by Lisa Wingate
I met her eyes, deep and moist and violet, narrowed by folds of wrinkled skin, red from weariness and tears. I realized that I’d never been close enough to really see her face.
I had the feeling she was thinking the same thing about me. “You look like your mama,” she said. “Your mama and my daughter, Elaine, were friends growing up. Your mama was such a pretty girl—big brown eyes and long hair all the way down to her waist, red, not blond like your hair, but you’ve got her eyes.”
I shook my head. Mama never talked much about what the farm was like when she was growing up. I think she was afraid to point out that our farm was once the finest in the county, that neighbors came to share dinners and buy cattle. After my daddy took over, the farm went to ruin and Daddy started selling it off piece by piece to pay the bills. After that, neighbors didn’t want much to do with us.
“Back when my Elaine was young, they had a path worn between your grandparents’ old house and this one.” Mrs. Gibson looked down the road toward the abandoned farmhouse where my grandparents had once lived. “Oh, Lord. Looks like the storm got that old house, and the hay barn, too.”
I followed her gaze, looking at the decaying remains of the house. The front had collapsed in the storm, leaving only the two bedrooms behind the kitchen still standing. Out back, the ancient barn that had sheltered the first cutting of hay looked like a pile of match-sticks. The heavy bales of hay were gone as if they had never existed at all. I wondered how we would survive the loss of the hay, but I didn’t want Mrs. Gibson to know that.
“Daddy just kept junk stored in that old house, anyway,” I said. The words sounded hard, like something Daddy would say. “It needed to be dozed.”
Mrs. Gibson gave me a hurt look, and I wondered why I had said it. I wondered why I felt the need to make her believe the old house meant nothing to me.
“I suppose you don’t remember your grandparents living there.”
I looked at the house, recalling an Easter Sunday, my blue Easter dress, my feet in tiny white Mary Janes, Grandpa’s hands clasping mine as we pitched horseshoes into a pit. I heard him laughing and Grandma fussing about getting the dress dirty. Mother lit four candles on a birthday cake while my brothers and I ran on the lawn popping soap bubbles that seemed to float forever on the breeze. I remembered a soft gray kitten in my lap, purring as I fell asleep on the porch swing just as dusk was falling… .
“No, I don’t remember,” I said. Those memories were too quiet and warm and gentle to think about. It was like opening the door to a room full of beautiful things and knowing you could never go inside.
Mrs. Gibson sighed. “That’s a shame. Your grandparents were good people. Your grandma and I were distant cousins somewheres down the line. She sure loved you and your mama.” Mrs. Gibson didn’t mention Daddy, of course. Everyone knew my grandparents never liked my father.
A pickup with a camper shell pulled into the driveway, and my train of thought slipped away.
“Mother!” Mrs. Gibson’s son and daughter-in-law rushed from the cab.
Beside me, Mrs. Gibson raised her arms, hollering, “Weldon! Janet! Praise God!” The hatch on the camper shell opened, and Weldon’s kids scampered out, four of them, their ages from twelve to five, all calling her name and crying at once.
They crowded around Mrs. Gibson, helping her to her feet. Lacy awakened and stood against the tree with her arms wrapped around her stomach, like she didn’t belong with the rest of them.
I rose unsteadily, feeling as if I shouldn’t be there either.
Mrs. Gibson stumbled backward, pushed off balance by the knot of grandchildren wiggling around her.
Weldon caught her from behind, making a quick, nervous laugh in his throat. “All right, now, all of you. You’re going to knock Granny into the mud.” He leaned around her shoulder and touched the compress on her forehead. “Mama, are you all right? What happened to your head? We tried to come quicker, but the low-water crossing was flooded, so we had to come around the long way.”
Mrs. Gibson twisted clumsily to look at him, dragging the children with her. “I’m all right. Got a little bump on my head in the cellar. Tree fell on the old door, and Jenilee Lane come down with her tractor and pulled us out.”
Weldon and Janet looked over their shoulders at me, and I could see in their eyes what they were thinking: Jenilee Lane came and pulled you out?
Mrs. Gibson laid her hands on each of the grandchildren, taking a head count. “The children are all here. Praise be!”
