The wind blew in straight from the Pole, or so it seemed. Not blade-sharp, but blunt and heavy, like a Kiowa war club. Dry leaves and snarling snow squalls hurried before, as if in haste to outrun it. The thickest sheepskin and greasewool were not enough to turn aside the assault of this wind; the stoutest fur-lined sealskin boots and mittens couldn’t keep feet and hands from aching and going numb.
Life itself retreated into the depths of Sarah Dawson. She sensed only a spark of warmth deep inside her, cowering away from the sweep of the black roaring void which had snuffed the sun.
The sudden temperature drop seemed a surprise at first. Surprise? No. Granny Synnestvedt had looked at the sky – when was that? Yesterday? This morning? Back in Canebrake. She’d looked at the sky with her cataract-fogged hazel eyes.
“Blue Norther,” she’d said. “I smell it. Blue Norther. Comin’ down on us sure as hell fire. Winter ain’t over yet, chickadee. You best stay right where you’re at till she blows through.” She sniffed the wind and cackled like an old broody hen over the last egg she’d ever lay.
But Granny Synnestvedt had got on Sarah’s nerves so bad it was going to take more than a late winter storm to keep her cooped up in that musty old bungalow in Canebrake. Shut up tight since the end of October, the place reeked of age, rancid cabbage and decay. Shades pulled down, even in daylight the interior was shadowy as the lukewarm shallows of a prehistoric sea, where Granny, a rippling transparent ctenophore, glided from room to room. For days on end, the only sound in the place was the keening of the prairie wind – and Granny’s chuckling as she talked to herself – or to someone Sarah couldn't see.
Sarah Dawson announced she must leave, Blue Norther or no.
“I’m warnin’ you, child. No, I’m beggin’ you.” Granny rubbed her hands together with a sound of grasshoppers’ wings. “Stay till the weather clears. I see a awful visitation of Satan’s angels comin’ on us. Stay another three days.”
“I got to go, Granny. Been here too long. You was kind to put me up through the cold months, but I got family waitin’ on me. I’ll be fine. I’ve rode fence lines in a snowstorm before. Don’t you worry about me.”
***
The roan mare rolled her eyes, showing the whites. She got skittish when Sarah tried to saddle her. Granny stood in the barn doorway and watched, her face closed up like a shuttered dark lantern.
“Horse senses it,” she muttered. “Horse can already hear the wind a hundred mile away. Horse don’t want to die out there on the storm’s anvil.”
Sarah finally backed the mare into a corner and threw the saddle over her back. It was a Spanish leather saddle, a gift from her father, with her initials tooled into the right stirrup flap.
“Quit it, Gran. Enough of that nonsense. Look at that sky. It’s as clear as eternity. Sun’s getting warmer every day. I’m going and that’s that.”
The mare whinnied and stamped and rolled her eyes as Sarah cinched the saddle.
“If you ain’t going to mind me, you should at least mind the horse,” Granny said.
“Not another word.”
“Horse knows. Oh, yes. Horse knows. You say that sky’s clear as eternity? Even with these old eyes I see the darkness in the north.”
***
Sarah Dawson rode out that morning, Granny’s predictions notwithstanding – over the illusory flatness of the earth toward where the prairie and the sky made a straight line of demarcation between them, following the sun’s trajectory toward dusk.
About ten miles out, Sarah looked to her right, startled, perhaps, by something she thought she heard – the suggestion of storm-tossed surf or a high-speed freight train in the distance. Sarah looked, saw nothing of interest in the near distance; then she gazed into the bright northern sky.
And there it was: a thin band of purple just above the horizon – a bruise on the face of heaven. Bit of weather shaping up? Maybe. Sarah recalled Granny’s warnings and dug her heels into the mare’s flanks. “Git up, Gertie.” She clicked her tongue and slapped the reins against the horse’s withers. “We’ll make Yankton by nightfall.”
Sarah shuddered slightly. The sun, she noticed, though still high in the sky – about an hour past noon, she figured – had lost a good bit of its warmth.
She looked northward again. The thin band of purple now looked like a mountain ridge. She felt a puff of cold wind, a cat’s paw, like the first tentative probing of a boxer sizing up a sparring partner in the ring. The grass rippled, the blades showing their pale undersides.
Then it hit.
***
According to the almanac, the blizzard of March 18-19, 1903 “smote the Dakotas with the fury of an avenging angel.” When the earth re-emerged from beneath its mantle of ice in the second week of May, vultures feasted on acres of carcasses – a smorgasbord of bison, steer, bull, sheep, coyote and whatever else raised its stink into the springtime air.
A wandering rodeo bum found a fine Spanish leather saddle and tack amid some maggot-crawling remains about fifteen miles west of Canebrake. The initials S.D. had been tooled into the leather, which came back nicely with lots of saddle soap and elbow grease. The cowpoke took a hot iron and obliterated the initials, substituting his own on the opposite flap.
One breezy afternoon in June, Granny Synnestvedt sat on her front porch with her grandson Jad Parsons from the Lazy B Ranch. She sniffed the air.
“Twisters.” Granny’s voice rasped as she lit her corncob pipe. “Twisters. Big ‘uns. And lightning. You best get your livestock under cover an’ pray for deliverance.”
“Aw, come on, Gran,” Jad said. “There ain’t no twisters out there. Look at that sky. It’s clear as eternity.”
IT'S INTERESTING what one can find while rummaging through boxes of old photos. Interesting and nostalgic beyond belief. So now, travel with me back to June 1964, to the Bellevue-Stratford Hotel in Philadelphia, where some unbelievably lucky (although they probably didn't appreciate it at the time) young people were taking part in the upper-crust social life of the day. This was about two years before the youth revolution of the mid-'60s, and the debutante season was still a very big deal in some circles. It was a carefree time, in which we danced the night away and thought not a bit about what might be waiting for us around the corner.
