Chapter 43 #2
There is nothing more beautiful than her is the first thing I think.
The second thing I think is, Is that a trash bag?
You don’t normally see those twenty feet up in the air.
I turn and look to where Birdie is looking.
A skinny, bending spool of silver stretches from the sky, lovely and graceful, a dancer alone on the stage.
Even the dark splash of dirt at its base is beautiful in a way—expensive dirt, a dirt that I know will be reported to insurance later.
It was fertilized, sown, sprayed, and watched over, and as the funnel dips and sways and then finds itself again, kicking up sideways sprays of near-black soil, I can see green mixed in, soybeans and alfalfa. Maybe some sunflowers and corn.
It takes only a moment—but it feels like an eternity—for the tornado to decide something.
It unbends itself, it goes vertical and thick and straight as an organ pipe. It’s fully begotten now, this son of the storm.
I’ve seen enough. There’s a stereotype about us in the Midwest, that we don’t take sirens seriously, and it’s true enough.
Sirens are only step one in deciding to take shelter, an invitation to go check things out and see if it’s really worth going into the basement or a bathroom.
Well, I’ve checked it out. That is a real fucking tornado, and we are going inside.
I start running to Birdie, yelling her name, but she isn’t moving.
I don’t think she hears me over the bearing, freight-train wind.
She’s staring at the twister like it’s a guest she’s been waiting for, like it’s a nurse bringing medicine into her hospital room, and I don’t understand, not really, until I reach her and grab her hand and she looks at me.
She’s surprised to see me, I can glean that much, but even the surprise isn’t enough to transform what’s on her face, what’s in her eyes: a sadness so deep, so cold and lonely and keening, that my heart tears itself apart in witness.
It’s a sadness that will leave you frostbitten but not numb, that will follow you around, a sadness that is so unfathomable, so profound, that it’s no longer in her bones but in her atoms, in the space between.
It’s a sadness that has seeped so far inside that it’s seeped into time itself—beyond the present, beyond the past. A sadness that gathers her future to itself, that kicks up a spray of grief and fury as it carves up her life, levying more and more and more, an unpayable tax of tears, a mortgage of herself that God forged her signature on.
What is a tornado in the face of that?
But I don’t need to think about it. I don’t consider things. If sadness wants her, that’s too fucking bad, because I won’t let it have her. Even if it had her first, even if it wanted her first—I want her more.
I’m her worst thing, goddammit. She agreed, and now it’s too late, I’m not letting her go back on her word.
I pull her and she resists, not actively but unconsciously, and then I sweep her up into my arms, moving before she’s settled.
She doesn’t fight me, which is good, because I’m running back down the driveway to the hill house, gravel and hail skidding under my shoes, and the wind is making it hard to see now, whipping up from all the wrong directions, grass and dirt everywhere.
The sound of it—yes, like a train, but also like a thousand thousand trumpets, not just seven, and not the trumpets we think of but the long, flared trumpets that Tyler showed me once, the ancient salpinx referenced in Revelation, unearthly and urgent.
I look back once, wife of Lot as I am, and see it. The funnel. The bottom half is now obscured by trees, the slope of the hill, but it doesn’t matter. It’s terror itself and also awe, and I could be Moses right now, only a glimpse away from what’s forbidden for humans to see.
It is impossible not to believe in God, seeing this. But I think I like him even less.
I kick open the door and turn sideways to carry her inside.
I take her straight back to the far wall, to what I think was a kitchen pantry once but is a doorless concrete nook now, and set her down on her feet, against the wall, putting my body between hers and the rest of the house, holding her tight in my arms and burying my face in her hair.
Perhaps it takes ten seconds.
There is no sound other than it, and it’s something so far past the idea of wind that to call it wind feels like lying.
Inside its embrace is a groaning, cracking, shrieking judgment.
The pressure deafens us to all other sound, the sucking force of the entire world against our eardrums, and I feel our clothes sucked at too, our hair, and I hold on to Birdie even tighter, ready to fight God for her if I have to.
Like Milton’s Satan, my thoughts are dark, my promises angry, all of it defiant and proud.
You don’t get to have her, I tell God. You never sent anyone to help her, to love her—and now I’m going to do your job instead. She’s mine now.
I’ll fight you on the plains of Heaven, if you take her from me; I will shake your throne. You’ll know the meaning of immortal hate and the meaning of revenge.
You fucker. You took Lizzy on a stormy day too.
For a single instant, I think God might take her anyway. I can feel the concrete shudder under our feet, sense the roof threaten to crack and lift away.
The entire house, angry as it’s always been at being a house, feels ready to surrender, desperate to give itself to the air after fifty years interred in the hill. Ready to be broken after it’s already been drowned.
And then—
And—
Then—
And then…it’s over.
And then it’s gone.
It passed us by.
No blood on the lintel. No hyssop, no bowl.
It passed us by and left us unharmed inside.
My ears pop and then start ringing as the house yields back into the hill. A soft, autumn-like breeze tosses itself around the space for a minute before even that subsides and the air is as peaceable as it should be on any September afternoon.
I open my eyes and then step back, checking over Birdie in the gloom, which is a little brighter now that the storm has fled and some semblance of light can reach in through the front door and windows.
She looks up at me, tears trickling slowly down her face, but she’s unhurt as far as I can see, at least bodily. The hurting inside…that’s still there.
I take her hand and pull her out of the pantry. I see immediately why it’s gotten a little brighter, as the old, dusty glass from every window has been blown inward. Explosively. Shards of it are embedded in the kitchen cabinets like glittering teeth in the dark.
If the pantry’s opening were rotated ninety degrees, if it had faced the windows as the cabinets did…
It doesn’t bear thinking about. Even if the pantry had faced the windows, I would have been there, between Birdie and the gashing fury of the storm. She would have been safe.
Birdie allows herself to be led outside and up the driveway, holding tight to my hand as we get far enough up the hill to see that the farm is…
gone. There’s no other word for it, no other word that captures the full reality.
The yellow farmhouse is not just flattened but unrecognizable, a clutter and drift of wood and detritus, its shingles caught in the stripped trees, and only the cellar still where it should be.
The barn as well is no longer standing in any meaningful sense, but it does look like it put up a better fight.
The oak beams were well joined and are mostly still together, even though they’ve been torn free and knocked over.
Lincoln Logs under the fist of a petulant child.
Birdie’s truck has a piece of metal rammed through the windshield and embedded in the passenger seat. I think it’s part of an antenna, and it juts out of the crackled windshield like Saint Longinus’s spear—confirmation, punctuation. A sign.
My own truck has been rolled past the hill house but it landed back on its wheels and, despite the slightly crumpled roof, looks drivable.
Birdie turns away from the ruin of the farmhouse, and I turn with her, still holding her hand tight. I keep seeing her standing in front of the storm, waiting for it. A suicide but passive enough to still be welcomed at the gates.
Fuck.
“Come on, Birdie,” I tell her. “It’s time to go home.”