Anna Martin goes wild in this kind of weather. It’s inspiring, painting, writing, walking-in-the-corn weather. It’s contemplative weather. When Anna Martin feels creative like this, she gets the urge to dig. And it makes no difference whether or not she finds anything. It’s the looking she loves. Loving to look.
Right now, Anna, twelve years old, is swimming through the corn. She’s easy to spot; she has short, thick hair all shades of metallic. Platinum, bronze, gold, copper. Titanium. Her thin, strong arms are pulling at the young walls of corn, lined up like boy scouts, and she’s using them to propel herself along the row. She thrashes with the opinion that, when there’s so much of something, what’s it going to hurt? She’s wearing a pink t-shirt with a darker bow sewn on the centre of the thickly hemmed neckline. Frazier bought it for her at the K-Mart in Barrie. It’s filthy and smells like adolescent sweat, rides up her back under a pair of denim overalls as she runs. She’s got a metal detector slung over one shoulder, and a gardening shovel in the deep left pocket bangs her leg with every step because she’s hop-running, skip-popping, so inspired and overjoyed by the cold, steel sky. The colour has an infinite depth to it, like things made with cobalt-blue glass. And the electricity is tangible; she’s practically breathing it. If her hair were long enough, it would stand on end. She can feel the charge because it’s going right through her, and she can see it; everything looks a little bit yellow. And the world hums slightly, like the needle dancing on the blank inner circle of a record album. The evening sun is behind her and the corn in front of her is brilliantly lit up in the fore of the blood-violet sky. In the distance, to the northeast, mountainous clouds are pop pop popcorning high up on top of each other, look as if they’re going to topple. Distant slashes of lightening have already cut through the air or lit up some of the clouds from within, separating molecules apart. Then the thunder, deep in the belly, as the molecules slam back together. She loves this! Feels like she can do anything, and the buds of new ideas are sprouting in her head, then disappearing like fireflies as brighter possibilities come up. Build a damn on the creek… take Mabel for a trot… turn on the metal detector! She feels hungry.
Frazier promised they would eat Kraft Dinner tonight, with Oscar Meyer wieners cut into pellets and stirred into the cheese. Anna approaches what she is certain to be the middle of the field and worries that Frazier will forget the KD. She turns on the detector and swings its round head a few centimetres above the ground. To the left and right, she walks slowly, head down listening to its slooping static. A little more to the north, a little more to the east, and the eratic sounds become uniform, slide into a steady beep. She drops the detector without turning it off and it fizzes again, ass in the air. On her knees, she digs straight down about a foot until she hits the gold-coloured tin top of a mason jar. Berries painted on it, dinged from previous excavations. Anna reaches her arm down so she’s in to the elbow, worms her fingers around the jar and coaxes it out of the hole. She opens the lid and smells the money inside. Jars are worth even more this year because Frazier raised her weekly allowance to four dollars. It’s getting full and soon she’ll move it to the safer location, under the porch where two other jars are buried, crammed with dirty one- and two-dollar bills. She’ll start yet another bank under the red caboose, and when she thinks she’s saved enough for a car, she’ll dig through the night, burrowing into the ground at various spots around the farm. Today though, she takes money out rather than put it in because there’s a book she wants to buy.
The jar goes back beneath the earth and Anna promises never to take money out again – she’s heard that one before. She thrashes back to the house, swinging her excavation tools, to demand her dinner.
Sometimes Frazier forgets. If quick, robust memory were a packet of sugary orange crystals, Frazier’s memory would be a glass of insubstantial juice. He’s smoked most of it away with a clay pipe and marijuana he grows himself, in tall stalks reminiscent of the jungle he dodged fighting a war in.
Frazier is a man who often finds himself in a room without knowing what it was that brought him there.
Anna’s movements outside are some of the only. The Aspen leaves, upturned to sip the coming rain, are patient. Hooves beat in the barn but the air, still warm, has siezed. Anna smashes through the flimsy screened door of Frazier’s trailer into the humid waft of Kraft Dinner and hotdogs, leaves the shovel and metal detector lying out on the little wooden porch. Inside, Frazier dominates this space and is bare-chested, wearing droopy jogging pants – looks like he’s tackling the window, studying the sky.
“What day is it today Frazier?” she challenges.
“I think it’s the bloody hottest day of the year. Why don’t you ask Mark?”
“Mark’s gone to town.”
“It’s Monday.”
“Monday the what?”
“Monday the thirtieTH,” he says, sticking his tongue out at her.
“Thirtieth of what?”
“June.”
She manoeuvres herself in the small space behind him, puts her arms around his corpulent belly and squeezes, lifts him a few inches off the floor.
