I had to have one more look at the storm.
The water-cyclone had either passed us or broken up when it reached the shoreline, but I still couldn’t see twenty yards out onto the lake. The water was in complete turmoil. I saw someone’s dock-the Jassers’, maybe-hurry by with its main supports alternately turned up to the sky and buried in the churning water.
I went downstairs. Billy ran to me and clung to my legs. I lifted him up and gave him a hug. Then I lit the candies. We sat in the guest room down the hall from my little studio and looked at each other’s faces in the flickering yellow glow and listened to the storm roar and bash at our house. About twenty minutes later we heard a ripping, rending crash as one of the big pines went down nearby. Then there was a lull.
«Is it over?» Steff asked.
«Maybe,» I said. «Maybe only for a while.
We went upstairs, each of us carrying a candle, like monks going to vespers. Billy carried his proudly and carefully. Carrying a candle, carrying the fire, was a very big deal for him. It helped him forget about being afraid.
It was too dark to see what damage had been done around the house. It was past Billy’s bedtime, but neither of us suggested putting him in. We sat in the living room, listened to the wind, and looked at the lightning.
About an hour later it began to crank up again. For three weeks the temperature had been over ninety, and on six of those twenty-one days the National Weather Service station at the Portland Jetport had reported temperatures of over one hundred degrees. Queer weather. Coupled with the grueling winter we had come through and the late spring, some people had dragged out that old chestnut about the long-range results of the fifties A-bomb tests again. That, and of course, the end of the world. The oldest chestnut of them all.
The second squall wasn’t so hard, but we heard the crash of several trees weakened by the first onslaught. As the wind began to die down again, one thudded heavily on the roof, like a fist dropped on a coffin lid. Billy jumped and looked apprehensively upward.
«It’ll hold, champ,» I said.
Billy smiled nervously.
Around ten o’clock the last squall came. It was bad. The wind howled almost as loudly as it had the first time, and lightning seemed to be flashing all around us. More trees fell, and there was a splintering crash down by the water that made Steff utter a low cry. Billy had gone to sleep on her lap.
«David, what was that?»
«I think it was the boathouse.»
«Oh. Oh, Jesus.»
«Steffy, I want us to go downstairs again.» I took Billy in my arms and stood up with him. Steffs eyes were big and frightened.
«David, are we going to be all right.»
«Yes.»
«Really?»
«Yes.»
We went downstairs. Ten minutes later, as the final squall peaked, there was a splintering crash from upstairs-the picture window. So maybe my vision earlier hadn’t been so crazy after all. Steff, who had been dozing, woke up with a little shriek, and Billy stirred uneasily in the guest bed.
«The rain will come in,» she said. «It’ll ruin the furniture.»
«If it does, it does. It’s insured.»
«That doesn’t make it any better,» she said in an upset, scolding voice. «Your mother’s dresser … our new sofa… the colour TV…»
«Shhh,» I said. «Go to sleep.»
«I can’t,» she said, and five minutes later she had.
I stayed awake for another half hour with one lit candle for company, listening to the thunder walk and talk outside. I had a feeling that there were going to be a lot of people from the lakefront communities calling their insurance agents in the morning, a lot of chainsaws burring as cottage owners cut up the trees that had fallen on their roofs and battered through their windows, and a lot of orange CMP trucks on the road.
The storm was fading now, with no sign of a new squall coming in. I went back upstairs, leaving Steff and Billy on the bed, and looked into the living room. The sliding glass door had held. But where the picture window had been there was now a jagged hole stuffed with birch leaves. It was the top of the old tree that had stood by our outside basement access for as long as I could remember. Looking at its top, now visiting in our living room, I could understand what Steff had meant by saying insurance didn’t make it any better. I had loved that tree. It had been a hard campaigner of many winters, the one tree on the lakeside of the house that was exempt from my own chainsaw. Big chunks of glass on the rug reflected my candle-flame over and over. I reminded myself to warn Steff and Billy. They would want to wear their slippers in here. Both of them liked to slop around barefoot in the morning.