TORNADO SEASON by Marilyn Manolakas

The air is creamy and astringent, electric on the tongue like sour milk. The wood is rotting on the old clapboard house, sweating off its paint in shaggy rafts of white. From a distance, it is the same color as the gray sky behind it, blistered with clouds. Harmon sits between rows of jumpy corn stalks with a bottle of Old Crow she found in the barn, watching the windmill’s patient spin turn maddening. Her dad’s old Ford half-ton comes clumsy up the dirt drive in front of her, and she thinks to herself, I’m getting married next week, and I don’t give a shitass who says what about it. Harmon is fourteen.
She wants to borrow a dress and go to the Church of Christ one afternoon and have punch and bricks of store-bought ice cream afterward like everyone else who gets married in Dill City. She doesn’t want to slink off to Texas. But in Texas, she doesn’t need her dad to sign the papers, so that’s what she’ll do if she has to. She’s heard that in the old days, girls her age could get married without permission in Oklahoma, but now it’s 1954, and there are laws. Harmon has always wanted a real wedding, has been planning it since she was little and would mash her corn husk dolls against one another, so why does he want to take that away from her? She pitches the empty bottle into the stalks behind her and pretends to study the wide, flat tumult of the sky.
“Come on back to the house,” her dad yells over his driver’s-side window mottled with mimosa pods caught in bird shit. “I been out at the Bookouts’. We got to get in the cellar before it comes.”
She stands up and whiskey-lurches toward him but then finds her gait, wishing there had been more than a few drinks left in the bottle. “I hate it in there. It’s got all of Mama’s jars and things. Besides, I don’t want to be in the cellar with you.”
“I don’t know why you got to act so ugly.” And then, a high hitch in his voice: “We got to go in there sometime, Harmon. I been saying we should clean up some of her things.” And he’s looking not at her but past her, past the blackening sky. She feels a thrum of ache opening up in her throat, and she knows it’s the least she can do for him, just to get in the cab. The springs of the leather bench creak against her weight as she slides in next to him, and the truck goes bouncing along toward the new house on the other side of the farm.
He looks over the big steering wheel in his lap toward her feet and says, “Wish you’d stop running around barefooted, nothing but stickers and cow patties out here.”
“I look where I’m going.”
He inhales some air between his teeth and then pauses. “Harmon, I saw that bottle. You can’t be acting this way. Where’d you even get that thing?”
“It was in the old barn.”
“Uh huh.”
“It was. Why don’t you trust me about anything?”
“Well, you’re still not supposed to be drinking it, wherever you got it from.”
In the close cab she can smell the tractor grease on him and his nasty old Swan soap. She can smell herself, too, her new rayon dress trapping the sharp spice under her arms in a way her old feed sack dresses, the cotton calico ones her mama used to sew for her, never had.
Her lips are dry and furrowed, crepe paper glued together at the ends, and she struggles to rip them apart and find something pleasant to say. “You know, Jimmy says they don’t have tornadoes in Dallas, not really.”
“Is that right?” He doesn’t take the bait. Jimmy is twenty and a mechanic in the Air Force. He used to be stationed in the next town over, in Burns Flat, but then he transferred back to Carswell in Dallas. He’s supposed to come get her sometime this week, just as soon as he gets a place for them to rent sorted out. He told her this on the phone six days ago, the heavy receiver hot on her cheek, her dad’s eyes pressing in on her from the divan. He hasn’t called since.
“Don’t you want me to get away from the tornadoes?”
“You got to help me get the chickens in the chicken house so they don’t blow away.”
“Fine.” She looks out at the crazed landscape stewing, dislodged thistles hopping along, insane, getting caught in the barbed-wire fence under the gathering ink of sky. She hopes Jimmy comes back soon. She misses him living near her, misses his neat blond body and the fug of his gritty sheets at night. She misses the wallop of something animal when she runs up to hug him, his musky cologne mixed with a powerful jolt. She’d sneak out of her house and meet his truck down the gravel road, and they’d spend a few hours in his little rented room. It’s all she can hardly think about – his hands on her hips, his long eyes and long feet, and the bright, white-hearted thrill of losing the borders of herself in the dark at night. Her first time with Jimmy had hurt, and what she had enjoyed most in those first weeks was just the way he looked at her, like she was one of the necessities of life. After a while, though, she started to look forward to it. Their hours together turned the rest of the world into a waiting room, everything else wrung-out and gray by comparison. Can her dad tell that this is all she thinks about? Can everybody?
