Welcome to the Greenhouse

by Gordon Van Gelder

  But the thing that makes all that beside the point for now, is that Jane has been monitoring certain species of birds here for years and years, and knows just about everything there is to know about them. Anything she doesn’t know, she looks up in books, or on the Birds of North America website, and then she knows that too.

  On the Garden Box page Kaylee fills in blanks. Species: Tree swallow. Date of visit: 05/04/2014. Time of visit: 4:00 PM. Number of eggs: 0. Number of live young: 6. Number of dead young: 0. Nest status: Completed nest. Adult activity: Feeding young at nest. (Both parents dive-bombed Kaylee today for the entire ninety seconds she had the front of the nest box swung open, swooping down like fighter pilots, aiming for her eyes, pulling up just before they would have hit her head (she happened to have forgotten her hat). When she was done they chased her all the way back to the house. Tree swallows are beautiful, sleekly graceful little birds, white and glossy dark blue, but Kaylee is so not crazy about the dive-bombing part.) Young status: Naked young. (The babies—“hatchlings” she should remember to say—hatched out only two days ago, and resemble squirming wads of pink bubble gum with huge dark eyeballs bulging under transparent lids still sealed shut, and little stumpy wings.) Management: No. Everything’s fine. Comment: Leave blank. The only thing not ordinary about this nest is how early it is, the earliest first-egg date for tree swallows ever recorded on Jane’s farm. Everybody on NestWatch is posting early nesting dates. Climate change, is the general assumption. Kaylee’s parents think climate change is a hoax. Kaylee doesn’t care whether it is or not, but saying so makes her project feel more dramatic, like, more cutting-edge. Submit.

  Next site: Barn. Species: Black vulture. Date of visit: 05/04/2014. Time of visit: 4:00 PM. Number of eggs: 2. Number of live young: 0. Number of dead young: 0. Nest status—and right then Jane’s NOAA Weather Radio emits its long piercing shriek.

  Jane comes in off the porch, where she’s been putting Revolution on the dogs to kill the ticks they pick up in the hay that grows wherever there aren’t any trees or blackberries. “What now? They only announced the watch twenty minutes ago.” The shrieking goes on and on, you can’t hear yourself think. Finally it stops and the radio buzzes three times, and then a robot voice declares, The National Weather Service in Louisville has issued a severe thunderstorm warning for the following counties in Kentucky: Anderson, Franklin, Henry, Nelson, Mercer, Scott, Shelby, Spencer… Kaylee stops listening and goes back to her data entering and her texting. Nest status: No constructed nest. Adult activity: At/on, then flushed from nest. (When Kaylee squeezed through the crack between the barn doors an hour ago, the mother vulture, as always, got up and hesitantly stalked, like a huge black chicken, away from her two gigantic eggs lying on the bare dirt floor. The father didn’t show up this afternoon, which suits Kaylee just fine. Jane says he’s all bluster, but he threatens her as if he means it, hissing and spreading his enormous white-tipped black wings like an eagle on a banner, and she’s scared of him. Scared he’ll barf on her, too; they do that, to drive predators away.)

  “I’m going out to the garden,” Jane says now. She’s wearing her big straw hat, so she’ll be safe from dive-bombing tree swallows. “If you hear thunder, get off the computer fast, okay?”

  “Okay.” Though right now the sky through the study window looks just flat gray, not stormy at all. Young status: (Leave that blank. The eggs should be hatching in ten days or so. Jane’s hoping for two live babies this time. Most often one of the eggs is infertile.) Number of dead young: 0. And so on. Submit.

  She’s worked her way through Patio (eastern phoebe) and Pond Box (Carolina chickadee) while keeping up on Lady Bearcats practice with Morgan, and Macy’s cat’s hairball with Macy, who’s at the vet’s, and checking Facebook every few minutes, and is just starting on Path Box (bluebird, her favorite) when the radio emits its bloodcurdling screech once again. Jane is still in the garden. When the robot comes on again, Kaylee is the only one in the house to hear it say, The National Weather Service in Louisville has issued a tornado warning for the following counties in Kentucky: Anderson, Franklin, Grant, Marion, Owen, and Washington until 6:30 pm. The National Weather Service has identified rotation in a storm located fifteen miles southwest of Lebanon and heading north-northeast at 40 mph. Cities in the path of this storm include Lebanon; Springfield; Harrodsburg; Lawrenceburg; Alton… Kaylee shoves back her chair, grabbing her SmartBerry, and runs to the door. “Jane! Hey Jane!” she yells, “They just said it’s a tornado warning!” Behind her the robot says sternly This is a dangerous storm. If you are in the path of this storm, take shelter immediately. Go to the lowest level of a sturdy building… “They said take shelter immediately!” she shouts.

