The Year of Chasing Dreams (27 page)

When they got to the house, Alice Faye was in the kitchen dressed in her bathrobe, and the smell of freshly made coffee saturated the air. “Tell me,” she said, worry creasing her face when Ciana and Jon came inside. Jon headed for the wall phone.

“Before we do, Cecil Donaldson is on his way up,” Ciana said. “In case you want to change.”

She arched an eyebrow, stood firm. “That old man’s seen plenty of us old farm women in our bathrobes in the mornings.”

The words and their implication startled Ciana. Cecil? Good grief! Had Alice Faye been one of those farm women? Ciana didn’t dare ask.

“Tell me what happened,” her mother demanded, just as Cecil knocked on the back door.

Alice Faye let him in, got him a clean mug, and gestured to the pot while Ciana told her what she knew. Her expression turned grim as she listened. After Jon hung up and announced that the sheriff was on his way, Alice Faye ordered everyone to sit at the table, and started fixing breakfast. Ciana was certain she couldn’t eat a bite, but her mother wouldn’t hear of it, and sent her to the hen coop, guarded by Soldier, to gather fresh eggs. In no time the smells of country ham, fried eggs, and baking biscuits, turned the morning into another normal day.

The Southern way
, Ciana thought.
In times of great stress, feed people
. In truth, once the platters of food were set on the table, and because of her restless, sleepless night and harrowing morning, her appetite returned with a vengeance. By the time the sheriff arrived, she felt fortified and ready to deal with what had happened.

“We’ll catch those sons of bitches,” Jon said in her ear as they went out to meet with the sheriff and his deputy.

Ciana nodded, but questions gnawed at her. Who was behind the terrorism? And what would happen when the truth came out? Was it really neighbor against neighbor, as Jon had once suggested? Or was it sinister men for hire, intent on driving her to her knees and taking by force what she would not sell?

The next day, Ciana and Jon started building a roadway to the stables. Jon laid out the route, marked it with stakes and orange twine, turning it south to skirt the stand of trees. A longer distance, but he said it would be easier than cutting through the tree line. Ciana had hooked up the chisel plow to the tractor in order to cut through the hard ground and carve out a bed for the road. The road would be crude, made of packed sand and crushed rocks, but easier to drive on than the current rutted path.

Two days later, Jon drove his truck heaped with supplies for the day’s work and Ciana rode Caramel to the newly formed roadbed. The horse needed the exercise but seemed nervous, difficult to handle. “Calm down, girl.” Ciana tried to soothe her. “You’ll be with your friends in a little bit.” The other five horses had been turned into the pastures near the barn to graze, and Ciana suspected Caramel wanted to be with them. Ciana tied the horse to the outside rail of the corral’s fence.

Jon parked beside the water trough. They still needed a well to be dug and a waterline to be laid so the animals could drink after a workout. Another chore, Ciana reminded herself. It had to be done because toting water back to the trough
in the truck was heavy, hard work. Ciana brushed aside what had to be done in favor of what they were here to do.

She and Jon began to unload the truck. The day was cool, and held the threat of a thunderstorm. Jon glanced at the sky.

Ciana asked, “Think we’ll get rained out?”

“Probably. Weatherman said a front was coming through.”

Farmers lived by the weather forecasters’ predictions, but she’d been in a hurry that morning and hadn’t listened to any reports. “We can still get something done before it hits,” she told him, hating to let a little rain stop their workday. Still, Jon kept searching the sky, watching the fast-moving banks of low-hanging gray clouds. Finally she asked, “What’s bothering you?”

“My horse. She’s acting strange, and when I turned out the others, they were acting squirrely too.”

Jon read horses like Ciana could read a book. She glanced at Caramel, saw the way the buckskin was sidestepping and how the whites of her eyes showed. “She looks scared,” Ciana said.

Jon jogged over to calm his horse. Caramel neighed, a deeply distressed sound. Ciana felt goose bumps crawl up her back. Horses had a sixth sense. “What do you think is wrong?” she called to Jon.

He leaned into the horse, trying to calm her with his familiar voice.

Seconds later Ciana felt the air grow still, heavy, clammy, and thick, and watched the gray sky churn and morph into the color of aged copper. The wind picked up. Caramel jerked, broke Jon’s hold. She reared, pawed the air, with a look of absolute terror. The leather reins went taut, then broke.

Impossible!
The power of the horse’s muscle to snap a
leather strap left Ciana stunned. She watched the frightened animal gallop away. The wind’s fury whipped Ciana’s hair into stinging strands that felt like whip marks on her cheeks.

Jon whirled, yelled something Ciana couldn’t hear above the roar of the wind. From the corner of her eye, she saw a funnel-shaped cloud in the sky skimming the ground, heard what sounded like a freight train bearing down on metal tracks.

Jon leaped across the distance separating him from Ciana. He hit her sideways, tumbling her into the nearly empty water trough. She landed hard, breathless, scrunched in a ball, shouting, “Jon!” and clawing at him to pile atop her. The awful screeching wind was deafening and her voice was swallowed. Daylight vanished. The world turned dark. What felt like a hundred bee stings pelted her exposed skin. Again she screamed out for Jon.

