An Ill Wind is a short story published in the
Anthology of Appalachian Writers, Karen Spears Zacharias Volume XI (2019).
A re-imagining of an occurrence that happened in Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria, it is a story of love and belonging, of loss and despair,
(An earlier version of this piece – as ‘Cyril’s Garden’ – was selected as Honorable Mention for the 47th New Millennium Writing Awards)
Bloated white cumulus clouds marched slowly across a murky blue sky that afternoon, their tops churning like restless fingers and their bottoms dark gray. Determined flies buzzed in the sweltering late August heat. A loamy smell of rich earth permeated the motionless humid air.
The back of Cyril’s tattered white t-shirt was soaked with sweat as he tended his land nestled on a hill at the edge of a gorge. His wiry frame bent to check for pests and disease on his prized vegetables. His liver-spotted hands caressed each leaf with calloused fingers gnarled by arthritis. It was as if he had a personal relationship with each plant. Jenny couldn’t get enough tomatoes, old Mrs. Hinkle loves zucchini, Burl’s son favors beans, …
Cyril knew the preferences of everyone living in the holler below. The small cluster of meager homes and trailers didn’t qualify as a town or even a village. It wasn’t much more than a bend in the road beside a muddy creek, but there were good people there.
At the periphery of Cyril’s property stood fruit trees — three varieties of apples, along with Bartlett pears — weeks away from harvesting. He had erected a few scarecrows throughout his vegetables and near the trees to discourage birds from feasting on his crops, yet the starlings were typically unintimidated. Large flocks would often darken the sky in choreographed swirls, their black wings catching thermals, carving complex arcs that culminated in mass dive-bombs onto his fruit.
But Cyril noticed their absence on this day. The air was quiet. He didn’t hear birds singing. Even the flies’ buzzing seemed muted with uneasy depression.
He pulled a stained handkerchief from his back pocket and wiped his brow, glistening above his deeply creased weathered face. Just then Burl, Cyril’s old friend from down the road, drove up the gravel driveway.
“Hey, Cyril,” Burl said as he pulled his ample frame down from his rusted pickup truck. “Hot enough for you?”
“Yep, and not a breath of air.”
“Maybe it’ll cool down a bit tomorrow, if that’s a good time for Jeb to come pick some vegetables?” Burl asked, hitching up his overalls and spitting tobacco off to the side. “His wife Ellie is all set to put some by — got her canning jars all cleaned and ready.”
“Those late-crop pole beans are just right for canning,” Cyril nodded with a proud smile toward the middle of his spread. “Tomatoes and squash, too. And if she wants to put up some preserves, the fruit should be ready in a couple weeks.”
“Thanks, Cyril. I don’t know what my family — and everyone in the valley — would do without you,” Burl said. “You got the greenest thumb in all these parts. How you manage to grow anything in this god forsaken dirt is a mystery, what with the runoff from the old strip mine.”
“I guess the good Lord just figured I had to be good for something,” Cyril chuckled.
“Well, you’re the official corny-copia king in these here parts, and ever’body knows it,” Burl slapped Cyril on the back. “You got a lot of people grateful to you.”
“I been workin’ this land for so many years I don’t even know how to cut back, now that Nora passed and my kids moved on. So there’s enough for anyone that needs or wants it.”
“Your boy Charlie’s down in Mount Olive, but your girl Bessie’s still around, ain’t she?”
Cyril didn’t need to be reminded that Charlie was in the state pen. “Well, yeah, and Bessie’s got problems that don’t want fixin’,” he muttered, stuffing his fists into his pockets and kicking at a clod of dirt with the toe of his boot. “County Sheriff already saved her twice, with that nal-ox- stuff, whatever it’s called.” He took in a gulp of air, shaking his head. “Ain’t right, what that little girl of hers has to put up with. Her daddy’s done gave up and left.”
There was an uncomfortable silence between the two men as Cyril stared at the ground.
Burl broke the quiet, “I’ll have Jeb pick more’n his family needs, and when Ellie’s done canning, I’ll bring some jars over to Bessie’s girl.”
“That’d be real nice, Burl. Nora always did the canning. I grew it, she put it by. Now with her passed … ,“ Cyril shrugged and broke off.
Burl spit again and changed the subject. “Say, did you hear there’s been some tornadoes touching down out west of here, other side of the mountains?”
“Good thing the mountain protects us from them things.”
“Maybe,” Burl nodded. “But my daddy told me it ain’t true that tornadoes never happen in the mountains. He lived through one that cut sixty miles through the mountains south of here in ‘44. Killed more’n a hundred people.”
