by Ninie Hammon
“The next day, it was back to normal. He never paid no attention a’tall to that child. Oh, he got drunk and brought her home this lacy, white, store-bought dress one Christmas, but lots of times we didn’t have no food to eat and I had to go a-beggin’ from the coloreds at the bottom of the hill. He went back to … messin’ with me, just like he always done, but right after Angel was born was when I got that stuff on my face, my chest and my back, them awful bumps. Jackson hated that, said it made him sick, that I’s so ugly it made him want to puke when he looked at me.”
Jonas spoke softly, the venom in his words as poisonous as a snake bite. “Somebody ought to of put a shotgun barrel down that man’s pants and blown his privates out the back side of his long johns.”
Princess actually smiled.
“I didn’t care that he acted like Angel wasn’t there. That just meant she was mine, all mine.” She looked sunshine out her eyes at Mac and Jonas. “I don’t have words fine enough to say what a gift she was to me, how my heart filled up to burstin’ ever day with lovin’ her. Ever’ breath I took, I took for her; ever’ thought was ’bout my Angel. She was everything good and beautiful and holy in the whole world, all wrapped up in a little girl with red curls.”
The sunshine left Princess’s eyes.
“Jackson never paid her no mind a’tall until that day when she was two, the day I’s telling you about that I give her a bath in the washtub.”
Angel’s bubbling laughter is the most joyous sound Princess has ever heard. She’s sitting on the floor with the child and reaches out to tickle her again when the front door suddenly bangs open and Jackson stomps in, looking meaner than a mason jar full of hornets.
He’s obviously been drinking, but even with his speech muddy, Princess has no trouble understanding him.
“Heard about your little party this afternoon at the bottom of the hill,” he roars at Princess, then turns on Angel. “I know what you done, too, Little Miss Priss.”
Joe Dan had told Jackson! Princess had seen the man, one of the elders of Jackson’s little church, drive by in his pickup truck, staring out the window at them. She should have known he’d go find Jackson at Shakey’s Tavern and fill his ear full about it.
Princess and Angel had gone down the hill as soon as the child woke up from her afternoon nap. Bess Washington, the nice colored lady in the shack by the road, had told Princess a couple of weeks ago that her cat was about to have kittens and Princess wanted to show them to Angel.
The four little critters were adorable! Two of them had mostly white fur, one had white and brown spots and one was black as a lump of coal. Angel had fallen in love with that one. Wouldn’t hardly put it down the whole time they were there.
Bess’s youngest, Willie, a three-year-old with great big ears, was the only playmate Angel had ever had. They’d wandered over to the creek together with two of the kittens and sat petting them while they dangled their toes in the inch-deep water.
Princess was standing on Bess’s porch, asking about her tomato plants, when she heard a truck coming. Didn’t hardly have no traffic at all on that road, so she was surprised to see Joe Dan’s pickup come around the corner. Wasn’t no time to hide, so she made like she didn’t care that he seen, just waved at him real big as he drove by.
But she saw how he was gawking at Angel and Willie. She looked over at them and the two children were sitting there holding hands!
“Joe Dan saw you with that little nigger boy!” Jackson yells at Angel and the tone of his voice terrifies the child. She jumps up off the floor and starts to run, but Jackson grabs her arm, like to of yanked it out of the socket.
Princess leaps to her defense.
“You leave her be!” she shrieks, but never even makes it to her feet before the back of Jackson’s hand connects with the side of her face. The blow knocks her sideways into the wood stove, her head bangs into one of the metal legs and the world goes dark.
She hears Angel’s sniffling beside her as she comes to. When she opens her eyes, the child’s face swims blurry in front of her and the room spins. She closes her eyes for a few more moments and opens them again. Angel’s face is clear. Her left cheek is an angry red, her left eye swelling. She’s gonna have a shiner. And her bottom lip is split.
“Printhess!” she squeals when she sees her mother’s eyes are open, and throws her arms around her neck. Princess struggles to sit up with the child clinging to her, then cradles the trembling child in her lap, rocks back and forth, crooning, “Shhh now, hush. You’re okay.”
