Child of the Storm

by R. B. Stewart

  “We never talk about magic and powers,” Celeste said to the bear on that night after Flossy tampered with her home. When she hoped for guidance, Celeste favored a less expansive setting and often chose a dream counterpart to her own porch on the waking side. A porch with a chair for her and a space beside it for the bear, with a sky of stars or of meaningful clouds to watch but not worry over. The bear would sense these times and let Celeste trace her ear with a long finger.

  “We never do,” the bear agreed. “Are they things we need to talk about?”

  “Some believe in magic or having power over things.”

  “Power over what manner of things?”

  “Just about everything, if you believe the talk. Health, love, death…the weather.”

  “You don’t believe the talk.”

  “Never did. Never believed in anything I couldn’t see or touch or smell or taste. Or feel deep down.”

  “Like you felt your father when he was away, or your mother when she had passed, or even me, when you were lost in distraction.”

  “Yes, like all those things.”

  “And now, having felt those deep down things, you wonder what else lies deep down, or deeper, where you might find powers over love or death? Is that what we are meant to find?”

  Celeste sat in silence for a time, gathering her thoughts, her words and her motives, and the bear did not interrupt.

  “I’m a simple woman,” she began.

  The bear interrupted. “You think so?”

  “I want simple things,” Celeste began again. “I have the life I need since I have made it or accepted what’s come my way without complaint, since none was warranted. Love, I’ve had and still have, of the kind I can manage well. Death has walked so near as to be no stranger. I want to see things done well, and proper care taken. I don’t want to shrug off what is mine to do, if it’s something I can do—or could do if I only knew how to go about doing it.”

  “And what is it you would do?”

  “If everything is connected, and changes by being connected, well, it occurs to me that what can change me, could be changed by me as well.”

  “Seems only fair.”

  “When the sun is hot, I change to the shade. If the rain falls, I step out to feel it. Each touch changes my path in life, even by just the tiniest bit. Sometimes for the good.”

  “Bound to be so.”

  “I want to touch back. I want to see if all this touching and seeing and feeling might give me the chance to touch back and touch the course of the wind or the clouds.”

  “And this has to do with powers?” asked the bear.

  “No,” Celeste said, thinking of that great big Gulf and its stormy and wandering children. “This has to do with protecting those I touch and love.”

  Clay

  The old man approached the counter, digging deep in an uncooperative pocket for money, which he finally caught and pulled free.

  “We haven’t seen you lately, Mr. Douglas.” Annie asked. “You want your usual?”

  “The usual,” he said, slapping his coins down on the counter under his wrinkled hand like he was ordering a shot of whiskey.

  “Did your place come through the storm okay, Mr. Douglas?” Celeste asked. He was one of their oldest and most loyal customers, though not the biggest spender.

  “Came through fine this go round, Miss Dubois. Next time, might not be so lucky. Feet of clay, Miss Dubois. Feet of clay.”

  “What do you mean by that, Mr. Douglas?”

  “You know your Book of Daniel?”

  “Not as well as I probably should, Mr. Douglas.”

  He raised his old chestnut chin toward the ceiling to pontificate. “Pharaoh dreamed of a fine statue with head of gold, body of bronze and all manner of grandeur down to the feet, but the feet, Miss Dubois, the feet were partly of iron and partly of clay.”

  “Doesn’t sound like a proper footing for a fine statue, Mr. Douglas.”

  The old man pointed a shaky finger at her and nodded. “Just so, Miss Dubois.” He dropped his voice to a harsh whisper as he leaned in toward her across the counter. She leaned toward him to receive the confidence.

  “Tried out some of the bread somewhere else. Only ‘cause it was a little cheaper, and I’m not a rich man.”

  “Rich in other ways, Mr. Douglas,” Celeste offered.

  “That’s so. But I’m back here ‘cause that other bread wasn’t worth even what they charged for it. Was fine to look at, but not worth eating. Like dust in my mouth.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that, Mr. Douglas. Glad to have you back.”

  He leaned in closer still. “Like the levees, Miss Dubois. They may look just fine, but you can’t go by that. All in how they’re built.”

  “Have to know what you’re doing and don’t cut corners,” Celeste agreed, drawing the old man out. “Same with bread and levees alike. Some levees in particular you don’t like?”

  “Guess I like the river levees. She laid down her own. Did you know that? Only she just builds high enough to manage for a time, until she floods and lays down a bit more. Still, she’s laid down a decent start for us to build on. No, it’s some of these others I don’t trust. I walk ‘em sometimes and can feel it’s not right down there. Can feel it in my feet.”

  “Like a water dowser?” she asked.

  “Maybe so,” he nodded. “Only finding water in New Orleans is no big trick. Water’s always coming in and going out. Just don’t want it taking a levee with it.”

  “Wouldn’t want that, Mr. Douglas.”

  He turned and shuffled off toward the door. “Came through Flossy just fine, Miss Dubois, and thanks for asking. Hopefully I’ll make it to my reward in a nice dry bed before those levees get tested too hard.”