Weldon’s wife tried to wipe the soot off Mrs. Gibson’s face with a rag. “We had just picked them up from the after-school care before the storm hit. We were on the way home when the warning came over the weather radio. We stopped on the side of the road and hid under a cow crossing, but the tornado turned and didn’t come our way.”
Tears rimmed Mrs. Gibson’s eyes. She wrapped her arms around the grandchildren and squeezed them so hard they squirmed like puppies with their heads caught in the fence. “Granny!” the boy, Toby, protested, his voice muffled by the overhang of her breasts. “I can’t breathe under here.”
Mrs. Gibson hung on and gave the back of his head a knuckle-rub that looked like it might have made a bald spot. “You hush up, Toby Ray. I’m praisin’ the Lord and ringing the bells of heaven here, and I’ll quit when I’m darned well ready.”
Anna, the oldest, wiggled loose from the circle of Mrs. Gibson’s fleshy arms, releasing the rest of the children. They scattered, looking for air. Only the littlest girl, Cheyenne, stayed with her arms around her grandma.
Mrs. Gibson reached down and picked her up. “Oh, that’s my little girl.” She held on tight as Cheyenne wrapped her arms and legs around as far as she could, which wasn’t nearly all the way. There was plenty of Mrs. Gibson to hug.
“My little precious girl.” Mrs. Gibson closed her eyes. She didn’t see Weldon, Janet, and the rest of them turn to look at the house. She didn’t notice their expressions of disbelief as they realized there was nothing left but rubble.
They straightened their faces and wiped their eyes quickly as Mrs. Gibson set Cheyenne down and cleared her throat. “How bad are things around at the neighbor places?”
Weldon gave Janet a guarded look. “It’s bad, Mama,” he admitted finally. “The radio said there were twelve tornadoes reported so far, all over the tristate area, some almost a mile wide, and on the ground for nearly an hour. The state’s never seen anything like it. The one that hit Poetry came from Kansas City, halfway across the state.”
I didn’t hear what Mrs. Gibson said next, some kind of prayer, I think. From Kansas City, halfway across the state, repeated in my mind. Daddy took Nate out of school this morning, and they were headed to the cattle auction in Kansas City… .
My head reeled. I felt Weldon Gibson grab my arm. “Jenilee, are you all right?” He looked at me with the same concern he had always shown when I came into the pharmacy to fill Mama’s prescriptions. Jenilee, are you all right? he’d say, and he’d look right at me, like he knew things at home were anything but all right.
“Weldon … I …” I clawed a hand against my forehead as my vision dimmed. “I’ve … got to get home. Daddy took Nate to Kansas City this morning to the cattle auction. They might be”—in trouble, hurt, dead—“trying to call.” I pulled from Weldon’s grasp, shaking my head to clear the darkening images. “I’ve got to get home.” It was my voice, but it felt as if someone else were saying the words, as if I were standing outside somewhere, watching a movie too horrible to be true.
Weldon came after me with his hands out, like I was going to fall and he was going to catch me. “Jenilee, wait.”
“I’m all right,” I said, unhooking the winch line from the fallen tree and climbing blindly toward the tractor. “I’ve got to go home to wait for Daddy and Nate. If you hear anything, will you let me know?”
Weldon nodded, regarding me with a mixture of pity and concern. “I’ll let the sheriff know about your father and brot
her, and if I hear anything, I’ll come tell you. The phone lines are down from St. Louis all the way to Kansas City, into Kansas and Oklahoma.”
I pulled the choke on the tractor.
“Thanks for saving Mother and Lacy, Jenilee.” Weldon shifted from one foot to the other, like he thought he ought to say something more.
I nodded, but I wanted to tell him I hadn’t saved her, just helped her out of the cellar, and I couldn’t even do that without knocking myself out cold. “She hit her head pretty bad,” I told him as I watched Mrs. Gibson being helped into the car by her daughter-in-law. Lacy was standing beside the car, staring across the ruined field through glassy silver eyes. “I don’t think Lacy’s hurt, but she hasn’t said much since we got out of the cellar.”
