Old Man Chandler, gray-bearded with a nose that lay slightly on his left cheek, it having got that way by him being butted by a goat when he was a child, lived about ten miles from us, directly in the path of the twister.
The twister came down and got him, carried him away, and he lived to tell the tale.
Later, down at the barbershop, he was quite a celebrity. For three or four days he sat and told his story all day long to the men that came in for a haircut or a shave, or to just sit and bull. We did considerable hair-cutting business during that time, and I made several pennies sweeping up, and Tom made two nickel tips just for being cute and sitting there sucking on a peppermint stick.
Way Mr. Chandler told it, he was in his outhouse taking his morning constitutional when he felt a popping in his ears, a sensation like his head being packed tight in sawdust, and a sound like a train roaring across his property, but since he wasn’t within miles of a track, he knew that couldn’t be.
Without rising from his business, he lifted a leg and kicked the outhouse door open just in time to see his shack go to pieces and leap skyward amidst a black tangled wind already filled with debris.
Before he could get a page torn from the Sears and Roebuck and apply it to that part of his body he’d just dirtied, the twister took the outhouse, peeled it apart around him, and away Mr. Chandler went, Sears and Roebuck catalogue in hand, his butt hanging out. On those rare occasions when women dropped by to hear the story, Mr. Chandler conveniently forgot to mention he was in the outhouse when the twister struck. The tale was slightly abbreviated then, with the storm tearing up the shack and the next minute he was up and in it.
He said he had no idea how long he was in the storm before he developed a sort of calm, realized he had lost the Sears and Roebuck catalogue as well as his pants. He said it was strange going around and around, like being in a suck hole. And he could see things in the funnel, spinning about. A cow, a goat head, fish, tree limbs, and lumber. And a naked colored woman. Her mouth wide open, screaming.
It was here in his story that he often got stopped, having stretched the credibility of some of the listeners. Key words that disturbed them were woman, colored, and naked. It wasn’t that a woman couldn’t be sucked up in a storm, or that she couldn’t be colored and naked, but it seemed to some this was putting the lace on the panties.
I suppose the reason for this was simple. Nudity wasn’t as common as it is now. These days, pick up a magazine, watch the TV, go to a picture show, and someone’s always shucking or nearly shucking their drawers. Back then a woman’s exposed ankle got men excited.
In my case, the cards like Richard and Abraham had talked about having, the covers of some pulp magazines, Tom bathing in the tin tub, and me likewise, were as close as I had ever gotten to nudity. And I’d only heard about the cards, never actually seen them.
Daddy was often chastised by certain church-minded folks for keeping pulps handy at the barbershop. But as my Dad always explained about the racy covers, it’s just a little paint, folks. Nobody’s naked.
But since nudity wasn’t something thought of outside of the privacy of the home, the idea that Mr. Chandler had gotten a peek at a naked woman, and a colored woman at that, her being forbidden fruit, and it all coming together so conveniently with him having lost his pants, there was doubt among some that this ever happened, and that buried within this story was some sort of wish fulfillment.
You see, colored women weren’t supposed to be something a white man would bother about, which of course everyone knew was a lie, but it was one of those polite lies back then. Like women only had sex to have children and everyone was a virgin when they married.
So the idea of a cow going round and round didn’t throw them, but a naked colored woman, that was different. Then again, there were a few jokes about the pants-less Mr. Chandler and the cow, but modesty forbids I discuss such a thing.
Even with the ribbing and the doubt, Mr. Chandler stuck to his story. It was here he added in yet another fact. As he went round and round, he determined the woman was not screaming, but was dead, her mouth wide open as if to scream. Her feet were crossed behind her and her arms were crossed over her breasts, and no matter how the storm turned her, she stayed in that position.
Round and round Mr. Chandler and all that stuff went. Then he saw a mattress and a little brown dog, still alive, spin past him. He thought if he could grab hold of that mattress, then everything would be all right. Why he thought this he was uncertain, but it was some kind of plan.
He tried to swim on air toward the mattress, but couldn’t. He and it tumbled around and around and finally it came within his grasp and he got hold of it and wrapped his legs around it.
He lost sight of the woman. Things got blacker, then abruptly there was light. Mr. Chandler felt as if he were gliding, hanging on to that mattress like some kind of Arab magician riding a magic carpet, and out into that brightening light he went.
But as Mr. Chandler said, “Soon as it got light, I went back into the dark.”
He lost consciousness. When he came to he was clutching the mattress and was stripped of every stitch of clothes, except for his right sock and shoe. He was lying in a field of clover without a drop of rain or wind going on, and when he looked up there wasn’t a cloud in the sky. The cow that had gone around and around with him lay in a crumpled mass some distance away, having hit the ground so hard it had been compressed to half its size. There were fish and some lumber and tree limbs sprinkled about. The little brown dog wasn’t brown anymore. Most of its fur was gone. It looked like a large balding rat. It was wandering about barking wildly, not able to decide if it was scared to death or mad about being plucked. The colored woman was nowhere to be seen.
Mr. Chandler tore the cover off the mattress, wrapped his privates, started in the direction he figured would be town. He arrived some hours later, his rear end poking out the back of the mattress cover, his hair gone, and his beard plucked, wearing one sock, one shoe, and an amazed expression. He was followed by a stunned bald dog in an extreme nervous condition that barked at anything that moved.
After Doc Stephenson treated him for shock with his favorite cure – a snort of whiskey – and gave him some spare clothes, Mr. Chandler nested free at Cal Fields’s house that night and for a week or so after. It was thought by members of the town that Cal did this not only out of love for his fellow man, but – being the entire staff of the newspaper – for the reason of getting the first real lowdown on Mr. Chandler’s adventures, which appeared sanitized in the paper’s next issue, two days early of its usual weekly appearance. It was a much sought after item, second only to Mr. Chandler himself, who as I said, made daily residence at our barbershop, along with the plucked dog that had become his constant companion.
My father listened attentively to the story, but like everyone else he was most interested in the nude colored woman Mr. Chandler had seen in the midst of the tornado.
“I just seen her a little bit,” he said, “then she disappeared. I can’t tell you much other’n she was a naked nigger, her mouth wide open. But she looked like a comely nigger to me.”
At home the night after we first heard the story, I asked Daddy if he thought the tale was true. We were out on the screen porch, and Daddy was oiling the shotgun down. He studied the distance through the screen a moment, said: “Reckon so. I’ve known Chandler all my life. He’s an honest man. And he tells the story pretty much the same every time he tells it. It don’t read as good, but it comes across the same in the paper. I’m pretty certain that’s what happened, or what he thinks happened.”