Ellen Crosby: The Riesling Retribution

The warnings never provided for the foolhardy soul who wasn’t about to be whisked out of the path of destruction by a waiting car. The tornado danced closer, teetering and swaying like a drunkard. If I didn’t get out of here soon, I was doomed. I fought against the panic crawling through my mind and tried to focus on my options. How fast did tornados travel? How much time did I have?

The surrounding woods were no safer than the field. The vineyard, where wooden posts could be uprooted and trellis wire become as sharp as a razor, was a worse idea. Get to a low place, that’s what they always said.

On my way here I had driven across a stone bridge my great-great-great-grandfather built across Goose Creek shortly after the Civil War. Calling it a bridge was a stretch, since it was really more of a culvert. But it was nearer than the winery or my house, both at least two miles away. Another flash of lightning looked like it struck something in the woods. My skin tingled as I heard the crack of timber splitting.

I grabbed my cane from the Gator and began moving toward the bridge. Four years ago an automobile accident left me with a crippled left foot and a devastating pronouncement from my doctor that I would spend the rest of my life in a wheelchair. I changed doctors until I found one who saw things differently. It took surgery and months of therapy and swimming until I finally managed to get around with the help of a walker. Later I graduated to a cane, which I still need for balance and support. But I can no longer run—and I never will—other than managing an awkward lope like I’m half of a shackled team in a three-legged race.

The wind shifted and I glanced over my shoulder. The darkening wall of clouds obliterated the sky and it sounded as though a jet or an out-of-control freight train was bearing down on me. I dragged my bad foot like a reluctant child. The dirt road dissolved into a muddy, rutted stream and my right work boot made a sucking sound with each step.

How much longer until I reached the bridge? What would happen if the tornado overtook me before I got there? Would it pick me up, like Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz, and spin me around, depositing me safely somewhere else? At least Dorothy had been inside a house. What really happened to people who got caught in a tornado’s vortex? Were they hurled through the air like human javelins? Or was the drop in barometric pressure so intense it literally tore them apart?

The outline of the bridge, blurred and softer looking in the downpour, loomed ahead. I slid down the embankment, grabbing a branch to keep from landing on my rear or tumbling into the creek. Underneath the air smelled of cobwebs and decomposing vegetation. I threw my cane into the darkness, coughing and swallowing what tasted like dirt, as I felt around for a dry spot that wasn’t some animal’s lair. The rising creek rushed past me in a torrent, but the noise could not drown out the apocalyptic sound of what was happening outside.

The bridge was too low and shallow to stand. Instead I knelt as though I were praying and dug my fingernails into the crumbling mortar between the old stones. The rain changed to hail, dancing like hot grease in a frying pan as it crackled on the ground and hissed on the water. Wind buffeted the bridge, sending debris hurtling at me with such force it seemed to penetrate my skin.

Only one other time in my life did I wonder with the same desperation if these were my last minutes on earth. For months after my crippling accident, I woke from sweat-drenched dreams where I’d relived the slow-motion moment I knew the car driven by a now ex-boyfriend would not make the turn and instead slam with a killing force into the stone wall at the entrance to the vineyard. Now the storm slammed into me with that same violence, inhabiting my body and crowding my mind like a demon that would need exorcising.

The bridge shuddered as the tornado passed by—how close I couldn’t tell—but so much debris and dirt rained down that I was sure it would collapse and bury me alive. Gradually the throbbing diminished and the roaring grew dimmer. My arc-shaped view of the world changed from black to gray. Then the rain stopped as suddenly as someone shutting off a faucet.

I found my cane and crawled back outside. My muddy clothes stuck to me like skin and my hair felt like seaweed when I pushed it off my face. To the west the sky was still death colored, but to the east the tornado seemed to have sucked the storm clouds with it, leaving behind blue skies and improbable sunshine.

The hail had transformed the summer landscape to a winter scene that dazzled and glittered. In the distance, the yellow-and-green Gator—exactly where I’d left it—was a bright blotch of color against a frozen carpet.

The tornado’s wide swath stretched from the edge of B.J.’s battlefield through the woods. I squinted at the low-slung Catoctin Mountains to my south, and the Blue Ridge, which filled the skyline to the west, and made some calculations. The twister had traveled from southwest to northeast. On that trajectory it probably sliced right through the vines in the south vineyard, which meant it might have destroyed more than half of our grapes. I closed my eyes and contemplated the loss of a few million dollars’ worth of vines and thousands of cases of wine. But my life had been spared, and if the tornado missed my home and the winery—and God was merciful—then everyone who worked here had survived as well.

I retrieved my phone. Still no service. Unless someone came looking for me, I had a two-mile hike back to the vineyard. Before I left, though, I wanted to see up close the gash the tornado had cut through the field.

At the edge of the trench a dome-shaped object gleamed in the late afternoon sunlight. I knelt and brushed away dirt to get a better look at it. The first thing I saw were empty eye sockets staring into space. There was a perfect triangular orifice where the nose had been. The mandible with its lower row of teeth was missing, but the maxilla and top teeth were intact. Distant thunder rumbled like a drumroll near the vineyard.

It was a hell of a way to announce that the tornado had unearthed a human skull.

Those dead eyes seemed to bore through me, and the mouth, or what remained of it, looked like it might have been formed as a scream. Or did I imagine it? I stumbled back from the trench as though whoever it was might rise out of the ground like a Halloween apparition and say “boo!”

What was a human skull doing out here, in the middle of nowhere? Everyone in my family—at least as far as I knew—was buried in our cemetery. Who was this?

We had seen our share of Civil War conflicts since this region had been the territory of the Gray Ghost—the nickname for Colonel John Singleton Mosby, legendary commander of the Confederacy’s most famous guerrilla brigade. Known for daring expeditions and midnight raids on Union supplies and horses, Mosby and his Rangers tormented the enemy with their ability to escape into the countryside and elude capture, hiding behind the miles of stacked stone walls that checkerboarded fields and lined roadsides, or taking shelter in barns and outbuildings offered by the locals. One of those buildings was a tenant house on our land, which Union soldiers burned during their search for Mosby. Maybe these remains belonged to a Union soldier who’d been part of that expedition? A Confederate in these parts would have been given a proper burial.

But the grave was shallow, an unmarked site in a deserted field. No casket, not even a shroud. Besides, the skull hadn’t decomposed enough to have been here for more than a century and a half. Whoever this was had been left in an obscure spot on purpose. A grave like this said nobody had given up a prayer as they shoveled dirt over the body.