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place of protection, too late to turn back.
    It started first as cold rain. Wet crept up from the south, light at first, just misting so I barely could hear it, and then it became rain and began to spit at the side of the tarp. I remember that, how it came at the wagon’s left side where my feet were crammed and curled tight beneath me. I could hear it spitting and then spatting and finally drumming steady on the tarp. Lyda was hiccuping at the back of the wagon. I couldn’t see Mama. The children were still asleep, all of them, even Thomas when I slipped my arm from underneath him and pushed back the flap to see out. No wind then, just the slant of rain from the south, the wind’s absence as strong as its presence, but I did not think. I looked around, as far as I could see, and the land was as flat as a door. I cannot describe to you how that was to me. I had never imagined the earth could be so lifeless, no more rise or fall to it than a coffin lid, and no trees that I could see anywhere around. The sight of it made me breathless and dizzy and a little bit frightened because I did not know what could have flattened the earth so. The air was a strange color, too bright for the overcast, almost greenish, even in that gray spitting rain. The water muddied the frozen ruts and drenched around the side of the tarp and poured against Papa, but his hat was pulled low and he acted like he was not even wet. I could hear Dan panting along by the right front wheel of the wagon. I couldn’t hear Ringo, but I knew him, how he tried to run underneath. Bertha and her calf both were bawling. Delia kicked her head back and down again, trying to shake loose the bit, the mules’ hooves sucked down in the muck and the wheels clogged and spinning, and Papa slapped the reins, hard, harder, silent, never once hyahing them. Papa did not treat his animals so. Never had I seen it. He’d been running them all night in that wind, and now here he was, going on and on and on in cold rain and mud. I could not fathom it, any more than I could fathom how or why he yelled at Little Jim Dee, but I would not ask. My papa was changed so.
    The wind, dead once, I thought, suddenly, even as I watched, got resurrected, and it blew up stronger than an old sinner just born again. Sound came first, the rustling shift and change, and I did not know how the sound sent itself when there were no trees to tell of its coming, but I heard it like water rising in the north, and then came the blue wind swooping down from the north and across us like an army of angels, and it met that southern rain, or else brought its own, I don’t know how it happened, but what happened was this: the cold rain slanting from the left suddenly shifted and slanted the other way, straight out, and became in that moment freezing rain, and we kept going on. There was thunder rolling above us and lightning flickering in the greenish sky and jagged hail falling in pieces big as horseshoe nails and small as the tiny tips of Lyda’s fingers, and the hail thumped the tarp and cracked on the wagonseat and bounced and jumped off, and Papa did not stop. The hail transformed itself round and smooth as musket balls, grew small, became freezing rain again, became sleet, became tiny frozen pellets in gravelly masses covering the earth, and us going on, going on, and air and earth and sky turning sleet again, turning freezing rain, becoming at last all together, all iceform at once pelting down together, jagged and frozen like shattered hell falling, and it went on forever, for hours or days or forever it seemed like, the whole world turning ice and white, the sky white, the earth white, and flat, and there was nowhere to turn for protection. I knew then that this— this —was the place of no turning back forever. This was God’s glory and punishment, and I thought Brother Hoyle lied when he preached it, because this old world is not burning. The end of the world is