Burial (14 page)

‘Joey!' snapped Wanda. ‘You have to come in!'

Already, her mother's painstakingly cultivated vegetable garden had become clogged up with dust. The lettuce leaves had been filled with dust and then buried, the tomatoes would be next, then the beans. Wanda knelt down beside the rows of scallions and tried to dredge out the sand with her hands. But it was no good at all. The faster she dug, the harder the wind seemed to blow, and the quicker the runnels of dust poured into the beds.

Joey ignored her for a while, tilting on his swing. He sang, at the top of his voice, ‘
It aint no cyclone, no, no way! Doo-dah! Doo-dah! It's Old Man Chopper come to stay! Oh, doo-dah-day
!' At last, however, he stopped singing, and allowed gravity to slow him down. He hopped off his swing, and came across the yard to watch her dig.

‘It's filling up faster than you're emptying it,' he remarked.

She glanced up. ‘You could
help
, couldn't you?'

‘If there's a cyclone coming, it don't matter. It'll all get blowed away any old how.'

But Wanda continued to bale out handfuls of dust; and hope that when her mother came back, she would see that she and Joey had done their best to keep things good; to keep things tidy.

The screen door slammed, making Wanda jump for a second time. But again, it was only the wind.

Lightning crackled on the western horizon, over towards Kim, in the heart of the Comanche National Grassland, and beyond, where the Sangre de Cristo mountains rose dark and secretive and haughty — twelve, thirteen, fourteen thousand feet above sea-level. But this lightning wasn't like the usual lightning. This lightning was fine and thousand-branched, almost
hairy
. This lightning advanced across the prairie likeblazing timbers, crackle-pop-crackle, or like the blazing organza petticoats of suicidal chorus-girls. This lightning was
fire
. This lightning was Armageddon coming today and not tomorrow.

Wanda snatched Joey's hand. ‘Come on, Joey! We have got to get into the cellar!'

‘But what about Mom?' Joey demanded, dragging and scuffing his heels.

‘Mom's okay, for God's sake. She probably took shelter in Springfield.'

She took hold of Joey's wrist and dragged him arguing
back towards the house. The wind was whooping and whistling now, and she heard another upstairs window break. A harness jangled, even though the horse was long gone.

‘I sure hope Mom doesn't think those windows are
our
fault!' said Joey.

Of course she won't, she'll know how windy it's bin.'

They struggled into the house. The screen door banged violently behind them. They went directly to the cellar door, but to Wanda's consternation it was locked, and the key was gone. She rattled the handle but that was no use. Joey kicked it and that was even less use. Where was the key? She tried the hall table but that was crammed with visiting cards and bills. She stood on tip-toe and ran her fingertips along the architrave. No key nowhere.

‘What're we going to do?' asked Joey. He seemed to be much less sceptical now. The house was creaking and stirring and giving unsettling little shifts and judders; and if that didn't mean cyclone coming then they didn't know what else it could be.

Through the window Wanda saw yards of fencing torn up and fly through the air. Then the chicken-coop went over, and there were feathers and chickens and flapping tarpaper.

‘What're we going to do?' Joey repeated, much more anxious. ‘S'posin' the cyclone sucks us up? Then what?'

‘How should I know?' said Wanda, with the irritability of real fear. ‘I was never sucked up by a cyclone before.'

All the same, she took hold of Joey's hand and the two of them stood in the middle of the living room, in bloody and darkened shadows, while the wind gradually rose to screaming-pitch, and the shingles started to rip off the roof. The windows were filled with crimson light; so dark and glutinous that it looked as if somebody had been horribly slaughtered in an upstairs room, and their blood was running down the windowpanes.

‘Wanda, what's happening?' asked Joey, his voice tiny and tight. ‘Everything's gone red.'

‘It's the dust, that's all,' Wanda reassured him. ‘Storms always have colours. Brown or grey or green or black. It depends on where they come from, what dust they whup up. We learned that in Weather.'

‘It's
red
,' whispered Joey, in awe. Even his eyes shone red, like the eyes of a Stephen King vampire. ‘I never saw a
red
storm before.'

