by Ace Atkins
“I wouldn’t light up a cigar just yet,” Lillie said.
Quinn nodded, standing on top of what used to be a house, the rusted blue water tower still looming over town, reading JERICHO in faded, worn letters. Lillie took a call from Mary Alice.
“Found another one,” Lillie said. “Old woman laid out in a field by the high school stadium. Mary Alice says she’d been impaled by a four-by-four.”
“Anyone we know?”
“Don’t think it’s easy to tell,” Lillie said. “They’re going to need you back at the SO. Nobody could have survived in here. Better just wait for the dogs.”
“I’d like to ride up to Carthage.”
“Lee County and Lafayette County are going door-to-door,” Lillie said. “Someone is going to have to talk to the press. Mary Alice says TV crews want permission to enter the Square. I think the town would rather see you on TV than Johnny Stagg’s grinning pumpkin head.”
“I’d rather search.”
“We got six counties who’ve come to help,” she said. “You can’t direct it all from radio. And those boys from emergency management need a little input on the local terrain.”
“What about you?”
“I want to check on Rose and your momma,” Lillie said. “See how they’re doing together.”
“Caddy took Jason to the church with her,” Quinn said. “I appreciate you giving Jean something to do and a place to stay. She needed that.”
“You say it ripped off her kitchen?”
Quinn nodded. “But you know Jean,” he said. “She said she’d always hated that kitchen and wanted to remodel anyway.”
He and Lillie walked down the trash-strewn street and destroyed neighborhood. Quinn held the ax loose in his bloodied hands. Volunteers from the local churches continued to dig into the piles, spraying all-clear symbols on vacant houses. So far, the county had accounted for six dead. A quarter of the downtown was just gone, the business district wiped clean.
On the hill off Main Street, Quinn searched for the Stevens home, seeing the old Victorian still standing but the right side splitting away from the center. A hundred-year-old shade oak had sliced away a solid portion. Quinn motioned for Lillie to walk on as he took a call from Mary Alice, directing Kenny and Art Watts over to the Piggly Wiggly for crowd control and to direct traffic.
Anna Lee stood on the hill, holding her child, speaking to a photographer who stepped back and framed her against what had been a town showpiece. Anna Lee wore jeans and boots, a cowboy shirt loose and flowing over a tank top. She looked proud and strong, resolved on the big hill, with the baby on her hip. Quinn wanted to run to her but slowed his pace to a jog.
The photographer, a big guy with gray hair and glasses from Oxford, left a card and moved on. Quinn stepped up to Anna Lee. He wanted to put his arms around her and hold her close and kiss her neck and cheek and take her with him. Wind pulled the hair into her face, and she pushed back a few strands, just staring at Quinn.
Quinn nodded. Never in his life had the town seemed so silent.
At the foot of the hill, a crew of local volunteers gathered around Lillie. Lillie sent them in the direction of the tornado, away from the old saltboxes and onto a grouping of larger, older houses that had been built not long after Reconstruction.
“Caddy said she saw you,” Quinn said.
Anna Lee nodded.
“Can I help?”
Looking sad, she shook her head.
“Can I put my arm around you?”
She shook her head.
“This is hard.”
Anna Lee nodded as if she might cry and turned back to the house. From over her shoulder, her daughter stared back at Quinn. In the west, the sun was starting to set. Just the thinnest edge of clouds, blood-red and black, streaked the horizon, shadowing the violence and wreckage.
As he got close to the Town Square, Quinn watched a young boy and his father raise an American flag off a toppled pole and lean it against a gazebo, where it caught the wind. Rescue workers and volunteers crowded the sheriff’s office parking lot. Television news trucks and wreckers and power company workers sat waiting with engines and lights idling. The night was coming on quick, the sky purple-red behind the old Jericho water tower, flash bars strobing atop police cars and sheriff’s department vehicles from as far away as Laurel.
