Taken By The Wind

The day the tornado came was the second worst day in Margaret’s life. It was four o’clock on a sunny June afternoon and she was sitting in the loft of the barn, thinking about the first worst day in her life: her birthday.

She had just turned ten and the memory of her party still burned in her heart. Not only didn’t she get the CD player she had dreamed about, but right there in front of Jennifer and Kim and Stacey—who was already eleven—her parents had given her the most stupid, babyish present imaginable. They had given her a doll.

Her friends looked at her with pity. Later Margaret made fun of the doll, and then she felt bad about making fun of the doll. Then she got angry at her parents for making her feel bad, because really it was their fault. And finally she came to the conclusion that her parents did it on purpose.

Margaret was convinced her parents had simply grown tired of her. That could happen to adopted kids, she thought. When her brother was born, a boy up the road said to her, “Now that they have a real baby, they’ll leave you out in a storm and let the wind blow you back to Korea!” Margaret was only four at the time. She could no longer remember the boy’s name, but she never forgot his words.

A noise came from below. Margaret peered over the edge of the loft and saw her little brother Brian. He was searching around for a piece of twine, and tucked under his arm like a football was the birthday doll.

“Where do you think you’re going with that doll?” Margaret said, climbing down the ladder. She called it “that doll,” as if she didn’t own it.

“Out to the ship,” he said.

“Not with that doll you’re not.” She pulled it from his hands.

“I thought you didn’t even want it.”

“That’s not the point. You can’t just take things.”

Brian shrugged. “Sorry, I thought you didn’t want it.” He sulked out of the barn, then Margaret hung the doll on a nail as if it were an old hat or something.

The sky was clouding over. A gust of wind wrenched the kitchen door from Margaret’s hand and slammed it against the side of the house. She stepped inside and gently pulled it closed.

“Don’t slam the door,” her mother yelled from upstairs.

Well, Margaret decided, if they want to send me back to Korea, I’ll go. All she really knew about Korea was that it was halfway around the world from Oklahoma, but that didn’t matter to Margaret. “I’ll go,” she said firmly.

Another gust rattled the windows, and moments later footsteps drummed down the stairs. Margaret’s mother appeared breathlessly at the door. “Where’s Brian?” she said.

“I don’t know.”

“There’s a storm coming,” her mother said. “Get in the basement!” Then she rushed out the door—letting it slam—and ran to the barn.

Margaret remembered the doll hanging on the nail and for a moment regretted leaving it where her mother would find it. But her mother came out of the barn and ran up the drive without so much as glancing back at the house. That’s it, Margaret thought. She doesn’t even care.

The crackle of thunder reminded Margaret of the coming storm. To the southwest the sky had turned the color of a bruise. Brian was probably out at the ship, and Margaret’s mother had gone off in the wrong direction. She’s too far away, Margaret thought. She’ll never find him in time.

The ship was really just a twenty-foot cabin cruiser that had been rotting forever at the back of the property. Margaret ran as fast as she could across the wide field of winter wheat to where the boat sat on its rusty trailer.

Brian popped his head up through a hatch in the deck.

“There’s a storm coming!” Margaret said, gasping for breath.

“Yeah!” Brian yelled, “Let’s ride it out!”

“Come on, Brian, Mom said to get in the house.”

“Here it comes!”

The sky back toward the house had turned green, and a dark curtain of rain sizzled across the field. Margaret scrambled onto the boat and crouched inside the small cabin with her brother just as the rain hit like a hundred fire hoses.

The rain fell so thick that Margaret could see nothing beyond the end of the boat. Within minutes, white, pea-size hailstones began clattering against the hull and gathering in the cockpit. Margaret stuck her hand out and laughed, trying to catch the hailstones, which tickled her palm and bounced away before she could grab them.

Then a big hailstone hit the boat. Then another, and another, and the clattering grew heavy and angry as hailstones the size of golf balls came crashing down on them.

Margaret looked at Brian, terrified. She didn’t have to say a word. They both knew well their father’s warning: Large hail meant tornado weather.

