CROSSING OVER

When my father gathered our family into the basement and led us in the singing of ‘Rock of Ages, cleft for me/Let me hide myself in thee’, with our wavering voices accompanied by the screaming descant of warning sirens, even as a ten-year-old boy I knew that we were singing to try and stem the fear – the fear that made my mother envelop my younger sister so only her small head was visible as we huddled against the upturned table and mattress I had helped my father drag downstairs. The singing didn’t get much past the second verse because, apart from my father, none of us could remember the words and suddenly he decided that there were other things that needed to be done. So despite my mother’s pleading he went back up and returned a few minutes later with a box and a sheaf of papers that looked like legal documents of some sort. Already there was the white bounce and drum of giant hailstones against the roof and basement windows. Then again, despite my mother’s insistent cautions, he told me to come with him and help carry other stuff into the cellar that I guess he thought was important, and I remember that this unexpected elevation into a kind of manhood briefly surpassed any sense of fear I felt as I followed him up the stairs.

I saw it first. Across the fields. Then he did too and, as if momentarily paralysed, we both stood silent and still, staring at this thing that was coming. It was the closest I have ever felt to him even before his drawn-out end, because it was the only time that all the strengths in which his life of faith wrapped himself fell away, and we stood there side by side, as equals, with nothing separating us in the course of our shared fear.

A blackened world, a sky funnelling and twisting itself in an approaching fury. The row of trees bordering the furthest field suddenly tattered and torn, everything broken-backed and flailing. Black-winged bats of careering debris, the air flecked and scarred, and the roar, the roar louder than anything I have ever heard or want to hear again, like some wild beast tearing itself finally free from a chained torment. The field being ripped up and relaid yard by yard. The hairs of the whole world standing on end.

My father never spoke, never uttered a single word, and then I felt his hand pummelling me back towards the cellar, but as we rushed towards it I carried one final image as the crack of thunder spliced with the slap of our feet on the wooden boards – the churning vertical funnel flaring out like a black sea about to flood over us. I almost fell down the stairs into my mother’s outstretched arms and the four of us squeezed into the tightest embrace where it was impossible to tell where one body ended and another began. Even amidst the roar I could hear my mother’s breathing and feel the beat of her heart. And then my father was praying that God would protect us and that this thing would pass over us, but before he could finish it hit, and his words were lost in my sister’s crying and the small cellar windows smashing open as in it rushed, a hissing blast filling the air with the gathered debris scooped up from the field and a grainy, grit-filled tumulation that tasted like metal in the mouth. Above our heads wood was tearing and screaming and at any moment it felt as if the trembling house might be picked up complete and tossed into the spinning vortex. We buried our faces in each other – it was the physically closest our family had ever been and the strength of my father’s arm circled us like a hoop holding us ever tighter. I thought of miracles, of things made right and furies calmed, of men walking through flames, and then it passed, but we didn’t move for a long time until slowly and uncertainly we eased apart our still-shaking limbs.