Child of the Storm

by R. B. Stewart

  So Celeste settled in as best she could against the rough wet tree, and waited for some sign of acceptance. “Wild things are more afraid of you than you are of them,” her father had told her more than once. “Most times that’s true,” he would add. “Even so, that’s not to say they aren’t dangerous. Frightened things can be the most dangerous and unpredictable.”

  Rain began to fall again, slowly at first, small and gentle drops falling through the air and the leaves on a light wind that came at Celeste from behind. Rain fell in her hair and trickled down her back uncomfortably, but at least it wasn’t a cold rain. This was a deep summer rain, coming in from the Gulf—pressing out from the spiraling bands of a hurricane. Celeste felt the weight of the storm and could feel it was a big one, maybe the biggest she had ever felt before. Still, as long as there was no lightning, there was no great danger, she told herself, and this bear cub needed her to sit with it, just like Sandrine had sat with her that time when she was little and her mother was sleeping under the Sadness. Poor little cub, she thought. Probably scared stiff, which is why it isn’t scampering off higher to be with its brother.

  Celeste reached out toward the cub, slowly so as not to alarm it, putting forward the palm of her hand like she would for a strange dog. The cub watched her hand draw nearer but held tight to the branch. When Celeste touched the wet fur along the cub’s exposed side, it uttered a low growl, very small and very deep. But to Celeste’s ear it was hard to tell in the rising wind whether it had been a growl or a purr, if bears purred. But she withdrew her hand anyway.

  The wind rose sharply and drove the rain sideways as it went, pounding Celeste’s back with drops like gravel. It smarted some, but not so much that she would cry out, since that might scare the cub and make it climb down. Then she realized that while she was catching the wind and rain in her back, the cub was sheltered from the worst of it. She was protecting the cub from the storm and that seemed the right thing to do, even if the cub was unaware of it.

  Above them the high branches of the Climbing Oak thrashed madly in the air, sending dense clusters of leaves spinning off into the woods beyond. Leaves were flashing past Celeste and the cub, ripped from trees in the front yard or from trees farther off. They swept away from her like the birds fleeing before the storm. When one bit of spinning leafy debris slapped against her neck and clung there, she reached back and swatted it away and the cub shifted nervously.

  “As long as there’s no lightning we’ll be fine,” she said to the bear. “You’re a wild thing and use to the rain and wind, and I don’t mind being out in it now and then myself. Long as I don’t get too muddy, I don’t get in too much trouble.” She was drenched through and there would be words said if she couldn’t get back inside and dried off before her mother woke, which might be a while the way her mother slept when under the Sadness.

  The cub’s fur was heavy with rain even though the worst of the wind driven stuff was falling against Celeste. And now the cub began to tremble and Celeste knew it was afraid. Another bunch of leaves slapped against Celeste and her neck burned. To stay in the tree was dangerous now, lightning or no lightning. But the thought of climbing down in the high wind was more frightening to her, and she thought it would be wrong. She might well make it to the ground without falling, but the cub might not do the same and would lose what little protection she was offering it by staying put. She had seen plenty of hard rainy days and they always moved on, leaving the world fresher and its colors brighter than when they started. A little rain never hurt anyone; she’d heard her brother say when told he shouldn’t be walking in the rain without a hat or coat.

  They blinked at each other, cub and girl. They blinked away the rain from their eyes, then went on watching each other intently as if their eyes could hold them together through anything the storm could throw at them.

  So the storm threw harder.

  Even as the rain slackened the wind rose and rose again, mounting in scales of anger worse than the wrath of churchyard ghosts raging at the living. The cub dug deeper into the bark, improving its hold and Celeste could see the little trickles of water oozing out around each claw. With the roar of the wind and the blur of shredded plants and driven dirt, she focused all she had on her little cub. Their eyes were locked together now and Celeste somehow knew that the cub would let her hold her if only they dared loosen their hold on the tree. Whatever differences there were between them and their worlds, there was only this single desperate holding on between them now. This was no ordinary rainstorm. This was one of the great storms like the one that brought her. She could sense that now, though maybe too late.

  A curious notion came to her in the midst of the roar and lashings. This storm has brought this little bear to me, she thought. I’ve never seen one so close in all my life and then this storm comes along, not to take me away, but to bring this cub to me, and I came out to be with it. And we’ll ride out this storm together. She couldn’t know what it all meant or where it would lead, but she knew she wasn’t afraid anymore, and she would shelter this little cub from the storm, no matter how great it might be and how hard it might blow it could not dislodge her.

  There are storms like the great hurricanes, and like war, they move over the land and through lives, breaking and spoiling indiscriminately. And then there are the smaller but more vicious storms that are born out of their rumbling mothers, spinning and dancing deadly paths of total waste and ruin, carving through home and heart as spitefully as the dark hearted people who hate for the sake of hate alone. As she heard the deeper howling of that rare wind coming from the south behind her, she turned to look, abandoning her little cub for only long enough to see that they had no hope of holding on. She had been disrespectful of the storm, thinking she was special, and it was sending her a messenger to say otherwise. She had heard about tornados even if she had never seen one before, nor heard one, but it was all she could hear now. Her ears felt like they would burst from its voice. It was carving through the trees straight for her, kicking and sucking up a dense and swirling cloud of debris as it came. She turned back to the cub, preferring those deep, dark and innocent eyes to the faceless thing coming to claim her.