Lillie saw Quinn and nodded. She held the door as he walked on into the SO, crowded as it had ever been. “Sheriff,” she said. Maps covered the conference room table. Mary Alice and two other dispatchers fielded the radio and calls. Someone had started to brew coffee. A crew was on top of the building, hammering up new tin.
• • •
“God is good,” Jamey Dixon said.
“How can you say that?” Caddy said. “At this moment? With what we’ve just seen?”
They stood next to the old barn, unwrapping hamburger buns and mixing sweet tea in five-gallon buckets. Jamey smiled and said, “Pretty easy.”
A few hundred people had just shown up at The River, unprepared and unaware but knowing something had to be done. Uncle Van, looking like a rat shaken loose from his tree, and some other men had started to pull out the picnic tables from the barn. Generators started whirring, long strands of the Christmas lights lit the mouth of the church and glowed out from the barn onto tall wooden poles where grills were lit, tablecloths were laid, and pitchers of water and tea were placed. After the storm, Jamey set out a feast, a celebration for everyone who came onto the old farm still hanging on to the earth.
They cooked out hot dogs and hamburgers and served sweet tea and Kool-Aid. Boxes and boxes of used clothes Jamey had gathered for a thrift store in town were thrown open and sorted at the church altar. Buckets were left by the front door for donations.
“God is at work in all our individual lives,” Jamey said. “You see it here.”
Caddy had moved into the barn and to a big table by the altar, folding and spreading out blue jeans and shirts and underwear and socks. Inside, you could take a hot shower and change and get a cot to sleep. She shook her head, overwhelmed with the sadness for her town and everything taken away. Caddy felt like she had a rock in her throat.
“Sorrow and joy are part of life,” Jamey said. “Without one, the other isn’t recognizable. We thank God for recognizing it all. We shouldn’t ever take this day for granted. It’s a gift. Everything is good and proper at the right time.”
“I don’t have a house.”
“God will provide.”
“Everything I own is gone,” she said.
“God will provide,” Jamey said.
Caddy looked out the big barn door to see Jason playing chase with some other kids, shadowed on the rolling hills by giant rounds of hay and an old tractor. Jamey stepped in and hugged her. She put her hand to her mouth and tried to steady herself.
“Be happy, Caddy,” Jamey said. “We’re here. We’re alive. We now know the gift the Lord has given us. Without the storm, we are blind. Now we’re prosperous.”
She took her hand from her mouth and shook her head. “Preachers sure have a funny way of looking at the world.”
“Everything is pointless, useless vanity. This is what is everlasting.”
Jamey pulled her in tighter, and for a moment she rested her head on his shoulder. Donation buckets filled with cash and coin. Elvis Presley sang “The Old Rugged Cross” as the air filled with electric light and the smells of meat on the grill. The color of the sky had gone from a deep blue and gray to the deepest shades of red and black, a soft, warm wind blowing over the dinner tables and on into the church.
“There will be times we will be down and out, but this is when we put our pain away,” Jamey said. “Look to that sky and see the promise He made.”
“You think that’s why you came back?” she said.
Jamey nodded. He stepped in front of her, held her face in his hands and kissed her on the forehead.
“There will be a long time of mourning,” Jamey said. “Bu
t we have to help these people mend. That’s why we are here. This is providence, not fate.”
“You know what I think?” Caddy asked. “I think we’re finally free of your past. I think this is bigger than us all and we can finally be left hell enough alone.”
“Everybody knows the material world is temporary,” Jamey said. “God’s love is everlasting. Don’t look at this life apart from God. A sovereign God has given us everything for a reason and a purpose, and He takes it away for the same purpose. God is completely in control. He has a purpose for everything. Even storms.”
“You do realize that only a crazy person could see beauty in today?” Caddy said.
Jamey smiled and nodded. “God is our refuge and strength, an ever-present help in trouble. Therefore we will not fear, though the earth give way, and the mountains fall into the heart of the sea, though its waters roar and foam, and the mountains quake with their surging.”
“Faith ain’t easy,” she said.
