NO ONE WOULD BE MORE ANNOYED THAN DAVY IF I TRIED TO RECAST THE predicament under some redemptive glow. Two boys were dead in our house and there was no bright side to the matter. I recall Davy sitting on the basement stairs under a yellow bulb, jacket dragged on over his T-shirt, his face oily with rain. He wouldn’t speak and his eyes showed a narcosis that was fearful to me. We waited together for Ted Pullet to arrive. Dad, far gone in prayer, held Swede in one arm and gripped Davy’s shoulder with the other. I recall a sensation of splitting in two, of becoming smaller. I babbled to Davy that it would be all right, that he had not meant to do it.
Which woke him from wherever he’d been, for he turned and snared my wrist. “Don’t say it’s all right, Rube, don’t say it. I meant to do it. I meant to. You hear me?” I could only nod frantically. Cars had driven up while he spoke, and we heard doors thumping and voices and saw red lights bouncing off the windows.
Davy said, “Here we go then.”
He was always impatient with our family’s general insistence that things turn out for the best.
True story: In the spring of Dad’s twenty-eighth year, he was raised up by a tornado, along with most of the roof above him and a few loose boards he was setting into the floor.
This was when he was married to my mother, attending a little school in Iowa under the GI Bill. In those days Dad’s love of books and scholarly quest kept him happily consumed—he was one of those honorably ambitious self-educated men loved by American folklorists, a Lincoln-hearted reader who might walk ten miles to borrow a volume of poetry by John Donne or a novel by Melville or, to be particularly honest about it, Owen Wister. Loving to study and possessed of unusual compassion he leaned naturally toward medicine, and I imagine my mother falling easily for this generous and handsome and obviously rising young man. (To this day, in fact, it is easy for me to conjure the look our lives might’ve had, if Dad had but held course: an unassuming farmhouse with a wide-swept porch, surrounded, I’m guessing, by a few head of Angus beef on a pastoral acreage, because a doctor needs his recreation, a couple good quarter horses in a painted corral, Mom coming out the back door slapping flour off her apron, calling us kids for supper, looking pleased and content. Surprising, isn’t it, how close such pictures lie beneath the surface?)
From what I heard those were fine times. Davy was a year old and tottered roguishly around the gladhearted poverty of marriedstudent housing; Mother fed him and wore thin from the chase and read him to sleep from Robert Louis Stevenson. Dad studied the bones of the science department’s hanging skeleton, name of Yorick, a short scurvied fellow gone the color of weak tea. A professor of Dad’s told him Yorick was no conscientious volunteer but was instead a hard-luck Calcuttan who’d been dredged from the Ganges River and been boiled clean and had ridden the black market to the American Midwest. It made a person think. When not studying, Dad worked, sweeping and painting in the athletic building twenty hours a week, unknowingly getting all the education he was going to need right there in his coveralls. It was the athletic building, Dewey Hall, that the tornado struck, just past eleven one heatsoaked night in September. This, by the way, is the only story Dad ever told us in whispers: how the tornado came cruising up out of the south, birthed from a yellow cloud; how it touched earth at the fringe of town, a pale umbilical rope, to corkscrew almost shyly up College Drive, gathering dirt but little else. Next morning the first thing emergent residents noticed was their street, swept like never before, and all streetside grass combed and pointed as if in praise to some passing magnificence.
Dad was working late, installing new floorboards on the basketball court where a light fixture had fallen the previous winter—it just worked loose and fell, interrupting a home game, injuring no one but thrilling the crowd with its descent and powdery detonation. Dewey Hall was the only building on campus not made of brick, and the tornado came for it in absolute maturity, no umbilical growth now but a strong slender lady hip-walking through campus—past the science hall, past English, jumping Old Main and the library with deliberate grace and lighting on the shallow roof of Dewey, where Dad toiled alone. He said it didn’t sound like a train, as the wisdom goes, but like a whole mountain breaking loose and skidding sideways over the ground, and looking up he saw shingles in the air, and bits of skylight glass hovering in slow circles; he saw incandescent fixtures likewise floating, torn from their sockets yet their filaments whole and gloriously charged by some storm-bent physics; and as he sprang for the basement steps—not fifty feet away—he heard the great slab of ceiling tear loose and felt himself move upward, ascending in bodily confusion out of the range of gravity and earth and earthly help.
Meantime my mother, awakened in their third-floor garret by the hissing wind, leapt up in time to see the rotating head of the funnel coast overhead, lit municipally from below. Gusts of sand raked the panes. No accumulation of hard feelings can diminish my admiration for what she did then, which was to fly nightgowned into Davy’s tiny room, seize a folded quilt, and brace it against his window. Thus she stood while the noise rose from a hiss to a many-noted baying; thus she stood as all lights failed and glass burst elsewhere in the building and the noise became everything a mind could hold.
As Dad told the story this was always the moment of triumph, the turn of the war toward winning: Mother is leaning against the window, standing between the gale and little Davy, and at the storm’s very crest, when it is like a war come seeking what it might devour, she feels the slightest easing in the glass. At the same time Davy stirs and smacks, he rolls to his stomach, the glass goes still beneath her hands, and by the time Davy’s settled back into sleep, the war’s moved on, to the north.
(But do you think the worst is over? Remember, Dad is only now on the ascent—hammer in hand, he’s peeking at eternity—Mom’s tears of relief are just standing at the corners of her eyes. Nope, the worst, for Mom at least, is still to come.)
