left the blacktop and headed up the gravel road. Back toward town, there was still blue sky visible. Just a little badge of it in her rearview mirror.
She had a couple of miles to go on the white, straight-shot road. Dust billowed behind her. The rumble of the tires cruising over the gravel masked any sound of thunder.
She was almost home.
At last she pulled into the driveway of the farmhouse, gathered her purse and sheet music, and got out of the car. The clouds were nearly overhead. The air was moist and stuffy, like a greenhouse. She went inside. She set her purse on the kitchen counter as a rapidly expanding whooshing sound came from all directions at once, and the house’s joints began to creak inside the walls. She looked out the kitchen window and saw the wind sweeping the yard in one sustained and still-gathering blast.
Then rain hit the panes.
She watched the storm. She moved through the strange, dusky light of the farmhouse, looking out the bedroom window, then the front door, then the side door. She thought about Grandpa, who had taken some calves to the sale barn and was now out in the storm. She thought about dinner. She thought about the funeral she’d just been to. It was one of nearly thirty she played for that year, and she hadn’t known the man well. She thought about the garden and hoped the rain wasn’t too much for it. But before long, the rain was letting up.
At 3:15, she sat down and wrote a letter to my family, as she did nearly every week.
It’s really dark, she started, looks like about 6:30 and it’s the middle of the afternoon—We’ve had a big rain this afternoon.
She heard an engine and looked through the dining room window to see Grandpa’s headlights.
Daddy took the rest of the calves to the sale this afternoon and he is just now getting home.
Sixty miles east, at that moment, I was on my way home from school. Mom had picked up Susan and me in dinky old Russellville, and now we were driving through the countryside toward our farm, followed by a car containing two of Mom’s piano students and one of their mothers.
The storm that had swept over Grandma now glowered on our horizon, and I didn’t care for it. I was a ten-year-old who knew too much about storms. They showed us informational films each year at school, films from twenty years ago, when the kids wore clothes that seemed more appropriate for church, films that strived to impart to us an awareness of the fact that tornadoes would, given the chance, kill us. The storm that faced us fit the profile of a tornado spawner if I’d ever seen one: greenish, from the southwest, April, midafternoon.
The films were clear: basements are your only hope.
We didn’t have a basement.
Mon. was such a beautiful day, Grandma continued. Washed 2 loads of clothes, the back bedroom curtains and cleaned that room. About 3 o’clock we set out 3 doz. cauliflower plants, 2 doz. broccoli—2 more rows of potatoes and 2 rows of green beans. Don’t think ever in my life it made me feel so bad, actually thought I was coming down with something.
Tue.—couldn’t do the curtains, was too windy—then last night was Sewing Club—this morn., washed the dining r. & front bedroom curtains and hung them out. . . I got all the curtains pressed before I left at 1 o’clock for the funeral, so have had plenty to do today, but did feel more normal this morn.
When we got home, I wrapped myself in a blanket, put on my fake plastic batting helmet, and went into the house’s only interior room: the sewing closet under the stairs. I could hear the piano lessons well because the piano was right next to the sewing closet door. I stood in the tiny closet and looked at the wall of shelves filled with spools, bobbins, and jars of buttons. I could hear the thunder. Muffled, thuddy thunder. And I could hear my quickened heartbeat. There was no place to sit. This was not good at all, this basementless tornado-bait farmhouse.
After several minutes, I heard the back door of the house open and close. It meant Elizabeth, my oldest sister, had made it home. I emerged to greet her, only to find not Elizabeth but the mother who had brought the piano students. She’d been waiting in her car.
“I think that’s more than just a regular storm,” she said to my mother. “Do you have a basement?”
I returned to the closet. Chewed my fingernails. Worried about Elizabeth.
Daddy planted 4 rows of sweet corn this morn. It should be well packed in the ground after this rain.
We are really proud of Elizabeth winning the trip to Wash. D.C., that’s just great. Now Darrell would you write another article for the paper for me about this and about the Distinguished Am. High School Student Award she has received—we will save all the track records for another time.
Daddy got good price for his calves, the best price was some at $74.75 (steers), had 5 bulls at $70.75, heifers at $63.30—he thought that was good for heifers. They are better prices than he got last year—
Must stop and get supper—
Love from both Mother and Daddy
P.S. Daddy saved 4 calves to butcher—
Elizabeth, on the other hand, didn’t worry about storms.
She left school and drove through Russellville—the curbless, peeling-paint town of seven hundred. Soon she entered the countryside. Black cattle lay in the corner of a pasture. A crow wheeled over the wind-wracked trees. For Elizabeth, the drive home was always satisfying, and the pickup—especially at speeds over sixty—had a nice floaty ride. One time, the truck had raced Tom Claypool’s car. And won.
She watched the storm as she cruised along the long, open ridge of Route U. She was thankful there had been a track meet yesterday, otherwise this wouldn’t be a resting day, and she would be out on some gravel road right now, miles from school, running.
I can beat this storm, she thought and pushed the accelerator. The truck went faster.
She loved a race, and she loved to win.
She turned onto Mount Hope Road—our gravel road—just a mile and a half from the farm and faced the oncoming storm. She was going to make it. She would beat the storm home.
But the clouds were coming straight at her now, so close they filled the entire western sky, and when she crested the top of the first hill, she was met with a blast of wind so strong that it stopped the truck and sprayed gravel against the windshield.
She had time to think, So this is what a tornado is like. And she had enough calm in her—enough of the athlete’s instinctiveness—to consider the safest place for her to be at this moment.
She opened the truck door, stepped into the storm, and dashed for the ditch. She crouched there with her hands over her head, her back to the storm, as the wind gusted and faded and then gusted again. Raindrops stung her back. But she soon realized the worst had passed.
After the storm’s blast waned, I emerged from the closet. I walked from room to room, looking out every window at the heavy rain. Piano music continued in the living room. I went to the glassed-in back porch and saw Elizabeth running up the sidewalk. I hadn’t heard the truck approach because the rain was so loud. I opened the door for her, and she ducked inside.