As soon as the hail let up, Margaret and Brian jumped out of the boat and ran for the house. But they got only a few steps before Margaret came to a stop, completely forgetting what her legs were supposed to be doing. Brian stopped beside her, his mouth open in awe. Just beyond the house, the darkness was split in two by the great shaft of a tornado. The funnel was smooth and silky white up near the clouds, but where it touched the ground it stirred up a huge whirling black smudge. Dark shapes the size of cars swarmed around the smudge like bees at a hive, and the whole thing made a sound like the earth itself was screaming.

The tornado bore down on the house. Margaret took Brian’s hand and ran to a nearby drainage ditch. The ditch wasn’t very deep, but it was the only low area in sight. She dragged Brian to a culvert that couldn’t have been much bigger around than he was, and said, “Get into that pipe!”

“I can’t,” he said, looking at the culvert in horror. “I can’t get in there.”

“You must, Brian. Hurry!” Margaret looked back at the tornado as it slipped past the house. The barn lifted straight up off its foundation as if it weighed nothing. It spun slowly until Margaret could almost see in through the barn doors, and she had the crazy idea it wanted to show her the doll hanging safely on its nail. Then the barn exploded into a million boards, which fluttered upward, spiraling around the tornado.

“Hurry, Brian,” she said. “It’s coming!”

Margaret pushed her brother into the culvert as far as she could, then laid down in the shallow ditch. After a moment she realized she was lying in water, but there was nowhere else to go. The screaming of the wind became unbearable, and somewhere behind it she heard a voice saying, “A strong wind will blow you back to Korea!”

Then it hit. Margaret felt a jolt and knew she was in the air. It was the strangest sensation, like being sucked into a dark and filthy vacuum bag. She tried to yell, but her mouth filled with dirt and she thought she would suffocate. A cattle trough spun past her twice. The third time it rammed straight into her...

The screaming wind stopped. The pelting of rocks and dirt and sticks stopped. The whole world and everything in it simply stopped.

The next thing Margaret knew she was in a neighbor’s car on the way to the hospital. She woke up lying across the back seat with her head on her mother’s lap. Her mother held a cloth to Margaret’s forehead and sobbed, muttering something that sounded to Margaret like, “My baby. Oh, my baby.”

Fear grabbed Margaret’s spine. Something must have happened to Brian. “Where’s Brian?” she asked, her mouth still gritty with dirt.

“Oh, Margaret!” her mother said. “You’re awake!”

“Where’s Brian?” Margaret repeated.

“Brian is all right. He’s with your father.”

Margaret was relieved, but the crying puzzled her.

“Is the house gone?” she asked.

“The house will be fine,” her mother said. “Everything will be fine.” She seemed to be smiling and crying at the same time. Then she hugged Margaret closer and said, “Oh, Margaret! My dear, darling Margaret!”

At those words Margaret realized that her mother was crying for her, and Margaret began crying, too, happy to be alive.

When she got back from the hospital Margaret went with Brian to look at the damage. The roof over her parents’ bedroom had been ripped away, but otherwise the house was all right. The barn, on the other hand, was spread out over three fields. Only the foundation was left where it had stood. Out near the drainage ditch they found their father’s lawn tractor rolled into a ball, and nearby a washing machine that belonged to someone else. The boat had broken in two. Part of it was tangled up in the trees; the rest of it was nowhere to be seen.

“Right there’s where I found you,” Brian said, pointing to a jumble of branches and boards and wire fencing, far from the culvert where they had sought shelter. “You were calling me and trying to get up.”

“I don’t remember that.”

“Your head was bleeding and then you fainted.”

“I think I was worried about you,” Margaret said.

Brian nodded and looked shyly at the ground.

The trees along the edge of the field were stripped of most of their branches. Some were shattered completely, as if they had been trampled by a clumsy giant.

“Hey, look at that!” Margaret said.

Caught in the only remaining branch of one of the trees was Margaret’s birthday doll. She poked at it with a stick and it dropped to the ground. Brian picked it up and handed it to her. Most of the hair was gone and the dress was in tatters. A feeling of love came over Margaret, and she didn’t know whether it was for the doll or for her family or for both.

“You’re not going to keep that, are you?”

“Yeah,” Margaret said, wiping the dirt from the doll’s face. “She’s a lot like me: she was taken by the wind and she survived.”

Image: Tornado. Found at “Severe Weather 101—Tornadoes,” The National Severe Storms Laboratory. http://www.nssl.noaa.gov/education/svrwx101/tornadoes/