Lightning Song by Lewis Nordan Read Free Book Online

Mennonite’s beard, his John Deere cap might have been a black hat with a severe brim. His sisters might have been selling quilts and goat cheese at a roadside stand. He himself—well, Leroy disappeared, for the moment anyway. For this exciting moment it was he himself who sat behind the wooden steering wheel of the amazing little car, Leroy not Harris, in glory, oh yes, oh yes.
    He looked hard at his Uncle Harris, who seemed to have changed again. Now he wore a wide-lapeled canvas driving coat, and on his head a jaunty cap with aviator goggles, and gloves for his hands, and a white silk scarf, which flowed behind him in the breeze. An orchestra played loud hopeful music all around. Dancers with long legs, dancers with top hats and canes, announced Uncle Harris’s entrance onto the scene. Here he is! He has arrived! The llamas in the pasture stood up on their hind legs and pranced. The tractor in the field went “Toot toot!” like a comical train. Funny smoke rings blew out its tall exhaust. Fish rose up out of the farm pond and sang along. Ducks flew over in a chevron and they joined in the song. Jiminy Cricket was there. Uncle Harris had come to rescue them from their dull lives on the llama farm.
    None of this was so, of course, how could it have been, the world did not become a cartoon, but so it seemed to Leroy, so it surely seemed for this moment, and seemed so perhaps to Elsie as well, Leroy’s mother, perhaps to Elsie more than to anyone.
    At least one thing was true. It was Harris, in that car, Leroy’s daddy’s extraordinary brother, and his appearance on the farm was as unexpected as a visitor from another planet. Leroy blinked away the extravagance of his imagination and looked upon the extravagance of Harris’s reality. He was wearing sporty sunglasses, so dark you could not see his eyes. The black pools of his shaded eyes spoke of mystery. His hair was straight and cropped short in the modern way, his facewas golden brown. Leroy’s own sun-blond hair and freckles seemed a loathsome thing. Harris was waving his arm and blasting away on the sassy horn. He brought his car to a crunching halt in the driveway and set the emergency brake. The car rocked forward and then back again it stopped so quickly. Even the crunch of gravel seemed filled with newness and miraculous distances. Harris’s smile was white-toothed as a shark’s. Leroy had never seen such a smile. His own teeth felt too big for his mouth. They felt gray by comparison. There had never been so wonderful a vision as his Uncle Harris, who sat before him like a king.
    Harris did not open his door and step out in the normal way. No one would have expected this banality of him, in any case. Somehow—later it seemed impossible that this should have happened and yet surely it did—Harris vaulted, effortless, from his seat. He left the car as if by extra-human propulsion. He rose from his seat, it seemed to Leroy. He might as well have been ejected from it, with such ease he seemed to become airborne. He launched himself, Leroy might have said—over the doors of his car and through the air. He was not out of control of this leap, he was flying, he was Superman. Solidly he landed with both feet on the ground. He held his arms halfway out, palms up, and said, “Whoa, Mama!” His smile, honestly, was like sunlight.
    Just then Elsie came out the back door to see what all the commotion was about. She had not yet been transformed by her brother-in-law’s presence. She was drying her hands onher apron. She wore no makeup, in her fresh-faced, farmwife way. She blew a strand or two of hair out of her eyes and scratched the tip of her nose with the dry back of her hand. Leroy watched her. He watched the neat little farm, the funny ducks on the pond, the baby llamas in the lot, he imagined the yellow pound cake on the table behind his mother, fresh from its pan, all the details of his life and