“Oh, no she ain’t,” Jackson says from the doorway. Princess whirls around and he is leaning on the doorframe for support.
Princess sucks in a little gasp of terror, but instead of advancing on them, Jackson sneers, “It ain’t okay for any kin of mine to truck with black savages!”
Princess wants to tell him that the “black savages” fed his kin when he’d left them to starve while he drank up all the food money. But she would never dare to say such a thing. Jackson spits on the porch, turns and marches off down the hill.
She holds Angel until the child stops trembling, then puts her down and starts supper. Jackson doesn’t come back, so the two of them eat beans and cornbread and sing silly songs as Princess washes up the dishes.
Then she gets Angel’s bath ready. She has just gotten the little girl’s hair all soaped up when she hears Jackson’s heavy boots on the front steps. She turns and he is standing in the open doorway. He has a beer in one hand and a little black kitten in the other.
“Kitty!” Angel squeals and reaches out her hands for it. Princess feels a cold stone in the pit of her stomach.
“What are you a-plannin’ to do with that cat?” she asks fearfully. But she knows the answer.
Jackson doesn’t reply, just finishes the beer, curls his lips up in a cruel smile and holds the animal out to Angel by the scruff of its neck.
“Gimme kitty,” Angel pleads and tries to climb out of the washtub to get to the cat.
“You’re gonna kill it, ain’t ya?” Princess says.
“No, I ain’t,” he says. He pauses, then purrs quietly, “But she is!”
Princess gasps.
He steps to the cabinet where she set the bean pot to dry, drops the black kitten down into it and puts the lid on top.
“Get her dry,” he commands Princess, “and I’m gonna show her how to treat a nigger cat!”
Princess shuddered at the memory. Mac and Jonas were both so sickened they couldn’t speak. Then she took a breath and continued the story.
“So I turned where he couldn’t see, and I rubbed soap in Angel’s eyes a-purpose! And she started screaming, yelling, and carryin’ on. He waited, but she just kept a-cryin’ and he couldn’t do nothing with a squalling child so …” She stopped. “‘Truth is, I forgot all about that cat in the pot. Never give it another thought. Had too much else on my mind.”
She turned in the chair toward the window and gazed out at the little town in the Indian Bluffs.
“I stood there pourin’ water over Angel’s head, her a-cryin’ while I tried to figure out how I was gonna get her out of there. I knew then he was gonna hurt her. Beat her, sure. But hurt her worse than that. He was gonna turn her into a mean, miserable, spiteful monster just like he was, squeeze all the love and laughter out of that little girl and fill her plumb up to the top with meanness and hate. He was gonna steal her soul. And wasn’t no way in the world I could protect her.”
She turned back to the table, rested her hands on it and looked earnestly into Mac’s face.
“Time we got off that train, Angel’s face was just about healed up and I had me a plan. I done a lot of thinkin’ as that cattle car bumped along the track. I figured out there was only one way to end it. I couldn’t get away from him. Sooner or later the money’d a-run out and he’d a-found us. And if I’d of just left Angel someplace, Jackson woulda tore up the whole country ’til he found her. Not ’cause he cared anything about her, but because sh
e was his. The onliest way in the world he’d a-give up on her was if she was dead.”
She fell silent again, took in a shaky breath, and then the stillness settled over her. Princess was finished.
Mac shook his head in wonder at her incredible story, then reached out and placed his hands over hers. In the silence, he looked tenderly at the frail mother who’d willingly paid an incredible price to save her little girl in the only currency she had—sacrifice.
Chapter 24
Andy Cook stopped breathing, waited for the green radar beam to circle the WSR-57 radar’s black screen and return to the spot where he’d seen it. Yes, it was there!
“Take a look at this!” he called out, and the three other meteorologists who’d been huddled around the radar a few minutes earlier dropped the maps and weather balloon data they were studying and rushed to his side.
“See it?” They waited and the green beam swept around again and illuminated the massive storm system gobbling up the southeastern part of the state. “Right there!”
