Chapter 11: Biscuits and Hard Sleep
Elizabeth Tanksley was eighty-two and had rarely slept over three hours without waking her whole life. Some would say it had been her misfortune having been born early in the century when child psychology (or any psychology, for that matter) had been in its infancy, if you could pardon the pun. There were no Dr. Spock’s or his equivalent in those days; people either got along or they didn’t. Graveyards weren’t strangers and surely not the surprise they became as the 20th century bedazzled with its empty promises of everything except eternal life. She’d worn cotton sack underwear for the first two decades of her life and farmed with her parents sunup to sundown whether she’d slept well or not. To her it was a normal fact of life, like buttermilk biscuits in the morning. Nothing was to be questioned; God was in his Heaven and the devil in Hell and the patterns of the world did Their bidding as they would.
But as mentioned in the Bible, for every affliction there was its opposite. Hers happened to be the Second Sight. She’d been three when her mother saw it upon her. They’d been farmers from Oklahoma on a little spit of land forty miles southwest of Tulsa. Her pa and the boys had been working a field a mile from the house when little Lizzy had walked into the kitchen where her mother was making the biscuits; they’d been poor and meat had seemed a strange delicacy until she’d reached her teens, meant for other, more refined, people. Her mother, Mertle, told her one morning she came padding up, rubbing at her puffy eyes and pulling the woman’s skirt. When Mertle had turned to her, the little girl had quite plainly stated there were circles in the sky. “Black circles,” she’d said, twirling her fingers tightly to run the picture home. Her mother picked her up and set her on the countertop, hushing her with a quiet lullaby as she continued with the biscuits.
It had been less than ten minutes later she’d heard the train. That low, dark, throaty building of sound that anyone living on the plains instantly recognized. Tornados. Mertle immediately squinted out the kitchen window and sure enough, off to the east, two distinct funnel clouds pushed down from the sky. The field was in that direction but Mertle had lived long enough to realize the only alternative. She scooped up the little girl and pushed the kitchen table across the floor with her backside. She set Lizzy on the table and bent to tug the threadbare rug out of the way. The trapdoor to the basement was underneath and up until that day had never been used for safety. She’d liked to think of it as a large, dark pantry with its dusty collection of preserves, tack and baking goods, but as the noise grew louder she was reminded of its true purpose. Cover.
Without a word her mother had grabbed Lizzy off the table, chanced one more look back toward the window (already the dust beginning to dance like the devil out there), and whispered a small, mumbled prayer for her husband and sons. Then they’d gone below, huddled among the dusty, cobwebbed preserves as Hell raged above. Several times during the milieu Mertle had been sure the trapdoor would come off and they’d be sucked into the vortex, but though the door threatened to let go it never did. Amid the rending of wood and screech of wind they remained removed in the cool sanctuary of the basement. Waiting until the storm left with the same abruptness as it came. One minute there was the screeching and rending, and the next, a quick retreat of the train whistle to some far distant point. Mertle guessed the whole thing had lasted less than three minutes, but those minutes were forever engraved in her mind, never very far away after she learned of the devastation they’d visited.
With the baby in her arms her mother had slowly ascended the ladder and pushed the door open. It flapped back easily (Mertle sighing with relief, having heard the horror stories of families trapped in their cellars to die after such storms, a wagon or other heavy implement lodged on top of the trapdoor), but her moment of respite vanished with the sunlight. Because above her head was not the ragged kitchen ceiling she expected but the clear, blue sky, as placid now as a sweet Sunday morning. The house was gone, scattered over the better part of five square miles (a neighbor eight miles closer in to town found the black iron pan she’d been doing the biscuits in half-buried in the hard-pan of the wagon track outside her house several days later) and she was reminded of the prairie gophers she’d seen popping their heads above ground in just the same way.
The land was barren as a graveyard.
And that, for the most part, was what it was. Mertle, baby in arms and hysteria rising, had swept the horizon with her eyes, shading them from the sun with her free hand. What little scrub brush she remembered was gone now, leaving the land scraped bare and raw. It was indeed as if she’d emerged from a hole. The house, every remnant of it save a few floorboards still attached to the floor joists that’d led down to the basement, was gone. The sapling they’d planted in the front and watered with what little they could spare uprooted and whisked away, likewise the picket fence that had defined three sides around the house. All gone. Glancing in the direction the whistle had followed she could make out a pitiful assortment of debris: a piece of twisted tin, the remnants of a broken porch standing ladder-like and strange, alone, a quarter mile away.
The silence was absolute. Elizabeth always remembered that too, the way her mother spoke of it on the very rare occasions when she did. “Like death pushed deeper,” she’d told her once, again on a rare occasion, this time, Lizzy suspected, after drinking. Mertle had pulled her apron around the little girl’s head and run toward the fields, screaming the names of her men until she was hoarse and mad. The fields were empty when she arrived.
A sheriff’s detachment found them near sunset. They were brought into town and sheltered in a saloon along with others left equally homeless. The whores didn’t mind if their rooms were requisitioned because the disaster stirred traffic in the area and they did a brisk business in less private locations. Everyone was as helpful as country folk generally are, and everyone was eventually accounted for in a ten-mile radius except Mertle’s husband and boys. The three were gone. There was talk around the barbershop over the next two weeks of the bodies popping up somewhere, even some unlikely where, but they never did.
Not a hat, not a boot, not one stitch of clothing. Ever. They simply went out one day and vanished into the sky.
And after that Mertle and Elizabeth had been on their own.
The town pooled their resources and bought them a ticket to Atlanta, Georgia, on Mertle’s insistence there was family there, more out of desperation than any truth, her head spinning on the circumstances, wishing only to be away and free of the very air that came in its deadly “black circles”.
They were at the point of destitution when the talent resurfaced.