Fever (14 page)

He began to make out the constellations that he had been looking at from this window ever since he was a child. He traced their shapes and grew calmer. Behind him, the house was silent, no knocking, no unexplained creaks, no glasses tinkling in the cupboards. A blurred star hung so low on the horizon that it might have been resting on the hilltops. He watched it, thinking, is that a star or a light? But no, it was late, and the constellations wheeling through the sky were circling lower, beginning to set. He wondered why its light wasn’t diamond-hard and clear like the other stars, but instead, had a smeared look. Mist rising off the hills, he supposed, then snorted. It takes moisture to make mist, he reminded himself, and there sure as hell wasn’t any moisture out there. Or maybe there was a smear on the window that he couldn’t see in the dark.

In the morning the wind had resumed howling around the house, scudding small clouds of dust across the yard or whipping up whirlwinds that raced down the road and played themselves out in the fields. And yet the heat was incredible, had been record-breaking for days

“Sleep well?” he asked Frannie who was at the stove cooking him eggs.

“Mmm hmmm,” she said. “I didn’t hear anything, did you?”

“Not a sound,” he said. “House was quiet last night.”

Gabe turned on the radio. It was getting so he could hardly stand the lack of voices in the house. All the time he’d been growing up there’d been his mother and father and his two sisters to make a racket. He and Frannie couldn’t make enough noise to fill one room. He wondered suddenly if the house had always had strange noises in it and they’d never heard them
because they were making so much noise themselves. Could be, he thought, and there wasn’t even a drought then.

Abruptly the wind rose with a screech, batting against the walls and the roof.

“Wow, look at that!” he said, and jumped up to look out the window above the sink. A huge dust devil, a whirling cone of dirt, grass, weeds and small stones was bearing down on the house from the field to the west. “Quick, shut the door.” Frannie did so quickly, then came to stand beside him to see what it was he’d seen. “It must be a hundred feet high,” he said. It was on them that quickly, a roar of sound, the view from the window blanked out by a wall of beige dust and then it was gone, one Russian thistle hitting the window, then falling away. It roared across the yard. “That was goddamn near a twister!” he said.

As if from a great distance he heard the radio announcer say, “Damage was severe in towns for fifty miles along the river.” He held himself still, not even breathing as the announcer went on to describe a tornado that had torn the roofs off barns, flattened steel bins and destroyed houses in a swath a mile wide fifty miles to the north of them.

It seemed to him for an instant that the world must be coming to an end: the terrifying heat that wouldn’t let anything live, the insane winds, the lack of rain that went on for longer than anybody could remember. He tried to picture what the people in the cities were doing this morning—going to work, drinking coffee, riding bicycles, making deals.

Frannie threw her arms around him and looked up into his face. “Oh, Gabe, don’t,” she begged, and he wondered what he had been doing.

“Come to town with me today,” he said.

“Yes,” she said at once, frightened.

He took her into the cafe, making an occasion of it, insisting they each have a hamburger though they could ill afford it. He was cheerful, making her laugh, inviting people they knew who passed their booth to sit for a minute, encouraging her to chat. Afterward he went with her to the grocery store while she bought a few things and then insisted she come with him to the hardware store where he intended to pick up some shingle nails so he could fix the roof.

“What is that?” Frannie said.

“What?” he asked, stopping in the middle of the sidewalk, knowing even as he said it what she was referring to. In the distance they could hear the low roll and boom of what sounded like thunder. “Maybe it’s going to rain,” he suggested, half-kidding.

“Rain!” she said. “There isn’t even a cloud in the sky.” They looked up as though they had never seen the sky before. From horizon to horizon it was perfectly clear. Further down the street a cluster of men had come out of the cafe and were peering up too, their hands in their pockets. At the beauty parlour across the street the two hairdressers in their sundresses gazed up at the sky, shading their eyes with their hands, while the hot wind whipped their skirts. The sound faded out, then rose again above the steady whistle of the wind.

“Sounds like thunder,” a man they hadn’t even noticed standing beside them, said, his voice incredulous.

