Hell With the Lid Blown Off

by Donis Casey

  Alafair’s eardrums felt as though they were going to be pulled out of her head, so she opened her mouth to relieve the pressure. Maybe I lied to Grace, she thought, and it is time to die. Resigned, she closed her eyes and pressed her forehead into the straining muscles of Shaw’s back. She took a deep breath and filled her lungs with his familiar smell, now acrid with the sweat of fear. She didn’t mind dying so much, but she very much resented the fact that there was nothing she could do for her children during their last moments this side of heaven.

  The world grew very small then, just the size of the root cellar, dark and painful and noisy, but filled with the ones she loved. She spared a thought for her children who were not there. No use to wonder how they were faring. If they had met their end, she would see them shortly in heaven. If not, she would wait for them, along with these who were with her now. There was no future, only this instant, and she realized that she felt no fear at all. She smiled at Grace, and Grace smiled back, before the wind sucked the light out of the lamp and everything went dark.

  Alafair Tucker

  Alafair’s ears were ringing with silence. Something smelled odd; like wet mud, and the fresh, burnt odor of lightning. At some point she had closed her eyes, but when she opened them again all she saw was blackness. She didn’t think she was dead. She didn’t think anything at all. Her ear was still pressed against Shaw’s back, and she was aware that his heart was pounding so hard that her head was practically bouncing up and down. She never did remember how long they stood there, suspended in that moment. Maybe a minute, maybe an hour. Sophronia slid down Gee Dub’s back and the sound of the thump as she hit the floor served to start time moving forward again.

  Alafair pried her arms from around Shaw’s chest and lunged toward where she had last seen the girls, reaching out like a blind woman in the dark. They were all right. No one was hurt. She clung to the three girls and listened to someone fumble around trying to relight the lantern. The rattle of glass, the scratch of a match, a sudden flash, and the warm glow of light that illuminated Shaw’s face.

  She wondered if she looked as stunned and haggard as he did.

  Gee Dub was still hanging onto the iron door handle with one hand, his face wet with sweat. Charlie was sitting on the dirt floor, right where he had dropped. When the light flared he turned his head, blinked at his mother and barked an incredulous laugh. “We’re alive!”

  “Let’s pray, Mama. I want to pray,” Sophronia said. Her voice was weak.

  “So do I, sugar,” Alafair assured her.

  Trenton Calder

  The wind blew like the devil and the streets flooded, but the twister missed Boynton. I rode it out in the hotel, but as soon as it let up I high-tailed it over to Miz Beckie’s house with a lantern to check on Ruth. Main Street was running ankle deep with water, full of branches and boards and who knew what. I had to wade part of the way up there. I was relieved to see that even though a bunch of shrubs and trees were torn up, the house was still standing.

  It was raining pretty good when I got out there and I was soaked to the gills. I ran up onto the front porch and pounded on the door. No one came at first, and I felt a twinge of worry. I backed off the porch and looked up at a lighted window on the second floor, then called her name. Ruth opened the window and leaned out.

  “Trent, is that you? Come on in. I’ll be right down.”

  I went in the front door and she came running down the stairs in her bare feet, holding a candle, her chestnut curls loose and streaming behind her. She was in her nightgown. It was a big old thick cotton thing that covered her from neck to toes, but I could feel my cheeks burning. She didn’t notice.

  “Trent, am I relieved to see you! I’m alone, you see, and the telephone lines are down. Was it a tornado? Did it hit the town?”

  “It was quite a storm, Ruth, but if there was a twister it skipped Boynton. I didn’t see any more damage than some trees down and some outbuildings blown over. Where’s Miz Mac-Kenzie? Are y’all all right here?”

  “Miz Beckie isn’t here, or Wallace and his friend, either. After you brought me here Sunday night I found a note that she left for me. She said that after church Wallace and his friend decided to go visit Miz Beckie’s son in Muskogee and she decided to go with them. I don’t know when she’s supposed to be back.” She put her hands on my chest. “I’m right worried about her, Trent. What if she was on her way home when the storm hit? She could be lying dead in a ditch somewhere between here and Muskogee!”

