Tornado, page 2
As far as I know, Tornado never dug another hole. And every time Five-Thirty came around, he looked the other way.
CHAPTER 6
Buddy
Pete opened the cellar doors. We peered around him, but my mother turned her head away, as if she didn’t want to see.
There was hail lying on the ground and broken limbs and leaves everywhere.
“No real damage,” Pete called to my mother in a cheerful voice.
My mother folded her hands over her heart.
“But I still don’t like the look of that sky,” Pete said. “We better sit tight.”
He closed the door and sat down.
“Do you remember anything else about Tornado?” I prompted.
“I remember one time. This was the saddest day of my life. I hate to tell it.”
“Please,” I said.
Well, my daddy and I went to town in the truck. Tornado was in the back. We hadn’t planned on taking him, but as soon as my daddy lowered the tailgate, he jumped in like he knew what he was doing, so he got to go.
My daddy and I parked the truck on the side of the street and went in the hardware store. Tornado stayed behind in the truck.
We were gone about an hour. When we came back, my dad was loaded down with things, and I was carrying some paper bags filled with different sizes of nails.
As we got closer to the truck, I heard a voice saying, “It’s Buddy! It’s Buddy!” in an excited way. “Mama, Papa, it’s Buddy. Oh, Buddy, Buddy! I never thought I’d see you again. Buddy!”
There was a family standing around the back of our truck, and one of the girls had climbed in. She had thrown her arms around Tornado’s neck. She was the one saying all the Buddys.
I stopped where I was. To save my life, I couldn’t have taken another step. The bags of nails fell from my hands onto the sidewalk. It was as if they nailed me down.
My daddy shifted his packages to rest a hand on my shoulder. He had warned me not to get too fond of the dog. “He’s not yours yet,” he had said over and over again, but both my parents had asked around and nobody knew who he belonged to.
Well I had got fond of him—more than fond. I loved the dog. He was mine. And now some girl was calling him Buddy.
My daddy held my shoulder tighter and said, “What’s going on?” to a short man in suspenders.
“Is this your truck?” the man asked.
“It is.”
“This dog,” the man said, “looks exactly like our dog, Buddy, that got blown away in the August tornado.”
“That’s about when we found him,” my daddy admitted. “He came to us. He was in our yard.”
I had stopped breathing. Everybody had, except the short man in the suspenders.
“My girl carried on something awful when she found that dog was gone. She’s always been real fond of him. Her grandfather gave him to her.”
“My boy’s gotten fond of the dog too,” my daddy said.
There was a long and terrible silence. Then the man in the suspenders said, “Well, maybe I better go get the police or something to settle this.”
“That won’t be necessary,” my daddy said. “You take the dog. He’s rightfully yours.”
They let down the tailgate and took Tornado out of the back of our truck. They loaded him into theirs. Tornado didn’t look real happy, but I couldn’t do a thing to stop what was happening. I was still nailed to the concrete.
My daddy put his packages in the truck and came back and picked up my nails for me.
“Let’s go home, Petey,” he said, using the name he called me when I was little. Then he fell silent. Even my daddy couldn’t find the good in this.
The truck was pulling away from the curb. Tornado was in the back.
I tried to get one last look at my dog, but my eyes were too full of tears.
If my daddy had not helped me into the truck, I’d be standing there to this day.
CHAPTER 7
The End of the Storm
Pete paused to wipe his eyes. That story always made him cry. It made me cry too. I wiped my eyes on my arm and then wiped my arm on my shirt.
“Go on,” I urged.
He took a deep breath to help himself continue.
That day, that miserable Saturday, was the saddest, longest day of my life. I couldn’t eat. I did my chores without knowing I was doing them. I couldn’t play cards after supper. I couldn’t sleep. There was an emptiness about my room that matched the one inside me. The whole house seemed empty—the whole outdoors—the whole world.
I didn’t go around exactly boo-hooing, but my eyes kept filling up with tears. As soon as I’d wipe one flood away, another would come. I felt like it would be that way for the rest of my life.
Sunday passed the same lonely way. Then Monday and Tuesday. On Wednesday, my mother got tired of what she called my moping, and she took me aside to talk some sense into me.
“You knew you might lose the dog,” she said.
I nodded.
“You knew he wasn’t yours.”
I nodded.