First thing she did, Dad told us, after the storm moved on, was to run out groping for the hall telephone they shared with the third floor. To ring up Dewey, of course—to check on Dad. The line was dead, no surprise, but a strange thing; the handset was hot. Not warm as if from someone’s hand but hot, charged, voltage-goosed. Mother had it to her ear before her palm registered pain. Later she would say the scorched phone scared her more than the storm. It seemed outside of nature. It foretold evil. Dropping it, she felt her way back and pulled Davy from his crib and held him for comfort. I imagine them at the window she’d stood braced against, looking across campus, but you couldn’t see Dewey Hall from there, the lights were still out, and anyhow Old Main stood up between them.
Within the hour, someone knocked. In the dark, wrapped in a robe, Mother opened the door to a small committee of men, their lanternlit faces the color of burning paper. The man in front said, “Mrs. Land, Dewey Hall is down.”
And there it was: the worst. She heard them out, their descriptions of the torn building, the void where the roof had been, the twists of painted siding and electrical wire and ruinous plankage spread northward in a long littered swath. They’d taken lanterns and hoisted wreckage and found no sign of Mr. Land. Others were searching even now. They needn’t have told my mother she should prepare for still harder tidings, but they were clumsy fellows and no doubt completely at sea. Was there a right way to deliver the sort of news they carried?
As to my mother’s state of mind in those next hours, I can only guess. Once in my life I knew a grief so hard I could actually hear it inside, scraping at the lining of my stomach, an audible ache, dredging with hooks as rivers are dredged when someone’s been missing too long. I have to think my mother felt something like that. Maybe Davy woke and distracted her; maybe she was numb; maybe she had the reserves to begin planning even then how best to make her way in a world that had been so friendly only the night before. All I know for sure, from Dad’s telling, is this: She was at the kitchen table late that morning, having dressed and fed Davy and set him to riding his reined footstool, when the hall phone, restored to service, began to ring. She sat a long while, wanting someone else to get it, but the whole floor had emptied, gone to class and to work and to walk blinking round the former Dewey Hall. At last she got up and answered. A woman asked for Mrs. Jeremiah Land.
“Speaking,” said my mother.
“Did your car survive the storm, Mrs. Land?” the woman asked.
My mother said, sharply, “What are you talking about!” Be patient with her, now; think of her long night.
“Mrs. Land,” the woman said, “I’m Marianne Evans. Our farm is four miles north of town. I got a man here drinking coffee on my porch. He says he’s your husband.”
Well, we all hold history differently inside us. For Swede such episodes retold themselves into a seamless and momentous narrative; she had a Homeric grasp on the significance of events, and still does; one of her recent letters asks, Is it hubris to believe we all live epics? (Perhaps it is, but I suspect she’s not actually counting on me for an answer.) Dad, he himself would say, was baptized by that tornado into a life of new ambitions—interpreted by many, including my mother, as a life of no ambitions. Finishing out that semester, he moved his family off campus and found work as a plumber’s assistant. This was the anticlimactic denouement to his whispered tornado story: Having been whisked through four miles of debris-cluttered sky, having been swallowed by the wrath of God and been kept not just safe but unbruised inside it, having been awakened midmorning in a fallow field by a face-licking retriever—Dad’s response was to leave his prosperous track and plunge his hands joyfully into the sewer. An explanation is beyond me other than to repeat what he would often say, the story ended, his hands tucking up the blankets, “I was treated so gently up there, kids.”
But the whole thing bothered Davy, and with Dad out of earshot he’d say so. You couldn’t get blown around in a tornado, he said, and not get banged up. It didn’t make sense. It wasn’t right.
Swede challenged him. “Are you calling Dad a liar?”
“Of course not. I know it happened. It just shouldn’t have. Don’t you see that?”
“No,” Swede replied.
But I saw what he meant, or I would eventually. Davy wanted life to be something you did on your own; the whole idea of a protective, fatherly God annoyed him. I would understand this better in years to come but never subscribe to it, for I was weak and knew it. I hadn’t the strength or the instincts of my immigrant forebears. The weak must bank on mercy—without which, after all, I wouldn’t have lasted fifteen minutes. History simply hadn’t equipped me as it had Davy. You had only to look at his hands to see it: His hands were hard as any man’s, and quick—quick as eyesight. They moved always as with a purpose long known. History was built into Davy so thoroughly he could never see how it owned him.
And Mom? I can only believe she sat down and wept, after that phone call, as any loving wife might do. How she must have rejoiced, how frantically she must’ve driven to the Evans farm—and the clasping and shuddering of that reunion must’ve been a thing Marianne Evans would tell her neighbors about and remember in her heart on rainy evenings while her husband worked in the barn. Happily for Marianne, she would not see the changes that tornado wrought. She wouldn’t see my mother’s puzzlement as Dad surrendered his studies and his prosperous future; nor my mother’s attempts to make the best of it. These attempts lasted quite awhile, really—long enough to bear Swede and me—but she must’ve felt Dad had violated some part of the covenant between them. She departed without explanation or epilogue. We heard, later, that she married a doctor after all, in Chicago, an older gentleman whose first wife had died; we heard they patronized the symphony and the theater and enjoyed choice memberships. But none of this did we hear from Mother, for no letter or call did we once receive; nor did we ever meet the gentleman on whose behalf we’d been erased.
They put Davy in cuffs and drove him to the Montrose jail and the rest of us to a motel for the night. Easing away through the rain we saw an ambulance backed onto the lawn, a deputy stooped smoking on the porch, and the freeze and fade of windows struck with camera flash.
The whole thing was no less a tornado than the other.
Next day when we went to see Davy, Swede tried to kick him. She was crying and incensed and he reached to comfort her, and she gave it a stout try between the bars, only to clank her shin.