The Way of the Wind

by Zoé Anderson Norris

And as for the winds of which Celia complained so bitterly, he loved them. His ears had never been out of the sound of them and they were very gentle winds sometimes, tender and loving with their own child born on the desert. They lulled him. They cradled him. They were sweet as Cyclona's voice singing him to sleep.

In another State, where they failed to blow, it would in all probability have been necessary to entice a cyclone into his neighborhood to induce him to slumber.

Accustomed to the infinite tenderness of his father's care from the first, the boy loved him. Seth determined that if it were possible, this state of affairs should continue. If it were necessary to invent a story to fit the case, he would be as other men, or even better in the eyes of the child, until there came a time when he must learn the truth.

Perhaps the time would never come. If he could by any manner of means keep up the delusion until the Wise Men came out of the East and built the Magic City, he would be a failure no longer. He would be an instantaneous success.

Also, though he fully pardoned Celia for her desertion of himself, he had never quite come to understand or fully forgive her desertion of the boy, her staying away as she had done month after month, year after year, missing all the beauty of his babyhood.

He therefore found it impossible to tell the boy that his mother had heartlessly deserted him, as impossible as to tell him that his father was a failure.

Yet the child, like every other, insisted upon knowing something of his origin. To satisfy him, Seth evolved a story, adding to it from time to time. He told it sitting in the firelight, the boy in his arms.

It was the story of the Flying Peccary.

"Tell me how I came in the cyclone," Charlie would insist, nestling into the comfortable curve of his arm.

"The cyclone brought you paht of the way," corrected Seth, jealous of his theory that cyclones never touched the place of his dugout, the forks of the two rivers, "and the flyin' peccary brought you the rest. You've heard me tell about these little Mexican hawgs, the wildest, woolliest, measliest little hawgs that evah breathed the breath of life and how they ate up the cyclone?"