Heat Lightning

I’d sat on the porch with the old man for nearly an hour now.  He had smoked his pipe and taken large gulps of iced tea out of a jar next to his chair the entire time while I took smaller swallows from the jar he’d given me and waited patiently for him to speak.  His wife came out from time to time to refill the jars and immediately returned to the house, leaving us in our shared and sweaty silence.  It was the wife who had contacted me some three weeks earlier.  She had a friend, she told me, who worked in the courthouse and had pulled records for me and had given her my name and told her that I might be interested in helping with her problem.

Her problem, as it turned out, was that her husband was a quiet and reticent man with a story which he’d thought should be told and recorded for most of his life but could never manage to find the ability to do so.  Since I researched the history of the area she thought that I might be the person to record the tale and, more importantly, I might be the one to whom her husband would relate it. 

“It eats at him,” she told me, “I’ve seen it as long as we’ve been married, even before we married, but he won’t tell me what it is and seldom even mentions it.”

I’d agreed to listen if he would talk and arranged to be here at nine this morning and here I was, sitting in silence on the bare boards with the sun climbing through the sky above us.  When I had stepped from my car, the heat shimmered in the air which hung almost motionless around me.  The porch was positioned to catch the breezes but there was little to catch as the sun climbed from our right and cast short, midsummer shadows in front of the house.  It was hot and there was little else to be said about it.

“It was hot that summer too.” His statement was startling both because he hadn’t spoken since I had introduced myself and because it mirrored my thought so closely.

“Which summer was that?”

The glance he threw my way was at once amused and annoyed.  “The summer that it happened.” He grunted and returned to his pipe. 

I wished that I hadn’t spoken.  It was obvious that he intended to tell me the story but that he had to get around to it in his own time and fashion.  It often seems that the people with the most to say tend to say the least of it.  I took a long swallow of the tea and returned to my silence.

He stood suddenly and mumbled, “Be right back,” as he walked into the house.  He had drunk quite a bit since I had showed up.  When he came back and sat down, the words began to flow at last.

“It was the summer of ’32 and I was fourteen years old.” He said with no preamble at all.  “We didn’t get any news like we do these days so I don’t know how things were anywhere else but here it was hot, hot and dry.  We got the last rain in late May and I don’t think another drop made it to the ground until at least the middle of September, the heat just turned it to steam in the air.”  He looked at me like he expected an interruption.  I just sat there with my pen and notebook until he nodded curtly and went on.

“By July all the crops were dying.  We struggled to keep even the kitchen garden alive and it was plain that there’d be very little to can for winter.  We had ditches for irrigation, of course, but even the river was beginning to dry up; there were no swimming holes, the best you could do was wade.  We carried water in buckets to the livestock because the ponds were dry but all you could say is that they were alive because there was no grazing and as we moved into August, there was little of anything.”  He paused to take another long pull at the jar.

“It’s funny how you remember distant things perfectly as you get older.” He stared pensively into the distance for a moment as he put his tea down.  “August started on a Saturday that year so the fifteenth and sixteenth made a weekend in the exact middle of the month.  That was normally a time when the country folks all went into town to trade, buy supplies, and visit a little amongst themselves.  Everybody knew most everybody else back then but getting around to visit was a different story.  A few miles was a long way to travel on bare feet so common days in town were a treat.  We went that year, though we didn’t have much to trade and less to use for buying, so we could see people and find out how others were faring.  Everybody else seemed to be doing about the same we were, which is to say hot, thirsty, and worried about having anything to eat when it finally started raining.  We had travelled in the dark of Saturday morning and since we only spent that day in town, travelled home in the evening with a nearly full moon as light.”  He looked into the distance for what seemed a long time without making a sound or touching the jar at his side.

