Forecast Read online

  It was something else, something that happened ten minutes earlier, that the stain-paintings made visible on the underside of my bed. I could trace the image with my fingertip. There was my father telling a madcap story: about Lear in repertory, about traipsing through backwoods Ontario towns in deep mid-winter, about costumes and sets that were lost or mislaid and retrieved. He took on each accent, each voice, he switched roles, he jumped up to shovel snow from the makeshift stage.

  ‘And then Lear came down with the ’flu,’ he said, ‘and the Fool was too drunk to play, and Cordelia was so fed up that she quit on the spot and drove off and left us. Two hours later she came back behind a tow truck – they’d had to pull her out of a drift – but by then I’d put on the Fool’s cap and bells and was doing a one-man show. The town hall was packed. I ran out of stories and jokes at the same time my voice gave out, but then they gave me an encore, and I managed to pull one more anecdote out of the Fool’s pointed hat.’

  ‘You are a man for all seasons, Derek,’ Mr Dreher said.

  ‘He is the perfect gentleman,’ our mother insisted, full of happiness, smiling down the table at my dad. And our father stood and went to her and kissed her on the forehead and brushed a wisp of hair from her eyes. ‘I am a man,’ he said, ‘who’s had more luck than any man deserves.’

  Hurricane Season

  1. Foreplay

  National Weather Service: Francesca passed 200 miles north of the Leeward Islands six hours ago and has been upgraded to a Category 4 hurricane moving west/north-west at a rapid pace. Reconnaissance aircraft estimate wind speeds of 150 mph at flight level. Intensity has remained constant for the last thirty-six hours, but there has been significant expansion of the core and the outer circulation. The eye diameter today is about 30 nautical miles, compared to 20 nm yesterday. If the eyewall contracts again, Francesca may yet intensify to the level of Category 5 and could make landfall within two days. Coastal areas from the Carolinas to Chesapeake Bay are on high alert.

  2. Obsession

  ‘Come and see the Weather Channel, Steven,’ his grandmother urges, but the child at the window is transfixed by the tops of the pines. ‘You can watch the storm coming,’ she promises. She stares at the frothing Atlantic, mesmerised. ‘It’s a satellite picture. Come and see. The ocean is sucking in the sky.’

  A dark fusion of cloud and wave skims a vortex. Writhing sky lunges at ocean; ocean swallows sky. ‘Obsessed,’ the grandmother murmurs, though not to Steven. She thinks of lovers tangled in their sheets.

  ‘The trees are angry,’ Steven cries, his voice high-pitched, breaking a little, snagged on a fear that tastes thrilling. He dare not waver in his vigilance. The pines, immensely tall, are reaching for the house, reaching for him, bending low, thrashing about with their arms. Any second now they will snatch the little cottage up and hurl it at God and Steven will rocket into the secret places of radiance. The thought terrifies him and excites him. He is poised for the end of all things, the spectacular event that is going to happen tonight or tomorrow night, the thing that is even more scarily desirable than a swing that goes higher and higher until it goes right over the top: which is the moment when the swinger disappears. Vanishes. Steven knows this is true because Jimmy Saunders saw it happen to a little girl in the playground after school. One day the little girl was in their class, and then never again. ‘Her swing went over the top,’ Jimmy said. ‘When it came back down, she wasn’t on it.’

  Steven watches the dangerous swirling lure of Francesca’s skirts. He thinks that perhaps he would like going over the top.

  But what if his grandmother and Marsyas were swept away and he was left behind?

  He negotiates with the bucking pines. He implores with his arms, waving back wildly. ‘I will ride you,’ he offers. ‘I will ride you like Marsyas’s grandma did. Don’t smash the house and don’t drown the islands, and I will ride you – me and Marsyas and Grandma – we will ride you out into the Deep and back again.’

  Once, he knows, his grandmother has told him and Marsyas has told him, once upon a time, in the beginning, in the time of the dragons, in the time before hurricanes had names, this has already happened and it will go on happening, every August, every September, this year, last year, one hundred and ten years ago when the big one without a name drowned the islands, and thirty years ago when Hurricane Gretchen roared in, and fourteen years ago when Hugo lashed about and laid waste.

  ‘Look! Look!’ his grandmother says. ‘Come quickly. You can see the eye.’

  Steven tears himself from the window. ‘Is Francesca as big as Hugo?’

