It isn’t that the old ones, particularly Gordy and Nancy Butler who live year-round on the lake, aren’t expecting a storm. They’re just not expecting this one. They don’t deserve it, having already coped inside their pine and maple forest with downed electrical lines season after season. Ice storms, windstorms, lightning strikes—they’ve had plenty. It isn’t that they aren’t hardy or hale enough to form chainsaw teams and dedicate themselves to downing, splitting, and shredding the debris. Hell, between them and the neighbors they have seven Stihl’s, three Husqvarna’s, and four Poulan’s—all gas-powered, chains in good order. No, what’s about to undo them this time is the storm itself, its purging hand and portending voice, the possibility that it will not run out of rain.
Nancy notices the lightning before Gordy does. Competing with the big screen TV, it’s streaking across the skin of the lake with an opaque but clear-edged luminosity, north to north-east. “Oh, would you look at that!” she nudges his foot on the ottoman.
He startles from his evening nap. “What?” Even when he hears her, he says, ‘What?’.
“Would you look at that?” she says again, unsure of which case this is—did he hear her without listening or vice versa? No matter. Repeating themselves is the rap poetry of their marriage. Good—he’s awake.
In fact, he sits bolt upright, swings his legs around and goes over to their sliding doors. She mutes the TV and joins him. “Weather Channel never mentioned no storm.” He unlocks the latch. As they step onto the deck, static electricity zings their shirts. Her wispy hair rises straight up as though she’s upside down and hanging from her feet. Gordy gives her little show a side-eyed glance and takes it as a barometric indicator. “Five minutes,” he says, “we’ll give it five minutes. Then we get ready.”
The air is growing chillier, the wind wilder. Hand in hand, they step closer to the edge and palm the railing. “Don’t they look nice?” she says of the just-pruned junipers. Rustling below the shimmering firmament, they take on the aspect of bears coming down from the ridge to sniff out the pantry window. Easy pickings in there. Mental note: fix that rickety window. Her mind is all over the place.
Gordy’s transitional glasses don’t know whether to darken or lighten and settle on a steely sheen. Their insides show him the door-wall at his back, mirrored against the Maples down on the shore—those mighty, broad-shouldered guardians of paradise. Comprehending what’s ahead and behind has always been Gordon’s gift. A prophet is what he is.
Wordlessly, they step back inside and head to the kitchen to charge their equipment. Cabin lights are doubling on the lake’s surface and Plan B is going into effect—for with wind and rain, come power failures. “Like carrying an umbrella when it’s gonna rain,” Gordy says of Plan B. “Notice how it never rains when you carry one?”
Nancy, as all who live in close quarters with prophets and never tire of eating chips and dip at their side while watching Columbo reruns are prone to do, falls for the error in his cliché. Oh, he’s full of clichés. She is too, full of his clichés. Small price…. In the entire twenty years since they’ve been retired, the worst that’s happened to their sweet place, including the kids’ treehouse in the 300-year-old Silver Maple, was when the popup-tent inflated with pre-storm wind and sailed over the treetops to oblivion, their best blow-up mattress inside. Preparedness is everything.
Flashlights next to matches, batteries and candles on the countertop, Gordy unhooks the electric garage door handle, so he’ll be able to raise the heavy square of steel by hand if necessary. In case the pump goes, she fills the bathtub, so they’ll still be able to, you know, flush the commodes with buckets.
When they meet back at the kitchen island, he pours a double shot of whiskey in her coffee mug. “Slàinte,” she clinks the ironstone against his pewter shot glass.
“Yep,” Gordy agrees.
“Did you…—?”
“Yep, it’s in the woodstove,” referring to the rack for the coffee pot.
Flash! Then, blinding lightning. Three seconds later, boom! Thunder rumbles underfoot. Boom! Boom! Boom! Another flash. Next, silence. Then, an ear-splitting crack, which they both recognize as the elongated sound of lightning severing a tree. Crown to root-ball. As the goliath begins its descent, the smell of searing bark rises. The sky is falling! But where? Which tree? The one over the bedroom wing? The shed? My God. Then they know which one. The landmark Maple over the main truss.