They get out of the truck in front of the brick house her mama barely got a chance to fuss over, and the wind picks up, cracking at the skeletons of fence-row trees, pockmarks of dry earth displaced by scattered drops of rain.
“Here it starts,” her dad says, and they begin to run at the chickens, a flurry of jittery white that they shoo in the low door. Scrabbly lightning veins across the sky trailed by hard, flat thuds of thunder. “We got to get some candles from the house so we don’t break our necks down there,” he says, the rain now addressing her skin in sharp, needling jabs.
They scurry through the back door of the house into the new kitchen, dishes piled up on the yellow Formica, the shut‑up smells of dust and fresh paint and old dinners. Not that they eat much anyway, lately. Harmon usually fixes some eggs, maybe some bread or a glass of milk, maybe some green beans for dinner, but that’s it. Everything they eat, by the time they eat it, is perched on the edge of rot. And neither of them clean up anything. Sometimes Little Mama comes over, the old lady’s chin bristling with dark glossy hairs, white strings of spit webbing across the sides of her mouth as she talks, and she says, “Harmon, someone has got to do something about this place. I didn’t raise your mama not to teach you how to keep up a house,” but then she leaves, and Harmon does nothing. Her dad doesn’t mind.
Flicking the light switch back and forth, he says, “Nothing doing. Where did Pauline keep the candles?”
“How should I know? I won’t be needing them in Dallas.”
“Go look while I fill up some jugs.”
She stands in the pantry, but she can barely see, the sun suffocated by the black clouds outside the kitchen window and everything getting darker by the second. So many extra cans of food that she used to play with, stacking up pyramids and fortresses and castles. Sometimes there’d be a dented one, and it wouldn’t stack right, and she’d ask her dad if she could throw it away, and he’d just laugh at her. He had been forced to leave home as a teenager, back when nobody had any food and the evil dirt was blowing and his family was living in a chicken coop. He left Oklahoma to go pick onions in California, a time he doesn’t talk about except to say that no one is allowed to bring any onions into the house, ever. Her mama was a good cook, and just about every recipe calls for onions, but she always minded him anyway.
Harmon looks under the sink, next to the soap and a sagging box of Brillo pads, and then she looks in the hutch with her mama’s good Desert Rose plates, and there she finds them, in the cabinet next to their brass holders with the finger loops. She grabs the candles and stacks them in a paper bag from the TG&Y along with some of the candle holders and the old army lighter, and then she slides her thumbs through two of the holders and walks around spinning them, waiting for her dad to finish filling the jugs, grenade strobe of lightning flashing the room bright and dark.
The water cuts off while her dad is filling a big O’Halloran’s Dairy jug from the tap. “Goddammit!” he says, and suddenly she’s so sick of being in this kitchen with him, so sick of everything. A sibilance of wind finds its way through the insulation, juniper branches scraping at the windows, and she hears a treble of shattered glass, probably the wind kicking some loose object against the house – it’s happened before.
But then there is the unmistakable low murmur of a human voice pitched against the clang and roar of the thunderstorm. It sounds like someone is upstairs cursing.
She holds her breath, pinned in place, the whiskey jagged in her empty stomach. Her dad stops fussing with the caps on the jugs and stands up straight as a telephone pole. One of the candle holders slips off of her thumb.
“Hush! Be still.” His eyes are wide and mean. The upstairs voice has gone quiet. “I’m going to go see. You stay down here.”
“You don’t get to boss me anymore!”
“Shh! Stop your hollering!”
She quiets down to a whisper-bite and says, “What if something happens? Little Mama said she saw the devil up there!”
