A Death On The Wolf (35 page)

SLOAN

— — —

The seven o’clock bulletin confirmed that Camille was coming ashore somewhere around Gulfport which meant we were going to be directly in its path. At quarter to eight the lights blinked and Aunt Charity started going around lighting all the oil lamps she’d set out and Daddy started taping up the sliding glass door in the den with masking tape. The winds, as he had predicted, were coming out of the east which meant they were slamming directly into the back of the house and hitting the sliding glass doors hard. During the stronger gusts, we could even see the glass in the doors bow a little. Daddy still maintained that the tempered glass would hold and the tape was just an extra measure of protection.

“
Charity,” Daddy said, “you better get some towels. The wind is forcing the rain in around these doors.” I went over and looked and sure enough the tracks were full of water and the carpeting was wet.

Daddy finished taping the door and then put Sachet to bed. She had fallen asleep over in the recliner. Aunt Charity came in the den with three bath towels and started rolling them up and putting them at the base of the sliding glass doors. I decided to go down the hall and check on Frankie.

The lights blinked again just as I stepped into the bedroom. The lamp on the table in between my bed and Frankie’s was on. He’d gone to sleep reading one of his comic books and it had fallen from his hand and was lying on the floor. I reached down and picked it up and put it on the table. Frankie seemed to be sleeping peacefully. He’d been through so much over the past ten days and yet his spirit seemed indomitable. As I watched my best friend lying there, thoughts of what I’d done earlier to ensure that he and I both could be in this room right now crept forward from the back of my mind where I’d forced them. I’d shot a man, and even if I hadn’t killed him he was surely dead by now from his wounds and the weather. I knew I did what I had to do, and intellectually I had no doubts or regrets. But you can’t take a life and not have it affect you deep inside where the intellect is not the gate keeper. I reached for the lamp to turn it out, but before my hand made it to the switch it went dark. The electricity was gone.

I stood there for a minute with my eyes closed to get used to the darkness. Without the sound of the air conditioning or the TV from the den, the wind noise from outside was really striking. With every gust there was a little roar and at times I could actually hear and feel the house shudder. When I opened my eyes there was quite a bit of light coming from the doorway to the hall from all the oil lamps and candles Aunt Charity had burning throughout the house. I made my way back to the den and sat on the sofa beside Mary Alice. Daddy was leaned back in the recliner and my aunt was in her rocker in front of the fire place. The wind was making a howling noise in the chimney.

“
Daddy, is the flue closed in the chimney?” I asked. For the first time I noticed the wind roar from outside was getting to the point that conversation across the room required me to raise my voice.

“
Yes, I checked it.”

“
How fast do you think the winds are now?”

“
Sixty, seventy maybe.”

I reached over and took Mary Alice’s hand and it was trembling a little. I leaned over and said into her ear, “Are you scared?” She squeezed my hand and nodded her head. I pulled her over to me and put my arms around her.

For the next two hours we all sat there like that: Daddy in the recliner, Aunt Charity in the rocker, me on the sofa with Mary Alice in my arms. We listened to the fury of Camille build until the roar was so loud that conversation was impossible. I’d never been in a tornado, but I’d heard people who had say it sounds like a freight train, and this did. And it just seemed to keep getting louder as the night went on.

I finally just had to get up. I stepped over to Daddy and pointed to my wrist, indicating I wanted to know the time. He looked at his watch and said something and I literally could not hear him—that’s how loud the wind roar was. I finally just took his wrist in my hand and looked at the watch myself. It was ten after ten.

I decided to go to the garage and see how Bear was doing. Aunt Charity had a candle burning on the bar in the kitchen, so I took that with me so I could see. I expected Bear to jump all over me as soon as I opened the door, but he didn’t. He was lying over in the corner and when he saw me he wagged his tail a few times but didn’t move. I figured the storm had him confused. I looked to see if he’d gone to the bathroom anywhere and he hadn’t.

When I got back to the den and sat down beside Mary Alice, she put her mouth right to my ear and said, “I want to go lie down. Will you come with me?”

I told her I would. We both stood up and I motioned to Daddy that I was going to Mary Alice’s room with her. He nodded. I looked over at Aunt Charity. She had her eyes closed and was rocking slowly in her rocker.

Once we got to Mary Alice’s room, she said she wanted me to lie down with her. Aunt Charity had put a small oil lamp on the nightstand and it was burning at a low flame, just enough to illuminate the room with a soft yellow glow. Mary Alice and I lay down on her bed, she on her side and me behind her, front to back, with my arms around her—“spooning” as they used to call it. My nose was buried in her hair and it smelled wonderful. The house was getting warmer now that the air conditioning wasn’t running. And I didn’t think it was possible, but the wind roar from the hurricane was actually getting louder. It was unnerving and for the first time I began to wonder what was actually happening outside and if the house could hold up to this relentless assault. Lying there with Mary Alice in my arms, inhaling her essence, feeling her gentle breathing against my embrace, was relaxing even in the midst of this storm and I found myself slipping into the edge of sleep.

Daddy gently shaking my shoulder awakened me. I opened my eyes and as I looked around the room it took a few seconds for me to remember where I was. Mary Alice was there beside me asleep and the oil lamp was still burning dimly on the night stand. But the house was dead quiet. I looked up at Daddy and asked, “Is it over?”

“
We’re in the eye,” he said. “We don’t have much time. I want you to take Bear out and let him use the bathroom.”

I worked my way off the narrow bed without disturbing Mary Alice. “What time is it?” I asked as I rubbed my eyes.

“
Quarter past one,” Daddy said.

