Clutterbuck over egg prices. It honed my math and taught me the art of negotiation, all of which was going to help me achieve my Purpose in Life. Dad was a philosopher and had what he called his Theory of Purpose, which held that everything in life had a purpose, and unless it achieved that purpose, it was just taking up space on the planet and wasting everybody’s time.
That was why Dad never bought any of us kids toys. Play was a waste of time, he said. Instead of playing house or playing with dolls, girls were better off cleaning a real house or looking after a real baby if their Purpose in Life was to become a mother.
Dad didn’t actually forbid us from ever playing, and sometimes Buster, Helen, and I rode over to the Dingler ranch for a game of baseball with the Dingler kids. Because we didn’t have enough players for two full teams, we made up a lot of our own rules, one being that you could get a runner out by throwing the ball at him. Once, when I was ten and trying to steal a base, one of the Dingler boys threw the ball at me hard and it hit me in the stomach. I doubled over, and when the pain wouldn’t go away, Dad took me into Toyah, where the barber who sometimes sewed people up said my appendix had been ruptured and I needed to get up to the hospital in Santa Fe. We caught the next stagecoach, and by the time we got to Santa Fe, I was delirious, and what I remember next was waking up in the hospital with stitches on my stomach, Dad sitting next to me.
“Don’t worry, angel,” he said. The appendix, he explained, was a vestigial organ, which meant it had no Purpose. If I had to lose an organ, I’d chosen the right one. But, he went on, I’d almost lost my life, and to what end? I’d only been playing a game of baseball. If I wanted to risk my life, I should do it for a Purpose. I decided Dad was right. All I had to do was figure out what my Purpose was.
IF YOU WANT TO be reminded of the love of the Lord, Mom always said, just watch the sunrise.
And if you want to be reminded of the wrath of the Lord, Dad said, watch a tornado.
Living on Salt Draw, we saw our share of tornadoes, which we feared even more than those flash floods. On most occasions, they looked like narrow cones of gray smoke, but sometimes when it had been especially dry, they were almost clear, and you could see tree limbs and brush and rocks swirling at the bottom. From a distance they seemed to be moving slowly, as if underwater, spinning and swaying almost elegantly.
Most weren’t more than a dust devil gone a little wild, ripping at the laundry on the clothesline and sending the chickens squawking. But once, when I was eleven years old, a monster came roaring across the range.
Dad and I were working with the horses when the sky turned dark real quickly and the air got heavy. You could smell and taste what was heading our way. Dad saw the tornado first, coming in from the east, a wide funnel reaching from the clouds to the earth.
I set about unharnessing the horses while Dad ran in to warn Mom, who started opening all the windows in the house because she’d been told that would equalize the air pressure and make it less likely that the house would explode. The horses were stampeding like crazy around the corral. Dad didn’t want them trapped, so he opened the gate and they galloped through it, heading across the range, away from the tornado. Dad said if we got through this, we could worry about the horses later.
By then the sky overhead was black and streaked with rain, but off in the distance you could see sunlight slanting through golden clouds, and I took that as a sign. Dad had us all, including Apache and Lupe, scramble into the crawl space under the house. As the tornado came closer, it whipped up sand and branches and broken bits of wood in one big swirl around the house, roaring so loud it sounded like we were right under a freight train.
Mom grabbed our hands to pray, and while I didn’t usually feel the call, I