Rain pressed us down. The whole roof of a hut gave way and sailed like a tumbleweed through the plaza, missing everyone. Wails and moans were starting all over the village, with real names, not ritual ones. People were getting hurt, crushed, burned, maybe killed.
I reached out and took the limp bundle from the midwife. I pulled Sunflower to me by the shoulder. She was weak, shaking. I guided her toward the temple mound.
Up on the mound they had some of the fire out, and most of the stuff was outside. People were still running around, Sun Man directing them to other parts of the village to fight other fires. He yelled to the women to get baskets and jugs and bring them back. Everyone was outside the huts now, oblivious of the rain and the lightning.
Then we heard the rumbling like a freight train coming through the forest to the south, the sound of tearing trees rising above it.
Through the lightning I could see a low wall cloud.
Then the rain stopped, like a faucet turned off.
The roaring grew louder. Lightning flashed deep within the cloud, and we all saw the tornado hanging like a fat anaconda from the ragged clouds, heading straight for the fields and the village.
Through the roaring tornado I heard other things. In the stillness of everything else I heard a cricket chirp, and rain dripping from a roof. I heard someone’s feet run through a small puddle. I heard the crackle of fire from the temple roof. I heard someone across the village say the word ‘basket’.
Then the roaring became louder, like a volume knob being slowly turned up.
I started Sunflower up the temple steps.
‘I can’t go up there,’ she said.
‘Yes you can,’ I said, and pulled her.
She came with me.
Everyone was transfixed watching the tornado tear up the trees. There were lightning flashes, but the thunder was drowned by the echoing roar.
The twister looked like a sideways S. Lumps that were trees, alligators, fish, boulders flashed and disappeared around its outside. The bottom was a haze of airborne garbage. Trees leaned in toward it from all directions, tearing away in the drowning roar and being sucked into the funnel. My ears popped.
Someone saw us.
‘No,’ they said. ‘No!’
We had reached the top step. Sunflower, me, the dead child. I turned facing the tornado and held the bundle up over my head.
The screaming tornado reached the edge of the fields, ripped up leaves and dead vines, heading for the south wall.
I held the baby up as high as I could. Nobody tried to stop me. The lightning was a purple dance around the tornado funnel. The landscape looked like it would through the bottom of a Vick’s Salve bottle.
The tornado lifted up.
It left the ground, broke contact with the dirt and debris, just outside the south wall. I felt my hair stand up. It was dark for a few seconds. The lightning quit for the first time in two hours.
Then a huge flat sheet of light enveloped everything. Up above my head, past Took and Sunflower’s dead child, I saw it.
The tornado hung. I could see inside the funnel, straight up. I tingled from fear and static electricity, my hair glowing. The tornado roared above us, moved to the north majestically, as if a moving cliff hung over us, upside down. It roared louder, set down to the north of the fields, tearing up the woods again, moving toward the River.
Thunder fell. A gentle rain started, cool and slow. Lightning still played but the thunder got lower, farther off. The last of the flames went out on the broken-down temple.
Took came to us, put his arms around Sunflower. I lowered the baby, went back down the steps. The only manmade sound in the village was that of the Buzzard Cult dancers, who had stopped only at the first appearance of the tornado.
The midwife was gone when we reached the plaza. Some of Took’s relatives joined us at the bottom of the steps.
From up above on the mound, Sun Man started a chant of thanksgiving, which everybody except Took and Sunflower and I joined in.
Before we reached our hut, stars were peeping out to the west.
Bessie IV
The test trench, begun fifteen feet out, hit the large mound six feet off center to the left. William, Washington, and the diggers from Jameson’s team took the trench only to the original ground level before Kincaid sent them in toward the mound itself.
‘Do a one-foot profile, then on down,’ said Kincaid. ‘Bessie, make sure the grids stay marked. I don’t want to lose anything on this one.’
Jameson was fidgeting on the edge of the cut. He and Kincaid sent two of the diggers off to help unload the trucks, and helped with the digging to work off some of their nervous energy.
There were gathering clouds on the northern horizon. The day was becoming still and hot with a high hazy overcast. There was as yet no thunder and lightning to be seen even in the darker clouds.
Bessie kept running checks on the digging, drawing new profiles in her notebook, a cross section of the mound at one-foot intervals, ready to be filled in as they worked. She sketched quickly and surely, and had sixteen of them, numbered and in sequence, before the diggers had reached the center of the mound on their first one-foot cut.
Kincaid and Jameson waited until the workers had gone down off the mound’s crest to the ground level on the other side. Then they lay on their sides, one to left and one to right, crawling the entire length of the cut from one end to the other, staring at opposite sides. They looked like they were playing a child’s game, or were two thirsty men crawling across the desert in a newspaper cartoon.
The workers leaned on their shovels, talked, sweated and joked. Somebody said something really rich and they broke into hoots of laughter. Bessie jerked her head around at the sound.
Kincaid and Jameson were oblivious. They finished their crawl, careful of the grid markers, and came to their feet, brushing dirt from their hands and clothing.
They had a hurried consultation, then went to the workers. The diggers went back around to the side they had begun the trench on. Once again they started a slow careful cut, a yard wide, another foot deep, from the edge of the mound, over the top, to the far side, carrying the dirt carefully over to the sifting screens as they worked, where others went through it.
Bessie knew it had probably taken the Coles Creek people who built these mounds at least a month to get them to this size, perhaps longer. They had carried basketfuls, skinfuls of dirt at a time, to raise it. The dirt had been dug with hoes made of the shoulder-blades of animals strapped to handles, or with shells, even scooped up by hand. Making a mound took a long time; they stood for hundreds, even thousands of years. They could be taken apart in a few days by skilled workers, or as had happened in a few disastrous cases, in a few minutes by treasure seekers with the use of grader blades and dynamite.
William and Washington could dig a trench straight as a ruler, never varying the depth by more than an inch or two, pretty quickly. Kincaid said William had azimuths for eyes. There were a couple more, including a white man named Griggs, on Jameson’s team, who were good, and all could do fine work under William’s directions.
The second one-foot cut went faster than the first, since they had already gone through the roots of the ground cover in the first foot. The diggers stopped, and once more Kincaid and Jameson made their long crawls, this time more slowly, and from the ends opposite to where they had started the time before. They met near the top of the mound.
‘How you doing?’ asked Kincaid.
They both laughed for a few minutes, then continued on. One of the guys from up on the bluff lugged a new watercan down, passing the dipper around among the workers who lay resting in the heat.