5. The author suggests that focusing on obtaining a lot of “stuff” makes it more difficult to nurture a healthy family. To what extent do you agree or disagree? If you wanted to simplify your own life, where would you start?
6. Some of the tension between Kate and her sister, Karen, arises from their very different situations—Kate’s as a stay-at-home mom and Karen’s as a childless career woman. Have you experienced a similar tension in your own family or community? What’s at the root of this kind of problem, and how might you begin to diffuse it?
We invite you to read the following excerpt from Lisa Wingate’s NAL Accent novel
Good Hope Road
Available now
Jenilee Lane
THERE is a moth in a cocoon outside the window. It has been there for months, twisted by the wind, dampened by the rain, a reminder that the windowframes should have been cleaned and painted last fall. It is spring, and there is a tiny hole in the end of the cocoon, a tiny probe pushing through, sawing back and forth, struggling to free the creature inside.
The moth has labored for hours, and only now has it pushed two legs through the hole. Inside in the darkness, does it know why it must struggle? Somewhere in the mass of cells and neurons that make up its tiny body, is it aware that the struggle is God’s way of pumping fluid into its wings? If not for the struggle, it would come into the world with a swollen body and flightless wings. It would be a creature without strength, unable to fulfill its purpose.
I wonder if it can sense the warmth of my hand on the other side of the glass as night falls and another spring storm blows in.
On nights like this, I do not sleep. I sit awake and listen as the storms howl through the valley. Like the moth, I have emerged in a place that was once beyond my imagining.
Outside, I hear a gust of wind, and I remember. I remember where I have come from, and it is as if every blessing in my life has been showered anew around me.
I fall to my knees, and I thank God for everything. Even for the wind. For the fragments of my life that survived it, and the fragments that didn’t, and the things that were changed forever. . . .
On the afternoon of July 29, the entire town of Poetry, Missouri, was cast to the wind. The town rained down around me for what seemed like an eternity as the tornado receded into the sky and disappeared, spitting out what was left of Poetry.
I stood watching, thinking it was the most horrible, awesome sight I had ever seen, unlike anything I had experienced in my twenty-one years of living. If Daddy had been home he would have yelled at me for not having sense enough to go to the cellar. But once you start watching something so enormous and so vile, it pulls you in just as surely as if you were caught in the vortex itself. I don’t know what it is that makes people want to look into the face of evil. . . .
“Dear God. Dear God,” I remember saying. My mind couldn’t comprehend what was happening. Only a few minutes before, I had been fixing dinner for Daddy and my younger brother, Nate, listening to an old Bob Wills record, and wondering if the coming storm would bring rain. I was thinking about leaving again—having that fantasy where I packed Mama’s old suitcase and went . . . somewhere. The dream always came wrapped in a tissue-paper layer of guilt so that I couldn’t see the contents clearly. Perhaps that was a merciful thing, because I knew Daddy and Nate couldn’t get by without me.
I heard branches slapping against the house as if the oak tree knew about the dream and was angry. Outside the window, a car sped by, a black Mercedes going too fast on the gravel, like it was running from something. It fishtailed back and forth on the curve, throwing rocks against the yard fence before it straightened and rushed onward.
Probably one of those doctors or lawyers leaving the resort on the lake, I thought. Probably doesn’t want his high-dollar car to get wet. They should stick to the paved roads where they belong.
The car disappeared down Good Hope Road, and the wind came up, roaring like a freight train. Hail pounded the roof, and debris whipped through the air, crashing into the house and barn.
When I ran to the screen door, the sky was swirling like a giant black cauldron. I watched as the cone of the tornado slowly separated from the ground and disappeared into the sky. Not a half mile away, a wall of rain was falling, but at our house, the hail stopped suddenly. The roar faded, and destruction lay everywhere—pieces of wood and metal, tree branches, shredded furniture, torn clothing, shards of glass glittering like diamonds in the afternoon sunlight.
Bits of paper floated from the churning clouds, drifting, swirling, dancing, as if they had all the time in the world. They filled the sky like snow.
The air was so quiet I could hear the papers falling, rustling slightly against an eerie silence, like a battlefield after the battle, when only the corpses remain. I wondered where so much paper could have come from, and if it had been blown all the way from Poetry, three miles across the low hills.
The big oak tree in the yard moaned, its limbs heavy with a crusty coating of fresh hail. I stared at the ice, then turned around in disbelief, looking at our single-story brick house and seeing everything as it had always been—the peeling paint, the overgrown bushes, the torn window screen where Nate sneaked out of his bedroom at night.
A piece of paper fell lightly on the screen and hung there, fluttering against the window like a bird trying to break free.
I remember thinking, Why not us? Why not our house? Why is everything the same as it was yesterday, last week, last month, last year, ten minutes ago? Why wasn’t anything destroyed, or changed, or carried away. . . .
I had the strangest sense of wishing that it had been. Then I realized how crazy that was. I should have been thanking God I was alive.
Turning around, I gazed at the wall of rain, now moving away toward the east, revealing the footprint of the beast—an enormous path of stripped earth and strewn debris, ending in a narrow swath of twisted trees just past Daddy’s wheat field. From there, it carved a jagged scar toward the horizon, toward Poetry. Where farms had been, there was nothing.
I wondered how God could let something so terrible happen at all.
A mile down the valley, the pecan orchard that had hidden old lady Gibson’s farmhouse stood splintered, the limbs hanging like broken bones. Near the road, a geyser of water sprayed into the air, mixing with the falling ran.
I realized the tornado had passed across the Gibson farm. Gasping the gritty air, I ran down the porch steps and across the yard. At the sound of the yard gate opening, Daddy’s bird dog rushed from under the house and slammed against my legs, sending me sprawling into the litter on the grass.
“Get away, Bo!” I hollered, grabbing his collar as he tried to bulldoze his way through the gate. “Get back in the yard, you big, stupid dog!” Daddy’s dogs were always big and stupid, and always trying to escape.
I held on as Bo plowed a furrow into the long, scrappy grass outside the gate and pounced on a bit of paper blowing by. Scrambling to my feet, I dragged him into the yard and struggled to hook him to his chain while he cavorted with the paper, grabbing it, then dropping it and pouncing on it again. I caught a quick glimpse of a face. A photograph. A baby. A birth announcement.
Securing the chain, I snatched the photograph away, dried it on my jeans, then looked at it with the same horrible fascination that had forced me to stare at the tornado.
Somebody’s baby. Just newborn. A girl. Seven pounds six ounces. The space where the name would have been was torn away.
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