Part 37

It's only three days since I wrote those last lines. But it seems a long time back to last Thursday. So many, many things have happened since then.

Friday morning broke very hot, and without a breath of wind. By noon it was stifling. By mid-afternoon I felt strangely tired, and even more strangely depressed. I even attempted to shake myself together, arguing that my condition was purely mental, for I had remembered that it was unmistakably Friday, a day of ill-omen to the superstitious.

I was surprised, between four and five, to see Whinstane Sandy come in from his work and busy himself about the stables. When I asked him the reason for this premature withdrawal he pointed toward a low and meek-looking bank of clouds just above the southwest sky-line and announced that we were going to have a "blow," as he called it.

I was inclined to doubt this, for the sun was still shining, there was no trace of a breeze, and the sky straight over my head was a pellucid pale azure. But, when I came to notice it, there was an unusual, small stir among my chickens, the cattle were restless, and one would occasionally hold its nose high in the air and then indulge in a lowing sound. Even Bobs moved peevishly from place to place, plainly disturbed by more than the flies and the heat. I had a feeling, myself, of not being able to get enough air into my lungs, a depressed and disturbed feeling which was nothing more than the barometer of my body trying to tell me that the glass was falling, and falling forebodingly.

By this time I could see Whinnie's cloud-bank rising higher above the horizon and becoming more ragged as it mushroomed into anvil-shaped turrets. Then a sigh or two of hot air, hotter even than the air about us, disturbed the quietness and made the level floor of my yellowing wheat undulate a little, like a breast that has taken a quiet breath or two. Then faint and far-off came a sound like the leisurely firing of big guns, becoming quicker and louder as the ragged arch of the storm crept over the sun and marched down on us with strange twistings and writhings and up-boilings of its tawny mane.

"Ye'd best be makin' things ready!" Whinnie called out to me. But even before I had my windows down little eddies of dust were circling about the shack. Then came a long and sucking sigh of wind, followed by a hot calm too horrible to be endured, a hot calm from the stifling center of which your spirit cried out for whatever was destined to happen to happen at once. The next moment brought its answer to that foolish prayer, a whining and whistling of wind that shook our little shell of a house on its foundations, a lurid flash or two, and then the tumult of the storm itself.

The room where I stood with my children grew suddenly and uncannily dark. I could hear Struthers calling thinly from the kitchen door to Whinnie, who apparently was making a belated effort to get my chicken-run gate open and my fowls under cover. I could hear a scattering drive of big rain-drops on the roof, solemn and soft, like the fall of plump frogs. But by the time Whinnie was in through the kitchen door this had changed. It had changed into a passionate and pulsing beat of rain, whipped and lashed by the wind that shook the timbers about us. The air, however, was cooler by this time, and it was easier to breathe. So I found it hard to understand why Whinnie, as he stood in the half-light by one of the windows, should wear such a look of protest on his morose old face which was the color of a pigskin saddle just under the stirrup-flap.

Even when I heard one solitary thump on the roof over my head, as distinct as the thump of a hammer, I failed to understand what was worrying my hired man. Then, after a momentary pause in the rain, the thumps were repeated. They were repeated in a rattle which became a clatter and soon grew into one continuous stream of sound, like a thousand machine-guns all going off at once.

I realized then what it meant, what it was. It was hail. And it meant that we were being "hailed out."

We were being cannonaded with shrapnel from the skies. We were being deluged with blocks of ice almost the size of duck-eggs. So thunderous was the noise that I had no remembrance when the window-panes on the west side of the house were broken. It wasn't, in fact, until I beheld the wind and water blowing in through the broken sashes that I awakened to what had happened. But I did nothing to stop the flood. I merely sat there with my two babes in my arms and my Dinkie pressed in close between my knees, in a foolishly crouching and uncomfortable position, as though I wanted to shield their tender little bodies with my own. I remember seeing Struthers run gabbing and screaming about the room and then try to bury herself under her mattress, like the silly old she-ostrich she was, with her number sevens sticking out from under the bedding. I remember seeing Whinnie picking up one of the white things that had rolled in through the broken window. It was oblong, and about as big as a pullet's egg, but more irregular in shape. It was clear on the outside but milky at the center, making me think of a half-cooked globe of tapioca. But it was a stone of solid ice. And thousands and thousands of stones like that, millions of them, were descending on my wheat, were thrashing down my half-ripened oats, were flailing the world and beating the life and beauty out of my crops.

The storm ended almost as abruptly as it had begun. The hammers of Thor that were trying to pound my lonely little prairie-house to pieces were withdrawn, the tumult stopped, and the light grew stronger. Whinstane Sandy even roused himself and moved toward the door, which he opened with the hand of a sleep-walker, and stood staring out. I could see reflected in that seamed old face the desolation which for a minute or two I didn't have the heart to look upon. I knew, even before I got slowly up and followed him toward the door, that our crop was gone, that we had lost everything.

