Sing Them Home

by Stephanie Kallos

  Days from now, newspapers all over the state will carry a photo of Mrs. Alvina Closs, coming down that flight of stairs carrying a shoe box; this photo will appear next to one taken at the other end of town, where Dr. Llewellyn Jones’s house looks the same as it did when the State Farm agent took a Polaroid of it in 1978.

  “Where would she have gone?” Larken asks. “Where should we look?”

  “I don’t know,” Blind Tom replies, and then, voicing that which neither of them has been able to say, adds, “She left on her bike, Larken. She went out on her bike.”

  They split up. Blind Tom heads out with Sergei to the house he and Bonnie share, Larken runs to the Williams place, where she finds a group including Bud Humphries and his sister, Vonda.

  The roof of Doc Williams’s garage has been removed and set down neatly about twenty feet away, in the middle of the yard, as if it was the lid of a gift box. All of Bonnie’s whirligigs are still perched on top, largely undamaged. The garage itself is completely destroyed, the street strewn with the mismatched baby shoes and pacifiers that Bonnie hung, like mobiles, from the ceiling. Her scrapbooks are gone. Only the avocado plants remain; three of them in big pots—spindly and standing tall, in spite of the fact that their leaves have been torn off.

  Hazel and Wauneeta appear at their door, in flannel nightgowns and bathrobes. Wauneeta is crying, badly shaken; several of their windows blew out and one of the old elms came down on the turret.

  Larken moves on. Everywhere, she collides with people she’s never seen, stopping long enough to exchange a few words, get information, relay information, point, lead, follow. “Have you seen Bonnie?” she calls to people who know her. “Have you seen a pregnant woman?” she cries to people who don’t.

  Among these searchers, no one among them feels anything yet. There isn’t time for that.

  Gaelan leaves Viney and Esmé and Jon in the paramedics’ care and runs to the park. He hears Bethan before he sees her, frantically calling his name.

  “I can’t find Eli,” she cries. “God, Gae, oh God.” There are others here, also calling, already working at clearing the debris. The bleachers have been flattened like refuse cardboard, stacked one on top of another. The corrugated steel roof of the Emlyn Springs Boosters Club has been partially torn off, its edges warped.

  “Eli!” Gaelan calls, joining his voice with Bethan’s. “Eli! Eli!”

  They hear an answering moan coming from beneath one of the collapsed picnic shelters. Gaelan moves ragged sheaves of metal and wood aside. When they uncover Eli, he’s clutching his notebook to his chest. His eyeglasses are broken. One of his legs is badly cut.

  “I’m shy at dances,” Eli says weakly, and Bethan clasps him to her as if trying to absorb his body into hers.

  Gaelan lifts him up and starts carrying him to the paramedics. Bethan walks close by his side, talking to Eli, holding his hand. They climb into the ambulance and Gaelan waves them away.

  He heads back into the night, empty-armed, in search of his sisters.

  His shoulder is healed now. He can lift anything.

  He’ll carry anyone who needs carrying.

  In the ensuing hours, more is known:

  St. David’s Home for the Elderly suffered severe damage, and two of its residents, Mr. Robert Norris and Miss Greta Hallock, are dead.

  One person, Mrs. Bonnie Jones, is still missing. Mrs. Jones is five months pregnant.

  The Bethel Welsh Methodist Church has lost its roof, its steeple, its bell; across the street, the school is missing bricks and windows. Trees have been knocked down, and in places where the tornado hasn’t touched structures directly, the damage comes from those felled trees.

  Strangers are pouring into town, volunteers from all over the state, the Red Cross, mobile homes and tents, the tents so suggestive of recent Fancy Egg Days that it seems as though all this is merely another phase of the celebration.

  Damage is estimated to be in the …

  The number of people made homeless by the storm is …

  The sky begins to lighten, revealing more ridiculous miracles: Where Bess and Owen Simpson’s house used to stand, a cabinet alone remains, its doors torn off, the wedding china vanished, and yet a single champagne glass etched with the words HARRIET AND LAWRENCE, SEPTEMBER 9, 1951 sits alone and undamaged in the middle of one shelf. Harriet and Lawrence are unknown to anyone here.

