Gone Crazy in Alabama

  Fern and I huddled together, and Vonetta, determined to not huddle with us, stayed over in her own corner of the room.

  I didn’t care how mad Vonetta was. I started to miss her so I said, “Come over here with us.”

  “Yeah, meanie. Come over.”

  Vonetta didn’t even bother to say no. She just wrapped herself in her blanket and turned her back to us.

  “Be that way,” I said.

  “Be,” Fern echoed.

  We had electrical storms in Brooklyn but nothing to confirm God’s anger. Blasts of white gold blazed through the dark, and we covered our ears to brace for the thunder. First the sound of the earth being cracked open like a walnut, followed by booms big enough to move the house.

  Each time the lightning cracked and the thunder boomed, Fern and I hugged tighter. Surely, Vonetta would forget being angry and scoot our way so we could be scared together.

  Black Pocahontas stayed wrapped in her blanket teepee pretending to be unafraid. I don’t remember the thunder and lightning ending but through it all, we’d fallen asleep.

  In the morning when I woke up, Vonetta was gone.

  Gone

  There was no Vonetta in the bathroom, only signs that she had just been there. Her face towel was damp and she’d left a fresh gob of toothpaste on the sink’s porcelain. I stuck my head in every room in the house but there was no Vonetta. Boy, was she going to get it from me. I didn’t care how angry she was with Fern and me. She knew better than to go marching over the creek walkway to be with her beloved Trotters.

  But just to check that she was really gone, I ran out to the henhouse. No Vonetta. I looked up to the cradle of my pecan tree, expecting to see her grinning down to show me I wasn’t the only one who could climb a tree, and then I was really angry at her. I felt myself breathing fast and heavily. Wait until she comes walking into the house. I’d make her sorry she left without telling me. Boy, would she be sorry.

  I had been shaking my fist, thinking of all kinds of punishments for Vonetta. Then I stopped. Something about the side of the henhouse caught my attention. I looked for the something without really knowing what I was looking for. Then it came to me: Last night, before we went inside from having been over the creek, Vonetta had leaned the bike against the henhouse. The bike was the missing thing. The bike was gone.

  From there I saw fresh bicycle tracks baked into the dirt. I followed them, expecting they’d lead me to the pines toward the creek, but they stopped at the road. She hadn’t gone toward Miss Trotter’s home. She was headed in the opposite direction!

  A queasiness came over me and I felt weak-kneed. As sure as anger rose up in me, a sick feeling took it sliding back down. My sister. My sister. My sister is gone.

  “Vonetta! VON-ET-TAAA!”

  Big Ma came outside through the back in her housedress and Mr. Lucas came out on his porch and leaned against the post.

  “Delphine. What do you mean by this noise? Waking up the neighbors. Lord, here he comes.” Big Ma started to pat her scarf and wig in place and fluff her housedress.

  Mr. Lucas was on his way over. His walk was more urgent than Big Ma’s. He must have heard my panic when Big Ma could hear only noise. I tried to tell Big Ma Vonetta was missing but she could only fuss about Mr. Lucas coming and I had to yell at her to make her hear me.

  “Quiet! Quiet, Big Ma. Quiet! PLEASE.”

  “Girl, who do you—”

  “Vonetta’s gone, Big Ma,” I said quickly. “Vonetta took the bike. She’s gone.”

  Big Ma shook her head to the contrary. “Gone, nothing! That child rode that bicycle across the creek to fool with her cousin and Miss Trotter.”

  “That’s what I thought. But look! See the tire tracks, Big Ma? They’re going the other way. To town.”

  Big Ma looked down at the dirt tracks. She saw where they were headed. I heard a small but deep moan seep from her. Big Ma stepped away from me and started turning in circles, wringing her hands. Mr. Lucas was there to catch her and make her stop turning in circles. But she pushed away from him and tried to gather herself. Even though she’d heard me and seen the tracks, she asked, “What do you mean, Delphine? What do you mean?”

  “She’s gone, Big Ma. She was mad all last night and took off this morning.” This was bad. Worse than the sick I felt coming on. So bad Big Ma didn’t threaten to beat the daylights out of Vonetta when she got home.

  “Why was she mad, Delphine? And where could she’ve gone?” Mr. Lucas asked. “A child either runs away from something or runs off to where they want to be. Or to what they want to have.”