“Anna!”
“I’m hungry!”
“I’m cooking!”
“Cook faster!”
“These are is the only days off we get for the month, child. You’re lucky I’m cooking.”
“Ketchup please,” she says a few minutes later, one arm stretched across the table, fingers extended, the other arm working at shoveling the food into her heart-shaped mouth.
“So I hear you’re through with Hitler,” Frazier says.
“Ya, well, I finished reading Adolph and started on a new one, and thought it was becoming redundant.”
“Redundant eh?” he says, smiles at his food.
“It’s time to move on.”
“And?”
Anna goes back to her food, takes a slug of milk. Burps.
“And whom have you moved onto Anna?”
“Pol Pot. Cambodia.”
“He was a pretty bad dude eh?”

“You already know?” Anna asks, and not for the first time, disappointed.
“Believe it or not, I know a few things about this and a few things about that. It’s all banked in here somewhere,” he says, tapping his temple, “chillin’ out in different corners, waiting for me to dig it up.”
“Must be pretty deep.”
“Can you imagine though Anna, one guy wiping out so much?” Frazier asks. “Just totalling everything.”
“Happens every day Frazier,” she says, like she’s taking the weight of it on her
own bony shoulders. They take a few bites, listen to the thunder. The pasta squeaks in their mouths.
“Anna,” he says, “he’s coming tomorrow and you haven’t said anything. Are you going to take a shower? Maybe put on a dress?”
“I don’t have a dress. You haven’t passed the ketchup yet.”
He hands her the ketchup and she spins it over 180º, holds it vertically over her bowl and waits.
“You must have a dress. You’re my sweetest little girl.”
“I don’t. He’s not going to give a shit if I wear a dress or not. He doesn’t give a shit.”
“Interesting usage of the word shit. Try to elaborate.” Frazier squints his left eye, and puckers and unpuckers his lips. “He’s your dad. He gives a shit. He just has an interesting way of presenting the shit he has to give.”
Anna slams the ketchup bottle on the table. “I put too much.” She yawns, feigns boredom.
“Haven’t you got anything girly to wear?”
“Look outside. Look how dark it is.”
Frazier spins around to look out the window and Mark kicks the door open, waddles in. He’s got large paper-bag parcels in his stubby arms, and all that’s visible of his head is the top mound of curly, black hair. Mark is a dwarf. He has remarkably big hands, even by a large man’s standards. His dwarfed legs and arms are stubbed onto an almost regular-sized torso and his neck is also the width and breadth of most men’s, with an exceptional, sharp Adam’s Apple.
Once, Anna asked Mark about this particular part of the body – the Adam’s Apple. She had wondered if this anatomical labelling stemmed from the Fall from Grace. The proverbial apple. Was it now so-called, she said, to signify a piece of apple lodged in the throat forever, as a reminder, perhaps a punishment, for the consuming of one apple which caused a deepening of the male voice; a product of puberty; a loss of innocence? Or what?
Mark, stumbling over the profundity of his beloved Anna, wasn’t sure how to respond. “I think ‘adam’ is just a generic name to refer to all men,” he said. “And ‘apple’, because it’s a lump, like an apple.”
They had been repairing the fence – digging old posts out, putting new ones in – around the pony-walk track where toddlers are put on the backs of the farm’s four, aged Shetlands, and led around a 100-metre dirt track.
“You make a lousy clown Mark,” she had said that same day.
“I’m no clown.”
Mark came to the farm about the same time Anna did, answering an ad Frazier posted calling for a clown. Because of his achondroplasia, Mark thought he could fake it.
But Frazier is no fool. He and his little brother went to the Arthur Ambrosia Circus every year it came to Orange County, and when he watched Mark perform loose, sideways somersaults on the grass, blow up a few measly balloons and act out a series of histrionic mimes that could have been mistaken for an epileptic attack, he called the bluff. But in Mark’s solid arms, Anna had stopped crying for the first time in three days, and he stayed.
Now, Mark unloads his parcels onto the table as the rain begins to drop in bullets, pelting the metal roof of the trailer.
Anna kneels on the padded bench that lines the trailer wall under the long window. Sticks her nose to the glass and murmurs.
“Millerville and Tottenham’ve got hail stones,” says Mark. “Anna, I got your chocolate wagon wheels.”
“Are all the animals in the barn?” Frazier asks.
“Yes… ‘cept maybe a coupla chickens, squak squak squaking around.”
“They’ll be under the caboose then,” says Mark, reaches into his bags and starts taking cans out, a box of cereal, a bag of sugar.
“Thanks for the wagon wheels Mark.”
“You’re all right darling.”