After a moment, he gives a horsey exhale in her direction and starts up the stairs, but then he comes back and picks up a squat pewter lamp from the hutch, thwapping it against his other hand to test its weight. She follows him up the stairs, and in the dark of the stairwell, his gibbous face angles toward her, but he doesn’t try to stop her. When he reaches the shadows of the balustrade at the landing, he pauses and then opens up her bedroom door, asking her, “Anything look different?” and she shakes her head, happy to be useful. They march on to the extra bedroom, the same quilts and Grandma Matilda’s Shaker furniture as usual, and she feels a deflating prick of disappointment at the vanishing drama of her life. They cross into her parents’ room, and no excitement there either, until she notices one of her mama’s pretty things – the Limoges box, she thinks – nestled in the carpet in shards. The door to the adjoining bathroom is open, so she turns toward it, and there they are.
There are two of them, boys she recognizes from the town across the highway, caught in the silvery light. The big one is named Cecil, but she doesn’t know the little one’s name. She doesn’t go to school with them, but she’s seen them at the drugstore and at football games and Sunday school parties. Her dad grabs at the soggy back of her dress, lift of cool air sent up her spine, and steps in front of her. Something long is in Cecil’s hand, and now he’s raising it, pointing it at her dad. He puts up his hands, useless lamp hoisted in the air, and backs into the bedroom a few paces. After a moment, the boys follow.
“Don’t point that at him, stupid,” the little one says, jump of fear in his voice.
“How do you know he’s not going to tell?”
“So you’re going to shoot him, shithead?” Only now, staring at her grandpa’s old Winchester ’94, does the warm whiskey drifting leave her all at once, replaced by a mealy headache and a sour clench at her throat.
Her dad lowers his hands, sets the lamp on the bedside table, and speaks to them in a deep, even register: “You boys should know that thing ain’t even loaded. Weren’t you going to check?”
“We was just borrowing it to go shoot some turkeys,” Cecil says.
“Okay. Well, fair enough. But you won’t get many turkeys without any bullets. So how about you give it back right now, and I won’t call Clifton Black as soon as the lights come back on?”
“Huh-uh.” Cecil is tall with a stout, proud stomach showing through his overalls like a man’s, but he’s still young in the face, a boy hesitating to blow out his birthday candles so all eyes stay fixed on him.
“Let’s just give it to him,” the little one says.
“We ain’t giving back shit! We just come out all this way.” But after a thick moment, he lowers the gun shakily. Harmon takes an easy breath, adrenaline leaving her body in waves. Suddenly she is very tired.
“Aren’t you Glenn Fight’s boy?” her dad asks the little one.
“Yessir.”
“Dumbass! Who’s stupid now?”
“She knows who we are anyway,” the little one says, pointing at Harmon, and it’s true, more or less. They’re her age. She’s always known them as shy, obedient boys, nodding politely at adults and sitting off to the side at church mixers. There’s never any telling about people.
“What’s your name, son?” Her dad’s eyes never leave the black shape of the rifle, still hanging from Cecil’s left hand with the front sight touching the floor.
“Verle, sir.”
“Okay, Mr. Verle Fight. Well. A tornado might be coming for us soon. Why don’t you tell your friend to give me back my dad’s rifle, and we can all get down in the cellar? If there’s any turkeys left, you can shoot them after.” In the dresser mirror, she can see her dad wink at Verle. She’s never seen him wink before.
Verle regards her dad blankly for a second and then looks at Cecil and says, “Let’s just get in there. I don’t want that old thing anyhow. I thought they’d have better stuff.” Harmon feels a scorching touch of shame at the thought that they didn’t have anything nicer to steal.
Cecil asks Verle, “What about my brother’s car?”
“We left our car by the highway,” Verle says to her dad.
“Don’t worry about that. Big tornado’ll smash a car whether it’s on the highway or not. Hey, now, how about I got ten dollars in my billfold, and I’ll buy that old thing back from you?”
Cecil considers this and then hands over the gun tentatively. Her dad takes hold of it by its cracking walnut stock and points it toward the ground. She thinks she hears an iced-over edge come into his voice as he says, “Alright then. Cellar’s in the yard. You boys go first. You can have your ten dollars after this thing passes.”
