Fat Lightning by Howard Owen Read Free Book Online Page B

Monacan. There’s a basement with a washer and room for a dryer, a garage full of old magazines and bottles that even the Fischer children didn’t want, a front porch and a back porch. The back yard even has a chain-link fence so that Nancy can turn Wade loose for a few minutes while she tries to write.
    Nancy is still thinking of all this as a temporary move, or temporary insanity. When she sits in her family’s comfortable house on Richmond’s North Side or she and Marilou and Candy get away and spend the evening in the Fan’s high-ceilinged restaurants and bars, she thinks that she can’t devote the rest of her life to a town where you have to import green peppercorns.
    She’s read a history of Mosby County that she found while browsing in Monacan’s cramped library, half the size of Sam’s father’s drugstore, only open 10 to 4, Monday through Friday. From reading this book, Nancy’s main impression of Old Monacan, where Lot lives, is that it is prone to have a disaster every 100 years.
    In 1678, it was the Indians massacring the Huguenots, killing dozens and scattering the rest before the militia came back to kill every Indian found in a 10-mile radius.
    In 1773, a flood destroyed most of the town, persuading the settlers to rebuild farther back from the river.
    In 1879, a fire burned up four blocks; it was already losing dominance to the new town on the main road, two miles away.
    Nancy likes the permanent feel of Monacan itself. There are sidewalks old enough to be cracking from maple and willow roots coming up underneath, and the houses in the town’s six residential blocks are all solidly brick and well-shaded, so that she can pretend she’s back in the tamer streets of Richmond if she doesn’t look to the ends of these streets where corn and tobacco back up to side yards.
    Nancy and Sam are watching TV, enjoying the hour or so between the time Wade goes down and they themselves do the same, when the old doorbell gives a muted ring.
    â€œWell, hey, Aunt Aileen,” Nancy hears Sam say, and she knows their short evening break is over. She switches off the TV.
    â€œNow, don’t turn that thing off on my account,” Aileen says. “I can’t stay anyhow.”
    But Nancy does get her to stay. Aileen talks about Grace’s hiatal hernia and Holly’s daughter Zoe, who doesn’t visit enough, and finally works her way around to the business she came for, in the roundabout way Nancy has noticed is a trademark of Sam’s family. Either they just blurt it out, or they dance around it so long you wish they would just blurt it out.
    Finally, she says, “Sam, I think Lot might be losing his mind.”
    â€œWell, how can you tell, Aunt Aileen?” Sam says. Nancy laughs, thinking Sam’s making a joke, then sees that this is an inappropriate response.
    So, Aileen tells them about the barn door, where Lot showed her the image of Jesus.
    â€œHe says it’s there every day, right before sunset,” Aileen says. “I don’t know who’s going to look after him if he loses his mind. I can’t bear the thought of having to lock him up.”
    â€œAw, Aunt Aileen, he’ll be OK. He’s always been excitable,” Sam says. “He’ll outlive us all.” This last is the first part of a family joke of sorts. The unspoken punch line is, “He’ll aggravate the rest of us to death first.”
    â€œThe worst part,” she says, “is that, when I looked at that barn, and looked where he told me to, it was like I could see Jesus on the cross. Do you reckon I’m losing my mind, too?”
    â€œIt’s like clouds,” Nancy says, and from the looks both of them give her, she immediately feels she’s cut in on a private conversation. “You know, you look up at a cloud and you can see just about anything you want to see.”
    She’s embarrassed and then infuriated when not