The Wind

Edward Willett

The wind rose in the night.

Carl Seitz woke to the moaning of the eaves and sleepily reached for the other side of the bed–only to come suddenly awake when all his reaching fingers touched was the smooth, cool flatness of an empty sheet. He’d slept alone for a month, but still, every night, the realization twisted his gut into a painful knot. The window rattled, shuddering in its frame under the onslaught of the wind, as though something outside very much wanted to get in. Jennifer loved to listen to the wind, Carl thought. He could picture her lying beside him, could hear her rich alto. “Listen to it, Carl,” she said. “It sounds so free, so alive…doesn’t it make you want to just pack your bags and follow it, follow it wherever it goes?”

He rolled over and closed his eyes, but the dull ache of grief and the wind’s rising howl would not let him sleep. He sat up and looked at the clock radio for the time, but its bright-red digits had vanished…and hadn’t he left the radio playing?

The power must be out, he thought. He reached for his watch. Its lighted dial told him what he didn’t really want to know: 2:47 a.m. From experience, he knew he wouldn’t get any more sleep that night…and night, in Saskatchewan in mid-December, would stretch on another six interminable hours. The window shook again. Carl pulled the covers over the cold tip of his nose. A deep chill pervaded the room, far more than even the northwest wind sharpening its claws on the outside walls could account for. Had the furnace gone out?

He’d better get up and check. There wasn’t much point in staying in bed anyway. He rolled out of the bed and knelt on the shag carpet, feeling for his clothes. Shivering, he pulled on the blue-and-red sweater Jennifer had knitted him for their first Christmas together, five years ago now. “It will keep you safe from the wind,” she’d said. He fingered the sweater’s herringbone weave. Those had been good days. Too bad they hadn’t lasted.

The power failed often on the isolated old farm, so Carl always kept a flashlight in a drawer in the night-table. He fumbled it out and switched it on, and instantly the wind screamed so loudly he almost dropped the heavy light.

Something moved in the darkness at the edge of his vision. Heart pounding, he jerked the light around, lighting up one of the rose-covered curtains and he’d insisted on over Jennifer’s objections. It shifted slightly as he watched.

Carl frowned. He’d have to check the storm windows, too. But first things first: the furnace. He felt his way cautiously down the creaking stairs to the kitchen, gripping the banister all the way, and paused there in the darkness. The old Formica-topped table and green vinyl chairs he’d refused to let Jennifer replace had belonged to his parents and were the ones he’d grown up with, as was the old round-cornered refrigerator. They were as familiar to him as his own face in the mirror. But lately, whenever he came down here, all he could think of was Jennifer, sitting at the table that last stormy afternoon, her half-finished cup of tea long since gone cold, listening to the crying of the wind. And tonight, without Jennifer, without the friendly green lights of the stove and the microwave, without even the usual faint orange glow from the yard light outside, everything seemed strange, almost threatening. The refrigerator, its constant rattling hum silenced, loomed in the corner, a half-seen, oddly unfriendly presence. Even when he shone the light on it, he could not escape the feeling that something lurked just beyond the innocent white circle of light on the smooth metal door.

“So I’ll clean out the moldy stuff tomorrow,” he muttered. Despite the wind, the air in the kitchen somehow felt as stifling and still as the air in the bedroom had been cold and drafty. His words sounded dull and lifeless to his own ears, and he clamped his mouth shut. Too much imagination, he thought. I’ve always had too much imagination. Mama always said so. Too much imagination.

Especially where Jennifer was concerned. He’d always found it all too easy to imagine what Jennifer might be doing while he was away in Regina . She never wanted to come with him. He’d be sitting in the casino or a bar, surrounded by people laughing and enjoying themselves, but all he could think about was Jennifer, all alone in this old house…until finally he’d begun to think that maybe she wasn’t alone. Maybe she stayed home because she knew she wouldn’t be alone.

And now she was gone, and he was alone.

Maybe a time would come when her leaving would no longer haunt him, but tonight, with the house trembling and creaking in the freezing embrace of the wind she’d loved so much, tonight was not that time.

Especially not when he still had to go down into the basement.

Maybe that was why the kitchen seemed threatening this evening. It wasn’t really the kitchen he dreaded at all, but the basement. As a child, he’d had recurring nightmares about that basement, ever since the day his mother had sent him down to fetch a jar of saskatoon jam. He’d reached up to get it, brushed through a sticky web, and yanked back his hand to find a fat brown spider clinging to it, a spider that had run up his arm, into his hair…he shuddered even now, remembering. Ever since, the basement’s water-stained concrete walls and floor, its musty smells, its root-ends and beetles and cockroaches, had given him the willies.