Her dad makes her walk behind him as they all shuffle outside, sheets of rain reigniting the scent of her V05 Creme Rinse. “It’s raining bullfrogs!” he says to her, trying to lighten the mood, she can tell. As she watches his rangy figure tread in front of her, his tired, flatfooted splay, she feels a twinge of guilt for the way she’s been talking to him. He’s so good, and he works so hard, and he’s being so good with these stupid, stupid boys. And he’s so nice to her, despite everything, despite the fact that if it weren’t for her, her mama would still be here. She should behave herself. But then, he’s trying to take away her one chance to have a wedding, isn’t he?
He stoops over and grunts as he opens the door in the cement driveway by the side of the house. Harmon drops down into the lightless night of the cellar, assailed by dank air and an ungodly stench that she doesn’t recognize. They file in behind her, and she flicks the lighter, looking around among the milk crates and canning jars and bric-a-brac for the source of the smell, and she thinks she sees something, an old mouse on its back marked with white gashes of decay.
“Harmon, give me that.”
Her dad takes the lighter, the flame doubling when the wick catches on the first candle, and then he melts the end of it and sticks it in its brass circle. The boys sit on the floor in a corner, so she sits in the corner opposite them, as far away as the tight space permits, wedged between two boxes and an old steamer trunk.
She looks over at the boys and considers them, the flame lapping at their greasy faces, making them look febrile, crazed. She thinks about Cecil, about his bulbous mouth and two slippery eels for eyes. If she didn’t marry Jimmy, would she have to make do with a scrap of affection for a boy like that? She didn’t want to chance it.
“We thought you’d be down here already,” Verle offers, as if this were a pleasant impromptu social call. Verle has dark grass stains on the knees of his denims and a haircut that looks like someone gave it to him in a hurry.
“Is that right?” her dad says to no one, tending to the rest of the candles on the floor, sitting on his haunches in the center of the low room, the long rifle parked by his side.
As he works, the shaky candle-jump light catches the tattoos that peek out beneath the rolled‑up sleeve of his shirt. Harmon has never known what to make of them. They split open her understanding of him, leave her with the same queasy feeling she got the time she accidentally walked in on her parents making love one Sunday afternoon. Almost like that, but not quite. Every time someone mentions his tattoos, the scumbled eagle and dagger on his upper arm, relics from his time in California, he stammers a few words about being young and then changes the subject. Her dad, such a dependable member of the Church of Christ, so shy in crowds that nobody even makes him read the scripture out loud like all the other grown men – the fact of these tattoos is inexplicable to her. Sometimes she catches glimpses of something – some youth, some violence in his eyes – that makes her think she understands, but then she loses it. Like when he clubs rabbits in the garden with an old wagon spoke and seems immune to their wheezing screams. Or when he laughs with his old friend Otto and they talk about how they used to have to take baths in the creek with one bar of soap to share between them. But mostly those tattoos remain improbable, alien on the skin of the man she knows as her father.
She leans against the cold wall behind her, the wet fabric of her dress revealing the slope of her legs underneath, and she tries to sink back into herself, into a series of forced daydreams about Jimmy: his wide shoulders, the black outlines of his mechanic’s fingernails, his mouth on the transparent skin of her breasts. The first time he asked her to be on top, she was embarrassed at first, but then something else happened, a connection made between being with him and the way she would rub herself against her bed at night. She started concentrating, gathering the threads of it, and then there it was – dizzying, boundless, like air or water or light. The first time he saw her shudder and pulse, he was surprised, shooting her an embarrassed grin after they were done, “Where’d you learn to do that?”
“By myself, I guess.”
“Well shit.” And he started tickling her, she thought, to end the moment.
There was such a difference, wasn’t there, between before and after? Before, she was so necessary. Sometimes, they wouldn’t even get as far as the fields along the highway, and they’d pull over and he’d put his hand up her skirt, and even when it wasn’t pleasure, it was the pleasure of being so urgently useful. They’d get to his room, and they’d take off their clothes and go weightless, and she would think: This is it. This is all she wants. How could anyone want anything else? The hot ferment of his breath on her neck: You’re my girl. My girl. Mygirlmygirlmygirl.
