by Jan Karon
His heart thundering, he leaped from the car and saw a tree limb fallen across both lanes. He pushed against the wind to get back in the car and switch on the emergency lights—he was a sitting duck out here—then, head down, he dived back into the squall to try to move the limb. Blast. The car had rolled over the limb before the motor died.
In the driver’s seat, he turned the key in the ignition. Nothing. Again. Nothing. Flooded.
He tried to think calmly. If he could lift the front of the car backward over the limb, he could then push the Mustang onto the side of the road, out of harm’s way. He had never lifted a car. . . .
He got out and walked to the right, checking the shoulder. But there was no shoulder; it was a drop-off to a creek, which was quickly rising to the roadway.
His glasses slid off his nose and he caught them and put them in his pocket, half blind. He was a desperate fool, the worst of fools. The rain was hammering him into the asphalt like a nail.
He saw it as he turned from the creek.
It was the lights of a truck bearing down in his lane.
His heart racing, he ran to the rear of the car and threw up both arms, waving frantically. Dear Jesus, let him see my lights. . . .
But what if the driver didn’t see his lights? He could be chopped liver between the grille of a tractor-trailer and the bumper of his own car.
“Please!” he shouted over the roar and din of the rain. “Please!”
He jumped out of the way as he heard the air brakes applied. The massive vehicle rolled to a stop only inches from the Mustang.
His legs were cooked macaroni, warm Jell-O, sponge cake as he walked to the driver’s side of the cab and looked up in utter despair.
The window eased down. “What’s your trouble?”
“Limb on the road, motor’s flooded.”
The driver climbed out of the cab in a flash, wearing an Indiana Jones hat with a chin strap, and a brim that instantly shed water like a downspout.
“I’ll take a look.” The driver bent into the rain and walked to the front of the car, squatted and peered underneath. “Goin’ to need a chain. Get in your car, I’m goin’ to haul you over th’ limb, then we’ll roll it off in Judd’s Creek.”
Sitting in the car, he heard the chain being attached to his rear bumper, and soon after felt the jerk as the big rig reversed its gears and rolled him backward over the limb. He pulled on the emergency brake and returned to the fray.
Together, they heaved, pushed, and rolled the sodden limb off the road and into the creek.
“Where you headed?” the driver shouted.
“Whitecap!”
“I’m runnin’ by Whitecap. Come on an’ follow me, but not too close or th’ spray’ll blind you. Just keep your eyes on my taillights and marker lights.”
“Done!”
“I’ll pull into that vacant lot by th’ Whitecap bridge.”
“God be with you!” he shouted.
He followed the truck for roughly half an hour in steadily decreasing rain. About four miles north of Whitecap, the storm had blown over, and he turned his wipers off.
In the vacant lot, rainwater stood in deep pools, and he saw a metal sign blown from Jake’s Used Cars leaning against the entrance to the bridge.
But, hallelujah, there was no sign claiming the bridge was out.
Dodging the pools, the driver pulled the refrigerated rig into the lot, and Father Tim parked alongside.
Leaving the motor running, the driver swung down and shook his hand with an iron grip.
“Tim Kavanagh. I can’t thank you enough.”
“Loretta Burgess,” said the driver. “Glad to help.”
“Loretta?” he said, stunned. “I mean . . .” Well, well. Holy smoke.
Loretta Burgess laughed and removed her sodden hat. A considerable amount of salt-and-pepper hair fell around her broad shoulders. “I don’t care what they say, Padre, it ain’t totally a man’s world.”
“You’re right about that!”
“I’d show you th’ pictures of my grandkids if we had time, but I’m runnin’ behind th’ clock. You take it easy, now.”
As Loretta Burgess pulled onto the highway, he turned to get back in the car. He was standing with his hand on the door handle when he sensed something odd and troubling:
The air was strangely, eerily quiet.
