MY WRITERS SITE: Family in the Wind. A short story by F. Scott Fitzgerald

Family in the Wind. A short story by F. Scott Fitzgerald

FAMILY IN THE WIND

THE TWO men drove up the hill toward the blood-red sun. The

cotton fields bordering the road were thin and withered, and no

breeze stirred in the pines.

"When I am totally sober," the doctor was saying "I mean when

I am totally sober I don't see the same world that you do. I'm like

a friend of mine who had one good eye and got glasses made to cor-

rect his bad eye ; the result was that he kept seeing flliptical suns

and falling off tilted curbs, until he had to throw the glasses away.

Granted that I am thoroughly anaesthetized the greater part of the

day well, I only undertake work that I know I can do when I am

in that condition."

"Yeah," agreed his brother Gene uncomfortably. The doctor was

a little tight at the moment and Gene could find no opening for what

he had to say. Like so many Southerners of the humbler classes, he

had a deep-seated courtesy, characteristic of all violent and passion-

ate lands he could not change the subject until there was a mo-

ment's silence, and Forrest would not shut up.

"I'm very happy," he continued, "or very miserable. I chuckle or

I weep alcoholically and, as I continue to slow up, life accommodat-

ingly goes faster, so that the less there is of myself inside, the more

diverting becomes the moving picture without. I have cut myself

off from the respect of my fellow man, but I am aware of a com-

pensatory cirrhosis of the emotions. And because my sensitivity, my

pity, no longer has direction, but fixes itself on whatever is at hand,

I have become an exceptionally good fellow much more so than

when I was a good doctor."

As the road straightened after the next bend and Gene saw his

house in the distance, he remembered his wife's face as she had

made him promise, and he could wait no longer: "Forrest, I got a

thing "

But at that moment the doctor brought his car to a sudden stop

in front of a small house just beyond a grove of pines. On the front

steps a girl of eight was playing with a gray cat.

"This is the sweetest little kid I ever saw," the doctor said to

Gene, and then to the child, in a grave voice : "Helen, do you need

any pills for kitty?

The little girl laughed.

"Well, I don't know," she said doubtfully. She was playing another

game with the cat now and this came as rather an interruption.

"Because kitty telephoned me this morning," the doctor con-

tinued, "and said her mother was neglecting her and couldn't I get

her a trained nurse from Montgomery."

"She did not." The little girl grabbed the cat close indignantly;

the doctor took a nickel from his pocket and tossed it to the steps.

"I recommend a good dose of milk," he said as he put the car into

gear. "Good night, Helen."

"Good night, doctor."

As they drove off, Gene tried again : "Listen ; stop," he said. "Stop

here a little way down . . . Here."

The doctor stopped the car and the brothers faced each other.

They were alike as to robustness of figure and a certain asceticism of

feature and they were both in their middle forties ; they were unlike

in that the doctor's glasses failed to conceal the veined, weeping eyes

of a soak, and that he wore corrugated city wrinkles ; Gene's wrinkles

bounded fields, followed the lines of rooftrees, of poles propping up

sheds. His eyes were a fine, furry blue. But the sharpest contrast lay

in the fact that Gene Janney was a country man while Dr. Forrest

Janney was obviously a man of education.

"Well?" the doctor asked.

"You know Pinky's at home," Gene said, looking down the road.

"So I hear," the doctor answered noncommittally.

"He got in a row in Birmingham and somebody shot him in the

head." Gene hesitated. "We got Doc Behrer because we thought

maybe you wouldn't maybe you wouldn't "

"I wouldn't," agreed Doctor Janney blandly.

"But look, Forrest; here's the thing," Gene insisted. "You know

how it is you often say Doc Behrer doesn't know nothing. Shucks,

I never thought he was much either. He says the bullet's pressing on

the pressing on the brain, and he can't take it out without causin'

a hemmering, and he says he doesn't know whether we could get

him to Birmingham or Montgomery, or not, he's so low. Doc wasn't

no help. What we want "

"No," said his brother, shaking his head. "No."

