Page 73 - Some Dance to Remember

Some Dance to Remember 43

within his terrified sight, his wife’s head rocked back and forth, her hair
alive in the vortex. A thin trickle of blood ran from the baby’s mouth. His
wife’s eyes bulged open and unblinking. The cellar door crashed closed.
He was in darkness. He felt for the wooden stairs with his hands. They
were wet with rain and blood. His two sons in those few seconds that
lasted forever had not yet made the cover of the cellar. Then the cyclone
lifted the door open and up off its hinges. The pressure sucked him part
way up the bloody steps. As fast as it hit, the storm roared off and away. He
pulled himself up through the debris. He found his two sons clinging to
the branches of the one tree left standing in the devastated farmyard. He
had immigrated all the way from Ireland for this, he thought, and pulled
his crying sons to himself.
The young widow from the next farm over, her own husband dead
two years from typhoid, helped with the burial of his wife and baby.
Within the year, in the grand brick Catholic church in the little town
of Fulda, Minnesota, they were married quietly by a German priest in a
ceremony attended by her three young children and by his two sons. In
another year, they had their own child, a son, Ryan’s father.
“Promise me,” his father had said. He was a child of storms. He was
born out of sudden violence that came from the sky, and he was dying
by slow degrees. He frightened Ryan the way a person alone in a house is
frightened by his own image caught sudden and distorted in a mirror. Like
father, like son. What if he himself should become so ill at so early an age?
Fear of illness, fear of Death took up nest in his heart. Death depressed
him. Maybe the promise, made and kept, could keep sadness and sickness
and Death at far away bay. “I promise, Charley-Pop,” he said. “I promise
I’ll take care of them all.”

15

“I love you,” Ryan wrote in an affectionate note to Kick. “I love us.
I’ve gone beyond being infatuated in-love with you. Funny, I have to get
around the way you look so I can love you despite your looks. I’m the man
most wished dead on Castro. Guys think I’m all that stands between them
and you in their beds. I don’t care who either of us plays with on the side.
As long as we remember you and I are the home team. I love you more
than I’ve ever loved anyone.” And he meant more than family, lovers,
friends, life itself.
“I’d die for you,” Ryan said.
“Don’t die for me.” Kick’s smile lightened the heat of Ryan’s dark

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