As if exploding from the inside, the tree’s head comes off first, then its shoulders and its torso. At least that’s what it sounds like from below, like many trees being felled, but it’s probably just the one losing its life by decree of Zeus himself. Nancy screams. She just screams. Gordy may be shouting, she can’t tell because he has draped himself over her. The smell of his whiskey breath is oddly comforting. After a pause, they rise out of their crouching positions, eyes deadlocked on each other’s because whatever’s afoot has not yet run its course.
When the power does go out, the removal of noise is a collective shut-down, not just inside their place but all across the lake, as if electrons have stilled, and protons don’t know what to do with themselves, or stunned humans for that matter. The wool of quiet muffles their senses until crickets, rustling leaves, one nervous owl and constant low-rolling thunder start up. None is a manmade sound. Still, in the sudden darkness both inside and outside the house, the calm seems unnatural. Next, not as a cause of anything, but as a delayed response, comes the clatter of rain. A minute later, an undeterred wall of water is streaming down windows and sliding across the deck, plinking the surface of the lake, though how can it? How can water splash when meeting itself, but that’s what it’s doing.
Nancy finds her voice. “Are we alright?”
Gordy palpates her shoulders to see if anything’s amiss, clunking her on the neck with the flashlight and reports that his toe hurts. “Something fell on it. I think it’s broken.” “Which one?”
“The left one.”
“Turn on the flashlight.”
When he does, they sense a new presence. Something huge pressing inward, breathing, growing, rustling, forking down the attic stairs into the vestibule, winding its bony fingers through knotholes in the pine paneling of the pantry and sighing as if it’s just come to terms with its own predicament. Nancy grabs the torch from Gordy and swings the beam wide. With a desperate groan, the ceiling in the great room gives way, and the beast breaks through the drywall’s-skin like a dinosaur through an egg. One more deadening boom and the massive hunk of rough-skinned tonnage is on the floor, feet up on the ottoman, limbs shuddering, leaves, branches, sinews, and smoking bark, immense and magnificent.
This time, Gordy and Nancy holler in unison. Their prized Maple has them, and they have it, and it is raining inside their home. “What’s that?” Nancy tips her head to an odd pop and crackle noise.
All Gordy can think to say is, “We’ll have enough kindling for years,” his mouth is less crooked than usual as he witnesses the impossible collision of elements—rain failing to douse the fire, fire consuming damp Maplewood, steam rising from the ottoman. In fact, hotspots are all around them, like chunks of fallen stars.
“Sush!” There’s shouting. Someone ramming a door. With a divided mind—one that is both out on the front porch and inside Gordy’s sheltering arms because he’s still hanging onto her—she further thinks that the entrance is probably blocked by the tree in the same way that the sliding doors are. The neighbors will fail. “What?” she turns to him.
“I said, I love you, Nancy.”
Something about the way he says it makes her bust out laughing and that makes him begin to cry. So often, she has wanted him to say those words—to say them when nothing is wrong, to say them with abandon, and he picks now. She’ll take them, save them up for later. Wiping his tears with both her thumbs, she explains quietly, in case he hadn’t noticed, “The house is on fire, Gordon, we have to get out.”
He sighs comprehendingly. Hobbled by his sore toe, he makes wet sounds on the floor while heading to the broom closet, then hands her a pair of ice cleats and grabs his own. “Cleats?” she asks incredulously.
He nods somberly and waves them at her. He’ll have a good reason for them, won’t he? She raids the junk drawer and swiftly seals chargers, phones, checkbooks, and thumb drives inside plastic freezer baggies. They stuff the lot in their pockets before pulling rain ponchos over their dampening clothes. Inanely, Gordy walks in a circle near the big screen TV as if he’d like to harness it on his back. But no. Alas, the cleats are for their Crocs, and they begin climbing the tree, their ancient, once-living tower-to-heaven.
