C. Morgan - All the Living

Look, he said and pointed as if she had not spotted it with her own eyes. They stood and gazed on it and even as they stood with their small faces upturned, the first pass of wind came and the heat was sluiced by a new cool.

What if it changes up and fairs off? Orren said, half turning toward her with his hands on his hips, but she only shrugged, because it was not a question, not really, just hope afraid to hope.

Come eat now, Aloma said, cowed slightly before the raging horizon and already retracing her steps into the kitchen, looking over her shoulder once or twice at the rising weather.

I can’t eat no food right now, Orren called after her, but by the time she was in the dining room and seated at the table, he had trailed reluctantly after her, stopping to look through each window as he passed.

Neither of them spoke while Aloma ate her own macaroni and salad, but true to his word, Orren could not eat, but only gripped his fork in his hand and passed his feet here and there under his chair like a restive horse, the heels of his boots pattered against the wood. Aloma closed her eyes as she chewed and tried her best to ignore him, but still she saw the blacker shadows of his movements against her eyelids. She opened her eyes again and watched him reluctantly, the way he tucked his head down to gaze up through the dining-room window to find the blackening sky beyond the compass of their small room. His mouth was moving just barely, she could not make out any words.

Suddenly thunder bucked across the width of the sky.

Holy shit, said Orren and stood up so fast that his chair scraped and upended with a clatter behind him. He left it where it toppled and stalked to the kitchen door and then back again as fast, grabbing Aloma by her elbow to pull her up from the table and then by the hand out the door into the unnatural dark of the encroaching storm. Hard, bulleting raindrops were just beginning to fall. No, she said, pulling back. With her hand still in his, he charged down past the willow, its long fronds streamed away from the white house. Aloma skipped and stumbled behind to keep up with Orren’s stride. She tried to pull back her hand half from irritation and half from pain, but he held her firm, and when thunder cracked again right over their heads, she yelped and was glad he was holding her hand tight enough to hurt. Down across the wetting grass and in between the rows of tobacco, the soil ashen beneath their feet, but pockmarked now by raindrops that grayed the farm as they fell.

She’s gonna break, Orren said and let go her small hand.

Orren, she said as he moved away, come back to the house before we get struck by lightning. He didn’t seem to have heard, but turned and turned, trying to see the whole of the farm at once, his face unbrooding itself as he watched, turning.

Then the first full sheet of rain fell and Aloma was caught by the sudden wind that whipped her hair and her blouse, which in another instant was saturated through with rainwater so that she felt the cold on her breasts and belly.

Orren stepped out farther into the field.

Thank you, he said upward as if in prayer and brought his fisted hands together and up to his forehead and closed his eyes. His face was light with relief. The rain washed his forehead and his hands, his lips parted. Aloma held a forearm up over her eyes to shield them from the driving rain, but did not smile and she discovered no thanks in her. She could only watch the unclosing of Orren’s face, which the sky had seduced from him as all around them the fulling rain beat an unsteady battering rhythm on the plants and the parched, loamy soil. Aloma retreated a few steps back toward the house with her eyes on Orren, and then with a sullenness that surprised her and that she did not foresee, she kicked out at a plant as she turned, cutting into the vibrant pith of the stalk near the soil. It did not fall, but the cut was deep. Its fluorescent green living inside was revealed. She cast a fearing glance over her shoulder, but Orren was still as she had left him, his hands before his face. Beyond him, the mountains were already enshrouded in the storm’s leaden clouds so that the ridge blended into the haze and the effect was one of borderless darkness.

When Orren finally came into the house — and when he did, he ran headlong into the wind and rain that cavalried down toward the foothills where it rose and then dissipated over the coal counties — he was soaked through his clothes. Aloma made him strip down out of his jeans and his button-up shirt in the kitchen and tried to help him, peeling off the wet fabric that leeched to his skin until he stood in nothing but his white underpants and his goose-bumped flesh. But even stripped naked he could not keep to one spot but passed from window to window gripping the white flaking sills and looking up and out at the whipping slate sky and he shook his head in wonderment. Shit, he said over and over as he watched and it was with gratitude and some sense of luck shared down the ridgeline.

The Friday of the first rains turned over to Saturday and the rains kept on. The sky swelled with flumes of black, the underbellies of great waves churning that rolled continually out of the northwest and broke against the farm. The thunder came so fast and hard, Aloma walked around the house with her head ducked and her hands at the ready by her ears. At its worst, it sounded like God ripping old-growth trees out of the earth by their roots and then whipping the earth with their length so that the crack of their breaking limbs reported across the land over and over, the reverberations shuddered from one horizon to the other. Once a rage of clouds passed over, the next came rolling in so there was no rest for their nerves, and no sun. Light straked the sky in candent broken lines for hours on end, sometimes so bright at night and so continuous that a person could read by it, which she did as a joke for Orren while they were lying in bed.

On Saturday late in the afternoon, while Orren sat at the dining table working figures and turning and searching the sky out the window every few minutes and Aloma stood on the front porch, barely protected against the slanting wind so that her hips were dry but her bare legs were slashed with rain, she saw a funnel cloud. One second all she could see was the rain slacking down by the road but still falling heavy at the house where she stood, and the next second the funnel appeared. By the time she reckoned what it was, she was too stunned to move. It was not large, it stretched from the low clouds to the grass that appeared unearthly green now in its saturation under the glaze of urine-yellow light that sickened the sky. It shimmied and snaked there, it seemed to advance and still Aloma could not move her feet and with an impassivity that would later startle her, she saw straight through the funnel to the trees on the other side and she knew suddenly, as though the thought had been gifted to her, that the wrecking blast of the funnel cloud was also God’s creation along with the dirt of the farm and her stricken face and all the rest of the living too. And that scared her properly and she moved back then in two giant steps, but as she reached for the door and Orren’s name was already forming in the stretch of her mouth, the cloud swung out to the side like the trunk of an elephant, and then spitting out the grass and branches it had drawn into it, it swirled wanly up into the clouds.

After that, she made Orren bring the television up from the small house — which he did, getting soaked to the skin again — so they could put it on the bedroom floor with the sound turned down just to watch the weather. If any more tornadoes came, they could flee with barely any warning around the side of the house to the root cellar. Long after Orren had fallen asleep against the soprano scream of the wind along the eaves of the house, she lay in the blue-lit dark watching the screen across his body. She wondered if all men could sleep this soundly under duress, fast to trust their own bodies and closing their eyes to everything else. But she did not know any other men, had not seen the way they slept, and she wondered as she looked at the screen how it would feel to have someone else sleep beside her, or be inside her even, and if that would speak to her happiness, which she felt lay unborn within her. She looked at Orren, the back of his head and his curved shoulder where he had drawn his right arm into his chest. Then she stifled the feeling by scooting up behind him, allowing her body to follow perfectly the line of his and then blocking out the blue flickering of the television and the living storm by pressing her head into his shoulder and the pillow. She lay there for a long time and tried not to think. Finally she fell into a wary sleep and in the morning the rains had stopped and she went to church.