And then he heard the siren.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Simple Graces
Three army trucks blew past the vacant lot, tailed by a mainland ambulance with a wide-open siren.
He scratched onto the slick pavement and followed the procession across the bridge without any memory of doing it.
As he came off the bridge, he was clocking seventy, but had no intention of slowing down. Wherever the rescue squad was needed, he could be needed. Instantly he prayed for the need, whatever it might be, and realized he’d been praying, almost without ceasing, since six o’clock this morning. Surely, days on end had been packed into this single half day.
Water rushed across parts of Tern like bold creeks, carving out sections of asphalt. Whatever the vehicles ahead of him plowed through, he plowed through.
As the cavalcade turned left on Hastings, he saw the tree hanging, as if in a sling, on the sagging power lines. Across from the fallen tree was the gray house on the corner, the one Cynthia always admired—another tree had slammed across the roof, caving it in, and scattering bricks from the chimney into the yard. Next door, a section of picket fence dangled in a tree, and over there, a limb had smashed straight down, like an arrow from above, into the hood of a car.
In the rearview mirror, he saw two more troop trucks behind him and, farther back, another ambulance.
A chilling fear was spreading through him like a virus.
In the sullen afterlight of the storm, he had returned to a place he hardly recognized.
Several houses this side of Dove Cottage appeared to have taken a beating, but without any serious damage.
As his house came into view, his heart was squeezed by a kind of terror he’d never known.
Dove Cottage had no porch.
Its facade was oddly blank, like a staring face. He saw that the porch had been blown into the neighbor’s yard, partially intact, the rest in smithereens. Pickets from the fence were scattered everywhere. A few had landed on the roof.
The need he’d prayed for only moments ago was partly his own.
He parked at what had been his front gate, as the stream of vehicles behind him blew past. He fled toward the house and stood looking up to the front door, wondering how to get in.
“Cynthia!”
The back porch . . .
He raced around the house and into the kitchen, where he stepped on fragments of china that crunched like bubble wrap under his feet.
“Cynthia! Barnabas!”
He skidded down the hall, and halted at the living room door, where the entire floor had caved in at the middle, in a deep and perfect V.
Their furnishings lay neatly piled along the crotch of the V, and on top of the pile was his mother’s Limoges vase; it appeared unharmed, as if it had rolled down one side of the collapsed flooring and, at the last moment, landed conveniently on a chair cushion.
“Cynthia! Please! ” He tore along the hall to the bedrooms, which looked as if nothing more than a strong wind had ruffled the bed-covers, as if the porch had not been blown to kingdom come, nor the living room destroyed.
But what if she and Jonathan had been in the living room when . . . ?
He raced out the back door and into the street, thinking he would flag down an ambulance, a neighbor, anybody. But there was no help in sight. Many in the neighborhood worked across, and only a lone pickup truck roared past, the driver refusing to make eye contact.
What had happened? Was it, in fact, a hurricane? Did tornadoes hit the coast? He’d never asked. All his life, he had ignored weather as much as he could, for what could one do about it, anyway?
He would burrow through the furniture like a mole, through the chairs and tables and books and magazines. . . .
Somewhere at the bottom was the rug. If he got to the bottom and found the rug, he’d know she was nowhere in the house. . . .
He called her name unceasingly as he clawed his way through the detritus of their everyday life, terrified that he might find her.
But there was no one, nothing.
And how in heaven’s name was he to crawl up the slick, polished floor, from the hole he’d lowered himself into?
“Father! You down there?”
White-faced, Junior Bryson squatted over the threshold of the living room and looked into the pit.
“I’m here, Junior. Have you seen my wife?”
“No, sir, I just drove up from th’ Toe an’ seen your porch was blowed off. I was goin’ to Ernie’s. I hear he took a bad hit.”
“Can you pull me up?” He’d never been so glad to see a face. He was trembling with feeling and with cold.
“I’m pretty much out of shape, I don’t know, but I’ll lay down and hook my feet on either side of th’ doorway. . . .”