“Easy as stepping off a cliff and hoping for a net.”
Caddy nodded and went back to sorting and folding. A slight woman in a huge yellow T-shirt and bedroom slippers walked up to the table, toting a couple kids under five, a boy and a girl. Caddy sized them up and looked for a box to fill. The children stared blankly and did not speak as Caddy spoke to them. The slight woman held them close to her side, a hand over each, saying they had just seen their aunt carried away.
“She lay over them, pressing her body against them,” the woman said. “The roof blew off, and she was sucked up into the sky.”
The woman bent at the waist, shaking. Jamey got down on one knee and smiled at the children. “That’s supreme sacrifice,” Jamey said. “I know she must have loved both of you lots. That love you feel in your heart for her won’t ever go away. You keep her there.”
Jamey Dixon touched each of their small hands, their eyes finally meeting his as if just coming awake. Caddy kept folding, crying a bit but folding, as more boxes of clothes appeared from strangers and friends. Food was served and then ran out. More food appeared. So many people lay up under the big tin roof that tarps were brought in to expand the shelter. God was good.
Quinn and Boom drove Kenny out to see his daddy, after getting word that his mother had been missing since the tornado. Kenny’s daddy, whose name was Ken Senior, lived in a little white cabin about five miles outside Yellow Leaf. He was a veteran, seeing too much action as a Huey pilot in Vietnam, picking up the dead and the wounded from hot LZs, and had spent most of the last twenty years sitting in a La-Z-Boy recliner, chain-smoking cigarettes and drinking cheap bourbon. He was a good man, round and bald like his son, who got out of the chair only for church and hunting season. His den was filled with the heads of a dozen trophy bucks. The bucks had held firm on the wall even though most of the house had been chewed up and spit out a hundred meters away.
“Why didn’t y’all just get in the shelter?” Kenny said. “That’s why we put one in.”
Ken Senior shook his head, eyes red-rimmed with sadness, cigarette in hand and a gaping wound in his chest as large as a fist. He said some flying glass had caught him.
“You’re going to die,” Kenny said. “Come on.”
“Not without her,” he said. “I couldn’t get in the shelter because she couldn’t get there.”
Quinn looked to Kenny, knowing that Kenny’s mother had been bedridden since a car accident three years ago left her with bad knees and frequent migraines. Kenny took off his ball cap and turned and studied his parents’ house as if it were the first time he noticed that half of it was gone.
“Quinn?”
He turned as Boom walked into the wreckage, that weird part, the chair and the three walls and the deer heads looking like some kind of theater prop. The sun was nearly down, red and bold all across the west like something out of a John Ford film. He nodded to Quinn and motioned with his head for him to come on away from Kenny and the old man, who kept up the arguing about going to the hospital.
“About a quarter mile to the north,” Boom said. “Right in the middle of the cornfield.”
“You sure?”
“It’s an old woman,” Boom said.
Quinn nodded and turned.
“Woman is nekkid,” Boom said. “Bring some water, her face gonna have to get clean of the dirt to tell for sure.”
Quinn motioned across the way for Kenny, who rushed out at attention in his usual unselfish way. “Sheriff?”
“Boom found something,” Quinn said.
“Is it her?”
“I can take a look, Kenny,” Quinn said. “I’ll let you know.”
Kenny shook his head, looking down at his boots. His father yelling from the remnants of his home, “If y’all know something, you boys better tell me. I ain’t leaving here until I know. You fucking hear me?”
Kenny nodded more to Quinn than his father. “How far?”
“Boom says a quarter mile.”
Kenny nodded and turned over his shoulder to his father, dropping his voice. “He ain’t going to get help unless he knows. You think we can get that four-wheeler out of your truck? I can ride him on out.”
“It’s just a body,” Quinn said. “We don’t know for sure.”
“What’s Boom think?”
Quinn didn’t say anything. Kenny nodded. Quinn went to his F-250, Boom already having repaired a lot of the damage before the storm hit, but the truck still showing lots of dents and scrapes from the chase in the woods that morning.
