This wind which had kept Prouty indoors for close to a week came out of a cloudless sky, save for a few innocent looking streaks on the western horizon. It had blown away everything that would move. All the loose papers had sailed through the air to an unknown destination—Nebraska, perhaps—while an endless procession of tumble weed had rolled in the same direction from an apparently inexhaustible supply in the west.
Housewives who had watched their pile of tin cans move on to the next lot found their satisfaction short-lived, for as quickly they acquired the rubbish that belonged to their neighbor on the other side. Shingles flew off and chimney bricks, and ends of corrugated iron roofing slapped and banged as though frantic to be loose. Houses shivered on their foundations, and lesser buildings lay on their sides. Clouds of dust obscured the sun at intervals, and the sharp-edged gravel driven before the gale cut like tiny knives.
Any daring chicken that ventured from its coop slid away as if it were on skates. Pitchforks were useless, and those who had horses to feed carried the hay in sacks. The caged inhabitants stood at their windows and made caustic comments upon the legs and general contour of such unfortunates as necessity took out, while those pedestrians who would converse, upon catching sight of each other made a dive for the nearest telephone pole. There, clinging by an arm like a shipwrecked sailor to a mast, they ventured to opine that it must be “getting ready for something.” It seemed as though the earth would soon be denuded of its soil, leaving the rocks exposed like a skeleton stripped of its flesh. Yet, day after day, it blew without respite, and the effect of it upon different temperaments was as varied as that of drink.
No one could seem to remember that the wind had not always blown, or realize that it would sometime stop. No character was strong enough to maintain a perfect equilibrium after three days of it. Logic or philosophy made no more impression upon the mental state than water slipping over a rock. It set the nerves on edge. Irritation, restlessness and discontent were as uncontrollable as great fear. Two wildcats tied together were not more incompatible than husbands and wives, who under normal conditions lived together happily. Doting mothers became shrews; fond fathers, brutes, lambasting their offspring on the smallest pretext; while seven was too conservative an estimate to place upon the devils of which the children who turned the house into Bedlam seemed to be possessed.
Optimists grew green with melancholia, pessimists considered suicide as an escape from the futility of life, neighbors resurrected buried hatchets. Friends found fault with friends. Enemies vowed to kill each other as soon as the wind let up.
If the combination of wind and altitude had this effect upon phlegmatic temperaments, something of Mrs. Toomey’s state may be surmised. With nerves already overwrought this prolonged windstorm put her in a condition in which, as she declared hysterically to her husband, she was “ready to fly.”
Lying on his back on the one-time handsome sofa, where he spent many of his waking hours, Toomey responded, grimly:
“I’m getting so light on that breakfast-food diet that we’ll both fly if I don’t make a ‘touch’ pretty quick. I’m 'most afraid to go out in a high wind without running a little shot in the bottoms of my trousers.”
Mrs. Toomey, who was standing at the dining room table laying a section of a newspaper pattern upon a piece of serge, felt an uncontrollable desire to weep. Furthermore, the conviction seized her that, turn and twist the pattern as she might, she was not going to have material enough unless she pieced.
Her lids turned pink and her eyes filled up.