The Darkest Evening of the Year

shortly before midnight, and she woke Brian’s father, John. He was dressing to drive her to the hospital when sirens sounded a tornado warning.
    Angela’s mother, Cora Nicholson, was staying with them, having traveled from Wichita to be of assistance after the birth. By the time she, her daughter, and her son-in-law stepped out of the house, heading for the car, the wind had escalated from gusts to gale.
    The sky, as black and evil as a dragon’s egg, broke open and spilled sharp electric-white gouts of yolk. In an instant the dusty air reeked of ozone and oncoming rain.
    “In the dream,” Brian said, “I was an observer. Not part of the action. Have you ever had a dream in which you weren’t part of it, you were just observing other people?”
    “I don’t know. Maybe. Come to think of it…maybe not.”
    “I don’t remember having a dream like that before,” Brian said.
    As Cora, Angela, and John reached the old Pontiac, shatters of rain rattled down on them with such force that the droplets stung the skin and bounced high off the hard earth.
    “I wasn’t part of the dream, just the audience. I didn’t speak to anyone, didn’t interact with anyone, and nobody saw me. Yet I was immersed in it with all my senses. I felt the rain snapping against me, the wet of it, cold rain for such a warm night. Scraps of green leaves, torn off trees, kept slapping my face, sticking to my skin.”
    Behind the crash of the rain rose a greater sound, not thunder, a continuous roar, growing in volume, like a score of passing trains.
    “The wall of the tornado, the whirling wall,” Brian said, “out there in the blind dark, concealed, approaching, not on top of us yet but not far off.”
    Their storm cellar was twenty yards from the house, and Cora, who had experience of these things back in Wichita, urged them to forget the car, to run for the shelter.
    If Angela was going to deliver the baby in the storm cellar, John wanted clean towels, rubbing alcohol to sterilize the knife with which he would cut the cord, and other items. Cora argued against his returning to the house, but he said he’d be a minute, less than a minute, no time at all.
    Brian said, “I ran with Mom and Grandma to an embankment. The grass was slick underfoot, not like in a dream. Intensely real, Amy. Sound, color, texture, smell. There was an open stone vestibule built into the slope. The shelter door stood at the back of it.”
    Brian had turned to look toward the house, and surprisingly the windows had been still bright with light.
    Suddenly lightning broke not in bolts but in cascades, did not step jaggedly down the night as usual, but lashed through the dark like broad undulant whips of chain mail.
    Those celestial flares revealed the twister immediately beyond the house, towering over it, the immense black wall churning, like a living beast, as amorphous as any monster in myth, rising up and up and still up, so high into the night that the top of it could not be glimpsed.
    All the windows burst at once. The house disintegrated. The funnel seemed to suck up every shard of glass, every scrap of wood, every nail, and John McCarthy, whose body would never be found.
    “My mother and grandmother had gone into the cellar and closed the door,” Brian said. “I was outside, watching a tree being pulled up by the roots—such a sound that made, a creaking scream—and then I was somehow inside the shelter with them.”
    At the last moment, Cora had looked back, had seen the house taken and no sign of her son-in-law. She had closed out the chaos and had driven home the six thick bolts that held every edge of the door to the header, jamb, and threshold.
    Wind married thunder, birthing ten thousand clamorous off-spring. Previously Brian had heard a sound like a score of trains, but now all the trains in the world were converging on a single intersection of tracks directly over their bunker.
    In that small refuge, brightened by one flashlight, the ceiling and the walls transmitted vibrations from the punished earth above, and dust sifted down, and the hordes of Hell howled at the door and tested the bolts that held it.
    Perhaps accelerated by terror, Angela’s contractions brought her to the moment of delivery quicker than Cora expected. With the funnel having passed but with the storm still raging overhead, frightened for her unborn child, weeping for her husband, Angela gave birth.
    Cora pulled a Coleman lantern from a shelf, lit it, and by that