Come Sunday

by Bradford Morrow

  He shot a brown bottle that was perched on top of a fencepost, and it shattered before him. Its neck had already been shot off by somebody else, leaving only a squat glass crown, the whole of which burst as the bullet ran through it.

  “Good,” he told himself.

  He turned to walk back to the house. The sun was sinking into the long horizon, cloudbanks still pulsing with a refractory of colors. The earth’s air, the density of its very atmosphere along the ground, pulled the bottom of the sun’s sheared sphere north and south, and distorted its base so that it was fatter where it submerged itself along the slight curve of the land’s edge.

  The sun, huh? shoot it, he thought, and propped the butt of the gun against the hollow of his shoulder, and unloaded the three shots left in his five-shot clip directly at it.

  The sun down, to home. New moon meant the sky would turn black quickly. The rifle rode handily tucked underarm. Evening star was already up there, twinkling. The thud thud of his footfall sounded on the baked road. It made the earth feel hollow. The familiar hoot of the barn owl now. Light shone out the kitchen window, breaking in a bar across the lot. Insect buzz at the side of his head slapped at, quiet. Meringue clouds lost their color. A range of stars building in the east, over town. Bats wheeling around the barn, intermittent peeps, diving, jutting. Upstairs he put the rifle on its rack. He sat again in the chair in the room, surrounded by mute partners in a mortal dance.

  Woke up, dawn-light in his eyes, having rounded the world. Morning, and time to go into Babylon.

  The train ground to a halt, wheels screeching on the blue tracks, mad squeal of metal moving against metal, track stubborn, wheels locked. The slide terminated after a buck, in a stall, a hiss, an utter calm. Cinders fell, heavy hot pellets, into the fields. Smoke puddled in the air. The cabooseman clung to his handle bar. Passengers peered out windows, hoping to see what was causing the delay. The seasons of Bonus Marchers, striking farmers who had laid threshing-machine cables and spiked logs across trestles to derail trains, were long gone. Pickets winking in dust-bowl wind, the chants, the echo of gunfire and of men yelling angrily—all that was over now. Enough milk had been dumped from cans into ditches here in this part of the country that some people claimed its rancid odor could still be smelled as far east as Cleveland on hot days when the wind blew hard enough. The plains were a peaceful place now; plains wars were over and, as Nicky said, all the wars were moved to the city. Since 1874 barbed-wire fences crisscrossed it. That settled people down, kept their cows separated. The Indians had been dispersed to reservations, and buffalo had been eliminated from the frontier: the vanquished pair were minted into limited immortality on either side of a nickel, the nickel Hannah rubbed anxiously with her thumb as she looked out the window with the others on the train. She studied the coin. This was what you bought stuff with in America. It was sort of comely. You could buy land with it, a home, or a train—you could live in a train if you wanted, see lots of places. The word Liberty was stamped on the coin over the forehead and nose of a profiled warrior. His eyes were shut, she noticed, and over his face was a mask of grief. It made her feel sorry for him, poor early-man with his braid. On his shoulder the number 1936 was stamped, like the number on the back of a prisoner’s pajamas. On the nickel tail was the buffalo with The United States of America emblazoned, a silver rainbow over its silver body. Its tail swished, but its head had to be bowed for it to fit on the round form of the coin. Well, things fit or they don’t and if they don’t somebody makes them fit. On the buffalo’s head George Washington’s periwig sat, a helmet. The buffalo also wore a beard on its chin. Hannah knew this wasAbraham Lincoln’s beard. She killed time by flipping the coin up, catching it and guessing heads or tails.

  Alarmed by the silence, a baby starting crying. The crying carried down the corridor from the car ahead. Gratitude for a break in the monotony was now expressed by a stream of confident complaints the travelers offered one another. She looked to mama Opal, “I thought there were supposed to be mountains here.”

  “You’ve got to go hundreds of miles west for those.”

  “Mountains, with snow on them.”

  “One of these days we’ll take you to the mountains.”

  “Tomorrow?”

  “Hannah, did I tell you that all this used to be under the ocean?” and mama Opal began to explain to her the inland ocean, fossils, the waves lapping the mountains’ edge, and her daughter listened and imagined it all, and heard behind her, “I didn’t pay twenty-three dollars to sit here in the tracks,” and another, saying, “Time’ll pass, may I introduce myself name is Grant.”

