The Finger of God

Abstract

The Finger of God Melissa Faliveno (bio) You have not come to a mountain that can be touched and that isburning with fire; to darkness, gloom and storm.hebrews 12:18 It was a warm night in early June—the Midwestern kind of warm specific to spring, the air so thick it's hard to breathe, so wet it feels as if you're swimming—when a tornado struck and destroyed a small town just eight miles west of mine. I was a little over a year old. My mother, who was younger than I am now, came into my bedroom as I slept and looked out the window into the darkness of the west. It was the same window out of which I would look for years to come, whenever the clouds began to build—face and fingers pressed to glass, cranking open the pane to get a better look at the sky. But that night, it was my mother who watched. She looked at the clock and waited. It was just after 11 pm. Maybe the wind was howling. Maybe there was thunder. Maybe, more likely, there was only silence—that still, strange calm Midwesterners know so well, the kind that precedes the most violent of storms. And then she saw them: fast, bright sparks of green, a second or two apart, like flash bulbs in the distance against the dark. It would take her a minute to realize what she was seeing: a massive tornado, invisible in the black of night, striking each pole of the power lines that ran along the highway—the road that connected a small doomed town and our own. Soon she would pick me up, press my small body to her chest, and hurry us down to the room beneath the stairs, a tiny crawlspace where we would huddle together—my father and the cat crammed in with us—and wait out the storm. But for a second or two she stood there in the dark, looking out into the night, as a great, unstoppable force tore through a sleeping town, destroying everything in its path. It was June 8, 1984. The town was called Barneveld, and the tornado—the largest in Wisconsin history—was an f5. On the Fujita scale, the f5 is [End Page 172] the largest, rarest, and most powerful tornado. It carries winds of more than two hundred miles per hour and can stretch up to a mile in width. It has the ability to rip entire houses off their foundations, pluck trees and trucks and livestock from the land and toss them to the sky. The f5 is dangerous, unpredictable, and unforgiving. In the bad nineties action movie Twister, which I watched obsessively as a kid, a group of storm chasers—led by the late Bill Paxton and an unhinged Helen Hunt—pause around a dinner table, on a momentary break from their mission in the Kansas stretch of Tornado Alley, when someone asks what an f5 is like. Commotion at the table ceases; conversation comes to a dramatic halt; forks are placed gravely onto plates. One of the elder chasers on the team, a character nicknamed "Preacher," stops as he serves up a steak. He takes a breath and says: It's the finger of God. I grew up in a small, God-fearing town in southern Wisconsin called Mount Horeb. A blue-collar place dealing in livestock feed and John Deere tractors, with a population back then of just over two thousand, Mount Horeb is perched on a high, sloping hill, surrounded on all sides by long, rolling fields of corn and wheat and soy. Five miles to the west are the Blue Mounds, a state park and tourist attraction that keeps the area on the map: a stretch of low, tree-dotted hills—technically monadnocks, or small mountains, a geological anomaly in that part of the country—with caves beneath them, a line of squat blue peaks that as children we were told protected our little town like a castle's defensive wall. From storms and monsters, the spirits that dwelt in the caves; from whatever else might come our way...