“You’ve got to stop moping around. You’re going to make yourself sick.”
I nodded. I felt like I already was.
“Listen. We can get another dog. There are other dogs in the county.”
I shook my head back and forth. “Not for me.”
On Friday I was in the barn, and I heard a thumping sound. It was the sound that Tornado’s tail used to make against the barn door when he wanted to come inside.
My eyes flooded. I couldn’t help it. I knew there was no thumping. It was a sound I wanted to hear so bad, my ears just heard it. There wasn’t any thumping. There couldn’t be.
But the thumping went on, and it really was thumping. It got faster.
I wiped my eyes and I looked, and Tornado was standing in the doorway. My Tornado was standing in the doorway!
“Tornado’s back!” I yelled. “Tornado, good boy, good boy!”
I threw my arms around him. He curved his body the way he did when he was pleased about something, and his tail wagged in my face.
My daddy came to the door. “Tornado’s back!” I told him.
“So I see.”
“We don’t have to take him back to those people, do we?” I tightened my hold on Tornado’s neck.
“Well, I don’t rightly know how we could,” my daddy said. “The man wasn’t polite enough to give us his name.”
“That’s true.”
“And if they find us, well, the dog knows where we are. He can come over for a visit anytime he takes a mind to.”
“Yes, but I want him to stay.”
“I do too,” my daddy said, “but if we have to share him with other folks, we’ll do it. Half a Tornado is better than none.”
And my father and I laughed.
There was a long pause in the cellar. I asked, “Did he stay?” I like a good ending.
“For seven happy years,” Pete said.
“And the people never came and got him?”
“No. Course we didn’t make the mistake of taking him to town again.” Pete stood up, took off his hat, and put it back on his head. He stretched. “I’m going to take another look outside.”
But before he could open the doors, there was a loud knock.
“Hello in there! Anybody home?”
It was my father’s voice.
“Storm’s over!” he cried.
We rushed out through the cellar doors and into the fresh air. My mother hugged my daddy. “Oh, Link, I was worried.”
As soon as my grandmother got up the steps, she hugged him too. Then she gave him a stern look and said, “Lincoln, I hope you had the good sense to get in a ditch.”
“Look at me, Mama, can’t you tell? Don’t anybody else hug me. I’m too muddy to hug.”
My little brother hung back to speak to Pete. “Could Tornado really and truly do a card trick?”
“He could.”
“And did you really and truly have a cat named Five-Thirty?”
“We did.”
My older brother said, “I wish you had told the story about Tornado and the rooster. That’s my favorite.”
“Next time,” Pete promised. Then he winked at me. “If there is one.”
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About the Author and Illustrator
BETSY BYARS is the much-loved author of many books for children, including the Newbery Medal winner THE SUMMER OF THE SWANS; THE PINBALLS; and THE TWO-THOUSAND-POUND GOLDFISH. She lives in South Carolina.
DORON BEN-AMI is an award-winning illustrator whose work has appeared on the covers of numerous young adult and children’s books. He lives in Connecticut.
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Books by Betsy Byars
The Seven Treasure Hunts
The Two-Thousand-Pound Goldfish
Good-bye, Chicken Little
The Pinballs
I Can Read Books®
The Golly Sisters Ride Again
Hooray for the Golly Sisters!
The Golly Sisters Go West
Credits
Cover art © 2004 by Mary Ann Lasher
Cover © 2004 by HarperCollins Publishers Inc.
Copyright
TORNADO. Text copyright © 1996 by Betsy C. Byars. Illustrations copyright © 1996 by Doron Ben-Ami. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Byars, Betsy Cromer.
Tornado / by Betsy Byars ; illustrations by Doron Ben-Ami.
p. cm.
Summary: As they wait out a tornado in their storm cellar, a family listens to their farmhand tells stories about the dog that was blown into his life by another tornado when he was a boy.
ISBN 0-06-026452-7 (lib. bdg.) — ISBN 0-06-442063-9 (pbk.)
EPub Edition © March 2016 ISBN 9780062265388
[1. Dogs — Fiction. 2. Tornadoes — Fiction.] I. Ben-Ami, Doron, ill. II. Title.
PZ7.B9836To 1996 95-41584
[Fic] — dc20 CIP
AC
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First Harper edition, 1997
Revised Harper edition, 2004
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Betsy Byars, Tornado
