The World Ends In Hickory Hollow

by Mayhar, Ardath

  We had the windows open, for existence inside the Burrow with so many confined there was intolerable otherwise. Suddenly, there was a feeling of disorientation. The Burrow filled with green leaves, ripped from their moorings, then with hay. Our ears popped.

  There seemed to be too little air, for a moment, but Zack staggered up and opened the door. A terrible cloud was moving over us, we could tell, but now rain to make the first seem a simple shower came bucketing down.

  "Don't go out, son," Mom Allie said firmly. "You can't see anything yet. And any tree that was unbalanced by the wind may just decide to fall on down under the rain. You just sit here and sweat it out with the rest of us. But I'd guess that it came over about treetop high, right here. Though it may have touched down in one of the hayfields. Let's just pray that it missed the cabin and the house."

  Outside, early though it was, it was dark as Egypt, as my father used to say. Then, gradually, the cloud lightened to a purplish-gray, and visibility returned, to some extent, though curtained by the pouring rain. Lightning was flashing and booming away to the north of us, and we knew that it followed the track of the twister.

  The children were totally subdued. Even Jim, who had been feeling himself to be quite grown up and competent, seemed content to be a little boy again, leaving the worrying to us. Every adult lap was occupied more than once, during our wait, and the warm weight of the children comforted me, at least, as much as it reassured them to be near.

  It wasn't as long as it seemed–it couldn't have been that long –until the rain eased to a lighter pattering, and the sky lightened even more. We straggled out into the wet and the mud and looked about.

  A section of wood to the west had its top sheared as neatly as if a lawnmower had run over it, just below the tops of the trees. Hay was everywhere, and we knew that some, at least, of our haystacks had gone, literally, with the wind. A big whiteoak had toppled over the embankment into which we had dug the Burrow, though farther along. Its shattered top lay lower than its pitifully bare roots.

  We picked our way around it and looked toward the cabin. It still stood, hunched low within its dirt bastions, though we could see that some of the sheets of tin had been ripped off the roof. That, however, might not have done so much damage, for we had put it on over the old shingle roof. As I hurried in and up the ladder to the loft, I found that there was not very much damp, even after the downpour we had had. And the books were safe.

  As we muddled about, moving things from under drips and covering things too big to move, there came the blast of a shotgun from the rear of the house. Suzi, who had elected to help me in the cramped area under the roof, looked at me with terror in her eyes.

  "They couldn't – they wouldn't–not on the heels of such a terrible storm–would they?"

  I shook my head. Even the Ungers, I felt sure, had been driven to shelter by the wind and rain. No, whatever had brought about that blast from one of our own menfolk was something else. I felt it in my bones.

  Nonetheless, we both scuttered down the ladder and through the cabin in record time. Zack met us at the back door, gun in hand.

  "Came a shot from over Fanchers' way. Then three more, spaced out like signals. You and Lucas come with me. The horses are spooked off into the woods, so we'd better run. He turned to Suzi. "Get some first-aid stuff together, spare bedding, whatever anybody might need, and send the kids out to find Maud. Then follow with Josh and Elmond. " She nodded and turned back into the house, while I slipped off my sandals and donned my heavy shoes, then shouldered the lighter rifle and sighed, "Ready!"

  We started off at a trot. It was only a bit over a half mile to Fanchers' by our new route, but the grass and weeds were heavy with wet, and the spaces between were slippery with mud. Only after we reached the beaten-down grasses of the fields could we really make time. Even as we ran I could see, before us and to our right, that the ragged line of trees that marked the edge of the river wood had become much more ragged. There were big gaps, and I knew that we would find, when we had time to look, that windrows of trees would mark out the path where the tornado had dipped.

  One of Annie's younger children waited for us beside the pathway.

  "Over to Londowns'," she cried, taking off in front of Zack.

  Without slowing, we followed her as she led us off the trail, up a cow path, and to the edge of the Londowns' garden before we realized we were near.