  I shook my head, more to dislodge the picture that her words had conjured than to disagree. But I said, “It’s more likely that she’s still in Muskogee with her folks, Ruth.”

  I could tell she wanted to believe me. “You think so?”

  “I expect so.” And if she is lying dead in a ditch, I thought, there isn’t anything we can do about it right now. “You mean you’ve been here all by yourself since last night?”

  “Well, yes, by the time I found out they were all gone Sunday night, it was too late to go home. And I had lessons to give this morning and a new niece to visit with this afternoon. I figured Miz Beckie would be back by the time I left Alice’s this evening, so I came back here. Besides, it was looking bad and I didn’t want to walk home in the rain. I had just decided to go on to bed when it started to rain like the dickens. I rode out the storm squatting in the bathroom down here on the first floor. There was big crash, and after the blow was all over I found out a tree had fallen through the window in Miz Beckie’s bedroom. There is a bunch of damage to the top story over on that side of the house, and I don’t know what to do. I’ve been upstairs trying to cover the hole as best I can to keep out the rain.”

  I went upstairs with her and surveyed the damage, which was a lot. A big old cottonwood that had probably been growing in that spot beside the house for a hundred years had broken right in two and a big old limb had crashed through the wall and into Miz MacKenzie’s bedroom. The rain was coming in, and that whole end of the room was a mess, the furniture slid all over the place by the wind. But the four-poster bed on the other side sat there neat and made-up like nothing had happened at all. I helped Ruth hang blankets over the hole as best we could. But I told her that I’d come back with a saw when it got light and saw the limb into pieces so we could board up the wall.

  “I don’t fancy you staying here in this big old beat-up house all by yourself tonight,” I told her after we did all we could. “You want me to take you back to Alice’s, or to your Aunt Josie’s house?”

  “I don’t fancy it much myself,” she said. “Wait in the parlor for a minute until I throw some clothes on, Trent, and I’ll ride double with you back to my ma’s house.”

  That was a two-mile trip in the rain over roads that were probably ripped up and strewn with debris. “You sure you want to do that?”

  “Yes, I want to make sure that everyone is safe.”

  “All right, then, but bundle up. It’s raining and cold as sin out there, and we’ll have to walk back to the hotel stable to get Brownie.”

  Ruth made off down the stairs toward her little room by the kitchen at the back of the house. “I’ll leave a note for Miz Beckie in case she makes it home tonight,” she called over her shoulder.

  Alafair Tucker

  They could only see by the lightning flashes. Alafair listened to the thunder booming overhead, deafeningly loud but moving away quickly. The house was still standing but it was impossible to assess the damage from where they stood in front of the root cellar. All they could see was the underside of the front porch, which had been lifted up and slammed against the front of the house like a wall.

  Charlie started forward, but Alafair grabbed his arm. When she spoke it was to Shaw. “Forget about the house right now. We’ve got to see to the other children!”

  Shaw nodded. “Gee, let’s you and me get over to Phoebe’s. The twister was going that way. Charlie,
run over to Mary’s. Alafair, you and the girls stay here.” Shaw knew she’d never let him go without an argument, but he thought it was worth a try.

  “What about the girls in town?” Alafair demanded, hot on Shaw’s heels as he and the others turned to rush away. He put his hand on her shoulder, vainly trying to hold her back. Gee Dub was fading into the distance, halfway across the barnyard, and Charlie was already out of sight.

  “Alafair, stay here with the young’uns. Light a lamp and go back down into the cellar. You know it’s not safe for them to be wandering around amongst all this rubble now that it’s dark. We’ll see about the house after we know the other children are all well.”

  “But…”

  “I’ll send Gee Dub back as soon as we know something. You know I’m right.” He made shooing motions with his hands. “Now, git. Go on, get back.”

  She did know he was right, but it sat very ill with her to be still and wait for word. However, the young girls were hovering around her, frightened and anxious. Their need for her, she admitted to herself, was more immediate. She twisted her neck to its extreme as she walked back toward the cellar with the girls clasped to her sides, and watched Shaw move away into the gloom.

