knows?
That Peter the huskier of the twins was slightly ahead on the trail, while Thomas the more slightly built of the twins strayed slightly behind, could not be attributed to design, intelligence, so much as mere fortuity, happenstance, accident, the random chance dance of figures fleeing chaotically, scrambling serendipitously, jiggling unpredictably, while on the lam from a funnel’s twisting fingers. Though many the possible configurations of the four on the narrow snaking trail – Arch/Peter/Faith/Thomas, or Faith/Peter/Thomas/Arch, or Peter/Arch/Thomas/Faith, and so on -- no particular order could be said to be inevitable, necessarily, in the sense of preordained, static, immutable. Or, for that matter, the manner in which a river, say, tugs beneath its roiling flow four boaters -- or perhaps five -- cast into the watery murk when the boaters’ boat tips. Or, for that matter, how those soaked boaters will disperse, or where the flow might individually cargo their struggling somethingness-es. To the sandy bank, for example, or upriver a spell to a gravel bar, alternatively, or directly into a tangle of logs and brush, perhaps. All mere possibilities, potentialities, the interplay of innumerable variables of dizzying complexity -- force and drag and momentum and drift and so on -- complexities indeed sufficient to stagger a supercomputer. So that, in a very real sense, Thomas might just as easily have been the twin pushed over the edge while Peter remained safe in his Mother’s grip. Unless of course one entertains the possibility that some accommodation indeed had been reached, a design, a meeting of the minds, a tete-a-tete ultimately resulting in conversion rather than loss of matter, for matter can neither be created nor destroyed, and in this, perhaps, can be found a hint of something other than “accident,” so-called.
As eternally writ.
Even as Faith saw or perceived or intuited the largish man blasting past her on the narrow trail, bolts of lightning erratically illuminating the rapidly darkening sky, the sheer stunning silence of unmoving air gave way to the first screaming sentries of the coming cyclone. Sticks and stones jet propelled by the twister’s collision with the library-cum-museum-cum-casino in relatively nearby Viborg penetrated the farm’s perimeter. Not to mention a Zenith 13-inch black and white television, a nearly intact Whirlpool washer-dryer, and, of course, splintered bits of stick and shattered sections of stone too numerous to tally. Not to mention further, as legend had it, the serene figure of Slim Torgerson slipping nickels into a one-armed bandit even as he and the machine careened o’er the landscape in the zephyr’s vicious grip, flying at an altitude of five to five hundred feet, variously, before being unceremoniously deposited on an island in the Platte River’s middle, where Slim continued to robotically tug the machine’s one arm even as the rains came and winds multiplied, or so local legend had it.
Game of chance, indeed.
But not Faith and Thomas the slighter of her sons. As lightning forked and thunder clapped and skies thickened and the funnel made its weaving way from Viborg’s edge to the river’s bank, demolishing the odd grain bin, henhouse and tool shed on its meandering way, Mother and son clambered and scrambled for the cave’s safety, blissfully unaware of quite another form of lurking danger.
It should be mentioned the four or rather five figures clambered and scrambled up the bluff from the valley below, and not down the trail from the plateau above, primarily because the Home Place had been lost some years previously. Lost in the sense of surrendered. Surrendered in the sense of conquered. Conquered in the sense of foreclosed. A victim of the Great Depression and Grandfather Henry’s perhaps o’erzealous financial ways, as abetted by Pop Slaughter’s sheer mendaciousness, coupled with that of other damn bankers, and the lusting greed of an Omaha insurance mogul. He, the mogul, bought the land for a song at the foreclosure sale a few short weeks or months before Pearl Harbor. Then all hell broke loose. Next thing anybody knew the Home Place had been well and truly sealed from undue intrusion, by electric fencing among other formidable barriers. Coming down the bluff from above would have been easier than rushing up the bluff from below. Alas, Faith and Arch and the boys had not that opportunity.