He and Jennifer had talked about renovating it, making it into a shiny, fully finished basement like new houses had, a basement that could be a cool retreat during the heat of summer and a private guest apartment at Christmas. But all they’d ever done was talk, and nothing had been done by the time their talking turned to arguing, and shortly after that they’d stopped talking at all, and shortly after that…after that, Jennifer was gone, and it was too late. He hadn’t gone down in the basement since that last time they went down…together.

In any event, no one would be visiting Carl for Christmas; his parents were dead, his brothers and sister lived in Toronto and Vancouver and Edmonton and didn’t much like him anyway, and Jennifer’s parents couldn’t bear to look at him, now that she was gone. He knew they blamed him for her disappearance, and maybe it was partly his fault, but it was Jennifer’s fault, too, what had happened. He shook his head. None of this was getting the furnace fixed. He was just delaying the inevitable. He opened the basement door. The wind screamed, the kitchen door rattled on its hinges, and cold air blasted through around his feet. Jeez, I’m going to have to get the back door fixed, too, he thought, and let his annoyance start him down the stairs.

He was halfway down when the basement door slammed shut with a sound like a shotgun blast. Startled, he snapped his head around. His bare foot slipped off the step, the hand holding the flashlight jerked up, the flashlight described a glittering arc, crashed against the cement floor below and went out, and he half-slid, half-tumbled after it. During the fall, which seemed to take both forever and no time at all, he heard a sound like green beans being snapped by Jennifer’s fingers; then he lay on cold concrete in absolute darkness, his ears ringing.

Something warm trickled down his face; he tried to raise his left hand to it, but his arm didn’t want to work; it felt numb and somehow…misshapen.

It’s broken, Carl thought. Of all the stupid…

And I’m bleeding. The thought seemed to come from within a deep fog. Shock, he thought. I’m in shock. I’ve got to get upstairs. Call an ambulance.

He tried to stand, using his good arm to lever himself up, but a wave of nausea slammed him back to the concrete, and turning his head, he retched out the sour remnants of his late-night snack of microwave pizza. His head spun. There was no way he could stand, much less walk…but maybe, just maybe, he could crawl.

He tried getting to his hands and knees, almost fell on his face when his hand slipped in the still-warm slime of his own vomit–which made him retch again, spitting up foul-tasting bile–but finally, coughing and spitting, was able to crawl slowly toward the stairs…

…or where he thought the stairs should be. He should have touched them, or the wall, at once; instead, his reaching fingers felt nothing but the smooth concrete floor. Confused, he crawled on–and then touched something that made him snatch back his fingers.

Not a spider, this time, but something far worse…broken pieces of concrete the size of his fist, and beyond that, cold, damp earth, solid to the touch, earth that had been tamped down hard, as hard as repeated heavy blows from a shovel could make it.

The shock cleared Carl’s head. He knew where he was now, all right: the farthest corner of the basement, right up against the outside wall, not far from the root cellar, a separate room with both a door into the basement and steps leading up to the outside.

Careful not to touch the packed earth again, Carl felt his way along the broken edge of the floor until he came to the wall. Then, reaching up with his right hand, he found an electrical cable, strung through rusted metal hoops in the crumbling concrete. As he pulled himself upright, a breath of cold air against the back of his neck made goosebumps race down his body. Damn, he thought, in inane counterpoint to the growing, throbbing pain in his arm. There’s even a draft down here . The old place is falling apart. Now he felt along the wall for the door to the root cellar–and felt, first, something made of cloth, hung over the electrical cable. For a moment he twisted the cloth in his fingers, uncomprehending–then jerked his hand back, gasping, his heart suddenly pounding, each thumping beat stabbing agony through his arm. Jennifer’s–Jennifer’s cotton dress–even in the dark he recognized the feel, from the last time–God, how could he ever forget the feel of her dress from the last time he’d touched her? But it couldn’t be here, it couldn’t, not when she was gone. Not when she’d been wearing the dress on the night she…he…

The breath of cold air came again, curling around the base of his neck, flowing under his chin, caressing his face like a hand…

…like Jennifer’s hand, the last time she touched him, as she reached up, not to strike him, as he expected, but as if saying a sad, disappointed good-bye to all their hopes, all their dreams, all the happiness they’d once promised to bring to each other.

The wind howled. The cold touch of air somehow seemed to slip inside his clothes, touching him gently, intimately, like a lover, like Jennifer…

…and then he screamed, as the caress suddenly became as cold and sharp as a knife. Pain slashed across his chest like fingernails, and terror followed after, as, in the absolute silence that followed his scream, a moment in which even the wind died away, a voice in the darkness said, clearly and coldly and utterly calm, “Carl.” And the voice…the voice was Jennifer’s.