And then: separation. Shy and embodied. Bashful drop of his eyes, put‑on smile, plunging back to the ordinary objects of this room that smells like feet. Flea jump of anxiety at her throat: He always wants to get up and forget about her, make a cup of coffee on his hot plate or turn on his new TV. After is a demotion. She is at best decent company. She has so little to offer him. One time, she offered to sew a button back on one of his shirts, and he said no, in the Air Force they taught you how to do that yourself. A boy her age would have obliged, even if he knew how. After, she feels bereft, thick sheen of his come down her thighs in the bathroom glare, her pubic hair slicked wet and mossy. She stares at herself in the mirror, at the rinds of moon shadow beneath her eyes, and she thinks about how she should eat more but never does. She knows that, even though she’s too skinny, she still looks like her mama, that she has her big dark eyes and round mouth, and she knows that this is why there will always be another time.
The last night she saw Jimmy before he left for Dallas, he seemed – more than usual, even – like he was in a hurry to drive her home, and she sat in his truck looking out the window at the flat wash of the blue horizon, slip of moon peeking through the clouds. That Davis Sisters song was playing on the radio, “I Forgot More Than You’ll Ever Know,” and she wondered if this was something she could say to another girl about Jimmy and mean it. She wondered if he saw other girls. Her new house sat at the end of the driveway, so tight-lipped and dim, like nothing she even recognized, a broken-off bit of nothing much against the tumbling vastness of the storm-lamp sky.
The sounds of the rain are doubling, tripling over themselves against the cellar door. The wind bangs it ajar and then closed again, over and over. Her dad comes and sits next to her on the steamer trunk, the .30‑30 perched in his lap.
She tries to think about something good, something pure. Images of her mama bead across her thoughts, but the one that gets caught in her mind is an image of her naked, the splayed breasts and dark pubic hair that Harmon glimpsed the night they had to get dressed for bed in the extra room at Little Mama’s house. Why is this the mental picture of her mama that comes to her most often? She has been infected with sex. She needs to get out of here. Out of this cellar, this house, this town. She stares at the blank-faced darkness of the wall behind her dad. There is nothing she can do for him anymore.
So her dad didn’t like Jimmy, fine, but that doesn’t mean he has to take away her happiness. She can’t imagine going the rest of her life without ever having a wedding. And she doesn’t know what she’d do if she didn’t have Jimmy to think about. She already has a hard enough time avoiding the high, keening ache for her mama that finds her wherever she is.
Most of the girls she knew had mothers who were tough, brittle, strict. At their houses, she’d sit stiff as a bolt of fabric and try to seem sweet and godly. At home, she was allowed to think her thoughts and do as she pleased. To check out how-to‑draw books from the library and spend afternoons copying down the ships and fashion plates. To read in bed all day and eat candy until dark. Sometimes she’d read a novel, like The Caine Mutiny, and love it so much that she’d get all excited and tell the entire book to her mama, chapter by chapter, and her mama would listen, really listen, and then tell her that she loved seeing the way her eyes lit up when she was talking about her stories. They’d sit up late together playing cards and drinking hot Dr Pepper with melted Red Hots at the bottom. When Harmon got in trouble at school, her mama would shrug and tell her dad that she was probably just smarter than all the other kids and bored. “Your mama let you have your way too much,” her dad said once recently, but she didn’t see it that way. Harmon had been born with a twin – a boy – who had died as a baby and had to be buried in a number-11 shoe box in a grown man’s coffin since that’s all they had left at the funeral home. Harmon always figured this made her mama more grateful.
And now the sounds of the rain are pinging against the cellar door, and it’s choking her, this guilt, and she tries not to look at the dark shapes of the blackberry preserves her mama set up right before she died. She tries to focus her thoughts on Jimmy, but then Verle interrupts her.
“I reckon we could play a game?”
And Harmon hates him, she really hates him. His pitiful hair. Why is he in her cellar? “No one wants to play a game with you, shit-for-brains!”
Over Cecil’s braying laugh, her dad says, “Harmon. Where’d you learn to talk like that?”