"I just want you to look at him and tell us what to do," Gene

begged. "He's unconscious, Forrest. He wouldn't know you; you'd

hardly know him. Thing is his mother's about crazy."

"She's in the grip of a purely animal instinct*" The doctor took

from his hip a flask containing half water and half Alabama corn,

and drank. "You and I know that boy ought to been drowned the

day he was born."

Gene flinched. "He's bad," he admitted, "but I don't know You

see him lying there "

As the liquor spread over the doctor's insides he felt an instinct to

do something, not to violate his prejudices but simply to make some

gesture, to assert his own moribund but still struggling will to

power.

"All right, I'll see him," he said. "I'll do nothing myself to help

him, because he ought to be dead. And even his death wouldn't make

up for what he did to Mary Decker."

Gene Janney pursed his lips. "Forrest, you sure about that?"

"Sure about it I" exclaimed the doctor. "Of course I'm sure. She

died of starvation ; she hadn't had more than a couple cups of coffee

in a week. And if you looked at her shoes, you could see she'd

walked for miles."

"Doc Behrer says "

"What does he know ? I performed the autopsy the day they found

her on the Birmingham Highway. There was nothing the matter with

her but starvation. That that" his voice shook with feeling

"that Pinky got tired of her and turned her out, and she was trying

to get home. It suits me fine that he was invalided home himself a

couple of weeks later."

As he talked, the doctor had plunged the car savagely into gear

and let the clutch out with a jump ; in a moment they drew up be-

fore Gene Janney's home.

It was a square frame house with a brick foundation and a well-

kept lawn blocked off from the farm, a house rather superior to the

buildings that composed the town of Bending and the surrounding

agricultural area, yet not essentially different in type or in its interior

economy. The last of the plantation houses in this section of Ala-

bama had long disappeared, the proud pillars yielding to poverty, rot

and rain.

Gene's wife, Rose, got up from her rocking-chair on the porch.

"Hello, doc." She greeted him a little nervously and without meet-

ing his eyes. "You been a stranger here lately."

The doctor met her eyes for several seconds. "How do you do,

Rose," he said. "Hi, Edith ... Hi, Eugene" this to the little boy

and girl who stood beside their mother; and then: "Hi, Butch!" to

the stocky youth of nineteen who came around the corner of the

house hugging a round stone.

"Coin to have a sort of low wall along the front here kind of

neater," Gene explained.

All of them had a lingering respect for the doctor. They felt re-

proachful toward him because they could no longer refer to him as

the celebrated relative "one of the bess surgeons up in Mont-

gomery, yes suh" but there was his learning and the position he had

once occupied in the larger world, before he had committed pro-

fessional suicide by taking to cynicism and drink. He had come

home to Bending and bought a half interest in the local drug store

two years ago, keeping up his license, but practising only when

sorely needed.

"Rose/' said Gene, "doc says he'll take a look at Pinky."

Pinky Janney, his lips curved mean and white under a new beard,

lay in bed in a darkened room. When the doctor removed the band-

age from his head, his breath blew into a low groan, but his paunchy

body did not move. After a few minutes, the doctor replaced the

bandage and, with Gene and Rose, returned to the porch.

"Behrer wouldn't operate?" he asked.

"No."

"Why didn't they operate in Birmingham?"

"I don't know."

"H'm." The doctor put on his hat. "That bullet ought to come out,

and soon. It's pressing against the carotid sheath. That's the any-

how, you can't get him to Montgomery with that pulse."

"What'll we do?" Gene's question carried a little tail of silence as

he sucked his breath back.

"Get Behrer to think it over. Or else get somebody in Mont-

gomery. There's about a 25 per cent chance that the operation would

save him ; without the operation he hasn't any chance at all."

"Who'll we get in Montgomery?" asked Gene.

"Any good surgeon would do it. Even Behrer could do it if he had

any nerve."

Suddenly Rose Janoey came close to him, her eyes straining and

burning with an animal maternalism. She seized his coat where it

hung open.