  What does it mean? Who is missing?

  Where is our town?

  Where is Flying Girl?

  Everyone looks for her, including the children. They are resolute; they will not be stopped, not by doctors or nurses, not by policemen or state troopers or distraught parents. Flying Girl, Miss Jones, now Mrs. Jones, is the heart of their town. She brought them through the blizzard. She belongs to them more than she belongs to anyone.

  They set out on their bikes, those who still have them. Those who don’t are issued bikes; Blind Tom sees to that, because the newly rechristened piano and bike hospital, KEEP ON TUNIN’ KEEP ON TRUIN’, survived as well, but Bonnie is not there.

  Sergei knows why his master is crying. He retrieves one of Bonnie’s jackets from the bike shop and drops it at Blind Tom’s feet.

  “I didn’t know you were a tracking dog,” Blind Tom says, petting Sergei’s head. “All right, my friend, lead the way.”

  Larken heads for the bridge, but it has collapsed. She stumbles along the edges of the ravine until she reaches Flying Girl’s tree. It’s still lodged in place, while others around it have been torn up by the roots. Bonnie is not there.

  Larken crosses the ravine, climbs up the other side, walks east, farther than anyone, farther than what makes sense.

  Everywhere she notices bits of trash, the kind of things Bonnie would bring home and glue into her scrapbooks: ticket stubs, business cards, the broken earpiece from a pair of glasses. Larken starts picking them up, pocketing them as she goes, these bits of refuse, this roadside trash to which her baby sister assigned such love, such reverence. No one saw these things the way Bonnie did, as artifacts, as evidence of human lives, the smallness and the greatness of human lives contained in detritus.

  Here’s a grocery list written in an even, tidy hand: Bacon, yogurt, eggs, raisins, pineapple, cashews, avocado. The list is written on notepaper printed with the words When you can laugh at yourself you become more whole. Larken tries to imagine, as her sister surely would, the person who made this list. She was making a special salad, something exotic for her monthly bridge group, all widows.

  Who can do this? Larken wonders. Who can go through life as her baby sister has done, assigning meaning to everything, looking, always looking? Whose heart is this strong, to have this kind of imagination and faith?

  Larken picks up and pockets more refuse—a bit of cloth, a carved wooden spoon, a penny.

  In this land that once formed the floor of a shallow inland sea, there are no trees to obscure one’s view, no forests. Looking for a body here is looking among flattened muddied fields, short crevasses where in places one of the underground springs has emerged for a time, become visible, given solace and drink to a small stand of trees. A body might be hidden in these sorts of places, and they are searched by some of the people who are looking for Bonnie Jones, but Larken does not search there.

  She continues to follow the trail of rubbish, the cast-off crumbs that the tornado dropped in its wake. It leads her to Babe’s Meadow Muffins.

  Because of the sudden downpouring rain, the ground is soft and wet; it has a surprising, unsupported springiness. Larken feels as if she’s walking on the floor of a dwelling with faulty foundation framing, or on the top of a sod house, perhaps a whole village of sod houses. Is that possible? Could it be that what she’s believed all these years to be hills are really bubbles overlaid with turf?

  She finds a golf tee, a prescription pill bottle, a pair of wooden dice. And then she sees up ahead—is it that house? The one at the top of the blind driveway? She’s disoriented. Usually she only sees
this landscape in passing, and from the window of a car. And yet it could be. She’s walked that far.

  From a distance, it looks like a doll house: Its back wall has been sheared off, revealing a cutaway view of two floors and many rooms, tattered wallpaper, torn curtains.

  As Larken draws closer, she sees that there’s hardly any furniture inside, only an old sofa with its cushions missing, its coiled springs extruding in places—no sign that anyone has lived here for a long time. It’s hard to know if the tornado did this damage or if the house has been this way for years.

  Propped against the sofa is a bicycle.

  Larken cries out and starts to run, at the same time becoming aware of other sounds—a dog barking, people calling Bonnie’s name. Other figures are running with her, all converging on the place to which she is bound.

  It is well known by every child in Emlyn Springs that—in case of a tornado and in the absence of a basement—one must seek out the center of the house; if there is a bathroom there, so much the better.