  Jane drops her shovel and starts trotting toward the house, calling “Fleece and Roscoe! Come!” She doesn’t trot too fast, she’s got arthritis in her knees like Kaylee’s grandma, but Jane is much, much thinner than Mammaw; think of Mammaw trotting anywhere! The dogs race up the steps onto the deck, followed by Jane holding on to the handrail. “Are you sure they said warning?” she puffs. “I wouldn’t have thought it looked that threatening,” and just then they hear the heavy rumble of thunder. Fleece, the white poodle, trembles violently and slinks through the doggy door into the house; she hates thunderstorms. The sky is starting to churn. As the rest of them come in, the radio is repeating its announcement, including the part about taking shelter immediately. Jane says, “Well that blew up out of nowhere! Okay, I guess we get to go sit in the basement for a while. Did you turn off the computer?” Kaylee shakes her head. “Get your data submitted?”

  She nods. “Almost all of it.”

  “Good. Go on down, I’ll be there in a sec.”

  Kaylee snatches up her backpack and runs down the basement stairs, then isn’t sure what to do. Jane’s house is set into a slope, so half the basement is underground and the other half isn’t; you can walk straight out the patio doors, climb a ladder kept out there for the purpose, and check on the phoebe’s nest perched like a pillbox hat on the light fixture. It’s pretty crowded down here; the basement is the size of the house, tiny, and piled with boxes containing mostly books. But now Jane’s hurrying down with Roscoe the beagle behind her, leading the way into what looks like a closet under the stairs, but turns out to be a kind of wedge-shaped storm shelter. Fleece is already in there, lying on a mat and panting. Roscoe flops down beside Fleece; they must be used to this drill. There’s a folding canvas chair in the shelter too. Jane says, “I guess you’ll have to squeeze in with the dogs. Or maybe just sit here on the mat next to them. I have to take the chair or in five minutes my back will be screaming worse than the radio.” Which, Kaylee sees, she’s brought down with her, and which she now switches back on.

  But the robot voice is only repeating what it said already. Jane turns down the volume. Kaylee sits cross-legged on the edge of the mat and consults her SmartBerry.

  When she first started working on the nesting project with Jane, she’d kept the SmartBerry in her jacket pocket or in her hand all the time; but when Jane noticed, she’d made her put it away. “You can’t do science like that, hon, texting seven of your friends while checking out a nest. Good observation requires all your attention, not just some of it.” Kaylee doesn’t see why; she’s always doing half a dozen things at once, everybody does. It’s actually hard to do only one thing. She tried to argue that she could record the data directly onto the NestWatch site from her SmartBerry, skipping the note-taking and data entry phases completely, and take pictures. But Jane doesn’t trust her not to spend the travel time between nest sites chatting, instead of listening and looking around, which is smart of Jane, Kaylee grudgingly admits. They’ve compromised: she can use her smartphone during data entry time, but not while actually monitoring nests. It makes Kaylee feel twitchy, all that time hiking between sites and trying to identify bird songs, not knowing what’s going on everywhere else.

  Now she says, “I should probably call my mom so she doesn�
�t worry.”

  “Good idea.”

  Nobody answers at home. Kaylee’s brother Tyler always drops her off at Jane’s on his way to work his shift, so he’s at work, and her dad picks her up on his way home, but her mom must be out. When the answering machine comes on, Kaylee says, “Mom, did the siren go off? There’s a tornado warning, I hope you’re someplace safe. I’m down in Jane’s basement till it’s over, so don’t worry. See you later.” Then she rapidly texts safe in basement @ janes dont worry and sends that to her mom and dad, then sends im in janes basement where r u? to all her best friends at once, Hannah, Tabby, Andrew, Shannon, Jacob, Morgan, Macy, and waits for somebody to text back. It takes her mind off being scared, not that she’s all that scared really. There are tornado watches and a few warnings every spring—more and more of them in the last few years, her mom is always complaining— but they’ve never actually come to anything around Lawrenceburg, though she’s seen the TV shots of other places, even in Kentucky, where whole houses got turned into piles of rubble in a few seconds. The worst watches are the night ones, when you can’t see what the sky looks like.

