Nothing Happens Here

The photograph was on Kimura’s telephone at seven o’clock on Thursday morning, and she showed it to him through the screen door.

She did not open it. She stood on the porch outside the mesh, in the grey light, with the telephone held up to it, flat, the screen towards him, so that he had to come close to the mesh to see; and he came, in his shorts, from the kitchen table, with a cup of coffee, and looked.

It was the swings.

It was a still, taken from a television picture, a little blurred, with the station’s number in the corner, 6, and a line of words along the bottom in white that had been cut off halfway through. The swings at the Craig County Free Fair, at night, lit, going round and out against the dark blue sky, with lights all the way along every chain; and on them, out at the end of their chains, flying, a row of people, small, dark against the lights, with their arms out. Four of them, in a row, near the bottom of the picture, closer than the rest. Blurred. Laughing; you could see that they were laughing, even blurred, even small. The one at the front with his arms straight out holding the chains and his head back.

He looked at himself on the swings for a long time.

“It was on the ten o’clock news on Saturday,” said Kimura, through the mesh. “Two minutes on the last night of the fair. The swings were behind the reporter for four seconds.” She looked at the telephone. “A man in Broken Arrow stopped it on the four seconds and put it on the internet on Sunday morning. Is this the King at the Vinita fair? Nobody paid any attention.” A pause. “Until last night.”

“What happened last night?”

“The Prime Minister told forty-one journalists at Tulsa that he had spent the afternoon on a bus in Craig County,” said Kimura. “And a woman in Kansas City put the two together at midnight.” She turned the telephone off. “It has been shared four hundred thousand times since midnight, sir. The Household has been rung by every paper in the Realm. The Household has said that the King is spending the summer privately and that it does not comment on his whereabouts.” Another pause. “Sergeant Castellanos has been on the radio since five.”

Frederick looked through the mesh at her.

“Are they coming?”

Kimura looked at the gravel road, at the bottom of the drive, which was empty, in the grey, with the dust lying still on either side of it.

“They’re in Vinita,” she said. “Since six. Asking at the fairgrounds.” She looked at the road. “Vinita is fourteen miles.”

---

Bonnie Tackett rang at half past seven, on Mrs Sixkiller’s telephone, on the wall, with the long curly cord.

“Hon,” she said. “Don’t come in.”

“I’ve got the bathrooms at ten.”

“There’s no bathrooms. There’s no pool. Kaylee’s shocking it.” A pause. “She says the chlorine’s gone to nothing in the heat and the water’s gone cloudy and she’s putting in the shock, which is chemistry, and the pool’s got to be closed twenty-four hours, and anybody who gets in it before then will lose their skin, which is chemistry too.” Another pause. “She says it’s a terrible shame. She says it’s never happened on a Thursday before. She says she checked the water at six this morning and made the decision herself and Bonnie, she says, had nothing to do with it.” Bonnie Tackett’s voice did not change at all. “There’s a sign on the gate. CLOSED FOR TREATMENT. She did it in marker.”

He did not know what to say.

“You’ll get paid,” said Bonnie Tackett. “It’s my decision, not yours. You were ready to come in.” A pause. “Stay home, hon. Stay home and be ordinary.” Another. “There’s already a car in my car park with a New Westminster number plate and a man in it with a camera that’s longer than my arm, and he’s been sitting there since seven looking at a sign that says CLOSED FOR TREATMENT, and he doesn’t know what it means, and I’m not going to tell him.”

---

They came to Ketchum at nine.

He did not see them come. He was at the farmhouse, on the porch, with the others, and the farmhouse was two miles from the town by the road, and a quarter of a mile up the gravel from the paved road, behind the oak; and nobody came up the gravel road all morning. But he heard about them. All morning he heard about them, on Mrs Sixkiller’s telephone, which rang, and rang, with the long curly cord stretched across the kitchen to wherever he was; and every time he picked it up it was somebody different, and every one of them said the same thing, and none of them said hello.

