It was one of those late August days where the air was soupy, thick with heat and fairly stale. It had been a month since the last time it rained, although for the last few days, clouds had gathered overhead, swollen and dark with water, but never letting a drop fall. Logan sat on the porch steps with a wet washcloth across the back of her neck, staring out at the once-green lawn, now turned the same sepia as the unrelenting sunlight.
Two days ago, an accident at the lumber mill had sent a tree careening through the power line that provided electricity to the whole town. The electricians from the city seemed to be just as eager to drive out into the mountains to fix it as the rain was to break the feverish haze. No electricity meant no air conditioning, no fans, no freezer to get an ice cube from, if only to time how fast it melted. All the residents of Chesterfield had fled their houses in favor of porches, patios and fields, hoping for a breeze, if not a downpour.
As Logan turned her head up to the sky and the big beech trees that her parents had planted on their wedding day, she saw the topmost leaves quiver slightly, then dip back and forth. She held her breath, waiting for the wind to gust over her face, her neck and the now clammy washcloth, but the puff of air that had moved the leaves was long gone. Logan sighed and ripped the washcloth off her neck in exasperation.
“It sure is fire weather,” Great-Aunt Ida said from behind Logan. Logan couldn’t stop herself from rolling her eyes. Great-Aunt Ida had moved in with them after her husband had died. They had lived in the middle of California and dealt with the wildfires constantly. She still spoke to her husband as if he was alive, so it wasn’t too far of a reach to assume that she believed she was still in California. Logan turned around to face her.
“There hasn’t been a wildfire here since before you moved away, Aunt Ida,” Logan said, as patiently as she could. “And this isn’t the longest drought we’ve ever had.”
Logan’s mother appeared in the doorway, her bangs plastered to her forehead.
“It sure feels like it,” she muttered.
“Just you wait,” said Ida. “They’ll announce the fire on the television any minute now. Joanne, I hope you’re prepared to evacuate.”
Logan’s mother wiped her face with her hand, breathing out slowly through her nose.
“Yes, Aunt Ida,” she said in a pinched voice.
Ida smiled primly at that and picked her knitting back up. Logan’s fingers burned just thinking about entwining them in the yarn, but Great-Aunt Ida wasn’t even sweating. Her hair was still firmly in its bun, no flyaways in sight.
“Logan,” her mother said. “I need you to water the tomatoes. They’re starting to dry out again.”
Logan nodded, but made no move to get up from the stoop. Her mother sank down next to her, closing her eyes.
“God I wish it would just rain already,” her mother said. “We’re losing all the crops. If we lose the tomatoes, we’ll go broke. They always sell the best.”
“I wish it would snow,” Logan grumbled. “Knowing this town, the rain will just boil us alive.”
“There was boiling rain during a fire one time,” Ida cut in. “We found one of the koi fish belly up and crispy in the pond when we got home.”
Logan and her mother stifled a laugh, leaning back against the stairs once more.
“Sometimes I think if I just concentrate hard enough, I’ll make it rain,” her mother said. She opened her eyes and looked out at the yellowed grass, before closing her eyes tightly. “I never used to understand mirages, but there’s a lake right there.”
Logan stared at the same spot, watching the air shimmer before her eyes, but could never quite make it turn into water.
“I don’t see it,” she said, turning to her mother. Her mother sighed, blowing the bangs off her forehead.
“I guess it’s wishful thinking. Go water the tomatoes.”
Logan dragged herself off the steps and around the house to the back patio. She turned on the hose, soaking the washcloth under the stream and placed it back on her neck without wringing it out. After the bucket filled, she lugged it over to the greenhouse.
Sprinkling a cup of water over the last surviving tomato plant, Logan heard splintering. She whipped around to see a crack in the glass ceiling, similar to a bullet hole, two feet away from her. She moved to inspect it, tracing her hand around the circular indentation at the crack’s center, when she heard another pane shatter.