“We got home late and all of us were tired.  Tired had become a constant state Since there was little rest to be found in the heat.  Conditioned air was something that you’d heard of but couldn’t quite believe in at that place and time, so we were all just hot, all the time.” He looked at me again like he thought I might protest but went on with the tale quickly.  “There was a tree out behind the barn where all us kids liked to try cooling off a bit.  It was a gum tree with low branches and easy to climb.  It was usually thick with leaves in the summer and sat on a little rise which let it catch whatever breeze was to be had.  That summer the leaves were sparse and dry but it was still some better than sitting on the hot ground and that night I climbed up to my favorite spot, a forked branch near the top that fit my tail-end perfectly, and leaned back against the trunk.” He stood and walked inside without a word, perhaps to rid himself of some of those gulps of tea.

I sat, waiting, feeling the sweat running down my back and sipping my own tea, wondering what conclusion such a common story could be working toward.  He had me curious for certain and I was eager to listen when he sat down again.

“I suppose that I fell asleep up in that fork because the moon was low in the sky when I looked around, aware that something had startled me but not at all sure what it had been.  The sky was flickering all over with a faint sort of light.  It might have been heat lightning, but there wasn’t a cloud to be seen, just an open sky softly flashing in the night.  I sat and watched it for awhile, several minutes I guess, and it seemed to sort of flow across the sky, so dim that it likely wouldn’t be noticed if you weren’t paying close attention.  I was looking straight toward it, my branch faced sort of northeast, when this much brighter beam of pale greenish light stabbed down from just the open sky.” He paused here to give me another speculative look but continued, “It wasn’t like these tales of aliens you hear from folks, just this light reaching down from that dim flickering in an open sky.  It seemed fairly close by, maybe a couple of miles, and got me right curious and more than a little scared.”  He got up and stepped inside again, returning shortly with a clear bottle of amber fluid and two small glasses.  He sat and poured into one glass and looked at me questioningly.

“No thank you.”

“Suit yourself,” He shrugged, “But if you change your mind just ask.”  With that he drained what he had poured for himself and poured again, setting the glass aside for later.

“It’s hard to admit to being scared you know.  Back then it was something that men just didn’t do at all and even women kept it amongst themselves.  When that light disappeared I climbed straight down from that tree and headed inside, keeping all that I’d seen to myself.  I pretended to sleep a little and got up to do my share of the morning chores.”  Here he drained the glass and refilled it again, holding it in his hand this time.

“I finished my chores about ten and I decided that I’d take a walk up to the northeast.  There was a family that lived a couple of miles in that direction, the Wells, and while I figured they needed checking on, I knew everyone would think I was crazy if I told them about the night before so I didn’t say anything, I just headed up the road.”

He took one little sip from the glass before continuing, “I mentioned awhile ago that even a couple of miles was a long walk on bare feet, and it still is, but the dirt roads were hot and you stepped quick, so I made it down there in no more than twenty, maybe thirty minutes.  Mr. and Mrs. Wells had five children but I turned into the drive leading up to the house and didn’t see a soul around, which was odd.  In those days the porch or under a tree were the coolest places to be and the porch was empty.  I went up to the door anyway and knocked  since the women could often be found working in the house even if the men were out on the farm but no one answered at all. It wasn’t until I turned from the door that I realized how quiet it was.  In the miserable heat there was less noise than in more comfortable conditions but even in midday there would at least be a complaint from sweltering livestock or a squirrel moving.  From the Wells’ porch I could hear nothing at all and not even a single brown tinged leaf shivered in a tree.  I had pretty much gotten over the fright from the night before but it was coming back strong as I realized all of this.  It was just plain unnerving.”

He sipped from his glass and sat in silence for some time, I don’t have any idea how long.  I was pretty thoroughly drawn into his tale and hoped he would continue but I knew that I had to wait for his time to do so.  The heat shimmering in the air around us made the world away from the porch seem unreal and nothing stirred around us.  My tea jar had been empty, I don’t actually know how long, and his wife had made no appearance to refill it.

