The storm hit on a Tuesday afternoon in June, a little after four o’clock. I was standing on the shoulder of Route F east of town in my orange vest and hard hat, holding a stop-slow paddle while the county crew patched potholes, when the sky to the west turned the color of a bruise. The foreman took one look at it and yelled for everybody to get in the trucks, and we barely made it. The wind came across the fields like a wall, flattening the corn and bending the power lines and throwing gravel against our windshield so hard I thought the glass would break.
The radio called it a derecho afterward. I’d never heard the word before that summer. It’s a long line of thunderstorms that moves fast and pushes straight winds ahead of it, ninety miles an hour in places, and this one tore across central Missouri from Kansas City to St. Louis in about four hours. It took the roofs off barns and turned over grain bins and snapped telephone poles like matchsticks. In our county alone, it knocked down so many trees that the road crew didn’t finish clearing the blacktops until the Fourth of July.
My phone rang at four-thirty, while I was still sitting in the crew truck waiting for the hail to stop. It was my mother, calling from her kitchen.
“Joann,” she said. Her voice was steady, but I could hear the wind still howling behind her through the walls of that old farmhouse. “I’m all right. The house is all right. But the big oak is down.”
My mother is seventy-nine years old. Her name is Nadine Fischer, and she lives alone on the eighty acres my father left her when he died seven years ago, four miles north of Pinckney Ridge on a gravel road. Dad farmed that ground for forty-five years, and she still has a few cows on it that a neighbor looks after, and a garden she won’t give up, and a white two-story house with green shutters at the end of a quarter-mile lane lined with fence.
That white oak had stood beside her lane longer than she had been alive. Dad used to say it was there before the house, before the barn, maybe before the Civil War. It was the biggest tree in the county, seventy feet tall with a trunk so thick that Kenzie and I couldn’t reach around it holding hands when she was small. Dad hung a tire swing from its lowest branch for my brother and me, and Mom used to sit under it in a lawn chair in August shelling peas.
