roll across the sunset, yet the air is eerily still, hot and humid. The usual noises of birds and animals have stopped, leaving only the high-pitched buzz of the crickets and cicadas. The chickens strut single file into the henhouse without being told what to do. Everyone moves slowly, except Dad. I want to help him turn off the power and lock up, but he says everyone must stay in the house. It is too dangerous. The wind picks up, making little dust devils in the driveway as we watch him from the window, turning off the power in the workshop and then the barn; we wonder if he will be struck by lightning or carried off by a tornado. He puts a padlock on the Wizard of Oz cellar doors, then comes back to the house. The wind follows him in and blows the papers around the living room before he closes and locks the door behind him.
I’m too old to cry, but my little brother and sister are crying and saying they’re scared. The big elm tree could fall on the house, Dad says. It is a giant, lopsided leviathan with muscular rough-barked limbs that reach toward our bedrooms and tickle the roof with its branches. The big elm is monstrouslysublime—a centenarian that whispers the ancient language of earth and sky. It lisps and chatters in the summer breeze and in a storm its voices howl and scream. The wind wails now, a siren song. We sit in darkness. My mom lights a kerosene lantern that casts shadows around the room. It is story time.
“A kerosene lantern can explode,” says Dad. “I knew a family once who came home and set their kerosene lantern down on the woodstove. The whole house went up in a fireball, two kids just about your age,” he says to my brother and sister, “and parents and grandparents too. They all lived in the little house with the woodstove and kerosene lanterns. They were good devout people but they were ignorant. They didn’t know any better. The bodies were so badly burned they had to get forensics experts to identify them through dental records.” The air is heavy when he pauses. “Maybe we should blow out the kerosene light, Mom?” I ask. She pretends not to hear me or my dad. She’s rocking my little sister to sleep, humming “Ghost Riders in the Sky.” Neither fear nor irony can deter her constant drone. Sheets of rain pummel the ground. We can’t see out the windows anymore.
The wind sounds like voices crying in the tree limbs. “We had a neighbour, once,” says Dad. “Old Joshua was his name, a loner type. He lived down the road in that big old brick house all by himself. His wife died years ago, before I knew him, the baby too. He used to go out in the storm, thinking he heard them in the wind. One night he put on a big scarf, wrapped it around his neck a few times, and headed out into the storm.” I’m holding my little brother. I feel less scared when I comfort him. “He went through the dark windy night knocking on neighbours’ doors. ‘Did they hear a childscreaming?’ he asked. Perhaps they had—a baby crying—or maybe a young woman in distress. He was sure now that he had heard a woman’s screams in the night and a baby crying.” I listen to the wind, and I can hear them, the young woman, terrified of death; the baby who would cry briefly, motherless and alone with no one to save it. Maybe Old Josh could still find them. We know he can’t, that he shouldn’t look, that he will find only ghostly fiends instead of his real wife and child. “In the morning,” says Dad, “after the storm had passed, the neighbours didn’t see Joshua in his garden and that night no lights went on in his house. When he didn’t show up at church that Sunday, some of the townspeople started talking. Maybe they should put a search party together and look for Old Josh.
“We found him swinging by the neck from a tree limb, down by the canal,” says my dad, “hanged by his own scarf. We found him under a circle of turkey vultures. Crows had already picked out his eyes. Funny thing is
I’m too old to cry, but my little brother and sister are crying and saying they’re scared. The big elm tree could fall on the house, Dad says. It is a giant, lopsided leviathan with muscular rough-barked limbs that reach toward our bedrooms and tickle the roof with its branches. The big elm is monstrouslysublime—a centenarian that whispers the ancient language of earth and sky. It lisps and chatters in the summer breeze and in a storm its voices howl and scream. The wind wails now, a siren song. We sit in darkness. My mom lights a kerosene lantern that casts shadows around the room. It is story time.
“A kerosene lantern can explode,” says Dad. “I knew a family once who came home and set their kerosene lantern down on the woodstove. The whole house went up in a fireball, two kids just about your age,” he says to my brother and sister, “and parents and grandparents too. They all lived in the little house with the woodstove and kerosene lanterns. They were good devout people but they were ignorant. They didn’t know any better. The bodies were so badly burned they had to get forensics experts to identify them through dental records.” The air is heavy when he pauses. “Maybe we should blow out the kerosene light, Mom?” I ask. She pretends not to hear me or my dad. She’s rocking my little sister to sleep, humming “Ghost Riders in the Sky.” Neither fear nor irony can deter her constant drone. Sheets of rain pummel the ground. We can’t see out the windows anymore.
The wind sounds like voices crying in the tree limbs. “We had a neighbour, once,” says Dad. “Old Joshua was his name, a loner type. He lived down the road in that big old brick house all by himself. His wife died years ago, before I knew him, the baby too. He used to go out in the storm, thinking he heard them in the wind. One night he put on a big scarf, wrapped it around his neck a few times, and headed out into the storm.” I’m holding my little brother. I feel less scared when I comfort him. “He went through the dark windy night knocking on neighbours’ doors. ‘Did they hear a childscreaming?’ he asked. Perhaps they had—a baby crying—or maybe a young woman in distress. He was sure now that he had heard a woman’s screams in the night and a baby crying.” I listen to the wind, and I can hear them, the young woman, terrified of death; the baby who would cry briefly, motherless and alone with no one to save it. Maybe Old Josh could still find them. We know he can’t, that he shouldn’t look, that he will find only ghostly fiends instead of his real wife and child. “In the morning,” says Dad, “after the storm had passed, the neighbours didn’t see Joshua in his garden and that night no lights went on in his house. When he didn’t show up at church that Sunday, some of the townspeople started talking. Maybe they should put a search party together and look for Old Josh.
“We found him swinging by the neck from a tree limb, down by the canal,” says my dad, “hanged by his own scarf. We found him under a circle of turkey vultures. Crows had already picked out his eyes. Funny thing is
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