March 18, 1925

Chapter 1

The wind had teeth.

Half an arm’s length from the boy’s face, chewing and tearing at everything in its path, the wind raged.

Hunk lay, face pressed down on damp, rotting leaves. Fingers digging into the soft earth, like a new-born child at his mother’s breast, he sought shelter. If he lifted his head more than a few inches, it would have hit the underside of his front porch. There was very little in the world of the ten-year-old boy that could tempt him to move in any direction other than downwards.

Hunk’s eyes were shut, a visceral, if not futile attempt, to block the fury of rain and wind; his face, a premature death mask cast in mulch and loam. The roar, climbing down from the sky, grew louder. He thought about covering his ears. The attempt to flex his fingers reminded him they were his anchor to the only solid thing in his world. His ears, solitary guards left behind by retreating comrades, bore the brunt of the assault, as sound, shunning light and vision, took center stage. The boards of the porch that sheltered him, creaked and groaned, as fiber and nail held to each other like drowning swimmers in a stormy sea. The animal panic of his muscles and limbs quieted. Hunk Dietrich retreated inwards, long his natural hiding place when the world became unbearable.

Chapter 2

The morning was bright and sunny as he let his mother kiss him goodby; around her apron, he waved at Evelyn, his five-year-old sister.

Walking to school in March was like the middle section of a ski jump. The first scary moments of confronting a new teacher with her own expectations was over, and year-end exams were still too many weekends in the future to hold any real terror.

Hunk Dietrich, while blessed with a keen intellect, was cursed with insatiable curiosity. From the moment he managed to recite the words his mother pointed to as they sat together after dinner, he was never without a book. In school, Hunk’s report cards insisted he was a solid C student. Most of his teachers knew better. Test grades did not indicate that he failed to understand the lessons, rather that he often allowed other, more interesting facts and figures, myths and legends to crowd out the knowledge demanded by the test paper in front of him. Now in the fifth grade at Murphysboro’s only grade school, he provided yet another teacher with a source of frustration. It wasn’t that both he and his teacher, Diane Ryan, didn’t agree that school was a place of learning; the gap lay in what exactly he was expected to know.

The clock on the wall of the classroom read 2:13. The cclick of each minute’s step into the future acquired something of a casual tone. This, in contrast to the previous six hours, when it played the role of mute prison guard charged with keeping the wrought iron and wood desks filled with restless students.

“Francis? It’s time to go home.” Mrs. Ryan was the only person, other than his mother, who called Hunk by his Christian name.

Hunk looked up from the book on his desk. Like a passenger on a cross-country train who, falling asleep between stops, awakens and tries to put what he sees into a familiar context, Hunk hesitated, seeing the empty classroom as if from afar. Finally, he got up and carried the book he was reading , ‘Mac-Map’ (of the school’s prized, nearly new set of Encyclopedia Britannica), to the book-case. Hunk experienced a rare feeling of pride as he slid the volume back into the gap of red-bound books; he was one of only three students allowed to take a volume home overnight.

“I read the part of the encyclopedia about Manifest Destiny last night…”

His teacher was staring out the windows towards the western end of the valley; her frown evaporated as she turned to smile at her favorite pupil. Hunk felt his heart elbow his lungs half out of breath.

“Go out and play with your friends, Mr. Dietrich.” Diane Ryan put the last of the test papers in her desk drawer, “While learning from books is quite admirable, you need to be with others your age.”

Hunk heard only: ‘Mr. Dietrich’, ‘learning’ and ‘admirable’. He stared at the young woman and believed he’d learned what it was he was trying to find.

“On second thought, why don’t you head straight home. It looks like bad weather is heading our way.” The frown returned to her face as the two stood outside the front door of Longfellow Elementary School. The sky wasn’t merely grey and cloudy. It was dark and angry.

Chapter 3

It started to rain. Not gradually. A handful of raindrops hit the back of his jacket, followed by a push of wind and then nothing.

Walking down Langley Street, Hunk’s hair flapped at his face. Brushing it back out of his eyes, he hesitated. Hunk thought he sensed a brightening of the sky, back over his shoulder, towards the west. He resisted the urge to look.

A car came up the street heading away from town. The next to the last intersection before the block of houses that included Hunk’s family had a stop sign on all four corners. A ghost of a smile pulled at his face as he recalled reading in the encyclopedia, (Volume: GA- GRA), the list of geometric shapes; the hexagonal stop sign. He stared as the car didn’t just not stop, it sped up. Two more handfuls of rain hit him on the back. He walked a little faster.

The sky grew darker, like when a cloud passes in front of the sun, except it was already overcast. It was more a deepening of darkness than a dimming of daylight.

Hunk decided he felt like jogging, instead of just walking. The wind heading in the direction of his house became noticeable. He thought he heard a train, except the 5:00 o’clock to Carbondale was still hours away. He set his sights on the sidewalk on the other side of the street.

As he crossed the intersection, he was staggered by a wallop to his shoulder, like when one of the eighth graders failed a test and Hunk happened to be in front of him in the lunch line. On the pavement, upside down, next to his right foot, was a good-sized box turtle. Hunk tried to make sense of it. The Mississippi was more than ten miles to the west; like one of those optical illusions, a turtle in the street refused to make sense. And for Hunk, everything made sense, or, at least it should. The need to get home ate at his thoughts like boiling water on a frozen puddle.

Hunk tried to enjoy his easy jog home and failed.

Behind him, past the school and beyond the train yard, the sound grew louder. The direction of the wind became confused and argumentative.

