STORMSONG RUNNER

WONDER WHO'S IN CHARGE OF COLD WEATHER FOR this region. I'd like to talk to them. You see, I-no, I'm not crazy. Or maybe I am. It would simplify things enormously if I were.

Look, let me explain it to you. About three years ago, I graduated from college in Pittsburgh. There I was, twenty-two, fresh, eager, armed with a degree in elementary education. All scholarship, no problems. I sailed through.

And back then, as now, that degree and half a buck bought a large coffee to go.

So I drifted, bummed around; took any job I could get, while firing off applications to dozens of school districts. The baby boom's over, though-there were few openings, none that wouldn't make you cut your throat in a couple of years.

I was on the road to failing the most important course of all-life. I started drinking, blowing pot, and sniffing coke, and was in and out involved with a bunch of flaky girls more into that than I was.

What rescued me was, oddly enough, an accident. I was driving a girlfriend's old clunker when this fellow ran a light and hit me broadside. A couple of weeks in the hospital, a lurking lawyer I'd known from high school, and I suddenly had a good deal of the other guy's insurance company's money.

I bought a place down in southern West Virginia, up in the hills in the middle of nowhere, and tried to get my head on straight. It was peaceful in those mountains, and quiet; the little town about three miles away had the few necessities of life available, and the people were friendly, if a little curious about why such a rich city feller would move down there. Grass is greener syndrome, I suppose.

As I wandered the trails of my first summer, I made some acquaintance with the people who lived further back, primitive, clannish, and isolated from even the tiny corner of the twentieth century that permeated the little town. I even got shot at when I discovered that they still do indeed have stills back there-and got blind stinking drunk when we straightened it out.

The grinding poverty of these people was matched only by their lack of knowledge about how destitute they really were. State social workers and welfare people sometimes trekked up there, but they encountered hostility mixed with pride. And, in a way, I admired the mountain folk all the more for it, for in some things they were richer than anyone in this uncertain world-their sense of family, the closeness between people, the love of nature and the placement of a person's worth above all else-these were things my own culture had long ago lost, called corny and hick.

Most of these people were illiterate, and so were their kids. Most of the time the kids were kept hidden when the state people came up-these folk were too poor to afford shoes, pens and pencils, and all the other costly paraphernalia of our "free" school system. They preferred to ignore the state laws on education as much as they did the federal ones on making moonshine.

Well, I talked to some of the state people, who knew of the problem but could do little about it, and convinced someone in the welfare department that I could make a contribution. They accepted my teaching certificate, and I became a per diem teacher to the hill people on the West Virginia State Department of Education. Not much, but it was a job, and I was needed here. The only way these people were ever going to break the bonds of poverty and isolation was through education, at least in the basics. I was determined that my students-perhaps a dozen at the start-would be able to read and write and do simple, practical sums before I was through-and that's more than most modern high school graduates in urban areas can do these days.

It was tough to get some of those parents to agree, but when the first snow fell in early October I had a group. We met in my house-a two-story actual log cabin, but with only two large rooms (one more than I needed). The kids were fun, and eager learners. I wound up with an ominous thirteen, but it was perfect-each one got individual attention from me, and I got to know them well. When they ran into trouble, I'd go up to their shacks, stomach lined as much as possible with yogurt or cream against the inevitable hospitality, and we'd have extra lessons. In this way I sneakily started teaching some of the parents as well.

Their ages ranged from nine to fourteen, but they all started off evenly-they were ignorant as hell. And I got help-the state was so pleased to make any kind of a dent in the region that they sent us everything from hot lunch supplies to pens, pencils, crayons, and even some simple books, obviously years old and discovered in some Charleston elementary school's basement but perfect for us.

Schooling was erratic and unconventional. The snow was extremely deep at times, the weather as fierce as the Canadian northwoods, and there were whole weeks when contact was impossible. Yet, as spring approached progress had been made; their world was a little wider. They were mostly on Dick and Jane, but they were reading, and they were already adding and subtracting on a basic level.

And they taught me, too. We spent time in those woodlands watching deer and coon, and, as spring arrived, they showed me the best spots for viewing the wonderful flowers and catching the biggest fish.

They were close to nature and were, in fact, a part of it. It sometimes made me hesitate in what I was doing. "Poor" is such a relative term.