“We’re trying to call her mother in Tulsa,” Weldon replied, glancing at Lacy as if there were more to it than that. “Don’t worry. We’ll take care of them. You let me know if you hear from your family.”
“I will. The tornado didn’t hit Springfield, did it? I think my brother, Drew, is still working there.”
Weldon shook his head. “I haven’t heard about any damage down that way, but the news is still real sketchy.”
Strangely, I didn’t feel relief, just numbness. “Oh,” I heard myself say; then I started the tractor and backed it slowly onto the road. My head spun dizzily. I gripped the steering wheel hard to make my hands stop shaking as the tractor lurched toward home.
An impractical hope kindled inside me as I came closer. I pictured Daddy’s truck in the driveway, he and Nate surveying the damage to the hay barn and discussing how they would get some fat government check to keep us afloat next winter.
By the time I cleared the grove of trees and the house came into view, I had almost convinced myself that they were home. But, of course, they weren’t. The driveway was empty, the one-story brick house growing dim in the waning afternoon sun. No yard light, which meant the power was out.
Bo sat motionless at the base of the tree, looking down the road in an eerie silence, as if he knew something.
A coldness came over me as I parked the tractor in the shed. The engine died before I could kill it. Out of gas. Daddy had taken the can to refill on the way back from Kansas City.
Climbing down, I stepped into the faded light as a gust of wind blew by, stroking the grass, rustling the papers that littered the lawn and covered the yard fence. Slowly, numbly, I picked up a scrap of paper, and another, and another.
Scraps of other people’s lives slowly filled my arms—a newspaper clipping, a kid’s math homework half-done, a wedding photograph in black-and-white, a torn page of photos from someone’s scrapbook. The Grand Canyon it said in some kid’s handwriting, next to pictures of a family standing on the edge.
I moved methodically through the yard, trying to bring some order to the world. In the back of my mind, I knew more papers would blow in. More pictures … more scraps …
The sound of a vehicle coming stopped my thoughts, and I looked into the distance, squinting against the twilight. A diesel engine, like Daddy’s truck. I waited for the rattle of the cattle trailer behind it. I could almost hear it… .
The truck came around the bend in the road. Red, not white like Daddy’s. A Hindsville Fire Department truck racing away from Poetry with people in the back.
I leaned against the fence as it passed, clutched the armful of papers to my chest, and sank into the grass, suddenly exhausted. Something inside me started to crack. Closing my eyes, I hugged the bundle of papers and cried.
Evening dimmed the light around me, and the breeze stilled as high clouds flushed crimson and amber in the sunset—just as if it were any other evening, any normal evening. Just as if today were no different from any other day.
A vehicle came around the bend from Hindsville. A gas engine, not a diesel. Not Daddy’s truck.
The car sped closer, then passed without slowing down. Bits of debris danced in its wake, spiraling like ghosts in the twilight. A torn paper brushed against my leg, and I laid my hand over it, looking at the even lines of handwriting—neat, careful cursive like my English teacher used to write, a poem or a song. I didn’t try to read the words. They didn’t matter now.
A police car passed with sirens wailing. After that, there was nothing. Nothing for as long as I sat there. Not a sound, not a voice, not a vehicle passing, or a light from a nearby farm. I heard the faint sound of Bo baying somewhere out in the pasture, telling me he had escaped his chain again, slipped under the yard fence, and run off.
The sound jolted me to life. I stood up and walked to the house, laid the pile of papers on the coffee table, lit a candle against the gathering darkness, tried the phone, cleaned the mess from the dinner that had never gotten eaten, walked from room to room looking at the pictures on the walls. Everything was just where it had been, just where it belonged.
How can there be such destruction less than a mile down the road while we still have pictures on our walls?
It seemed as if everything normal should cease to be.
I sank onto the sofa, staring at the torn papers and soiled photographs on the coffee table. Taking the picture of the newborn baby girl from my back pocket, I propped it near the candle. I stared into her cloudy blue eyes, wondering who she was and if she was all right. The candle burned lower, flickering as it drowned in a pool of melted wax. I closed my eyes, drifting.