Chapter 4

A dry, jagged branch grabbed at his pants leg as he jumped over the tree that lay across the sidewalk and half out into Langley Street. It didn’t hurt, but the chill that sparkled up the back of his neck coincided with a strong gust of cold wind. It hit the center of his back like a rolled-up carpet and, stumbling his landing, Hunk hit the asphalt road surface with palms and knees. He rolled over on his side and looked back the way he’d come. He immediately wished he hadn’t. The wind was bending the trees lining Langley Street, but not like a normal strong wind, all branches pointing in one direction. The trees moved with more of a swaying motion, first to one side then the other. As disturbing as that was, it was not what made Hunk Dietrich get up and start running.

What made Hunk run towards home was the white-on-gray cylindrical mass descending from the low-hanging clouds. It was moving; both in a rotation from his left to right as well as, and much more importantly, in his direction. Hunk’s neighborhood was laid out in a grid. The town fathers were quite proud of the orderly layout of the streets. The result of this exercise in modern community planning was that a certain ten-year-old boy had an unobstructed view almost to the town’s center, three-quarters of a mile away. What remained of the town’s commercial center, Hunk thought, staring at the approaching funnel cloud.

Chapter 5

Hunk almost ran past his house. It was where it always was, the middle house on the block, but he was so intent on not falling again, that he didn’t look at anything other than the ground in front of his feet. The mailbox should have been a clue: 42 Langley Street. But it wasn’t where it was supposed to be either. Leaning into the wind that groped the right side of his body, he tried to make sense of what he saw. He knew what he should be seeing: a two-story white house, covered porch across the front with windows bracketing the front door. What he actually saw, made him recall the photo of a cannibal from Borneo; the front was as familiar as a shirt sleeve, but, like a bone through nostrils, a spruce tree struck through the porch, from one side to the other. People-sized branches were pressed up and over the blue front door like starving Trick-or-Treaters.

The backdoor should be… drew his attention to the side of the house that wasn’t missing windows and shutters, when his right leg was knocked out from under him. Staring at the mailbox, also laying on the ground, he saw a dark red rectangle next to his foot. The feeling of being in a dream grew and as the roaring wind somehow receded into the background, he read the spine of the book: ‘Mac-Map’ ‘Encyclopedia Britannica’.

Hunk pushed himself to his feet, stared down at the mailbox but decided it was beyond help and turned to look down his street, back towards school. One block from where he stood was a wall of clouds and mists and things that should not be flying.

Hunk ran across the front lawn and dove under the front porch of his house.

Chapter 6

The earth shook and the boy under the porch felt his world begin to spin. The reassuring pressure of earth against his chest disappeared and the last thing he felt was the back of his head hitting the underside of the porch.

Chapter 7

Hunk awoke to silence and sky.

The silence began somewhere just beyond his skin and the sky was a depthless blue. Hunk thought, If I was in a story, this would be where I’d wonder if I’d died and gone to heaven.

He didn’t think everything was alright, if for no other reason than he was laying on his back, staring at the sky. He knew for a fact he’d been lying face down, under the porch, his fingers buried in the dirt. He rolled to his right and sat up, bringing the rest of his world into view. Unfortunately, what he saw was far more difficult to make sense of than the cloudless sky and the total silence.

Everything was a jumble of almost-recognizable objects. Looking across the street he saw a tree and a house. Trouble was, the tree was growing up through and out of the roof of the house. To his left, a kitchen chair, a light blue rug and a car, surely the most everyday of items. They were lined up, neat as you please, in a row down the middle of the street.

Hunk stood up, arms out to either side. Looking at his feet, he saw the outline of a person, complete with a pattern of holes perfectly spaced for ten fingers. Seeing the imprint in the soil made him think, You can’t stand up, you’re under the porch. He turned to his right, and the dark, square hole where his house was supposed to be.

His arm was jerked to the left hard enough to pull him off-balance. Mr. Drew, from one street over, was making faces at him. Hunk’s mind, the least disadvantaged part of him, retrieved the memory of seeing, in the ‘Dom-Dz’ volume of the Encyclopedia, a picture of the Masks of Drama and Comedy. Mr. Drew looked mostly like the drama mask, and was just as silent. The man’s mouth was opening and closing, without making a sound. His eyes never stopped moving, almost independently of each other, as if to see everything at once, a desperate animal cornered by predators.

Hunk pulled his arm free and looked around. Like one of the puzzles in the Sunday paper that he enjoyed, where the object was to find the Indians hidden in a black and white line drawing, he began to see other people. Some were walking on the street, which wasn’t so bad. What was bad was when he saw the woman who lived in the house behind the Dietrich house standing in her yard. He saw her because his house wasn’t there anymore.

Hunk walked a familiar path in an unknown place. He walked around the block. He knew he walked on the street because he could see asphalt. Most of the time. Other times he would see clothing and furniture, and as he adjusted to this indoors/outdoors world, he saw people. In the street and on the street. The last was too much and he turned in a random direction, the street people as soundless as the rest of Hunk Dietrich’s world.

Hunk found himself approaching his school. He saw the swings and the teeter-totters in the playground just as always. The two-story, brick-sided elementary school was not as always.

Chapter 7

Hunk saw something move at the base of the front wall of the elementary school. Things that moved were not a rarity on this day in March. The world around him was disassembled. Like a house of cards, after a sudden shake of the table, each card recognizable, the house they once formed only a somewhat vague image.

The world was silent. Hunk felt more wonder at how he could forget he couldn’t hear than he did at accepting the destruction of his home town.