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Tornado Gift
Contents:
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Midpoint
By S.A. Barton
Copyright 2015 S.A. Barton
Eventually, the walls-strumming throb of the tornado passed and the family emerged from their storm nest in the hallway. They had ridden through the storm-the hail and rain hammering on the walls, the gusts rocking the trailer home side to side on its blocks, the thunder shaking the roof, and finally the open-throated steam engine chug of the funnel cloud itself-encapsulated in the mattresses rushed from their beds and stood up against the hallway walls to cushion them in case the trailer rolled over. But it hadn't.
The storm had been black, choking off the little bit of light that illuminated the hall from the living room on a sunny day. After the hail the electric lights had failed. The lights were still out, but now a weak sun filtered in again, gray.
Paul rushed ahead of his parents and little brother on the energy of thirteen, threw open the door and the screen, and burst out onto the open porch. Twigs, leaves, and small branches torn out of the big maple between them and the next trailer thirty feet over crunched under his sneakers. From the maple, from the woods engulfing their end of the trailer park, branches and leaves covered the grass and the gravel road, a green and brown carpet with only a few worn patches showing what lay underneath. Paul looked up. The clouds trailing the storm were high and thin, ragged, sending down random momentary sprinkles. The air was fresh, washed, green with the sap of bruised leaves and broken trees. Paul sucked in a deep breath, alive in the wake of the storm's fear.
"We made it!" he shouted as his family crowded onto the porch. He ran down the steps into the yard, and from there he saw it between the back of the trailer and the woods. A refrigerator, tall and white but not square like all the ones he'd seen before. This one was rounded and smooth like an enormous bar of soap. The handle on the front was short, chrome worn dull on one end and attached to the fridge only on the other. The fat and round black power cord disappeared into the undergrowth of the woods' edge as if it were plugged into the ferns and sticky sundews that grew there.
"Tornado must have hopped right over the trailer park," Paul's dad, David, said from the porch, the trailer between him and the fridge. "That looks like a piece of the Parsons' red fence from up on the hill-see it there in the road?"
Paul didn't look. "You guys gotta see this," he said.
"Look, that's the corner post with the hinges still on, right on the center stripe. That'll tear someone's muffler off if they don't see it in time."
"Seriously you guys, look!"
Paul's little brother Matt ran down the front steps and came around to look at where Paul was pointing.
"Oh, my go-o-osh," Matt said, his high kindergartener's voice full of awe in tones usually reserved for a second scoop of ice cream at Pulaski's Dairy and Dogs on Family Night Out, held every other Sunday unless acts of God or unexpected bills intervened.
Mom and dad came out into the yard, finally, to look where Paul was still pointing. Once they got far enough to see, they stopped and stared, both their mouths just barely hanging open.
"You think that came from the Parsons' too?" mom finally said.
"It looks old enough," dad said.
"Because the Parsons are annn-TEEKS," Matt said, drawing the word out like dad had when the subject of the Parsons had come up at dinner a couple of nights ago.
"That's not nice," mom said with a little headshake, same as she had then.
"Why not? They're old, aren't they?" Paul asked.
"It's a Westinghouse," dad said, not hearing a word, talking to himself as he approached. He put out a rough-palmed hand and caressed the fridge's sloped flank. "Can't be younger than World War Two, this thing. Look, the door has a real latch." He gripped the dull chrome and pulled: KACHUNK.
He paused at the sound and looked over his shoulder. "Ashley?" he said, as if he had suddenly realized that mom needed to be in on an action so momentous as opening a gift from the tornado. Mom nodded at him and reached her hands out wide to her sides, gathering in the children who were suddenly silent and close.
"It's just an old fridge," dad muttered. The incantation failed to dispel the air of gravity. He pulled the door open; the hinges were smooth and silent.
Inside, under the stainless steel racks, a single object rested at the bottom of the refrigerator section, on top of the small freezer compartment at the base of the fridge. It was a box, smooth cardboard the color of a manila envelope, but dark and rich as if it had somehow ripened. The corners were burred with fuzz, slightly rounded, points worn away by time and innumerable hands.
Dad looked down at it, thinking. The rest of the family waited a long beat, then mom stepped up next to him, reached down, and picked up the box.
"We'll take it inside," she said. Dad let out a little gust of breath and nodded, relieved to be set free from the responsibility of deciding what to do with the artifact.
Matt, attention span exhausted, picked up a long stick broken free by the storm and began fencing with the ferns at the edge of the woods. Paul followed his parents in. They set the box on one corner of the kitchen table, dragged chairs over, sat down. Paul pulled over a third chair.
"Curious?" dad asked.
"Sure," Paul said, eyes on the box. It felt old on his eyes, even older than the Parsons who lived up on the hill, who hardly ever came out and when they did they got straight into their old Buick that dad said was a seventy-something and drove away into town to do who knows what. Probably church, that's what old people usually did. They were wrinkled, thin; they walked with canes like they were made out of glass. Paul had watched them from the corn, corn tilled by another neighbor, Paul forgot his name, the field rented out by the Parsons. "I wonder if they ever tilled their own field," Paul said to himself, out loud.