I stood in the doorway, staring out at what, only that morning, had been a world golden with promise, rich and bountiful and beautiful to the eye and blessed in the sight of God. And now, at one stroke, it was all wiped out. As far as the eye could see I beheld only flattened and shredded ruin. Every acre of my crop was gone. My year's work had been for nothing, my blind planning, my petty scheming and contriving, my foolish little hopes and dreams, all, all were there, beaten down into the mud.

Yet, oddly enough, it did not stir in me any quick and angry passion of protest. It merely left me mute and stunned, staring at it with the eyes of the ox, with a dull wonder in my heart and a duller sense of deprivation away off at the back of my brain. I scarcely noticed when little Dinkie toddled out and possessed himself of a number of the larger hailstones, which he promptly proceeded to suck. When a smaller one melted in the warmth of his hand, he stared down at the emptiness between his little brown fingers, wondering where his pretty pebble had vanished to, just as I wondered where my crop had gone.

But it's gone. There's no doubt of that. The hail went from southwest to northeast, in a streak about three miles wide, like a conquering army, licking up everything as it went. Whinnie says that it's the will of God. Struthers, resurrected from her mattress, proclaims that it's Fate punishing us for our sins. My head tells me that it's barometric laws, operating along their own ineluctable lines. But that doesn't salve the sore.

For the rest of the afternoon we stood about like Italian peasants after an earthquake, possessed of a sort of collective mutism, doing nothing, saying nothing, thinking nothing. Even my seven dead pullets, which had been battered to death by the hail, were left to lie where they had fallen. I noticed a canvas carrier for a binder which Whinnie had been mending. It was riddled like a sieve. If this worried me, it worried me only vaguely. It wasn't until I remembered that there would be no wheat for that binder to cut and no sheaves for that carrier to bear, that the extent of what had befallen Alabama Ranch once more came fully home to me. It takes time to digest such things, just as it takes time to reorganize your world. The McKails, for the second time, have been cleaned to the bones. We ought to be getting used to it, for it's the second time we've gone bust in a year!

It wasn't until yesterday morning that any kind of perspective came back to us. I went to bed the night before wondering about Dinky-Dunk and hoping against hope that he'd come galloping over to make sure his family were still in the land of the living. But he didn't come. And before noon I learned that Casa Grande had not been touched by the hail. That at least was a relief, for it meant that Duncan was safe and sound.

In a way, yesterday, there was nothing to do, and yet there was a great deal to do. It reminded me of the righting up after a funeral. But I refused to think of anything beyond the immediate tasks in hand. I just did what had to be done, and went to bed again dog-tired. But I had nightmare, and woke up in the middle of the night crying for all I was worth. I seemed alone in an empty world, a world without meaning or mercy, and there in the blackness of the night when the tides of life run lowest, I lay with my hand pressed against my heart, with the feeling that there was nothing whatever left in existence to make it worth while. Then Pee-Wee stirred and whimpered, and when I lifted him into my bed and held him against my breast, the nearness of his body brought warmth and consolation to mine, and I remembered that I was still a mother....

It was this morning (Sunday) that Dinky-Dunk appeared at Alabama Ranch. I had looked for him and longed for him, in secret, and my heart should have leapt up with gladness at the sight of him. But it didn't. It couldn't. It was like asking a millstone to pirouette.

In the first place, everything seemed wrong. I had a cold in the head from the sudden drop in the temperature, and I was arrayed in that drab old gingham wrapper which Dinkie had cut holes in with Struthers' scissors, for I hadn't cared much that morning when I dressed whether I looked like a totem-pole or a Stoney squaw. And the dregs of what I'd been through during the last two days were still sour in the bottom of my heart. I was a Job in petticoats, a mutineer against man and God, a nihilist and an I. W. W. all in one. And Dinky-Dunk appeared in Lady Alicia's car, in her car, carefully togged out in his Sunday best, with that strangely alien aspect which citified clothes can give to the rural toiler when he emerges from the costume of his kind.

But it wasn't merely that he came arrayed in this outer shell of affluence and prosperity. It was more that there was a sense of triumph in his heart which he couldn't possibly conceal. And I wasn't slow to realize what it meant. I was a down-and-outer now, and at his mercy. He could have his way with me, without any promise of protest. And whatever he might have done, or might yet do, it was ordained that I in my meekness should bow to the yoke. All that I must remember was that he stood my lord and master. I had made my foolish little struggle to be mistress of my own destiny, and now that I had failed, and failed utterly, I must bend to whatever might be given to me.

"It's hard luck, Chaddie," he said, with a pretense at being sympathetic. But there was no real sorrow in his eye as he stood there surveying my devastated ranch.

"Nix on that King Cophetua stuff!" I curtly and vulgarly proclaimed.

"Just what do you mean?" he asked, studying my face.

"Kindly can the condescension stuff!" I repeated, taking a wayward satisfaction out of shocking him with the paraded vulgarity of my phrasing.

"That doesn't sound like you," he said, naturally surprised, I suppose, that I didn't melt into his arms.

"Why not?" I inquired, noticing that he no longer cared to meet my eye.

"It sounds hard," he said.

"Well, some man has said that a hard soil makes a hard race," I retorted, with a glance about at my ruined wheatlands. "Did you have a pleasant time in Chicago?"