"Doc, you do it! You can do it. You know you were as good a

surgeon as any of em once. Please, doc, you go on do it."

He stepped back a little so that her hands fell from his coat, and

held out his own hands in front of him.

"See how they tremble?" he said with elaborate irony. "Look

close and you'll see. I wouldn't dare operate."

"You could do it all right," said Gene hastily, "with a drink to

stiffen you up."

The doctor shook his head and said, looking at Rose : "No. You

see, my decisions are not reliable, and if anything went wrong, it

would seem to be my fault." He was acting a little now he chose

his words carefully. "I hear that when I found that Mary Decker

died of starvation, my opinion was questioned on the ground that

I was a drunkard."

"I didn't say that," lied Rose breathlessly.

"Certainly not. I just mention it to show how careful IVe got to

be." He moved down the steps. "Well, my advice is to see Behrer

again, or, failing that, get somebody from the city. Good night."

But before he had reached the gate, Rose came tearing after him,

her eyes white with fury.

"I did say you were a drunkard I" she cried. "When you said

Mary Decker died of starvation, you made it out as if it was Pinky's

fault you, swilling yourself full of corn all day I How can anybody

tell whether you know what you're doing or not? Why did you

think so much about Mary Decker, anyhow a girl half your age?

Everybody saw how she used to come in your drug store and talk

to you "

Gene, who had followed, seized her arms. "Shut up now, Rose . . .

Drive along, Forrest."

Forrest drove along, stopping at the next bend to drink from his

flask. Across the fallow cotton fields he could see the house where

Mary Decker had lived, and had it been six months before, he might

have detoured to ask her why she hadn't come into the store that day

for her free soda, or to delight her with a sample cosmetic left by a

salesman that morning. He had not told Mary Decker how he felt

about her ; never intended to she was seventeen, he was forty-five,

and he no longer dealt in futures but only after she ran away to

Birmingham with Pinky Janney, did he realize how much his love

for her had counted in his lonely life.

His thoughts went back to his brother's house.

"Now, if I were a gentleman," he thought, "I wouldn't have done

like that. And another person might have been sacrificed to that

dirty dog, because if he died afterward Rose would say I killed

him."

Yet he felt pretty bad as he put his car away ; not that he could

have acted differently, but just that it was all so ugly.

He had been home scarcely ten minutes when a car creaked to

rest outside and Butch Janney came in. His mouth was set tight

and his eyes were narrowed as though to permit of no escape to the

temper that possessed him until it should be unleashed upon its

proper objective.

"Hi, Butch."

"I want to tell you, Uncle Forrest, you can't talk to my mother

thataway. Ill kill you, you talk to my mother like that!"

"Now shut up, Butch, and sit down," said the doctor sharply.

"She's already bout sick on account of Pinky, and you come over

and talk to her like that."

"Your mother did all the insulting that was done, Butch. I just

took it."

"She doesn't know what she's saying and you ought to understand

that."

The doctor thought a minute. "Butch, what do you think of

Pinky?"

Butch hesitated uncomfortably. "Well, I can't say I ever thought

so much of him" his tone changed defiantly "but after all, he's

my own brother "

"Wait a minute, Butch. What do you think of the way he treated

Mary Decker?"

But Butch had shaken himself free, and now he let go the artillery

of his rage :

"That ain't the point ; the point is anybody that doesn't do right

to my mother has me to answer to. It's only fair when you got all

the education "

"I got my education myself, Butch."

"I don't care. We're going to try again to get Doc Behrer to oper-

ate or get us some fellow from the city. But if we can't I'm coming

and get you, and you're going to take that bullet out if I have to

hold a gun to you while you do it," He nodded, panting a little ; then

he turned and went out and drove away.

"Something tells me," said the doctor to himself, "that there's no

more peace for me in Chilton County." He called to his colored

boy to put supper on the table. Then he rolled himself a cigarette

and went out on the back stoop.

