The Wind Chaser: A Cautionary Tale.
29 November ‘46. Page 210. The Storm Riders Almanac.
My great-grandfather
spun a good yarn.
He played a good game.
And I’m not kidding you
when I say
he was ten feet tall,
and he could do anything.
The ragged scar on his face
still smelled like trouble unfurled
for the lightning that struck him
as a young man
was not of this world.
It took his eye, and
it took his leg.
It can happen that way
when men
refuse the prophets and
strike at the sun.
One day a storm blew in,
one brutal beast of a storm,
an old one, and it had my
great-grandfather in its sights.
But he perceived no sign of its coming,
the great white whale of the sky.
“Live by the storm,
die by the storm,”
he always said,
but he still had to go
stand in the yard that day,
that peg leg pirate,
when everyone else with a lick of sense
was snuggled right down
in their basements.
He still had to go after it.
He still had to go and shake his stick
at rotations in the clouds.
It circled him, that swirling monster,
and danced away again,
and running from my hiding place
I called out to him,
“Grandfather! Come back!”
But he could not hear me,
or he would not hear me,
over the smell of musk
in the air and
a water spout far away in the distance
He hobbled after it,
wiry and mean and cussing a blue streak,
and I swear he grew as he ran-limped across the lawn,
his cane raised to the Leviathan,
an old man’s harpoon.
The neighbors came out
like a wave in his wake.
Porches filled all down the street
with people restless and tired of the dark.
Emboldened by his creaking war cries
and whipped by the lashing rain,
they too pointed to heaven
with their fingers,
drawing tiny storms in the air.
“He always was the meanest man
in the county,”
they said, nodding to one another,
with not one ounce of grace in their hearts
for an old man who could still
outrun the wind.
And then,
while we watched,
it swallowed him up,
just like that.
The dark jaws of that storm
closed around him
and took him from us forever.
We could hear him as it lifted him off the ground
Shouting like a foghorn
with his last breath,
in his mind,
a conqueror, even in death.
It’s been six years now, but
I think I’ll see him again, I do.
I prayed as he ran after that thing so fast
that he would surrender even at the last
and repent of laughing in the face of God.
I wasn’t sure until today,
but then I knew for certain
when a wooden leg
fell on the ground in front of me,
right out of the curtain
of the sky.
© Amy Axby 2019