Anna starts bouncing on the bench, considers running outside. She watches the muddy rivulets already running in the dirt from the top of the small rise where the trailer sits, down to the grassy area where they sell buttery corn on the cob and Mark does his pathetic clown act. The lightning is on top of them now, dousing the farm in silver blue light, and the first balls of hail bounce off the dirt.
“Crap,” says Mark with a frozen chicken in his arms. “Stand up to her, you corn.”

Anna is running through the hail into the cornfield. Her bare arms over her head offer little protection but she wants to see if the corn gets flattened. Screw her stupid father, coming out here and disrupting the peace. He’s done it before – plenty. Clandestine, he comes crawling out of the jungle like a dissident with a sack of grandiose ideas: I’ll be getting my own house Anna, in Florida, and when it’s ready you can come live with me. We’ll go to Disneyland and see movies every weekend. Shop for pretty clothes in the biggest malls you ever saw. You’ll see Anna, I promise I’ll make it good for us. She doesn’t have the patience for changing rooms.
The corn is taking a beating. Anna gets to it in time to see the young stalks give way to hails stones the size of cherries. What seems to bounce off her, leaving only red marks, lands heavily on the bright green husks until they lose the turgidity to recover. The corn is a major attraction at Mabel’s Farm – so named after Frazier’s mother – where families come to scratch the horses’ velvet noses, ride the hay wagon, throw seed to the chickens and slop to the pigs. They lap up ice-cream and eat peaches-n’-cream corn on the cob that boils in an iron cauldron. They watch Mark’s pathetic clown act and shop in the caboose behind Frazier’s trailer, where they buy the wooden toys that Frazier makes. Airplanes, trucks, dolls, puzzles, trains, whistles, yo-yo’s, spinning tops, building blocks. Things like that. Frazier was taught how to carve wood by a fellow Vietnam War draft dodger, in a half-way house in Toronto. He lived there, on Madison Avenue, for nine months in 1971 after leaving Mabel and his younger brother in Florida. In 1972 Anna was born and in 1973 dropped off with her uncle Frazier, after her mother died of cardio myopathy and her father lost his nerve.
The lightning chases Anna to the barn, where she now sits with Mabel the horse. Mabel is 10 years old, coloured like a chocolate chip cookie, very docile and remarkably clever. Anna sits cross-legged on the dirt floor, drapes her arms over the middle slab of the wooden gate to the horse’s pen, and talks to her, feels her warm breath on her face. The hail turns back to rain, and the barn keeps it out.
“Corn is nearly broken,” she tells Mabel, and thinks, lightning rhymes with frightening.

At the centre of the homestead is the farm house, built by the original land owners in the 30’s: six bedrooms, four bathrooms, a dirt basement, an attic, stain glass windows in the dining room and on the landing, a sunroom off the kitchen, and a good Ontario porch. Deep, and wrapped around two sides of the house, with an antique rocking chair from Huntsville and two benches that Frazier made. The twelve farm cats hang out on the porch, follow the shafts of sun as they slide along it each day through the spider plants that hang in rough wicker baskets off the wooden awning. The plants are swinging now with the wind blasting through from the northwest. CBC Toronto has put out a severe storm warning for Southern Ontario. Mark’s standing on the inside of the screen door, his forehead pressed against the white wood that divides the top half of the door from the bottom, and takes in the metallic smell of the rain. He considers rescuing Anna’s bicycle, which lays on its side underneath the grandfather oak at the front of the house, but decides that maybe its better to let rust teach a lesson.
The wind has shifted a little and rain wets him through the screen, wets the hardwood beneath his bare feet. The sky is a beautiful black and the CBC announces that hail further north of here has already ruined hundreds of kilometres worth of crops. Basements are flooding but the severe storm warning has now been lifted. Winds that blew at sixty and seventy kilometres an hour are now dying, blowing the storm south over lake Ontario. Toronto has been hit but not nearly as heavily. Bad, but not apocalyptic. There will be community forums in Barrie and Millerville to organize aid for those who have lost their crops.
Anna comes into the house through the back door. “Your apple trees are okay, ” she tells him, soaking the kitchen floor with run-off. Mark hands her a dish towel. “It’s because they’re sturdy like you,” she says.
A few years back, Frazier bought ten adolescent apple trees from the nursery in Barrie. He planted them along the path that leads from the house to the barn, and secured their branches to stakes in the ground so that the branches grew horizontally, low to the ground. This way, the trees never got too tall that Mark couldn’t pick apples easily. They are beautiful Macs – the sort that spray white foam on their shiny red skin when incisors pierce in.
“The corn’s not okay,” she says, wags her wet head like a dog.