“Yeah, Burl, I’ve heard you tell that story before,” Cyril scoffed. “But it’s gotta be rare if it hasn’t happened again since then.”
“Well, he always said that if you ever see a wall cloud, take cover,” Burl said. “But I never did learn what a wall cloud is supposed to look like.”
Both men laughed at this, perhaps a bit nervously.
After Burl drove off, Cyril looked back at his spread. Radiating a lush greenness in the late afternoon light, it comforted him. Now he noticed birds of all sorts lining up on nearly every branch of his trees. Starlings segregated from sparrows, separate from robins, and so on. They seemed unusually still and quiet, disregarding the ripening fruit right next to them.
He had propped up the branches of his old pear tree to support the weight of the fruit, especially bounteous this year. Of the apple trees, the Grimes Golden was the oldest. It was Cyril’s favorite, reaching its gnarled limbs to heaven like his arthritic fingers. The Rome apple tree at the edge of the steep cliff bounding the property was the youngest. He’d planted it a few years ago, before Nora died. Its strong branches spread out wide, showing off like an adolescent boy flexing his biceps. This was the first year it finally realized its obligation to bear fruit in abundance.
Good thing his neighbors would be coming to pick in the next few days and weeks. Wouldn’t want any of it to go to waste. They all need to eat during the winter.
That evening Cyril sat on his porch eating corn, tomatoes and cucumbers from his garden, admiring the sunset over the mountains to the west. His house wasn’t much more than a shack. After Nora died, it hadn’t benefited from the same care he lavished on his garden. The crickets seemed to be snoozing that night. Probably too hot even for them.
The next day was even hotter, and so humid that Cyril thought he might drown just by inhaling. It felt like rain might be moving in later that night, but the air wasn’t going anywhere just yet. Burl called to say that Jeb would come pick the next day, when things cooled down a bit after the rain.
Cyril stood beside his wife’s roses, flicking Japanese beetles off the blooms and inhaling their sweet fragrance, like Nora’s perfume. He mostly stayed in the shade during the oppressive temperatures of midday. He wasn’t getting any younger and couldn’t handle extreme heat as well as he used to.
He ventured out that afternoon to pick his supper. Everything was so quiet. He gazed at the sky to the far west. The mountains were cloaked in a thick blanket of atmosphere with a spectral greenish-yellow fluorescence set aglow by a veiled afternoon sun. Above that translucence lurked a huge dark cumulonimbus cloud. It seemed impenetrable, reaching so high Cyril couldn’t see its top. The outer edges of the black behemoth showed agitated swirls, discernible even from a distance.
Although Cyril was known for being steady and calm in any situation, he was now beginning to feel a little tense. The hair on the back of his neck was bristling. If that cloud advanced toward the homes below, it could bring either welcome rain or damaging storms.
Suddenly he turned and ran to his shed, grabbing a bushel basket, then rushed out to his vegetables. Frantically pulling down beans, tomatoes, squash, corn, overflowing his basket. Heart pounding and out of breath, he lugged the basket into his house. He looked down at the bounty and was struck by the futility of his action.
He reached for his old wall phone and dialed his daughter’s number. His granddaughter answered.
“Hi Jenny,” he said. “Can you put your momma on the line?”
“She cain’t talk right now, Grampa,” the girl whispered, aged beyond her years.
“Is she okay?”
“I’m not sure.”
“Are her eyes open?” Cyril dreaded the answer.
“I think she’s having one of her spells,” Jenny said, her voice cracking.
“Okay, Honey.” Cyril tried to sound calm. “You go try to rouse her. I’ll call for help.”
He hung up and called the county sheriff’s number to go out to Bessie’s trailer. They knew the location well.
Cyril went back outside, fixing to go get Jenny. The white cumulous puffs from the morning had vacated his sky, which now assumed the same greenish-yellow that had surrounded the mountain. The ominous giant clouds had passed over the peak, advancing east toward him. Now they were hovering over the one-road settlement below, threatening the few houses and trailers clustered thereabouts. Including Bessie’s small trailer.
The solid black mass extended across the entire western horizon from south to north. Frozen in place, he saw a broad rectangular section of the cloud protruding lower, as if dropping a solid mass from its underbelly. Was that what Burl’s daddy meant by a wall cloud?
Cyril had never felt panic like this before, not even in the heat of battle in Vietnam. He looked out his window. The wind had picked up, sweeping the branches of his fruit trees into frenzied turbulence. And now that cloud sprouted a black writhing tail like a prophetic finger of doom, pointing directly to the little cluster of homes below. Rapidly extending in length, it reached all the way to the ground. Large pieces of debris rose up into the anguished atmosphere, everything unleashed and moving in the same swirling direction as the tail. Sections of roof, branches, an unmoored tree, all levitating upward.
