“If only them danged fish and game boys opened up the season a month or two earlier them bambis wouldn’t be so damn many of them and we’d have no damn bloodthirsty mountain lions to eat our sheep.” Or our kids. Many a trigger finger itching. Deprived of opportunity, we holstered our weapons, thus paving the way for a slightly superior predator to occupy the field, or, in this case, sandy bluff hard by the Platte’s roiling flow.
Oh, the cyclone. Shifting spring winds tend to bring them our way. Cold winds scudding in the grip of the jet stream crash against the flanks of sluggish gulf air unlucky enough to stray in the way, the radically misfit air masses intermingling chaotically, with predictably disastrous results. Located some ten miles from town as they were, at the end of a dirt and gravel lane mere yards from the river’s edge, Faith and Arch and the boys benefitted not in the least from the siren blasting warning from atop of the courthouse on the Plowman town square -- for not even seventy-mile-an-hour winds can whisk a siren’s sound all of ten miles – but scurried for cover (Faith and Arch and the boys, that is) nonetheless, as the rapidly advancing low pressure anomaly made a beeline for their front parlor. Intuition, call it. A Midwesterner’s hard won sense of precisely when and where a twister threatens imminent death and destruction.
Signs aplenty that particular May day. At least for those with eyes to see. Monstrous thunderheads bunching in the west. An eerily atypical darkening of those towering clouds. Ominous, brooding, blue black cloudbanks blanketing the horizon. Skiffs of unusually intermittent breeze sallying from all sides. Most provocatively, the storm’s swirling sentries descending from the blackened mass in scouting parties of two or three, then five or ten, then ten or twenty. Oddly shaped, oddly rotating swirling currents dropping from the damn wall cloud itself, some flagging east, while others make a course due west, while still others dance and dally in a north-southerly minuet.
Rotation, they call it. Damn bad news, we call it. No sight quite like it.
“That ain’t right. See how them tails swirl and bunch and drop down like a fog atop a stream bed? And one cloud goin’ this way while another goes t’other way? That there is a twister, or fixin’ to be.”
So we mumbled one to another while anxiously scanning the sky.
Faith and Arch no exception, veteran plow jockeys that they were.
Death an ever present threat from above.
Followed soon enough by the silence.
The awful silence. A clammy, oppressive, stifling, unnerving vacuum of sound. No stillness quite so deep as that of a prairie landscape lying in the way of a tornado. For those five or ten or twenty minutes, as the molecules of hydrogen and oxygen and nitrogen making up mere atmosphere surrender serenely, passively, yes indifferently to the low pressure center’s summons, the grass-strewn steppes stand lifeless, still as the proverbial grave, a deep and abiding sheer stillness so deep and unyielding as inevitably to make the hair on the back of one’s neck leap to attention. Which it does, and did, that particular May day. Birds and beasts of the field cease movement, or even the slightest hint of braying, bleating, belching, or chirruping, powering down to mute mode uniformly and on cue even as the sheer stillness thickens, like a formerly raucous pool hall stunned into silence by gunshot.
Alerted, as it were, by all this and more, Arch and Faith gathered up the twins and made haste away from their modest two-story farmhouse up the hill to the storm cellar or, as we say around here, the “cave” Arch’s great-grandfather Arch thought to dig before he died. Just in the knick, too. By then the twister had lifted the roof off a henhouse near Silver City, and flattened an implement shed at the outskirts of Hart Creek, before, scarcely sated, apparently, digging its windy mitts into the lending library/pioneer museum/slot-machine casino at the edge of nearby Viborg.