Darlene rang at ten past nine.

“Three of them,” she said. “In the café. At the counter. Two from Tulsa, one from New Westminster, with a recorder. They’ve ordered coffee and they’ve asked me if I’ve seen the King.” The sound of the coffee pot being put down. “I told them I heard he’s in Alaska.”

“Did they believe you?”

“No, hon,” said Darlene comfortably. “But they can’t prove it.” A pause. “The one from New Westminster asked for the special. I didn’t tell him it was liver.” She rang off.

The postmistress rang at twenty to ten.

“There’s one in the post office,” she said, low, with her hand over the receiver; he could hear it. “A young woman with a notebook. She’s asking about the letter. Somebody told her that a boy posted a letter to himself here last week, for a library card, and she wants to know his name.” A pause. “I told her it’s against the regulations of the American Postal Service to disclose the name of the sender or the addressee of any item of mail, which is true, and that it has been against the regulations since Franklin, which is very nearly true, and that I would have to ask her to leave if she asked again, which is a lie.” Another pause. “She left.”

Mr Baggett rang at half past ten, from Vinita, to say that there were nine of them at the fairgrounds, standing in front of the swings, which were being taken down by Hollis’s men onto a lorry, and that they were photographing the swings; and that he had told every one of them that the Craig County Free Fair had been attended this year by eleven thousand four hundred people, a record, and that he could not be expected to remember all of them, and that he would be very glad to talk to them about the grand champion steer.

Royce Pettit rang at eleven, and said they’ve been in, and I said I’d never seen a King in my life, and which is true, I haven’t, I’ve seen a boy who could get a clock in standing up, and rang off.

Officer Hummingbird rang at a quarter past eleven, from her car, and said that a van from a Tulsa television station had been stopped on Highway 85 for doing fifty-one in a forty-five by Deputy Tidwell, and that Deputy Tidwell had been very thorough about it, and that it had taken him forty minutes, and that she had arrived while he was doing it, and that under the compact whoever arrived first dealt with it, and that they had both arrived first, and that it was going to take some time to sort out the paperwork.

“How long?” said Frederick.

“Lonnie’s thorough,” said Officer Hummingbird. “And I’m thorough.” She paused. “We were taught by Loretta Sixkiller.”

---

Mrs Sixkiller came at half past two.

She did not ring. She came up the gravel road in the blue car, and she was not at the speed limit. He knew it at once, from the porch, from the dust: it came up behind the car in a great pale wall, higher than he had ever seen it, and hung in the still air all the way back to the paved road; and the car stopped by the oak with a jerk, and she got out of it in her gardening hat and her gloves, which she had not taken off, and stood in the yard, and did not look at the house.

She looked at the sky.

He looked at it too. He had not looked at it all day. He had been looking at the gravel road, and at the telephone, and at Kimura, and at Castellanos coming in and out of the trailer with his radio; and now he looked up, at where Mrs Sixkiller was looking, which was west, over the barn and the windmill and the fields going down to the trees, and the sky over there was a colour he had never seen a sky be.

It was green.

Not bright green. Not the green of anything. A low, thick, dull, bruised green, like old copper, like the bottom of a pond, lying along the whole of the western edge of the sky from one side to the other, under a ceiling of cloud so dark that it was nearly black, that had not been there at noon; and the light in the yard had changed, while he was not looking. It had gone yellow. A strange, flat, sourceless yellow, as if the sun were coming through a sheet of oiled paper; and the oak, and the barn, and the windmill, and the blue car, and Mrs Sixkiller in her gardening hat, all stood in it very sharp and very still, like things in a photograph.

And it was quiet.

