He watched from his one good eye as Maudie’s eyes blazed in some kind of mystical triumph, her fingers dazzled with lightning.
‘I won’t!’ Matthew heard her say. ‘I won’t! I won’t!’
He never knew whether she was drawing the lightning in or warding it off.
The next thing Matthew remembered, Darlin’ Maudie was kneeling beside him on the wet grass, her cheek against his, whimpering like a puppy, alternately kissing him and imploring him to show some sign of life.
As he came around, Matthew realized he could see from both eyes, that he could blink his left eyelid. The pins were retreating from his left arm and leg, leaving an ache in his hip and knee. His fingers and toes on the left side felt like candles that had been lit and then extinguished.
‘I’m all right,’ Matthew said as Maudie planted more kisses down his cheek.
Matthew could feel her hot little breasts against his chest, burning right through her blouse and his shirt. He managed to get his right arm around her shoulders and pull her even closer to him. Her breath was warm against his cheek and holding her was like clutching an armful of flowers. The odors about her were somewhere between sweet clover and heaven. But painted on the inside of Matthew’s eyelids was the frightening image of Maudie, arms raised to the sky, joined to the lightning.
When the rain stopped, Maudie helped Matthew to his feet. He was limp as laundry and had black dots the size of floating tapioca in front of his eyes. As they moved down the rows of corn toward the carnival Matthew said, ‘I can’t carry you this time,’ and tried to muster an apologetic smile.
‘No need to,’ said Maudie.
‘But your shoes … ’
‘To hell with my shoes. I ain’t goin’ back,’ she said, looking down past her mud-splattered costume to where her shoes were all but covered in muck. ‘That is, if I can come with you?’
Matthew took her hand. ‘It’s a long, messy walk to my truck, especially if we avoid crossing the carnival grounds.’
‘I’m with you,’ said Maudie.
An hour later, wet, bedraggled, mud-scoured, Matthew Clarke and Darlin’ Maudie arrived at Matthew’s home in Onamata. As he helped Maudie out of the truck he glanced at the sky, which appeared troubled: dark fleeces of clouds glided across the night, covering and uncovering a tangerine-colored moon. Matthew tucked Maudie into the huge, black-walnut four-poster, which still dominates the downstairs bedroom, and covered her with the Gypsy quilt.
‘How do you feel?’ he kept asking.
‘It was you got struck by lightning, not me,’ Darlin’ Maudie replied.
* * *
I still live in the town of Onamata, two miles south and west of Iowa City, a hundred miles east of Des Moines. I am the only person who knows the origin of the name Onamata; yet explain as I might, no one will pay the slightest attention to me. In Place Names of Iowa, Onamata is described thus: ‘Origin unknown. Possibly a corruption of the Black Hawk Indian word for magic. Town established 1909.’
Onamata now consists of thirty houses, a general store, a café, a Conoco service station, a John Deere subagent, and the Clarke & Son Insurance Agency, of which I was until recently the proprietor. My grandfather was the original Clarke, and my father the son. Then Matthew Clarke was the father and I was the son. Now I am the Clarke and there is no son. The agency fronts on the main street of Onamata, a hundred yards from the banks of the Iowa River, where the water runs placid, the color of green quartz. The false front of the insurance agency building is painted a vibrant peach. The building once housed a bank, and before that an undertaker. Underneath the peach paint can still be seen BANK OF ONAMATA, the dark letters looking as though they want to push themselves to the surface.
Only I know that long ago Onamata was called Big Inning. That was before the flood of 1908, before the Iowa Baseball Confederacy was erased from human memory for thirty-five years. When the Confederacy did resurface, its origins, history, and secrets were known only to my father. His knowledge of the Confederacy destroyed his life, and some say my knowledge of the Confederacy is destroying mine. Personally, I feel somewhat like a prophet, and prophets are meant to be derided and maligned.
I have spent the past seventeen years of my life trying to prove the existence of my inherited obsession. Whatever was done to erase the Confederacy wasn’t enough. Bits and pieces have survived, like rumors, like buried evil unearthed and activated.
My grandparents, Justin and Flora Clarke, retired to Florida in 1942, leaving my father the insurance business and the two-story white frame house with a wrought-iron widow’s walk centered by a tall silver lightning rod. From a distance the top of the house resembles the helmet of a medieval soldier.
Grant Wood, the world-famous Iowa artist, could have known my grandparents. They could have posed for American Gothic. They were dry, meticulous people. My grandfather retired precisely on his sixty-fifth birthday, which was a Wednesday. He had been forty-one and my grandmother thirty-nine when my father was born. There had been an older child named Nancy-Rae, born to them in their late twenties, who, shortly after her fourteenth birthday, when my father was a toddler, stole off in the dark of night, walked out to the highway, where someone they knew saw her hitchhiking toward Chicago, and disappeared from the face of the earth.
‘Our greatest sadness,’ was how my grandmother described the loss of my aunt Nancy-Rae.
I saw my grandparents only once. When I was about eight my father and I drove to spring training in Florida. I saw Curt Simmons, Robin Roberts, Allie Reynolds, Vinegar Bend Mizell, Yogi Berra, and my grandparents.
They lived in a very small house on a side street in Miami. There was an orange tree in the back yard. The house and my grandparents smelled of Listerine, peppermint, and Absorbine, Jr.
They left Iowa irrevocably behind them when they retired. They never returned for a visit, never invited anyone from Onamata to visit them, including us, I suspect, although my father never said so.
What he did say, on the drive back, as if he was trying to explain something to me but was not exactly sure what, was, ‘We are haunted by our past, which clings to us like strange, mystical lint. Of the past, the mystery of family is the most beautiful, the saddest, and the most inescapable of all. Those to whom we are joined by the ethereal ties of blood are often those about whom we know the least.’ I think he was talking about much more than just my grandparents.
I listened to my father’s tales with half an ear. I knew he was obsessed with something no one else cared about. He wrote letters, articles, talked of a book, which he eventually wrote. Complained. I didn’t pay half the attention I should have. Children, thinking themselves immortal, assume everyone else is, too. He died when I was a few months short of seventeen.
The morning after being struck by lightning, Matthew Clarke woke in the cavernous double bed in the front bedroom, one of his long arms draped over the frail shoulders of Darlin’ Maudie. He stirred slightly, his finger tips touching her ribs. At his touch she moved closer to him. He had to restrain himself from counting her ribs with his fingers, one, two, three. Her body felt cool as it curved against his.
He could see her back, the skin the soft brown of tanned leather; her ear, protruding through tangles of coal-colored hair, seemed anxious to be kissed.
Matthew remembered the carnival, the rain, the lightning, the