"Who?" mom said, one hand on the box top, fingernails finding the seam of top and box.
"The Parsons. Did they ever farm their own field, or have they always rented it out?"
"You think this is theirs, don't you?" mom said. "Well, if it is we'll put the top right back on and give it to them. And I don't know."
"I talked to them once, before we met," dad said. "At a funeral; I think I was just out of high school. They used to grow corn, alfalfa, beans, tomatoes, and peppers. Maybe more, but that's what I remember my mother saying. She told me they used to sell their vegetables in a roadside stand when she was a girl. I think one of her teachers was a Parson, now that we're talking about it."
"Gramma's teacher was a Parson? They had kids?" Paul asked, trying to imagine the Parsons like mom and dad, still not very old yet. It seemed impossible. "There's never any car there but that old Buick," he added.
"I don't know why nobody visits, maybe their kids moved away. Sure aren't a lot of kids going into farming these days. It's all going to the big corporations. They just hire people to work the land, barely anyone owns a family farm now," dad said.
"I'm opening it," mom said, impatient. She tugged the lid up with her fingernails. The cardboard squeaked faintly and then the top was off. Inside there were two ranks of envelopes, brown manila and aged like the box, standing up with stiff white dividers between them, one or two envelopes in each division. On the divider tabs were numbers. Years.
"They're all open before this year," mom said. Her hand hovered over the box, trembling.
Paul leaned forward, eyes sliding off the box itself and watching mom's hand, waiting for it to descend.
<
br /> "Go on," dad whispered.
She picked one of the opened envelopes out, widened the opening with one thumb and reached in. She pulled out a folded sheet of typewriter paper, faintly yellowed along the edges. She set the empty envelope down in front of herself and opened the folded paper. A newspaper clipping fluttered out, into her lap. She picked it up, looked. Her brows furrowed.
"It's blank," she said. She turned it around, showed it to Paul and dad. It was a yellowed slip of newsprint, slightly rough along the top edge as a newspaper often is. But there was nothing printed on it, not even shadows of faded ink. She replaced it in its envelope, put the envelope back in its division. "I don't get it."
"Maybe?" dad said, and reached into the box. His hands stopped over one divider, hesitated, skipped up a year. "I think this was it," he said.
"It's what?" Paul asked.
Dad pulled out the envelope, extracted the folded paper and held it flat while he opened it so the expected clipping would not fall. And there it was. This one wasn't blank. At the top of the short column was a portrait photo of a woman, perhaps in her thirties or forties, in a dark suit jacket, the blouse under it light with a conservatively high and straight neckline. A professional shot, perhaps for a yearbook.
"Elizabeth Parsons-Muller," dad read. His eyes skimmed down over the obituary, picking out bits and pieces. "Thirty-four. Traffic accident. Eleven years of service to the school district. Survived by her husband of one year, Richard Muller, and their infant daughter. That's the funeral I remember."
"Why's one blank and the other not?" mom asked.
Paul leaned forward and snatched out the first untorn envelope, this year's, slid his finger under the edge of the flap and ripped it open in one long push.
"Hey, I don't think?" dad said, reaching out to snatch the envelope. Paul slid off his chair, away, and pulled out the clipping. It was crisp, new, white. He held it a moment, eyes scanning, then he dropped it and the envelope to the floor and bolted through the front door.
"Where's he going?" mom said, running to the front window. Dad followed, looking over her shoulder. Paul was a lithe streak across the grass, heading toward the road at a dead run.
A long steel blast from a semi trailer truck horn bellowed out of the woods the rural route emerged from. In the middle of the road, little Matt stood up, a piece of the red wood railing dad thought was blown over from the Parsons' in his hand.
The semi emerged from the trees. Its brakes locked, howling; its tires laid thick smoking black stripes down on the blacktop.
Paul rocketed across the road. For a moment the boys were a silhouette in their parents' vision: a runner, lean, stretched out, his hand clutching a handful of the smaller boy's shirt; the smaller boy tilting sideways, as if taken by the wind, feet just leaving the earth; both etched against a background of chrome bars and headlights.
And then they were past, leaping, tumbling, disappearing down into the ditch on the other side of the road.
The semi truck's brakes unlocked. It slewed slightly, recovered, blatted out a cloud of black smoke as the driver downshifted, and accelerated away up the hill.
"God," mom said. The boys climbed up out of the ditch, soaked by the storm water there, alive. Paul held Matt's hand and they both looked one way, the other, and then back and forth twice more before they dared set foot on the road again to cross. "Oh, God," mom said again. She turned away from the window once the boys were back in the yard again, safe.
"Honey," dad said as she turned. He was back by the kitchen table, holding up the scrap of newsprint Paul had dropped on the floor. "It's blank."
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