Under a Dark Summer Sky

by Vanessa Lafaye

  Missy looked out the window one final time. No sign of either Mama or Selma. It was unnaturally dark outside, more like evening than late afternoon. And suddenly she was overwhelmed by the certainty that they must leave immediately.

  “Time to go,” she said to Nathan and wrapped his blanket tighter. “Most likely we’ll meet them on the road.”

  Once outside, she realized the strength of the wind was far greater than she’d thought. It hit her with such force that she staggered and nearly fell over. Rain stung her face, her arms. Briefly she wondered if she had left too late, that maybe she should go back inside, but Mama’s little house had started to sway. One of the posts that supported the porch gave way and the roof sagged. The shelter was not far. They would be fine. It was just a matter of one step then another. She gripped Nathan tighter to her chest. He made no sound at all, just looked up at her with his trusting blue eyes. “Don’t you worry, Nathan. We be fine.”

  Small missiles buffeted her all over. With every step, the strength of the gale seemed to increase. She had to lean over, almost parallel to the ground.

  She tried to picture Henry’s face again, which helped to calm her in most situations, but it only made her sad now. The wind grew stronger. An icy trickle of fear seeped into her heart. It got worse with each step, although they should have been closer to the store by now. So she did what she always did when she was scared: she sang.

  “‘Don’t you know, God is able, he’s able, he’s able, he’s able, y’all.’”

  That helped. She felt stronger. Nathan felt more settled too, as if the vibration coming through her ribs had soothed him. “You like that? Almost there, precious boy, almost there.” She knew it would not be long before bigger objects took to the air. The wind grew stronger still. She dodged a milking stool just in time. In a louder voice, she sang, “‘Clouds may gather, all around you, so dark and sable.’ You know what sable mean, Nathan? It an animal, like a muskrat but prettier, with oh such soft fur.” Or so the Encyclopedia Britannica said. “Words is funny, Nathan; they can do two jobs at the same time. Sable a color too, dark brown.” She raised her eyes to the furious sky. “Nothing like these clouds, though. They is plum, or violet, or…burgundy.” The unfamiliar word felt funny in her mouth. “And burgundy got two jobs too. It a place, a faraway place, called France, where they don’t talk like us and eat different stuff and all.” She wrapped herself more tightly around his little body. “Henry been to France, he say—” Her throat closed. She refused to cry. Instead, she croaked, “‘Surely, surely, he’s able to carry you through.’”

  Except that for the last few yards, she had started to realize they weren’t going to make it after all. Bigger chunks of wood, coral, glass, and stone flew at her. Her arms and legs were cut and bleeding. Soon would follow objects big enough to knock her from her feet or crush Nathan against her. She had to get out of their path. The wind sucked the air from her lungs. Her shoes felt made of iron. She must not let Nathan feel her fear. Its malevolent voice urged her to drop the baby and run for her life. She could make it to the shelter without him. Breathless from the effort of standing still, she said, “Tell you what, baby boy; we gonna set down and have a little rest.”

  She climbed into the filthy ditch, already half flooded, and huddled over Nathan, tried to make herself as small as possible. Nathan whimpered. “I got you, honey. I got you.” Henry’s smile came to her, and she was comforted.

  • • •

  “For the last time,” Selma said to Jerome, “we got to go.” She waited by the door with her small bag of necessaries, Elmer the rooster tucked under one arm. People took their pets to the shelter; she was taking Elmer.

  Jerome had tied one on the night before with a load of other idiot storm watchers down at the beach and carried on drinking when he woke up. It was his favorite hangover cure. He was sprawled in his chair, cuddling a bottle of rum. “You go on,” he said. “I be fine here.”

  She stroked Elmer’s russet feathers. It seemed to calm them both. She had brought the rest of the birds inside, where they clucked nervously around her legs. They had made a mess of Grace’s rag rug, but it didn’t matter. She would clean it up. Her beans and tomatoes would be ruined, but as long as the salt water held back, they could be replanted. She always thought the worst part of any hurricane was the mess it made.

  “You crazy?” she yelled at Jerome. “You seen it out there?” She put her eye to a gap in the window boards. The wind had begun to tear the town to pieces. The street looked like a canal.

