Ben Soule
The old man can smell it: a green smell, pungent, deep. It easily drowns out the reek of the stone house gardens next door. The smell creeps through the shade and blankets the marsh. It levels the surface of the let to an ominous still. For the past few days, he has watched his barometer kicking back and forth, rising a bit, then getting fidgety, the gauge pumps up and down, and then begins to drop in slow erratic plunges. He readies himself.
On a day in September 1892, from a farmer’s front porch in the middle of Kansas, he had watched a dust bowl tornado move across the flat-cake plains. It filled the sky with a funnel of black dust, sweeping haystacks and small privies up into its shaft. It was headed for the house, but five hundred yards away, it took an abrupt turn toward the barn, sucked up the plow and the henhouse, then continued on its way. The farmer roped his fastest horse from its stall and set out after it, his spurs digging into the flanks of the terrified horse, drawing blood to chase down that tornado demon thief. The plow was lost, but he found the henhouse, two miles west. The tornado had spit the thing from its spout, and it landed right side up next to a decimated barn. When the farmer opened the latched door, the hens glared at him calmly from their nests, eggs still underneath them, unbroken and warm.
Ben washes the dirty dishes in the sink, wipes them dry, and puts them away into the cupboard above the ice chest. He stuffs rags into the open spaces around them so they will not break up against one another. He tacks shingles across the cupboard doors to keep them shut. He nails boards over the outside windows and caulks the frames to seal the cracks from the rain. He places everything else that is loose—chairs, guns, broom, bottles of whiskey and gin—into the stove or on the bed. Then he removes the wings from their burlap sack and goes outside.
He will wait for the eye. The dead center. The vortex. The calm in the heart. The deep core. The abyss. The blackness. He will wait until it comes close, and then he will launch himself from the roof and fly toward it.
The wind moves out of the southeast just before noon. By one it has begun to shake through the weeping cherry trees set along the drive of the stone house. Small branches snapped loose whiz around him. One plucks the cap from his head. He sits in his chair on the knoll, oiling the feathers to keep them from taking on rain as the last birds hammer in off the sea—geese, duck, heron, osprey, gulls, even the land-hating storm petrels—they fly in rafts over East Beach through the warm gray mist: fugitive, harrowing tribes.