The Virgin of Small Plains

Chapter Twenty-three

The name, “Cotton Creek Ranch,” was still above the front gate, the ranch house was still down in a hollow at the end of the dirt road, and the keys to it were where they had always been, but when Mitch walked in he discovered that the house looked like nothing his mother would have allowed. There were beer cans everywhere-most empty, some partly full. The furniture that his mother had been so insistent on keeping clean was in disarray, with dining room chairs in the living room, a couple of them overturned, and the sofa and armchair cushions scattered on the floors.

What with the stale beer and being closed up, the place stank like a tavern.

He walked into the back of the small house and found the two bedrooms in much the same condition: sheets and blankets tossed about on the beds, stains on the carpets, rings on the tops of the furniture.

He didn’t even want to see the bathrooms.

Mitch suspected for a moment that his father had sold the place, lock, stock, and love seats, following his mother’s death, and he nearly walked back out again to put the keys back where he’d found them. But then he saw some family photographs, even one of him as a small boy, and an old file cabinet containing ancient legal documents. His father would never have let strangers get their hands on the photos or papers.

Mitch opened all the windows and propped open the front and back doors.

Had kids broken in and used it as a party house?

If that was true, they had known where to find the keys, because no door locks or windows showed signs of a break-in.

He located a roll of plastic trash bags and started picking up beer cans.

It didn’t take him long to discover there were many more things he had forgotten about living in the country than he remembered. Well water, for one thing. He’d forgotten that his parents’ small ranch house wasn’t on a city water line, and so his first glass of water surprised him with its mineral flavor.

He used many gallons of it to mop, wash, scrub.

It made him feel better to work hard, sweat, get results.

After two hours of nonstop cleaning that left nine full trash bags propped outside against the house, he closed the windows and doors again, turned on the air conditioner, put one last load of towels in the washing machine, and then-feeling suddenly starved-went through all the cupboards to see if there was any food. The refrigerator was empty except for one lone beer can and a container of rotten salsa. On the cupboard shelves he found cans of gourmet stuff: little cans of sardines that might be a decade old, mustards in brands that local grocery stores would never sell, cocktail onions, and several different versions of liver pǎté.

There had been cocktail parties here, he recalled, with the Old Friends.

The Shellenbergers, the Newquists, the Reynoldses.

While the six adults had drunk themselves silly, with a lot of laughter and card playing, he, Rex, Abby, and Patrick had chased one another around in the grass. The memory of that made him think again of the grown-up Abby and Patrick he had seen that morning, which made his stomach clench and drove him restlessly outside again.

Mitch stepped onto the front porch and then into the middle of the front yard, where he stopped and turned in every direction, looking around. That’s when he saw another thing he couldn’t believe he had ever forgotten-the drama of an approaching thunderstorm.

“Wow,” he breathed, unable to keep from saying it out loud.

He was facing southwest, looking straight into the leading edge of the blackest, biggest, baddest storm he had seen since he left his hometown. My God, he thought, did I ever take these for granted? Did I used to think this was no big deal? The line of black was huge, rolling for miles horizontally, and also up, up, up until he had to bend his neck back to see the top of it. He’d seen dramatic clouds in the city sky, but nothing had the overwhelming drama of this panorama in which he could view the whole front edge, and watch it marching toward him.

It was close, he realized with an inner start.

The wind was kicking up in front of it.

He could see the lightning now, hear the rumble of the thunder.

It was spectacular. He didn’t know how he had lived without seeing this for so many years. He felt as if it was made of sheer energy-which, he supposed, it was-and that all of it was starting to infuse him with something that felt exciting. Ions of excitement. He glanced to the south and saw that part of the countryside had gone stark black, hiding everything that stood there. Then there was a ferocious crack of thunder followed by a lightning bolt that flew from sky to ground, lighting up the southern scene with false daylight. In that incredible instant, he saw cattle standing in the pastures. Then, just as quickly, they were gone, disappeared into the blackness of the storm again.

Once, but only once, he had seen a tornado when he was a boy.

He and Rex would have chased it if they’d been old enough to drive.

