Family Plot

P. 34 in text: In the early morning light he could see the silos in Tine Falls fading in the mist.  To the west a long cone seemed to float in the sky.  “Oh, Jesus!”  He grabbed the quilt from his bed, wrapped himself in it and ran down the stairs to his parents’ room.

“Ma!  Pa!  Get up!  It’s a tornado.”  His dog barked and jumped on the bed to lick their faces.  “We got to get to the root cellar!”  He whistled for his dog.  “Tiger!  C’mon!”

Orin raced to open the door to the root cellar dug into the kitchen garden while the rat terrier barked wildly beside them. 

His father lifted Orin’s pale and thin mother out of bed.  “It’s gonna be all right, Adalia.  Don’t you worry none.”

“Eli, I ain’t scared of dyin’, but I sure don’t want no more pain.”  She put her arm over her husband’s shoulder to help her walk.

As they rushed down the steps of the back porch and across the yard to the root cellar, the wind picked up and the sky seemed to turn from gray and black to green.  The air was heavy with both dust and rain.  They scrambled down the steps to the root cellar and caught their breath for a second.  In the distance they could hear what sounded like a train. 

Inside, the rough stone walls were lined with shelves.  The remnants of winter stocks, perhaps a half dozen quart Mason jars each of green beans, limas, corn, beets, and dill and sweet pickles stood on the shelves next to smaller jars of strawberry jam, rhubarb preserves, and cherry jelly.  The smell of a basket of apples gone mealy and a rotting potato mingled with fermented cabbage in a crock of sauerkraut.  Carrots and turnips had started to sprout in a bushel of damp sand.

Orin and his father set Adalia on an apple crate and covered her with blankets.  She leaned against the stone walls as they pulled the bulkhead door closed and barred it against the sounds they heard in the distance.

Orin took a deep breath.  He took another breath and wrinkled his nose.  “What is that smell?  That rat poison you bought off the traveling peddler must of worked.”  

“That ain’t our first worry, boy.”  His father felt on the shelf next to the door for a tin of matches to light the lantern hanging there.  Eli struck the match and lit the damp wick. The lantern sputtered at first, then flamed.

Orin’s mother moaned and sagged against the wall.

“Take it easy, Adalia.”  Eli put his arm around his wife’s shoulder.

Orin’s mother hugged the quilt tight around herself, her shoulders shaking, tears rolling down her face.

“We’re safe, Ma.  Don’t worry.”  

Orin looked around in the dim lantern light. Cobwebs hung from the ceiling and a fat white spider seemed to stare at them from a web in a corner. Dead roly-polies lay near the walls, and live ones curled into balls.  A millipede crawled through a chink under the door and inched up the wall into the darkness outside the lantern glow.  Hail beat on the door, followed by heavy drops of rain, and the wind forced trickles of water through the cracks in the boards.   

Orin’s stomach growled and he laughed.  “We’re up before breakfast, ain’t we?”

A soft whimper escaped his mother’s lips.   The two men exhaled, suddenly realizing they had been holding their breath.  The three of them fell silent for several minutes listening to the rain beating on the bulkhead door.  End p. 36 in text.