The weather had changed. The sky was now overcast and the grass

stirred restlessly and there was a sudden flurry of drops without a

sequel. A minute ago it had been warm, but now the moisture on

his forehead was suddenly cool, and he wiped it away with his hand-

kerchief. There was a buzzing in his ears and he swallowed and shook

his head. For a moment he thought he must be sick ; then suddenly

the buzzing detached itself from him, grew into a swelling sound,

louder and ever nearer, that might have been the roar of an approach-

ing train.

Butch Janney was halfway home when he saw it a huge, black,

approaching cloud whose lower edge bumped the ground. Even as he

stared at it vaguely, it seemed to spread until it included the whole

southern sky, and he saw pale electric fire in it and heard an in-

creasing roar. He was in a strong wind now ; blown debris, bits of

broken branches, splinters, larger objects unidentifiable in the grow-

ing darkness, flew by him. Instinctively he got out of his car and, by

now hardly able to stand against the wind, ran for a bank, or rather

found himself thrown and pinned against a bank. Then for a minute,

two minutes, he was in the black centre of pandemonium.

First there was the sound, and he was part of the sound, so en-

gulfed in it and possessed by it that he had no existence apart from

it. It was not a collection of sounds, it was just Sound itself ; a great

screeching bow drawn across the chords of the universe. The sound

and force were inseparable. The sound as well as the force held him

to what he felt was the bank like a man crucified. Somewhere in this

first moment his face, pinned sideways, saw his automobile make a

little jump, spin halfway around and then go bobbing off over a field

in a series of great helpless leaps. Then began the bombardment,

the sound dividing its sustained cannon note into the cracks of a

gigantic machine gun. He was only half -conscious as he felt himself

become part of one of those cracks, felt himself lifted away from the

bank to tear through space, through a blinding, lacerating mass of

twigs and branches, and then, for an incalculable time, he knew

nothing at all.

His body hurt him. He was lying between two branches in the top

of a tree ; the air was full of dust and rain, and he could hear noth-

ing ; it was a long time before he realized that the tree he was in had

been blown down and that his involuntary perch among the pine

needles was only five feet from the ground.

"Say, man!" he cried, aloud, outraged. "Say, man! Say, what a

wind ! Say, man ! "

Made acute by pain and fear, he guessed that he had been stand-

ing on the tree's root and had been catapulted by the terrific wrench

as the big pine was torn from the earth. Feeling over himself, he

found that his left ear was caked full of dirt, as if someone had

wanted to take an impression of the inside. His clothes were in rags,

his coat had torn on the back seam, and he could feel where, as some

stray gust tried to undress him, it had cut into him under the arms.

Reaching the ground, he set off in the direction of his father's

house, but it was a new and unfamiliar landscape he traversed. The

Thing he did not know it was a tornado had cut a path a quarter

of a mile wide, and he was confused, as the dust slowly settled, by

vistas he had never seen before. It was unreal that Bending church

tower should be visible from here; there had been groves of trees

between.

But where was here? For he should be close to the Baldwin house ;

only as he tripped over great piles of boards, like a carelessly kept

lumberyard, did Butch realize that there was no more Baldwin house,

and then, looking around wildly, that there was no Necrawney house

on the hill, no Peltzer house below it. There was not a light, not a

sound, save the rain falling on the fallen trees.

He broke into a run. When he saw the bulk of his father's house

in the distance, he gave a "Hey I" of relief, but coming closer, he

realized that something was missing. There were no outhouses and

the built-on wing that held Pinky's room had been sheared com-

pletely away.

"Mother ! " he called. "Dad I " There was no answer ; a dog bounded

out of the yard and licked his hand. . . .

... It was full dark twenty minutes later when Doc Janney

stopped his car in front of his own drug store in Bending. The elec-

tric lights had gone out, but there were men with lanterns in the

street, and in a minute a small crowd had collected around him. He

unlocked the door hurriedly.

"Somebody break open the old Wiggins Hospital." He pointed

across the street. "I've got six badly injured in my car. I want some

fellows to carry em in. Is Doc Behrer here?"