Quinn slid down the ramps and drove the ATV out of the truck bed. He left it idling, walking back with Kenny to his father, helping the old man out of his old recliner. They both held on to an arm, propping him up as he shuffled more than walked. Kenny got onto the 4-wheeler, and Quinn helped Ken Senior onto the back, the old man wrapping his arms around Kenny’s waist.
Quinn started the truck and rode with Boom down the road scattered with broken limbs and fallen trees, zigzagging in and out until Boom pointed the way to the big open field. The field had been recently planted, small green corn plants dotting straight and true across the acreage, some pulled up in thick swirls of upchurned earth. Halfway across the plantings, there was a body. Boom had spotted it from the road.
Boom took his good hand and lifted a water jug to his mouth. He offered Quinn a drink, and the two crawled out, carrying the jug with them, walking across the cornfield in the last red light of day. The 4-wheeler came up behind them, running slow and solid by their sides as they walked, not overtaking them, Kenny still letting Quinn take the lead to the body.
The woman was old and portly. She lay contorted and twisted, naked but covered in mud and debris, her face coated in dry, blackened earth. Boom looked to the men, loosened the cap from the water jug, and began to pour.
The wail from the old man, still perched on back of the 4-wheeler, filled the little valley. The wail became deep sobbing, and Kenny held his father the way a father might hold his own child.
Quinn and Boom turned away, walking back across the field and toward the truck.
The men did not speak. The red-and-black twilight was turning to gray and full black. You could see the stars and a sliver of moon.
“That’s a hell of a thing,” Boom said.
“Yep.”
“You make any sense why this stuff happens?”
“Nope.”
Boom held on to a fence post with his only hand before jumping across a narrow ravine and over to the highway. “Yeah, me neither.”
• • •
Johnny Stagg had promised Esau a fucking doctor.
Instead he sent up some teenage girl with a goddamn sewing kit, telling him she’d done a full year of nursing at junior college before she said to hell with it and became a stripper.
“Baby, I got glass in my eye,” he said. “I don’t need no one to feel around my nut sack.”
The girl said she was twenty-one and that her name was Sandi Jo and if he had a problem with her skills, he could
go wait at the county hospital. “But I don’t think they have power or lights, and you might have to wait maybe, I don’t know, two weeks before seeing someone.”
Esau nodded. Sandi Jo opened up her doctor’s bag and pulled out a syringe and a vial, Esau thinking, OK, this is how it goes; Stagg is going to shoot my ass full of dope or poison and drop my ass in some deep hole. “No way, baby.”
“You really want me to start digging in that eye with a set of tweezers and no pain management?” Sandi Jo, maybe a hundred pounds, no ass or tits, with black streaks in her blond hair, just sort of shrugged. “Fine by me, Red.”
“Don’t call me Red.”
“You the reddest man I ever saw,” she said. “I bet you get burnt to a crisp, you down on the coast. That’s where I was supposed to be this weekend until this shitstorm hit. Now Mr. Stagg says we all need to stay if we want to keep dancing. He said we can earn an assload of cash with all them emergency workers, Guard folks, and all. He’s probably right. Mr. Stagg kind of reminds me of my grandpa.”
“Shit,” Esau said. “Go ahead and stick me.”
“You sure?”
“Goddamn, I’m sure. Go ahead stick me.”
The girl shot him in the closed eye, the damn eye feeling so swollen and puffy that it wasn’t any pain. He gritted his teeth anyway, her turning a table lamp from Stagg’s desk full on his face, trying to work that lid open.
“You are swelled tight.”
“No shit.”
“You swelled too tight and I won’t be able to see that glass.”
“Where you do your nurse training?”
“Northeast.”
“Mmmhhm.”
She let out a long breath and winced. “Damn, Red. That looks like shit. Your whole eye ain’t nothing but blood. I got some antibiotics in my bag. I get most of my shit from a veterinarian who thinks I look just like Carrie Underwood.”
