this wind break the cornstalks?” she asked. She didn’t put any worry into her voice. She tried to behave as her father behaved at times of crisis—quietly gather the facts and, under all circumstances, stay rational.
“Maybe,” he said. The muscles around his mouth tightened.
“What did the weather report say?”
Before he answered, snapping sounds came from the asphalt in front of the garage.
“That.”
The first hailstones were large, popping and splattering like eggs, but they were followed by an encore of smaller hailstones. Buckets and buckets of hailstones.
“Horses,” said Aldah. Alice saw her satisfied smile.
The hailstones did sound as if they were galloping across the roofs.
“Horsemen of the Apocalypse,” said her mother dryly. Alice glanced at her and detected a smirk on her face, as if she were enjoying her own bitter cleverness.
The rest of the family kept their usual silence in response to one of her bizarre proclamations. The hooves of hail became a clatter of pebbles, first on the roof of the house and then amplified on the metal roofs of the cattle shed, the machine shed, the hog feeders, and the corn dryers. Pig squeals cut through the noise of the hail, but they were squeals of life as they fought to get inside out of the storm. A cloudburst of hail. Thirty seconds? Sixty seconds? It was like sitting in the dentist’s chair waiting for the drill to stop. Alice clenched her fists. She clenched her jaw. Her mother slumped down into a chair at the table, and they all sat staring into the warm flame, listening.
Alice knew that through his grim expression her father was calculating. What was this hailstorm costing? A hundred dollars a second? A thousand?
Aldah sat between Alice and her mother, with her father across the table. They all stared into the yellow light. Her father could pray at times like this, but he didn’t pray. He stared.
A half hour passed before the metal roofs were silent again. Her father stood up. “Well, that’s that,” he said. “Let’s go to bed.”
“Y2K,” said her mother. “How’s that for starters?”
Her mother the conversation stopper.
Her father stood off to the side watching them. No one stirred. For several minutes the family was unanimous in their silence.
Alice could feel the image of that moment make its imprint on her mind: her dear sweet sister leaning into her sweater, the squat egg shape of her, her mouth open slightly with her tongue resting on her lower lip; the chiseled features of her mother, her hair like a helmet, her detached and inscrutable countenance behind the large glowing eyes; and her erect and controlled father, calm and cold as a bronze statue. Alice had no idea what she looked like or whether she resembled any of them in appearance or behavior. It was a vivid photograph of her family, with her as a blur.
When her mother stood up in a manner that was both deliberate and languid, Alice and Aldah rose too, all of them in the dim kerosene light with their shadows casting misshapen figures on the kitchen cabinets and wall. With the kerosene lamp light on her back, her mother followed her own weaving shadow into the living room. She was dressed in jeans and work shirt. She picked up a blanket from the couch and flung it over her shoulder as if she were ready to wander off and away from the whole scene.
All summer the tension had grown in her mother, an edginess that could erupt into sharp words or strange actions at almost any time. She acted as if she was expecting the worst, though Alice didn’t know what “the worst” might mean for her mother. She probably didn’t either. Sometimes Alice assumed that her mother was afraid of everything and anything the future might bring, whether that was an influx of immigrants or the inevitable change of farm life. The millennium was a magnet that drew all of her unspoken fears together. Now she moved across the living room and became a long silhouette in front of the picture window, then stood motionless again, staring out into the darkness. It was impossible for her to see the hail damage, but she must have known as well as the rest of them that it was there and that it had been devastating.
Aldah’s bedroom was a small room, which before the remodeling had been a large pantry off the kitchen. With her father holding the lantern, Alice led Aldah into her pantry-bedroom and tucked her into bed.
“Read to me.”
“No light,” said Alice. “I’ll play something on the piano.”
“No light,” said Aldah.
Alice knew most of Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata by heart, but when she started playing it in the dark, Aldah yelled out, “Not that one! Not that one!”
Alice switched to “Have Thine Own Way, Lord” and played the simple hymn three times to the quiet approval of her sister, who was soon asleep. Alice found her way up to her own room, got in bed, and wondered if she should pray but found her mind was filled with cacophonous sounds of clattering hail and squealing hogs warring against country music and a church organ playing “A Mighty Fortress Is Our God.” The Devil’s work, she thought to herself, and closed her eyes.
8
Sleep did not come easily. The truth of what had happened to their farm came to her with the weight of the silence. Cool silence, but a silence that was heavy as the sultry silence before the storm. It was the kind of silence her great uncle told about when he spoke of the deathly calm that followed a German bombardment of Rotterdam. Nobody moved because that might have invited more destruction. The old Krayenbraak house had been their bomb shelter while their farmland was machine gunned to death. They had been strafed for an hour, and now the final aftermath was upon them: Silence. Numb silence. Posttraumatic silence.
What was the point of it all? What issue did the sky have with them? Hadn’t they suffered enough? She felt battered and defeated like the fields outside. She was wrung out, flat, with neither an urge to pray nor to shake her fist at God and scream, “Why us?”
She thought of her parents and how everything had come to this moment. Her father had been his usual strong self through the storm. She could understand why her mother had fallen in love with him: he was handsome, he was gentle, and he was strong in a crisis. But what did he see in her? True, the pictures of her as a young woman made her look beautiful. She had that wry and sultry look and the hint of a smile, combined with an inscrutable expression coming from her eyes, what Alice had come to regard as an intense blankness. What did her father see? He must have seen somebody who needed rescuing, not from the world but from herself. What did he see in her now? Alice saw a woman who was so erratic in her moods and so unpredictable in her behavior that she’d hate to see what label a certified psychiatrist would give her. Maybe she was only a more sharpened version of the person she had always been. Maybe her father understood her and saw something good, though other people saw what Alice saw: an icy presence who would complain about anything that didn’t fit her fancy. Alice absorbed the looks on merchants’ faces when her mother walked into a store, the look that said, “Oh no, get ready, here she comes.” Her mother was an embarrassment.
People probably talked about her whole family, not just her mother. No other family looked like them. Both of her parents looked older than most parents with teenage kids, and their height made them stand out even more: her mother was over six feet tall like Alice, and her father was a towering several inches above them. Unlike most of the farm folk, the three of them were skinny. Then there
