shiny chocolate heads and their maple chests against the background of the pale blue sky. And those sharp-edged tails and wings, the way they made slicing the air look like a spatula swiping through meringue. They were a medley of happiness as they flew, and Alice knew they’d continue to live the good mood of their movements when they weren’t flying. They never squabbled or complained like crows or starlings or blue jays. They didn’t push each other out of a nest unless they were teaching their young to fly. Swallows made living look so easy. So swift. So graceful. If they could live past their label of barn swallows, maybe she could live past her label of farmhand.
She walked back to the control panels and retrieved The Grapes of Wrath. She had already read it once and was almost finished rereading it. The air outside felt too hot and sticky for reading, so she carried the book back up the haymow. Before putting it in its place behind the hay bale, she unzipped the plastic bag and pulled it out. She flipped through the final chapter until she came to her favorite sentence of all: “For a minute Rose of Sharon sat still in the whispering barn.” She didn’t try to remember what happened next at this point in the novel; she just loved the sound of that sentence, the lilt of it, which was very much like the flight of the swallows.
7
The evening supper table was a sober scene: her stern father offering a stern prayer, her severe mother challenging everything with a menacing stare that never erupted into words, and her soft sister Aldah clinging to Alice’s arm when she was not pointing for more food. And more food.
As Alice lay in bed that night, she didn’t think about the smoldering discomfort of the dinner table, or the smells she might have taken to bed with her, or about the weather, but she woke to a distant rumbling. Thunder didn’t frighten her. It brought back the memory of her kind grandmother saying, “It’s just God talking.” Thunder as God’s comforting voice. It had sunk in. She loved that booming voice.
A bolt of lightning streaked across the sky, followed by a sound of ripping canvas—and then the ba-boom when the bolt bit the dirt within a mile. The sky fluttered with lightning and the clouds murmured with thunder. God was tired of chitchat and getting down to business.
“Alice!” her father yelled up the stairs. “We’re getting some weather. It’s headed straight at us.”
“Yeah, yeah,” she said. Tornado season was past. This wouldn’t be the first storm their house survived. The approach of a big Midwestern storm could be more exciting than frightening—like watching a bull charge toward you when you’re standing safely behind a metal gate.
“Alice!” This time it was the family witch. “Close the windows and get down here.”
“In a sec.”
“Get down here! Aldah is scared!”
So why wasn’t she doing something about it?
“I’m getting dressed.”
“Did you hear me?”
“I said I was coming.”
“This could be it,” she heard her mother say in her practiced ominous voice.
Alice put on her soft fleece sweater and work jeans. She wasn’t dressing for the weather; she was dressing to comfort her sister Aldah. When she got downstairs, her father had gone out to lock down any loose doors. She heard the clink of the metal gates in the hog pens. The feeder cattle could find shelter in the sturdy gambrel-roofed barn or the corrugated metal cattle shed that had its back to the wind. Their big block of a house had stood up to a century of Midwest weather, and this storm wasn’t about to scare it off its foundation.
Her mother stood in her usual place in front of the kitchen sink, staring out the window at the approaching storm with the family Bible clutched against her stomach. At moments like this, Alice couldn’t decide if her mother was a pillar of faith or a pillar of skepticism. How could a person of faith be either so sour or so fearful of everything?
Lightning struck somewhere close with a force Alice could feel in her cheekbones. Blunt fists of wind whacked the house in a syncopated rhythm. This was a stuttery storm—and that was not a good sign. The deep-throated thunder gurgled closer. No longer the voice of God, it sounded like a beast that couldn’t make up its mind, sniveling one minute and grunting the next. The lights went out like an exclamation point. Alice swam through the wake of darkness, trying to find Aldah. Her whimpering cries were everywhere—and moving. At Alice’s touch, her sister flung her arms around Alice and buried her face in Alice’s sweater. If Alice smelled bad, she knew Aldah would never say so. Now the wind leaned against the house with a steady pressure. Twigs and gravel sprayed noisily past the windows, but the house shrugged its shoulders, and Alice thought for an instant: would that the rest of us could be so sure of our place on the planet.
Alice’s mother remained standing, her legs apart as if she were getting ready for something. She had laid the Bible down and had both hands on the counter as if she were bracing for whatever was coming at them. This was neither a position of fear nor faith. It looked more like a position of defiance.
Alice turned to Aldah. “We’re not going anywhere,” she said and stroked Aldah’s head.
“Promise?”
“Promise.”
A golden light appeared in the doorway from the porch. Her mother turned toward it, and in a voice that sounded like startled relief, she sighed, “Oh, Father,” as if she were looking into the face of the Lord of Hosts Himself, but before she could transfigure into the glories of heaven, the light transformed into Alice’s father carrying the old kerosene lantern in one hand and a flashlight in the other. Her mother’s arms came down in the deliberate slowness of a chicken hawk perching on a fence post. Alice couldn’t see her father’s face, but she sensed that he wanted to comfort Aldah and her when he shone the flashlight where they huddled next to the kitchen table.
“That’s probably the worst of the wind,” he said, and no sooner had he spoken than the wind let up. At times like this her father was an Old Testament prophet in his deliberate manner and without a quake in his body or voice. He set the kerosene lantern in the middle of the kitchen table where his father and grandfather no doubt once put it. When he lit the wick and slipped the glass chimney over it, a fist of flame shot up. In his steady way he adjusted the wick until a soft light spread over the round table. He turned off the flashlight, and they all sat down around the yellow tablecloth of light. Aldah kept her face pressed against Alice’s soft sweater as Alice smoothed her hair. Their mother stood motionless, a stark shadow in the kitchen doorway. Why, at moments like this, Alice wondered, did she look more like a grim messenger of disaster than like a warm motherly defense against it?
Rain hit like a fire hose against the house.
“Here it comes,” her mother rasped.
The crystal ball of her father’s bald head glowed in the mellow light. Her mother moved across the kitchen and shoved a pie tin under the lantern with such sharp force that she looked like someone who thought she was saving the day. “Don’t burn the table,” she said. “That’s all we need.”
Alice felt tension in the room, but no panic. Aldah stared into the flame with her soft oval eyes. Their father’s mouth was like a pencil mark across his face. Alice looked around the room and the steady warm light that the lamp cast on the praying-hands painting and the black-and-white Love Begins At Home plaque. Alice felt as if she was watching a movie in slow motion, a portrait of her family forming and reforming before her eyes,