  The place was chaos compounded. Confetti-like debris covered the area where the house had been, as well as the yard, garden, and even the fields around. Part of the orchard was gone. As we came to a halt I gripped Zack's hand tightly. I didn't want to know what we were about to learn.

  A stifled shriek moved us to action. We pushed our way through the foliage of a downed elm and found Annie lying full-length on top of Cheri Londown, who was struggling and heaving to shake her off. The woman's eyes were blank, and one arm hopped as she squirmed.

  "Knock her out, Zack," Annie panted.. "She's hurt pretty bad, but she doesn't feel it. All she can do is worry about her husband. Bill's looking for him, right now, and the children."

  Zack dropped to his knees, found an opportunity, and struck a solid blow beneath the woman's chin. She went out instantly, and I helped Annie to straighten her limbs, very carefully, feeling for the grating of bone.

  Annie laughed hysterically. "One thing–I don't think there's a thing wrong with her spine. The way she fought and wiggled, it's got to be all right."

  It was, but her left arm, her left leg, and several ribs were broken. What might have been simple fractures had been compounded by her desperate efforts to rise and look for her family, and we looked with dismay at the protruding bone poking through the arm. Then we pulled the limb straight, returning the bone as nearly as we could to its normal position, and Zack strapped it tightly to her side with his belt, my shirttail, and Annie's big red bandanna. Then we set out to find the others, though we did it with dreadful misgivings.

  Someone must have had some warning. We found the three children crying silently and shivering in a drain ditch that ran through the orchard. They were frightened out of their wits, but we could find nothing but scratches and bruises on them, and we thought those came from their scramble into the ditch. Not one of them could talk coherently, so we carried them, even Carl, who was as big as his mother or bigger, back to her side and left them there with stern orders to watch her and not to let her move.

  Then we heard a hail from the scrub oak patch just north of the house-place. We ran through the drizzle, wet bushes slapping into our faces and wet brambles catching our legs as we went toward Bill's call.

  The little wood was of recent growth. There wasn't a tree more than fifteen or twenty feet tall. It was a good thing, for something that looked more like a scarecrow than a man was entangled in the top branches where three of the trees had interlocked their limbs. As I was lightest, Zack hoisted me into the lower branches, and I scrambled upward, cursing the maze of twisty growth that impeded my way.

  I had hoped that the tangle that held Curt Londown would he flexible enough so that my added weight would bend it down. It was rigid as welded iron. With a sigh, I crawled out into the mess. One red-streaked arm came within my grasp, and I put my fingers on the pulse.. There was one, very faint.

  "He's alive," I yelled. "I'm going to have to have a saw or an axe, though, for I can't get to him, with all this junk wrapped around like it is."

  I felt the tree shake, and I wiggled backward out of the way as Zack cut his way toward me with a hatchet that Bill must have produced. I watched anxiously as he began carefully cutting away the meshing branches that held Londown captive. It was entirely possible that any joggling, much less a fall from the treetop, would prove fatal to a man who had been thrown into a treetop by a tornado.

  Below us, Bill, too, was worrying. I could see his wet face, turned upward. To ease us both, I asked, "Did you see the cloud coming? We just crawled into the Burrow and waited it out."

 
; "Sure did," he answered. "We'd been eatin' when we heard the noise. Annie took the children and put 'em in the basement –mighty nice to have one, too. I never saw a house with one, in this country, until this'n. Anyway, I stood at the door and watched 'er come. Three tails, she had. Just dippin' and slashin' down with lightnin' and thunder fit to drive you out of your mind. I took one look and went down with the others. I'm not brave when it comes to twisters."

  "I wonder why the Londowns didn't all get in the ditch together?" I mused.

  "Dumb bastard didn't think even a tornado would dare mess with him," grunted Zack over his shoulder. "Can you come around the other side of the trunk and get hold of his other arm? It's hanging down about my knee level."

  Once I had a grip on the other arm, we eased the limp bulk of the man, branch by branch, down the tree, cutting away anything that held up the process. Bill was waiting to hold him steady while we let him down the last of the way, and I prayed we hadn't punctured a lung with a broken rib or anything even worse.