Ever after that, they had eagerly scanned the bottoms of every storm cloud, hoping for that characteristic roiling action, that spooky special color that looked like car oil, praying for the storm to work itself up into the full boiling fury of a funnel. They’d never lucked out. Friends of theirs claimed to have seen plenty of twisters, but Rex and Mitch had never witnessed another one.

Mitch almost didn’t believe it when he saw one start to form to the southwest of him.

A bit of black cloud dipped down, went back up, dipped farther down.

He saw the unmistakable shape of it.

Jesus! he thought, and wondered what to do. Call 911? Call the weather bureau? Get himself the hell out of the middle of the yard and down into the storm cellar at the back of the house?

He knew he wasn’t going to do that.

He remembered the storm cellar more vividly than he wanted to. His mother had been a bit claustrophobic. She’d made his father get it dug bigger than average. She had insisted on cement-lined walls, instead of just dirt, and a ceiling high enough to make it feel like a room, instead of a grave. She had even put in plumbing for a toilet and sink, and electricity. It had seemed silly, until you had to race into it when storms like this one roared across the prairie.

All of the kids he knew had hated storm cellars; there was something so creepy about the lightbulb-lit underground refuges with their old splintery wooden doors. Everybody had always been afraid of getting imprisoned in one of them. And now, even as an adult, everything in him rebelled at the idea of closing himself into such a dank, dark, anonymous space where it might be that nobody would ever come to look for him. Which they never would, since nobody even knew he was there.

While he stood there, awed, indecisive, the cloud with the funnel moved away from him, and around to the southeast. When he saw he was out of its path, he kept staring at it. It was amazing to see it veer off suddenly yet again, this time to the northeast, in a straight, fast, and deadly path.

It dawned on him that its path led straight toward Abby’s place.

With his mind screaming at him not to be a fool, his body ran to his car, hopped in, started up the engine, and tore off toward the way the storm was heading.

The deputy didn’t mean to leave anybody locked inside the cemetery before the storm hit. The girl with the wheelchair in her van didn’t intend to get left behind. On this, her second visit of the day, she had stayed in her car without trying to reach the grave. When the deputy drove through the graveyard, stopping every time he saw people and pointing to the clouds and ordering everybody out, they all had to drive in single-file down and around, winding through the cemetery in order to get to the gate again. When Catie Washington got near the point in the road where there was a large equipment shed, she began to feel nauseated. She knew she had only a few seconds before she’d be too sick to drive. And so she jerked her van out of line, drove up a short gravel byway toward the shed, and scooted back around it, not wanting anybody to see her getting sick.

She was behind the shed, helpless and miserable, for a long time.

When she finally felt well enough to steer the van again, her hands were trembling, her body was soaked with perspiration, her mouth was sour with vomit, but she felt the gratitude that came when the worst was over.

It was starting to rain very hard now.

Catie turned her windshield wipers on, and then her headlights.

It grew darker by the instant, it seemed, but not so dark that she couldn’t detect the oily green-black roiling of the bottom edge of the clouds directly above her. The deputy had rousted them because of tornado warnings, and now she saw the accuracy of them. There wasn’t a funnel, not yet, but she looked up into the clouds, and knew the signs of what might come. Disoriented by her sickness and the worsening weather, she got back out to the one-lane road and made the mistake of turning left instead of right.

That way took her back to the top of the hill where the Virgin lay.

The air had gone a greenish-yellow; even in the darkness, she could detect the change in color, the coming vacuum, the impending stillness in the center. Under the darkest part of the storm, there was enough light to be able to watch the cloud formations. They curled, they stabbed the air beneath them, they began to rotate, and then she saw the tornado a few hundred yards away.

She put her van in park at the top of the hill.

Without thinking, hardly knowing what she was doing, and even less why she was doing it, the girl flung open her door against the rain. It was hailing now, small, hard, rough balls that pelted her weakened body, and would have hurt if she had been capable of feeling anything at that moment except the overwhelming desire to run to the top of the hill to meet the storm. She stumbled, and fell to her hands and knees on the dirt road that was turning to mud. With the rain and hail pelting her back, and the wind pushing at her like abusive hands, she crawled toward the Virgin’s grave.

When she reached it, she turned over and lay spread-eagle, her face to the clouds.