  “Exactly, Selma,” he said. “We safer here. Now come away from the window and have a drink.” The single bare electric bulb flared and went out.

  If that big wind picked him up a hundred feet in the air, he wouldn’t feel a thing.

  “Jerome,” she said in the voice that usually brooked no backchat, “get outta that chair. We going. Now.”

  He just wrapped himself tighter around the bottle. With a sleepy smile, he said, “I keep an eye on the house, Selma. See ya later.”

  Something thudded loudly against the front door. She did not relish even the short walk to Jenson’s store, not in that wind. Worse still was the idea of staying put. She knew exactly how much the house could take—and what destruction hurricanes could wreak. As a child, she and Grace and Henry had hunkered down many times, with only the kitchen table for protection. Grace believed the old spirits would save them, and it seemed she was right. One time they emerged to find all four walls still standing but the roof removed cleanly, as with a huge can opener. Another time, the whole house was destroyed around them, but the kitchen table was untouched.

  It was the same one they still used. She had prepared Jerome’s meals on that table for fifteen years. On the underside, it bore her initials and Henry’s, which they had carved during a particularly fierce storm in case it blew away, so someone would know they had been there.

  Jerome was asleep in his chair, mouth open. The house shivered like a wet dog, and Selma made up her mind. With one last look at him, she said, “God bless,” and left.

  Chapter 20

  In the mess hall at the veteran’s camp, the men had been waiting a long time for instructions with nothing to do but drink beer. So they had waited and drank. And waited and drank some more.

  “My friend Marvin,” said Lemuel, “he been in a hurr-a-cane before lots of times, and he seen a shark swimmin’ down the street in Havana.”

  Sonny nodded solemnly, like this was a bulletin straight from National Geographic.

  “I got a friend too,” said Tec Brown, “and he says snakes travel on the ground in the same direction as the hurricane for days before.”

  “My friend,” said Carl Bukowski, a motor mechanic from Wisconsin, “says you got to leave open a window or else your house’ll explode inward from the change in pressure.” Carl was a slight, nervous young man who suffered so badly from shell shock that any loud noise could unman him, even Tec’s farts.

  “And my friend,” said Stan Mulligan, “said the best thing to do is put your head between your legs and kiss your ass good-bye!” He cackled and clinked his beer bottle against Tec’s.

  “Mr. Watts said we’d be going to get the train,” said Carl. “He said that, you all heard him. What’s taking so long?” He shredded the label from his beer bottle.

  “And you believe him?” Two-Step asked. “Because he’s taken such good care of us so far?” He spat and crossed his arms. “My money says there’s no train. No one gives a shit about us; we know that for sure. They left us here to take our chances.”

  The little color remaining in Carl’s face drained away.

  “Don’t listen to him, Carl,” said Jeb. “The train is comin’. And even if it wasn’t, Two-Step, there ain’t nothin’ in nature could be as bad as what we seen in France.”

  “You got that right, brother,” said Franklin. “I’d face a hurricane any old d
ay. Nothin’ scares me no more.”

  Suddenly the roof screamed like an animal in pain. The men gulped their beer. Carl made a sound like a leaky balloon.

  Two-Step stood up with a loud belch. “All you pussies better prepare for the day of judgment,” he said with dark glee. “’Specially you, Bukowski. Yessir, you’d better wipe your snotty nose and get ready, ’cause it’s here, Bukowski!”

  A lantern blew off a table and went out. Carl shouted in alarm and flung himself to the ground, hands over his head. Two-Step laughed long and loud. The wooden sides of the mess hall rippled like they were made of canvas.

  Trent Watts entered the mess on a gust of wind that almost knocked him off his feet. He was wet through, bald head shining. He had briefly considered cutting off the beer but decided the last thing he needed was a mutiny. The room hummed with tension, the air heavy with the smell of fear and hops. The relief train should be almost there by now, although by rights, it should have been sent days before. The speed of the storm’s arrival was unlike anything in his experience, from squally rain to destructive winds in a matter of hours. Even Jenson Mitchell seemed taken aback in his last phone call before the line went down, urging Trent to evacuate the men. That time, Jenson was preaching to the choir. At last, help was on the way. They would shelter at the station until it arrived. The flimsy mess hall already looked about ready to collapse.