  When we had him flat on the leaf mold of the wood, we caught our breaths in

  horror. The man had practically been skinned. Aside from having on nothing but sneakers, he was almost denuded of hair and skin and even strips of flesh. Afraid to

  touch him, we waited for the wagon.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  There was only one thing to do. The Londowns, willy or nilly, must be divided up among those best able to care for them. Once we got Curt into the wagon, we dared not delay. We took him straight to the Jessups and Sim Jackman, picking up Lantana as we went back by the site of the destroyed house, where she was salvaging what she could. She was our best nurse, and we knew that Carrie and the girls would need her.

  Bill and Annie were making Cheri ready to travel the short way to their own new dwelling. They had decided that she would be more biddable with one of her children to keep her company, so they took Cookie with them. Our own crew gathered up Carl and Carol and bore them back to the Burrow before they had a chance to come apart at the seams. In the twinkling of an eye, as it says in the Bible, the touch-me-not Londowns had become our care and responsibility. It was almost frightening.

  "Remind me not to get to thinking we're sufficient unto ourselves," I said to Zack as we squelched along behind the slow-moving wagon. "It doesn't seem to be safe anymore."

  "The hand of God," said Lantana over the still lump that was Curt Londown. "This fellow, he gets to thinking he's the best thing God ever turned a hand to; better than all the rest. Gets to thinking he can take care of anything comes along, no matter what. Just give him a gun in his pocket and not Ungers nor niggers will dare to bother him. But Old Man Twister, he just waltzed right in and tore right out again."

  "It scares me to death," I admitted, and I felt Zack's hand tighten on mine. "We always knew we could count on having droves of people come tearing in, when anything like this happened, and they'd try their best to save whoever could be saved, get things in shape, everything. I guess this, more than anything, makes me feel lonesome. That was one of the few good things about the world as it was."

  "What's tearing me up," said Zack in a carefully emotionless voice, "is the notion that there may be folks all up and down the country, hurt and homeless, children wet and in shock, and nobody to come. Makes me wish we had ten times the people, so we could send some out scouting along the right directions to see if anybody needed help.

  I shuddered, and not only with the wet chill of my ripped shirt and pants. Then I scrunched up under his arm, put my right hand in his left pocket, and said, "We're doing what we can, honey. There are so few people now, surely it won't have hit any more. Seldom did they make a long track of destruction, even when the country was full of folks."

  He said nothing, and we walked along, sharing what little warmth we had between us. The alcohol lantern Lantana had lighted swung from the stanchion we had built onto the wagon, and our shadows wavered in monstrous shapes beside us as we forged ahead to warn the Jessups of a new influx of wounded.

  The warm light of their lamp guided us the last few hundred yards, and Zack stopped to hail them before getting too close. "Ho, the Jessups!" Three times he called.

  After the first hail, the lamp went out, leaving us with only the unsteady will-o'-the-wisp of the lantern far behind us. Then Horace's voice boomed, "That you, Zack?"

  They were wonderful people. Before ten words had passed, they understood enough to have Grace rouse Sim from his after-supper nap, Laura lighting extra lamps and firing up the cookstove, and their long-suffering table stripped, once again, for action.

  "You should put up a sign–Jessup Hospital and Nursing Home," I laughed. "We come in here every few months, bringing desperately injured people. It's a wonder you don't shoot us on sight."

  "We know that if we blow our horn, you'll be here as fast as feet can bring you," Carrie answered. "We may have lost the greater community that everybody depended on, but we seem to have landed on our feet with this smaller, closer, maybe more caring one. We may not have all the life-saving things that used to be available, but you know, child, dying isn't all that bad a thing. We used to know that. Sometimes it's a pure blessing just to die."

  "But not if we can help it," I gritted, as the wagon groaned to a stop and Maud whuffed disapproval through her nostrils. Like it or not, Sim was the nearest thing we had to a doctor. Luckily, our needs, up to now, had been in his line–accident and gunshot wounds. What we'd do when somebody came up with a hot appendix I hated to think, but until that time we'd make do with Sim's rough skills.

