Storm Damage

The day after the storm, Daddy took his cane and went out to look at the damage.

“You’d better go after him, Caroline. He’s got that look in his eyes,” Deb warned.

I’d seen it, too, and I was already pulling on my boots. Left to his own devices, he was apt to decide he felt spry enough to handle a chainsaw, and heaven knows none of us had any interest in dealing with the medical aftermath of that little experiment. It’d been bad enough nursing him through the wrenched back he’d got from shoveling a path to the barn last winter.

“I’m on it,” I called back through the screen door.

Sure enough, Daddy was making a beeline for George’s truck and the spare chainsaw. A slow, arthritic beeline, anyway. He’s deaf enough now that it’s easy to swoop up and get ahold of him before he knows you’re coming. So I came up on his non-cane side and looped my arm through his, friendly-like, and steered him gently toward the line of trees on the hill instead.

“Did you see what happened to Anthea’s pear tree?” I said loudly.

“I planted that tree the day she was born,” Daddy said, allowing himself to be steered. It was slow going. I could just about hear his knees creaking.

“I know, Daddy,” I said.

“Planted one for each of you kids,” he went on. “All pear trees. Figured I’d get a little sweetness back for my trouble.”

He’d been telling that joke longer than I’d been alive. I laughed a little anyway, on cue, like an actor who’s been in the same play so long he doesn’t even have to listen to the lines. Daddy wasn’t paying attention, either. He was leaning hard on his cane and staring even harder at the broken line of trees.

Anthea’s tree was in real bad shape. It looked like a bomb had gone off right on top of it. The trunk was split and twisted; there were shards of bark and broken branches everywhere. A lost cause, George had told me. There was no saving it.

“Where is Anthea?” Daddy asked suddenly, peering around as though he expected her to pop out from behind the wrecked tree.

“Well,” I said, stalling, wondering how much to tell him.

Again, he wasn’t listening to me. “Shoulda brought the saw up with me,” he muttered.

That settled it. Clearly I’d have to tell the whole story to keep him distracted.

“She’s in the hospital,” I blurted out. “It’s kind of a funny story, actually…”

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. . . . . . . . .

Despite having moved into town the second she turned 18 and claiming to be allergic to farm life, Anthea’s constantly coming up with excuses to come out here and check up on us. I chalk it up to pure nosiness, but Deb says she’s probably lonely, and Deb’s usually right about people.

Anyway, all that’s just to explain why I wasn’t surprised when Anthea came pedaling up the farm road that afternoon, almost before the storm had even blown itself out. She bikes everywhere; she pretends it’s for the environment, but we all know it’s because she failed the driving test three times in high school and lost the nerve to try it again.

“Knock, knock!” she cooed, sashaying into the dim farmhouse kitchen.

“Anthea,” Deb said, probably aiming for a welcoming tone but hitting somewhere between resignation and dismay.

“I had to come out. I had this terrible feeling that the barn roof had blown off and there was a tree on top of the house,” Anthea said.

Deb calmly dumped a bag of gas-station ice into the big cooler George used on his hunting trips. There was a dark smear on the outside-- deer blood, I wondered, or engine grease?

“It wasn’t as bad as that,” she said. “The main problem is the darn generator. Kids, come get these Popsicles before they turn into soup!”

George Jr. was out somewhere with George, working on storm cleanup. But the younger four ran in like a half-tame herd of deer, grabbing melting Popsicles and vanishing again. Only the oldest girl, Ginny, stayed. She hopped up onto the kitchen counter and sat there, eating an orange Popsicle and watching the three of us with those calculating doe eyes of hers.

“Where’s Daddy?” Anthea asked. “He always could get that thing running.”

“The last thing I need is to have him out there tinkering,” Deb said sharply. “He’s napping. Don’t bother him.”

You could see that Anthea didn’t like that tone. She held her tongue, but she looked sour about it.

“I’m putting together some stuff for Aunt Pat,” Deb went on. “Her power’s out, too.”

“I’m not surprised. You should see the roads,” Anthea said.

Deb nodded. “On the radio they’re saying it was the storm of the decade.”

“Decade’s not over yet,” I pointed out.

“Don’t you go wishing bad luck on us,” Deb said, teasing me.

“Daddy said we were lucky this time,” Ginny said. “None of the trees that fell hit anything important.”

“Which trees fell?” Anthea said, instantly suspicious. She can sense important information the way a shark senses blood in the water.

Deb pushed her wispy bangs off her sweaty forehead with the back of one wrist. “Some of the hickories near the barn, George said. And one of the pear trees.”

Well, there it was. She’d dropped the bomb, and now we’d have to live with the fallout. I watched Anthea’s eyes widen.

“I knew it!” she cried. “I knew I’d been drawn out here for a reason! Oh, my god, it’s a sign! Whose tree was it?”

“A sign of what?” Deb asked, bewildered. I felt bad for her. A hysterical Anthea zaps all the energy and common sense right out of any room.

Anthea ignored her. “Whose tree, Caroline?” she demanded.

“Yours,” I admitted.

