"JUM" — © 1987 - 1999 by Charles Dobie

JUM : Page 2

After that, Jum cried a lot. Some nights he woke up screaming because he dreamed he was drowning.

We were living in their house then. I mean, when it happened, the storm and everything, we were living in the house Archie and Edna lived in when all their kids died. Dad said he remembered folks saying they were cursed, because how could your kids die like that without you being cursed? He said those who talked the meanest were the ones who called themselves good Christians, and that's why we never went to church.

In three years all their kids were gone; a year after Jake drowned, Mary Ann died of meningitis, and then Archie Junior who was the oldest, was crushed by the tractor on his fourteenth birthday. When that happened, they left everything and moved into town. I guess they just gave up.

So anyway, Mom said Jum and I could do the dishes and stay with the others, and she and Dad would get the canoe and they would be back before we even knew they had gone. Besides, since I was twelve and Jum was eleven, we were too old to need babysitters, weren't we?

So they drove off in the half-ton. They walked out of the house holding hands, and we kids looked at each other and couldn't keep from laughing. They were laughing too, and when they drove away they were hugging and smooching so much that the truck had a two-headed driver. Then they waved and Dad leaned on the horn as they turned onto the Fourth Line and disappeared in a cloud of dust.

We were so excited about having the place to ourselves that we didn't notice the dust was blowing the wrong way, from the land toward the ocean, like it does before a storm. Or maybe it was because it was almost dark. Until the day he died, Dad said that ever since we got the stupid TV we lost touch with nature, that we lost the meaning of the language of the land. So we stood there, me and Jum and Sue, who was carrying Paul (who as usual, was laughing) and we waved, even after the truck was gone in the dust that was blowing the wrong way. Then we went back into the house to do the dishes and watch the stupid TV.

Jum finished his homework in about five minutes and then we turned on the TV, but the reception was bad: there were loud bursts of static and the picture jumped so much we finally turned it off and started to make popcorn.

Suddenly, there was a blinding flash and deafening 'bang!! We ran outside and were shocked to find thick, oily clouds filling the sky as far as we could see in the fading light, churning like dirty work socks in a washer. It was like all the fireworks in the world exploding as lightning stabbed from those ugly clouds into the fields and the trees and the beach and the ocean. Then the wind smashed into us with a solid wall of rain.

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"JUM" — © 1987 - 1999 by Charles Dobie