They heard the long-case clock in the hallway beginning to strike twelve; but before it could finish striking the whole house lurched beneath their feet, and they heard the pendulum knocking and the chimes sound only once more, muffled and flat, before the clock fell sideways onto the floor. Pictures dropped from the walls; the curtain-rail collapsed. The big Zenith television-set slewed around on its axis and knocked against the red-brick chimney-breast.

‘I want Mommy,' said Joey, in a tight, breathy voice. ‘Wanda, I want Mommy.'

‘It's okay, Mommy's sheltering too. She'll be back when the storm's blown over.'

Wanda didn't know whether she believed that their mother was safe or not. She had seen electric storms and hurricanes and two or three rip-roaring twisters, but she had never seen anything like this before. It felt like the whole world was being pulled sideways — like standing on a rug that somebody was forcefully dragging away beneath her feet.

‘Look!' said Joey, squeezing her hand. ‘Mr MacHenry's pick-up!'

As if in a dream she saw Mr MacHenry's old blue Chevy pick-up sliding through their yard. There was nobody driving it, and it was sliding
sideways
, its tires digging deep furrows in the dirt. It was followed by a slowly tumbling junkpile of wheelbarrows and shovels and farming equipment, even a
rusty engine-block turning over and over. Wanda could hear the sound of it over the shrieking of the wind. Ajangly, bumping, knocking, dragged-along sound, like some strange ritual funeral-procession. It gave her a feeling of fear like nothing she had ever experienced before — a slow-burning chill that ran through every nerve-fibre in her body.

I was standing by my window
On a cold and cloudy day
When I saw those hearse wheels rolling
They was taking my mother away
…

What had made her think of that song? Why did that jangling, tumbling junk sound so much like a burial? She thought of ashes to ashes and dust to dust, and black sashes and black veils, and grim white faces gliding through the bloody half-darkness.

It was then that something collided with the corner of the house. Something huge and heavy, that splintered the verandah and cracked the frame around the kitchen door. They heard furniture falling all through the house. Upstairs, their mother's huge mahogany wardrobe slammed flat on its face. Windows broke, china smashed, rows of books softly thundered onto the floor. Both Wanda and Joey were knocked off balance, and toppled onto the rug. All around them, chairs and tables and china came sliding across the room, to heap themselves up against the wall.

‘Wanda!' screamed Joey, climbing to his feet, and balancing himself like a slack-wire walker. ‘The house is falling down! The house is falling down!'

Wanda managed to get herself up onto all fours, and then unsteadily stand upright.

‘We'd better get out!' she shouted at Joey. ‘Try and get to the door!'

They struggled towards the living room door. Wanda couldn't believe how difficult it was, Just to walk. The floor was perfectly level, but it felt as if it were tilting uphill at forty-five degrees. All of the furniture in the house wanted to slide towards the western wall. The living room door was already clogged with kitchen chairs and stools and pulled-open drawers from the kitchen hutch; and up above her head Wanda could hear the beds rumbling across the polished board floors.

Joey tried to clear the tangle of chairs in the doorway, but as soon as he pulled one chair aside, it slid back to where it had been before.

Wanda shouted, ‘We'll have to climb over! Quick!'

Awkwardly, they managed to scale the chairs and climb down the other side, into the hallway. The front door was open, and outside they could see the yard and the highway beyond. They should have been able to see Mr MacHenry's house, but that seemed to have vanished altogether.

By pulling themselves along the walls, they managed to reach the doorway. The force of the storm seemed to grow every second so that by the time they had reached the doorway, and were clinging onto the frame, they felt as if they were hanging by their fingertips from the top of a building. The floor stayed as level as ever, but Wanda knew that if she lost her grip on the doorframe, she would literally fall.

Peering through the doorway, their eyes narrowed against the wind and the flying grit, they could see why Mr MacHenry's house seemed to have disappeared. The whole building had been wrenched free from its brick foundations, and had slid right across their yard and collided with theirs. The two houses were now crushed together like a monstrous traffic-accident; with stove-in boarding and broken windows and collapsed rooftops.

And all around them they could feel their own house
shuddering against its supports; its whole frame tense, its mitres and dovetails strained to the limit; its nails being gradually dragged out like wisdom-teeth.

