Tornado Tracks (Jack Grady) …nor trees break Except for the will of this blind thing… —Mark Van Doren, King Wind The day Spring came sprouting tornadoes like tulips from Kansas to New England, I felt wind box my car like a speed ball in a giant’s gym. Later, I heard that a twister bloodied a boys camp in the neighbouring town. What was it I had felt then, there in the car?— a distant tendril of the tornado’s rage that I was not in its track or the passing breath of death from the twister’s mate that teased but never touched down? I looked for the camp where two boys were whipped in a whirl and hurled into trees. Beheaded, serrated stumps were a clue beside a cornfield’s remains, swept high over a road in a reef-break wave of husks, cobs, and leaves as if caught in a snapshot or frozen in time like Dali’s Still Life Fast Moving. A friend as a boy left home only minutes before such a blind beast rived it to rubble. But the wind would not forgive his absence, and it hunted him again when he was a man on bivouac near the Mississippi. Rumbling down in the night, its monstrous snout sniffing out his tent, it gave him the wild ride of his life, then dropped him on a tent post almost impaled. When I told him of the dead boys, the trees and the field, he pulled open his shirt and proudly revealed the deep impression aimed for his heart, the mark, he said, of the wind’s final mercy or the scar of his own victory— the silence of his shudder declared he would not dare to guess which.
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