  “Ladies,” Trent hollered, “we’re going to the station to wait for the train. It won’t be long, and we’ll have more protection than here at the beach.” Water surged in under the walls and scooped out lagoons in the sand. “Watch yourselves out there; got lots of debris.”

  They filed into the storm. Palm trees knelt in deference to the mighty wind, their trunks bowed to the ground. The air was alive with pieces of wood and metal and swirling sand that made it almost impossible to see. As soon as he stepped out of the door, Carl took a blow to the head from a flying plank torn from a cabin. He went down without a sound. A large flap of skin hung over his eye. Blood soaked the front of his shirt.

  “Get him to the station!” Trent yelled.

  Stan and Franklin half dragged Carl away, but they had not gone far before Stan suddenly spun sideways with a scream that carried even over the wind, hands clutched to his belly. A wooden fence post protruded from his abdomen. Lemuel scooped up the big man as if he were a child and ran in the direction of the station. The others hung back in the lee of the mess hall, which provided a little shelter from the wind. Water rose around their ankles. A corner of the roof peeled back, as if pulled away by a giant hand.

  “Get moving, ladies, NOW!”

  They stepped quickly into the ferocious wind, heads down. And then the entire ocean-facing side of the building came off and flew into the sky, light as a leaf.

  • • •

  Still many miles to the north, the relief train sped onward through the rainy darkness, its headlight illuminating wet tracks strewn with debris. The massive cow catcher on the front of the locomotive could blast through most obstacles, but they had already stopped twice to remove a big branch and a section of fence.

  The chief engineer, Ken Cramer, had taken some persuading to allow Henry and Jimmy on board. They had waited in the yard while Moses made the case for them. They could hear nothing of the conversation, just watched it through the office window. There was a lot of shouting. Cramer folded his arms at one point and spat. But Moses had kept on.

  Clarence had studied the scene through the window. “Ken ain’t a bad man. He just hate any ideas but his own. So the trick is to make your idea his idea, ya see? Moses, he good at that.”

  The engine was ready. All 160 tons of it snorted and hissed like a racehorse at the gate. Its shiny black flanks seemed to puff in and out with great gusts of steam. It had seemed to Henry like the most powerful thing he had ever seen. And it needed to be. His body fairly vibrated with impatience. If the weather was this bad up in Miami, it would be much worse in the Keys. “Come on, come on,” he had said under his breath.

  “This looks good, ya see?” Clarence had asked. “Ken’s arms is unfolded. He leanin’ forward.” He clapped Henry on the back. “Congratulations. The deal be done.”

  Indeed, the chief engineer had looked more relaxed although still dubious. Moses was smiling.

  “Well,” said Henry, “let’s hope that Moses lives up to his name. Jimmy, you don’t need to make this trip—it ain’t your fight. You can stay here or go up to Pensacola to meet your folks.” He did not want to be responsible for putting the boy in harm’s way again.

  Jimmy did not move. “I’m going with you. Uncle Dwayne been good to me. He’s gonna need help. I’ll come back up here to get the truck when the storm is over.”

  Henry regarded him for a long moment. Time to stop thinking of him as a boy.

  • • •

  “The thing that swung it,” Clarence said later, “was you being a war hero and all. Cramer fought in France. Almost didn’t make it out. Man’s only got half a stomach, ya see?”

  They sat in the first carriage behind the engine. Moses was assisting Ken in the engineer’s compartment. With the rain-swept darkness pressing in on the carriage windows, it seemed to Henry they could have been anywhere: another state, even another country. It could be the blasted, cratered French countryside out there instead of a Florida swamp. Only the hot, muggy air gave it away.

  The swaying motion of the carriage made him realize how tired he was. How long was it since he had slept a whole night? He could not remember. “I’m no war hero,” he said with a yawn.

  “You is now,” chuckled Clarence. “What was it like? Over there?”