I followed him down the hall. He had a flashlight and he reached in his back pocket and pulled out another one and handed it to me. “Put the leash on Bear. I don’t want him loose because once the winds start back up it will be quick.”

“
I didn’t bring his leash,” I said.

“
I did. It’s hanging on the wall in the garage where Charity has all her gardening tools. And don’t open the garage door. Bring him in the house and take him out the front door.”

“
Why can’t I take him out the garage door?”

“
Because the wind could have warped it and I don’t want to open it and then not be able to get it closed. Just do like I said, please.”

I got Bear hooked up to his leash and Daddy followed us out onto the front porch. Normally, in the middle of the night, you’d expect to hear crickets and frogs and all manner of insects making a racket, but everything was still and silent. We stood there on the porch and shined our flashlights out in the front yard. Limbs of all sizes were everywhere. “Are you going over and check on our house?” I asked Daddy.

“
No, and I don’t want you going any further than right out there in the front yard. Take him on out there and let him do his business before this thing gets going again.”

As soon as I stepped off the porch with Bear I let out some of the leash I’d had wound up in my hand to give him some walking room. As I expected, he immediately went over to one of Aunt Charity’s azalea bushes and peed on it. I looked up and was shocked to see a star-filled night sky, clear and beautiful. “Look at that,” I said and pointed my flashlight upward.

“
Yep,” Daddy said, “there’re no clouds in the eye of a hurricane. No clouds, no wind, no rain.”

I walked around a little further out in the yard. Bear was tugging on the leash the entire time. The beam of my flash light fell on one of the huge pine trees lying across the yard. I did a quick pan with the light to see which one it was, but they were all still standing—or so I thought. Once I shined the light up the trunk of the tree I was beside, I saw that the wind had snapped it off about twelve feet up. This was an old pine, nearly two feet in diameter and seventy feet tall. “One of the trees is down over here,” I hollered to Daddy. I caught a whiff of dog poop so I knew Bear was indeed “doing his business,” as Daddy had put it. I moved the flash light around until I spotted him finishing up about ten feet away.

Daddy stepped over beside me and shined his flashlight on the downed pine. “The tap root held,” he said. “I’ll bet you anything that pecan tree over there is on top of our house.”

“
You don’t want to go look?”

“
No, we don’t know what may be in the yard between here and there. We can see what’s happened in the morning. Judging by how long it took the eye to get here, we’ll have another four hours or so of winds from the opposite direction when it starts up again.”

“
When’s it gonna start up again?”

“
I don’t know—depends on how wide the eye is and how fast the storm’s traveling. But it won’t be like before when the winds started up gradually. If you’d been awake you would have seen how quickly the winds died when the edge of the eye passed. It’ll be the same way on the backside. It will be calm like this one minute and then boom—hundred and fifty mile an hour winds.”

“
You think that’s how fast the winds got? A hundred and fifty?”

“
At least. Look at how cleanly that big pine is snapped off.” Daddy put his flashlight beam on the break point of the tree.

Bear was sticking his cold nose against my hand so I knew he was finished. “I think he’s done,” I said.

“
Okay, let’s get back inside.”

Chapter 21

Gone with the Wind

About thirty minutes after Daddy and I went back inside the house, Camille returned in full force. It was just as my father had said it would be. In a matter of minutes we went from calm and silence to the deafening fury of 150 mile per hour winds, this time coming from the west and blasting the front side of the house. The risk was greater now, if for no other reason than all those big tall pines in the front yard that could come crashing down on us as the winds thrashed them mercilessly.

By five o’clock we could tell the storm was starting to subside and by six the battering we’d endured for nearly ten hours was over. At first light I opened the draperies over the sliding glass doors and peered through the spaces in the tape into the back yard. It was full of limbs up close to the house, but the cars and pickup out in the middle appeared to be fine. The wind and rain had plastered them with leaves and pine needles, but Daddy had been smart to put them back there.

I went out into the garage and this time Bear did jump all over me as I made my way to the garage door and looked out the windows. The angle was such that I could not see our yard or house, but what I saw in Aunt Charity’s front yard was enough to make me think the worst. The downed pine tree I had encountered during the brief respite of the passing eye was only one of five that I could see now. Three other pines had been snapped off by the easterly winds and two by the westerly winds on the backside of the storm. Fortunately, neither of those had hit the house, but they had come close. The front yard itself was littered with limbs, leaves, and unrecognizable debris.

At seven o’clock, while everyone else was still sleeping, Daddy and I took our first venture out to see what was left of our world—and it wasn’t much. Bear was happy to be free of the garage and he immediately took off running and exploring. Our house was still standing, but as I stood there on Aunt Charity’s front porch staring at it, something didn’t look right. It almost looked like it was sitting in a different position. The big pecan tree in the backyard had gone down, but not as Daddy had predicted. It had somehow withstood the full brunt of the initial pounding of Camille only to be felled by the winds on the backside of the storm. Hence, it was not lying on top of our house, but neither was it up against the barn, which is where its final resting place would have been had the barn been there. The barn was gone—literally. The only indication it had ever existed was the rough outline left in the wet clay soil. Daddy’s workbench, all his tools, the old Harley he was restoring, everything that had been in the barn was gone. Our vegetable garden was a disaster area.

“
That’s amazing,” Daddy said, pointing to our carport. It was still standing, but the small workshop that had been attached to the back of it was gone. The arbitrary nature of how the winds had wreaked havoc on our farm was bewildering. The barn was gone, while a hundred feet away the house was still standing. The new fence we’d built back in July was still standing. In preparation for the storm, Daddy had released the goats into the cow pasture, but as I peered out into the open field I didn’t see any cows or goats.