by Ninie Hammon
On the green screen of the WSR-57 radar in the National Weather Bureau office in Oklahoma City, the hook-shape in the blob of thunderstorm disappeared.
Jackson lay with his face in the mud sobbing hysterically as a gentle rain sprinkled down on him. When his hysteria eventually calmed, he remained where he had fallen, panting, trying to get his breath as relief washed over him in a delicious, reassuring flood.
He’d made it; he’d even beat a tornado! A low chuckle bubbled up from his chest as he started to get to his feet. But he couldn’t get up. He suddenly became aware of a heaviness, a weight on his back, pressing down so hard he couldn’t catch his breath; he was beginning to have trouble breathing at all. Some piece of the shattered town, or set, or whatever it was, had obviously landed on top of him. Fear instantly traded places with relief in his gut, and the laughter died in his throat.
What if he wasn’t strong enough to get out from under it by himself? How long would it be before somebody came along and found him?
With great effort, he managed to lift his face out of the mud, turn and peer fearfully over his shoulder to see what was pinning him to the ground.
Nothing was.
That was impossible! Something was holding him down, had him crushed to the ground so tight he couldn’t move at all.
Raw terror gripped him. With his heart stampeding in his chest, he lifted his head up as far as he could and struggled frantically to get his arms under him so he could raise his body up on his elbows. But his arms refused to cooperate, lay limp, with the dull, numb sensation of a foot that had gone to sleep. Within seconds, he realized that he could not move any part of his body below his shoulders.
That’s when he began to scream, the warbling, high-pitched screech of a terrified woman.
* * * * *
Oran turned away from the window, his face ashen. He didn’t say anything about what he had seen; he had no air to speak at all. And some part of him wondered if he’d really seen anything at all, if it was a hallucination brought on by the stress of this strange, heart-rending execution.
He shook his head to clear it, tore his scattered thoughts away from the nightmare vision and directed them to the remainder of the task at hand.
Princess was looking at him, her purple eyes huge. He stared at her sadly for a moment or two, then slowly nodded his head at the guard beside the small, white door. Princess gasped, then turned her gaze on her lap.
Her hammering heart banged so fast it might burst from the effort, but that open, airy feeling of a rip in her side below her ribs—it wasn’t there. If that was fear, then she must not be afraid.
Good! She didn’t want to spend her last seconds scared. She took a deep breath and focused on the pictures in her lap. And suddenly, they wasn’t black-and-white pictures no more. They was real! Four alive faces a’lookin’ up at her.
Angel at six, her hair in fat braids tied with blue ribbons…
At nine, freckles on her nose and dog-ears…
A twelve-year-old, her hair in a tangle of rusty curls on her shoulders…
And the beautiful, red-haired teenager looked up at her mother with the big brown eyes of the toddler who’d whined, “I’m thirssy.”
An indescribable joy filled Princess as golden and sweet as warm honey. Then they all smiled at her—the six-year-old didn’t have no front teeth!
She smiled back. “Bye-bye, Angel,” she whispered, so low not even Talbot could hear. “I love you.”
The guard designated as executioner opened the white door, stepped inside, and flipped a single black switch to “on.” When he did, 2,000 volts of electricity instantly completed the circuit from the wet sponge on the top of Princess’s head to the one on the side of her leg. Her thin body went rigid, then jerked uncontrollably as the current sent her muscles into spasm, spilling the pictures in her lap out onto the floor. A smell like burned hair filled the room, but no sound of any kind escaped her lips.
Twenty agonizing seconds after Oran nodded his head the first time, he nodded it again. The executioner flipped the switch to “off” and Princess slumped down and was still.
Oran looked at the limp form held to the chair by leather straps and was profoundly grateful that she appeared to be dead. The machine had worked flawlessly, perhaps because Princess had been wet all over from the rain they’d run through. Old Suz had taken her life quickly and he hoped, painlessly. In fact, she wasn’t even disfigured. Princess looked … peaceful. Like she’d just fallen asleep in the chair.
“Check her out,” he grunted at the doctor. “Make sure she’s gone.”
The doctor stepped closer, lifted his stethoscope and placed it on Princess’s chest, taking great care not to touch the body. Often the skin of electrocuted prisoners was so hot it would burn.
He stood silent for a moment, listening.
The people in the viewing room were uncharacteristically quiet, sat unmoving, waiting for the doctor’s verdict. They had not yet fully recovered from the sound of Princess’s singing. None of them would ever forget it, and more than a few of them would someday long to get that haunting melody out of their heads.
Oran held his breath. He honestly didn’t know if he could send another bolt of electricity through her.
The doctor stepped back and looked at his watch.
“Let the time on the death certificate of Emily Gail Prentiss read 5:02 p.m. May 10, 1963.”
Chapter 31
Sunday morning dawned so crisp and clear the air itself must have been scrubbed with lye soap and hung out on the line to dry. Mac got up and dressed quietly, so as not to wake Joy. She’d had a rough couple of days. Then he drove as far as he could—only a few of the roads had been cleared of debris and tree limbs—parked the car, and walked the rest of the way. The symphony orchestra of chain saws was already tuning up before he even got near the church. He hadn’t seen it, or what little must be left of it. Yesterday, he’d had to see to family and to Princess.
