Читать книгу The Fall of Alice K. - Jim Heynen - Страница 14

7

The evening supper table was a sober scene: her stern father offering a stern prayer, her severe mother challenging everything with a menacing stare that never erupted into words, and her soft sister Aldah clinging to Alice’s arm when she was not pointing for more food. And more food.

As Alice lay in bed that night, she didn’t think about the smoldering discomfort of the dinner table, or the smells she might have taken to bed with her, or about the weather, but she woke to a distant rumbling. Thunder didn’t frighten her. It brought back the memory of her kind grandmother saying, “It’s just God talking.” Thunder as God’s comforting voice. It had sunk in. She loved that booming voice.

A bolt of lightning streaked across the sky, followed by a sound of ripping canvas—and then the ba-boom when the bolt bit the dirt within a mile. The sky fluttered with lightning and the clouds murmured with thunder. God was tired of chitchat and getting down to business.

“Alice!” her father yelled up the stairs. “We’re getting some weather. It’s headed straight at us.”

“Yeah, yeah,” she said. Tornado season was past. This wouldn’t be the first storm their house survived. The approach of a big Midwestern storm could be more exciting than frightening—like watching a bull charge toward you when you’re standing safely behind a metal gate.

“Alice!” This time it was the family witch. “Close the windows and get down here.”

“In a sec.”

“Get down here! Aldah is scared!”

So why wasn’t she doing something about it?

“I’m getting dressed.”

“Did you hear me?”

“I said I was coming.”

“This could be it,” she heard her mother say in her practiced ominous voice.

Alice put on her soft fleece sweater and work jeans. She wasn’t dressing for the weather; she was dressing to comfort her sister Aldah. When she got downstairs, her father had gone out to lock down any loose doors. She heard the clink of the metal gates in the hog pens. The feeder cattle could find shelter in the sturdy gambrel-roofed barn or the corrugated metal cattle shed that had its back to the wind. Their big block of a house had stood up to a century of Midwest weather, and this storm wasn’t about to scare it off its foundation.

Her mother stood in her usual place in front of the kitchen sink, staring out the window at the approaching storm with the family Bible clutched against her stomach. At moments like this, Alice couldn’t decide if her mother was a pillar of faith or a pillar of skepticism. How could a person of faith be either so sour or so fearful of everything?

Lightning struck somewhere close with a force Alice could feel in her cheekbones. Blunt fists of wind whacked the house in a syncopated rhythm. This was a stuttery storm—and that was not a good sign. The deep-throated thunder gurgled closer. No longer the voice of God, it sounded like a beast that couldn’t make up its mind, sniveling one minute and grunting the next. The lights went out like an exclamation point. Alice swam through the wake of darkness, trying to find Aldah. Her whimpering cries were everywhere—and moving. At Alice’s touch, her sister flung her arms around Alice and buried her face in Alice’s sweater. If Alice smelled bad, she knew Aldah would never say so. Now the wind leaned against the house with a steady pressure. Twigs and gravel sprayed noisily past the windows, but the house shrugged its shoulders, and Alice thought for an instant: would that the rest of us could be so sure of our place on the planet.

Alice’s mother remained standing, her legs apart as if she were getting ready for something. She had laid the Bible down and had both hands on the counter as if she were bracing for whatever was coming at them. This was neither a position of fear nor faith. It looked more like a position of defiance.

Alice turned to Aldah. “We’re not going anywhere,” she said and stroked Aldah’s head.

“Promise?”

“Promise.”

A golden light appeared in the doorway from the porch. Her mother turned toward it, and in a voice that sounded like startled relief, she sighed, “Oh, Father,” as if she were looking into the face of the Lord of Hosts Himself, but before she could transfigure into the glories of heaven, the light transformed into Alice’s father carrying the old kerosene lantern in one hand and a flashlight in the other. Her mother’s arms came down in the deliberate slowness of a chicken hawk perching on a fence post. Alice couldn’t see her father’s face, but she sensed that he wanted to comfort Aldah and her when he shone the flashlight where they huddled next to the kitchen table.

“That’s probably the worst of the wind,” he said, and no sooner had he spoken than the wind let up. At times like this her father was an Old Testament prophet in his deliberate manner and without a quake in his body or voice. He set the kerosene lantern in the middle of the kitchen table where his father and grandfather no doubt once put it. When he lit the wick and slipped the glass chimney over it, a fist of flame shot up. In his steady way he adjusted the wick until a soft light spread over the round table. He turned off the flashlight, and they all sat down around the yellow tablecloth of light. Aldah kept her face pressed against Alice’s soft sweater as Alice smoothed her hair. Their mother stood motionless, a stark shadow in the kitchen doorway. Why, at moments like this, Alice wondered, did she look more like a grim messenger of disaster than like a warm motherly defense against it?

Rain hit like a fire hose against the house.

“Here it comes,” her mother rasped.

