Windquake. The concept described what it felt like to be in houses literally shaken by the wind. The spiteful aspect of the weather often forgotten until it arose, aeolian damage could be heard in real time as the gusts became sustained. As if the sky were trying to tear civilization itself apart. Dickinsheet wasn’t built to code.
Queequeg and Terah rode out the storm in Cicero’s house with his bones. The place shook like a frightened old man. No rain fell, but the violence of the wind rocked everything. “At least with a thunderstorm you know when its done,” Queequeg called out. The wind would blow itself out only to begin again with even more rage.
Terah felt terror. “It’s like hurricane Sandy,” he shouted above the din. He’d been in New Jersey for that.
“Least we don’t have to worry about losing power,” Queequeg smiled. Where had he been during that storm? It’d left an indelible impression on Terah, although he’d experienced others. In his fear he began reciting them, like a mantra.
“Gloria, Irene, Sandy.”
“You obviously never lived in Florida!”
A lull settled in. “Pennsylvania’s supposed to be safe from natural disasters. Too far inland for hurricanes, too hilly for tornadoes. It rains a lot so droughts and wildfires are rare. No volcanoes, and no earthquakes. But who can hide from the wind?”
As if conjured by his words, the howling resumed. The high-pitched whistle around the windows was unnerving. For Terah it suggested packs of hungry wolves circling the village. He resented being pushed, but this wind simply wouldn’t stop. A tremendous crack joined the howling, instinctively making both men duck. Moments later a loud crash came over the furor of the wind.
The windquake came apart slowly. The gusts would continue into the night, but the pitch told them that they could venture out and see what that terrible noise had been. What damage had been done.
Stepping outside, at first everything looked normal. Eddys of wind rushed by and Queequeg pointed. “My god! Hooper’s store!”
The roof of an unoccupied house had crashed into the store like a flying saucer in the desert. Wary, lest the gusts might grow more violent again, the men headed that way. Others were coming from different directions. Hagrid, although not the leader, became so through his size. “Is everyone accounted for?” he shouted. Of course, with no emergency management plan Dickinsheet relied on everyone coming out to assess who wasn’t there. Nobody wants to be the red-shirted security detail beaming down with Captain Kirk. Where was Vince?
The chill wind ruffled again, but the largest gust seemed to be over. People were now calling for Vince and doing the best they could to remove the errant roof with no heavy equipment. The shingles clung together in heavy masses like a crocodile’s back, the beams and plywood required the muscle of everyone to move. Finally, with plenty of strains that should’ve been looked at by a doctor, the roof was pushed off the front of the smashed store. Vince was found in the wood room under a bier made by nature’s chaos.
Hagrid broke the silence. “It might sound insensitive, but we’ve lost quite a few supplies.”
“But Vince is dead!” Moby cried. “That’s two in one week.”
“Statistics won’t bring him back,” Queequeg noted.
“We have to be practical,” Hagrid called over the wind. “Claresta, would you go for supplies?”
“I’ll take the new guy with me, Cal.”
“Okay, he needs to learn the way.”
Terah didn’t know what to feel. He’d come to know Vince and had liked him. His feelings for Lindsey, however, still felt like joyful dredging in his chest. Hope tinged with impossibility. His pulse was explosive. He climbed down off the roof of Hooper’s and joined her. “You should get your pack, and dress for the weather,” she said.
They left the others trying to make order from the confusion of random events. Lindsey retrieved her pack and met Terah at his assigned house. “We could be gone awhile,” she said, “pack smartly.”
The snow had melted a couple weeks back, but the cold rains in March left everything muddy on the trail. In his time there Terah hadn’t yet walked out this way. He kept his eye out for the phantom that he’d glimpsed a couple of months ago. “Do you believe in her?” he asked.
Lindsey knew what he meant. “Of course I do. Did gettin’ religion make ya lose yer faith?”
“I saw her once. Back after I first arrived.”
They were slipping in the tracks going uphill. Lindsey stepped into the grass at the side. Terah followed.
“Then why’d ya ask?”
“It seems so unlikely. I mean, a ghost inviting men to live in her own private village.”
“She’s not a ghost. What’d they teach you in religion school?”
“Seminary,” he corrected. “Certainly nothing about supernatural beings. Well, apart from the Trinity.”
“Seriously? I would think they’d be tellin’ ya all about the things people actually see. Caileigh’s a wood nymph. Don’t look so shocked. People still report seein’ fairies an’ gnomes an’ shit. They never stopped. It’s just they don’t fit with scientific materialism.”
Terah glanced around hopefully, not seeing her. “When I was in seminary they were trying to reconcile Christianity with materialism. You can’t very well be a university department if you claim there really are spiritual beings.”
“At what price, though?” she asked. “Ya know, I wanted to go to college to study physics. We had a great teacher in high school, Ms. Fifield. The way she described what was goin’ on in quantum mechanics made me think there was room for the unexplained. She said theoretical physicists were some of the most mystical people she’d met. Turns out that those who study religion are among the least.”
Terah was glad for her teasing. “I suppose physics had to struggle for respectability when it first developed. Isaac Newton was an avowed alchemist, and he never gave up looking for spiritual forces behind his clockwork universe. Theology spun in the other direction. Think of it this way: you’ve just spent seven years of your life and thousands of dollars to be trained as a minister by professors who don’t believe in the supernatural. You’re up to your ass in debt. You can’t afford to go back to school for three more years. You’ve got to make a living. What would you do?
“Don’t get me wrong—there are still plenty of graduates who believe. Those who never really learned this whole critical thinking thing. I knew one guy who studied the Old Testament but not the New. He wasn’t Jewish or anything. I once asked why he was so interested in the older stuff.”
“What’d he say?”
“Well, he told me that he saw the logic of source criticism—Moses didn’t write the first five books of the Bible, Isaiah didn’t write the whole book of Isaiah, things like that—but he couldn’t bring himself to apply it to the Gospels. Now on an intellectual level he had to know that if it worked for one testament it had to work for the other. He just couldn’t face it. He went on to become a minister.”
“If the seeds were planted, though,” Lindsey mused. She suddenly stopped. “Don’t move!” she whispered.
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