Come what May

Sometimes in a small town God has to reach pretty far in order to deliver people their fate, like the time he reached way over into the next county to find someone drunk enough to smash into Eloise Hurley and her beau Josh Rath on their graduation night; people get mad at me for saying God had a hand in that, but it's either that, or God leaves it to dumb chance for things to happen to people completely out of the blue, and if that were true, there would also be a lot of explaining to do. Not that I know whether God plans it all out or not, but I will say this, a good windstorm gives God a chance to knock over lots of pins at once and still play another round.

Now in the case of Eloise and Josh, they were at the top of their lives, so some people said, since it couldn't get much better for either of them, maybe God just figured that it was time to grab them now before it got any worse. That's the generous way of looking at it. The drunk, of course, lived, but he never left town; after he got out of jail he hung around for years still drinking and getting into fights with anyone who suggested he was at fault. Of course he was at fault. He'd been driving at 90 around Blind Mackey's curve and throwing a beer can out the window which some observant hiker found not long after; it had his prints all over it. Josh's mother Roseanne took it the hardest; she was often heard wailing at church or even on a Friday evening when her younger son was gone; I swear she was ready to go down to that bar and pound that drunk herself, she was so upset over the loss of Josh. The younger son, Jeremiah, did his best to stick by her side, be faithful, never do anything to upset the balance, but when he finally hit high school he got into a kind of a wild streak himself, running off with a group of friends and just being wild. One night they stole a case of whiskey from the father of one of them, who owned the liquor store, and snuck a couple of extra kids into the drive-in where they could grab a corner spot, hide in the shadows, drink the whiskey and not even watch the movies. Occasionally one of them would stumble out and use the bathroom, maybe order a coke for the way back to the car; I happened to notice this only because I was on a date which wasn't working out well and it was a terrible movie. But fate has a way of moving in and making it easier for a couple to break up, and still give them something to remember. A huge storm came up from the west, had some tornados in it, the sirens went off, and people started packing for home; this was at about 11 or midnight.

Now Jeremiah lived with Roseanne in a house not far from mine; there was a church in the area that was in the habit of putting profound messages on its sign out front on the corner, signs such as "Does God exist?" or "Prepare to meet thy maker". Sometimes I'd ride my bicycle by the sign and would actually reflect on what it said, even if it was funny, which generally only happened if the priest or whoever wrote out the sign won the powerball lottery or maybe the bingo; most times it was grave and austere, serious. This particular night, the wind was blowing all over the place, and I was driving; I was behind the car Jeremiah was in, only by virtue of dropping off my date on the other side of town after some quick words that, frankly, ensured I wouldn't see her for a while. In the rain and the driving wind I could see the car full of Jeremiah's friends up ahead, stopped, and people were frantically running around in the rain, as a tree had fallen on a small house and literally fell enough into it so that the widow Hill, a frail old 90-year-old woman, was trapped in her own living room. These drunken kids were wandering around trying to get her out, but they were so seriously drunk, I'm sure they were having a hard time. Lightning was cracking and power lines were down; I was afraid to get out of my car, because power lines now were on both sides of me, and I couldn't open either door without touching them. Not wanting to be fried, I just sat there, watched the storm, and hoped that somebody would come along who could save the widow Hill.

About then I noticed the sign, which was more or less right out my window, beyond the power line. It said, "Does God have any plan at all?" which was not as confident as usual, almost a desperate plea, as if to say, if there's a reason for all this, God, please show us. Up a few houses, Roseanne, a nervous wreck, was shouting at the drunken boys as if to get Jeremiah to come back inside quick before there was more damage, and get downstairs. But it was too late. Another huge tree fell and, this time, damaged Roseanne's house, right as she stood on the porch, and totally smashed the center driver's side of the car, which was parked in front of her house.

Miraculously, she was unharmed, and even looked a little healthier after the storm, as if losing the car and part of the house would actually make her life simpler. We didn't find this out until later, but one of her front rooms was Josh's old room, and she'd left it entirely untouched, as if Josh would come back any day now, and it still had his clothes hanging in the closet. The tree bashed in that room, closet and all, totally destroying every part of it, right down to the bed, as if to say, get on with it. Get this room out of here.

But the weirdest thing was about her car, which as you remember, was pretty smashed up, up by the steering wheel. The thing was, Jeremiah himself was in the trunk, asleep, the whole time, and though he might have woken up when the tree hit it, and I'm sure he was kind of smashed up in there, he was so drunk, he just fell back asleep. They didn't even find him until well into the next day when somebody heard faint whines from the direction of the smashed-up car's trunk. You couldn't fault Roseanne for being a little upset after the tree had destroyed her porch and front room; maybe she had even left town, or at least gone over to her sister's, but was nowhere to be found when they took him out with a crowbar, and poured some water over his head so he could take in the wreckage of his house. Poor Jeremiah; I don't think he ever took a drink after that, he was so shook up when he got out of that car. He found his mother, I think, across town at her sister's, or somewhere, and they were ok, really, once they rebuilt the house.

I myself had climbed out the back of my own car, in order to help extract the widow Hill, and after a long night of using a hammer and crowbar to take apart a closet that we were able to use to save her life, basically, I'd gone home, muddy, dirty, and exhausted, but glad to be alive, like the widow Hill too, who we took to the hospital in a Cadillac. One of the drunken kids also ended up in the hospital; he'd broken his leg in the mud trying to get the widow Hill out. Those drunken kids were of almost no help at all, they were so drunk, and everyone was mad a them for forgetting all about Jeremiah, but you couldn't much blame them for that, it was all so crazy; I know, I was there. We'd all come together a little over the saving of the widow Hill, so I tended to be forgiving of the drunks, who tried their best to sober up and be of some use in spite of everything; mostly they fetched tools for us, and one of them went to get the Cadillac, and in return we tried to make sure they didn't trip over any fallen power lines.

In fact, though, nobody even died in the storm, which caused trees and power lines to fall all over town, except for one person: the drunk. He was asleep in his car, too, not too far away, but a tree fell on his car too, and didn't have the courtesy to avoid the part he was in. He was killed instantly, presumably in his sleep. Some people, of course, would have preferred that he die a long, slow tortuous death, because of what he'd done, but others said, well, he did; after all, he wasn't really enjoying himself in his last days, anyway. And the church just took down that whole sign, in favor of a new style of decoration. Before that, I'd suspected that I was the only one who even read it, but, on reflection, I decided that they reached a point where just about whatever they wrote would not be received all that well anyway.

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