He screamed again, a wordless howl, and, pain forgotten, scrabbled along the wall for the door to the root cellar. He found it, tugged at it, screamed curses at it when it wouldn’t open, and then when it did, so suddenly he fell, crawled back toward it, sobbing and panting. Inside, he pulled himself up, jars of pickles and preserves crashing heedlessly around him. More of Jennifer’s work, those jars; those times he’d been gone, she’d always said she was making preserves, or knitting, or painting, or singing duets with the wind, but he’d never believed her–how could he believe her? She was too perfect, too beautiful, he knew how men looked at her–the same way he’d looked at her–knew, knew they had to be coming here when he was away, had pictured their hands on her, their lips, their naked bodies entwined with hers in their bed, his and Jennifer’s bed, and he hadn’t been able to stand it any more. He’d had to put a stop to it–had to. And he had. And Jennifer had gone away. Forever.

He stepped forward, and broken glass from one of the jars he’d pulled down stabbed his bare foot. Spilled brine and vinegar seared the wound and brought him to his knees, where more glass ripped through his jeans, cutting to the bone. But he crawled forward anyway on his knees and right hand, moaning and sobbing, because he had to get away, away from that dress, hung impossibly on the wall, away from that tamped-down earth in the corner of the basement, away from that ice-cold touch, away, most of all, from that voice, that voice he’d loved, cherished…and finally decided to make his, and no one else’s, forever.

His lacerated hand found the wooden steps leading up to the outside cellar door at the same moment that the door leading into the basement slammed shut behind him.

The noise brought him back to his feet, his whole body now aflame with agony. He could feel blood running down his calves from his knees, could feel it sticky on his one usable hand, but it didn’t matter. He was almost out of the house, now, almost up the steps and into the clean, cold wind. It called to him, promising to wash away these nightmares of his own making. Hallucinations, that’s all, he told himself as he dizzily mounted the steps. Has to be. Hallucinations. Guilt. That’s all. But I shouldn’t feel guilty. I shouldn’t. I didn’t mean to do it. It was her fault. She should have come with me. She should have stayed with me all the time. That’s what she promised at our wedding, didn’t she? She shouldn’t have stayed here, alone, waiting for her lovers. And then she lied to me. She lied…she never admitted it, not even at the end, not even when I was holding her down, not even when my hands were on her throat, when she reached up and touched my face. Maybe if she’d admitted it, I wouldn’t have…but she was lying to me. I knew she was lying. And I couldn’t stand it. Couldn’t stand to hear that beautiful voice telling me lies…couldn’t stand to know that even our lovemaking was a lie.

So he’d put an end to the lies. He’d put an end to it all. And he shouldn’t feel guilty. He shouldn’t…

He bumped his head on the cellar door. Almost out. Almost safe, in the clean wind…and then he’d leave. He’d sell the farm. Start a new life. Lose himself in the city, far away from this house, and the basement, and the tamped-down patch of earth in the corner. Jennifer wouldn’t follow him to the city. She’d stay behind.

She always had.

The wind died away again outside. He found himself holding his breath, listening. Of course it had all been his imagination, so he wouldn’t hear…

“Stay with me,” Jennifer whispered in the dark. “Don’t leave me alone with the wind, Carl. Stay here with me. Stay…forever.” And this time there could be no mistaking the ice-cold touch of her hand in the dark…

Terror seized his breath in an iron-like grip, holding it in his throat; then released it in a scream that boiled up from his guts and exploded out into the cold air. The wind, suddenly stronger than ever, echoed him. He thrust desperately up at the heavy cellar door with his one good arm. As the door lifted, the wind caught it, flinging it open. Carl plunged upward, frantic to escape–and the wind swirled, seized the door as it bounced from the force of its opening, and threw it closed again. Carl had one brief, horrifying moment to realize what was about to happen, then the iron-bound oak slammed down, fracturing his skull, snapping his neck, and smashing him down into the darkness of the root cellar, where, impaled on the broken glass of Jennifer’s last preserves, his blood mingled with vinegar, brine, and syrup. The wind died. In the kitchen, the refrigerator came to life, rattling and humming as it had for 40 years. Upstairs, red lights glowed on the clock radio, and a voice spoke in the stillness.

“It’s a beautiful winter’s night, folks; cold, clear and not a breath of wind. It’s a night made for lovers, so cuddle close. Maybe you can make it last forever…”