  Coffin.

  Retail.

  Physician.

  Sun-glint snapped off someone’s belt buckle.

  “You ever hear the one about Dr. Coffin and Nurse Graves?” Hannah had no idea what all the laughter was about. She turned around and saw that it came from the man who was in retail. Retail was a kind of thing her father Nicky said crawled with the scum of the earth. Retail, he would say, and spit.

  Opal

  August 1956

  UNDER THE AEGIS of a darkened cloud the tornado churns like an inverted serpent in sly summer. Winding, wind draws down into an orderly coned funnel blocking off the brightness of the sun. The chicken hawk and the crow are pulled like helpless rags out of flight into the swirling snake of air. The dun cloud is dense as a wandering island floating over the rolling geometrical fields. The twister dropped from the cloud like a chain that seeks mooring in the unexpectant earth. Grasshoppers along the set rows of wheat and rye desist from their songs. The voice on the shortband has interrupted music to establish the cyclone watch. The dragon of dark wind drops its stinging tail lightly into the loam. Asphalt is eased from its flat soft base running straight for miles across the great plains. Sunlight is shielded from that swath of land where the tornado begins its hellish harvest. Planks, shingles, frames, tarpaulin, shutters, grates, brick, tarpaper, rain gutters, glass, stones are rearranged within the circling wind one hundred feet over the earth, above where a yawning rectangular hole shows the dimensions of a structure that once stood. A shaft of dried hay is driven at such speed that it lodges headfirst in the stone-solid trunk of an elm. A tractor and its plow are lifted far above the ground and deposited gently intact and operable upon the mansard roof of the grange hall. Within the blast’s bowels a roan pony is impressed against the side of a washtub inside which a bantam rooster roils and riots until the pony bursts like a bag of blood. The crooked and ambiguous air, running scales on the metal tines of a springtoothed harrow, mimes a folksong sung by frightened children who are hidden in a storm cellar tunneled beneath the barley shoots. Alfalfa, bromegrass, bird’s-foot trefoil, soy, timothy and clover are pulled from broadcast and banded fields. Barbed wire and tumbleweeds dance flibbertigibbet like greased lightning. Spittlebug flies with wheatstalk, sweet clover and hourglass fagots. Leafhopper twirls like a screwy zozzlestick in the sorghum. Aphids and guidoing crickets cling to the peeled ground in flight. Even the two-rooted white clover is yanked aloft from its insistent lime-struck pod of turf behind the rickety century-old farmhouse, oddly left unfazed by the growing gale. Turn and turn about the tornado weaves across the rolling yards and dells northeast toward the sprawling clutter of town where men and women and their children crouch against the oncoming whirlwind. Like a clotted dervish it marks a course to the dust-paved streets. The minimal contents of a trickling stream named after a forgotten settler are partly sucked and ascend in gyres around the central core of the glutted monster. Suddenly in a wrenching single monumental twist the roaring spiral veers away from its northeastern ray simultaneously disgorging itself of countless unnamable bits and fragments of what lay in its three-mile path. The ascendant walls of the turning column hard as stone now gain new velocity as the snake dances quickly over the petroleum depot and slaughterhouse and three grain silos west of the huddling clapboards saved from demolition by the change of course. To the accompaniment of volumin
ous groans the beamed sheet-metal roof of the howling slaughterhouse is ripped like onionskin off the top of its walled structure. Halved carcasses of swine and cattle and sheep sail as massive forklifts tumble easily into the upchurning twirl. In instants the arrangement of men, machinery, and beasts is tossed into wild shambles by the rocky air. At the end of the central chamber in the roofless building a bandsaw is now toppled upon a man whose head is lightly blown against the concrete floor, concussing him. The woman who was standing at his side is miraculously elevated into the middle of the violent vortex, and suspended fifteen feet above the man lying beneath his bandsaw on the floor. Her arms are raised tenderly by the rushing fingers of invisibility and her pink dress and slip are lifted as if by the ginger touch of a lover anxious to run his hands over her naked and motionless body. These clothes are sent high into the sky before the hindmost swift-flown edge of the funnel snags the sparking end of a powerline and introduces it to a thousand gallons of petroleum that send a percussive flash exploding low across the horizon. Hung thus in the storm the woman’s substance is drawn up in microscopic particles and sent to the topmost mass of jet-black thunderclouds rocking overhead. Just before retracting its tongue off the shocked sod the tornado throws three grain silos together momentarily into a curious tripod and then tosses them out into cornfields. One is carried up with the receding cone to the thunderhead but is casually cast a quarter mile east to collide with a turnstile on a grassy knoll where Guernseys and a black Angus graze.