  ‘Bigger maybe. She’s already a Category 4.’

  Steven sees the one-eyed giant of the sea: red pupil inside a swirling mustard halo within an angry eyeball of whitish green. ‘Why’s she got a red eye? Is Francesca the Cyclops?’

  His grandmother tousles his hair. ‘Maybe,’ she laughs. ‘That’s a Doppler radar picture. Red is where her energy is.’

  A man stands in front of the eye. ‘Storm Track is monitoring closely,’ the man says gravely. Steven watches the Francesca-Cyclops shrink into a little box in the lower left-hand corner of the screen. ‘If her present speed keeps up …’ the Storm Track man says. Steven only half listens. ‘Already high winds along the coast,’ he hears. ‘Essential that windows be boarded up and adequate supplies of bottled drinking water, batteries, candles …’

  ‘Have we got enough bottles of water?’ Steven asks, shivering.

  His grandmother reaches for him and pulls him onto her lap. ‘We have plenty of everything we need, but if Francesca makes landfall here, it won’t help. We’ll know by tonight or tomorrow morning if we have to evacuate.’

  ‘Did you have to vacuate when Hugo came?’

  ‘Everyone did. The storm surge was fifteen feet high and most of the city was drowned.’

  Steven’s grandmother, and Marsyas too, are surrounded by mist. They smell of the time of the dragons. ‘Tell me about the other hurricane,’ he begs.

  ‘Which one?’

  ‘You know. The biggest one ever. The one without a name.’

  ‘Ask Marsyas,’ his grandmother says, seeing her handyman through the window. ‘In fact, go and tell Marsyas that I want to know why in God’s name he’s still fussing with those wretched magnolias. Tell him to forget the garden and start battening down the hatches, for heaven’s sake. In fact, tell him to get on home to his wife and grandchildren. He’d better board up his own windows.’

  When Steven opens the door, the wind catches it and bangs it back against the outside of the house. ‘I’ll close it, I’ll manage,’ his grandmother says, straining with Francesca. ‘You run and tell Marsyas to get on home while he can.’

  Steven hurls himself into an invisible elastic wall that keeps pushing him back. He gasps. His mouth fills with grit and a grey-green ribbon of Spanish moss.

  ‘Marsyas!’ he coughs, but his words go whipping skyward with the flailing streamers of moss.

  Marsyas is wrestling with the magnolias and the crepe myrtles, lashing old grain sacks around them. ‘Grandma says to stop,’ Steven gasps, pummelling him. ‘She says to go home and batten … and batten your own … because we might have to vacuate.’

  The wind rips a sheet of grain sack from the old man’s hands and it swoops up like a kite. Steven shrieks with excitement. The fabric dips, flutters, bucks upward again, catches on a branch momentarily and then is lofted into the sky like a bird with tattered wings. A piece of roofing tile comes hurtling at Steven, and Marsyas throws himself on top of the boy. ‘Root-cellar,’ something screams in Steven’s ear. He does not know if it is Marsyas or the wind, but Marsyas is crawling and dragging Steven with him the way a mother cat drags her kittens and Marsyas is fighting the bucking root-cellar doors and pushing Steven down the six concrete steps into dark. The air roars. The cellar smells of sweet potatoes and apples and wet pine needles and mould.

  Everywhere, cobwebs touch Steven.

  Spider – the big
gest ever, the one without a name – watches him. Steven can see its red eye.

  The air stops roaring. The quiet is as sudden as the dark.

  ‘Lord be praised,’ Marsyas says, tumbling down against Steven. The boy puts his arms around the old man’s neck and hangs on tightly. ‘That Francesca is one wild woman.’

  ‘Is she wilder than the one without a name?’

  ‘No, not wilder than that. There won’t ever be another one like that.’

  ‘Grandma says to tell me about the one without a name.’

  ‘I told you already one hundred times.’

  ‘Your grandma told you one thousand times.’

  ‘That is the gospel truth, Steven. She did. She remembered that Big Blow all her life.’

  ‘She was seven.’

  ‘Seven years old, same as you.’

  ‘In 1893,’ Steven says.

  ‘Thirty years after the Jubilee.’

  ‘And your grandma was born free.’

  ‘Yes she was. Born free. But the old Slave Mart in Charleston wasn’t even a museum yet, just a market not being used. Took the wrath of God and a mighty wind to wash that market clean.’