  “That’s a funny old man,” Annie said.

  Celeste didn’t think it was that funny.

  The following Saturday, she stood across the street from her house with George and a young handyman he knew named Miguel. His old truck was parked nearby, the back of it loaded with the tools of his trade; ladders, saws and such. She gestured toward the face of her house, drawing in the air as she squinted.

  “I need a window above the roof of the porch, up where the roof makes a triangle,” she explained. “Not even a window really, just a hatch I can open from the inside.”

  “What do you need it for,” George asked. “You putting a room up there? Doesn’t look like there would be roof enough to stand up in.”

  “A sitting room then,” she jabbed. “No, I don’t need a proper room, just an attic space with a way out across the porch roof.”

  Miguel nodded. “If a flood comes.”

  “If a flood comes,” she repeated. “Flossy wasn’t much, but worse could follow and I’d hate to be chased up into the attic and have nowhere to go if the water kept rising.”

  “You think that’s likely?” George asked.

  “Likely doesn’t figure into it. Unless someone I trust tells me it could never happen, I’d rather be safe than sorry. Rather not find myself trapped by rising water and wishing I’d taken a precaution to save myself.”

  For her own safekeeping, she’d done what she could. For the sake of the day-to-day need for bread and friendship, she did what she could do there too. Some days better than others. She made no fuss over the doing of these day-to-day things. All in a day’s work. All for the good of anyone who might benefit, as she benefited from all those unsung day-to-day things they did as well.

  But when there was time for her to slip away to that other world where the bear with its kind eyes waited, she would do so without a backward glance, knowing the chores and friends of her tangible world would be right where she left them when she came back again.

  There were wide and deep connections to sense out, and she wasn’t getting any younger—whatever the bear might say.

  Audrey

  The storm season of 1957 was still young, not quite out of June when Hurricane Audrey tore into the coast wes
t of New Orleans, landing between Louisiana and Texas like she meant to drive a wedge. Warnings went out, but Audrey jumped the schedule and showed up early, catching many in their sleep. A surprise to most, but not to Celeste.

  In the two and a half years or so since Flossy inspired her to dig deeper into her rarer talents, she had explored the language of the air. Like a baby’s first words, maybe so, but a starting point on a road she could see no end to. Only Aurore noticed any difference. Pointed out whenever Celeste offered up a casual reading of the weather, but increasingly, readings about people too. Chance encounters and dear old friends alike.

  “Like knowing of your old friend John Stone’s passing, before word could make it here.”

  “So glad I saw him that last time, thanks to you.”

  “Some day, I think we should swap callings,” Aurore said. But Celeste just shook her head at that.

  From her porch Celeste had seen the distant darkness that was Audrey, then stood out back as the far flung bands of light rain drifted through New Orleans—the wet fingertips of the hurricane. The wind was fresh but not strong enough to pull the leaves from trees, much less the roofs from houses. Not in New Orleans.

  Later, she felt anxious but couldn’t put her finger on why that was until Aurore phoned and made it clear.

  “You remember my family we visited years back?” said the voice of Aurore.

  “Your niece and the little twins,” Celeste said.

  “Everyone is accounted for but them. There’s been no word.” There was a silence that Celeste would not interrupt. “You said Audrey would come in early. I remember you saying it and I didn’t do anything about it.”

  “What could you have done?”

  “Maybe nothing. But I need to do something now. I need to go out there and see if I can find them. I need you to come with me, if you will.”

  “You know I will. Likely to be bad out that way and the roads in a mess. If I go, I’ll want to take George and his truck.”

  “That would ease my mind, Celeste. You think George will come.”

  “He will. I know George. We’ll be around as soon as I can pull him together. So be ready.”

  They rolled out of New Orleans early, splitting the dark with high beams, the three of them packed into the cab of George’s old but reliable truck. He had grabbed up what day-old bread he could from the bakery and stashed it in the back in case they found folk needing something to eat—or if they needed it themselves should the truck give out in an untimely way and some unfortunate place.

  By the time the sun was pushing up toward the horizon, there was enough light to see evidence of the storm. Leaves littered the road and there was the occasional pine tree toppled over. Celeste knew they were bad about that, because their wood was weaker and their roots more shallow than an oak’s. In soft soil or sand, a lone pine left to face heavy rain and a heavy blow was easy prey for a storm. You could see them even this far from landfall, toppled to the ground with half of their desperate roots clawing at the air like dead and helpless fingers.

  They tried road after road only to find them blocked by trees or broken by sections washed clean away. Some small bridges were gone or so feeble looking that they dared not cross. All of this pushed them north of the path they had wanted to take; the path to find Aurore’s missing family.

  Each time they came to a fork in the road, Aurore would ask Celeste which way to go and each time, Celeste had an opinion. Aurore never challenged it, nor did George.

  Audrey had been fast and savage. In broad areas, the landscape was like a nightmare; stretches of it leveled and coated in a monotonous grit. The scale of it was hard to grasp. A world turned inside out and head over heels. The human side of life made to look small and feeble.

