1
1968 Thomas Engelhart pulled up under the lean-to next to his barn and
switched off the ignition of his old Case tractor, his whole body still
vibrating from driving through the cornfields for ten hours. Like most jobs needing to be done on the
farm, it was long and boring and second nature to him, to be accomplished without
much thought, usually regardless of the weather. Although the sun was beginning to retreat into the lower quadrant
of the sky, it was still 90 degrees and as humid as it could get and not rain. Cumulonimbus clouds reached far up into the
sky to the west, with their fibrous anvil tops spreading out into each other
covering hundreds of miles.
The orange colors of a
typical Midwest sunset were beginning to form on their mash potato sides, and
the slightest tint of purple was reflecting off of the underside of their cirrus
crowns. What would be a cover photo for
Sunset magazine only brought apprehension to Thomas as he wiped the sweat,
salt and dust from his brow, doing little more than making a dark brown smear
across his forehead.
Thunderstorms. Life giving, life
taking, unpredictable thunderstorms.
Would his land be the recipient of badly needed rain, or just receive a
sprinkling supplied from the ferocious winds that accompanied the outskirts of
each cloud cell? Worse yet, would he be
the one to have his fields beaten flat by the two minutes of half-inch
hailstones that sometimes fell from these dissipating meteorological
monsters? Only the next few hours would
tell, he thought to himself, it was a craps-shoot at best.
He jumped down from the old
gray tractor his father had once owned and started his inspection of the rest
of the farm on his way back to the white two-story house that was his castle,
and his prison. A trip through the barn
and a glance at the cows showed him the milking had been done. In back of that he checked the water troughs
for the penned in animals, and a quick look in the hen house proved that most
of the eggs had been gathered. The
vegetable garden showed signs of being hoed, or at least one had been dragged
down the middle of the rows he suspected, and the bull was still where he was
supposed to be. It wasn't that Thomas
had any doubts that the rest of the family members knew what their chores were,
but he just never knew when one of the children might conveniently forget to do
something. Like the time the cows
hadn't gotten milked and their udders had nearly burst. Or the time the bull had gotten loose,
trampled half of the garden, and gored two steers and the flatbed Dodge before
Thomas and a neighbor had tricked him back into the proper pasture. Things could go to hell in a hand basket
mighty quick sometimes, his wife's untimely death had taught him that, God
bless her soul.
As he walked towards the
front porch his dogs ran out to meet him, and the cats, those goddamned cats,
scattered to places unknown. His
daughter adored them, and the hundreds of kittens that seemed to come with
them every year, so he tolerated their existence. The truth was he would just as soon throw them all into a
weighted burlap bag and dump them into the Platte River. He didn't like their sneaky, independent,
unpredictable, uncontrollable ways, and there wasn't any price being paid for a
pound of cat meat. As far as he was
concerned they were worthless parasites, and rodent catchers on a farm were as
worthless as tits on a boar, since the mice bred even faster than the cats.
He reached down to pat each
of the dogs as they rubbed up against the legs of his Big Mac overhauls. Dogs were obedient, trainable, and
loyal. You could always count on your
dogs. They respected the hand that fed
them, unlike cats and children, who were always testing the ties that
bind. He conceded the fact that life
was proceeding as it was meant to. It
was just so damned hard without the maternal half around to keep the reins
tight on the domestic front while he tried to squeeze a living out of this
potential dust bowl known as Nebraska.
As he walked up the steps to
the front door, he instantly felt that something was wrong. Missing were the aromas of dinner waiting to
be promptly served upon his arrival.
How could there be any smells of pot roast simmering in onions and
carrots when the front door was still closed?
Hell, it's ninety degrees outside and the goddamned door's closed, and
the front windows too for that matter.
Something's wrong, and by God he was going to set it right, he thought,
as he grabbed the door handle expecting to throw it open and march inside.
His sweaty hands just spun
around the worn brass door knob as his body crashed into the unopened
door. Locked. A locked door on a farm?
His adrenaline kicked in as he banged on the door, the window
threatening to blow out the old cracked putty that held it in place. Somebody's gonna catch hell for this, he
raged to himself. He'd worked hard all
day, and he expected his dinner on time, on the table, and least of all, not to
be locked out of his own damned house.
"I don't know what's
going on in there, but open up this door before there's the devil to pay!"
he yelled at the top of his lungs.