  ‘And all the sea islands disappeared.’

  ‘The sea islands sank under the waters for seven days and seven nights, and darkness was upon the face of the deep.’

  ‘What if Francesca drowns the islands?’ Steven whispers.

  ‘She won’t.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘Because the Lord God give my grandmama His sign. That mighty wave come to the top of the pines. My grandmama hold on tight and she pray. Lord save me, she pray, but everywhere she look, she see nothing but ocean and bodies. All drowned.’

  ‘Two thousand people, Grandma said.’

  ‘More’n two thousand,’ Marsyas insists. ‘In one night. All drowned.’

  ‘But not your grandma.’

  ‘Not my grandmama. Her pine tree was torn up by the roots and she sailed it for seven days. No food and no water.’

  ‘Tell about the angel.’

  ‘You know this story better than me.’

  ‘No, you tell, you tell.’

  ‘Well, there was a blinding light all about my grandmama, like to the radiance of the Lord God of Hosts. Her skin was on fire, my grandmama say. She was burning up. The crust of salt on her arms was thicker than grits.’

  ‘And hard as a shell.’

  ‘Harder than crabshell.’

  ‘And shone like diamonds,’ Steven says.

  ‘And shone like phosphorus on the sea.’

  ‘She thought she was a fish,’ Steven prompts.

  ‘She thought God had caught her on His line. She thought she had swum to the end of days and the pearly gates.’

  ‘And then, and then?’

  ‘She saw an angel come stepping across the waves.’

  Steven claps his hands. ‘And the angel came on board her pine tree and said unto her: I will guide you home.’

  ‘Amen,’ Marsyas says. ‘And she came to safe harbor in the old Slave Mart itself, washed clean. And the waters receded and the islands rose back out of the sea as it was in the beginning. Now and ever shall be. And we better get you back inside the house or your grandmama going to have a fit.’

  3. Point of No Return

  ‘Marsyas, for God’s sake, get home while you can. Steven, your mother’s on the phone. She wants to talk to you.’

  ‘And who is going to board up your windows, Miz Leah, if I don’t do it?’ Marsyas wants to know.

  ‘It might have been more sensible,’ Leah points out, ‘to have spent less time on the damned crepe myrtles. And who’s going to board your own windows?’

  ‘Grandsons, Miz Leah. Teenagers now. You are forgetting. Those boys already bought enough sheets of ply—’

  ‘It’s getting too dark now anyway. If we don’t get evacuation orders by morning, you can do it then, but for heaven’s sake, go. Just help me get this door closed first. You push from outside.’

  She feels the heft of Marsyas against the wood. She slides the bolt home. Francesca hurls imprecations, flaunting herself on the screen porch. In the hush that follows the closing of the door, Leah hears Steven say: ‘But I don’t want to. I want to stay with Grandma.’

  Leah watches the way her grandson concentrates, frowning, his whole body engaged in the listening. She would like to bolt plywood sheets around the delicate outer edges of his days. She would like to wrap him in silk.

  ‘But it won’t,’ he says. ‘Marsyas told me. And they’ll vacuate us if it gets … But Mommy …!’

  There is a longish silence. Steven is pouting, biting his lip.

  ‘Hi, Daddy,’ he says, his voice flat. There is another silence. ‘Yes,’ Steven says, dully. ‘Yes, I am a little bit scared, but Daddy …’

  Leah watches him trying to explain. She can feel his thoughts on her nerve ends. I like it, he is thinking. When I’m with Grandma and Marsyas, I’m not frightened when I’m frightened. It’s something else and I like it.

  ‘It’s like … it’s like …’ he says, groping for words that the wind keeps snatching, ‘it’s like going very high on the swing—

  ‘Yes, but—

  ‘Yes, Grandma’s here, but Daddy—

  ‘Yes.

  ‘Daddy wants to talk to you,’ he says, extending the receiver.

  Leah watches her grandson press his face against the windowpane. She watches the way his arms lift and sway. Sign language, she thinks. He believes he can talk to the trees.

  Steven shivers and hugs himself.

  ‘I’m sorry, what …? Oh. Yes,’ Leah says, contrite. ‘Of course, if that’s what you think is best. It just didn’t occur to me you’d be so worried.