Just as suddenly as it had come, the roar of the wind abated, and an eerie silence fell. Ciana fought for breath, struggled to process what had happened. As her head cleared, she realized that she lay in a few inches of steadily rising water. She shivered. She was alone with a cold rain falling. Jon Mercer had vanished.

Jon!
If she didn’t move, Ciana knew she could drown in the rapidly rising water filling the trough. But her muscles had cramped and frozen in place. She couldn’t straighten her legs. “Move,” she whispered. Then louder, “Move!” Her muscles balked, but slowly, through sheer force of will, her body began to obey. First her legs, then her arms unclenched and stretched out. Her teeth chattered as her body began to shake as she sat up.

She blinked, looked around. Destruction lay in every direction. The truck was battered, filled with rubbish. Yards from the truck, the new stables still stood, but a large tree branch had partially crushed the roof. In the other direction she saw fields littered with chunks of wood, leaves, paper—stuff she couldn’t even identify. But no matter which direction she looked, she couldn’t see Jon.

Fear for him wiped out the remaining dullness in her brain. Panic gave her strength to boost herself up and slide over the side of the trough. Her legs were too weak to support her. She
hung on the edge of the water trough, waited for waves of nausea to pass. She had to find Jon.

She tested her legs. She was wobbly, but her legs worked. She examined her hands, arms. Cuts and scrapes, but no gushing blood. Ciana pushed back her tangle of wet hair, her eyes darting in every direction. No sign of Jon. She limped forward, calling his name. The farther from the truck and stables she went, the more scared she became. He’d been right beside her when he’d pushed her into the trough.

She kept moving slowly and methodically, forcing herself to not run willy-nilly screaming and yelling for him.
Control
. She had to stay in control of her fragile will, so close to shattering. The world looked surreal, like some willful child had pitched a temper tantrum and kicked a well-ordered play space into shambles. To add to the insult of wreckage, the rain had stopped and sunlight spilled generously from blue sky through pockets of gray clouds, so that the damage stood out in sharp relief.

In the distance she heard the sound of a siren. Tornado warning. Had it been going all along, and was just now registering? She didn’t know. She resumed her search. Thirst burned her throat. Her head ached and her vision blurred. Her knees gave way and she fell into a standing puddle. Mud splattered. She pushed herself onto her hands and knees, fought the urge to vomit, then to cry. Neither would help. She held up her head, took deep breaths, but seeing the area from a different vantage point allowed her to recognize a man-shaped lump about twenty yards to her left. Jon!

Relieved, she staggered upright, but when she got to him, she saw that while his right leg lay straight, his left was twisted, obviously badly broken. He was bleeding from a deep cut on his forehead. And he wasn’t moving. Her relief gave
way to fear, then terror.
What if … what if?
Her heart beat like a trip hammer.

She warned herself away from the dark precipice of such a thought, dropped to her knees beside him. She bent, said his name into his ear. No movement. She wanted to touch him, was afraid to touch him. Screwing up her courage, Ciana pressed two fingers to the side of his neck, searching for the sign that would herald life. Her breath caught. She felt a flutter and sagged. His pulse was weak, but it was there.

She crouched, kissed his cheek, his lips. No response. “Jon, I’m here, honey. I’m here.” She realized he was unconscious, and if he woke, he’d be in terrible pain. He needed medical help, and he needed it quickly.

Her cell phone! For the first time since the storm struck, she remembered it. She dove into her pocket, jerked it out, punched in 911, and heard only the frantic noise of a busy signal. She punched in the emergency number three more times, finally heard a repeating automated message, “All circuits are busy. Please try your call later.” The scope of what had happened slammed her. What had happened was not a storm. They’d been struck by a tornado. Surely many others needed help too. She’d have to go get help and bring it to Jon. But that meant leaving him. How
could
she leave him unconscious and broken and hurt out here in an open field? She needed to stay with him, wrap herself around him, keep calling the emergency number. She couldn’t leave him! What if he woke up, tried to move? Tried to find her?

For a moment she was immobilized, torn between what she wanted to do and what she must do. Her mother had gone grocery shopping in town. She wasn’t even on the property. No one knew they were out there. No one was even looking for them. Getting help was up to her. She thought of the
house. It wasn’t very far. She could go to the house, find blankets. She’d get water and anything else she needed to make Jon comfortable. Maybe the house phone, the old landline, was working, and she could get through.

Urgency shot through her. And hope. She took a second, smoothed Jon’s forehead, and although she knew he couldn’t hear her, she was compelled to say, “I have to go for help. I’ll be back soon as I can. Please hold on, darling. I love you, Jon. Hold on!”

Ciana rose, turned, and started walking as swiftly as possible through the torn earth and over debris. In seconds the exertion turned each breath into panting gasps. Her lungs were on fire, and she felt a hitch in her side. She ignored her pain, kept moving, forced air inside her mouth and nose in great gulps. It seemed like an eternity, but eventually she arrived at the garden so lovingly planted weeks before by her mother and Eden. Most of the orderly rows lay shredded by the wind, and yet other areas stood unscathed. On the far side the poles for beans to climb were arrow straight, a testament to the wind’s capriciousness.

She had stared at the ground until now, being careful not to trip. At the edge of the garden, she glanced up toward her home, then stopped and stood stock-still, not believing what her eyes were broadcasting to her shell-shocked brain.

There was no house.