It had been late Saturday afternoon before he made it out to the Iron House to collect Princess’s body. He’d spent the morning at the hospital with Jonas and Maggie—bunged up, couple of bones cracked was all. He’d have looked in on Wanda Ingram then, too, but she was already gone. After her broken arm was set in the emergency room, she’d been shipped off to the Oklahoma State Mental Hospital in Lawton. Then he’d had to borrow a car, a station wagon, and drive the long way around to get to the prison. US 270 was closed; three miles of it would have to be completely rebuilt before it could open again.
Mac had made arrangements for the warden’s secretary to meet him when he arrived at the prison. Oran wouldn’t be there, of course. The warden had lived on the southeast side of Graham. His house was gone. His family’d been in the basement when the twister hit. His wife was in the hospital; she’d make it. His little boy didn’t. Jason Blackburn was one of the fifty-eight people the twister killed in its seventy-seven-mile journey of desolation that started outside Tishomingo and ended in the Indian Bluffs an hour and nineteen minutes later. Thirty-nine of those people had lived in Graham.
Everybody said it could have been a whole lot worse, though. Hundreds would have died if that siren hadn’t blasted out a warning.
But the death toll would likely rise. There were people still unaccounted for; more than 150 had been injured, some of them seriously. And Mac had not been sorry to hear that Jackson Prentiss was one of them. An EMT friend told him that Prentiss had been found in the ruins of Laramie Junction, apparently had a broken back and was paralyzed. There was poetic justice in that. Princess had spent fourteen years in a cage on the Long Dark because of Jackson Prentiss; now he was the one who’d be locked up, a prisoner in his own body. And his would be a life sentence. Mac couldn’t figure out why on earth the man had decided to go up to the movie set in the middle of a storm, why he hadn’t stayed at the prison to watch the execution. Turns out the Iron House was the safest place in the whole county Friday afternoon … for everybody except Emily Ga
il Prentiss.
Two guards wheeled her body out on a stretcher and placed it in the back of Mac’s station wagon. It was zipped up tight in a black bag and Mac didn’t intend to unzip it. He’d already said his goodbyes. He’d called ahead to the funeral home—which was swamped—and said he wanted a simple casket and a quick burial.
There’d be no service. Who was there to mourn her passing?
He and Jonas would. Joy would, too. He’d told her the whole story, well, most of it. That Wanda Ingram meant to kill her and Princess knew it, sent him looking for her. That Princess had saved her life. They’d stayed up all night Friday, talking. It had felt like they were getting reacquainted. She’d been totally transparent, open and honest. He’d been open and honest, too—when he spoke of his own feelings. But he was neither when he told her the story of his meetings with Princess. He considered the promise he had made to the small, scar-faced woman a sacred vow; he would carry her secret to his grave.
Mac gawked at the devastation all around him as he picked his way through it. The utter destruction made it clear just how close he, Joy, and Wanda Ingram had come to dying. In a battle with a twister, survival was all about what you hit or what hit you in the monstrous swirling wind. A stray two-by-four could ruin your whole day. He was certain the debris that took out Mr. Wilson’s windshield and windows would have taken them out, too, if all three of them hadn’t been lying over in the seats. It was a miracle they were alive.
One of a herd of miracles he’d witnessed in the past week.
He stepped gingerly over a dead chicken. They were everywhere, hundreds—no, thousands—of them, littering the rubble.
The neighborhoods Mac knew so well were unrecognizable; the houses he’d run past every morning for much of his life had been reduced in seconds to tangled heaps of mangled debris, crushed under downed trees, flattened vehicles, or the roof of the house next door.
He passed an undamaged refrigerator sitting upright beneath a leafless tree, the door hanging ajar and the contents intact—a jug of milk, leftovers in Saran-wrapped bowls, something trussed up in aluminum foil, and bottles of catsup, mustard, and salad dressing. The vegetable and meat drawers on the bottom were missing. Pieces of tin and what looked like curtains were wound into the tree’s bare limbs like tinsel around a Christmas tree. A bed and chest of drawers were the only two pieces of furniture that remained in the shattered brick house beside the tree. A hat hung from the bedpost and a church pew lay upside down in the middle of the unruffled bedspread.
The destruction all around him worsened the farther he went. The outside winds of the twister—still hurricane-force winds, he was sure—had struck here, like they’d slammed into Mr. Wilson and lifted it into the air. But he was walking toward where the epicenter of the tornado, the sweet spot, had mowed down everything it encountered.
He’d prepared himself for how damaged the church would be, for a huge pile of rubble where the building had once stood. But he wasn’t prepared for … nothing. Mac looked around, trying to get his bearings in the desolate landscape. Then he spotted a handprint in concrete, Joy’s handprint. Her name was scratched above it and the date, Sept. 4, 1953. She’d come with him the day builders had poured the concrete for the new porch on the building. Now that porch and the concrete slab behind it were all that remained of New Hope Community Church. There wasn’t a brick or beam or piece of mortar. Mac walked in a daze around the slab, then noticed it wasn’t completely bare. Up near where the pulpit had been there was a piece of colored glass from one of the stained glass windows. Mac squatted down and picked it up, turned it over and over in his hand, examining it.