‘Wanda, we're not going to die, are we?' asked Joey. All the hysteria had gone out of his voice. His words sounded like clear water.

Wanda swallowed and clung on tight to the door frame, and didn't know what to say. This wasn't a storm at all. This was hell on earth.

The noise was enormous and overwhelming, but quite unlike any noise that the children had heard before. Apart from the funereal jangling and clanking, and the keening and whistling of the wind, there was a deep arythmic crashing. It was the sound of cars and trucks rolling over and over — not fast, as they would have rolled over in an accident, but
slowly
— roof, fender, trunk, wheels — jouncing on ruined suspension — as if they were being heaved over and over by a mob of protestors. Except that there were no protestors. There was nothing but the wind and the grit and the bloodily-swirling sky. These cars and trucks were rolling on their own.

The cars and trucks were accompanied by a tumbling, dancing tide of rubbish. Wanda saw a half-crushed telephone booth; and a bashed-up Coca-Cola machine, its cans brashly sliding around inside it; a jumble of newspaper-racks performing clattering handstands. She saw iceboxes and display counters and shelving and magazines and bright red packs of frozen food and shoes and sunglasses and broken bicycles and sacks of dog-food.

She began to see people, too. One dark-blue Ford wagon slid eerily past with its tires screaming an off-key Hallelujah chorus, its windows totally blanked out with blood. A few moments later, Mrs Hemming from the Hemming General Store appeared. She was sliding along the highway on her back, dead or nearly dead, her eyes open as if she were
staring up at the sky. Her auburn wig was clotted with blood and a big whitish bulge of brain-tissue, as if she had pinned a cauliflower to her hair. Her pink floral dress was torn to tatters, so that Wanda could see her blood-soaked corset and her bruised and bulging thigh.

Soon after, a tall thin man in Oshkosh dungarees slid past, face down. He looked as if he had been broken, like a marionette. Nobody could lie with their arms and legs angled like that, not unless their arms and legs were all dislocated, torn out of their sockets, shoulders and hips. Wanda thought she recognized him as one of Mrs Hardesty's farmhands from the Grasslands spread. He left a wide glistening trail of blood on the road surface; but the blood was soon covered over by newspapers and gum-wrappers and Kentucky Fried Chicken boxes.

Wanda glimpsed children amongst the rubbish — children who must have been dead. She saw broken baby-buggies and dead dogs. She saw Leroy Williams, the janitor from Pritchard Elementary School, lying on his side with his face like a bright red Hallowe'en mask.

Joey started to scream. Piercing, high, in utter panic.

‘Joey!' Wanda reached across the doorway and snatched at his wrist. ‘Joey, it's all right, just hold on!'

‘But it's Mommy! Look, it's Mommy!'

‘Mommy's in Springfield, I told you!'

‘She's not, she's not! It's Mommy!'

Wanda stared at Joey, wide-eyed. ‘
Look,
' he said. But she didn't want to look. All this wind and noise and blood and deafening chaos were enough for her to cope with.

She couldn't face the idea that she might have lost her mother, too.

‘It's not Mommy,' she whispered. ‘Mommy's in Springfield,'

But then that capillary-fine lightning crackled from the clouds; crackled like cellophane; crackled like blazing hair.

Its charge was so strong that Wanda could feel her blouse sticking to her skin. Her fingertips snapped with tiny sparks of static. The lightning crackled again, and rubbish whirled and shopping carts bucked and bounced and tumbled. Stray sheets of newspaper suddenly caught fire.

In the sudden darkness that followed the lightning, Wanda turned toward the highway. There — slowly borne along on a river of garbage and paper and broken vegetables — her mother lay, white-faced, dead, like Ophelia.

Her mother's hair was spread out all around her, blonde and fine. Her eyes were wide open, her fists possessively clenched around bunches of paper and plastic bags. What can you take, when you go? When you go to Heaven even the humblest of plastic bags is too much of an earthly self-indulgence.

Wanda watched her mother pass with a terrible feeling of loneliness and desperation. What was she going to do now? She would have to bring up Joey; she would have to fend for herself. How were they going to eat? How were they going to get to school? Who was going to buy their clothes? What about the rent? She couldn't bear it, couldn't believe it.