That was the thing. He understood it a moment after he understood the green. It was quiet. The insects had stopped. All of them. The great dry breathing in the trees that had been there every minute of every day and every night since Saturday the twenty-first of July, louder than any crowd, rising and falling across the whole dark country, had stopped; and the birds; and the frogs at the water; and the whip-poor-will. There was no sound in the yard at all but the hum of the trailer’s air conditioning by the barn, and then that stopped too, because Castellanos had come out of the trailer and turned it off, and was standing at the door of it, looking west.

It’ll be green, Kaylee had said, from the top of the high white chair, at noon, on the first Wednesday of the month. And it’ll be quiet. And the birds will stop.

“There’s a television van on the gravel road,” said Mrs Sixkiller, to the sky. “At the bottom. I passed it. Tulsa. The one that was at the fair. It came out of the town after me.” She did not look round. “There’s no time to argue about that now.” She looked at the green. “Get the boys.”

---

The siren went at twelve minutes past three.

It came across the fields from the town, the same sound, the scream that rose and fell, rising and falling, filling the whole sky; but it was not the same. He could not have said how. It was the same pitch and the same rise and the same fall and it was not the same at all, because the sky over the barn was green and the insects had stopped and it was not the first Wednesday of the month; and he felt it go into his chest through his ribs, and stay there.

Mrs Sixkiller had the radio. The one from the kitchen windowsill, small, with a handle, on batteries; she had it on, at the cellar door, turned up, and a man’s voice was coming out of it, quick and level and very calm, the voice of somebody who would stay on the air for six hours at a stretch when it turned, reading it: a tornado warning for north-eastern Mayes and southern Craig counties until four p.m., a severe thunderstorm capable of producing a tornado was located near Big Cabin moving east at thirty miles an hour, take shelter now, in a basement or a storm cellar or an interior room on the lowest floor, take shelter now; and then the same voice said it again, all of it, in Cherokee.

He had never heard the language spoken. He had seen it written, on the sign at the edge of the town, and on the Nation’s letter, and on the back of his own hand. He stood in the yellow light in the yard with the siren going and the sky green over the barn and heard it now, out of a small radio at a cellar door, quick and level and calm, the same warning, word for word, for whoever was listening in it.

“In,” said Mrs Sixkiller.

---

They went in.

The cellar door was slanted, wooden, set into the end of the grassy mound like the cover of a book, and Castellanos pulled it open, and there were steps going down, concrete, into the dark, and a smell came up of earth and damp and something sweet; and they went down. Felix first, then Marcus, then Theo, who had the mixing bowl in both hands, with Earl the goldfish going round in it, slopping, because Theo had gone back into the kitchen for it and would not discuss it; then Frederick; then Kimura; then Mrs Sixkiller, with the radio.

Castellanos stood at the top of the steps, in the doorway, in the yellow light, looking west.

“Sergeant,” said Mrs Sixkiller, from the bottom of the steps.

“Ma’am.”

“Not the trailer.”

“No, ma’am,” said Castellanos, and came down, and pulled the slanted door shut over them, and the dark came down with it, all at once, total, and the siren went small and far away above them, through the earth, like a voice in another room.

Kimura turned on a torch.

---

The cellar was a room under the ground, the size of the kitchen, with walls of concrete and a floor of earth and a ceiling of concrete so low that Castellanos had to stand with his head bent; and there were two benches along the walls, wooden, and shelves at the far end from floor to ceiling, and on the shelves, in rows, in the torchlight, jars. Hundreds of them. Peaches in halves, packed in their syrup like rows of small suns; and tomatoes, red; and something green; and something purple; and wild plum jelly, pale gold, with the torchlight going through it so that the whole far wall of the cellar glowed, very faintly, red and gold and purple and green, like the windows of the exhibit hall at Vinita, like a church.

There was a lamp on a hook. Mrs Sixkiller lit it. There was a jug of water on a shelf, and a box of matches, and a first-aid tin, and a stack of blankets, folded, and a plastic tub with a lid that said CRACKERS, and on a nail by the steps a calendar from 1994 with a picture of a bluebird on it, which nobody had taken down.