He remained there for a long time, just staring at it. Then he heard a sound. He looked up, and picking her way through the nearby rubble was Maude Duffy. The president of the Women’s Missionary Alliance, she was one of the little old ladies who’d been preparing covered dishes for him and Joy every day for the past six months.
“What are you doing here, Maude?”
She tucked her chin and looked at him over the top of her wire-rimmed glasses.
“It’s Sunday morning,” she said.
It was, wasn’t it. Mac hadn’t even considered what day it was.
Then Mac saw that Maude wasn’t alone. Others were coming, too. A handful of people were making their way through the debris, coming from every direction, converging on the bare slab where the church had once stood. Will Hardesty, with a big bandage on top of his bald head, picked his way around downed tree limbs. Bruce Daniels limped along on a crutch, his leg from knee to toe encased in a plaster cast. Howard Wilson helped his wife step clear of a tangled pile of twisted metal that might once have been a chain link fence. Mac looked around, half expecting to see the other two members of the church’s elder board that had never convened for its meeting Friday night, when Mac had intended to resign from the church, the ministry—and from God. Just like he’d resigned from life for the past six months. But Andy Porter and Lee Davenport weren’t there. The last Mac had heard, both men were listed as missing.
Within a few minutes, there were probably two dozen people standing on the bare slab, talking quietly.
Mac wiped his eyes—must have gotten dust in them. He cleared his throat a time or two before he began to speak.
“When I announced last week that I’d be in the pulpit this Sunday, I planned to preach a sermon I’d been working on for months.” He looked into all their earnest faces. “But I have something very different to say this morning than what I had planned.” He gestured wide at the desolation. “I want to talk about rebuilding, redemption, and restoration.”
His voice grew soft. “And about sacrifice.”
Epilogue
Mac, Joy, and Jonas walked down the stone path between the headstones toward the cherry tree at the back of the cemetery. Joy moved slowly, ponderously, a week past her due date. It had been a very difficult pregnancy; Mac had watched his little girl become a young woman, a strong young woman, through the process. And in the past few weeks Joy had blossomed, smiled more and talked lovingly about the as-yet-unnamed child she was absolutely convinced would be a girl. Oh, the tears still came—often. And when they did, Mac comforted her, promised they would get through it together. And then he’d put his arm reassuringly around her shoulders and squeeze.
He did the same thing now as they walked along, the icy fingers of a cold wind reaching under his turned-up collar to tickle his neck. She gave him a grateful smile, but he could see her eyes were brimming. His probably were, too. Jonas’s mouth was set in a thin, tight line. The three of them had come to the cemetery today with flowers for Melanie because it was the first anniversary of her death.
They stopped in front of her grave. Mac considered the black granite stone and decided it looked less foreboding and intimidating somehow than it once had. Now, it seemed … dignified, almost stately. It seemed to proclaim, “There is something very precious here.”
The marker on the grave next to it was much simpler and plainer. On a small, white stone was inscribed a single, large word: “Princess.” And beneath it: “Emily Gail Prentiss. Died May 10, 1963.” Mac couldn’t list her birth date because nobody knew what it was. But he had no trouble deciding what to put on the bottom of the stone. It was what she’d said to him that first day, the day they’d talked about weasels and she’d told him he was scabbed over from being dragged through the rocks. But scabs fall off, she’d said, her voice husky, her purple eyes sparkling. When you’re healed, scabs fall off.
“Never underestimate the power of doing the right thing,” Joy read off the bottom of the white headstone. She turned to her father, “You believe that, Daddy?”
Mac hesitated, but only briefly. “Yeah, I do, sweetheart.”
“Good,” she said, and let out a breath, “because I’ve got something to tell you.” She must have seen the stricken, almost panicked look on his face because she smiled and patted his arm. “It’s not that bad, Daddy.” She turned to her grandf
ather. “I mean, it is bad … sad, really.” She stopped sputtering and just said it, straight out. “I’ve decided to give the baby up for adoption.”
Mac was so surprised he took a step backward. Give it up? He’d already come up with half a dozen girls’ and boys’ names, even if Joy hadn’t. They’d already gotten a crib and the ladies of the church were preparing to give Joy a baby shower.
“Honey, you don’t know what—”
“Yes, I do,” she interrupted. “I have thought and thought about this, and no matter how much I want it to be different, I keep coming back to the same place: this baby deserves a mother like mine.” She looked at the black headstone, then turned back and faced Mac. “And a father like you. A home and a family. I’m going to give my little girl a good life.”
Mac couldn’t speak, simply reached out and folded his daughter tenderly into his arms, the bulge in her belly making her hard to hug. An understanding that needed no words passed between him and Jonas. He struggled to get his voice under control as he looked over Joy’s shoulder at the two graves under the cherry tree.
“Your mother would be so proud of you,” he said.
The End
*****
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Ninie Hammon
By
NINIE
HAMMON
Prologue
