’s circumstances had changed, though not into comfort. He and Deck Shifflet were gradually accumulating clients and building a small practice, but the office remained financially modest. A settlement in Derrick Dogan’s case brought in a $25,000 check shortly before Christmas. Dogan received $16,667, while the firm received $8,333; Rudy refused to let Deck deduct small expenses from the client’s share. They each took $3,000 and left the rest in the firm for leaner months.

The money allowed Rudy to buy a used 1984 Volvo, his first car he thought of as a lawyer’s car, without taking on new debt. But the approaching holiday revived painful memories of the previous Christmas. He decided not to spend it in Memphis. His mother invited him to join her and Hank, but he declined, saying he was too busy. Their distance had developed gradually, rather than from one defining quarrel, and he had never visited the house where they parked Hank’s Winnebago.

The legal calendar offered a practical opening for departure: Deck told Rudy that courts generally stopped scheduling trials and hearings from December 15 until after New Year’s. Rudy packed the Black case into the Volvo’s trunk along with clothes and set out on the slow roads north and west. The trip was deliberately low-budget, with inexpensive motels, fast food, and whatever sights came along. Snow across Kansas and Nebraska turned the plains into a quiet expanse, and the road gave Rudy distance from the city and its demands.

Christmas in Madison

Rudy reached Madison, Wisconsin, on December 23. He found a small hotel and a diner, walked downtown among people preparing for the holiday, and sat on a frozen park bench listening to carolers. He valued the anonymity: no one knew where he was. After dinner and a few drinks, he called Max Leuberg, the former law professor who had returned to a tenured position in Madison and had been advising him about the case. Rudy had already sent Max the relevant documents, pleadings, written discovery, and depositions in a fourteen-pound FedEx box that cost nearly $30.

The next morning, at eleven degrees, Rudy went to the open but nearly deserted law school. Max met him with coffee, and the two spent the holiday examining the case materials. Max knew the trial was six weeks away. Rudy reported that Great Benefit had offered $175,000, but that his client had refused it. Max judged the case strong and advised Rudy not to settle, while cautioning him that the local county was not known for punitive damages. Their discussion focused on the evidence, witnesses, trial strategy, and the danger of relying too heavily on a favorable outcome.

Max also gave Rudy a new Great Benefit policy he had obtained for the purpose of examining its language. The policy, issued after the Black family filed suit, specifically excluded all transplants, including bone-marrow transplants. Max urged Rudy to use the change at trial: if the Black policy did not exclude the treatment, the company would have to explain both its refusal to pay and its later decision to write the exclusion expressly into a new policy.

Their work widened from trial tactics to the insurer’s finances. Max explained that insurance-company accounting could be difficult for outsiders to interpret and that Great Benefit was worth between $400 million and $500 million, with about half held in reserves and surpluses. Rudy filled three legal pads and several cassette tapes with Max’s analysis. They continued working through the remaining documents on Christmas Day, finishing after dark before another heavy snowfall.

Solitude redirected toward purpose

The trip did not make Rudy’s problems disappear; it changed what occupied his attention. The previous Christmas had left him alone amid the wreckage of a failed romance and purchases he could not afford. This one also involved solitude, but now it was chosen and productive. In Madison, the holiday’s pause from ordinary legal business gave him uninterrupted time with a trusted adviser and the central case of his young practice.

After leaving Max, Rudy took three days to reach Spartanburg, South Carolina. The open road gave him room to set aside old resentments and worries about other people’s problems, while his thoughts repeatedly returned to the coming trial. Christmas thus sits at a turning point in the novel’s seasonal pattern: the first holiday exposes the cost of confusing love with expensive gifts; the next finds Rudy using the same season to prepare, with greater discipline, for a consequential legal fight.