  And so it is that—abutted on each side by the walls of two other rooms, in an old, iron, clawfoot bathtub, beneath a stack of sofa cushions and with a copy of What to Expect When You’re Expecting lying open on her belly—Bonnie Jones is found, sleeping.

  They arrive, one by one, breathing hard, their feet muddied: Larken and Gaelan and Blind Tom and Sergei.

  They gather in silence and do not speak until she awakens.

  “What’s wrong?” Flying Girl asks of the kneeling people surrounding her, her voice sleepy and childlike.

  And still they cannot speak.

  Coming more fully awake, she chuckles, not unkindly. “Why are you crying?” she asks, petting each of them in turn. “You’re all so funny. You didn’t have to worry. Didn’t you think I’d know what to do?”

  Standing at attention on the fringes of this scene like defensive line-men guarding the goalpost—heads denuded, stripped bare, bald as cue balls and naked as jaybirds but otherwise intact—are Viney’s hymnbook angels.

  Epilogue

  A Painting Is a Little Lie

  South O got hammered pretty good, but by the time the storm got to Omaha, it was a shadow of its former self, nothing but hot air, a blowhard already bragging about the damage it did in its glory days, down there in the southernmost part of Gage County.

  Newspapers all over Nebraska report on the devastating tornado that swept through the tiny town of Emlyn Springs, leaving two dead and many homeless. There are photos of gray-haired women in work gloves with their backs to the camera and their arms around each other; an overhead shot of overturned cars lining the streets, looking like vertebral bodies bent in a severe scoliotic curve; kids knee-deep in rubble, laughing.

  One caption reads: “Gaelan Jones, former KLAN-KHAM weather-man, and his sister Larken, a University of Nebraska professor, serve a hot meal to Estella Axthem, longtime resident of Emlyn Springs, and one of many people left homeless in the disaster, which destroyed 20 percent of the houses in this tiny southeastern community.”

  The day after the tornado of 2004, a thousand people converge on Emlyn Springs. Kind people, well-meaning people, people with expertise in everything from registering an insurance claim to pouring a cup of coffee, skills much needed and welcome. The good monks of Emlyn Springs’ sister city wire a sizeable monetary donation. Food and clothing come in by the truckful.

  Yes, help pours in from across the state and across the country and they are grateful for it. No mayor of a small dying town will admit to it outright—certainly not Bud Humphries, and especially not when deaths have occurred—but a natural disaster can be a boon, bringing as it does thousands of volunteers into a community, attention, an outpouring of support, and FEMA money. They’ll come out of this okay.

  Still, none of them are so naive as to believe that, at the end of the day, it won’t be they who are left here, deciding whether to stay or go. No one really knows a small town like the people who live there. No one else understands why they stay, maybe not even those who do.

  But if they were to try to explain it, the townsfolk of Emlyn Springs would say that—in those days and weeks following the tornado of 2004, as they freed their loved ones, sifted through rubble, helped their neighbors, salvaged what they could, tore down what was irreparable—they found themselves incapable of leaving, bound together by that rare kind of suffering: an abiding love for a place that has been ruined.

  She is learning new modes of travel.

  She still comes and goes frequently as a soloist—for that is Professor Jones’s long-standing habit—but more and more she chooses to move through the world in the company of others: students, colleagues, new acquaintances, old friends.

  Now sometimes when she is flying, eyes closed, half-dozing, she imagines landing, disembarking, and finding her parents waiting for her at the other end of the tunnel that bridges plane and terminal. The fantasy is so real as to feel like something that actually happened, a true memory.

  Hi, Mom! Hi, Dad!

  And she does find them now in a sense, more often, often unexpectedly—the best and kindest and most forgiving versions of those two people with whom she shared such complexities of feeling. (Trite as it is, the word love is the only one that holds it all. A reduction, as in cooking, their selves caramelized, leaving only a fierce, dense sweetness just this side of scorched, an effort to chew, sticky and adherent.)

  She finds them in a face in a car window glimpsed in passing while walking to school; in an unconscious gesture; in the melody in a stranger’s voice; in the graceful hands of a woman sitting across the aisle from her, knitting. She allows her heart to open then, accepting the cost.