“No surprise there. I wish you hadn’t gone out there.”
“What are we going to do?”
“We’re going to wait until tomorrow and start cleaning up.”
“After what’s-his-face comes.”
“Maybe the ol’ ass will help us.”
“Ya, right.”

The clouds were majestic yesterday; they’re domineering today. Indiscernible and coloured vomit green around the base like mushy peas. In the hot morning she walks to the creek, west along the periphery of the cornfield, the edge closest to the house. She can see from here Mark clambering over the hay wagon like a monkey, checking it over for tomorrow’s visitors after the clobbering of the previous night. Life will go on beyond what’s-his-face. The creek is to the north of the corn, and runs through a small, tree-filled ravine. It rained again overnight and now everything drips. Her feet squish in the soft path, mud squeezes between her toes like toothpaste. Mosquitoes and black flies zip around her head and spin off in their own vortexes. A mosquito lands on her arm and deftly slides its probiscus into her skin as she watches. She stretches the skin underneath the bug so it can’t pull out, though it tries with all the strength in its wiry legs, and watches its abdomen balloon into a tiny ruby. She lets go of her skin and then the mosquito disengages and floats drunkenly to the ground. “That’s what you get, diggin’ for my blood.”
The air is sticky, and every leaf and needle and blade of grass leaves its water on her. The electric smell is still here, like the storm is going to forget something on its journey home and turn around quickly, cursing, to come back and pick up whatever it was.
All the life in the ravine has perked up – stands tall, wet and copious. The creek is pumping, making a racket over pebbles, rocks and sticks. Could be impossible to damn. She begins by finding a natural bottleneck in the creek, where a small boulder creates a drop-off. She collects rocks and other debris and starts building it up around the boulder, interlacing the sticks the in the same way she’s observed from beaver damns. But every time she lays a stick down, the one before it gets carried away. She finds a clay deposit in the creek bed and digs at it with her fingers in claws, digs until she hits a layer of pebbles and starts slinging clay over the remaining sticks. But the water passes the bottleneck and turns milky as is carries the clay away and after twenty minutes, Anna, sweating in the heat, gives up. She’ll throw rocks instead, and sticks. There are a good number of sticks and branches on the ground, ripped from their trees and thrown there by the storm – ends white, ripped flesh.
Anna has no romantic misconceptions of reuniting with him. She plans to direct this meeting; to make it formal, brief and benign. She pictures a car driving northwards on Highway 427 from Toronto, driver strumming radio tunes on the steering wheel. She pictures an old hatchback, floor decorated possibly with Country Style coffee cups and McDonald’s bags. The cigarette tray a graveyard of dull orange headstones.
She thinks of Suharto bringing wrath to Indonesia, forcing people out of their homes. Hitler to Germany.

At 1 p.m., Anna’s father is less than fifteen minutes from the gate to the farm, and the CBC issues another severe storm warning. The breeze has picked up to a solid warm wind, pushing the tall grass into waves. The scene outside looks as if it’s been shot through a green filter, distorting every colour as the sky slowly rolls into black. Hail comes down twice as hard as the day before, and then turns to rain. The rain gets so heavy he decides to pull over. Once at the side of the road, the rain stops completely. His ears pop. There’s nothing for twenty seconds and he’s about to go again, then the pocket passes and it’s pouring once more. Like being in a car wash.

Mark and Frazier are in the house when the rain starts, when just after 1p.m. the peculiar green world turns to night. Lightning slaps the dark like a symbol to the thunder’s drum. They’re deciding if only one of them or both should look for Anna. The rain has come right through the back door and soaked the kitchen floor and table, but the men are reluctant to close the heavy wooden door, which catches on its frame, while Anna is still outside.
She’s back in the barn though, latched again onto the side of Mabel’s pen. She’s got her eye to a fist-sized hole in the wood, where a knot has rotted out. It’s a good view from here and she can make out the white outline of the house. Knows they’ll be worried but she’s too afraid to run the hundred metres. The animals are going crazy – stomping hooves, biting wood, tossing heads. Illustrating what’s happened to the atmosphere. Her ears pop and the animals’ racket sounds different, as if it’s projected through a tube. She can see the corn too; the patches that were standing this morning are now bending to horizontal, then whipping back in the other direction. She has a strange moment of calm, thinks to herself how fantastic it would be if she could develop some method of manipulating a corn crop into a weather instrument.