  Hannah

  July-September 1955

  GIVEN WORDS SAY it was me speaking now I’d say mama Opal and I looked out the window, streaked with the dust of a dozen states. A bitty wind made the fields, so thick with what the picture books at school had taught me was wheat, rise and fall like waves in a dry gold sea. Such clear air crawled over the crops in streams making the blue out at the fences wiggle. The passengers had gone back by and by to talking. We were near Babylon, a man with a black hat like a pancake said. It was probably cows blocking the tracks up ahead, his woman said. Cattle’s what it must be, someone agreed behind us. I watched mama’s eyes move nervously. I had put my buffalo-head nickel back in my pocket. Mama had told me to and I minded her.

  A bell rang way off in the distance. I knew that mama Opal wasn’t nervous over the train stopping in its tracks. She was tired from the long trip that began it seemed like years ago, in a drizzle that splashed over the big house with all the walkups and windows where all the women could look out into the streets to see us children. It seemed we were locked in the train forever. So many towns and trees had run one into the other that any church or courthouse, lumberyard, river, borough hall or garden, any arch, stone-walled prison or museum, had melted for us into one great blur of prettiness.

  Just the greatest beauty it was hard to believe it could be real out through the window.

  It was our country. It was our land. I had never hoped to see such a thing in my life but there it was. And time during the trip had been swept away into a flatness. Something we could not count on. I would wake up in the middle of the night and think it was noon. I was able to mistake towns for stars and stars for lantern bugs.

  The bell rang again.

  So slow you couldn’t feel the difference, the train started forward again and picked up speed a bit at a time. I looked out the window to see the cattle that blocked the tracks but didn’t see them. All I saw were the soft fields that stretched away to the place where the clouds came down to touch the land.

  As we came up to uncle’s town, there were more fences we could see that marked off squares and other shapes. I said something to mama Opal and she said to me, What a smart young lady you are.

  She was proud of me when I said things like this. I loved to make her happy and to make her proud of me. I was always on the lookout for smart things to say to her, to show her I was her young lady. That’s what she called me when she was proud—her young lady.

  Today was Saturday. Come Sunday, she said, everything would be glorious. Home someday? I asked, I’d have my own room? Maybe I’d be able to see the mountains out the window. I must have heard her wrong. She said, Come Sunday.

  Tying up land with poles and lengths of wire or slats and drawing lines with sticks or surveying instruments, plumb bobs is what they’re called and tripod-mounted scopes and demarcations, and settings-off, making some sense of the wild by all these things that were called ownership. This is what our job was on the green earth, divvying up being the birthright of every pioneer, that’s what uncle LeRoy would come to say. It reminded me of sidewalks in the city, chalked up for hopscotch. Crosswalks, the boys’ baseball diamonds, stripes on the blue of the policeman’s uniform, lines on the bum’s socks, wrought-iron fences out in front of brick houses marking off the front yards with the ginkgo trees between stoops. Marks that all by themselves made up the silhouette like the kind you can buy in summer from the artist on the sidewalk, a silhouette (I’ve got one of me) from childhood on through life toward when you give up your ghost and they stick you right in the ground, that too marked by sunken grass and a gravestone. I know. I’ve been to a cemetery before. That was when mama Opal’s own mother passed. It was bad uncle LeRoy didn’t come. Everybody must go to the graveyard when their mama dies.

  Say it was me speaking, I’d say the town appeared on both sides of the train. We were here. The noisy talk of the passengers, our temporary family, filled up the car. Babylon, Nebraska, pop. 334. Now, three thirty-six.

  We were the only passengers getting off the train at this stop, though you’d never know it from all the loud talking and moving going on. Wind through wheat’d make for sounds more understandable than all the talk these people built up. People talk most when they’ve got nothing in their head, or too much in their head. It’s a natural thing. I’ve noticed it. I’d be quiet myself except that right now I’ve got too much in my head.

