That’s where my mother was raised, out somewhere near where the collective memory of short-lived humanity fades into an even plain of old fences cutting up older land with lines that run straight east-west and north-south with nary a curve until they hit the edge of the forsaken lands of points nearer the coast where the Earth forgets its manners and has the all-fired audacity to roll up and down from time to time. Too changeable. And that’s just why storms don’t seem to register, neither. There’s just sky, out there. Folks’re too full up of it, since they get it all the time and everywhere, stretching east-west and north-south and heavy and the same.
That sky what never moves, that was my mother’s birthright, and it wormed its way under her skin until there was some measure of her that was permanent too. Most everything not nailed down to her was leached out and replaced with old, red dirt and a steady, whistling wind, I think. Or at least, she gave off that impression.
You don’t believe? You’re lookin’ at me with a curious eye, friend.
Alright, I’ll prove it to you. Time was I couldn’t stay home from school less I had blood flowin’ out my boots, but there you have it. Illness was always too transitory. Anyway, I had one day when the old boots were full up, metaphorically speaking, and she kept me home so I didn’t die on the way to school and arrive a corpse. So there I was, trying to learn how to breathe again when every breath was agony, and my mother was cleaning the house. Every now and again, she would vacuum by a window and say something like “huh.”
You’d huh too, and worse, if you saw the rain goin’ by horizontal. Now and again, a gust would roll past that threatened to invite itself inside, but she didn’t react. You might wonder why.
Having moved from Oklahoma to the rolling hills of Missouri, she had carried Oklahoma with her. ‘round her house, folks waited to head for the storm shelter “until you have to worry about the youngest flying away,” and even then they went with great reluctance. The storm would be gone again, sure enough, and the sky would go on like before.
She leant over me.
“Can you walk?”
“Hggghh.”
“We’re going to the basement.”
It wasn’t until the door closed that I realized just how loud the house had been singin’ in the wind. I sat on the bottom step, wrapped in two blankets, while my mother rearranged the cans on the shelf with a sort of cooped-up energy. But it weren’t five or six minutes before she sniffed, loud, like sayin’ somethin’, and she headed up the stairs.
Well, the house was still there, and the sky was still there. Some might even argue God was still there. But the tornado that had threatened for the last five hours had took some trees from the yard and no mistake.
Ah, well. Trees aren’t permanent anyhow. Mom is.
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