“Why would we want to play a dumbass game with someone who tries to rob us?”
She feels the hold of his eyes on her, watches the buckle of his mouth as he considers scolding her. “I have a game. It’s called questions. I ask questions, and you all answer them.”
She doesn’t know if her dad is serious.
“First question: What do you boys think a twenty-year-old wants with marrying Harmon? You think I should just let her go get married?”
The boys hold themselves very still, looking down, and she is so ashamed. But after a moment, she sees Verle look up and absent himself from his face as he considers an answer. “Could be that he’s lonely, sir. Not a lot of women his age around here. A lot of people moving to the city.”
The city. These girls who graduate and move to Oklahoma City. She’d have to wait so long if she didn’t marry Jimmy.
“Could be. Maybe Mr. Verle Fight’s brains ain’t so bad after all. Then again, I don’t know. I don’t know about this one.” One of the candle wicks crackles, shoots a spark twirling to the floor. “Next question: What was you boys doing in my house?”
“We just wanted to shoot some turkeys, we told you!” Cecil says, voice nasal and sullen.
“Come on now.”
Verle sighs a long sigh, and Harmon hates him even more, like he has any reason to be sad, coming over here and taking their things. “We was looking for some jewelry. Then we broke that little jewelry box with nothing in it and saw the gun hanging on the wall.”
“What were you going to do with jewelry? You got a lot of girlfriends or something?”
“We were going to sell it. In the city. I want to start learning to rodeo. The junior division? Takes money, and my dad’s been sick.”
”I was pulling your leg, Mr. Verle. I knew you didn’t have any girlfriends. And you broke one of my wife’s good things. Next question: Harmon, what do you think it’s like in Dallas? Do you think it’s a good place to live?”
This question troubles her. She’s worried about the water in Dallas. She can’t even stand to drink the water in town. It’s so sweet and soft, filmy on the tongue. She likes their hard cistern water on the farm, water that slakes your thirst with a bite of something metallic on the end. And Jimmy said his mother likes to wear hats and that he was going to buy her a new hat from Foley’s to wear when he introduces them. Wearing hats isn’t really the thing around Dill City, not except for at church.
“I think it’s probably better there. People are smarter.”
“Do you think God wants this for you?”
Does he? Is her mama with God now? Church of Christ women have to sit mutely while the men do everything. Do they sit mutely in heaven too? Other kinds of people, like the Baptists, let their women sing and read. They even have instruments. Maybe it was more like that. But then again the Baptists said that the Church of Christ didn’t baptize right – a prim little sprinkle instead of a dunk – and that if you don’t get baptized right, you go to hell, so maybe it was better to hope they were wrong. Mostly, it seems like God goes about his own business and she goes about hers. Before her mom died, the Holy Spirit did seem alive in the church some Sundays though, in the preacher’s thunderous voice, the great, roundhousing energy that echoed through the room, the curlicued spirals of logic that clenched a final place in her heart – We know God loves us because the Word lives – but then she’d go home and everything would be the same. As far as she was concerned, God could work his side of the street and she’d work hers. Lately she sits in church and thinks only about Jimmy.
“What I think is that God loves other people more than me.”
“Harmon Lee, don’t talk like that.”
Harmon Lee. Her dad says it, like a lot people’s dads say their middle names, when he’s mad, but her mom would always say it when she was happy. Harmon Lee Sweetheart. Harmon Lee Sweetheart. Oh Jesus she has to get out of this cellar.
“I have a question,” Verle says. He had been watching this conversation, rapt, absorbing its moments with little exhalations and faces. He needed to mind his own damn business. “Where’s your wife?”
“How stupid are you? Why are you asking questions? My dad asks the questions.”
“She passed,” her dad offers.
“Oh,” Verle looks panicked, searching the air above him for something to say. “I’m sorry. How, how’d she die?”
“Don’t you know that’s not polite, dumbass?”
“It’s alright. She was in an accident. Painless. It happened real suddenly. She’s in heaven now.”