Junior positioned himself and, huffing, reached toward Father Tim.
“OK, you hang on, now, just kind of climb up my arms or whatever.”
“This room was built pretty high off the ground, so it’s a stretch.”
“But don’t be pullin’ me down in there with you,” said Junior, “or we’ll both be in a good bit of trouble.”
“I can’t seem to get any traction with these loafers,” he said, breathing hard.
Blast loafers into the next century, he was over loafers.
“It just happened,” Junior said, as Father Tim hurriedly changed into dry clothes and pulled warm socks onto his numb feet. “About thirty, forty minutes ago, looks like it tore up th’ north end and blew on out to sea, th’ rain an’ wind just stopped all of a sudden. But we didn’t have no damage at th’ Toe, not a’tall. Far as I know, ’lectricity’s down all over th’ island, an’ Mr. Bragg’s phones went out. How’s th’ bridge?”
“Still working.”
“That’s a blessin’,” said Junior.
On his way out the back door, he turned and did a final search for Violet, looking under the beds, and hoping she wasn’t stranded under the study sofa, which he couldn’t get to because of the collapsed living room.
They walked at a trot to the truck and the car.
“Good luck findin’ your wife and th’ boy. I’m sure they’re fine, prob’ly at th’ grocery store or post office when it hit.”
“Thank you, buddy.”
But his wife couldn’t have been at the grocery store or the post office; she had no car. She was, he decided, at the church with Jonathan, where she’d gone to work on the Fall Fair. He felt so certain of it, he wanted to shout.
As he drove away from Dove Cottage, he wondered—where was her bicycle? She usually hauled it up the steps and left it on the front porch. Surely she wouldn’t have been out on her bicycle. . . .
More cars were on the street now, people coming from across or from the Toe; there was a veritable snake of solid traffic along Hastings, and not a little horn-blowing.
He hated seeing Ernie’s. The right wall had crumbled, leaving the framing and a pile of bricks. Glass from the front window was missing as well, and books lay scattered around the parking lot and into the street.
All that unrefrigerated bait, all those books open to the elements, they’d better get a tarp over it, and fast.
But he couldn’t think about Ernie’s right now.
A camera unit from a mainland TV station blew around him as he wheeled the Mustang into the empty parking lot next to Ernie’s, and set off running to St. John’s.
“She’s leanin’ to th’ side of my politics, is what it is.” Ray Gaskill, who lived in the house closest to St. John’s, removed a toothpick from his mouth and surveyed the damage.
Roughly one-third of a live oak had split off and collapsed across the roof of the church, knocking the building askew.
“It’s racked to the right,” said Leonard Lamb, looking ashen.
“Who was in it?” asked Father Tim.
“Nobody. Sometime after you left for Dor’ster, the women packed up and went over to the Fieldwalkers’ to work.”
“The organ?”
“It’s OK, if we can get a tarp on before it rains again. We can’t find Sam, and the phones are down so we can’t call Larry to bring a tarp from the ferry docks. Looks like I’ll have to go across if th’ bridge is working.”
“No problem with the bridge.”
“Or we could maybe get a tarp from up Dor’ster, maybe at the boat repair.”
He felt ridiculously guilty that he hadn’t picked up a tarp.
“Trouble is, the plaster’s cracked pretty bad and when we set her straight, that’ll crack it even worse.”
“This ain’t nothin’ to the’ Ash Wednesday storm,” said Ray, chewing the toothpick. “Now, that was a storm. This wadn’t but prob’ly seventy-five-, maybe eighty-mile-an-hour winds.”
He thought St. John’s neighbor seemed personally proud of the catastrophe that struck in ’62. Though it spared lives, its fury had pretty much battered everything else along five hundred miles of shoreline.
“I’ve got to find Cynthia,” he said. “Do you have any idea . . . ?”