"Here he is," offered eager voices out of the darkness as the

doctor, case in hand, came through the crowd. The two men stood

face to face by lantern light, forgetting that they disliked each

other.

"God knows how many more there's going to be," said Doc Janney.

"I'm getting dressing and disinfectant. There'll be a lot of frac-

tures " He raised his voice, "Somebody bring me a barrel ! "

"I'll get started over there," said Doc Behrer. "There's about half

a dozen more crawled in."

"What's been done?" demanded Doc Janney of the men who fol-

lowed him into the drug store. "Have they called Birmingham and

Montgomery?"

"The telephone wires are down, but the telegraph got through."

"Well, somebody get Doctor Cohen from Wettela, and tell any

people who have automobiles to go up the Willard Pike and cut

across toward Corsica and all through those roads there. There's not

a house left at the crossroads by the nigger store. I passed a lot of

folks walking in, all of them hurt, but I didn't have room for any-

body else." As he talked he was throwing bandages, disinfectant and

drugs into a blanket. "I thought I had a lot more stuff than this in

stock. And wait ! " he called. "Somebody drive out and look down in

that hollow where the Wooleys live. Drive right across the fields

the road's blocked . . . Now, you with the cap Ed Jenks, aint

it?"

"Yes, doc."

"You see what I got here? You collect everything in the store

that looks like this and bring it across the way, understand?"

"Yes, doc."

As the doctor went out into the street, the victims were streaming

into town a woman on foot with a badly injured child, a buckboard

full of groaning Negroes, frantic men gasping terrible stories. Every-

where confusion and hysteria mounted in the dimly illumined dark-

ness. A mud-covered reporter from Birmingham drove up in a side-

car, the wheels crossing the fallen wires and brushwood that clogged

the street, and there was the siren of a police car from Cooper, thirty

miles away.

Already a crowd pressed around the doors of the hospital, closed

these three months for lack of patients. The doctor squeezed past

the melee of white faces and established himself in the nearest ward,

grateful for the waiting row of old iron beds. Doctor Behrer was

already at work across the hall.

"Get me half a dozen lanterns," he ordered.

"Doctor Behrer wants iodine and adhesive."

"All right, there it is. ... Here, you Shinkey, stand by the door

and keep everybody out except cases that can't walk. Somebody run

over and see if there ain't some candles in the grocery store."

The street outside was full of sound now the cries of women, the

contrary directions of volunteer gangs trying to clear the highway,

the tense staccato of people rising to an emergency. A little before

midnight arrived the first unit of the Red Cross. But the three doc-

tors, presently joined by two others from near-by villages, had lost

track of time long before that. The dead began to be brought in by

ten o'clock; there were twenty, twenty-five, thirty, forty the list

grew. Having no more needs, these waited, as became simple hus-

bandmen, in a garage behind, while the stream of injured hundreds

of them flowed through the old hospital built to house only a score

The storm had dealt out fractures of the leg, collar bone, ribs and

hip, lacerations of the back, elbows, ears, eyelids, nose ; there were

wounds from flying planks, and odd splinters in odd places, and a

scalped man, who would recover to grow a new head of hair. Living

or dead, Doc Janney knew every face, almost every name.

"Don't you fret now. Billy's all right. Hold still and let me tie

this. People are drifting in every minute, but it's so consarned dark

they can't find 'em All right, Mrs. Oakey. That's nothing. Ev

here'll touch it with iodine . . . Now let's see this man."

Two o'clock. The old doctor from Wettala gave out, but now there

were fresh men from Montgomery to take his place. Upon the air

of the room, heavy with disinfectant, floated the ceaseless babble of

human speech reaching the doctor dimly through the layer after

layer of increasing fatigue :

". . . Over and over just rolled me over and over. Got hold of

a bush and the bush came along too."

" Jeff I Where's Jeff?"

". . . I bet that pig sailed a hundred yards "

" just stopped the train in time. All the passengers got out and

helped pull the poles "

" Where's Jeff?"

