The Way of the Wind | Page 7

churches in a town by the roots, turned them upside down and stuck their steeples in the ground as if in mockery of religion.
"Why do you call them cyclones?" the old man at the corner grocery had asked. "They are not cyclones. They are tornadoes."
And this old man who had once been a doctor of medicine in an Eastern village and who was therefore learned, though he had been persuaded by some Wise men to go West and grow up with the Fools, went on to explain the difference.
"A cyclone," he said, "is miles and miles in width. It sweeps across the prairie screeching and screaming, but doing not so very much damage as it might do, just getting on the nerves of the people and helping to drive them insane. That is all.
"Then along comes a hailstone. It drops into the southeast corner of this cyclone and there you are! It generates a tornado and That is the Thing that rends the Universe."
Seth had listened to these stories undismayed; for what had they to do with his ranch and the Magic City upon which it was to be built?
A cyclone would never come to the forks of two rivers. The Indians had said so.
Tradition had it that an old squaw whose name was Wichita had bewitched the spot with her incantations, defying the wind to touch the ground on which she had lived and died.
It must have been that this old squaw still occupied the spot, that her phantom still stooped over seething kettles, or stalked abroad in the darkness, or chanted dirges to the slap and pat of the grim war dance of the Indians; for the winds, growing frightened, had let the forks of the river alone.
Seth was very careful to relate this to Celia, to reiterate it to this fearful Celia who started up so wildly out of her sleep at the maniacal shriek of the wind. Very tenderly he whispered the reassurance and promise of protection against every blast that blew, thus soothing her softly back to slumber, after which he lay awake, watching her lest she wake again and wishing he might still the Universe while she slept.
He redoubled his care of her by night and by day, doing the work of the dugout before he began the work of the fields, not only bending over the tubs early in the morning for fear such bending might hurt her, but hanging out the clothes on the line for fear the fierce and vengeful wind might tan her beautiful complexion and tangle the fine soft yellow of her hair.
For the same reason, he brought in the clothes after the day's labor was over, and ironed them. He also did the simple cooking in order to protect her beauty from blaze of log and twinkle of twig.
If he could he would have hushed the noise of the world for love of her.
And yet, day after day, coming home from his work in the fields, he found her at the door of their dugout, peering after the east-bound train, trailing so far away as to seem a toy train, with a look of longing that struck cold to his heart.
His affection counted as nothing. His care was wasted. In spite of which he was full of apologies for her.
Other women, making these crude caves into homes for themselves and their children, had found contentment, but they were women of a different fibre.
He would not have her of a different and coarser fibre, this exquisite Southern creature, charming, delicate, set like a rare exotic in the humble window of his hut.
It was not her fault. It was his. It was his place to turn the hut into a palace for his Queen; and so he would, when the Wise Men came out of the East and built the Magic City.
When the Fools had made the plains a fit place for human beings to inhabit, planting trees to draw down the reluctant rain from the clouds, sowing seed and raising crops sometimes, to their surprise and the amazement of those who heard of it, the Wise Men would appear and buy the land, and the building of great cities would begin.
Already they had reared a town that dared approach in size to a city on the edge of the desert, but what had happened?
An angry cyclone, hearing of it, had come along and snatched it into the clouds.
Furious at sight of its spick and span newness, its yellow frame shanties and shining shingles, it had carried it off as if it had been a hen coop and set it down somewhere in Texas, a state that had been longer settled and was therefore a better place for houses and fences, and left it there.
Then the Wise Men, growing discouraged,