  A roll of thunder was followed by a burst of torrential rain and light hail. As unhappy as Blanche, Sophronia, and Grace had been to go down into the dark, dank cellar in the first place, they were eager enough to return to shelter now. The temperature had dropped and a cold rain had begun to fall. Alafair offered to go to the house to check damage and see if she could find some blankets and pillows for them, but this idea was met with a chorus of vetos. Even Sophronia, who would never admit fear, assured her mother that she would rather sleep uncovered on rows of Mason jars than be left alone.

  Resigned, Alafair arranged a species of bed for them out of sacks of potatoes and dried beans and created a bedspread from empty burlap bags to cover them as they huddled together for warmth. Alafair knelt beside the bean-sack bed to repeat bedtime prayers with the girls, fervently thanking God for letting them live. After she had decided that all three had fallen into the sleep of exhaustion, she hoisted herself off her knees and raised the lamp to cast its light on her children. Sophronia’s face was obscured by a tangle of reddish curls, and Grace was so huddled down between her sisters and under her burlap covers that all Alafair could see of her was the top of her head. Blanche’s wide green eyes were staring at her. Alafair gently placed her hand on Blanche’s cheek, and the girl sighed and turned over.

  Alafair became aware of Charlie’s voice calling from a distance. She wasn’t going to have to wait much longer to find out if God’s mercy had been extended to her other children. She wrapped a gunny sack over her head, pushed open the cellar door and went outside just as Charlie came up the path. Tears of relief flooded Alafair’s eyes when she caught sight of Mary and Kurt, with Chase close on their heels.

  Mary rushed into her mother’s arms. “Oh, Ma! Oh, Ma, look at the house!”

  “Never you mind about that. Thank the Lord y’all are all right!”

  “We’re fine. We were just coming up here to see how y’all are when we met Charlie on the path. We had a bunch of wind damage, outbuildings and tree limbs and the like, and a little damage to the house. Scared us silly, though. When the twister went by, the windows bowed in like they were made of rubber! I had no idea that glass could stretch like that. It was the strangest thing I ever saw. Just blew out an east window in the parlor. We got it boarded up already.” Mary gestured toward the upended porch. “Nothing like this. How are Phoebe and John Lee and the Zeltha?”

  “I don’t know yet. Your daddy and Gee Dub are still over there. Kurt and Charlie, go on over and see if they need some help, then somebody come back right quick and let me know how they are. Then I need one of you fellows to go into town and make sure Alice and Ruth and Martha are all right. I’m about to jump out of my skin with worry.”

  Mary took charge. “Kurt, you tell Daddy and them to come back to our house for tonight. There’s no use Ma and the girls spending the night in the cellar when we have dry beds and plenty of blankets.”

  Phoebe Day

  It took Shaw and Gee Dub a long time to pick their way through the dark and the debris as they made their way east across the field toward the Day farm. It had turned unseasonably cold and it didn’t help matters when the rain began to fall again, slowing their progress even more.

  When the limbs and odd pieces of board and building began to thin out on the ground, Shaw was briefly heartened. But as they neared the property line, not only was there no debris, there was nothing on the ground at all. No grass, not a weed or a rock.

  “Look, Dad.”

  Gee Dub’s voice startled him out of his preoccupation. “What, son?”

  “The fence is gone.”

  The barbed wire fence that divided the Tucker and Day farms now consisted of a couple of broken fence posts sticking out of the ground at crazy angles. There was no barbed wire to be seen.

  Shaw’s heart fell into his boots with a thud. The landscape was unrecognizable. “Come on,” he urged, his voice tense with fear.

  If it hadn’t been for the creek on the Day side, Shaw expected they wouldn’t have been able to find their way at all. The path had been scoured out. The continual lightning threw demonic flashes of light on the collection of leafless, limbless sticks and poles that used to be a stretch of woods. Shaw wondered if hell was similar.