They sat on the benches, in the lamplight, the seven of them. Mrs Sixkiller at the end by the shelves with the radio on her knee, turned low now, the calm voice still going, in English and in Cherokee and in English. Theo with the mixing bowl on his knees and Earl going round in it. Marcus and Felix side by side, very close, Felix holding the back of Marcus’s shirt without seeming to know he was doing it. Kimura on the bottom step with the torch. Castellanos at the top of the steps, under the door, bent, with his hand flat on the underside of the wood.

Frederick sat on the bench beside Theo, and put his hands on his knees, and listened to the siren, far away, through the earth, and to his own heart.

Above them, the wind came.

---

It came all at once. He felt it before he heard it: a change in the air in the cellar, a pressure, in his ears, as if he were going down in an aeroplane, so that he swallowed, and everybody swallowed, and Marcus said ow; and then the sound. It was not like wind. It was like a train. Like a freight train going over the top of them, over the grassy mound and the slanted door, a long, deep, continuous roar that did not rise or fall but simply went on, and grew, and filled the whole of the dark under the ground, so that the jars on the shelves at the end hummed in it, very faintly, all together, a note; and under the roar, on the slanted door above Castellanos’s flat hand, a drumming. Hard. Fast. Like gravel being thrown at the wood by the handful, by a hundred hands, a thousand.

“Hail,” said Mrs Sixkiller, at the end of the bench, quite calmly.

Theo’s hand found Frederick’s wrist, the bandaged one, on the bench between them, and held it.

He did not say anything. Neither of them said anything. They sat on the bench in Mrs Sixkiller’s cellar in the lamplight with the jars humming and the train going over and the hail on the door, and Theo held his wrist, on the bandage, over the raw rows that Cecil Rowe’s fish had made; and in the mixing bowl on Theo’s knees Earl the goldfish went round, and round, and round.

And then, through the roar, through the hail, through the earth and the concrete and the slanted wooden door, there was knocking.

---

It was a fist. On the door. Hammering. And a voice, a woman’s, high and frightened and very close, shouting something that the wind took away, and then shouting it again.

“Please. Please. Is anybody there. Please.”

Castellanos’s hand, flat on the underside of the door, did not move.

Frederick looked up at him, at the top of the steps, bent under the door in the lamplight, with his hand on the wood and the hail drumming on the other side of it a few inches from his fingers. He looked at Castellanos’s face. He knew what Castellanos was thinking. He could see it, all of it, the whole of it, in the face, in the lamplight, the way he had seen it in the doorway of the hog barn: the television van on the gravel road, at the bottom of the drive. Tulsa. The one from the fair. The swings. Four hundred thousand times since midnight.

If you open that door, it’s over.

“Please,” said the voice, on the other side of the wood. “Please. We can see the funnel. Please.”

“Sergeant,” said Mrs Sixkiller.

She had not raised her voice. She did not need to. She sat at the end of the bench by the glowing jars with the radio on her knee, in her gardening hat, with her gloves still on, and said it the way she had said it on the first day, in the yard, in her funeral hat, to Castellanos, by the mound of grass.

“Anybody,” said Mrs Sixkiller. “That’s the law.”

Castellanos looked down the steps at her.

Then he looked at Frederick.

Frederick did not say anything. He did not need to. He looked back at Castellanos, and nodded, once.

Castellanos pushed the door open.

---

The wind came in with them.

It came in with a roar and a white blast of hail and a smell of torn leaves and wet earth and something electrical, like the smell of the fireworks; and two people came down the steps in it, falling more than walking, a woman and a man, soaked, the woman first, in what had been a blue blazer, with her hair plastered flat to her head and her face white and her mouth open, and the man behind her, large, with something black and heavy on his shoulder that he was holding on to with both arms; and Castellanos pulled the door shut behind them against the wind with both hands and his whole weight, and it slammed, and the roar went small again, and the hail went back to drumming.