Only one of the students was a real puzzle-a girl of ten or eleven (who knew for sure?) named Cindy Lou Whittler, the only child of a poor woman who made out as best she could while tending the grave of her husband just out back. She was fat and acne-ridden, and awkward as hell; the other kids would have made her the butt of their cruel jokes in normal circumstances, but they steered clear of her. She sat off by herself, talking only haltingly and only when prompted-and you could cut the tension with a knife.

They were scared to death of her.

Finally I could stand it no longer, and had a talk with Billy Bushman. He was the oldest of the group, the most worldly-wise, and was the natural class leader.

"Billy," I asked him one day, "you've got to tell me. Why are you and everybody else scared of Cindy Lou?"

He shuffled uneasily and glanced around. "'Cause she a witcher woman," he replied softly. "You do somthang she don' liak, she sing th' stormsong an' thas all fo you."

A little more prompting brought the rest of the story. They thought-knew--she was a witch, and they believed she could cause lightning and thunder.

I felt sorry for the girl. Superstition is rampant among the ignorant (and some not so ignorant, come to think of it) and an idea based on it, once formed, is almost impossible to dislodge. Seems a couple of years back she and a boy had had a fight, and she threatened him. A couple of days later, he was struck by lightning and killed.

Such are legends born.

Shortly after, contemplating her sullen loneliness in the corner, I called her aside after class and talked to her about it. Getting any response from her was like puffing teeth.

"Cindy Lou, I know the others think you're a witch," I told her, feeling genuinely sorry for her, "and I know how lonely you must be."

She smiled a little, and the hurt that was always in her eyes seemed to lessen.

"I heard the story about the boy," I told her, trying to tread cautiously but to open her up.

"Didn't kill nobody," she replied at last. "Couldn't."

"I know," I told her. "I understand."

Finally she couldn't hold it in any longer, and started crying. I tried to soothe and comfort her, glad the hurt was coming out. To cure a boil-even one in the soul it must first be lanced so tears can flow.

"I jest make 'em liak ah'm told ta," she sobbed. "Ah caint tell 'em what to do."

This threw me for a loop. In my smug urban superiority it had never occurred to me that she might believe it, too.

"Who tells you?" I asked softly. "Who tells you to bring the thunderstorms?"

"Papa come sometimes," she replied, still sniffling. "He say ah got to make 'em. That everybody's got a reason for bein' heah an' mine's doin' this."

I understood now. I knew. An ugly, fat little girl would see her father, now two years dead, and she would rationalize her loneliness and ugliness somehow. This was in the character of these people so much a part of nature and the hills-she wasn't the ugly duckling, no, she was the most important person, most powerful person in the whole area.

She made the thunderstorms for southern West Virginia-and she was here for that purpose.

It made life livable.

The beginning of spring meant the onrush of thunderstorms as the warmer air now moving in struck the mountains; and as they increased in frequency, so did her loneliness, isolation-and pride. As the kids became more scared of her, she knew she had power-over them, over all.

She made the storms. She.

I tried to teach them a little basic meteorology, to sneakily dispel this fantasy for the rest of them, but they nodded, told me the answers I wanted to hear, and kept on believing that Cindy Lou made the storms. Outsiders couldn't understand. And this gave them some pride, too-for they were smugly confident that, for all my education, they knew for sure something that was beyond me.

It was the middle of May now, and my job had been among the most enjoyable and rewarding that I could imagine. I started to pick up other students as word got around, and began to travel as well, to teach some of the adults who managed to swallow just enough of that fierce pride to get me to help them.

One day I was coming back from one such student-he was seventy if he was a day, and I had him up to Dr. Seuss-when I passed near the Whittler house. I decided to stop by and see how Cindy Lou and her terribly suffering mother, the oldest thirty-six I had ever seen, were getting along. Classes were infrequent now; in spring these people planted and worked hard to eke out their subsistence.

As I approached the house, I thought I heard Cindy Lou's voice coming from inside, and I hesitated, as if a great hand were lain upon me. Frozen, her words drifted through the crude wooden shack to me.

"No, Papa!" she cried out fiercely. "Ah caint do this'n! You caint ask me! You know the wata's too high now. A big'n liak this'll flood the whole valley-maybe the town, too!"