“Can’t be,” Gabe said. Nobody spoke, and slowly the sound died away. One by one the people who had gathered outside went back to what they had been doing. Gabe held the door of the hardware store open for Frannie and then followed her in.

“Maybe I could use a new mixing bowl,” Frannie said absently, as if she were thinking about something else.

“Hi, Gabe, how you doing, Fran,” Arvid, the owner of the
store said. He was sitting in front of his new computerized cash register working the keys and occasionally stopping to thumb through a pile of bills beside him on the counter. He paused and rested his hands on the keyboard. Gabe said, “Hot day.”

“Sure is,” Arvid said. “What was that noise I heard out there?” Frannie wandered over to the side of the store that displayed kitchenware.

“Don’t know what it was,” Gabe said. Another man, someone Gabe knew to see but whose name he couldn’t recall, came in and leaned on the counter beside Gabe. While they chatted, Gabe watched Frannie out of the corner of his eye. She lifted a plate from a rack and turned it over to read the writing on the underside. He turned his attention back to the men.

“Business must be good,” the newcomer was saying, “if you can afford one of them things.” Arvid snorted.

“I’m part of a chain,” he said, “and if the head office says I gotta have one of these, then I gotta have one.” He swivelled back to the cash register and began to press the buttons again. Suddenly there was a tremendous boom, Gabe felt the floor heave under his feet, the cash register made a poof sound followed by a rapid sizzle and Arvid slumped forward onto it. Gabe grabbed the counter to steady himself and only then noticed that the other man was on his knees on the floor, already beginning to get up.

Gabe rushed to Frannie who had dropped and broken the plate. As soon as he touched her tears began to ooze from her eyes as she stared up at him, eyes wide and mouth trembling. He turned and saw through the window that people were clustering in front of the store and that Arvid had recovered, was standing, holding his head.

“Sit down, sit down,” he shouted to Frannie, although there was nowhere for her to sit, and rushed outside.

The people who had appeared out of nowhere to gather in front of the hardware store were staring downward this time, at the sidewalk. Gabe stared down too. There was a jagged, circular hole a couple of inches in diameter in the cement sidewalk in just about the place he and Frannie had been standing a moment or two before. Deep cracks ran out in several directions from it.

There were confused exclamations and a babble of voices. The word, ‘lightning,’ emerged and was repeated and people began to look upward again. But again there was nothing to be seen except a few wispy white clouds floating harmlessly in the distance.

Still Frannie did not say, I want out of here, get me out of here, and Gabe was grateful to her for that. Soon enough, he replied grimly to himself, when he could tell what she was thinking. Soon enough.

But still he couldn’t bring himself to make specific plans for what they would do when the final foreclosure notice came. Exactly how much money would he have in his pocket the day they would have to pack their suitcases, get in the truck and drive away for good? And to where would they drive? He knew he should be driving into town everyday, buying the city newspapers and studying the want ads. He should have made a trip to the city already to size up the job situation first hand and to check into places to live. He knew he should have everything set up and ready to go for Frannie’s sake and for the sake of the child she wasn’t even carrying yet. He supposed that deep inside he was still hoping for a reprieve even though he knew perfectly well that none would come. And lightning out of a clear sky now.

It was three or four in the morning and he was standing at the window in the front room again, looking out at the stars. He thought of the blurred star he had seen hanging over the hills,
but tonight it wasn’t there. But of course, it was later now than when he had seen it before and it might have set.

It was still out and very dark. The stars kept their clarity even in the drought and shone, if anything, more fiercely than usual. He became aware of a moving point of light and thought, a plane, a satellite, a shooting star.

He watched. The light grew brighter as if it were coming nearer. It dipped, then rose again and its hard white light changed to a greenish shade. He stared hard, not taking his eyes off it. It lowered itself into the hills where he liked to walk, almost as if it were resting on top of one of them, but it was too dark for him to make out the horizon so he couldn’t tell if it was in the sky or on a hilltop. It grew brighter, raised, lowered a little, and remained still. It occurred to Gabe that nobody could drive a vehicle up there, and that no star behaved in such a way. Gradually he realized that there was a good chance he was seeing a UFO. This didn’t alarm him, since peculiar lights in the sky were not unknown in the region, and besides, he felt safe here in his own house. He watched.

