Tales From the Burning Prairie

The loose board creaked as she stepped out onto the porch. Have to get Cletus to fix that, she reminded herself for the umpteenth time. She touched the back of one hand to her forehead and pulled the cheap cotton of her dress away from her chest with the other. So hot already and not even noon, she was pleased the housework was done. Of course, it was a lot easier with her new daughter-in-law to help. Odell had picked such a fine girl; Mary was pretty and delicate-looking, but she was a farm-girl and bred to hard work.

Cletus, Odell and the hired man were cutting and baling hay, she couldn’t see them but every so often their voices would drift in on the hot August breeze. They would come in for lunch soon and probably eat on the wide, shaded porch. It was too hot in that house even with the windows open and all the box fans running. It wouldn’t be that hot in the house Odell and Mary were building on the parcel of land she and Cletus gave them for a wedding present. They were putting in central heat and air, no window units or floor furnaces for them.

“Ruthie,” said Mary, in her deceptively dainty voice, “I brought you some tea.” Iced, of course. They sat down on the flowered cushions she made not just to keep legs from frying on the hot metal chairs, but also to hide the rusty patches Cletus hadn’t fixed yet. Mary didn’t sit for long, that child never did. This time she jumped up to go hang a load of wash on the line to dry.

Mary pinned the sheets and towels to the line and dreamed about the many, many loads of wash she would hang on the clothesline behind her very own house. Not that she didn’t like Cletus and Ruthie, she did, but she just wanted to set up her own home. She couldn’t wait to hang the curtains she was making and to put the dishes just where she wanted them. They would get a lot of the work done this winter and maybe by this time next year she would be in her own house, perhaps with a baby on the way.

Ruthie was looking forward, too. Not that she didn’t like having Odell and Mary in her home, she did, but she was looking forward to having fewer people underfoot. And the thought of spending some of the hottest afternoons in air conditioning surely did have its appeal, so much the better with grandbabies to hold. It would be easy since their parcel of land, and the new house taking shape on it, was directly across the gravel road that ran in front their house.

“There, those should dry real quick in this heat, then I can hang Odell’s shirts,” the younger woman said, sitting down again. But for now, for a moment, there was nothing else to do. Nothing to wash or scrub, no meals to get, no men to fuss over, no buttons to sew back on, no gardening to do, no dogs to feed. Nothing to do but sit a spell. It was such a rare occurrence in a country wife’s day that they took full advantage.

Sitting on the porch, looking at the house-in-progress or at some point off in the distance, they didn’t notice him at first. The young man walking eastwards on the road spotted them and waved. Ruthie waved back but Mary didn’t; she was still too newly married to be comfortable waving at strange men. He took her wave as the welcome it was and picked his way across the cattle grate. The women took his measure as he walked the long driveway.

Kind people would call him slender, but he was plain scrawny. He wasn’t as tall as Mary first supposed, it was his skinny build that made him seem taller. To Ruthie, he looked the way cows did when they were malnourished and hopped up from her chair and ran to get him Cletus’ lunch. In her mind, Mary compared the young man to Odell and found him wanting. After a life spent cattle farming, Odell was strong and self-assured; he knew who he was and his place in the world. Their guest was little more than bones-his clothes hung awkwardly on his body and his face, well with some weight he might be handsome. But his skin, Mary thought, looked like it was pulled too tight over his high cheekbones and squared jaw, it looks like it hurts. All she said aloud was, “Hi.”

Ruthie returned with a sandwich and tea. “It’s not fancy, but it’s good. I can make Cletus one later.”

He thanked her and ate his sandwich, occasionally closing his eyes and smiling, but not speaking until it was gone. He thanked them for the meal, the first he’d had in two days, and stood to walk on. Ruthie brushed aside his protests and told him to stay in the shade and finish his tea. So he did just that, taking the opportunity to study his hostesses.

One young, one not so young, both dressed in simple cotton dresses. The young one was pretty and friendly, but no more than that. No coy glances, no preening, no stray touch to his arm, no sultry invitation to sin. He could hear a male voice in the distance every so often, and she would smile off that way. The voice of her husband, no doubt. He watched the not so young one; she must have been a beauty once, he could see a ghost of pretty on her worn face. She had seen good years and lean, and never once wavered in her love of her man and her land. That much he could also see in her face. The women seemed so good and true, so steady and strong; their brows had never been troubled with duplicity, only honest worry.