A shape had appeared in the cloud formation that showed up as a blob on the radar screen. A hook shape.
One of the other meteorologists cursed softly under his breath. “Look at the size of that thing.”
A hook formation on the tail end of a cloud was the only visual sign radar could pick up of a tornado within a storm system. But that’s all it could determine, just that a tornado was there. Radar could not detect whether the tornado was on the ground or a thousand feet up in the air.
Andy had only read about the hook-shaped formation of a tornado visible on radar. He’d never seen one until today. But the supervisor of the section had seen plenty and he began giving orders like a drill sergeant, instructing his team to issue a tornado watch for the area directly in the path of the fast-moving storm. Area radio and television stations would be notified immediately.
A tornado watch meant only that conditions existed in which a tornado could form. Spotters on the ground would have to confirm that a tornado had touched down. And that was a problem. Many twisters, shrouded by clouds or concealed inside rain storms, were hard to see, and spotters were scarce. Communication was an even bigger issue. Radio transmissions were always interrupted by severe storms; power and phone lines were usually among the first casualties of bad weather. In other words, the very thing the spotters were looking for often prevented them from reporting that they’d found it. But only after confirmation by a spotter would the National Weather Bureau issue a tornado warning, which meant a tornado was on the ground and headed in a particular direction. The warning would urge those in the tornado’s projected path to take immediate shelter.
Though Andy knew the protocol as well as anybody else in the room, he wasn’t satisfied with a mere tornado watch. There were so many of those during spring storm season on the plains; people ignored them, and he had a really bad feeling about this storm. Absent a single bit of concrete information, Andy’s gut still told him this hook was a tornado on the ground. He trusted his gut. And gauging from the intensity of the storm that had formed the huge hook—the super-cell thunderstorm stretched up 45,000 feet!—the tornado could be massive.
Andy turned to the wall and studied the big map of Oklahoma, where the progress of the storm was plotted out with stick-pins. He knew West Texas intimately, could tell you every town in a 100-mile radius of Lubbock. But he wasn’t that familiar with Oklahoma, and as he studied the area in front of the storm, he relaxed slightly. Nothing much out there but empty plains, cattle ranches, and a few oil rigs. The only town on the map directly in the storm’s current path was Graham and it was sixty miles away. Only a handful of all the recorded tornadoes in history stayed on the ground more than ten or twenty miles.
Well, there was the Great Tri-State Tornado on March 18, 1925 … It killed 695 people and injured 2,000 more on its three-and-a-half-hour, 219-mile rampage through Missouri, Illinois, and Indiana.
For just a moment, Andy considered chucking the protocol and calling city officials in Graham, just to give them a heads-up. But he didn’t. He couldn’t get all worked up over his first sighting of a tornado on radar or he’d get himself fired his first day on the job! That crotchety old weather forecaster in Lubbock had often warned him not to run ahead of his headlights. “When it comes to twisters, son, think horse, not zebra,” he’d said. In truth, the vast majority of tornadoes that formed inside thunderstorms remained in the clouds and never touched down at all. And of the ones that did, the fastest forward speed ever documented was fifty miles per hour. So if this twister really was on the ground, and if it was a sprinter, it wouldn’t strike Graham until well after five o’clock. That was more than an hour from now. There was still plenty of time.
* * * * *
All the clocks in Dawson Station, Oklahoma, stopped at 3:59 p.m. The brutal rainstorm lashing the little cluster of buildings that wasn’t even on the map had cut the power lines. Families in the five houses nestled beside the road between the gas station and the general store were plunged into semi-darkness as the rain grew more intense, became a solid wall of water, the wind screamed and wailed, and hail the size of golf balls pummeled the rooftops.
Cloaked in the massive rainstorm, no one saw the tornado coming before the dead center of the monster twister slammed into the town and erased it, wiped it off the face of the earth as if it had never been there at all. The boiling black wall at the bottom of an eight-mile-high rotating column generated winds 300 miles per hour at its core and seventy-five on the outer perimeter. It demolished every structure and then sucked up the debris. It scooped the vehicles off the ground, yanked the bark off the trees, and left nothing behind but the foundations of seven buildings and a mile-wide stretch of land scrubbed as featureless as if it had been bulldozed.
