The Wind Comes Sweeping. Marcia Preston
was still an indivisible part of J. B. Youngblood.
The musty smells of mice and old hay closed around her, and beneath that the metallic scent of engine oil. Overhead, sparrows chirped from the lofted darkness. When she was very young, the hay barn had been a magical place. She remembered two little girls scrambling over a mountain of hay bales that reached to the rafters. In a crevice between the prickly bales, they’d found a nest of sightless kittens. Nowadays hay was packaged in giant round bales and lined up along fences like Jurassic caterpillars. Today’s ranch kids didn’t know the joy of playing in the hay.
She took a deep breath that stuttered in her chest as her gaze settled on the ruined airplane. The left side of the cockpit was torn raggedly open, as if bitten away by monster teeth. The monster was a grove of hackberry trees that had ripped J.B. from his seat as the plane cartwheeled. She tried not to imagine the horror that must have seized him as he vaulted through the sky, out of control. Did images of his life pinwheel before him? Did he think of the granddaughter he never knew?
In her nightmares she flew with him and felt it all.
They’d found his body hanging in the branches, fifty yards from where the Cessna finally scraped to a halt. He was only twenty miles from the ranch when he crashed, on his way to pick her up for a visit. She was living halfway across the state at the time, a traveling art teacher for a sprawling rural school district. If she had promised to drive home for spring break, maybe he would be here today.
Funerals should be held in the gray chill of November, or in August’s punishing heat. Not in springtime with the pasture singing flowers. After he was buried, she’d made the hay barn available to FAA officials for their investigation. Aeronautics experts brought the aircraft here piece by careful piece and laid it out like a jigsaw cadaver, just as it remained now. Their verdict was inconclusive. The plane had undergone its required annual inspection and maintenance only a few weeks before, and J.B. never did trust those annuals. He said something was more likely to go wrong with the plane after it was tinkered with by unfamiliar hands. Maybe he was right.
The Cessna was the last thing her father had touched, and he felt more alive to her here than in the little family cemetery where she and Anna used to play. When they were six and eleven, they had set up their dolls on their mother’s grave and talked to her when the lonesomeness got too strong. But they grew older and the memory of their mother dimmed. Anna stopped going to the cemetery, but Marik never did. Now both her parents lay in the tall grass beside two generations of grandparents, a bachelor uncle, several family dogs and Leasie, the ghost lady of Silk Mountain. All of them watched over by the towering windmills.
Marik walked around the tail section of the airplane and looked down at the grounded right wing, the only part left completely intact. She’d made her first solo flight in this plane when it was new and she was seventeen—her dad waiting with a magnum of champagne when she returned, even prouder than she was. Anna was gone by then, but Monte was there to help them celebrate. In the barn’s artificial dusk, she saw J.B.’s jubilant face that day—and then the quick contrast of his wounded eyes four years later, the day she’d driven home from her apartment at the University of Oklahoma.
He couldn’t avoid staring at the expanse of her stomach when she’d dragged her lumpy suitcase up the front-porch steps. She read his disappointment—his artistic, college-educated daughter caught in a clichéd mistake, her bright future in jeopardy.
She had called her father to tell him, to ask if she could come home. But she hadn’t said she was already seven months along, having hidden from her college friends by moving off campus, dropping her classes when she began to show. She’d intended to go it alone, but she chickened out. He must have expected her to look the same as always, not showing yet, with options still available.
“My God, Marik,” was all he said, and her heart was a boulder in her chest.
“I’m sorry, Dad.” It was the first in a litany of apologies, but her father had already wrapped her in a hug.
Two months later she’d taken her last flight with her dad, coming home from the hospital. Marik knelt in the dust and put her hand on Queenie’s metal skin. It felt strangely warm.
A whirlwind swept through the barn door and sifted dust into her eyes. She wiped them on her shirtsleeve. Stood up and straightened her back.
For months after the baby was born, she had continued her self-imposed exile on the ranch, cooking for her dad and Monte, painting landscapes with too many dark colors. Hiding out, waiting for a vacuum to refill. She had no appetite and she spent sleepless hours in the middle of the night. Her father tried to get her to talk; so did Daisy. But she had no words for the emptiness inside her, the strange weightedness of her limbs.
Finally her dad had insisted she shouldn’t give up on her degree with only two semesters left. She was to be the first Youngblood to graduate from college. To make him proud, she’d agreed to go back. She moved to campus, two hours’ drive from the ranch, and rented a room from an elderly lady whose house smelled of lavender and dust.
A week before graduation, she’d received a job offer from a school district three hundred miles from home. The prospect of earning her own way, in a place where no one knew her, felt like absolution. Instead of going back to the ranch, she’d moved away to start her life over.
She’d been teaching four years at the time of J.B.’s accident. Suddenly her father was gone, denied the only grandchild he might have known. Her grief was a cyclone, for her dad and for her unknown daughter—the last of the Youngblood line.
When Marik came out of the barn, Daisy Gardner’s dust-colored Honda was parked on the circular driveway near the house. The sight of it gave Marik an uneasy moment; she had not heard a car drive up. She rolled the barn door shut, latched it and walked across the yard toward her friend. A distinct chill had diluted the February sunshine. In less than an hour the sun would drop behind Killdeer Ridge and cast the outbuildings into premature dusk.
Daisy was leaning against the fender with her arms crossed, one loafered foot angled over the other. She was still in her work clothes, an embellished cotton jacket and khaki slacks that smiled at the knees. Daisy knew what was inside the barn and had chosen not to interrupt, but she didn’t look happy.
“You were supposed to call me,” she said.
“Sorry. I had company until a little while ago. An applicant for the foreman job.”
“The guy who was in your truck today.”
“Right. Seems like a good prospect.”
“Is he married?” Daisy asked.
Marik chose the short answer. “Yes.”
Daisy sighed heavily. “The good ones always are.”
“Come on in,” Marik said, starting toward the house. “It’s happy hour.”
Daisy followed her up the cobblestone path with her tote bag hanging from one arm. She wouldn’t cross the street without that bag. It was her portable office, stuffed with case files, feminine necessities and more snacks than a vending machine.
Beneath the carport, they climbed three concrete steps to a side door that opened into the large, lived-in kitchen. The room stayed a bit too warm, even in winter, but this evening the kitchen’s warmth felt good to Marik. She took off her jacket and tossed it onto a chair.
Daisy parked her tote bag beside the battered oak table that had been the hub of Youngblood family life for fifty years. In the open top of Daisy’s bag Marik saw the toaster tarts and fruit roll-ups Daisy used to calm frightened child clients, and minisacks of Dorito chips to which Daisy was addicted.
“Wine or something harder?” Marik said.
“How about a good stiff scotch. It’s been one helluva day.”
“Uh-oh.” Marik took wine and scotch from a cabinet and two glasses from another, adding ice to one. The Chivas was left over from J.B.’s stash. Marik didn’t drink the hard stuff and had given