The lightning is visceral and the whole barn shudders and shifts; the wind outside has practically blown the rain away. Somewhere behind her one of the twelve cats cries like its being skinned alive. It hurts too much to keep her eye to the hole and she’s about to look away, to go and wrap herself in a blanket and wait until the lightning stops. But there’s a tornado swinging through the sky, blacker than the sky, to the north of the ravine. Her first impression is that its motion is uncannily similar to that of the wooden spinning tops that Frazier makes. It sort of dances to the left and to the right; the bottom of the funnel choosing the direction, dragging the rest of the wind with it. Though she can see it, she can’t yet hear it, or at least can’t discern the sound of it from the wind that is already beating the walls of the barn.
She wishes she was in the red-brick walls of the house.
Feels like the second little pig.
So this is what it’s like to be at the mercy of an indiscriminate, destructive force. It can come in with its grandiose ideas and flippantly decide who will live and who will die. It can disrupt things irreversibly. The tornado is still far enough away to go in any direction. It’s left her scope and then swings back into it, closer now. Amazed and immobilized, she watches the tornado until it comes so close she cannot see where it begins or ends. There are things flying in it. A television, bits of trees, thousands of pieces of wood, paper and bricks. A piece of highway sign. A chicken. A shred of roof. Water. Mud. She sees all these things in one second and then curls into a ball. Something is ripping. Debris violently pelts the side of the barn and a wooden spoon flies past her head. This is like one day after school under a train trestle, screaming the word fuck with a couple other kids in order to be heard over passing trains. She’s screaming but the wind blocks the sound even from her own head. Her mouth and eyes are full of dirt and dust. Everything shakes and she’s held to the floor by a heavy slate of pressure, like a centrifuge, like being pinned to a spinning ride at the fair, but she’s not moving anywhere and it’s difficult to breathe. And then it lifts. The wind abates slightly and she can hear herself crying. The cats wail together but out of tune and sync, and Mabel stomps and shudders. Everything is caked in mud. Anna looks up to see the exact shape of a wooden spoon as a hole in the barn wall, about three metres above her head. Light comes through the hole. The barn whistles. She goes back into a ball and stays that way for minutes, then wobbles up, like a newborn calf, and goes to the door and unlatches it, walks it open.
It’s drizzling and the sky is sober grey. The cornfield is like grid paper and the house is half a house. Roof gone. Looks like an unfinished jigsaw puzzle. She hears a car horn coming from the direction of the cornfield; it’s low and painful. She heads towards the house, steps over a baby carriage, walks past a toaster. By the pony walk fence – still standing – there’s a twisted cluster of metal. Anna gets closer and sees that it’s someone’s screen door, not from her house. Mark’s apple trees are also still standing. The big oak in front of the house has been stripped a few of its smaller limbs, and now looks hunched. The bicycle is gone. Mud is everywhere and has actually embedded itself in the brick walls of the house. The car horn in the cornfield stops. Then starts again but this time someone is pushing and releasing it. Anna looks through the window because the back door is blocked by roof. She can’t see Mark or Frazier but she can see that everything has been completely ransacked. Nothing fits where it should. The long kitchen table is upsidedown and propped against the wall, and a half-finished glass of orange juice, Anna’s from this morning, sits upright in the middle of the floor, still half filled with orange juice. She calls their names. The car horn becomes more insistent, and she hopes whoever is pushing it is someone who can help her to dig through the house.

What she notices now, on the way back out to the middle of the cornfield, is the calm. It’s like the tornado wrapped all the nasty weather around itself like candy floss. The person in the car is getting angry now; the beeps are longer and more urgent. It’s a red compact, pretty much intact except that the windows are gone. She can see him hunched over the wheel, sees his shoulders move every time the horn goes.
She calls out that she’s coming.
He turns and looks at her, his face and neck are covered in slashes and blood flows over his left ear. She walks up to the driverside window and sees that the inside of the car sparkles beautifully in the dull light, an ocean of thousands of nuggets of broken glass.
“It’s you,” he says. “The windows blew in.”
“Why did you drive to the middle of my cornfield? Are you okay?”
“This is your place?” He sits up and looks over towards the barn. “I can’t believe this. That thing… fucking. It carried me here.”
“What? Are you okay? Can’t you get out? Holy shit!”
“I don’t want to get out.”
“You have to help me find Mark and Frazier.”
“You got bigger.”
“You have to get out of the car.”
“This can’t be real. You’re too big.”
“I’m going to open the door and you have to get out,” Anna says, and struggles with the door handle. Her father slams his hand down on the lock. So she pushes him, and he looks at her with horror.
“Get out of the car!” she screams in his ear. “Get out of the car! Get out of the car! You have to help me! We have to dig them out of the house!”
He looks at her and shakes his head, and his eyes glaze over because he’s looking through her. “You couldn’t have grown this big,” he says.