"He says, 'Let's get down cellar/ and I says, 'We ain't got no

cellar' "

" If there's no more stretchers, find some light doors."

"... Five seconds? Say, it was more like five minutes!"

At some time he heard that Gene and Rose had been seen with

their two youngest children. He had passed their house on the way

in and, seeing it standing, hurried on. The Janney family had been

lucky ; the doctor's own house was outside the sweep of the storm.

Only as he saw the electric lights go on suddenly in the streets

and glimpsed the crowd waiting for hot coffee in front of the Red

Cross did the doctor realize how tired he was.

"You better go rest," a young man was saying. "I'll take this side

of the room. I've got two nurses with me."

"All right all right. I'll finish this row."

The injured were being evacuated to the cities by train as fast as

their wounds were dressed, and their places taken by others. He

had only two beds to go in the first one he found Pinky Janney.

He put his stethoscope to the heart. It was beating feebly. That

he, so weak, so nearly gone, had survived this storm at all was re-

markable. How he had got there, who had found him and carried

him, was a mystery in itself. The doctor went over the body ; there

were small contusions and lacerations, two broken fingers, the dirt-

filled ears that marked every case nothing else. For a moment the

doctor hesitated, but even when he closed his eyes, the image of Mary

Decker seemed to have receded, eluding him. Something purely pro-

fessional that had nothing to do with human sensibilities had been

set in motion inside him, and he was powerless to head it off. He

held out his hands before him ; they were trembling slightly.

"Hell's bells! "he muttered.

He went out of the room and around the corner of the hall, where

he drew from his pocket the flask containing the last of the corn

and water he had had in the afternoon. He emptied it. Returning to

the ward, he disinfected two instruments and applied a local

anaesthetic to a square section at the base of Pinky's skull where

the wound had healed over the bullet. He called a nurse to his side

and then, scalpel in hand, knelt on one knee beside his nephew's

bed.

Ill

Two days later the doctor drove slowly around the mournful

countryside. He had withdrawn from the emergency work after the

first desperate night, feeling that his status as a pharmacist might

embarrass his collaborators. But there was much to be done in

bringing the damage to outlying sections under the aegis of the Red

Cross, and he devoted himself to that.

The path of the demon was easy to follow. It had pursued an ir-

regular course on its seven-league boots, cutting cross country,

through woods, or even urbanely keeping to roads until they curved,

when it went off on its own again. Sometimes the trail could be

traced by cotton fields, apparently in full bloom, but this cotton

came from the insides of hundreds of quilts and mattresses redis-

tributed in the fields by the storm.

At a lumber pile that had lately been a Negro cabin, he stopped

a moment to listen to a dialogue between two reporters and two shy

pickaninnies. The old grandmother, her head bandaged, sat among

the ruins, gnawing some vague meat and moving her rocker cease-

lessly.

"But where is the river you were blown across?" one of the re-

porters demanded.

"There."

"Where?"

The pickaninnies looked to their grandmother for aid.

"Right there behind you-all," spoke up the old woman.

The newspapermen looked disgustedly at a muddy stream four

yards wide.

"That's no river."

"That's a Menada River, we always calls it ever since I was a gull.

Yes, suh, that's a Menada River. An' them two boys was blowed

right across it an set down on the othah side just as pretty, 'thout

any hurt at all. Chimney fell on me," she concluded, feeling her

head.

"Do you mean to say that's all it was?" demanded the younger

reporter indignantly. "That's the river they were blown across 1

And one hundred and twenty million people have been led to

believe "

"That's all right, boys," interrupted Doc Janney. "That's a right

good river for these parts. And it'll get bigger as those little fellahs

get older."

He tossed a quarter to the old woman and drove on.

