Page 72 - Some Dance to Remember

42 Jack Fritscher

below. He leaned back against the plastic. The rising wind flapped its edges
around his legs. From the high ledge in the hospital on the high hill, he
could see for miles across the rolling prairies. A heavy June thunderstorm
was moving in over the flat skyline of Peoria. The air was violet. Lightning
flashed. He knew how to read Midwestern summer storms. He counted
the seconds from the lightning until the thick roll of thunder rumbled
from the western farmlands and across the city. Every second between
lightning and thunder told how far he was from the center of the storm.
At first flash, he counted to nine. Minutes later, between flash and
thunder, he counted to six. His breath grew shorter. The rain was moving
in a curtain toward him from the west. He counted to three. Lightning
and thunder were almost one. The first rush of rain blew up under the
overhang of the corridor above him. Mist sprayed his face. The plastic
beaded up with moisture. His hands and back pressed flat against the
wall. The storm swept up in a rising vortex in front of him. The falling
pressure took his breath away. He was crying, for the first time in a long
time, really crying. The downpour was soaking his corduroys and madras
shirt, and no one was around anymore to tell him to please come in from
the rain. For the duration of the storm’s passing front, he stood facing
whatever wild energy of lightning and thunder the twilight could conjure.
“I’ll invoke any god,” he pleaded.
For the first time with any real clarity, he saw through the rain into
the past, into his dying father’s past, into the past whose history until this
moment had been lifeless as the three paragraphs in the Jackson County
Register of 1904: the wife of Michael Fitzpatrick O’Hara had been killed
in a Minnesota cyclone. But the statistic was far less than the jolting vision
he had of his grandfather’s first wife standing at the top of the storm-cellar
stairs, holding their ten-month-old Aurelia in her arms, her long golden
hair fallen loose and flying in the wind, shouting for her two young sons
to run to her in the shelter. His grandfather started up the thick wooden
stairs. He was knocked flat by the gust of wind that sliced a piece of flying
sheet metal clean through his young wife’s neck. Her face, shrouded by her
flying hair, showed no surprise. Only her arms reacted, pulling her baby
in close to her breast, then straightening out rigid. The baby fell and was
killed in the bloody tumble with her mother’s head down the storm-cellar
stairs. The confined shelter roared with the blast of the cyclone. His grand-
father, then a young man, struggled up against the wind. The suffocating
dust turned to mud as rain blew into the cellar across his wife’s headless
body at the top of the stairs.
Michael O’Hara had not known where to turn. Near his knees, full

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