  While she waits—in the circumstances Jane can hardly object— she gets on Facebook and posts, “I’m in a tornado warning in Jane’s basement!”

  She’s reading Tabby’s text —me + my mom + the twins r in the city hall shelter— when Jane puts her hand on Kaylee’s arm, “Listen. Do you hear that—like a freight train?” Something does sound like a freight train, getting louder and louder. She feels a thrill of serious fear, which spikes into panic when Jane says urgently, “Better get down low.”

  At that instant three more buzzing beeps interrupt the droning radio robot. A tornado has been sighted on the ground near Glensboro, heading north-northeast at forty miles per hour. If you are in the path of this storm, move to the lowest level of a building or interior room and protect yourself from flying glass. Kaylee and Jane look at each other; Glensboro is only a couple of miles west of here. If it stays organized this tornado should pass near Lawrenceburg at 5:45 pm, near Birdie at 5:50 pm, near Alton at 6 o’clock pm, and near Frankfort at 6:15 pm, the flat voice states.

  “Kaylee, get down. Get under the blanket and hold that pillow over your head.” Fleece and Roscoe are both whining now; Jane slides out of the low chair onto her knees and stretches herself out on top of Fleece, with her arm tight around Roscoe and terrified Kaylee; she pulls the blanket up over all of them.

  The roar becomes deafening. There’s pressure in Kaylee’s ears, she can feel the floor vibrating. The house blows up.

  After the shaking and roaring have stopped, and they’ve thrown off the blanket, Kaylee can’t see anything through the cracked but miraculously unbroken patio doors but a tangle of branches full of new green leaves. The basement has held together, though light is coming through some new cracks in the aboveground foundation block. “Kaylee, let me look at you. Are you okay?” Jane says worriedly.

  “I think so.” She feels lightheaded with relief that the tornado is over, but nothing hurts when she moves her arms and legs. She automatically checks her SmartBerry, still in her hand, but there are no bars at all. Dismayed, she reports to Jane, “I’m not getting a signal. We can’t call anybody.”

  “I expect the tornado took out the cell tower. Phone line too. Keep the dogs in here with you—I want to check things out, all right?” Holding to the shelter’s doorframe, Jane hauls herself up, grimacing, steps carefully out into the basement and looks around. “Looks like we were lucky. The ceiling’s still in one piece, far as I can tell.” She moves a few cautious steps farther and stops. “The stairs look solid but they’re full of junk, I don’t think we better try to get out that way. Let’s see if the patio doors will open.” She goes over and tugs at the sliding door, but it won’t budge. “Frame’s bent. The window frame may be bent too, but I’ll check before we start breaking glass.”

  Startled, Kaylee says, “You’re bleeding! Jane, you’re bleeding!” There’s a big spreading bloodstain on Jane’s shirt and jeans on one side.

  “I am? Where?” Jane looks down, sees the blood on her clothes, sees it dripping onto her right boot. “Hunh. Now how the dickens did that happen? I must have cut my arm on something.” She comes back toward Kaylee. “There’s a plastic tub with a lid, see it? Way inside, back where the stairs almost come down to the floor? That’s the first-aid stuff; can you pull that out here? Fleece, Roscoe, come. Down. Stay. Get out of Kaylee’s way.” The dogs, both panting now, slink out of the shelter, very subdued, and slump down on the basement floor by Jane’s feet without an argument. Fleece has some blood on her woolly white back but seems unhurt. Apparently the blood is Jane’s.

  There are three or four plastic tubs with lids back there, all blue. “Which one?”

  “The closest one, nearest the door. Just drag it out here.” Suddenly Jane leans against the wall, then reaches into the shelter, pulls out the camp chair and sits in it.

  Kaylee backs out with a tub. “This one?”

  Jane snaps off the lid and looks in. “Yep. Thanks.” She rummages around inside, gets out a packet of gauze pads and a pressure bandage, and rips the seal off the packet. She starts unbuttoning her flannel shirt. “Do you faint at the sight of blood? If you don’t, maybe you can help me find the cut. The back of my arm is numb, I guess I cut a nerve.”

  Kaylee isn’t crazy about the sight of blood, but this is no time to wimp out. But the cut makes her feel a little sick. It’s high up on the back of Jane’s left arm, deep and triangular, and thick-looking blood is welling out of it. She can’t help sort of gasping through her teeth. “I see it. It’s pretty bad. What should I do?”