  ‘Yes, but you see—

  ‘So many of them miss us, you know,’ she explains. ‘They swing south at the eleventh hour, or they swing north-east and never make landfall at all.

  ‘No, no, it’s just … there’s been no evacuation order yet, but of course I’ll … Oh, she’s already—? That settles it then. Steven, can you hand me a pen?’

  His grandmother copies down a number. ‘We can make it, I think,’ she says. ‘I’ll just grab an overnight bag for him and send the rest of his stuff up later.’

  She hangs up. She shows Steven the scrap of paper. ‘Your mother’s booked your flight home. This is the reservation number for your ticket,’ she tells him. ‘We’ve got to be at the airport in an hour.’

  ‘But I don’t want to go,’ Steven says.

  ‘Your parents are worried sick. They’ve been watching the weather reports. Run and get some clothes. I’ll call the airport to find out if your flight is on time.’

  Steven stops at the turning of the stair. Through the small casement window on the landing – the sill is higher than the top of his head – he can see the furious sky and the tossing crowns of the pines. He wants to ride them. He can feel the rush of the branches lifting. He imagines riding the storm surge with dolphins. He imagines his thighs brushing the moon.

  He believes he could fly.

  ‘Steven!’ his grandmother calls. ‘Listen to this! They’ve closed the airport. I’ll have to break the news to your parents.’

  Steven feels his heart shoot upwards the way the grain-sacking was lifted from Marsyas’s hands. Laughter inhabits him. He swings one leg over the banister and careens down, bumping over the corner-post moulding. He lands with a thump at his grandmother’s feet.

  ‘I’m afraid the phone lines are down already,’ she sighs. ‘I can’t call them back. We’re cut off.’

  Steven’s eyes glitter. His grandmother smiles and puts a finger to her lips.

  4. Evacuation Advisory

  ‘It now seems certain,’ the man on Storm Track says, ‘that Francesca will make landfall within twenty-four hours. Coastal airports have been closed and evacuation will become mandatory as of seven o’clock tomorrow morning. Evacuation routes and reverse-lane changes are being posted …’


  ‘Will Marsyas drive us?’ Steven asks.

  ‘No. I’ll drive. Marsyas never leaves. Even for Hugo, he wouldn’t leave. Your parents will be watching this on the Weather Channel though. They’ll be so relieved.’

  ‘The man said we have to.’

  ‘Yes, it’s the law. The National Guard will come knocking, door to door.’

  ‘So how come Marsyas—?’

  ‘Oh, he’ll hide somewhere. There are always people who won’t leave. They feel just as safe here. They feel safe wherever they are.’

  ‘The Governor has announced that one eastbound lane will be kept open for emergency vehicles,’ the Storm Track man says. ‘All other lanes on the Interstate are for inland-bound traffic.’

  ‘Marsyas thinks he’s got a special arrangement with hurricanes,’ Leah says. ‘He believes he can talk to them.’

  ‘He can,’ Steven says. ‘Like his grandma.’

  ‘According to Marsyas, hurricanes speak Gullah,’ Leah laughs. ‘Like the island people.’ She raises her eyebrows and cups a hand behind one ear, listening to the noisy patois of the wind.

  ‘I can speak some Gullah. Marsyas taught me.’

  ‘Did he indeed?’

  ‘There has been much criticism of the Governor,’ the Storm Track man says. ‘Charges are flying … many claim that the order to evacuate has been left too late.’

  ‘Grandma?’

  ‘Hmm?’

  ‘Couldn’t we stay here with Marsyas?’

  His grandmother folds him in her arms. She smiles and puts a finger on his lips. ‘And just what would your parents say to that?’

  ‘How will they know?’ he whispers.

  ‘We interrupt this announcement,’ the Storm Track man says, ‘to warn that the Carolinas have now been placed on Hurricane Watch, the highest state of alert. Many think this is far too late, given what happened with Dana last year. Impossible congestion on the Interstate, gridlock from Hilton Head to the Georgia border. A highway patrolman, on condition of anonymity, said angrily: “You can’t move several hundred thousand people at a moment’s—”’

  A soft popping sound floats from the mouth of the Storm Track man. For a moment, he glows like phosphorus and then the television screen goes dark. Every light in the house blinks off. The air-conditioner groans and shudders and dwindles into a trembling that Steven can feel in the floorboards before it goes silent and still.