felt dense. It wouldn’t be that bad to just slide in. The darkness could hold her.
“Hey. Hey, Mrs….Rose are you okay?” The girl yanked on her skirt until Rose hoisted herself up. Sill looked like the Old Man and Perry around the eyes, but was otherwise mousy and forgettable, soft chin and shaky hands. The girl pointed at the paper she’d flown at Rose—she wanted something, she trembled with want.
“Spit it out,” Rose said. The sky rumbled.
The girl said something Rose couldn’t hear, and her eyes were like eyes she’d known forever—searching and old, demanding what Rose couldn’t give, posing a question she would not—
“A storm’s coming,” Rose snapped. “Get home.” Words munched along the eaves of the house. Sodden clouds lumbered overhead. (Whether the weather is hot, whether the weather is cold…) As the girl’s yellow t-shirt receded from view, the hayloft she spent so much time in leaned after her like a lover. (…Whether you like it or not.) There never was a less silly girl.
Rose waved the letter after her, shooing her off. The letter: there it was in her hand, with its light blue envelope. Rose Red. The only message that mattered. Fergus paced a circle on the porch. Rose threw it into the air and it came back on the wind, smack across her eyes. Okay, then. She sat on the porch steps and kissed the envelope’s sealed flap. Here we go.
It opened under her fingers like a linen napkin at a dinner party. Everything fell quiet. She looked at the heading. It was dated a long time ago: months. She’d been warned about this, when they’d sent her his things. She’d been warned about a lot—the closed casket, the pieces of him, seams pulled apart never to be resewn. His things half filled a duffel bag: fatigues, combat boots, some drawing pencils, a knife, strange binoculars that saw things blurry, letters from the Brown girl. Things from a man’s world. But he wasn’t a man. Just a boy.
Dear Ma,
I hope you and Fergus are doing good. I am okay here in ------. Things are hard sometimes and I wish I was home sometimes, but -------------- very important work, they say. ------------ then we had a meeting and I thought how funny that was. Funny strange, like you’d say. The food is crap and I still miss your cooking. Yesterday I ate --------- how do you like that? The guys in my squad call me ------. There are ----------- and ------------------ --------------------- stuff you wouldn’t believe, even though I’m sitting here writing it so you know it must be true. I’m thinking about the end of -------, they say it’s ------. Have you seen Aunt Stella? If you do, Ma, tell her I have a new one, say that --------------- I hope to see you and the farm soon. Has Sill been visiting you? I sent her some emails that she says she’ll pass on ------------ break down and get a computer? Well, I better go, we got ------ before morning. Write soon and I’ll get it sooner or later.
Love, Lance.
Below his name he’d drawn a sketch of him and her, standing side by side in front of the porch. Her hair always looked wild in his drawings—but good, like real hair. He was good. The clouds, the rumbling at the edges. She couldn’t hold it off. Stupidstupidstupid. Fergus poked her with his snout. No.
Rose slammed her back onto the porch, trembling and choking, her chest in a vice grip. The sun dropped from the sky and the only warmth came from Fergus’s breath. Wind came ripping through the yard and Rose couldn’t tell where her house ended and the storm began. Fergus scrambled backward and disappeared off the edge of the porch.
“Fergus. Fer-gus!” Wind tunneled through her chest and took her voice, whipped it up into the growing fury. Her yells disappeared in the voiceless roar. Things she’d screamed and things she should have screamed. Lance! She shifted weight onto her hands and knees, feeling the hard porch boards reach out for her, catch her skin and let go.
Something glanced off her back. The roof? Oh, no, I’m not that easy. Colors blurred past—odd shapes—furniture? animals? She held onto the screen door and couldn’t get herself through, couldn’t stop looking back. The sky was emerald. A clump of dirt blew into her face. Ashes to ashes, the wind screamed. Lance! The screen door buckled and shuddered under her fingers and then snapped; she was sucked backward with it. But the wide frame lodged momentarily between the posts on either side of the porch steps and Rose flung her right arm out to grab the porch beam, dragging herself toward it, clutching, trying to pull the wood into her chest. Hold on, hold on. The house trembled, wanting to let go, she could feel it talking to the storm.
Then a tremendous crack: wood split, the floor groaned. Something came at her—a hard, black shape—and darkness fell with quick, relentless grace.
*
Dust devils, cyclones, whirlwinds, waterspouts, twisters. Tornado. A modification of the Spanish word for thunderstorm: tronada.
A tornado begins most often with the tronada. Cumulonimbus clouds cluster. Warm updrafts cool in the atmosphere, water droplets and ice crystals form and fall; downdrafts are met by upstart updrafts. Air rushes in to fill the void. Nature becomes a vacuum, sweeping dirt into the vortex, growing darker and stronger, and spinning around its axis. The twister can travel anywhere.
The birds know first. They cluster unnaturally, stringing themselves along the power lines and flying in angular patterns. There is a more than usual darting to their movements, a quickening. Then insects disappear—dragonflies, bees, mosquitoes, ladybugs, spiders, cicadas, and weevils crawl for cover under leaves and into the rotting black logs out by Johnson’s Creek. Voles burrow. Mice gather in their dark dens and fall into anxious dreams, kicking and biting in fitful sleep. Barn cats and house cats crouch in readiness, tails twitching.
Not all see it coming. The colorful denizens of a fish tank wind their way blissfully back and forth between the tines of the plastic merman’s plastic trident. A worm in a supermarket pear shipped from Argentina eats a peaceful path through its mealy universe. This pear, long past its prime, sits atop Scottie Dunleavy’s worktable in the small back room of Dunleavy’s Fine Shoes (&Shoe Repair) on the almost forgotten end of Main Street, a few blocks down from the old town square.
Tornado. From the Latin tonare, meaning to thunder, which is also related to astonish, detonate, stun.
Scottie Dunleavy
Loop around, again, to the morning of the storm.
Here is the town, here are the people. Beyond are the farms, and the church with its steeple. Scottie Dunleavy pressed his fingertips to the glass. He didn’t care about churches or farms. Just watch what’s right outside your window and you’ll see more than most people ever will.
Across the street at Mondragon’s Emporium, Ward Mondragon swept the porch with broad, distracted motions, not much dirt to pick up since he did the same thing every morning. Stella Mondragon’s dark head moved among the shelves inside the store. Ward and Stella were the only signs of life from Scottie’s front window. It was early. Mondragon’s Emporium had been around even longer than Dunleavy’s Fine Shoes (&Shoe Repair), and Ward was trying to keep up appearances. All of the Main Street shops had lost customers when the Discount SuperStore opened, though Mondragon’s still took in business from people who didn’t have time to drive twenty miles down the interstate for cheaper duct tape or flour. Ward bent to work some dirt into a dustpan and then set the broom by his door, turning to straighten the chairs that lined the porch, looking up and down the quiet street. Five years ago when Crown Co. opened a meatpacking plant on the edge of town, they’d waited for the promised influx of workers with wallets full of cash. They were still waiting.
After awhile Ward went into his store and Stella came out with car keys and a cell phone in hand. Scottie stepped back nervously. Stella gave him funny looks. She spoke too slowly when she talked to him. Her eyes always found the spots on his clothes where he’d dribbled soup—he didn’t have time to use the Laundromat as often as he should. After his parents died and the house was lost, Scottie moved into the back stockroom of Dunleavy’s Shoes with his cat, Dogberry, shoeboxes full of his mother’s costume jewelry and his father’s cufflinks, a cot, and paperwork charting the two-decade decline of the family business.