The woman stood at the bottom of the steps in the lamplight, streaming, with her hands on her knees, breathing.

“Thank you,” she said. “Thank you. Thank you. Oh God. Thank you. The van. We were in the van and we saw it, we saw it come down out of the cloud over the field, and Dan said get out, get out, and we got out and there was a light, a lamp, I saw a lamp through the trees, and the door, and…”

She straightened up.

She looked round the cellar, at the benches, and the lamp, and the glowing jars at the end, and the people on the benches in the lamplight: a woman of seventy in a gardening hat, and a small quiet woman on the bottom step with a torch, and four boys, one of them holding a mixing bowl with a goldfish in it; and her eyes came along the bench and stopped.

She looked at Frederick.

He watched her face do it. All of it. See him, and know him, and be astonished; and then go on being astonished, and not stop, because there was nothing in her face, he saw, that knew how to decide anything else, because she had been looking for him since six o’clock that morning, in Vinita and at the fairgrounds and on Highway 85, and in Ketchum, on the main street, at the café and the post office and a blue door, and she had found him, in a cellar, in the dark, in a storm, on a bench, with his bandaged wrist in another boy’s hand.

Behind her, the man with the camera had lowered it from his shoulder. He was holding it in both arms against his chest, the way you hold a child. He was looking at Frederick too. His hand moved on the camera.

“Daniel Swimmer,” said Mrs Sixkiller.

The man with the camera stopped.

He turned round, very slowly, towards the end of the bench, towards the voice, and looked at the woman of seventy in the gardening hat with the radio on her knee; and his face, which had been doing the four seconds at Frederick, stopped doing them, and began doing something else, much older, from much further back.

“Mrs Sixkiller,” he said.

“Put that down,” said Mrs Sixkiller. “This is a shelter.”

---

He put it down.

He put it down on the earth floor at the bottom of the steps, slowly, the camera, very carefully, the way you put down a thing you have been told to put down by somebody who taught you the eighth grade; and stood up beside it, large and soaked and dripping, with his hands empty at his sides.

“And Shawna Proctor,” said Mrs Sixkiller, to the woman in the blazer, without any change in her voice at all. “Sit down. You’re dripping on my floor.”

The woman in the blazer sat down. On the end of the other bench, opposite Frederick, by the steps, with her hands in her lap.

“Mrs Sixkiller,” she said, faintly.

“Eighth grade,” said Mrs Sixkiller. “Two thousand and fourteen. You sat at the front by the window. You wrote an essay on the history of the Cherokee Advocate and you got an A, the only A I gave that year, and at the bottom of it you wrote that you were going to be a journalist.” She looked at Shawna Proctor in the lamplight. “Are you?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“A good one?”

Shawna Proctor did not answer. She sat on the bench opposite Frederick with her wet hands in her lap and looked at Mrs Sixkiller, and then, slowly, at Frederick; and then at the camera on the floor by Daniel Swimmer’s feet; and then at her own hands.

“I don’t know,” she said. “I don’t know yet.”

Above them, the train went over.

---

It was an hour.

He did not know that while it was happening. While it was happening it was the whole of time, the way the creek had been. The roar went on, and then it went down, a little, and the hail stopped, and then started again, smaller, and then stopped; and then there was rain, a different sound, heavy, steady, on the door and on the mound of earth over their heads, like a great many hands patting it; and then thunder, a long way off, going east, rolling, like the boom of the fireworks coming back off something far away. And the radio on Mrs Sixkiller’s knee went on, calm, in English and in Cherokee and in English, saying where the storm was, east of Big Cabin, near Ketchum, east of Ketchum, over the lake, moving away.

Nobody said very much.