Nobody seems to know what to say, so nobody says a word. How is her dad so sure that her mama’s in heaven? And, suddenly, that word. Like all the words people have used about her mama since she died, especially at the funeral, there’s something sideways about it. Harmon has relived that day so many times. She’s sick of hearing this singsong version of it offered up to people who don’t even matter.
It was almost suppertime. Cotton-chopping season. The sun dipped low and the heat hung back. Her mama in the doorway of her room, I’m all cooped up in here. Let’s go for a drive and get us a Dr Pepper from town. Harmon putting down her old copy of Little Women and getting up from her prone position on the bed, unwholesome ache in her belly from eating Sugar Babies all day in the dark. I keep telling you that’s bad for your eyes. Hot wind on the sweaty hair stuck to her forehead. You drive, Harmon, I’m tuckered out. Why? Why did she agree to drive? What if her brother had lived, and he had driven instead? What if her brother had lived and she hadn’t?
To say something happens suddenly is to forget that everything happens suddenly. But there are some moments that heave more weight onto themselves than our minds can bear. The Plymouth turning out from the bowling alley, striking them headlong and lifting. The truck sent spinning. Sheeting shrapnel of glass, light in the air, hanging, pealing down on her in cuts, cuts, cuts. Her mama pitched through the windshield, floating, up and up, and then the truck’s heavy whirl, around and around and into the ditch, Harmon’s head against the metal door.
And then, the icy surface of something, fleet on the face of it, skating light, falling through, plunging. The man pulling on her. Putting her on a stretcher like a lank doll. Where is she? Where is she? I need to put my head on her jelly chest and cry about this. Goddammit, I need her.
Oh her mama. She was beautiful, that wrecked word. It doesn’t even touch what all she was. The photo of her in her dad’s wallet that drew him back from California, back to this town, this farm that had once belonged to her parents. Doe-eyed, dark-lipped, the rest of her life shining forth from her eyes looking up and to the right of the camera.
Into this spiraling silence, her dad’s voice breaks like a clay pigeon, shattering across the air. “Harmon, I can’t let you get married in the church. It’s a sin, being with him. I don’t think any of this is right.” He pauses for a second. Opens his mouth, then closes it. Then he says, “I heard you leave at night, Harmon.”
And the rain has slowed down to hard, staccato bursts, and this is the worst kind of shame, that he said this in front of these ridiculous boys.
“Do you think he’ll be good to you?”
“No. I don’t really think so.” And as soon as she says it, she knows it’s true, is visited by it, this radiating knowledge that doesn’t change a single thing about her plans to marry him.
She met Jimmy at the drugstore in Cordell two months after the funeral. She’d take the Buick after school while her dad was still out with the workers, and she’d sit there at the counter, drinking dun-colored coffee heaped with high piles of sugar and cream. She liked reading the women’s magazines, the articles about skincare regimens and ideas for ways to busy herself creating colorful finger foods for her husband when he got home from work. They made life seem conquerable. She hated being at home. Sometimes Karen and Carolyn would come sit with her, and they’d talk about the boys, but most days they had chores.
The first time Jimmy spoke to her, he sat down next to her and said, “You look like a girl who wants to go to the rodeo with me next weekend.”
She was startled at first, but then she considered his uniform, his cheekbones, his slick smile. She decided she was probably lucky.
“I love the rodeo.”
He put his hand on hers for one jolting moment and asked, “What’s your name?”
She told him, and he said, “Harmon. That’s different.”
“It was my grandpa’s name. And then it was my brother’s name. But he died, so they gave it to me.”
He studied her face. “How old are you, anyway?”
“Fourteen.”
“I would have guessed sixteen at least.” And it was true, she did look older lately, with her face painted up to match the saturated colors of her store-bought clothes. Carolyn had pierced her ears just the week before with an ice pick and an old piece of potato. That fall, instead of winding her wet hair around curlers every night, the way her mama used to do for her, she started getting her hair set once a week at the beauty shop, unsticking it from her scalp in the morning with a pick reeking of Spray Net. She had also stopped wearing her glasses on account of the fact that her homework had always been too easy for her anyway. She looked like her mama now – everyone said so.
“Does that mean you don’t want to take me anymore?”