Passing a country church, he stopped and counted the new brown

mounds that marred the graveyard. He was nearing the centre of

the holocaust now. There was the Howden house where three had

been killed ; there remained a gaunt chimney, a rubbish heap and a

scarecrow surviving ironically in the kitchen garden. In the ruins of

the house across the way a rooster strutted on top of a piano, reign-

ing vociferously over an estate of trunks, boots, cans, books, calen-

dars, rugs, chairs and window frames, a twisted radio and a legless

sewing machine. Everywhere there was bedding blankets, mat-

tresses, bent springs, shredded padding he had not realized how

much of people's lives was spent in bed. Here and there, cows and

horses, often stained with disinfectant, were grazing again in the

fields. At intervals there were Red Cross tents, and sitting by one of

these, with the gray cat in her arms, the doctor came upon little

Helen Kilrain. The usual lumber pile, like a child's building game

knocked down in a fit of temper, told the story.

"Hello, dear," he greeted her, his heart sinking. "How did kitty

like the tornado?"

"She didn't."

"What did she do?"

"She meowed."

"Oh."

"She wanted to get away, but I hanged on to her and she scratched

me see?"

He glanced at the Red Cross tent.

"Who's taking care of you?"

"The lady from the Red Cross and Mrs. Wells," she answered.

"My father got hurt. He stood over me so it wouldn't fall on me,

and I stood over kitty. He's in the hospital in Birmingham. When

he comes back, I guess he'll build our house again."

The doctor winced. He knew that her father would build no more

houses ; he had died that morning. She was alone, and she did not

know she was alone. Around her stretched the dark universe, im-

personal, inconscient. Her lovely little face looked up at him con-

fidently as he asked: "You got any kin anywhere, Helen?"

"I don't know."

"You've got kitty, anyhow, haven't you?"

"It's just a cat," she admitted calmly, but anguished by her own

betrayal of her love, she hugged it closer.

"Taking care of a cat must be pretty hard."

"Oh, no," she said hurriedly. "It isn't any trouble at all. It doesn't

eat hardly anything."

He put his hand in his pocket, and then changed his mind sud-

denly.

"Dear, I'm coming back and see you later later today. You take

take good care of kitty now, won't you?"

"Oh, yes," she answered lightly.

The doctor drove on. He stopped next at a house that had escaped

damage. Walt Cupps, the owner, was cleaning a shotgun on his

front porch.

"What's that, Walt? Going to shoot up the next tornado?"

"Ain't going to be a next tornado."

"You can't tell. Just take a look at that sky now. It's getting

mighty dark."

Walt laughed and slapped his gun. "Not for a hundred years,

anyhow. This here is for looters. There's a lot of 'em around, and

not all black either. Wish when you go to town that you'd tell 'em to

scatter some militia out here."

"I'll tell em now. You come out all right?"

"I did, thank God. With six of us in the house. It took off one hen,

and probably it's still carrying it around somewhere."

The doctor drove on toward town, overcome by a feeling of un-

easiness he could not define.

"It's the weather," he thought. "It's the same kind of feel in the

air there was last Saturday."

For a month the doctor had felt an urge to go away permanently.

Once this countryside had seemed to promise peace. When the im-

petus that had lifted him temporarily out of tired old stock was ex-

hausted, he had come back here to rest, to watch the earth put forth,

and live on simple, pleasant terms with his neighbors. Peace! He

knew that the present family quarrel would never heal, nothing

would ever be the same, it would all be bitter forever. And he had

seen the placid countryside turned into a land of mourning. There

was no peace here. Move on !

On the road he overtook Butch Janney walking to town.

"I was coming to see you," said Butch, frowning. "You operated

on Pinky after all, didn't you?"

"Jump in. ... Yes, I did. How did you know?"

"Doc Behrer told us." He shot a quick look at the doctor, who

did not miss the quality of suspicion in it. "They don't think he'll

last out the day."

"I'm sorry for your mother."

Butch laughed unpleasantly. "Yes, you are."

"I said I'm sorry for your mother," said the doctor sharply.

"I heard you."

They drove for a moment in silence.

"Did you find your automobile?"

