They emerged blinking from the potting shed. Broken branches lay strewn about everywhere. A rose arbor had blown clear over. The blue tarp had lodged in the crotch of the great white oak tree outside the north end of the ballroom. The house was still there, apparently intact, its roof in place. But as they made their way past the fern garden and the nuttery, Maggie could see that the intense storm had carved a path of devastation across the northwest corner of the property. At least three ancient maples along Kettle Hill Road had been savaged, uprooted, and toppled. The henhouse lay literally flattened and several birds stood dazed outside it like trailer park people in TV news footage of someplace like Arkansas. A beloved Magnolia grandiflora, the herald of spring at Kettle Hill Farm, tilted at a strange angle from partial uprooting, and many of its enormous shiny leaves had been stripped off. Her lovingly cultivated collection of rosemary topiaries on the terrace above the swimming pool was strewn about the flagstones, their terra-cotta pots smashed, and the pool itself looked like minestrone, there was so much vegetative flotsam in it. Maggie resumed weeping.
“Could have been a lot worse,” Walter observed.
“I suppose …”
They continued up through the vegetable beds. The rest of the crew was up there, standing around dazed like the chickens.
“You guys all right?” Walter hailed them.
“It was a twister, a goddamn twister!” cried Chad, an earnest towhead of nineteen with aspirations to become a wildlife ecologist someday. “Just like in the movies!”
“I actually prayed for the first time in my life,” said Ben, the youngest son of a boat-building family from Mystic, who was going to law school, nights, at UConn.
The hail had torn perfect bullet holes through the large rhubarb leaves. The first lettuce crop, nearly ready for the table, lay pummeled and shredded in its black earth bed. The sugar snap peas were ripped from their hemp supports. A marble sundial she’d found in Newport had toppled on the bluestone footpath and cracked into several pieces. Maggie gave up trying to compose a mental inventory of all the damage.
“I need a drink,” she said.
“I understand,” Walter said awkwardly.
“Don’t take that the wrong way.”
“No, I could use one myself.”
“Okay then, let’s go to the house. I’ve seen enough.”