Cyril recognized the tail as a funnel formation, and he knew what that meant. His heart stopped. He knew he wouldn’t be able to reach his daughter’s place before the impending hell broke loose. He hoped the sheriff might be nearby, not coming from way down in south county.
He ran to his old root cellar, bending down to open the hatch to the subterranean storage. He jumped down the stairs and pulled the doors behind him. But there was no latch inside the doors, nothing to prevent them from flying open in the storm. He looked around in the crack of light for something that could secure the doors against the coming wind. Spotting a long coil of rope, he used one end of it to tie the doors as best he could.
Seconds later, the sounds closed in on him. The doors of his shelter were assaulted by wind and battered by unknown objects and pelting hailstones. He hoped his knots held, that the doors of the cellar wouldn’t be ripped from their hinges. The sounds grew closer, a furious whooshing that undulated with each rotation of the vortex, becoming stronger and more intense. Then came a noise like an approaching train, getting louder each second, a giant continuous rumble, roaring relentlessly, assaulting his ears, louder than a jet engine, the sucking air creating infrasound, throbbing his head nonstop.
Cyril thought of his daughter and grandchild. He prayed they would be safe.
Finally, after what seemed like an eternity, the noise stopped. It didn’t gradually subside. It just stopped. There was an unnatural quiet outside the hatch of the root cellar. He hesitated, wanting to be sure it was all truly over. He slowly untied the rope, and even more slowly cracked open one door. Peeking out, he saw nothing but barren earth strewn with scattered rubble. The sky, gleaming crystalline blue, mocked in cruel irony. The storm had swept the heavens clean of every cloud, pushing it all into a receding pile to the east.
Cyril’s house was gone. So was his truck. But more importantly, Nora’s roses, his vegetables, his fruit. All gone, as if they’d never existed. The bottom had fallen out of his world. His entire spread had been eliminated, wiped clear of all evidence of the garden that had flourished there, the cornucopia that fed his community. Only the skeleton of the Rome apple tree stood, leafless, its sole remaining branch sticking out over the gorge, as if pointing to where Cyril’s garden had vanished.
He had no way of knowing whether his daughter and grandchild were safe, or if any of his neighbors survived. He walked to the edge of his hill and peered below. There was nothing where Burl’s spread had been. Nothing but scattered debris where the homes had been in the holler. Trailers toppled, twisted and crumpled. He couldn’t even make out which one was Bessie’s. No people or animals seemed to stir. Nothing had been spared. It was if all signs of life had been sucked up and carried off to another planet.
The storm had destroyed everything. Including his food for a community that seemed to no longer exist. Cyril felt empty, directionless, not knowing what to do next — or even if there was anything that could be done. He began walking down the hill, into the destruction, looking for Burl, Bessie, Jenny, poking into fragments of trailers and under remnants of houses for any living thing. So far, he wasn’t finding any of the two dozen residents alive. The only sign of life was Jeb’s old three-legged dog Queenie hobbling by, one of her good legs bloody. But no sign of her master.
Finally Cyril found Bessie under a large twisted section of trailer, her dead eyes open, a needle in her left arm. More than twenty yards beyond Bessie, under the branch of a large uprooted tree, he found sweet Jenny, her thin little body broken.
Everyone Cyril loved, all who mattered, were gone. He looked around for a shovel — or anything he could use to bury Jenny, but even that simple thing was denied. He gathered his granddaughter in his arms and trudged back up his hill.
By the time Cyril reached his desolate plot of land, the sun was dropping lower over the mountains to the west. There was eerie silence; no sounds of birds or insects. He carried Jenny over to the root cellar, the refuge that saved his life, for whatever it was worth now. The hatch doors were still open. He descended the stairs and laid her gently on the dirt floor, took off his old shirt and covered her with it. His shoulders sagged, deflated as if he’d been drained of all life and purpose.
Cyril walked to the remaining apple tree and sat down beside it, gazing out over the cliff into the gorge below. He looked numbly at the void with hollow eyes. Finally summoning effort, he put his arm on the trunk of the tree to help him stand, and walked back to his root cellar.
He knelt beside Jenny and kissed her cold forehead, then picked up the rope he’d used to secure the doors during the storm. Bolting the cellar doors behind him, he staggered toward the apple tree in the waning light, the rope dragging behind him on the destroyed earth. It was all he had left.