  I didn’t answer the first question. Only the second, although I knew the answers to both. “Milk,” I said. “She went to get milk.”

  “All right, all right,” Mr. Lucas said calmly. “That’s down the road, less than two miles from here. I’ll jump in the truck—”

  “Truck’s gone,” I said. “Uncle Darnell went to work early.”

  “Call over to Miss Trotter’s,” Big Ma said, finding herself. “Miss Trotter’s got that old car.”

  “JimmyTrotter can’t drive the station wagon,” I said. “The sheriff said he better not drive it without a license.”

  “I don’t care a fig about Davey Lee Charles,” Big Ma said. “I’m going to get my grandbaby.”

  Mr. Lucas tried to calm Big Ma down but Big Ma couldn’t be calmed. She spoke against the white man who was her cousin. And the law. And the Klan. Big Ma could not be calmed.

  Mr. Lucas said, “You tell JimmyTrotter I said to drive the car over and I’ll take it into town. Fastest way to get the car here. The sooner for the little one”—he meant Vonetta—“the better.”

  While he comforted Big Ma, I turned to go inside the house. I might have even taken a step. But a hand grabbed my arm and I stopped where I stood.

  Mr. Lucas didn’t say a word. Both he and Big Ma were frozen, not speaking, but looking off and upward. Big Ma’s hands covered her mouth. I turned to the direction that Big Ma and Mr. Lucas’s eyes were fixed. Overhead but in the distance, toward town, where Vonetta must have ridden that bicycle, half of the sky was bright, and pushing against the bright was a darker blue.

  Darker blue, then gray. Or was it smoke? It was growing like a smoke cloud from the sky to the ground. It seemed alive, angry and moving.

  My pecan tree leaves flickered toward it, even though the dark thing was far away. But it grew dark. Darker. Then we heard the sound of gunshots. At least ten in the air.

  “The warning.” Mr. Lucas’s voice was even, the way cops talk to people standing on a ledge threatening to jump. “Go get your baby sister,” he said to me and eased the grip on my arm. “I’ll get Ma.” He took Big Ma’s hand from her mouth and said, “Ophelia, go down in the root cellar.”

  “But—”

  “We got”—he paused and looked at the dark—“less than ten minutes. Go. Now.”

  Big Ma seemed dazed or hypnotized by the dark out there. She kept looking at it while she moved slowly down the root cellar. Then Mr. Lucas said, “Go, Ophelia. Now!”

  I asked Mr. Lucas nothing. Just did what he said. Picked up Fern, who was heavier than she looked, and started back toward the doors to the cellar. Mr. Lucas had Ma Charles wrapped in her blanket, half leading her, half carrying her. “No time. No time, Ma,” he said. “No time.”

  We headed down the cellar. He turned to me and said, “Still have about six minutes. Maybe five. Let’s grab all the hens we can. No time for the eggs.”

  “Caleb,” Fern said.

  I could feel the wind. The pecan tree leaves all swayed to one side. Caleb didn’t have to be told where to go. As soon as I loosened him from his chain he trotted down the steps to the cellar. Mr. Lucas started grabbing hens and almost threw them down the cellar. I did the same, chasing, grabbing, and throwing them down. With clipped wings, they couldn’t fly far but they could still fly a little. I didn’t ask a thing. I just did what Mr. Lucas said. There was no time to think or ask. I didn’t
know what the dark was about, but it was growing darker and windier. I looked up at it. We were running from a dark monster. I could barely breathe with the wind whisking up and around my nose. The dark was far away but I could feel it pulling. The dirt on the ground kicked about, sweeping and stirring. And then Mr. Lucas grabbed my arm. Between us we had the last of the hens, and we went down into the cellar. He closed the metal door and took the iron bar and pushed it through the holes that linked one metal door to the other. It was pitch-black in the root cellar, and it smelled of chickens, potatoes, turnips, onions, dirt, and breath. Big Ma no longer asked for a mercy. Instead she called on “Jesus! Jesus! Jesus!” over and over without stopping.

  The chickens hopping everywhere in the dark were too much for Fern. “Get away, hens!” she cried out. “Get away!”

  Caleb bayed and Ma Charles told him to hush but Caleb kept making his noise and the chickens squawked on and on.