He figured that one of the
children would have immediately opened the door, but his request was met only
with silence. He stomped down the
stairs and around the west side of the house, building up a head of steam that
could have pulled a freight train up a grain silo, getting more pissed off as
he passed each side window that was also shut.
Anger began to give way to fear as he stopped long enough to peer
through the dining room window.
Although the window was
closed, and the air was still as it so often is just before an electrical
storm, the thin summer curtains were blowing almost horizontal inside the
house. The pages of the telephone book
were flipping over as if being shuffled by an invisible casino dealer, and part
of yesterday's newspaper was being sucked up the stairs to the second story as
if trapped in a giant vacuum cleaner hose.
Over the sound of his own blood coursing through his ears from his
building rage, he could hear windows actually shaking in their frames.
For the first time in years
he broke into a dead run, turning around the corner of the house as if he were
executing a down and out pass pattern from his high school football days. While his brain had somewhat remembered the
drill, his legs and feet had not, and he fell on one knee and crashed into the
entry way to the potato cellar. He
cursed aloud and got back up on his feet, not noticing the tear in his pants
leg or the crimson stain starting to form around it. He half ran, half fell, the remaining ten feet to the back door,
grabbing the handle as much to keep from falling on his face as to open it.
The screen door was latched
from the inside by a hook, which gave way with a snap as he nearly ripped the
entire thing off the hinges. The inner
door was locked also, which by now he found as no surprise. He stood back a step and kicked it as hard
as possible, for a split second feeling like some actor in one of the numerous
cop shows the kids sometimes watched at night.
He grimaced in pain, as the solid wood door barely gave at all. “So much for being the Hollywood
hero,” though he wasn't really surprised. The back of the house was part of the original structure that had
been built in the late 1800's, when things were supposed to outlive their
owners. Without a second thought, he
punched his hand through one of the windowpanes. He stared in disbelief at the shards of glass that flew across
the kitchen level to the floor, and around the corner out of sight, never once
giving into gravity and actually touching the ground. The sound inside the house was deafening.
He closed his eyes and shook
his head once, trying to clear what must obviously be some kind of mirage. Maybe he was having one of those 'strokes'
Doc McNally had warned him about, and he would wake up and this would all be
gone, or he would be dead and St. Peter or the Devil himself would be
sentencing him to hoe a thousand acres of corn by hand until Hell froze
over. When he opened his eyes again,
the Waring blender his kitchen had become was still churning. He reached his hand through the window and
down past the inside handle where the skeleton key should have been and cut his
armpit open on the glass.
He winced in pain and swore
again. The key was gone. He yelled out the names of the children, but
his voice just seemed to get sucked up into the vortex along with everything
else that wasn't bolted down. He heard
a crash as the old glazed cookie jar his mother had made by hand rocked off the
counter by the stove and exploded into pieces, which began to get sucked
across the floor and around the corner, along with the gingersnaps inside. They flew just above the jar pieces like
little brown, out of control, Frisbees similar to the ones the kids had trained
the dogs to catch.
Jesus H. Christ! He had to do
something to get in the house, right now
damn it! He began punching out the rest
of the glass, using his forearm to bust out the wooden slats that held the
windowpanes. There was an old chair sitting
nearby that was used by whom ever had the potato peeling or pea shucking duty
that week, which he drug over in front of the door and stepped upon to climb
through the hole where the windows had been.
As he tried to push himself through, some of the glass slashed through
his bib overalls, nicking the skin on his chest and stomach, temporarily
leaving him caught on the edge, teetering like a beached whale on a
sandbar. He kicked again with his feet,
tipping the chair over backwards, but it gave him enough momentum to fall
through to the other side. He landed on
his hands and knees, seeing blood on the floor in front of him. His panic level went up another notch, as
his pulse rate approached the speed of sound.
It took him a second to realize it was his own blood, which was little
comfort considering an unexplainable tornado seemed to be ravaging the inside
of his home, and nowhere else.
He scrambled to his feet
again, only to be sucked through the kitchen past the counter where the cookie jar
had been, and slamming up against the solid cherry dining room table set. An ornately carved chair back caught him in
the ribs and sent sharp pains through his chest, totally taking his breath
away. He raised his head and looked
toward the stairway to the right, which led up to the upstairs bedrooms. He tried to yell again, but his names of his
children only came out as raspy whispers, while the searing pain that came from
the effort convinced him that his ribs were more than bruised.