  So this was Babylon? Why would so much lumber, mortar, brick, glass, stone be dragged here, just to this spot, to be lifted, hammered and pulled together to make a town? The towns we had passed through seemed to have at least a river, or a bluff of hills ranged about with cottonwood trees or maples, a rise, a ring of sand around a lake’s shore—something that called to mind a reason for settlers to build a first home and for others to want to follow. Yet so far as I could tell (and after months of wandering around Babylon and environs I would come to realize my question was fair) this town was not nestled beside a low-flowing, majestic river, not even a gulch. No plateau edged it, no hill crested beside it, no valley of luscious vineyards stretched away at its feet. Its character seemed defined by no character at all.

  Months later, I learned that Babylon lay outside the known alleys of the tornadoes that spin their way across every other quarter of the state—it was for this the land was homesteaded. Babylon had a reputation of being a hex on twisters. Even the Indians held that its grounds were possessed of fortunate powers that kept the winds at bay. Ever since, it spread out its streets and structures, unprotected from the winds’ forces by either land or trees, it was as if the town and all its inhabitants stood out on the high plains in defiance of that part of nature.

  Two men stood on the platform. One was smoking a pipe. The purple of the smoke was funny against the red paint on the side of the station house and all the yellow everywhere else. The man with the pipe was my uncle. He didn’t look very happy, did he.

  There was so much to learn!

  Hens lay eggs. Lambkins are born with long tails that must be docked isn’t that crazy. You can do it with shears or an ax and block. There are different kinds of earth. Some kinds of earth you can walk on, some earth gives birth to plants. These can grow. It is hard to believe. Words stick to each different thing. Knee-high by the fourth of July besides sounding pretty has its meaning. What grows out of the earth. Corn does. So does wheat and weeds do, too. Rice, it grows out of the earth but requires more water. Apple trees come up out of the soil, they make flowers and after
wards apples. Green and red. You can climb up an apple tree more easily than up a willow tree. Up in the branches of an apple tree you can eat raw apples. They are tart on the tongue and the meat is crisp against the teeth. Too many of them and your belly will ache all night. At night there are stars in the sky, in the day there are birds. Both birds and stars have names because there are many different kinds of the one and many different positions for the other. Bats like the sky, too, but in between day and night. The sun is a star. It’s so big and warm because it’s closer to us than any star. Some of the planets are there, also, they look a lot like stars you have to be careful. The moon seems to get confused once in a while. It drifts like a sliver of nail in the daytime sky, milk-white up in all that blue. I couldn’t tell you why the sky is blue and I don’t know why uncle keeps saying once in a blue moon. I think the sky might be a reflection of the oceans but this is what mama Opal would call an educated guess and my uncle would call cockshit. The world is mostly oceans. That is where the fish go. People live down there probably. They have gills. They lay eggs just like birds do. Fish lay eggs I mean. The underwater people I don’t know what they do. They probably lay eggs, too, otherwise water would get on the babies too soon and they would drown. If you shoot something with a gun it stops moving. That’s because it is dead. We die all of us, even apple trees, wheat. Stars, bats, corn, planets die in time too. I saw a banty rooster die. I held it in my lap. I knew just when its ghost inside flew away, I could almost see it. Time’s something that moves but not in such a way you can see it going. It moves inside people and things. The earth is round. This roundness can be seen along the edge of the horizon from up in an apple tree, or on the roof of the house. It’s not easy to see but once you’ve seen it once it is always easy to see after that and also it is easy to close your eyes and imagine the curved line of the horizon sweeping away in both directions downwards. Then you get a sense of how very grand the earth is. It may be shaped like an egg or a marble I don’t know. Some people are born with mean temperaments just like other people are born with crooked noses or flaps on their lips that make them lisp. There are words, names for these folks. Unkind, unhappy, cruel. They hurt other people. It’s their nature. Some probably run out of people they know to hurt and then they have no choice but to hurt themselves. They’re crying inside, these people. They’re crying in the same place where time lives. You can’t see it. No one can. There are other people whose souls are sweet. Sweeter than the stem of the honeysuckle you can draw out of the flower and suck. They cry too, these people. But their lives are made up of atoms sparked and borrowed from the spirit of a blessed one who alone knows the nature of all these things. I will tell a secret. I have seen this spirit once. Like a dull gold, it walked out under the great elm beyond the porch. I never told before. It was majesty.