"'Is it going to lightning now?’ asked Molly.
Almost immediately a bright bolt jagged down the sky to our right. My daughter the prognosticator. Both girls screamed again at the thunderclap.
The rain hit. I strained to see. There were greasy blurs in the fan-shaped swipes of the wipers. Then I remembered I’d forgotten to call my folks at the plaza. Well, in the hours of Illinois ahead of us there’d be time before it got too late.
I kept on and kept on but couldn’t get beyond the swath of the storm. Molly fell asleep. Anne asked if she could turn on the car ceiling light to finish her book, and when I said absolutely not, she scrunched down into her corner of pillows. I turned the radio on again, very softly, and scanned the stations for weather reports. In a few more days it would be the autumnal equinox.
One hundred and fifty-odd years ago my pioneer ancestors went around this particular stretch of land by way of water. They drove the Conestoga wagon and ox team onto a barge near Pittsburgh, made their way down the Ohio River to the Mississippi, and then disembarked up the Mississippi at what is now Muscatine. They purchased their first forty from the government for a dollar twenty-five cents an acre, then mortgaged the land again and again over the years to pay for more acres and for equipment to farm it. They tried hard to hold on; now what was left of the family was talking of letting go.
Both girls were asleep and sheets of rain still swept across the highway. I didn’t want to wake them, and I didn’t want to leave them unattended while I ran in somewhere to a telephone. I drove on and on through the dark flat farm country beyond Dixon, a segment of Illinois that has always appeared so bleak to me that I sort of dread going through it – and I’m supposedly a country boy. Here something terrible seems to have happened, or be about to happen, maybe the ghosts of Indians rising up to reclaim land that never should have been bought and sold in the first place. On a clear night I would at least have been able to see the spaced lights of farms and small towns, reassuring distant constellations.”
From Rain –
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