The older woman wore shoes that his grandmother called brogans, but the younger one’s feet were bare and white on the weathered, gray boards. Wisps of hair escaped their braids and clung wetly to Mary’s face and neck; a trickle of sweat made its way down her throat and into undergarments only barely obscured by her dress. He looked away, not wanting to want what he could never have. If only.

If only all the women in his life had been like these two. A futile wish, he knew, but he couldn’t help but wish it. His mother, too young when she had her bastard child, was killed by another woman, over a man of course. His grandmother never let a day pass when she didn’t remind of him of his status as burden. After leaving home at 15, he found himself involved with bad woman after bad woman. How different his life would’ve been. To be raised by a woman like the older one and bed down with a woman like the younger one, he would not be the thing he was now.

“I have to get back on the road,” he said, standing quickly.

Ruthie stood when he did, “Wait,” she said. She opened the screen door and retrieved a bag from inside. “Here you go, young man, enough to get you through at least tomorrow. You dropped your pack by the driveway, if you have a canteen you can fill it at the well.”

Which he did. The women waved at him and he waved back. And the killer walked on. Working his way east, leaving what remained of the brightly-painted bad women in his wake. And they would never know how close they came to death. Oh, not from him, after meeting Ruthie and Mary, something in the killer broke. It felt like a bad fever breaking in the night, leaving him weakened and sweaty, but free of infection. His freedom solidified later that night in a hobo camp.

There was another drifter there like him. Not one of life’s wanderers like the hobos, but another Very Bad Man. The evil that used to live inside the young man must have resonated like a tuning fork as it left him, and this Very Bad Man could feel it. He confided, deliciously, about two women he had been watching for a time and what, in painful detail, he would do to them at first chance. The young man knew that the Very Bad Man meant the two women, his two women, and kept watchful.

Later that night, the Very Bad Man crept from camp headed west. The young man followed him and killed him. He wiped the lead pipe clean and stuck it in the other man’s pack, then he found a good-sized rock and laid the man’s head on it. It was possible that the cops would think him responsible for the other killings and close all the cases. But he wouldn’t stick around to find out. It was still possible to disappear into the mountains and live like a hermit and that is what he did.

The next day the sheriff paid the farm a visit. “Seems like a bum died just up the road from here,” he told them. He didn’t tell them about the lead pipe or that the bum seemed to be headed towards their house. No use to scare them.

Ruthie had to see if it was the young man they fed the day before, he seemed troubled and left in a hurry. When she saw the man, she was relieved. But she would never know that she had a guardian angel, and that the angel was a killer.

Today marks an anniversary for Oklahoma, the 33rd anniversary of the 1974 tornado outbreak. The same day, for the same reason, marks an important anniversary for me. June 8, 1974, the day after my sixth birthday, was the day of my first real memory. That’s not precisely true, I have memories from before that day but they are hazy and fragmented. I’m not even sure if I am truly remembering things or simply incorporating other peoples’ stories about me and perceiving them as memories.

Before that day, the only thing that I know is my memory alone is an impression of late afternoon sunshine angling through a paned window, illuminating the dust motes floating in the air, and painting squares of light on the wood floor. There was an easel and I was holding a large paintbrush, it was probably preschool. Kindergarten was a blur, but I’m told I was mean to my teacher, sorry Miss Berryhill.

But that day, that terrible day, holds my first narrative memory. My First Story. This Story begins the first chapter of my life.

My birthday was the previous day, but I don’t recall it. That day, all the many pieces of that day, have wiped my birthday from the slate. But June 8 is so alive to me that the day is more like a person than a fragment of time.

That Saturday dawned as Saturdays do. Daddy was home, Mama was on the couch, and I was in my new favorite toy. I came into possession of a refrigerator box somehow, the details are hazy. But it didn’t matter if we bought a new fridge or if a neighbor had, I got the box! Daddy cut a door and windows into the box and I decorated the inside with my 64-box of crayons.

It was hot and humid, our little window-unit air conditioner was just not up to the task. Mom closed the curtains, hoping, I suppose to shut out some of the heat along with the light. It was no use. Mama was especially miserable, as she was 8 months pregnant with my little sister. As she lay on the couch, a cold rag on her head, I left my playhouse to cool off. Something didn’t feel quite right; there was an odd silence, not really an absence of sound, but a muffling of the natural noises of the day. The air was heavy and still and there was a hint of dusk to the light.

Daddy was out in front of the house, talking with a neighbor. Even with the sharp hearing of childhood, I couldn’t understand what the men were saying. That I could hear them at all was due to the fact that I grew up in a different era. Our front door stood open for the cross-breeze, only the screen door guarding the entrance to keep out bugs. I pushed open the screen door, with its fancy scroll-work ‘S’. Sensing that Mama was too sick to ease my mind, I went to find Daddy.