“Mine!” Anthea clasped her hands in calculated anguish at her bosom. She seemed, for a moment, to be considering the dramatic effect of an old-fashioned swoon. But there was no soft place to land in the kitchen, so she wisely dropped that idea and settled for staggering slightly, bracing herself against the back of a chair, and crying out “I knew it! I knew something was wrong! I can only imagine what this means!”

“It means we’ll have a little more firewood this winter and a little less fruit next summer,” I said.

“Don’t be so, so, prosaic,” Anthea said witheringly. “Don’t you see? It’s symbolic. It’s an omen. Ugh, I can’t even talk to you right now! I have to see for myself!” And out she flounced, letting the screen door bang shut behind her.

There was a moment of silence in her wake. Then Deb closed the cooler with a no-nonsense bang, and I blinked, and the world seemed to give itself a little shake and go on with business as usual.

“She doesn’t actually think the tree dying means she’s gonna die, does she?” Ginny asked, licking her Popsicle stick in a thoughtful way.

I shrugged. “She’ll believe whatever gets her the most attention.”

“Auntie Anthea is just a tad superstitious,” Deb said, giving me a look that said I wasn’t being helpful. I shrugged again. I figured the kid was old enough to take a look through the cracks in the veneer of politeness. And sure enough, there was a new gleam in Ginny’s eyes, the dawning of the realization that sometimes grown-ups can be stupid, or vain, or attention-seeking. Human, in fact. It’s a good realization.

Ginny bit down on her Popsicle stick. “What if she does die?” she asked.

“She won’t die,” Deb said.

“Either she’ll die and get a funeral, which she’ll doubtless enjoy immensely from whatever spectral plane she ends up haunting,” I said, “or she’ll go on living with this supposed pear tree curse hanging over her head, which she will also enjoy.”

The kid thought this was the funniest thing she’d ever heard.

Deb sighed deeply. “The real lesson here is not to be disrespectful, like Aunt Caroline, or over-dramatic, like Aunt Anthea. Got it?”

Still giggling, Ginny nodded.

“Great. Now get out of my kitchen.”

Anthea fussed and fretted about that tree all day. She never lifted a finger to help-- just stood around yammering about signs and fate while George and George Jr. cut up the hickory trees and the rest of us hauled firewood to the pile, cleared away loose branches, and swept the porch clean of debris. Finally Deb ordered her to take a supply of food and candles over to Aunt Pat’s, just so we could get a break from her constant self-important prophecies of doom and disaster.

It was blissfully quiet with Anthea gone. Daddy was reading a farming magazine in his room, George was swearing at the generator, and the kids were playing peacefully in the yard.

“Should I feel bad? That’s a long way to go on a bike,” Deb said, sinking into her chair on the front porch.

“She’s used to it,” I said.

“Aunt Pat’s gonna be mad when Aunt Anthea shows up instead of you,” Ginny said.

“Aunt Pat’s always mad,” Deb said. “The two of them deserve each other.”

We were quiet for a few minutes.

“When’s the power going to come back on? I want to watch TV,” Ginny grumbled.

“I’m sure they’re working on it,” Deb said, rocking placidly.

And that was when Lon Jones pulled up in his police cruiser. He walked up to the porch, propped one thick-soled boot on the bottom step, and looked at us, making that compassionate-but-professional face they must teach them to make at the police academy. It’s funny seeing that face on the body of a guy who was best known in elementary school for the number of decorative erasers he’d eaten.

“Ma’am,” he said, using his police voice. “I’m sorry to have to tell you this, but there’s been an accident.”

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

So Deb and I left Ginny in charge of the kids and drove right over to the hospital, I concluded.

“She’s not dead,” Daddy said, looking at me, waiting for the punchline.

“No,” I said. “It’s worse than that. She’s smug.”

“I told you!” she’d said, the instant Deb’s foot crossed her hospital room’s threshold. “I knew something was going to happen!”

“Oh, dear lord,” Deb had muttered. For a second I’d thought she’d reverse right on out of that room and go home, and I didn’t blame her. The look of triumph on Anthea’s face was purely intolerable. But she’d rallied, gone over to the bed, and said all the polite things, with me behind her trying to look sympathetic and wondering if I could ask Lon for some pointers.

Daddy was waiting for an explanation.

“She’s got a broken arm and a few bruises,” I said. “What happened was that Aunt Pat got impatient waiting around and decided to come get her stuff herself. She was just backing out of her driveway when Anthea came along on her bike, probably still thinking about her pear tree instead of looking where she was going--”

“And Pat’s Buick said howdy to Anthea’s bicycle,” Daddy guessed. “But what’s she so all-fired smug about? She’s too old to get caught woolgathering.”

“She’s pleased because her prediction came true. I dunno, though. I’d expect a lot more from an honest-to-god omen than one lousy broken arm, wouldn’t you?”

But Daddy’s watery blue eyes were fixed on the trees again, and he said nothing.

“It’s an interesting story, anyway,” I said.

“Sure is,” he said slowly. “There’s just one thing wrong with it.”

“What’s that?”

“That wasn’t Anthea’s tree. That was your tree.” Daddy laughed, turned, and began creaking his way back down the hill. “Guess you’d better stay away from Aunt Pat for a spell,” he said, still chuckling. “Thanks for the laugh, Carrie. Guess I’ll go give George a hand now.”