  The cub was trembling with fear, so faint a trembling that only she could have seen it because they were almost the same. They were almost one. So much the same that for a moment, she could see herself through its eyes; see herself gripping the branch and trembling with uncontrolled fear as the monster bore down on them, with its flying host of ripped and mutilated trees spinning all round it, like souls being carried away to some dark and final place.

  The tornado sucked up the fields beyond the road and made for her home. Splinters flew like daggers and stabbed into the thick branch beside her. She felt a stinging in her arm and on the side of her face and saw a thin trickle of blood streak across her hand, then spray out into the quick air. The wind had her pinned tight to the branch but she clung to it tighter still and could feel the tree vibrating madly as it fought to hold itself together, gripping the earth with every root it had. She felt the struggle of the tree and saw the eyes of the cub even though she could hear nothing but the howling horn of the tornado. She turned away again and braced once more. The oak shuddered, and every branch and root shrieked and wrenched, but somehow Celeste knew it would lose against the storm and be swept up.

  But it was not entirely swept up. Even as the killer wind gained the road, it lost its footing or was called away again by its parent storm, or sent off by Celeste’s silent cry of NO! It made one last grab for Celeste and the cub, but came away holding only the top half of the tree, and this it flung away into the forest beyond, along with every other victim it still held in its swirling skirt. The oak became still, horribly and maybe mortally wounded but still standing.

  And for some long time Celeste remained clutching the ravaged branch that held her, shivering with shock as a gentler rain fell. At last, she heard a stirring and scratching and opened her eyes to see the cub climbing down
to where its mother waited, watching Celeste. Then they were gone, disappearing into the woods beyond, maybe to find the cub that had climbed so high. Her last clear image of her cub was of it padding across a carpet of sunflower petals; all that remained of the wide field of the tall sun tracking flowers that had once grown on the other side of the road.

  As Celeste began her slow and shaky climb down, she caught sight of her home, flattened by the tornado, even as it withdrew into the sky. She slid more than she climbed, the bark digging at her skin until she couldn’t hold and she fell the last several feet. When she tried to stand; tried to go to the house, she found her legs couldn’t manage and she sagged against the trunk of the ruined tree. Just sat there staring at what had been her home. Now there was only a tangle of wood, nails, shingles, a single plate and the unfinished quilt she had been working on. It had been sucked up through the ceiling and now draped from a splintered rafter like a flag of surrender. The window where she had been sitting earlier, watching the coming of the bears, was cast to the ground, shattered, along with the wall around it. A small tree had driven almost clean through the house, dropping it like an arrow through a deer.

  Her house had once been something with an inside to it where comfortable time had been, but now the inside was gone. Like a room when the lights are put out and the moon isn’t there to shine in, the room just goes away ‘cause you need to sleep and not do anything there till morning. She was sitting on the outside of her house when something like that had just come along and happened, leaving her out here in the mud and the sudden cold while her mother slept and slept in that room where the lights had just been put out. Sleeping till Daddy could come home and wake her up, since it wasn’t for Celeste to wake her under all that weight of Sadness.

  She felt the cold get a deeper hold and then heard a thump that must have been her own head bumping back against the trunk. She closed her eyes. Can’t be real, she thought. Just a bad dream. The storm and all of it, just a bad dream. Seeing the bear cub was good, but sometimes dreams do that. Start out one way and go somewhere else. Like a nice day and a long walk that ends at the white cemetery where the ghost is waiting to take the good out of everything. Take this bad dream away. Just wake up and find her mama waiting for her. Simple as that—only this dream was stubborn. Wouldn’t let her go. Wouldn’t let her wake. Change it to something else. Make it be a nicer, less stubborn dream. Leave this bad dream behind and go somewhere better.

  She opened her eyes again and stared up into the branches of the Climbing Oak, whole and strong and reaching like they had always been and not ripped down to stumps by the bad dream. Better already, and the sun shone down on her through a little break in that great cloud of leaves. Not sun, she told herself. Not sun because she’d have to squint at the sun. Redder than the sun, or like the sun sitting like a bright apple on the bottom edge of the sky instead of high overhead; redder like fire. Like fire in the chimney place or like fire at her Papa's forge. The fire was all blurred like it could be when she sat too close and the heat made her eyes water and the fire blurred and the shapes in the fire moved and changed like clouds rolling in the sky. A shape like a bear. Like a bear of hot coals that was cooling now. Red to black, just up there in the tree. A black bear in the tree, looking down at her with nice kind eyes, dark as could be and swimming with gladness to see Celeste. Like her mother would look at her when she was happy and not under the Sadness. Eyes like her mother’s eyes, only if she had been a bear, and this was a bear. A bear up the tree wanting her to climb up and follow.