After a while he heard in his head, or somehow knew, since there was no voice and no sound, ‘we’re leaving now.’ So he watched with renewed concentration. Soon the lights around the object, he could tell now it was an object, burned red and for an instant he thought he saw them as several evenly spaced red lights around a circular rim. Then it rose a short distance, hovered, in a split second grew smaller, and disappeared.

He searched the sky, but all he could see were the constellations shining immovably in the blackness. He couldn’t hear a sound.

The next evening he walked up to the place in the hills where he judged the light must have been. He only half-believed in what he’d seen and he walked thoughtfully, no longer able to screen out the ache in his gut where the impending loss of his
farm sat now all the time. What will we do? Where will we go? It seemed to him that he loved even the Russian thistle blown several feet thick up against his fence line, threatening to topple it, that he loved even the stone piles gathered with such pain into the corners of his fields, even the dirt so dry that it no longer held together when he took up a handful of it, even the great cracks in the prairie that he had to step over. Every step of the way was pain and sorrow-filled, his own, private
via dolorosa.

When he reached the hill where he thought the UFO had landed, he stood on its crown and tried to line up the right section of the far off front room window with the right spot on the hill. When he was satisfied, he began to walk, carefully studying the ground. In just about the right place he found two rocks—he couldn’t think what they were called, sandstone or shale, but they looked as though they had been formed by the compression of soil from the hill. They had each been about the size of a breadbox and both of them had been shattered, the small broken chips were scattered down the hillside for a couple of feet below each rock. He squatted and lifted a couple of the broken pieces. Each of them left a slight imprint in the soil where it had lain. He studied them. They looked as though they’d been rained on and something in them had leached out and stained the ground a rusty colour.

But he had seen shattered rocks before, he thought, although not in this particular stretch of hills. It was said that the frost shattered them. Perhaps it had and what he thought he’d seen the night before was only an illusion he’d thrown up himself.

Ah, Gabriel, he said, you’re losing your mind.

Suddenly it occurred to him to wonder who the ghosts were that bothered them. He’d never thought of that before, had thought of them only as disembodied things that made noises in the night, that tried to wake them, that seemed intent on scaring
them. And he had blamed Frannie for them. Now he wondered if they had anything to do with Frannie, if maybe the ghosts were trying to tell them something that they couldn’t understand, or were trying to alert them. His mother and father maybe, or his grandparents who couldn’t sleep either because the world they’d left behind was no longer recognizable.

He rose slowly, painfully, and began to walk again. He went toward the highest hill, for some reason craving height and more height, wanting a clear view of his place nearly a mile away, sitting so small in the big landscape. To the west the sun was dropping lower, had almost disappeared behind the rim of the earth. It was a blazing, fiery red with a golden edge to it where it touched the hills and now it seemed the margin would ignite, the fire would burst out and consume the earth.

He found a large rock, one that came to mid-thigh with a depression in the bare soil all around it where cattle had once stood to use it for a rubbing stone, and before his cattle and his father’s and his grandfather’s, buffalo had used it. He leaned his buttocks against it, half-sitting, and was surprised to find it was warm, still radiating heat from the sun. He wondered how far inside it the heat had penetrated.

The rock was granite and that peculiar shade of pink with minute points of light in it and other, equally small points of black. He swivelled and ran his hand over its hard, rough surface and noticed for the first time how it was almost covered with patches of ivory-coloured lichen and patches of the palest green.

It struck him then that the rock was a beautiful thing, miraculous, and that it had sat in this spot for a very long time, so long that he couldn’t imagine all the years it must have been there. He stood, then squatted on the ground beside it, put his arm around it, and lay his head against the bulge of its side.