He took a fairly deep swallow from his glass before continuing. “I stepped on off the porch and headed toward the barn, completely ready to cover that two miles home like a bolt of lightning if need be.  It turned out to be just as hot and silent, if not quite so empty.  The Wells’ had four cows and three were in milking stalls, but the milking should have been finished hours ago and there was no sign of the fourth.  What I immediately noticed was the quiet, though.  Confined in the heat of that barn those cows should have been loudly complaining, but now only an occasional ear twitch let you know they were living.  They just stood there almost motionless.  I stepped out of the barn, wondering what to do next and almost ready to just head home at a run, but I looked down into the pasture and saw something that just shouldn’t be there.”

He paused then to drain his glass again and gave me a questioning look after he refilled it, in response to which I shook my head.  I was beginning to wonder a bit about his sobriety but he showed no sign at all of inebriation as he set the bottle back down next to his lately untouched tea. 

“Out behind the barn was a large circle,” he began without preamble, “It was marked around with six trees, only maybe ten feet tall and growing in sort of a twisted fashion and everything inside that circle was green.”  A swallow from the grass interrupted his narrative momentarily but he soon continued. “Everything was green except what looked like an old stump, four or five feet high, that looked to be dead center of the ring.”

He sat in silence again, perfectly still as though frozen, then continued without even a glance at the whiskey in his hand.  “I was sort of moving on impulse as I started toward that circle.  I didn’t want to go, my mind was screaming at me to run, but my feet were taking me there regardless.  It might have taken ten seconds or ten hours to walk into that ring, I don’t know, but everything changed as I stepped inside, it was night inside.  There were stars overhead and a light, cool breeze, fifteen or twenty degrees below the summer heat, stirring.  The grass under my feet was soft and springy, growing thickly on well-watered earth.  The moon looked full and bright in the sky and as far as I could see in its light there were trees scattered across fresh, growing grass.  Everything was lush and full, except the old stump in the center and that drew me to it.”

He drained the glass and several minutes passed as he sat holding it empty on his lap.  “There was a face on it.  The closer I got, the plainer that face stood out to me and it was unmistakable as I stood next to it.  I couldn’t make myself turn away, I stood and looked straight into that face until it opened its eyes and they were screaming in silence.”

He took a long pull from the bottle and filled my glass without comment as I held it out to him.  “Those tortured eyes broke the spell on me.  I spun around, noticing the faces on the trees in the ring for the first time.  The eyes in them were screaming too and the breeze grew to a howling wind as I ran from the circle back into the summer heat.”

He took another long pull at the bottle and I drained the glass he had poured for me without thinking.  The liquor burned like the summer sun going down my throat.  “I didn’t stop when I got out of there either.  All that was in my mind was run and run I did.  I collapsed in exhaustion on the porch of our house with mama running to me and yelling for one of the girls to go find daddy. She reached me with a bucket of cool water from the well and ladled it over my head and neck, letting me sip some and stopping me when I tried to gulp it.  By the time daddy reached us, I was leaning against the wall of the house, gasping for breath.”

He sat there in the chair with his head down for awhile, I don’t know how long, not touching the bottle and not speaking.  I noticed the empty glass in my hand and set it down on the floor beside me. 

When he finally spoke his voice was tired and spent.  “My daddy was tough as an old tree root, but he was fair and patient.  I told him everything and he listened without a word.  When I was done, he got up, saddled our old mare and took off up the road.  He didn’t ask me to come along and I didn’t want to go so I sat there on the porch trying to get my breath back.  It was dark when he made it back, with the clear full moon overhead.  He never said a word to us kids that night, which never happened, but he spoke to mama and left before daylight the next morning.  That afternoon there was a large column of smoke up to the northeast and it was the day after that he returned.”

He looked to the south, wincing some as he did so.  “No one ever spoke of that weekend, or even mentioned the Wells family, afterward.  I never told my story to anyone except daddy, until today, and I doubt that anyone else is alive who might know about what happened.”

He stopped talking, looking both relieved and exhausted.  There was an offer of supper, but it was half-hearted and I declined, opting to take my notes home instead.

I would need to go research some land records tomorrow.  I needed to look into something.