All around her, the branches of the trees danced and the trees themselves leaned one way and then the other. There was a howling all around her, and then there was a roaring like a train coming closer to her. She felt like a damsel tied to the tracks, but that’s how she had felt for months in the path of the cancer that was killing her. This was no different: No one could rescue her.

No strong, handsome man would come along to pick her up this time.

This was her third go-round with chemotherapy for her brain tumors. Each of the first two times, she had “known” she would lick it. When the third diagnosis came in, she lost the will to fight. She would endure one more round of chemo, she told her doctors, but that would be it. In the other two rounds, she had fought to control the nausea, using acupuncture and medicine, using whatever worked, and for a while, it had seemed to work.

It wasn’t working anymore, nothing was working anymore.

She was in pain a lot of the time, and so very ill.

Now, from under the black, black oily layer of clouds, she watched the funnel form high in the air, watched it dip down once, watched it rise back up again, always moving in her direction.

When it traveled directly over her, it was one hundred feet wide at the tip.

She gazed up directly into the mouth of it, where she could see the revolution of the air and things-objects-whirling around inside of it. The roar was deafening and terrifying. She felt her whole body being picked up as if she were levitating, and then being laid back down. And then some of the things inside of the funnel began to fall on her. She closed her eyes, expecting to be killed by them. But they fell lightly atop her and all around her.

When she opened her eyes, she discovered she was covered with flowers.

The three teenage boys following the twister parked across the road from the cemetery. One of them hopped out of their pickup truck and ran around to the front of it while his friends stayed inside where it was dry.

“Are you crazy?” was the last thing he heard them say before he slammed the door.

As the twister roared safely above him, Jeff Newquist realized he could get the video of a lifetime: actual footage up inside a tornado. Although he was getting pelted by rain and hail, pushed and pulled by wind, he took an educated guess that he’d live through it. The ’nado was just high enough not to kill him, just low enough to reveal its black heart to him.

People always claimed a tornado sounded like a freight train.

He felt as if he were chasing it down the tracks.

Jeff propped himself against the grille of his friend’s truck and started filming. First, he panned the sky for context, then he focused on the eye of the storm and hit “zoom.” Feeling an illusion of safety behind the lens, he began to follow the twister-across the highway, over to the opposite shoulder. He stopped beside the fence, propping himself against it to steady himself, still filming as the tornado moved on.

While he was looking in the viewfinder he couldn’t tell what the hell he was seeing; it was all black and wet to him. There was a moment, though, when an odd bright greenish light filled the sky, illuminating the scene as if a director had shone spotlights on it. Even so, it was only when he hopped back in his truck, and took a look at what he had filmed, that he and his friends saw that his zoom had caught a shower of stuff falling from the funnel. Excited to find out what it was-litter from somebody’s house? fence posts? arms and legs? dogs and cats?-he hopped out of the truck again, and then climbed over the cemetery fence toward where his camera had been pointed.

What he found there, at the top of the hill, scared the hell out of him.

At first, he thought it was a body dropped out of the center of the storm.

Then he thought maybe it was a corpse tossed out of a new grave, because if it wasn’t, then what in God’s name were all those flowers doing on top of her, and all around her?

He raised his camera and started shooting again.

When the “body” moved, he yelped in fright, but never put the camera down.

Jeff watched the “corpse” rise to her feet, shedding petals as she got up.

When he realized she was definitely alive, he ran toward her, yelling, “What happened?”

Smiling in a dazed way, the young woman looked at him, and then pointed up.

Toward the sky.

It finally registered with him that she was bald. And very thin. She would have looked mortally ill except for the expression of wonder and bliss on her face.

“Where’d you come from?” Jeff called to her.

“Wichita,” she called back, and laughed.

“What’s your name?”

“Catie!” She threw her arms wide in a gesture of pure joy. “My name is Catie Washington and I’m alive!”

She walked away from him, moving like a zombie in a trance, albeit an ecstatic zombie. Jeff filmed her getting into her van and then driving away.

When he raced back to the truck to show his friends, they watched with amazement at video proof of a “miracle”: flowers falling from a deadly storm, a young woman rising from a grave, and walking away with a look of bliss on her gaunt face.

“You going to sell this to the local news?” one of his pals asked him.

“Local news, hell,” Jeff Newquist scoffed. He could already feel the cash in his hands. “What do those big tabloids pay?”