“I don’t,” said Leonard. “Marjorie’s at the Fieldwalkers’. She’d probably be able to say.”
Come to think of it, why would Cynthia have taken Jonathan out in a terrible storm, when he was burning with fever and on medication? And she wouldn’t have taken Barnabas and Violet to the soiree at the Fieldwalkers’. . . .
His heart was in his throat.
“Looks like some of th’ sidin’s popped off. That’ll expose your studs to water,” said Ray.
“What about the basement?” he asked Leonard.
“You don’t want to know.”
And he didn’t. Not until he found Cynthia.
“I’ll be back,” he said.
When he picked up the Mustang, he spoke with a young police officer in the crowd milling around Ernie’s.
“Why is the army in here?” he asked, afraid of the answer.
“They’re not any army in here. We use army surplus trucks in storms ’cause saltwater eats up th’ brake linin’s on our patrol cars. These babies stand way up off th’ road.”
“Was anyone hurt at Ernie’s?”
“No, sir. They think it was all that water in th’ ground that did somethin’ to part of his foundation, made his wall fall in. Then a big trash can blowed into his front window, an’ the’ wind scattered books from here to Hatt’ras.”
“What about Mona’s?”
“One of th’ waitresses got her arm burned pretty bad, a deep fryer come off th’ stove, fella in a pickup just ran ’er across to ER.”
“I’ve lost my wife,” he blurted.
The young man removed his hat. “Gosh,” he said.
“I mean, I can’t find her,” he explained, feeling foolish. Why was he standing here?
Not knowing what else to do, he shook the officer’s hand and ran to his car.
Close to tears, he turned the car around in the parking lot and headed onto Hastings, which was covered with water.
He suddenly recalled the time on the beach, only days ago, when she had reached up and stroked his cheek and said she wanted to remember him like this always. Had that been some terrible omen?
With the Whitecap police directing traffic, he made his way back the way he’d come.
The door was not only unlocked at the old Love Cottage, it had been blown open, and most of the furniture overturned. The wind had heaved a rocking chair through a front window; shattered glass was strewn on the sodden floor.
“Cynthia!” There was a basement here, Otis had said so; maybe when the porch had been ripped off their house, she’d come here, fearing worse.
Shaking as with palsy, he searched for the door to the basement, opening closets, finding the water heater, listening for the booming bark of his dog. . . .
“Cynthia! Please!”
There! Hidden in the bedroom they’d slept in all those eons ago . . .
He threw open the basement door and peered down into a dark void, unable to switch on a light.
“Cynthia!” he bawled.
Silence.
He turned from the mildewed odor that fumed up at him, and closed the door and put his head in his hands and did what he’d been doing all day.
“Lord,” he entreated from the depths of his being, “hear my prayer....”
Maybe there was a note at Dove Cottage.
Maybe there was something on the kitchen counter telling him where they’d gone. If not, he’d drive to the Fieldwalkers’ if there were no power lines across the roads. He’d heard that was a problem in some parts of the north end, but so what, he had two feet, and besides, they couldn’t have just vanished off the face of the earth. They had to be somewhere. . . .
He parked at the side of Dove Cottage and sprinted across a yard that felt like marsh beneath the soles of his running shoes.
“Father!”
Morris Love . . .
He turned and looked across to the wall. Something odd over there, a blank spot in the sky where a tree had stood. . . .
“They’re over here!”
Again, his cognition lapsed, and he wouldn’t recall racing from his yard and across the street and through the iron gate, which Morris Love had unlocked and swung back as he dashed onto the familiar turf of Nouvelle Chanson.
“Timothy!”
There had been times of absolute, unfettered joy in his life—his ordination, his wedding, and the day he and Walter stood on a hill in Ireland and looked across to the site of the Kavanagh family castle.
With his wife in his arms, his dog jumping up to lick his face, and Jonathan tugging on his pants leg, he experienced a moment of supreme joy that he felt he may never know again.
