Promises of Home Read Free Page A

when I felt Junebug’s weight ease up beside me. I first became conscious of the quiet. It was as penetrating as the noise had been. An eerie stillness settled on the land, and the sky, rather than being dark, shifted to a bilious green—a gigantic dead eye, staring sightlessly down at us.
    Junebug and I were coated in mud and twigs. We shook with dampness and shock, our clothes completely soaked. The tornado had passed near us, disintegrating in the storm’s competing winds or as it hit the trees that crowded in on the river.
    “Holy God,” I heard myself say in something that didn’t sound like a child’s voice.
    “It’s the eye. It’ll be calm for a little while, then it’ll be much worse.” Junebug started crawling out of the ditch. I followed him, my breath catching in my throat when I looked at the land. Trees lay shattered in a swath. A dirty smell hung in the air, even though we’d just been battered with rain. Where the tree house stood not even the tree remained—only a gaping maw where the old roots had vainly clutched. The land lay like a dead thing.
    “Clevey!” Junebug brayed at the top of his voice. “Davis! Trey! Where are y’all?”
    “Oh, God, don’t let ’em be dead,” I coughed. “We got to find them before the eye passes. Then we got to get to Mrs. Foradory’s. We can’t stay out here again.”
    Junebug ran toward the woods, calling for Little Ed and Clevey, his voice slicing through the ominous quiet. I followed him, avoiding even the trees that had survived, seeing too many branches barely hanging on their moorings.
    “Here!” I heard Trey’s voice call back hoarsely. “Over here, hurry! Hurry!” His voice broke; shock and fear had replaced coolness and swagger.
    Junebug and I didn’t see the others right off; they had fled into a dense copse of loblolly pines that the tornado spared. I finally saw them, in a small clearing: a stone-faced Trey, his arm around a sobbing Little Ed, Clevey shaking, Davis staring at the ground gape-mouthed.
    We ran up to them and Junebug saw her before I did, crying out, “Jesus Christ!”
    The six of us stood there, silent for once as a group, our eyes riveted on the body of a teenage black girl. I’d thought the sky looked like a dead staring orb, but that girl’s open eyes were the true thing. Blank. Empty. Without a hint of life, staring unflinchingly at the storm. Her skin was brown as rich earth and her face was the kind that just gets prettier with time. But she had no more time left.
    She was drenched, her yellow blouse molding to her soft, motionless breasts. I made my eyes look at her face again. I couldn’t see any blood on her, but there was a dent in the side of her long, dark hair, as though someone had dropped her, like a doll, from a great and unforgiving height. Her mouth was open and delicately small white teeth stood in perfect formation. A lank of her straightened hair lay across her throat. She was wearing a navy wind-breaker, torn open by the storm, old jeans, and muddied cowboy boots. She was beautiful.
    And we six boys stood, paralyzed, as the giant wheel of the hurricane moved its calm canopy of eye away from us to thunder down more destruction.

But where the path we walked began
To slant the fifth autumnal slope,
As we descended following Hope,
There sat the Shadow feared of man;
    Who broke our fair companionship,
And spread his mantle dark and cold,
And wrapped thee formless in the fold,
And dulled the murmur on thy lip, And bore thee where I could not see
Nor follow, though I walk in haste,
And think that somewhere in the waste
The Shadow sits and waits for me.
    —Alfred, Lord Tennyson
In Memoriam

“WHY ON EARTH DOES WANDA DICKENSHEETS think she looks remotely like Elvis?” Junebug asked me, sipping coffee and chewing on a cheese kolache.
    “First time I ever saw a woman dressing like a man,” Sister offered, dropping another kolache on Junebug’s plate. She left me unpastried, putting her head near