  In late December, the extended family of Hope and Llwelyn Jones is far-flung, standing at great distances from one another on the map of the world:

  In the baggage claim area of Heathrow Airport, Larken unrolls a cherry-colored, hand-knit scarf—an imperfect lacework of randomly occurring holes and dropped stitches—and winds it around Esmé while Jon looks on.

  In a synagogue in Seattle, Gaelan stands among a large, joyful congregation, singing the Mazel Tov song to Bar Mitzvah Eli Ellis Weissman. Today, he is a man.

  And in Emlyn Springs, Nebraska, the firstborn child of Morgan Geraint and Bonnie Jones (midwifed into the world by Alvina Closs) opens her fist to reveal a flat, rectangular piece of ivory.

  These improbabilities set something twanging in the pools of their bellies, and as the birds at lucky dusk cry, Really? Really? Tell me tell me tell me tell me tell me, they all let forth with laughter.

  Acknowledgments

  A couple of years ago, during a difficult time, I took part in literary fundraiser that included the wonderful Malachy McCourt. At one point, I was bemoaning the fact that I was an only child. Mr. McCourt replied, in his beautifully lilting voice, “Ah, but you’re a writer now, dear. You’ve got lots of brothers and sisters.” Indeed I do, and it is my great pleasure to offer thanks for the role they played in bringing this book to completion.

  My deepest gratitude:

  to the many readers and booksellers across the country I’ve met since the publication of Broken for You, without whom the lonely work of writing would be even lonelier;

  to Rich Marriott and M. J. McDermott for their knowledge of meteorology; to Alister B. Fraser and the Bad Coriolis Web site for setting me straight on raindrops;

  to Larry Jones, for sharing a wealth of wisdom related to Welsh culture, language, and music; to Robert Price, for translating the lyrics to the “Nebraska Fight Song;”

  to Dr. Ron Singler, Dr. Mary Case, and Fran Gallo, for providing medical and personal insights into multiple sclerosis;

  to Julie Everson, the former mayor of Wymore, Nebraska; to the citizens of Wymore, including Arnold Irvin, Robert Norris, Bud and Vonda Roberts, and Margaret Thomas;

  to Judith Wills for her Web site artistry; to Dave Bennett for the joke;

  to Dr. Alan Hamlet for his advice on designing a fiction
al landscape; to Richard Weeks, for explaining the inner workings of the piano;

  to the people of Llithfaen and Pwlltheli, North Wales; to Richard and Bethan Ellis of Organic Parc; to the Welsh Language Centre; to the Seattle Welsh Choir;

  to Morgan Entrekin, prince of publishing, for his enduring faith in my abilities, and for including me in the amazing community of Grove/Atlantic writers; to all the Grove gang, including Deb Seager, Elizabeth Johnson, Jessica Monahan, Elisabeth Schmitz;

  to Cindy Heidemann and Cheryl McKeon, who read an early draft and provided the cheerleading support so needed at the time;

  to my fellow writers: Ellen Parker, Craig English, Ron Pellegrino, Lisa Lynch, Heather Barbieri, Jennie Shortridge, Kit Bakke, Mary Guterson, Garth Stein, Randy Sue Coburn, Phil Jennings, Sheri Holman, and the infinitely gracious Sue Monk Kidd;

  to Nan Burling, ChiChi Stewart-Singler, and Alexandra Immel, for being in the room on Epiphany night 2006; to Wendy Dell, Lynne McMahan, Kate Zuckerman for assisting me in my quest for the perfect pancake;

  to Hedgebrook, where I was gifted with the time and space to write the first chapter, and to the Ragdale Foundation, where I received the inspiration to write the last;

  to Dan Lazar, for the offhand but insightful comment about Larken’s comings-and-goings;

  to Simon Lipskar, for saying the hard words that made me write a better book;

  to Lauren Wein—beloved friend, teacher, fellow traveler, and cohort in dreams;

  to Noah, Sam, and Bill for helping me remember to laugh and—when laughter was impossible—for holding me when I cried;

  and finally, to Joan Didion, for her unwitting guidance in navigating the confounding, slippery landscape of grief, and for helping me understand why my mother could never bring herself to get rid of Dad’s shoes.