The feathers were still in his pocket, and as he handed them to her at home he said, “I will be by for you Sunday. These horses do need exercise.”
Chapter 29
Summer Storm
The heat was intense that week, and in church on Sunday morning Laura gasped for air. Shimmering heat waves quivered upward outside the windows, and the fitful little breezes were hot.
When church was over, Almanzo was waiting outside to take Laura home. As he helped her into the buggy he said, “Your mother asked me to dinner, and afterward we will exercise these horses again. It will be hot this afternoon,” he said in the buggy, “but driving will be pleasanter than sitting in the house, if it doesn’t storm.”
“My feathers are sewed on tight,” Laura laughed. “So let the wind blow.”
Soon after Ma’s good Sunday dinner, they set out, driving southward over the gently rolling, endless prairie. The sun shone fiercely, and even in the shade of the swiftly moving buggy top, the heat was oppressive. Instead of flowing smoothly and cool, the breeze came in warm puffs.
The shimmering heat-waves made a silvery appearance that retreated before them on the road ahead, like water, and phantom winds played in the grasses, twisting them in frantic writhings and passing on, up and away.
After a time, dark clouds began to gather in the northwest, and the heat grew still more intense.
“This is a queer afternoon. I think we’d better go home,” Almanzo said.
“Yes, let’s do, and hurry,” Laura urged. “I don’t like the way the weather feels.”
The black mass of clouds was rising quickly as Almanzo turned the horses toward home. He stopped them and gave the reins to Laura. “Hold them while I put on the buggy curtains. It’s going to rain,” he said.
Quickly, behind the buggy, he unbuttoned the straps that held the top’s back curtain rolled up. He let it unroll, and buttoned it at the sides and bottom, tightly closing in the back of the buggy. Then from under the seat he brought out the two side curtains, and buttoned them along their tops and sides to the sides of the buggy top, closing them in.
Then, back in his seat, he unrolled the rubber storm apron, and set the pleat in its bottom edge over the top of the dashboard, where it fitted snugly.
Laura admired the cleverness of this storm apron. There was a slot in it that fitted over the whipsocket, so the whip stood up in its place. There was a slit, through which Almanzo passed the lines; he could hold them in his hands under the storm apron, and a flap fell over the slit, to keep rain from coming in. The apron was so wide that it came down to the buggy box on either side, and it buttoned up to the side frames of the buggy top.
All this was done quickly. In a moment or two, Laura and Almanzo were snugly sheltered in a box of rubber curtains. No rain could come through the apron, the curtains, nor the buggy top overhead. Above the edge of the storm apron, that was as high as their chins, they could look out.
As Almanzo took the lines from Laura and started the horses, he said, “Now let it rain!”
“Yes,” Laura said, “if it
must, but maybe we can beat the storm home.”
Almanzo was already urging the team. They went swiftly, but even more swiftly the black cloud rose, rolling and rumbling in the sky. Laura and Almanzo watched it in silence. The whole earth seemed silent and motionless in terror. The sound of the horses’ fast-trotting feet and the tiny creaks of the speeding buggy seemed small in the stillness.
The swelling great mass of clouds writhed and wrestled, twisting together as if in fury and agony. Flickers of red lightning stabbed through them. Still the air was motionless and there was no sound. The heat increased. Laura’s bangs were damp with perspiration, and uncurling on her forehead, while trickles ran down her cheeks and her neck. Almanzo urged on the horses.
Almost overhead now, the tumbling, swirling clouds changed from black to a terrifying greenish-purple. They seemed to draw themselves together, then a groping finger slowly came out of them and stretched down, trying to reach the earth. It reached, and pulled itself up, and reached again.
“How far away is that?” Laura asked.
“Ten miles, I’d say,” Almanzo replied.
It was coming toward them, from the northwest, as they sped toward the northeast. No horses, however fast they ran, could outrun the speed of those clouds. Green-purple, they rolled in the sky above the helpless prairie, and reached toward it playfully as a cat’s paw torments a mouse.
A second point came groping down, behind the first. Then another. All three reached and withdrew and reached again, down from the writhing clouds.
Then they all turned a little toward the south. One after another, quickly, all three points touched the earth, under the cloud-mass and traveling swiftly with it. They passed behind the buggy, to the west, and went on southward. A terrific wind blew suddenly, so strong that the buggy swayed, but that storm had passed. Laura drew a long, shaking breath.
“If we had been home, Pa would have sent us down cellar,” she said. “And I would have been glad to go,” she added.
“We’d have needed a cellar, if that storm had come our way. I never did run to a cyclone cellar, but if I ever meet a cloud like that, I will,” Almanzo admitted.
The wind abruptly changed. It blew from the southwest and brought a sudden cold with it.