watching her go like a boy memorizing a story he would be required,
someday, to tell exactly right.
The storm did not come up the way weather comes up in country that has
hills to warn it. On the plains it assembled. All morning it had been building
a wall in the west, blue-black and flat-bottomed, higher than anything ought
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to be able to stand, and the air under it had the held-breath stillness that
makes cattle bunch and birds go silent, and when Willa was two miles out of
Alder Creek, the wall arrived at the speed of a galloping horse and the world
changed so completely that she understood, in her body before her mind,
why the old freighters called such a storm a prairie eraser. The wind did not
rise. It struck. One moment there was a road, a mare under her, a horizon.
The next there was only force, and the rain coming sideways through it hard
enough to sting through wool, and hail mixed in it, gravel-sized, thrown
rather than fallen, so that the sound on her hat brim and on the mare's neck
was a sound like the sky tearing along a seam. Button screamed — she had
never heard the mare scream — and tried to turn her tail to it, and Willa let
her, and for a while there was nothing to do but be a passenger on terror,
crouched low over the saddle horn with her face against the wet neck, one
hand fisted in the mane, the other pressed flat over the oilskin bundle at her
ribs, feeling the mare run by instinct down a grade Willa could no longer see.
Afterwards she could not have said how far they went or in what direction.
The storm took the landmarks in order: first the road, which was simply not
there when she looked, the sheeting water having made the whole face of the
prairie into one shining, sliding skin; then the fence line, vanished in a
curtain of rain; then the sun, then the west, then north and south themselves,
until there was nothing left in the world but up, where the rain came from,
and down, where the water was going. She thought: I will keep the wind on
my left cheek. That is west. I will keep it there. It was the kind of thought her
father respected, a surveyor's thought, a chainman's thought — hold your line
by whatever the country gives you — and she held it for as long as the wind
consented to come from one quarter, which was perhaps ten minutes, and
then the storm, as plains storms do, began to turn on itself, and the wind
came at her cheek, then at her back, then full in her face with a gust that took
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the breath out of her body in a single theft, and she understood that she was
lost in the true and ancient sense: surrendered to a landscape that had
withdrawn every offer of direction it had ever made.
The wash took the mare. She felt the ground go first — a softening, a giving,
the sound changing under the hooves to a deep, drinking sound — and
Button plunged to her knees in the brown rush of water pouring down a draw
that had been dry as a road an hour before. Willa went over the shoulder and
into it. The cold was the first shock and the force was the second: the water
was only at her thighs but it leaned on her like a man shoving, and it carried
her six feet before she caught at the saddle as it came up, thrashing, beside
her. She got one hand on the stirrup leather and the mare, maddened, already
climbing the far bank in great lunging heaves of mud, dragged her up out of
the wash by main strength and then — the girth, Beck's twice-buckled girth,
holding a moment and then letting go all at once as the saddle slid sideways
under her weight — was free, and gone, up the bank and away into the murk
at a dead run, and Willa was sitting in the mud of the bank with her dress
plastered to her and her boots full of creek and her hat gone, watching the
place where her horse had been as if the rain might relent and give it back.
It did not relent. She got up because getting up was the only verb left to her.
Her first act, before she even wiped the water from her eyes, was to open the
front of her dress with numb fingers and find the oilskin. It was there. The
wrap was wet through on its outer fold and dry within, and she laughed then,
one breath of it, alone in the drowned world, because her father had wrapped
his work for exactly this weather and some part of him had known it. She
tied the bundle tighter, working by feel, and took stock of what she was: a
woman afoot, in May, in a storm that had already produced a flash flood in a
dry draw, at least five miles and possibly nine from Alder Creek, with the
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temperature falling the way it falls behind a plains front, all at once and
without apology. She knew what cold water and wind did to a body. She had
grown up on the freighters' stories: it did not kill by drama. It killed by
arithmetic, a subtraction performed slowly on the fingers first, then the
thoughts.
So she kept her thoughts the way her father had taught her to keep a chain:
taut, and counted, and attended to one link at a time. The fence line. There
had been a fence line east of the wash — she had blundered through it with
the mare, which meant it crossed the draw, which meant if she could find the
far bank and follow the slope up, the posts would come. She found the first
post with her shin. It knocked the breath out of her and she blessed it aloud,
and after that she traveled hand over hand along the wire, post to post,