Gordy goes first, then gives Nancy a hand-up. “Have you got it? Are you good? Can you do another set?” With each step and shift, he repeats the question. A bashed-up Lego box dislodges from one of the limbs and flops soggily onto the carpet. The tree-fort is no more.
“Keep going!” she shouts so he’ll hear her and not have to lose his grip by turning around to see where exactly on the slippery furrows of the bark she is, between which charred valley or stub or burl she has placed her feet. All he can see of her is the hood of her poncho and the bulge of her shoulders. Were it not for the flames leaping everywhere the rain can’t reach, he’d unseal his phone and take a shot. She looks like a giant flying squirrel. He hopes he’ll remember to tell her this later. She’ll get a kick out of it.
Having never beheld the old Maple from this angle, kind of sideways as if the two of them are freed from gravity and climbing El Capitan in Yosemite again, Nancy marvels at how easily she is pushing off from her feet in response to his movements. They aren’t making love, actually, but this is definitely a love tango. If they slip, so what? They’ll recover and climb, climb, climb, using branches for handholds. Shoving insulation and shingles out of their path, they will emerge through that hole in the ceiling like soggy mountain climbers.
Meanwhile, half the residents from around the lake are in some state of climbing into or out of Gordy and Nancy Butler’s home to rescue them. But there’s no need. Heaving their bodies through the open gully in the roofline, the couple stands upright before the multitudes. Wearing broken tree branches, their ponchos are slick and flapping in the wind, Gordy’s glasses flashing with firelight. Illumined by the light show, they look like gods. In some extraordinary manner involving too many people, the endangered pair is guided down a wobbly ladder to stand on shaky legs. Together with the others, they watch the fall of the house of Butler. Some of the women are crying, but not Gordy and not Nancy, not yet.
Their future may be unfathomable, that is true, but they do understand their situation. They belong to this storm, to this temple of what was and what will be, and although the bears, in a manner of speaking, have indeed brought mayhem to their world, the exhilaration of survival will see them through. Nevertheless, when someone tries to wrap Nancy in dry towels, she elbows them away, not wanting to let go of Gordy’s hand. She’s worried about his toe.
Across the street where a reclusive neighbor lives, there’s a lawn sculpture made of whirring windmill blades. Absurdly, or expectedly, depending on how you think of these things, it has created a tempest in a tempest. The owner has never spoken to the Butlers or even waved back at them. Too shy or too mean. But right now, he is staring brokenheartedly into Nancy’s eyes.
She breaks the ice. “You got any whiskey over there?”
“By God, I do,” he says, putting out his arm for Nancy and escorting her out of the fray toward his garage. Gordy hesitates. He wants to say a few words to the gang and climbs into the flatbed of someone’s pickup truck; he’s a climber now. A dozen cellphones bathe him in a white beam. Rubbing his chin and shifting off his bad toe he waves them closer. They start to chuckle. They know Gordy Butler and his jokey personality.
“Me and Nancy, we’re so grateful to you. We’re alive. Right?” He’s weeping again, but who can tell?
“Right!” the gang shouts in unison.
“You know what this means, don’t ya?
“No!” the crowd goads.
“We’re pilgrims now. We plan to sleep around.”
“And we get first dibs,” yells Francine from two doors down.
“Keep in mind, we take our coffee black and percolated. None of that fancy stuff. 8 AM on the dot. And Columbo. We watch Columbo. 9 PM. And we make love every day at 3 PM.”
“Aw, go on!” It’s his bride.
His smile fades as he turns to look at the smoldering mess, and someone has to help him get down from the truck.
“Ready?” the heretofore quiet guy is still glued to Nancy’s arm. “You come along too, Mr. Butler.”
“You’re damn right, I’m coming along.”
“Nancy’s poncho pocket starts ringing. “That’ll be the kids.” (Francine must have called them.) “I’ll let them know we’re okay. That we will rebuild. Here. On our lake.”
“Yep,” Gordy says. It’s an idea he cannot fathom.