And then there came the sound I'll never forget-the one that made the hairs on my neck stand up.

"You do liak yo' papa say!" came a deep, gravelly and oddly hollow man's voice. "Ah ain't got no choice in this mattah and neither do you. Leave them choices to them what knows bettah. You do it, now, heah? You know what happen if'n you don't!"

Suddenly the spell that seemed to hold me broke, and I stood for a moment, uneasily shivering. I considered not dropping in, just going on, but I finally decided it was my duty. I knew one thing for sure-somebody definitely did tell Cindy Lou to make the storms; she could never have made that voice outside a recording studio.

I had to know who was feeding her this. I knocked.

For a while there was no answer. Then, just as I was about to give up, the door creaked open and Cindy Lou peered out.

She'd been crying, I could see, but she was glad to see me and asked me in.

"Mama's gone to town," she explained. "Cleanin' Mr. Summil's windas."

I walked into the one-room shack that I'd been in many times before. There was no back door, and only the most basic furnishings.

There was no one else in the shack but the two of us. My stomach started turning a little, but I got a grip on myself.

"Cindy Lou?" I asked anxiously. "Where's the man who was just here? I heard voices."

She shrugged. "Papa dead, you know. Cain't hang around fo' long," she explained so matter-of-factly that it was more upsetting than the voice itself. I shifted subjects, the last refuge of the nervous.

"You've been crying," I noted.

She nodded seriously. "Papa want me t' do a big'n tonight. You been by the dam today?"

I nodded my head slowly. There was a small earthen dam used to trap water. Part of it was tapped for town use, and the small lake it backed up made the best fishing in the area. I had walked by there only a half hour or so earlier; the water was already to the top, ready to spill over, this mostly from the runoff of melting snow from the hard winter.

"If'n it rain big, that dam'll bust," she said flatly.

Again I nodded. It was true-I'd complained to the county about that dam, pleaded with them to shore it up, but it was low on the priority list-not many voters in these parts.

"Ah din't kill that boy," she continued, getting more anxious, "but if'n I do what Papa want, ah'll kill a lot of folk sure."

And that, too, was true-if the dam burst and nobody heeded any warnings. I tried to think of an answer that would comfort her. I was terribly afraid of what would happen to her if that dam did break in a storm. She paid a heavy price for assumed guilt by others; this one she'd blame on herself, and I was sure she couldn't handle that.

"What happens if you don't bring the storm?" I asked gently.

She was grim, face set, and her voice sounded almost as dead and hollow as that man's eerie tones had been. "Terrible thangs" was all she could tell me.

I didn't want to leave her, but when I heard that the storm was set for before midnight, and that her mother probably wouldn't come home until the next day, I decided I had to act. Cindy Lou refused to come with me, and I had little choice. I was afraid that she might kill herself to keep from doing her terrible task, and I needed reinforcement. I made for town and Mrs. Whittler.

It took me over an hour to get there, and another half hour to find her. She seemed extremely alarmed, and it was the first time I'd heard her curse, but she and I rushed back to where no cars could go as quickly as possible.

Clouds obscured the sky, and no stars showed through that low ceiling as sundown caught us still on the rutted path to the shack. Ordinarily, no problem-it was usually cloudy on this side of the mountains-but that deepening blackness seemed somehow alive, threatening now as we neared the shack.

We burst in suddenly, and I quickly lit a kerosene lantern.

The shack was empty.

"My God! My God!" Mrs. Whittler moaned. "What has that rascal done to mah poor baby?"

"Think!" I urged her. "Where would she go?"

She shook her head sadly from side to side. "I dunno. Nowheres. Everywheres. Too dark to see her anyways if she din't wanta be seen."

It was true, but I didn't want to face it. Nothing is more terrible than knowing you are impotent in a crisis. There was a noticeable lowering of the temperature.

The barometer was falling so fast that you could feel it sink. There was a mild rumble off in the distance.

"There must be something we can do!" I almost screamed in frustration.

She chewed on her lower lip a moment. Then, suddenly, her head came up, and there was fire in her eyes. "There's one thang!" she said firmly, and walked out of the shack. I followed numbly.

We walked around to the back in the almost complete darkness. Small flashes of lightning gave a sudden, intermittent illumination, like a few frames of a black and white movie.