  The old man came out of his bedroom, hair on end, looking like the sort of stick figure first-graders used to draw. He sighed when he saw me.

  "Don't take it amiss, Miz Hardeman," he drawled, "but whenever I see you I look past you for whoever's near dead this time."

  "Curt Londown," I said, opening the door for Zack and Horace to carry the slack figure inside. We had laid him in a sheet that Suzi brought in the wagon, and they carefully maneuvered him, sheet and all, onto the table. The cloth was streaked with blood now. The man on it seemed flayed.

  "Fore God!" Sim whispered. "I don't know, folks. I've seen a man bit by alligators, tore by a bobcat, but this 'un–this 'un is bad."

  Lantana edged by him with a basin of warm water. "Got to get this mess off, before we can see to tend him," she grunted. "Then we'll know can we do or can we don't."

  It seemed impossible that Londown's chest could still be rising and falling. Still, he was breathing, fairly regularly, and his heart was beating, though slowly. As Lantana's ministrations removed the crusted blood, the extent of his lacerations seemed to worsen. Sim bent over him, his monkey-like face screwed up with concern, and suddenly the man's eyes opened.

  "The wind... " he mouthed, though no voice came through.

  "Twister's gone now, son," said Sim, and Lantana laid her dark hand on Curt's forehead as his pale eyes turned up toward her. "The Fanchers-they came." His voice was less than a croak.

  Zack answered him. "They came. They signaled for us to come, too. They're taking care of your wife, who isn't too badly hurt, and the children, who are all fine."

  The pale eyes closed for a moment, then opened. "Don't eat crow worth a damn," he said clearly. Blood spilled from the corner of his mouth, and he was gone.

  We looked across the pool of lamplight at one another. My face must have held the shock that marked all the others, for it seemed almost as if the man had chosen to die rather than to give up his dearly held beliefs.

  Carrie folded the edges of the sheet together over the mutilated body. Tears were running down her cheeks, but her hands were steady as she covered the face, first closing the blank eyes. "We tried," she said to Horace as she turned into his arms. "It just wasn't enough."

  "His lungs must of been tore up," Sim muttered, wiping his eyes on his sleeve. "Couldn't have fixed him up, anyway, Miss Carrie. He was too far gone. It's just that there's so damn few of us any more."

/>   We buried him that night. It was a weird procession, by lanternlight, but we took him to the Sweetbriers' and laid him beside Jess. Somehow, we hated to think of him lying alone, and we felt that this would perhaps comfort Cheri.

  It didn't. though. We had, of course, known Cheri even less than we had Curt. None of us had ever heard her open her mouth and utter words, even. We just took it for granted that she was something like the rest of us, determined to survive and to make her children survive. We weren't prepared for the reality of Cheri Londown.

  I've known a few people–two women and one man, actually – who were fairly decent and acceptable people, seemingly. All three had been married to (or the child of) one person who had the reputation of being hard and strict to the point of cruelty. In the cases I knew, when the dominant person was suddenly removed (by death, in my cases) this ostensibly equable person suddenly became hell on wheels. Unreasonable, demanding, arbitrary. All the worst traits you can think of.

  Cheri made them all look like pikers.

  Her injuries were severe enough to keep her immobile for quite a while, though luckily she developed no infections. When she had been with the Fanchers a week, Annie made the trek to Hickory Hollow to pour out her woes. "She thinks we're there to fetch for her. Got nothing else to do, she thinks. Yells at the babies, gets onto her own child until I could cry for the little thing. She's a miserable person, Luce. What we going to do?"

  "I'll swap you the other two children for her," I offered. "They are bright kids. Once they realized their dad was dead and their house really gone for good, they buckled to and changed their ideas. I don't think you'll have a bit of trouble with them. They get along fine with all our bunch, now.

  "But what'll you do with Cheri? She's a pill I tell you."