  Celeste found her good legs for climbing and followed. Up and up through the branches. Up and up, higher than she’d ever climbed before, following the bear. Maybe miles and miles of climbing. Days and days of climbing with no night in between. Like a walk way past town and on toward New Orleans or wherever her Papa might be. Or Augustin. Climbing up the Climbing Oak and it was so easy. Clear up to the top where the leaves touched the sky and felt the sun and made the wind and smelled of spring. A great big field of glossy leaves for her to stand in, beside that black bear, and see and feel all those things that lived between tree and sun. Things like colors of all kinds that shared a bit of themselves to make more colors, and things like warmth and coolness that flowed high and low, taking in some color too. And clouds licked with colors that took whatever shape they chose, like the shapes of birds or pigs or things with ears like boat sails and fish with mouths like pitchers.

  One big sky full of everything. Everything stirred in together like the best soup she’d ever eaten. All there for her and so real she could reach out and lay her hand on it. More real than a bad dream about a house with no Inside to it. Celeste reached out and traced the edge of the bear’s ear, just as she’d do with her mother’s ear, and the bear turned to her with those dark, dark eyes where everything imaginable swam.

  “It’s all yours, Celeste,” she heard the bear say. “Everything you can hear and see and touch and smell is yours. Maybe not for the taking, but for the touching.”

  But before she could say how she liked the sound of that, or how she would like to see and touch and smell it all, she felt a touch and heard a voice from somewhere else. The bear was gone. The light and the air were cold again, and she was looking into the face of Sandrine.

  “Can you hear me child?” she asked.

  Celeste managed a soft, confused question. “Where’s Mama.”

  She could see John Stone over by the house, trying to find the inside; moving board after board. He moved quicker than she was used to seeing him move, but not a sloppy kind of moving fast. Fast like Mama could do with mending or cooking, or like Papa at the forge, or like she could do herself when pulling up weeds in the garden. Careful to do it right, but get it done.

  Sandrine was helping Celeste get cleaned up, maybe for dinner. She was a mess and Sandrine could tell. There were lots of scratches needing to be cleaned up too. She’d been careless again. Always skinning herself or pricking herself or doing something to get a little cut or a bruise. Must have been ‘specially careless this time. Sandrine took care of the cold too, wrapping her up in something and setting her on a perch out of the mud. She could see sweat on Sandrine’s face, and thought it strange since it was so cold without being wrapped up. Maybe it wasn’t cold where Sandrine was. Right there but kind of far off too.

  John Stone was way, way off, over by the house with no inside to it—where Mama was asleep. But then he opened up the house a little more, knelt down for a while, maybe having a talk with Mama but not just walking in until invited. Talked a while then stood up and looked up their way. Celeste thought she should wave at him, only her arms were all stuck to her sides by the warm wrapping. She saw him look to the sky, then look to the ground beside him like maybe he’d lost something. Sandrine turned Celeste around so she was facing the woods out back, where the bears had gone. She felt Sandrine’s fingers touching the back of her head and her neck. Must be a mess back there. Must need more cleaning up before dinner, so she sat there for a while, watching the woods for bears until Sandrine gathered her up and carried her out to where John Stone waited, sitting on the back of the mule that pulled their wagon. Funny to have a wagon and sit on the mule instead.

  Sandrine handed Celeste up to John Stone where he sat on the mule and he held her safe and tight in front of him as Sandrine went back to sit in the wagon. Mama and Sandrine are good friends. Sandrine will let Mama sleep inside the wagon, she thought. But she had to sit up on the mule with John Stone because she was still too big a mess to sit in the wagon. Mules don’t mind a mess and maybe John Stone didn’t either. She stayed close to John Stone and faced ahead, watching the road go by and watching the mule’s big ears pointing this way and that as it listened to the countryside settling down after the storm.

  Watch

  She was clean and warm and fed. That much was better, but so much else was worse. The bad dream was real. She lay on a bed that John Stone had dragged out into the main room. He and Sandrine sat b
eside the bed, silent and watchful. The door to the only other room in the house was closed. Celeste wouldn’t ask the question she knew the answer to. She asked the one she was not so sure about.

  “Is Mama an angel now?” Her slim knowledge of angels came from what she could piece together from things she had heard Sandrine say. Never a subject at home.

  “She is,” Sandrine assured her. “She’s watching over you.”

  “I know,” Celeste said. She thought of her dream of the tree and of the black bear.

  John Stone shifted uncomfortably and his brow wrinkled. She’d seen this sort of shifting and wrinkling by Papa when Mama said something he didn’t agree with but wouldn’t say so. Not seeing eye to eye, Papa called it. Mama could always read it in him. Always.

  Celeste swallowed a lump in her throat. “Can angels look like bears?” she asked.

  “No child,” Sandrine said, but John Stone seemed to want to have a word. It would have to wait. Celeste could see that.

  “When will Aunt Odette be here?” She’d been told already, more than once, but couldn’t remember if it was tomorrow, or if tomorrow had already come and gone and it would be another time. Hard to remember anything. She tried to picture her house but left it be when Sandrine spoke.

  “Tomorrow. Just as soon as she can get here from the station.”

  “We’ll take the wagon to meet her?” Celeste asked. She’d forgotten this too.