The men were standing in the street looking South over the tops of our houses. Daddy picked me up and I looked in the direction he was looking and I saw it. The only tornado that I have seen with my own eyes. Its impact wasn’t blunted by a TV screen; no weatherman to filter the experience for me. It. Was. Right. There.

The clouds that day were as heavy and miserable as my mother and I could see all of the funnel cloud as it dropped from the green, pregnant sky. It was a violent and ugly birth.

Even though the tornado was far enough away for our safety as we face it down, we could still see the debris it sucked into the sky. The three of us stood silent, watching. Even so young, I knew that what looked like pieces of paper and other trash were parts of other people’s houses.

The next day, or maybe after, we visited one of those houses. Daddy worked with the man and Mama used to watch their little boy. I was most impressed by the gaping hole in their ceiling; such an unusual feeling to stand inside and look up at the then-beautiful sky. We were not allowed to sit down, not because they were being inhospitable but because all the chairs were filled with broken glass.

The most basic thing I took away from that day was the idea of insecurity. When I was young, my parents took care of everything. They seemed so competent, so on top of things. It was as if nothing bad could ever happen due only to their presence. Until.

Until that day. At any time something bad could happen and steal away our shelter. It scared me to realize that my warm, safe home could be taken away at any moment; and how fragile a barrier stood between us and the storm.

From then to this very day, when the storm approaches, I take what meager shelter there is and wait it out, my babies as safe as I can make them. I faced down one tornado in my life, however safely, and once was enough.

Horses hold a unique place in human culture. They may be domesticated but there is nothing servile in them. War horse, Trojan horse, horse of a different color, nightmare, buck the system, Mustangs, ponytail, stallion. Our language would be less colorful without them. We love them, we fear them, we bet money on them. Horses have carried not just people, but hopes and dreams. The settling of the West would not have been possible without them. Unlike pets, horses are truly partners with Man. I was four the first time I rode horseback. Wasn’t much of a ride, just clinging to her mane while some male relative-uncle, father, grandfather, I don’t remember-lead her around the yard. It was glorious.

I rode several horses after that first equine experience, but I was simply a witness to my most powerful and surreal encounter with them.

It was a few years after we moved to Claremore, I was 11, maybe 12. We were waiting for the bus on an early Spring day. I hated that bus, but for just one day I was glad that I was there.

Anyone who has ever lived in Oklahoma in the Spring knows how interesting the weather can get. That day, Mother Nature gifted us with the thickest fog I have ever seen. The stop sign feet from where we stood looked ghostly, and the houses just yards away were completely invisible. It was already an unnerving situation and we were unnaturally quiet.

In our own quiet, we began to hear a strange sound. The fog thickened and distorted all sound, including the one approaching us. Hearing what sounded somewhat like a train, we looked up. In Oklahoma, in the Spring, when you hear a freight train and there is no train, you are about to die. Or to come so close to death as to touch its hem. Even though there were no storm clouds in the sky, only that thick fog enshrouding us, we still eyed the ditch. It was a deep ditch.

The sound grew louder and closer, and then the ground itself began to tremble. Had we been California kids instead of Oklahomans, we probably would have thought it was an earthquake. What happened next seemed improbable and had I been alone I would’ve doubted my senses.

The fog parted like a curtain and a herd of horses burst through. Maybe a dozen of them passed so close to us, I could smell horse sweat and hear them snort with the effort. They jumped the ditch and disappeared across the road. As the hoof beats faded into the distance, we heard something new-voices calling and whistling. The horses were being chased by cowboys! Real cowboys! As they chased the horses across the road, they took no notice of us.

I have always wondered if, in the fog, we were somehow seeing something out of the past. It seemed so strange, so unreal, yet it was real. It really happened. Not a single one of us talked about it when the bus finally arrived and we had to go back into the present. The experience was too fragile and exquisite to talk about. To speak of the horses in the same way we might talk about teachers or other kids or what we did on Saturday would have been incredibly profane. I didn’t speak a word all the way to school and the rest of the kids that saw them were strangely silent as well.

Of course, life went back to normal but I will never be the same. The horses gave me an incalculable gift that day, one which I can’t even describe in words. Sometimes I wish I could touch somebody in the middle of the forehead and show them what I saw, impart the beauty I received. Alas, this gift remains mine and mine alone and I will never forget them, the horses out of time.

Of moons and moons and
Dreamless nights, she sleeps.
Never-always and
Always-never
Remembering what she dreams.