Automatically he took a mental inventory of the farm—not just the homeplace but all the land touching his that his sons now owned and farmed.
Cotton was holding up all right, and soybeans and corn could take a little more rain without hurting bad, but all this water was leaching nutrients from the sandy soil. Bolls was starting to crack though so it was too late to spray the cotton with urea to get the nitrogen up enough to finish it off. Tobacco had so much water lately, it was all greened up again. Curing schedule shot to hell. Just as well, he supposed, since the ground was so soggy along the bottoms you couldn’t get tractors in without bogging down.
Playing hell with the garden, too. Maidie was fussing about watery tomatoes and how mold on the field peas was turning ’em to mush. That second sowing of butter beans won’t faring so good neither—them fuzzy yellow beetle larvy making lace outen the leaves. Every time him or Cletus dusted ’em, along come the rain to wash off all the Sevin before it had a chance to kill ’em.
The boys was worried, but that’s what it was to be a farmer. First you lay awake praying for rain, then you lay awake praying for it to quit. You done it ’most your whole life, he thought. All them years Sue tried to make you put farming over whiskey. Got to be a habit after a while. Certainly was for the boys.
And now another round of hurricanes setting up to blow in more rain?
Deb’rah won’t going to be any happier ’bout more rain than the boys. She said she was about to get eat up out there by the pond. Fish couldn’t keep up with the eggs them mosquitoes was laying in this weather.
Through the open back window, Ladybelle’s nose nudged the back of his neck. Kezzie took a final drag on his cigarette and stubbed the butt in his overflowing ashtray.
“Still don’t see why she had to go and build out there when the homeplace is setting almost empty,” he grumbled to the dogs.
CHAPTER | 1
The situation . . . is portrayed day by day exactly as it existed, and is not the product of imaginings of writers who put down what the conditions should have been; the storm has been followed from its inception.
August 31—Hurricane Edouard is now 31° North by 70.5° West. Wind speed approx. 90 knots. (Note: 1 kt. = 1 nautical mile per hour.) (Note: a nautical mile is about 800 ft. longer than a land mile or .15 of a land mi.)
Math was not Stan Freeman’s strongest subject. In the margin of his notebook, the boy laboriously scribbled the computations so he’d have the formula handy:
90 kts. =
90 + (90 x .15) =
He rummaged in his bookbag for his calculator.
The fan in his open window stirred the air but did little to cool the small bedroom. Perspiration gleamed on his dark skin. His red Chicago Bulls tank top clung damply to his chest. It’d been an oversized Christmas present from his little sister Lashanda, yet was already too tight. His distinctly non-stylish sneakers lay under the nightstand so his feet could breathe free. Three sizes in six months. After he outgrew a new pair in one month, Kmart look-alikes were all his mother would buy “till your body settles down.”
At eleven and a half, it was as if his limbs had suddenly erupted. The pudginess that had lingered since babyhood was gone now, completely melted away into bony arms and legs that stretched him almost as tall as his tall father. He was glad to be taller. Short kids got no respect. Now if he could just do something about his head. It felt out of proportion, too big for his gangling body, and he kept his bushy hair clipped as short as his mother would allow so as not to draw attention to the disparity.
At the moment, though, he wasn’t thinking of his appearance. Using his light-powered calculator, he multiplied ninety by point fifteen, then finished writing out his conversion:
90 + (13.5) = 103.5 mph.
For a moment, Stan lay back on his bed and imagined himself standing in a hundred-and-four miles per hour wind.
Freaking cool!
And never going to happen this far inland, he reminded himself. He sat up again and picked up where he’d left off in his main notes: Hurricane warnings posted from Cape Lookout to Delaware, but forecasters predict that Edouard will probably miss the North Carolina coast.
Gloomily, he added, Hurricane Fran downgraded to a tropical storm last night.
With a sigh as heavy as the humid August air the fan was pulling through his open window, Stan took out a fresh sheet of notebook paper and made a new heading.
NOTES—Meterolg
He paused, consulted the dictionary on the shelf beside his bed, tore out the sheet of paper and began again.
NOTES—Meteorologists say we’re getting more tropical storms this year because of a rainy summer in the deserts of W. Africa. (Reminder—look up name of desert) (Reminder—look up name of country) This makes tropical waves that can turn into storms. At least they think that’s what caused Arthur and Bertha so early this year.
He couldn’t help wishing for the umpteenth time that he’d known about this new school’s sixth-grade science project earlier in the summer. If he had, he might have thought about documenting the life and death of a killer hurricane in time for it to do some good. Unfortunately, nobody’d mentioned the project till this past week, a full month after Bertha did her number on Wrightsville Beach. Cesar and Dolly had been right on her heels, but both of them wimped out without making landfall.
Like Hurricane Edouard was about to do.
Just his luck if the rest of hurricane season stayed peaceful. When he came up with the idea of doing a day-by-day diary of a killer storm, Edouard was still kicking butt in the Caribbean and had people down at the coast talking about having to evacuate by Labor Day. Now, though . . .
He wasn’t wishing Wilmington any more bad luck, but a category 3 or 4 hurricane would sure make a bitchin’ project.
Sorry, God, he thought, automatically casting his eyes heavenwards.
“Son, I know you think you have to say things like that to be cool with the other kids,” Dad chided him recently. “But you let it become a habit and one of these days, you’re going to slip and say it to your mother and how cool will you feel then?”
Not for the first time, Stan considered the parental paradox. His father might be the preacher, but it was his mother who had all the Thou Shalt Nots engraved on her heart.
As if she’d heard him think of her, Clara Freeman tapped on the door and opened it without waiting for his response.
“Stanley? Didn’t you hear me calling you?”
“Sorry, Mama, I was working on my science project.”
Clara Freeman’s face softened a bit at that. Guiltily, Stan knew that schoolwork could always justify a certain amount of leeway.
Yet schoolwork seldom took precedence over church work.
“Leave that for later, son. Right now, what with all the rain we’ve been having, Sister Jordan’s grass needs cutting real bad and I told her you’d be glad to go over this morning and do it for her.”
Without argument, Stan closed the notebook and placed it neatly on his bookshelf, then began cramming his feet into those gawdawful sneakers. His face was expressionless but every cussword he’d ever heard surged through his head. Bad enough that this wet and steamy August kept him cutting their own grass every week without Mama looking over the fences to their neighbors’ yards. Sister Jordan had two teenage grandsons who lived right outside Cotton Grove, less than a mile away, but Mama could be as implacable as the Borg—which he’d only seen on friends’ TV since Mama didn’t believe in it for them. If ever she saw an opportunity to build his character through Christian sacrifice, resistance was futile.
Any argument and she’d be on her knees, begging God’s forgiveness for raising such a lazy, self-centered son, begging in a soft sorrowful voice that always cut him deeper than any switch she might have used.