The crystal ball of her father’s bald head glowed in the mellow light. Her mother moved across the kitchen and shoved a pie tin under the lantern with such sharp force that she looked like someone who thought she was saving the day. “Don’t burn the table,” she said. “That’s all we need.”

Alice felt tension in the room, but no panic. Aldah stared into the flame with her soft oval eyes. Their father’s mouth was like a pencil mark across his face. Alice looked around the room and the steady warm light that the lamp cast on the praying-hands painting and the black-and-white Love Begins At Home plaque. Alice felt as if she was watching a movie in slow motion, a portrait of her family forming and reforming before her eyes, and she couldn’t decide if they were scared or relieved to be together like this.

“Will this wind break the cornstalks?” she asked. She didn’t put any worry into her voice. She tried to behave as her father behaved at times of crisis—quietly gather the facts and, under all circumstances, stay rational.

“Maybe,” he said. The muscles around his mouth tightened.

“What did the weather report say?”

Before he answered, snapping sounds came from the asphalt in front of the garage.

“That.”

The first hailstones were large, popping and splattering like eggs, but they were followed by an encore of smaller hailstones. Buckets and buckets of hailstones.

“Horses,” said Aldah. Alice saw her satisfied smile.

The hailstones did sound as if they were galloping across the roofs.

“Horsemen of the Apocalypse,” said her mother dryly. Alice glanced at her and detected a smirk on her face, as if she were enjoying her own bitter cleverness.

The rest of the family kept their usual silence in response to one of her bizarre proclamations. The hooves of hail became a clatter of pebbles, first on the roof of the house and then amplified on the metal roofs of the cattle shed, the machine shed, the hog feeders, and the corn dryers. Pig squeals cut through the noise of the hail, but they were squeals of life as they fought to get inside out of the storm. A cloudburst of hail. Thirty seconds? Sixty seconds? It was like sitting in the dentist’s chair waiting for the drill to stop. Alice clenched her fists. She clenched her jaw. Her mother slumped down into a chair at the table, and they all sat staring into the warm flame, listening.

Alice knew that through his grim expression her father was calculating. What was this hailstorm costing? A hundred dollars a second? A thousand?

Aldah sat between Alice and her mother, with her father across the table. They all stared into the yellow light. Her father could pray at times like this, but he didn’t pray. He stared.

A half hour passed before the metal roofs were silent again. Her father stood up. “Well, that’s that,” he said. “Let’s go to bed.”

“Y2K,” said her mother. “How’s that for starters?”

Her mother the conversation stopper.

Her father stood off to the side watching them. No one stirred. For several minutes the family was unanimous in their silence.

Alice could feel the image of that moment make its imprint on her mind: her dear sweet sister leaning into her sweater, the squat egg shape of her, her mouth open slightly with her tongue resting on her lower lip; the chiseled features of her mother, her hair like a helmet, her detached and inscrutable countenance behind the large glowing eyes; and her erect and controlled father, calm and cold as a bronze statue. Alice had no idea what she looked like or whether she resembled any of them in appearance or behavior. It was a vivid photograph of her family, with her as a blur.

When her mother stood up in a manner that was both deliberate and languid, Alice and Aldah rose too, all of them in the dim kerosene light with their shadows casting misshapen figures on the kitchen cabinets and wall. With the kerosene lamp light on her back, her mother followed her own weaving shadow into the living room. She was dressed in jeans and work shirt. She picked up a blanket from the couch and flung it over her shoulder as if she were ready to wander off and away from the whole scene.

All summer the tension had grown in her mother, an edginess that could erupt into sharp words or strange actions at almost any time. She acted as if she was expecting the worst, though Alice didn’t know what “the worst” might mean for her mother. She probably didn’t either. Sometimes Alice assumed that her mother was afraid of everything and anything the future might bring, whether that was an influx of immigrants or the inevitable change of farm life. The millennium was a magnet that drew all of her unspoken fears together. Now she moved across the living room and became a long silhouette in front of the picture window, then stood motionless again, staring out into the darkness. It was impossible for her to see the hail damage, but she must have known as well as the rest of them that it was there and that it had been devastating.

Aldah’s bedroom was a small room, which before the remodeling had been a large pantry off the kitchen. With her father holding the lantern, Alice led Aldah into her pantry-bedroom and tucked her into bed.

“Read to me.”

“No light,” said Alice. “I’ll play something on the piano.”

“No light,” said Aldah.

Alice knew most of Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata by heart, but when she started playing it in the dark, Aldah yelled out, “Not that one! Not that one!”

Alice switched to “Have Thine Own Way, Lord” and played the simple hymn three times to the quiet approval of her sister, who was soon asleep. Alice found her way up to her own room, got in bed, and wondered if she should pray but found her mind was filled with cacophonous sounds of clattering hail and squealing hogs warring against country music and a church organ playing “A Mighty Fortress Is Our God.” The Devil’s work, she thought to herself, and closed her eyes.