“You don’t have to be sixteen to go to the rodeo.”
From that point on, all that mattered was Jimmy.
The cellar is getting colder. She can’t sit still, can hardly stand herself, shivering and smelly, her dad’s watchful gaze filling up the room, headache growing more insistent. She gets up to move her body, to look around at all of this detritus the two of them have been avoiding so assiduously. Boxes of quilts bubbled with holes that expose the batting, stiff nursing uniforms that smell like dust and rot, an old black iron that once belonged to her Choctaw great-grandmother. Her mama’s high-school recipe cards, and the coursing energy of her looping scrawl, returned from the dead right there in blue ink. A sack of something lumpy and fetid behind the boxes. Harmon reaches for it, holding her nose as she picks it up, and then dangles it away from her. Onions. A sack of onions. And she can feel a grin spread across her face. What would her mama want with a sack of onions, anyway? She didn’t cook with them.
“Lookit, Daddy. Mama’s got onions down here.”
She holds them up, the stench stinging her nostrils, and he looks pained for a moment, but then he laughs and then laughs again, and he keeps going, far more laughter than she’s comfortable with in her dad, really, these laughs that don’t even work right – he hardly makes any noise and just bats at the air with his hands a little as his face turns red. It’s embarrassing.
Cecil looks over at her dad, elbows Verle, and says, “Don’t take much to get him going, does it? He better quit or he’ll piss hisself,” and then Cecil starts laughing too, showily, Harmon thinks, peacocking for Verle.
Finally, her dad says, “I just knew that’s what it was. Well, Pauline. I swear. Thank you for that. I needed it.”
Harmon sits back down, a lopsided smile finding its way to the disused muscles of her face, and the rain slows to an intermittent tap on the cellar door, and then it stops. Her dad picks up the rifle and blows out the candles, one at a time, smoke tailspinning.
“Well, let’s get, I guess.”
He opens the hatch to the outside, abrupt light closing the aperture of her eyes in a spasm. They climb up the ladder and stand in the driveway, shot through with sunset all at once. The sky is enormous, alien, belonging to some other kind of planet, pressing down on them in pinks and blues and purples. In the mixed‑up landscape of the yard, tree branches, two-by-fours, lawn chairs are stranded wildly, shipwrecked. The air is now sweet and flat and settled. “Guess it missed us,” her dad says. Their overgrown garden sits neglected by the patio, and the silhouettes of something fidgety – rabbits – are shaking the ragged foxtail between the heads of cabbage pocked with dark marks of rot.
“The rabbits came out,” Harmon says, pointing toward them. Her dad looks her in the eyes for a vacant moment, and then, in one floating motion, he lifts the rifle and presses its wooden stock to his cheek, clicks back the hammer, and sends an echoing shot toward the garden. The rabbits scatter.
Her dad turns toward the boys, who look startled, unsure about what happens next, “You boys better get home before I call Clifton Black.”
As she watches their hunched shapes recede toward the road, she hears the far-off hum of an engine growing louder. A new truck is gliding up the road toward the house, crunching the gravel, the thin, twining vocals of a country song blaring distantly. The truck is red and white, flat-nosed, sharp – it’s Jimmy’s new truck, and she jumps to smooth the static of her hair, to wipe the mascara under her eyes onto her thumbs. Her bare feet are caked in dirt, and she hadn’t noticed until now that she’s bleeding from her toe a little, a notch missing from the hard skin above her big toenail. She looks at her dad, picking up the lumber from the yard and putting it back in its pile on the back porch. Her stomach turns over. A hollow, swallowing place opens up in her. What’s he going to do here by himself? She’ll have to come back and visit all the time, then. Dallas is only five hours on the highway, four if you drive real fast. She’ll be back.
Jimmy parks in front of her, gets out of the cab and reaches his hands in the air. “Whew! I did not think I was going to make it. I’ve been trying to call you all week! It just rings and rings.”
And she looks at him, standing underneath the lurid wall of collapsing sky. He doesn’t look quite the way she remembers. The expression on his face is not one she knows.

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“Tornado Season” is Marilyn Manolakas’ first published story.