Nate’s voice awakened me. “Hey, Jenilee, are you sleepin’? Good God, girl, you don’t do nothin’ but sleep.” I opened my eyes to see him standing in the doorway, his big grin beneath overgrown sandy blond hair, his Poetry Pirates ball cap pulled low in front, the brim curled. Nate was always smiling. When he smiled like that, he looked more like twelve than sixteen, like a little boy full of mischief. “Hey, Jenilee … hey, Jenilee …”
I laughed and felt my body jerk fitfully. Nate vanished like a puff of smoke, and I searched the flickering orb of light from the candle, hoping to find him in the melting shadows. The room smelled of burning wax and rain somewhere far away.
“Nate?” My voice crackled into the air like static on a radio. “Nate?”
Nate wasn’t there. I was dreaming.
The events of the past day flooded my mind as I sat looking through the window at the empty driveway, knowing that if nothing were wrong, Daddy and Nate would have been home hours ago. My heart ripped down the middle, half hope, half dread, a thin, dark line in between.
I leaned closer to the candle, staring at the picture of the baby. Beside it lay the sheet of paper with the flawless cursive handwriting. I picked it up and started to read.
The top was torn away, so that only the lower part remained. The paper was old and yellowed, water-stained on one corner. The torn edge was white, like a fresh wound.
Touching it, I read the words.
… I do not know how to imagine my world, because I cannot imagine a world without you close to me. This terrible separation has been more than I can bear. I sometimes wonder if I can go on, rise and dress each day, cook, eat, work, when you are in a place beyond my imagining. Somewhere half a world away, cold or lost or hungry.
Yet love has no weight, or size, or substance. It does not know the barriers of time or space or distance, of life and death. Love travels on the wind. Love is greater than the trials and the suffering of this world. Love endures all things.
I imagine traveling on the wind like a puff of smoke, seeking you. I imagine floating around you, encircling you. You are not lost or cold or hungry. You are in my arms, and I in yours. We can never be far from one another.
Close your eyes, love.
Imagine.
You are home.
Tenth, November, 1944
I closed my eyes and imagined my little brother, laughing, teasing, driving a little too fast along the county road toward home. I listened to the ring of his laughter until I could believe that what was in my mind was real. I pictured him coming home, as if wanting could make it so.
I could not imagine the world any other way.
CHAPTER 3
EUDORA GIBSON
When an angel comes to you, it will wear the face of someone you know. I learned that from the old Mexican tinker who worked for Daddy when I was a little girl.
“An angel will wear the face of someone you know, so that you will not be afraid,” he said in thick, foreign-sounding English. “So that you will listen …”
It was 1932, and I was just eight years old, a barefoot slip of a girl. I looked at that tinker and thought he must be very, very wise. There was a soft look in his tobacco brown eyes, a hardness in his coppery skin that made him seem ancient.
That night I dreamed about an angel with Grandma Benton’s face. She smiled at me, and touched my face, and told me she loved me, and to take care of my mama.
When I told Mama about the dream and about what the tinker said, she took after me with a bar of soap. “Don’t you be speakin’ none of that voodoo nonsense of Ignacio’s, you hear,” she hollered. “Angels don’t come to Missouri, and sure not to talk to regular folks like us.”
Later on that day, we were told that Grandma Benton had passed away down in Little Rock. Mama was spooked, and she shook her finger in my face. “You’re not to go tellin’ anyone about that dream,” she told me. “Especially not Brother Bartles down at the church. He wouldn’t take kindly to such sinful nonsense.”
“Yes, Mama,” I said. “I’m sorry, Mama.”
“Don’t be sorry.” She touched the side of my face and started to cry. “Just stay away from old Ignacio. He’s talkin’ out of his fool old head. Angels don’t come to Missouri on a regular day and talk to ordinary folk.”
After that, I never dreamed about angels again.
Not until I was seventy-eight years old, lying on the root cellar floor, and the tornado was howlin’ overhead. My sister, Ivy, come to me as an angel, her face all filled with love and her body awash in light. She reached out a hand, and all I wanted to do was take it. She was trying to say something to me, but I couldn’t make out the words.