“Jonah?” Logan called out. Her brother had whittled a slingshot out of one of the tree branches from the lumber yard and had delighted in arranging minor attacks for the past couple of days. “This isn’t funny. You cracked the glass on the greenhouse! Mom’s gonna be pissed.”
“Jonah?”
He appeared at the back door, slingshot nowhere in sight — although with Jonah, that didn’t mean much. He had Lily, their 2-year-old sister in his arms, though, so that counted for something.
“What?” he drawled.
“Where’s your slingshot?”
“Upstairs, maybe? I don’t know. I think this heat is melting my brain.” He shifted Lily to his other hip and stepped outside, heading for the hose. “C’mon Silly Lily, let’s get you cooled down.”
The clouds were darkening rapidly overhead, but none of the siblings paid any attention to it. Out on the front porch, however, Ida’s needles stopped clicking.
“Joanne, the smoke is so low to the ground. When are you going to start evacuating?”
Logan’s mother grit her teeth and swallowed her reply. The clouds were dark enough to look like smoke, if one was 80, grieving and probably delirious from heatstroke, she guessed. Regardless, there was no use in a back and forth in this weather. The leaves on the trees were rustling, and a hot breeze fanned itself generously over their faces. Joanne, all three kids and even Ida practically swooned. Joanne stood in the walkway, letting the breeze unstick her shirt from her back, as Logan and Jonah laid in the dried grass, letting Lily splash in the puddles from the hose.
When the first wave of hail fell, the entire family was unprepared. Balls of ice the size of quarters flew out of the sky, smacking into the dry earth. The dust flew up around the house, making it impossible to see more than a few feet in front of one’s face. The greenhouse’s roof shattered, the shards of glass slicing through the tomatoes Logan had just watered.
Jonah and Logan sprang up as the first few chunks of hail sprayed out of the sky and Lily began to wail.
“Take Lily and go inside!” Logan yelled, running towards the greenhouse. The tomatoes were gushing crimson flesh onto the floor, seeds spilling everywhere. She grabbed as many unharmed ones as she could possibly carry, and scrambled back to the house, raised welts on her back and arms.
Lily sat in Jonah’s lap in the foyer, sobbing. The skin on her knee and cheek had split open after being pelted with the hail, and blood was trickling down her shin.
“She’s fine,” Jonah said, reassuringly. “Just scared.”
Logan nodded, too afraid to open her mouth to reply. She thought she would start crying.
The hail continued to beat down, and the responding dust storm didn’t let up either. They were trapped in the old farmhouse with no way of contacting anyone, in the middle of a freak hailstorm. Logan stared out the screen door as the ice sparkled on the yellow grass, melting almost immediately.
This isn’t what I meant by snow. It felt like some sort of sick joke, the universe’s twisted idea of a game.
As the hail cut through all the remaining crops, she unloaded the seven tomatoes she had managed to salvage. Her mother walked into the foyer, eyes bright with tears, and smiled sadly.
“Mom, I’m sorry,” Logan said. “The tomatoes are gone. I can try to get more?” Her mother shushed her, wrapping her arms around Logan.
“They’ll grow back,” she said. “You won’t.”
The hail continued for another hour before turning into a torrential downpour. It rained for a week-and-a-half straight, but Logan never complained, too afraid they would go back to the feverish hellscape of the week prior.
At first, the parched soil soaked up the rain like Sisyphus, finally able to take a drink, but the ground eventually grew soft with water. A mudslide over the main road blocked the electrician that had finally deigned to venture out to Chesterfield, and the residents remained without power.
Joanne got out the early summer pickles from the basement and made salad after salad, cutting up the tomatoes one at a time. On the fourth day of the storm, Great-Aunt Ida showed Logan how to knit a straight line of yarn. She killed about an hour doing it before becoming deathly bored and choosing to play cards with Jonah on the floor of the living room.
That night, it got so cold that Joanne made a fire, using the last of the lumber from the downed tree.
“See?” Aunt Ida said, setting down her needles as the smell filled the house. “I told you it was fire season.”
Statement Columnist Lucy Del Deo can be reached at ldeldeo@umich.edu