Mrs Sixkiller opened the tub that said CRACKERS and passed it along the benches, and everybody took some, Shawna Proctor and Daniel Swimmer as well, and ate them. Felix let go of Marcus’s shirt, at some point, and Marcus looked down at his shirt as if he had not known it had been held. Kimura turned off the torch, to save it, and sat on the bottom step in the lamplight with her arms round her knees. Castellanos stayed at the top of the steps, under the door, bent, with his hand flat on the wood, the whole hour, and did not move once.

Theo did not let go of Frederick’s wrist.

And Shawna Proctor sat on the bench opposite, by the steps, with her hands in her lap and a cracker in one of them that she did not eat, and looked at him. Not all the time. Now and then. She would look at the jars, or at the lamp, or at Mrs Sixkiller, or at the goldfish in the mixing bowl on Theo’s knees going round; and then her eyes would come back across the cellar to him, on the bench, in the lamplight, with his wrist in Theo’s hand; and stay there for a while; and go away again.

He let her look. He did not know what else to do. He sat on the bench and was looked at, and looked back, now and then, at a young woman in a ruined blue blazer with a cracker in her hand who had got an A in the eighth grade and did not know yet whether she was a good journalist; and he thought that this was the first time all summer that anybody in Oklahoma-Sequoyah had looked at him and not decided. She had not decided. He could see her not deciding. It went on for an hour.

At a quarter past four the radio said that the warning for north-eastern Mayes and southern Craig counties had been allowed to expire, and that the storm had moved east over the lake into Delaware County, and that people could come out, carefully, and should watch for power lines.

Then it said it in Cherokee.

Mrs Sixkiller turned it off.

“Well,” she said. “That’s that.”

---

The yard was not the yard.

He came up the steps into it behind Castellanos, into a light that was ordinary again, grey and wet and cool, cool for the first time since he had come to Oklahoma, a cool that was like a hand on his face; and stood at the top of the steps on the grassy mound and looked at it.

The ground was white. Hail. All over the yard, in drifts against the porch steps and the foot of the oak and the side of the barn, white, like snow, like a winter yard in Sweden, except that it was hailstones, round, the size of marbles, some of them the size of eggs, and they were melting already, smoking slightly in the warm wet air. The oak had lost a limb. A great one, from high up on the west side, torn off and lying across the yard with its leaves still on it, green, enormous, from the trunk nearly to the porch. The big doors of the barn were open, and one of them was not on its hinges any more but lying on the ground in front of the barn, flat. The windmill was standing. But its blades, at the top, were bent, all of them, twisted round to one side, like the fingers of a hand that had been shut in a door; and it did not turn.

And the trailer had moved.

It had moved two feet. Perhaps more. It stood by the barn where it had always stood, but not where it had stood; it was two feet further east, and tilted, a little, so that its door was higher on one side than the other, and the blind in its window had come down off its roller and was lying across the inside of the glass at an angle.

Castellanos looked at it for a long time.

“The trailer will go to Missouri in a good wind,” he said, at last, to nobody, very quietly.

“That wasn’t a good wind,” said Mrs Sixkiller, coming up the steps behind him with the radio. “That was a little one. It came down in the Baxters’ field two miles north and went up again before it got here. That was just what was left over.” She looked at the trailer. “A good wind and it’d be in Joplin.”

The house was there. All of it. White, two storeys, with its porch and its swing and its screen door and its tin roof, which was dented, all over, in a thousand small round dents, like the surface of the moon, and which had not come off. The screen door had a hole in it the size of a fist, where a hailstone the size of an egg had gone through the mesh. The windows on the west side were broken, two of them.

Everybody was all right.

Everybody was all right. He stood on the grassy mound over the cellar in the cool grey air with the hail melting round his feet and counted them, the way Kimura counted bottles, the way Castellanos counted a room: Theo, with the mixing bowl, and Earl going round in it. Marcus. Felix. Kimura. Castellanos. Mrs Sixkiller. Two strangers who were not strangers, coming up the steps behind them into the light, slowly, a young woman in a ruined blazer and a large young man carrying a camera that he was not holding up.

