The Six Brothers

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I was at home again—Holiday Ranch. All eight of us siblings were there, hanging around in the kitchen. Conversation and everyone in a merry mood, as if it were a holiday.1

Dad was content but not saying much, not a dominant force, not a large personality. I think this may be a new element in my dreams arising from his passing three years ago. But Bill was the same way, and I don’t have a theory about that. I was the dominant male and the dominant personality, and I don’t have a theory about that, either. It was my feeling during this dream that I was the male of the family whose job it was to set a happy tone and to help the family know that things were fine with us, and that life was good for us.

I happened to go outside, and looking east across the yard and over the hills beyond our big lake I saw six tornados spinning. “They’re coming from Labadie,” I said. 2

Labadie, where the big power plant is with its three high smokestacks towering up from the river bottoms. That smoldering castle of power. From that direction came these six tornadoes, six tall dark twisters clustered together, doing their slow hulas around one another. They were magnificent and terrifying. The emotion of seeing them, even in a dream, was one of profound dread.

I was finally fulfilling a lifetime desire to witness a tornado. And fulfilling it sixfold! I’ve dreamed many tornados in my decades, and each one always feels like the first. But I think this really was the first time to dream six of them. And it felt like seeing six tornadoes would feel.

I said to myself in a meaningful whisper, “The six brothers!”

I ran inside and told the others that six twisters were heading our way and to get to the basement quickly, calming them and rushing them at the same time. It was me taking charge, not Dad or Bill or Mom. This itself felt momentous.

I instructed the family to gather the essentials we would need as we sheltered, but to make it super quick. I went looking for my camera. I couldn’t find my good one, and had an icky, unsatisfied feeling about that camera anyway, knowing the lens (as in real life) is smudged internally, that its photos would always be a bitterness. I found my silver pocket camera, a good-enough second choice, and ran back out to the wide driveway in front of our house, where I had a clear view of the six twisters, closer now. But then I couldn’t operate the camera, with its small buttons and tiny labels. The twisters danced closer to the nearby horizon of trees, the east wall of our valley. I was pushing my luck. Almost at once the storm came over the the forest and was now so close I couldn’t see the whirlwinds themselves. The sky was funky and ominous, and leaves and other small bits were flying across the yard.

Dad stepped out onto on the porch as I headed inside. It was the time when he would normally have yelled at me, in real life and in older dreams, for me being foolish. He would have commanded me to get to the basement. But this Dad said nothing. Concern for me had brought him out into the storm, but there was no rebuke, only a silent tension of hoping I would do the wise thing.

“Let’s get downstairs,” I said, and went with Dad to the basement. Some of the family were already there. Others were still gathering supplies. I ran back upstairs to fetch the tall plastic bottles of water I had bought (in reality) when Hurricane Irene was coming to Brooklyn last summer. Hugging them to me and ordering everyone to go ahead of me to the basement, I ran back down the two flights of stairs, hooked left down the utterly familiar hallway to the bedroom of my teenage years. The others had all clustered next door in Bill’s bedroom, organizing the supplies. In a minute or less they would come to my room, from where we would ride out the storm.

My room was nicely and pleasantly furnished and clean and straightened up—lamps and end tables, a nice big chair to sit in, some plants, a good place to shelter. Urbane and comfortable and safe. I was glad that I could offer this place of safety, this lair of my young self, this place my New York self still felt as a manifestation of the true Tom.

1. The original writeup says I thought this to be the first in series of three or more tornado dreams I had from Nov. 2011 to Jan. 2012.

2. From the original writeup: “It wasn’t until I thought about it later, awake, that I realized the direction straight past the big lake must indeed be the direction of Labadie. All my life I’ve thought of our lake as being due east of the house, a straight line to St. Louis (it probably is) with Labadie being more to the south. But I’m thinking now that I may have somehow gotten it right in my dream: that Labadie is along the line between our house and St. Louis.”