  He didn’t realize that they had reached the farm until he saw the back of the house. The little white clapboard cottage stood pristine in the middle of a bare yard. Two small saplings that John Lee had recently planted stood straight and fully leafed beside the back door.

  “Looks like it’s still standing,” Gee Dub exclaimed, breathless with relief.

  Shaw broke into a run. “Phoebe!” he called.

  As they rounded the corner of the house, Shaw stopped so abruptly that Gee Dub ran into him. The back of the house was untouched, but the front of the house was gone.

  It had been sheared in half as neatly as if by a giant buzz saw.

  Even the floor was gone. There was no parlor or kitchen, though Phoebe’s heavy iron cookstove stood on the ground in its usual place. The recently added bedroom at the back of the house was neat as a pin. Three walls stood undamaged but the fourth had disappeared, along with half the roof. The bed was made up with a colorful quilt and white eyelet curtains hung at the window. A rocking chair sat on top of a rag rug next to the bed, opposite a chifforobe upon which lay a comb and mirror, a shaving cup with brush, and a crocheted doily. All in all it was like looking into a giant doll house, complete with a doll.

  Zeltha was sitting on the floor with one leg of the chifforobe sitting on the tail of her nightgown, her face wet with tears and purple with fear. She shrieked when she saw her grandfather and lifted her arms to him.

  Shaw scrambled up onto the foundation and hauled the child free as Gee Dub lifted the heavy dresser off of her gown. Her little body was shaking with cold and terror. Shaw snuggled her up to his chest and wrapped his coat around her.

  “Do you think they’re blown away?” Gee Dub had one arm around his father’s shoulders and was patting Zeltha’s back with his other hand.

  “Phoebe put the leg of that chest on Zeltha’s shirttail.” Shaw raised his voice to be heard over the girl’s wails. “Your mama used to do that to keep little ones from straying when she had to do a quick task. Maybe they’ve run to check the animals. Zeltha, baby, where’s Mama, honey? Where’s Mama?”

  “Mamaaaa!” Zeltha howled, but offered no other enlightenment.

  Shaw walked over to the gaping hole that was once the bedroom wall and yelled into the night. “Phoebe! John Lee! Holler if you can hear me, young’uns!”

  Shaw heard no answering call, but Gee Dub had younger ears. He stiffened. “Listen, Dad.”

 
Shaw cocked his head and strained to hear over Zeltha’s sobs and the receding crackle of thunder as the storm moved farther away from them. His first thought was that he was hearing a wounded calf bawling, but he realized with a jolt that whatever it was, it was speaking English.

  “Daddy, Daddy, Daddy…” A high-pitched voice that he didn’t recognize, a woman’s voice.

  But Gee Dub did. He started out into the muddy yard. “It’s Phoebe, Daddy. Come on, come on!”

  They rushed toward the voice as fast as they could in the dark. They didn’t have to worry about debris since the yard had been scoured right down to the bare ground, but the landscape was so changed that they had no way of recognizing where they were. Zeltha was snuffling quietly against Shaw’s chest, now, clinging to him.

  If it weren’t for the near-constant lightning, they’d have never been able to see Phoebe, barefoot and clad in a cotton housedress and apron, so pregnant that she could hardly bend over. She was frantically digging in a pile of what seemed to be muddy firewood. When she saw them approach she stopped calling for her father, but she didn’t stop flinging sticks and pieces of wood off the pile. Her auburn hair was wet and hanging in strings over her face and shoulders.

  Shaw handed the two-year-old to Gee Dub and scrambled up onto the woodpile to grab Phoebe’s hands. “Honey, what in the world are you doing? You’ll hurt yourself! Come on down with me. We found Zeltha right where you left her. Where’s John Lee?”

  Phoebe shook him off and grabbed another stick of wood to throw aside. “He’s here, Daddy, help me! He went to see that the barn was closed up when the storm hit.”

  “The barn?”

  “This is the barn. It collapsed and John Lee is under here somewhere!”

  Shaw felt like he’d been hit in the chest by a fist. He picked Phoebe up bodily and carried her kicking and protesting off of the hill of splintered wood.