Whether the twister might have plucked the family from the edge of the very ledge on which the narrow trail snaked had the big cat not interceded remains too a matter of mere conjecture. Suffice to say the family thought the twister had done precisely that when, in all the confusion, the crew eventually gathered wits sufficiently to count heads.
Which is when they realized Peter was missing.
Unaccounted for.
Gone.
They would, of course, immediately have deserted the cave into which they had only just thrown themselves in favor of a rather vigorous search and rescue operation, except the very fierce winds that bodily had tossed them into the cave -- while lifting Peter over the edge in the other direction, apparently -- at that precise instant chose to slam an enormous tree branch into the hillside not five feet from the cave’s mouth. A not un-mean feat, particularly given that the tree the branch originally came with clung to the planet a good half a hundred yards to the west. A mere stick becomes a missile in a twister’s two-hundred-mile-per-hour grip. Try though they might, Arch and Faith and A. Jacks could not summon strength to overcome the vicious winds pinning them. From that stony refuge the five or rather four of them weathered the storm’s passage, shielded yet able to hear the storm’s tumult and feel -- yes physically feel -- the storm’s pressurized passing. Quite a sensation, that.
When at length the winds abated A. Jacks and Arch scrambled down the steep sides of the bluff over whose edge Peter had been tossed, apparently, but by then the boy was gone, lost in a tangle of scrub and brush, and, of course, the ominously sporadic scattered tracks of a big cat. Though diligently followed for long hours with aid of flashlight and moonlight, the tracks eventually disappeared, simply up and disappeared, as if the creature had moved wavelike in many directions -- or perhaps every possible direction -- before vanishing altogether. Peter, too, having vanished.
Then it rained.
Hard.
When we gathered in the basement of the Methodist church for the makeshift rescue-planning summit and memorial service the following evening many a man amongst us remarked on the characteristic freight train sound the twister had emitted while making passage through our county, and the random manner in which flotsam and jetsam first scooped up then casually vomited by the storm had deposited itself. As, for example, the holstein milk cow Gabe Sutter thought he had lost to the twister’s maliciousness, at least until his neighbor, Abe Connor, found the creature still chewing her cud in his, Abe’s, kitchen, calmly dropping cow pies on his, Abe’s, kitchen linoleum. Aside from the de-materialized grain bins and tool sheds and library/museum/casino, and many a shattered fencepost and windmill and telephone pole, and the scattered elms and maples and oaks and other assorted flora ripped to shreds by the twister’s winds, and a handful of hereford yearlings found in an ungainly pile by the river, their necks gruesomely snapped -- the calves not aligned with Lady Luck, apparently, as had been Gabe’s holstein (for ever unpredictable is the cosmic crap game in which all and sundry are mere players) -- the storm blessedly did relatively little in the way of material damage, and not a single loss of life, or at least of human life, Saints be Praised.
Excepting, of course, the boy fallen into a cougar’s clutches. Missing and presumed … well, missing.
Once assembled in the church basement we collectively marveled again at the storm’s power, remarking again on the awful and absurd terror of raw nature, his Mother most of all, for none grieve a child’s loss quite like the Mother of that lost child. Arch at Faith’s side, staunch-backed and stoic, determined not to make eye contact with the midnight-blue clad agents arrayed at the back of the church basement in surreptitious fashion, concealed so effectively that Arch alone much noticed them. “A. Jacks” as he eventually came to be known, or, more accurately, A. Jackson Payne, which by and by was shortened to A. Jackson, then A. Jacks, sat alone on a folding chair in the back of the church, or so Faith testified -- for none amongst us much noticed him either -- as Pastor Bowman intoned the homily to the cadence of sobbing women and more than a few sobbing men. The boy, Thomas, A. Jacks had saved by timely colliding with a leaping lion sat head bent and eyes closed at Faith’s side, unable, apparently, to so much as witness the awful event, buckled at the emotional knees as he undoubtedly