She stood there at the grave of her husband, the little wooden cross the only sign that someone was buried there.

"Jared Whittler!" she screamed. "You cain't do this to our daughta! She's ours! Ours! Please, oh, God! You was always a good man, Jared! In the name of God, she's all I've got!"

It seemed then that the lightning picked up, and thunder roared and echoed among the darkened hills.

Now, suddenly, there was a cosmic fireworks display; sharp, piercing streaks of lightning seemed to flash all around us, thunder boomed, and the wind picked up to tremendous force.

It started to rain, a few hard drops at first, then faster and faster, until we were engulfed in a terrible torrent.

And yet we stood there transfixed, in front of that little cross, and we prayed, and we pleaded, oblivious to the weather.

Suddenly, through it all, we heard a roaring sound unlike any of the storm. I turned slowly, the terror of reality in my soul.

"Oh, my God!" I managed. "There goes the dam!"

There was a sound like a tidal wave moving closer to us, then passing us somewhere to our backs, and continuing on down into the valley below.

As suddenly as it came on, the rain stopped. Both of us still stood there, soaked to the skin, now ankle-deep in mud. Now the storm was just a set of dull flashes in the distance to the east, and a few muted rumbles of what it had been.

She turned to me then. Though I couldn't really see her, I knew that she was stoic as all hill folk were in disaster.

"You're soaked," she said quietly. "Come in and git dried off. There'll be work to do in the town tonight."

I was shocked, numb, and silently, without thought, I followed her into the shack where, by the light of the kerosene lantern, she fished out some ragged towels for me to use.

We said nothing to each other. There was nothing left to say.

Suddenly there was a noise outside, and slowly, hesitantly, the old door opened on creaking hinges.

"Cindy Lou!" her mother almost whispered, and then ran and hugged her, holding the child to her bosom. Cindy Lou cried and hugged her mother all the more.

After a time, Mrs. Whittler turned her loose and looked at her. "Lord! You a mess!" she exclaimed, and went over and threw the girl a towel.

I stood there dumbly, trying to think of something to say. She sensed it, and looked up at me.

"Ah went to the dam," she said softly. "If'n it was gonna go, ah wanted to be goin' with it. Papa come to me then, say, `These things hav'ta happen sometimes.' He say you goes when th' time comes, but it wasn't mah time, that you an' Mama was heah, callin' fo' me."

"It had to happen-your papa's right about that. If it hadn't been this time, then a few days from now," I consoled.

She shrugged.

"Ah couldn't do it. Papa got the man in charge of eastern Kentucky to do it," she said. "Papa say he don't want me doin' this no mo'. He gon' try to git me changed to handlin' warm days."

And that was it.

We spent days cleaning up the mess; my cabin was the highest ground near the town, so it became rescue headquarters and temporary shelter. It'll take months to dig that silt out of the town itself, but, miraculously, no lives had been lost.

The state says they'll do something real soon now. By that time I'll be dead of old age, of course-but, no, I'll die of helping everybody with the red tape first.

Cindy Lou? Well, she seems happier now, convinced that she's switched jobs to something potentially less lethal. I go up there often. The kids still aren't all that friendly, but I take Cindy Lou with me on my rounds; realistically, I know I'm the father figure she craves, and she is almost like a daughter to me, but, what the hell. You get to analyzing why you do something and you go nuts.

And my students? More each day seem to show up, ages five to eighty-five. No teacher can find more satisfaction in his work than I do.

Every time there's a thunderstorm, though, I get to thinking-and I'm not sure that's good, either.

The weather bureau had predicted that storm; the Charleston paper showed a front right where a front should have been, and I looked at back issues and that front had been moving across the country for three days. Anybody used to this mountain country could tell a storm was brewing that day.

And that man's voice? I don't know. I'm not sure whether Cindy Lou's voice can go that low or not, but ... it must have, mustn't it? She hasn't seen Papa much these days, she tells me. He's mad at her, and she doesn't care at all.

And yet, creeping into my mind some lonely, storm-tossed nights, I can't help thinking; what if it's true? Is it truly a disturbing thought or is it, in some way, equally comforting, for if such things actually are it gives some meaning to practically everyone's usually dull life.

Does each of us have a specific purpose here on Earth? Are some of us teachers to those who need us, and others stormsong runners?