  “It could shift at the last second,” Mr. Lucas said.

  “Maybe it shifted before . . . Vonetta . . .”

  “We’ll just hold on,” Mr. Lucas said, not letting me finish, and that was best. “We’ll just hold on.”

  I grabbed Fern, and Fern held on to me and Caleb.

  Then everything shook. I kept my eyes closed but I could hear the noise of things flying, crashing, falling, knocking against other things. Glass breaking. Rain shooting. Horrible, horrible noises.

  “Jesus! Jesus! Jesus!”

  The storm door clanked fiercely like murderers were at the door, tugging and shaking to break in. Chickens squawked something terrible.

  Through it all, Fern cried out for Vonetta. “Vonetta! Vonetta! Where’s Vonetta?” I couldn’t answer her. I could only cry. We were all in there crying. Big Ma, Ma Charles. Even Caleb.

  Mr. Lucas spoke first. He put a name to the darkening, the shaking in the air and in the ground and why everything around us was flying. Breaking. Slamming. Falling. “Tornado!” Mr. Lucas yelled. “Tornado’s passing.”

  I couldn’t see what was outside but I felt it pounding on the root cellar door. I heard it tossing things about. And I knew. I knew my sister was out there. Out there pedaling on a bike. An old bicycle was all she had out there. My sister was out there.

  Blue Sky

  Caleb was the first to bound up the steps and out into the light when Mr. Lucas undid the iron bar and together we heaved the root cellar doors open. The sky looked as if it hadn’t blackened in the first place. Blue. Pretty. We hadn’t even spent fifteen minutes down in the cellar. People say “unreal” as an expression, but this was truly unreal. For all the banging, crashing, and whomping we heard while we were down below, the sky had the nerve to be a beautiful shade of blue.

  We stepped out from the dark into what was now an altogether different place. No one could speak. I turned around and around in disbelief. In less than fifteen minutes everything except the house had been turned upside down. Smashed eggs. Straw and feed everywhere. No henhouse. Just planks and splinters. No chicken run. Just swept away. Caleb’s house was knocked over on its side but it was still one whole house. One of the metal poles for the clothesline leaned while the other had been uprooted and thrown. The clothesline itself, with white sheets still pinned to it, was nowhere to be seen. The cradling branches of my pecan tree had been snapped clean off but the tree still stood. The telephone poles stood firm, but the pines, both narrow and thick, had fallen, like soldiers in ugly army green had been shot up in the road. Just unreal.

  “Thank you, Jesus!” Big Ma shouted in spite of the horrific unreal every which way we looked. “House is still standing.”

  “Only one window broken but not a shingle loose,” Ma Charles said. “Thank you, Jesus!”

  “Good storm windows,” Mr. Lucas said. It was how he said it that I knew he was responsible for those storm windows.

  And then we turned to Mr. Lucas’s house. The pillar posts on both sides had snapped in two and the roof had caved in. A pine tree had fallen through the roof. Unreal.

  “Son, oh son, oh son,” Ma Charles said, her voice wobbly with true sorrow.

  “Jesus, Jesus, Jesus.” Big Ma took and squeezed Mr. Lucas’s hand.

  Mr. Lucas said, “Let’s keep on praising Him. I’ve seen worse.” As if they were standing before a miracle, my great-grandmother, my grandmother, and Mr. Lucas continued praising the Lord like they were in church. But we weren’t in church. We were standing in the unreal. Topsy-turvy, broken, and scattered.

  How could they praise Him? How could they thank Him? As sure as I stood and saw it all, the busted henhouse and smashed eggs, the split-up pecan tree, its parts blown away, Mr. Lucas’s house half standing and half fallen, hundred-year-old pine trees snapped like twigs, I knew what that tornado could do to my little sister on a bicycle. I knew she had no chance out there.

  Fern went running into the house and I went after her. She shouted, “VONETTA! VONETTA!” expecting Vonetta to appear from underneath the bed with her hands on her narrow hips. She called into each room, “Vonetta! Vonetta!” like she didn’t want it to be true about Vonetta. That she was gone. Gone for good.

  I caught her. Then I said it. “She’s gone, Fern.”

  “Where?”

  “Out there. In the tornado.”

  “I want Vonetta!” she screamed at me.

  “We all want her.”