  “Didn’t you ask Ken?” Henry did not want to have this conversation, not now. He wanted to blink his eyes and find the train pulling in to the Heron Key station. His whole concentration was fixed on what to do when they arrived, how to find Missy and Selma, how to get his men to safety.

  Clarence shrugged in the direction of the conductor’s cab. “He won’t talk about it, ya see? We only knew about his stomach when we saw him with his shirt off one time. Man, you musta seen some wild shit out there.”

  Henry bit back his caustic reply. Clarence’s face was so openly curious, no malice there, and he had the man to thank for getting him on the train at all. “You could say that.” Night had been the worst time in the trenches. The mind supplied what the eyes couldn’t see, only far, far worse. Sometimes a flare would go up and illuminate the ravaged, unnatural landscape of shell craters, which stank of rotting flesh. But mostly the men just sat and smoked and waited for the cold comfort of daylight.

  As the train clattered on, Henry felt some of the same mixture of fear and excitement as before a battle. The weather had worsened considerably as they moved south. The wind punched the carriage again and again, made it shudder on the rails. The rain smashed against the windows. They would have to be quick to get all the boys on board and away. Likely they had been drinking all afternoon, which would not make them any easier to handle. Maybe Trent will have the sense to stop the beer. He hoped to persuade Missy and the others to evacuate too but knew it wouldn’t sit right with them. The shelters had always served them in the past. They had never run from a storm before and would see no cause to do so this time.

  “But what about the women?” Clarence leaned forward. Henry noted that Jimmy was actively listening while pretending to be asleep. “You must have got your share of those fine French ladies?”

  “It’s different there,” said Henry. “Black, white—don’t matter.” Henry thought of Thérèse for the first time in…how long? It used to be her face that he conjured to get him through the bad times. Now it was hard even to remember her clearly. She had taken on the blurred outlines of a dream. Red hair, he recalled that much, fine as copper silk. Skin the color of fresh milk, with a sprinkle of freckles on her arms. The smell of fresh bread that always clung to
her, mixed with her rose cologne. But the rest was clouded. Instead, it was Missy who came to him when he closed his eyes; it was her soft skin that his fingers longed to touch. He pictured her, safe and dry in Jenson’s shelter with the others.

  “C’mon, man,” pleaded Clarence, his arm dangling over the back of the seat. “Give us the lowdown. We want—”

  Henry never found out what Clarence wanted, because just then there was a loud shout from the engineer’s compartment.

  “Hold on!” yelled Ken.

  But it was too late. Everyone was thrown to the floor when the train hit something big and hard enough to stop several tons of hurtling iron. Henry felt the carriage buck wildly beneath him and grabbed hold of Jimmy as he was flung into the air. Somehow the train stayed on the rails. Henry covered his ears against the awful shriek of metal on metal. And then there was only the sound of the wind and the rain.

  They surged into the engineer’s cabin to find Ken on the floor, a bloody gash on his forehead. Moses stood over him, a rag pressed to the wound. “Give me a hand, Clarence!”

  They got Ken back into his seat. “It’s a crane,” he gasped. “A fucking crane. I saw it, but there was no way to stop in time.”

  “Musta blown over,” said Moses. He pulled on a yellow raincoat and hat. “Clarence, come with me.”

  They returned a few moments later, dripping and panting.

  Moses shook water from his hat. More puddled at his feet. “It ain’t the crane that’s caught us. That’s lyin’ clear. It’s the cables. They knotted around the wheels like Christmas ribbon.”

  “How long will it take to get it off?” asked Ken. Blood trickled into his collar. Moses gave him a fresh rag.

  “Hard to say,” said Clarence with a shrug that sent a shower of droplets from his coat. “It’s stuck there good, ya see? Two hours, at least. Maybe three.”

  Henry was all too familiar with the kind of cables used on construction cranes. They would be thick ropes of steel, designed to lift massive loads. It was not an option to cut through them, not without special equipment, which could only be found far away in Miami. No, their only option was to go out and untangle it by hand. A gust of wind rocked the carriage. They could not afford to lose two hours, much less three. “I’m coming too,” he said. “Will be faster with more hands.”