  They came upon a family standing in a silent group outside their smashed house as the mother ran frantically this way and that, into the house and back out again as she desperately searched for Billy and called his name, over and over again. The roof of the house was askew, and in one place there appeared to be a sheet hanging half in and half out of the house—between the roof and the walls, where it had been pinned when the roof lifted up and the sheet was sucked out through the gap.

  George went to help the woman look, but something about the scene looked wrong to Celeste. She and Aurore went over to the silent family members who looked exhausted, unable or unwilling to help in the search for Billy. They watched George and they watched Billy’s mother as she ran here and there, heedless of his offers to help.

  “Nothing you can do here,” a man said to Celeste before she could say a word. He didn’t even look at her. “Her son Billy’s been dead for two years, but she won’t listen. Guess this storm made something snap.”

  Aurore left it to Celeste to decide what to do, but Celeste agreed there was nothing much they could do. They collected George and left the family a little bread before setting off again.

  There were other such encounters, but likewise, little to be done, since it was just the three of them with nothing more than a little bread to offer. They even found a horse standing in the road, with a goat lying beneath it in the shade of the horse’s broad belly. No injuries they could see except for evidence of a shock to the mind of each and a need for peace to sort it all out. There was grass and water in the ditch so they went around.

  At the westernmost reach of their journey they came to a sight that Celeste recognized all too well, and a deep chill ran through her in spite of the heat of the day. The road was impassable, buried under stacked tree trunks and splintered branches, as if giants wielding scythes had mowed it. To left and right, the carved path of the tornado stretched as far as they could see, and if anything or anyone lay beneath that tangled deadfall of wood, there would be no telling. It was absolutely still and silent—like some awful snapshot. No sign of life apart from the three of them looking through the windshield. Celeste considered a while before sending them back toward a turn south, farther back the way they’d just come, saying how she’d been mistaken bringing them this way, and apologizing.

  In the end, they came to a crossing in the road, to a town called Elysium though it hardly seemed to warrant a name, small as it was. But there it was, spelled out on a tilted sign by the road. A few buildings loitered around the intersection itself; none of them very close to each other since this was the countryside. Set at an angle to the roads so that it had a bit of yard for parking was a combination General Store, Gas Station and Post Office, its front end compromised by the storm in a most indirect and curious way.

  “Well what do you make of that?” Aurore asked as they came to a slow stop across from the ruined store.

  The trees around the area, some of them large, looked as if they had come through the storm well enough, but the same couldn’t be said for the other prominent building near the crossroads, just back of the store. The church had been cleanly topped, its steeple blown off and the steep roof of it lay crumpled like a dunce’s cap in the field across the road. The rest of the steeple, the parts where the bell and the bats lived, had gone to ground through the roof of the store, and the bell itself had torn clean through the store like round shot, ripping a ragged hole through the flimsy doors and windows. It now lay at the edge of the cracked pavement like a plow at day’s end.

  “I think it would have been something to see,” Celeste said. “Assuming you weren’t standing in the wrong spot.” She laid a hand on George’s as he went to change gears and turn. Stopped him from setting off west, which is how she’d been inclined to take them next. Now, she wasn’t so sure.

  The sight of the store and the church and the bell was so captivating they hadn’t at once notice the old man beside the road, just outside Aurore’s window; a man so dusty that he blended with his surroundings like a chameleon.

  “Morning ma’am,” he croaked. “Or is it afternoon?” He shielded his eyes and looked to the sky.

  “Morning, I think,” George replied. “What happened here?”

&n
bsp; “Judgment,” said the old man. “Judgment pure and simple.” He leveled a gnarled finger at the store. “I stopped in there on the evening before the storm came through. Asked for any old bit of food or drink they might have for a poor and wandering soul, and was shown the door. Didn’t dare push on that night, knowing what was coming and all. Weathered the wind and the pouring rain under that great magnolia over yonder. Couldn’t see what happened but the sound of it told well enough. When I woke the next morning there it was as you see, only there was all these tins of food scattered out in the road and beyond.” He reached inside his coat pocket. “And this was just lying in the mud like a sign.” He produced a can opener. “Now I’m a man of simple means and simpler needs, so I only picked up those tins of things that looked dented, and only as many as would set quietly in my pockets. As for the rest, the shop keeper gathered those up himself.”

  “But that’s been two nights ago,” Aurore said. “You’ve just been sitting here since then?”

  “No ma’am. I get up and stretch my legs from time to time and do what’s called for, but the road can be short on entertainment, so I’m parked here a while to enjoy the show.”

  “I can’t see how there could be much of a show,” George said.

  “Power’s out all through these parts since the storm dropped the lines,” said the old man. “It goes dark at night, except for the old lanterns. No one got hurt in the storm and most of the houses are standing, at least the way I came.”

  “And which way was that?” Aurore asked.

  He pointed down the road coming up from the south. “But you’ll not get through that way, if you’re thinking of trying. Only way in or out is on foot until the crews go in with saws.”