She walked the rows at first light because that was what you did even when there was nothing left to walk them for.

The soil had gone to powder. It moved when she breathed on it. The sky to the west was the color of an old bruise and coming.

Inside the house the boy slept. The baby slept. Her husband had not come back from town and she had stopped expecting him at a particular hour and then at all.

She knelt and put her hand flat against the earth. It was her father’s gesture and his father’s before that. She did not know what it told you. Only that you did it.

The storm hit at noon.

She got the children into the root cellar and pulled the door and in the darkness held them both against her while the world came apart above. The boy asked nothing. He had learned not to. The baby cried until it didn’t.

Three hours. Or four. Time moved differently in the dark.

When she opened the door the light was a different color than she remembered. Everything redrawn. The barn a new shape. The truck half buried. The rows gone like they had never been.

She stood in it. Let it settle on her. The grit in her teeth. Her eyes. The particular taste of the place she had lived her whole life now in the air around her.

She went inside and woke the boy.

Pack what matters, she said.

He looked at her.

You know what matters.

He did. She had made sure of it.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​