I went downstairs. Billy ran to me and clung to my legs. I lifted him up and gave him a hug. Then I lit the candles. We sat in the guestroom down the hall from my little studio and looked at each other's faces in the flickering yellow glow and listened to the storm roar and bash at our house. About -twenty minutes later we heard a ripping, rending crash as one of the big pines went down nearby. Then there was a lull.
“Is it over?” Steff asked. “Maybe,” I said. “Maybe only for a while.”
We went upstairs, each of us carrying a candle, like monks going to vespers. Billy carried his proudly and carefully. Carrying a candle, carrying the fire, was a very big deal for him. It helped him forget about being afraid.
It was too dark to see what damage had been done around the house. It was past Billy's bedtime, but neither of us suggested putting him in. We sat in the living room, listened to the wind, and looked at the lightning.
About an hour later it began to crank up again. For three weeks the temperature had been over ninety, and on six of those twenty-one days the National Weather Service station at the Portland Jetport had reported temperatures of over one hundred degrees. Queer weather. Coupled with the grueling winter we had come through and the late spring, some people had dragged out that old chestnut about the long-range results of the fifties A-bomb tests again. That, and of course, the end of the world. The oldest chestnut of them all.
The second squall wasn't so hard, but we heard the crash of several trees weakened by the first onslaught. As the wind began to die down again, one thudded heavily on the roof, like a fist dropped on a coffin lid; Billy jumped and looked apprehensively upward.
“It'll hold, champ,” I said. Billy smiled nervously. Around ten o'clock the last squall came. It was bad. The wind howled almost as loudly as it had the first time, and lightning seemed to be flashing all around us. More trees fell, and there was a splintering crash down by the water that made Steff utter a low cry. Billy had gone to sleep on her lap.
“David, what was that?” “I think it was the boathouse.” “Oh. Oh, Jesus.” “Steffy, I want us to go downstairs again.” I took Billy in my arms and stood up with him. Steff's eyes were big and frightened.
“David, are we going to be all right?' “Yes.” “Really?” “Yes.” We went downstairs. Ten minutes later, as the final squall peaked, there was a splintering crash from upstairs the picture window. So maybe my vision earlier hadn't been so crazy after all. Steff, who had been dozing, woke up with a little shriek, and Billy stirred uneasily in the guest bed.
“The rain will come in,” she said. It'll ruin the furniture.” “If it does, it does. It's insured. “ “That doesn't make it any better,” she said in an upset, scolding voice. “Your mother's dresser... our new sofa... the color TV...” “Shhh,” I said. “Go to sleep.” “I can't,” she said, and five minutes later She had. I stayed awake for another half-hour with one lit candle for company, listening to the thunder walk and talk outside. I had a feeling that there were going to be a lot of people from the lakefront communities calling their insurance agents in the morning, a lot of chainsaws burring as cottage owners art up the trees that had fallen on their roofs and battered through their windows, and a lot of orange CMP trucks on the road.
The storm was fading now, with no sign of a new squall coming in. I went back upstairs, leaving Steff and Billy on The bed, and looked into the living roam. The sliding glass door had held. But where the picture window had been there was now a jagged hole stuffed with birch leaves. It was the top of the old tree that had stood by our outside basement access for as long as I could remember. Looking at its top, now visiting in our living room, I could understand what Steff had meant by saying insurance didn't make it any better. I had loved that tree. It had been a hard campaigner of many winters, the one tree on the lakeside of the house that was exempt from my own chainsaw. Big chunks of glass on the rug reflected my candle-flame over and over. I reminded myself to warn Steff and Billy. They would want to wear their slippers in here. Both of them liked to slop around barefoot in the morning.
I went downstairs again. All three of us slept together in the guest bed, Billy between Steff and me. I had a dream that I saw God walking across Harrison on the far side of the lake, a God so gigantic that above the waist He was lost in a clear blue sky. In the dream I could hear the rending crack and splinter of breaking trees as God stamped the woods into the shape of His footsteps. He was circling the lake, coming toward the Bridgeton side, toward all the houses and us and cottages and summer places were bursting into purple-white flame like lightning, and soon the smoke covered everything. The smoke covered everything like a mist.
II. After the Storm. Norton. A Trip to Town.
“Jeee-pers,” Billy said. He was standing by the fence that separates our property from Norton's and looking down our driveway. The driveway runs a quarter of a mile to a camp road which, in its turn, runs about three-quarters of a mile to a stretch of two-lane blacktop, called Kansas Road. From Kansas Road you can go anywhere you want, as long as it's Bridgeton.
I saw what Billy was looking at and my heart went cold. “Don't go any closer, champ. Right there is close enough.”
Billy didn't argue. The morning was bright and as clear as a bell. The sky, which had been a mushy, hazy color during the heat wave, had regained a deep, crisp blue that was nearly autumnal. There was a light breeze, making cheerful sun-dapples move back and forth in the driveway. Not far from where Billy was standing there was a steady hissing noise, and in the grass there was what you might at first have taken for a writhing bundle of snakes. The power lines leading to our house had fallen in an untidy tangle about twenty feet away and lay in a burned patch of grass. They were twisting lazily and spitting. If the trees and grass hadn't been so completely damped down by the torrential rains, the house might have gone up. As it was, there was only that black patch where the wires had touched directly.
“Could that lectercute a person, Daddy?” “Yeah. It could.” “What are we going to do about it?” “Nothing. Wait for the CMP.”
“When will they come?” “I don't know.” Five-year-olds have as many questions as Hallmark has cards. “I imagine they're pretty busy this morning. Want to take a walk up to the end of the driveway with me?”
He started to come and then stopped, eyeing the wires nervously. One of them humped up and turned over lazily, as if beckoning.
“Daddy, can lectricity shoot through the ground?” A fair question. “Yes, but don't worry. Electricity wants the ground, not you, Billy. You'll be all right if you stay away from the wires.”
“Wants the ground,” he muttered, and then came to me. We walked up the driveway holding hands.
It was worse than I had imagined. Trees had fallen across the drive in four different places, one of them small, two of them middling, and one old baby that must have been five feet through the middle. Moss was crusted onto it like a moldy corset.
Branches, some half-stripped of their leaves, lay everywhere in jackstraw profusion. Billy and I walked up to the camp road, tossing the smaller branches off into the woods on either side. It reminded me of a summer's day that had been maybe twenty-five years before; I couldn't have been much older than Billy was now. All my uncles had been here, and they had spent the day in the woods with axes and hatchets and Darcy poles, cutting brush. Later that afternoon they had all sat down to the trestle picnic table my dad and mom used to have and there had been a monster meal of hot, dogs and hamburgers and potato salad. The Gansett beer had flowed like water and my uncle Rueben took a dive into the lake with all his clothes on, even his deck-shoes. In those days there were still deer in these woods.