  “Put the pads right on it and apply pressure, don’t worry about hurting me. The important thing is to stop the bleeding.”

  Gingerly, Kaylee presses the pads against the wound, but they’re saturated in seconds; the cut is really bleeding. “Do you have anything bigger? These aren’t really big enough.”

  “Use my shirt while I look.” She paws through the box. “There’s this sling thing, but that’s not very absorbent, or very big, come to that. And some cotton balls. I guess we could pack the cut with these.”

  Kaylee suddenly says “Oh! I know!” and lets go of the shirt, which Jane grabs and tightens with her other hand. “Sorry,” says Kaylee, “only I just remembered, I’ve got some, well, some maxipads in my backpack, because you know, just in case… anyway—” she fishes in her pack and pulls out a plastic bag triumphantly.

  “Perfect!” Jane says. “Brilliant!”

  Kaylee flushes, embarrassed but gratified. She snatches away the shirt and slaps a pad onto Jane’s wound, wrapping it around her arm. Then, showing further initiative, she says, “Hold that like that,” and puts another pad on top of the first, and binds them both to Jane’s arm with the pressure bandage. “There! Just hold that really tight. If you bleed through the first one there’s another one all ready to go”

  “I will,” Jane says. “Thanks.” She looks around. “I need to sit still while this clots. Do you want to see if the window will open? I don’t like to have you walking around down here till we know for sure the house isn’t going to cave in on that side”—her voice catches and Kaylee thinks for the first time, Her house is totally wrecked, her perfect little house!— “but it should be okay. Just pry up the levers and try turning the crank. It kind of sticks. If anything shifts or falls, jump back.”

  What felt like an explosion turns out to have been a humongous old hickory tree smashing down right on top of the house. The tornado only clipped one corner, peeling back part of the roof and tearing the screened porch off, but it dumped that hickory right in the middle of the crushed roof, where it’s hanging with its branches on one side and its roots on top of Jane’s car on the other. The car is crushed and plainly undrivable, but even if it could be driven there would be no way to get it down to the road; Jane’s steep quarter-mile driveway is completely blocked with downed trees.

&nbs
p; In fact, the world has become a half-moonscape. Everything on one side of the house just looks about the way it might look after a really violent windstorm, but everything on the other has been toppled and ripped and broken to pieces. “We must have been right on the very edge,” Jane says, holding her wounded arm with her other hand. “And this must have been one hell of a big tornado.” There are no trees standing in the creek valley below Jane’s house: none. They’re all laid down in the same direction, pointing uphill on this side and downhill on the other. The road that follows the creek, the only way there is to get to Jane’s house, has completely vanished under a pile of trunks and branches, broken and jagged, piled many feet deep on top of each other.

  The sight of this world of leafy destruction has obliterated Kaylee’s spurt of competence. She’s shaking and crying in little sobs, arms wrapped about herself. “I need to talk to my mom,” is all she can think of to say, “I need to find out if she’s okay.”

  Jane says soothingly, “The best thing you can do for your mom and dad right now is just take care of yourself and stay calm. They know where you are, and they know you’re with me. Eventually somebody will come looking for us. It might take them a few days—if that twister hit any population centers, all the emergency equipment and personnel are going to be very, very busy for a while. We have to give people time to get things up and running again. But they’ll be along.”

  “But the road’s covered with trees!”

  “I’m betting on a helicopter ride long before they get the road open. The good news is, lots of people know where you are. We just have to hunker down and wait.”

  Kaylee pictures KY 44 as it looked before the tornado, two lanes, no shoulders, a steep wooded bluff on one side and Indian Creek on the other, with another wooded bluff across the creek. The road follows the creek. If all the trees on both sides of the valley went down the whole way to town, like they did here, she can’t imagine how they’ll ever get the road open again. Worst of all in a way, her wonderful new SmartBerry, her Christmas and birthday presents combined, that keeps her continually connected her to everything that matters, is useless. She’s worried to death about her family and friends, and there’s no way to find out if they’re okay. From being in constant touch with everybody, suddenly she’s out of touch with everybody! It makes her feel lonely and frantic, and furious with Jane, because of whom she’s stranded in this war zone. “How can you stand living out here all by yourself?” she yells. “Something like this happens and you’re stuck, you’re just stuck!” When Jane reaches toward her she jerks away and takes off running, crying hard, down the mowed path to the garden where things still look almost normal, away from the wrecked house and jagged devastation in the other direction.