Catherine Field

THE BABY IN THE DITCH

THE BABY FOUND MIRACULOUSLY UNHARMED IN THE DITCH TALKS ABOUT THE TRI-STATE TORNADO OF 1925

Don’t bother huddling in the dusty basement. Save your
batteries for the TV remote, your candles for the wake. All those
stories you’ve heard— how the southwest corner walls, built true
by honest men, will hold while all else flattens— are false.

Look at the photographs. DeSoto might have been the Second
Temple about the time the Romans took aim. Murphysboro might
have been Pompeii. The wind bloweth where it listeth, and it
listeth where you are. See if you can change that, under the musty
steps with your jars of jam, your trembling jugs of stale drinking
water, and those calm, spacey voices from the Emergency
Broadcasting System telling you where to tune in your galaxy and
why.

For all your splintered studs and joists, now crosshatched on the
broken odds of glass that once was your lawn, there may be
compensation. That sound you hear from that ditch over there

may not be only the squeak of a radio snatched from the bobbling
clutch of another whose southwest walls have also betrayed his
trust when push came to pushing harder.

You might check it out, see for yourself if it isn’t some sky-boy,
dirty but unhurt, and wailing like the hinge on a gate after the earth
has been pounded into the same foul mud from which the moon
was made.

 

 

 

 

 

 

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