Seven, and two, and a fish.

At the bottom of the drive, in the ditch beside the gravel road, a white van with a number 6 on its side and a dish on its roof, folded, was lying on its side with a branch across it.

---

Shawna Proctor asked him one question.

She asked it on the porch steps, at five o’clock, when the others had gone round the side of the house to look at the windows and Mrs Sixkiller had gone to the well, because the well was the most important thing on the place, and Daniel Swimmer had gone down the drive to look at the van, with his camera, and had not turned it on, and was standing beside the van in the ditch looking at it the way Castellanos had looked at the trailer. She sat on the bottom step of the porch, in her ruined blazer, with her hands in her lap; and Frederick was on the top step, by the post, with his arms round his knees; and between them, on the porch boards, in the mixing bowl, which Theo had put down there to go and look at the windows, Earl the goldfish was going round.

She did not look at him. She looked at the yard, at the white drifts of hail melting, and the limb of the oak lying across it.

“Can I ask you one thing?” she said. “Not for anything. Not for the news. Just to know.”

“Yes.”

“Are you having a good summer?”

He looked at the yard. At the hail, and the oak, and the barn door flat on the ground, and the windmill with its blades twisted, and the trailer two feet east of where it should be; and beyond them, down through the fields, the trees, and the lake, which he could not see from here and could, because the light was coming off it, grey and silver, through the gaps.

He thought about the slate, and the bike, and the queue, and the clock standing up. He thought about the till and Tucker and the frog. He thought about a white ribbon and a judge’s note in pencil, will last, and about the swings going round and out over the dark country, and a pig in a creek, and a fish in a stump. He thought about a library card, and a bluebird on a stamp. He thought about sitting in a cellar for an hour with his wrist in Theo’s hand while a train went over.

“Yes,” he said. “Yes. I am.”

Shawna Proctor did not say anything for a long time.

“Then I didn’t see you,” she said.

---

The ten o’clock news, on the television above the pie case at the Cove Café, where they had gone for supper because Mrs Sixkiller said the house had no glass in its west windows and she was not having four boys eat in a room with no glass in it, was the storm.

It was all storm. The funnel coming down out of the cloud over a field near Big Cabin, filmed from a long way off by somebody on a telephone, grey, thin, like a rope, touching the ground and lifting again. Hail on a car bonnet in Vinita. A roof off a barn near Langley. The courthouse at Vinita with a tree down across the lawn and the soldier on his plinth standing in the middle of the branches, untouched. No one hurt. No one hurt anywhere. The calm man from the radio, on the television now, in his shirtsleeves, at a map, saying a lucky county today.

And then Shawna Proctor.

She was standing in front of a windmill. Not Mrs Sixkiller’s. One by a road somewhere, with its blades twisted; Frederick did not know where. She was in a different blazer, a dry one, and her hair was dry, and her face was quite calm.

“This is Ketchum,” said Shawna Proctor, on the television above the pie case, “a town of four hundred and seventy-one people on Grand Lake, in Craig and Mayes counties, which came through this afternoon’s storm with dented roofs, a few broken windows and a great many fallen limbs, and nobody hurt. I spent the afternoon here. I spent part of it in a storm cellar, with people I had not expected to meet, who let us in out of the hail, as the law of this State says they must, and gave us crackers.” A pause. “People here will tell you that nothing happens in Ketchum. They told me so all day. I believe them.” Another pause. “This is Shawna Proctor, in Ketchum, for Six News.”

The counter of the Cove Café, all nine stools, was quite silent.

Then, three stools down, the man in the tractor cap put down his fork.

“Huh,” said Cecil Rowe.

Behind the till, Darlene reached up, and turned the television off, and put the cloth back over the top of it; and picked up the coffee pot, and came down the counter, and filled every cup on it, one after another, whether it needed filling or not, all nine, without saying anything at all.