Fourteen people died instantly.
The savage twister had covered the nine miles between a field outside Tishomingo and Dawson Station in less than nine minutes.
* * * * *
Mac picked up his notepad and the visitor’s card encased in Saran Wrap and slid them both into his jacket pocket.
“I have to go talk to the warden,” he said.
Princess’s bald head snapped back like he’d slapped her face.
“Ain’t you been listenin’ to a word I said? You can’t do that!”
“Earth to Princess!” he cried in frustration. “You’ve got a date with Sizzlin’ Suzie in …” he looked at his watch “a little over an hour—for killing somebody who’s not dead.”
“I already told you, I made my peace. I’m ready.”
“Princess, they’re going to execute you.”
“This ain’t about me. It ain’t never been about me. It’s about Angel. Everything I done, I done for her. I got her away from that monster and she’s safe now where he can’t hurt her. She’s got you …” She turned and nodded toward Jonas, who was sitting stock still, his eyes huge, “and Mr. Cunningham. I’ve give my little girl a good life. But if you tell the warden, you’ll ruin everything. All those years a-sittin’ by myself in that cell, that’ll all a-been for nothin’.”
Mac was so dumfounded he could think of nothing to say; she kept at him, her siren’s voice full of surging power.
“You ain’t thought this through, Rev. You ain’t thought what the truth of this is gonna do to your Joy!”
Joy!
“What’s it gonna do to that child to find out the only mother she ever knowed wasn’t really her mama a’tall? That she was born to a thirteen-year-old kid in a filthy shack, and her real mama’s a scar-faced woman with brown teeth who’s got a fifth-grade education and spent the last fourteen years all alone in a cage on the Long Dark?”
Her voice was the rumble of thunder.
“What’s it gonna do to her to find out her father ain’t the good Reverend McIntosh, neither? That her real daddy’s Jackson Prentiss, maybe the most hated man, and for sure the most hate-filled man in the whole country?” She stopped, then whispered in horror. �
��He’s done things you don’t know about … killed people.”
She leaned across the table and hissed at him, “And you best remember that Angela Marie Prentiss ain’t but 16 years old! You thought ’bout what you’re gonna do when Jackson comes to claim her?”
Mac gasped.
“Don’t you think for a minute he won’t. She’s his! Him all famous, got them powerful friends, ain’t no way you could stop him. You promised me you wouldn’t never let nothing bad happen to her. That man blacked her eye when she was just two years old, what do you think he’ll do to her now? This secret comes out, Jackson will destroy the whole rest of that child’s life. I done all this to get my Angel away from him. You can’t give her back!”
Mac’s head was spinning. He was dizzy, nauseous. She was right, of course. The truth about her parents would shatter the child. And what about her future? What would Jackson Prentiss do to her if he took her?
But if Mac didn’t tell, Princess would be—
“Princess, do you realize that my silence will kill you?”
She said absolutely nothing, sat stock still, studying him. Then she shook her head in wonder.
“I swan, I never dreamed conversation—just talkin’—was this hard. You’re the one that don’t understand, Rev. You still don’t get it, do you? You ain’t killing me. The state of Oklahoma ain’t killing me. Ain’t nobody killing Emily Gail Prentiss. Nobody’s taking my life; I’m giving my life. Of my own free will. For my little girl.”
Suddenly, Princess froze. Literally stopped moving, stopped breathing. She’d been looking at Mac and her eyes were still pointed at him. But it was plain she didn’t see him anymore. She saw something else entirely.
“She’s ’bout to throw a fit,” Jonas said.
Mac had never seen an epileptic seizure and had no idea what to expect. But Princess didn’t fall out of the chair to the floor. She didn’t shake and foam at the mouth. She sat frozen where she was, looked like she was viewing a movie he and Jonas couldn’t see. A horror movie, from the look on her face.