"Did I?" Butch laughed ruefully. "I found something I don't

know whether you'd call it a car any more. And, you know, I could

of had tornado insurance for twenty- five cents." His voice trembled

indignantly : "Twenty-five cents but who would ever of thought of

getting tornado insurance?"

It was growing darker ; there was a thin crackle of thunder far

to the southward.

"Well, all I hope," said Butch with narrowed glance, "is that you

hadn't been drinking anything when you operated on Pinky."

"You know, Butch," the doctor said slowly, "that was a pretty

dirty trick of mine to bring that tornado here."

He had not expected the sarcasm to hit home, but he expected

a retort when suddenly he caught sight of Butch's face. It was

fish-white, the mouth was open, the eyes fixed and staring, and from

the throat came a mewling sound. Limply he raised one hand be-

fore him, and then the doctor saw.

Less than a mile away, an enormous, top-shaped black cloud

filled the sky and bore toward them, dipping and swirling, and in

front of it sailed already a heavy, singing wind.

"It's come back ! " the doctor yelled.

Fifty yards ahead of them was the old iron bridge spanning Bilby

Creek. He stepped hard on the accelerator and drove for it. The

fields were full of running figures headed in the same direc-

tion. Reaching the bridge, he jumped out and yanked Butch's

arm.

"Get out, you fool ! Get out ! "

A nerveless mass stumbled from the car ; in a moment they were

in a group of half a dozen, huddled in the triangular space that the

bridge made with the shore.

"Is it coming here?"

"No, it's turning ! "

"We had to leave grampa ! "

"Oh, save me, save me ! Jesus save me ! Help me ! "

"Jesus save my soul 1 "

There was a quick rush of wind outside, sending little tentacles

under the bridge with a curious tension in them that made the

doctor's skin crawl. Then immediately there was a vacuum, with

no more wind, but a sudden thresh of rain. The doctor crawled to

the edge of the bridge and put his head up cautiously.

"It's passed," he said. "We only felt the edge; the centre went

way to the right of us."

He could see it plainly; for a second he could even distinguish

objects in it shrubbery and small trees, planks and loose earth.

Crawling farther out, he produced his watch and tried to time it,

but the thick curtain of rain blotted it from sight.

Soaked to the skin, he crawled back underneath. Butch lay

shivering in the farthest corner, and the doctor shook him.

"It went in the direction of your house!" the doctor cried. "Pull

yourself together! Who's there?"

"No one," Butch groaned. "They're all down with Pinky."

The rain had changed to hail now ; first small pellets, then larger

ones, and larger, until the sound of the fall upon the iron bridge

was an ear-splitting tattoo.

The spared wretches under the bridge were slowly recovering, and

in the relief there were titters of hysterical laughter. After a certain

point of strain, the nervous system makes its transitions without

dignity or reason. Even the doctor felt the contagion.

"This is worse than a calamity," he said dryly. "It's getting to

be a nuisance."

There were to be no more tornadoes in Alabama that spring. The

second one it was popularly thought to be the first one come back ;

for to the people of Chilton County it had become a personified

force, definite as a pagan god took a dozen houses, Gene Janney's

among them, and injured about thirty people. But this time per-

haps because everyone had developed some scheme of self-protection

there were no fatalities. It made its last dramatic bow by sailing

down the main street of Bending, prostrating the telephone poles

and crushing in the fronts of three shops, including Doc Janney's

drug store.

At the end of a week, houses were going up again, made of the

old boards ; and before the end of the long, lush Alabama summer

the grass would be green again on all the graves. But it would be

years before the people of the country ceased to reckon events as

happening "before the tornado" or "after the tornado," and for

many families thing would never be the same.

Doctor Janney decided that this was as good a time to leave as

any. He sold the remains of his drug store, gutted alike by charity

and catastrophe, and turned over his house to his brother until Gene

could rebuild his own. He was going up to the city by train, for his

car had been rammed against a tree and couldn't be counted on for

much more than the trip to the station.

Several times on the way in he stopped by the roadside to say

good-by once it was to Walter Cupps.