How the timber flew. Splintered in an instant into a blizzard of sticks and bricks. Like a dollhouse surrendering to a peevish toddler’s hammering. A gigantic toddler’s peevish hammering. A cross beam intended as support for the main roof truss imbedded itself in the side panels of a like new 1988 Buick with only 85,000 miles halfway across town. A perfectly serviceable IBM selectric typewriter winged its way out the door and through the front window of the hardware store next door. The pioneer museum was particularly hard hit. Highly prized if seldom thumbed missives detailing the escapades of Achilles and Paris, and Leif and Ethelred, and Arthur and Mordred, and Sherman and Lee, and Rockne and Chamberlain (Gus the football-toting Nebraskan who beat the fabled Four Horseman twice) took brief albeit memorable flight. Lovingly preserved photographic collections commemorating the county’s settling by and through the extraordinary efforts of the Hendersons and Connors and Slaughters and Johnsons and Andersens and Andersons and Cyvliks and Shotskis and Hauptmanns, and many too many others to mention, surrendered to entropy, all semblance of order abandoned. For days grazing herefords stumbled across the widely-dispersed snapshots in time, here an Aunt May, there a Grandfather Arch, not to mention Parrish and brother Henry and Luther and the faded mug shot of the whole fam founding damily recorded the very winter of the empire’s homesteading, not long after the War Between The States, Leese clan patriarch Arch and his imported Swedish wife Becky and their five boys and five girls ranging in age from thirteen years to thirteen days, as assembled by an itinerant photographer under the big maple that then and still commands the north forty south of the river confluence, from which humble sod shanty beginnings the chain of begats began, and uninterrupted continued, at least until the day the churning funnel took dead aim at the family castle, setting its sights on Faith and Arch and the twins, seemingly, and the stranger who quite suddenly appeared in their midst even as the family scrambled up the hill to the cave just below the Home Place, unaware a genuine mountain lion perched on a sandstone outcrop awaiting a tender fleshy morsel’s distracted passing.
That the lion would leap even as a simmering twister bunched both surprised and did not surprise all and sundry, for though living things generally cower in fear as the winds ominously stiffen, of all God’s creatures the most inscrutable by far is the cat.
Leave it to a feline to break rank unforeseeably.
The narrow snaking trail from the family’s modest farmhouse to the cave at the edge of the Home Place boundary offered just such ambush opportunity, as it turned out. Surprisingly and against all odds a formidable bluff climbed to the sky just adjacent the farmhouse, a promontory left behind, apparently, by the glacier that otherwise flattened our land tens of thousands, or perhaps hundreds of thousands, of years ago now -- we aren’t quite sure of the precise dates -- the bluff -- as we sometimes called it -- itself a compilation of sandstone and scattered pine rising gradually at first, then more steeply, to a promontory backed up against a cliff on the Platte’s very roiling edge. A unique geologic feature boasting not least a solid stone cellar -- or “cave” as we call them -- cut into the very hillside itself, and to whose welcoming arms Arch and Faith and Peter and Thomas hurried even as the very sky died, or seemed to, a stunning emptying of all things that presaged the even more sudden coming of hellacious wind. And, trailing them just slightly, the stranger A. Jacks, unknown and unnoted, at least until the lion leapt.
Arch never saw it. He was otherwise occupied scanning the horizon with one eye while leading his family to the cave’s mouth for throwing-oneself-in purposes. Peter the older and slightly huskier of the twins clad in levi’s and plaid short-sleeved work shirt and Angels baseball cap trailed Arch by a pace. Whether he saw the lion leap could not have been said. Faith gripped Thomas, one hand on the boy’s shoulder, urging him on, trailing her son and brother by a good ten yards, incognizant of lurking predator, understandably -- what with the storm bearing down, wind steadily thickening, heavy raindrops spattering intermittently -- which is when she sensed slightly, or perhaps vaguely cognized, the bushy-bearded man scampering mere paces behind her.
Did not perceive so much as intuited the presence of. Or perhaps Faith herself wished the very man into existence, knowing as she did not know she knew, but nonetheless somehow did know, that a bulky, muscley, modest-to-a-fault, unfailingly brave interceptor of leaping lions would come in quite useful just then. Or perchance A. Jacks had been there all along, running up the same snaking trail hour after hour, day after day, year after year, waiting, just waiting, for the convergence of Faith and family and a ravenous lion and churning funnel in the same place in the same