  “You don’t.”

  “I do.”

  “No, you don’t. You’re mean to Vonetta. You pick on her.”

  “Because she picks on you.”

  “Because you pick on her!” she shouted at me. “Stop being mean, Delphine. Stop being so mean and bossy.”

  Fern didn’t know what she was saying. I understood that. She was upset. That storm shook us all and we were missing Vonetta. I couldn’t be mad at her for what she said. We were all in shock and sick about Vonetta.

  I reached out to shoulder-hug her but she pushed against me and out of my arms and ran to Ma Charles.

  Mr. Lucas had Big Ma turn the lights and water on and off. On and off. Then she picked up the phone for an outside line.

  “Call over to Miss Trotter,” he said. “See if she’s there.”

  I said, “The bicycle tracks ran—”

  “I know, Delphine,” he said. “But let’s check first and see if they’re all right.”

  Big Ma held up the phone’s receiver to me and I took it.

  I dialed Miss Trotter’s number, both hoping but also knowing not to hope. I had seen the tire tracks leading to the road before the wind came and scattered the last trace of Vonetta. I knew she was on her way to town for a bottle of milk.

  “Is it ringing?” Ma Charles asked. “Lord, let there be ringing.” And they started praying and praising the Lord for a phone line. But the line rang funny. Different.

  “I don’t think their phone works,” I said.

  “I’ll go over there to check on them,” Mr. Lucas said.

  “You’ll go to town to see about Vonetta,” Ma Charles said. “Darnell will go across the creek to see about the Trotters.”

  “I can go,” I said.

  “You’ll go nowhere,” Big Ma said. “Dangerous as it is.”

  “Your grandmother’s right,” Mr. Lucas said. “Timber can fall any which way, and who knows if the wooden crossing’s steady or standing.” He looked to Big Ma and said, “I’ll go on toward town on foot.”

  “Just bring her back,” Big Ma told him.

  “I’m going to try,” he said.

  “Bring her back,” she said again. “Bring her back, Elijah. I can’t rest until she comes through that door. My heart, Elijah. My heart’s beating so. I can’t rest till she’s home.”

  “Darnell will be here soon,” Mr. Lucas said.

  I couldn’t stay there inside and followed after Mr. Lucas. “I’ll go with you,” I said.

  “No, Delphine. Stay here with your grandmothers and your sister. I need you to start piling that henhouse wood. Gather up what straw yo
u can. Rake the yard for nails. Glass, too. Can’t let the chickens up out of the cellar until the ground’s safe. When you’re done here, I’ll need you to help me clear my yard.”

  I didn’t want to do any of those things but “Yes, sir,” fell out of my mouth nice and easy.

  Big Ma shouted to Mr. Lucas to be careful. He waved to her and was on his way.

  The Call

  “Daughter, call your father.”

  I was the only one in the kitchen with Ma Charles but I couldn’t believe she meant me. That I had to be the one to make the phone call. Even though Big Ma said she couldn’t rest, she was lying down in the other room. It was just as well. Her face was covered in sweat and she didn’t look good.

  I still asked, “Shouldn’t Big Ma call Papa?”

  “Don’t question me, daughter. Pick up this phone and dial that number. Your father needs to know.”

  What do I tell him? What do I say?

  “Come on, daughter. That’s your father. Your sister. Make the call.”

  I didn’t want to do it. I shouldn’t have to. I shouldn’t have to. But the phone was in my hand and my great-grandmother stared into me with no intention of repeating herself.

  I knew Pa’s number in the dark. My finger hooked into the first circle on the dial and my fingers pulled around, dialing for a long-distance line, the area code, followed by “AT7” and the last four digits. I thought I would be unsteady, shaky, and sobbing. Unable to speak. I thought all the tears and nausea pooling in me would come up and I’d choke when he picked up the receiver and I had to speak. But when the phone rang, and the line clicked when he picked up the phone, and his voice said, “Hello,” my mouth opened and I spoke calmly. “Papa. Papa.”

  Pa’s voice didn’t leap toward mine, asking me how my sisters and I were making out and such. Instead, he waited. Waited for me to speak. He knew. He knew. My stomach knotted something awful. He knew I didn’t call with good news. Then he said, “Yes, Delphine.” His voice was so calm. So steady. Full of stillness and waiting.