The Seal Wife - Kathryn Harrison [21]
Because she wasn’t frightened, he wasn’t, either. She told him stories about past storms: chickens dropping naked from the sky, alive, with every last feather torn off; a field planted with a burst sack of seed corn, not in rows, of course, but, “tidy,” she said, “you’d be surprised how tidy and even.” To hear her talk it was as if tornadoes were invented for amusement, the redistribution of tools and toys, improvements in landscaping.
“Good,” she said the next day, looking into the hole where the cottonwood had been. “I never liked that tree. Took up too much sun, and now I can plant flowers closer to the house.”
The dust was so bad that Bigelow could hardly breathe, but he picked up shingles and shards of glass, he swept and stacked and helped her hang her gate back on its post. “I’m all right,” he told his grandmother, but she made him lie down in the parlor.
She gave him the almanac to read, and he looked up the date of the twister. Fair skies return, it said, and it called the day favorable for planting root crops and reminded readers to set their strawberry plants. He showed her the page and she laughed.
“There’s not a soul who can predict the weather,” she said.
On the farm down the road, a man had died, tossed with tables and chairs into the hungry sky. He came down, and they put him in a box and put the box on a wagon. Bigelow and his grandmother came to the gate and watched the wagon go by. A woman was driving, holding the reins in her white church gloves. Sitting next to the box were the man’s three children, silent and scrubbed, wearing their best clothes.
“They have no shoes,” Bigelow said, referring to the children. He pulled at his grandmother’s sleeve. “How can they go without shoes?” He tried to imagine himself, barefoot, at his father’s funeral. His mother’s gloves were dark gray, almost black, with three buttons at the wrist. He’d watched how she held her hands absolutely still; they didn’t move at all.
His grandmother didn’t say anything. Behind the wagon’s wheels, dust rose and then settled.
He saw his grandmother without clothes. He still remembers that. It was late and she thought he was asleep, she didn’t shut the door to her room. She was skinny and wrinkly and didn’t seem to have a proper backside, and immediately he confused her with the rain of plucked chickens.
Even now he can’t think of her without seeing her drop naked from above.
THE DAY BIGELOW CHOOSES for the maiden flight, September 8, is so warm he walks up the bluff without a coat, wading through high yellow grass, carrying a handheld anemometer in a rucksack on his back, as well as theodolite, pen, and his field book in which to record notes—wind speeds, line lengths, angles of incidence. With these numbers, and factoring in the curve of the line based on the speed of the wind, he’ll use a sine table to estimate the height his kite reaches.
The shed and launch platform look sturdy, and Bigelow congratulates himself on their construction, all those nails pounded straight on the rock outside the station door. The reel isn’t finished, and the piano wire he ordered has yet to arrive. He won’t send up instruments, because what’s the point? He doesn’t have what he needs to get the kite high enough to collect data.
What he does have is gut, the same that the island people use for fishing. Not smooth like the strings of a tennis racket or a fiddle, but strong—it bears the weight of a seal fighting for its life. And it’s cheap. Bigelow buys several thousand feet worth, testing each inch, running the oily lengths of it through his fingers, holding down one end with the toe of his boot and pulling as hard as he can on the other, tying and