A large, heavily framed picture was torn from the wall at the same moment, and skipped off the back off his head on it's way up the stairs, slamming his face into the hardwood table top. His vision began to darken, but he could still hear the tremendous roaring of wind and he felt his knees go weak. He could feel himself start to slip from the table, with the chair top counting each row of his ribs with a stab of pain as he slid towards the floor. He felt his hands starting to slide past the edges of the tabletop, and he grabbed hold for dear life, trying to will his legs back into commission at the same time. Somehow his worn out Sears and Roebuck boots found a footing on the smooth oak floor, and his knees locked extended in a last stand of defiance.
He raised his head, dazed
from the impact, and could suddenly taste the coppery salt flavor of his own
blood, which was running profusely from his nose down onto his lips. As he waited for some form of his breath to
return, and his legs to respond again, he saw the first flash of lightning from
the corner of his eyes. The inside of
the house began to darken as the thunderstorm approached nearer, blocking out
all remaining rays of the setting sun.
He shook his head one more time, trying to clear the stars and cobwebs,
spraying blood and saliva across the starched white table linen as blood
trailed from his nose toward the stairway, carried on the wind.
When he finally gathered
enough strength to stand again, he to began to be sucked towards the stairs,
and he tried to slow his progress rather than to hurry it. Even though he was still grasping the
tabletop, his sweaty hands were slowly losing their grip, until eventually all
he was really holding was the table linen.
Suddenly, as if in a bad dream and he was a magician who was trying to
do the old pull out the tablecloth and
leave the place settings trick, the whole top of the table was wiped
cleaned as he was pulled towards the stairwell. He crashed into the wall, with the silverware, plates and
candleholders right behind him, most of it glancing of his back and flying upstairs, although one dinner fork
managed to stick him in the right calf.
He yelled in pain as his cracked ribs yanked the chain on every nerve
ending in his chest, but he held onto the handrail with all his remaining
strength, not even noticing the fork bouncing back and forth in his lower leg.
His hair, pasty as it was
from sweat, dirt and blood, wrapped around his head and pointed upward as if
directing the way to go. A calendar
slapped him on the back of the head, forcing him into a crouch, thinking that
maybe next time it would be a lamp or a kitchen appliance. All he had to do now to advance was release
his grip on the handrail and allow his feet to break traction with the
floor. When the toe of his foot slammed
into the next stair, he raised the other foot just high enough to clear the
next step, and it too immediately shot forward. He repeated this process over and over until he was far enough up
the stairwell to see onto the second floor.
All of the doors were closed except the one to Edward's bedroom. There was debris everywhere, just swirling
up against the closed doors and banging into walls, eventually ending up being
inhaled into Edward's room. From his
present angle, Thomas couldn't see inside the room, but from the slope of the
pile protruding out of the door, he knew that over half of Edward's room was
buried.
The noise was even louder at
the top of the stairs, he hadn't heard anything like it since the first time he
had heard a jet take off at the air show in Omaha. The vacuum was so intense that he had to take the last few stairs
on his hands and knees, holding on to the railing with one hand and bracing
against the opposite wall with the other.
It was then that he heard a loud cracking sound above his head, and he
looked up expecting to see a bolt of lightning bursting through the roof. What he saw instead was the access panel to
the attic blowing apart, and the pieces of boards and small splinters were
immediately attracted to the top of the pile in Edward's room, as if caught up
in some kind of magnetic force field.
Then, one by one, heavily filled cardboard boxes began falling out of
the ceiling and onto the floor, one hitting Thomas across the side of his face
as he ducked too late, and everything went black.
2
Later that evening, the line
of thunderstorms produced by a cold front rolling across the plains from
Colorado into Nebraska and Kansas, built up until their tops finally punched
into the stratosphere. Once the hot
moist air mixed with the jet stream and combined with the unique mixture of
high and low pressure, tornadoes began to spawn in near record proportions. One of them, a particularly nasty storm
cell, had shown up with three hook echoes on the weather radar at Offut Air
Force Base in Omaha. Each one of these echoes was actually a tornado, which
tore through several counties before turning into water spouts over the
Missouri River and dissipating in Iowa.
Left in their paths was the hit and miss ruin that only a tornado and
one-inch hail can produce. Among the
casualties were seven people, dozens of homes, hundreds of automobiles and
livestock, and most of the Engelhart farm.