The Marvelous Weather Machine

It's funny, I mean when you think about it, how we take it for granted that the universe, with all its myriad convolutions and interlocking complexities, is somehow comprehensible. I've read a little of Feynman, and Einstein, and others like that, and while I won't pretend I understood it all, it sometimes seems as if everything we learned in science class was wrong, and that what we call natural law is little more than an artificial grid laid down over the chaos of a wild universe. Sometimes it even seems that cause and effect, when you get right down to them, are little more than a matter of faith.

I'll give you an example. When I was a child we (Mom, Dad, and my two brothers) lived on the outskirts of town, about halfway up a hill in a house that was too old and too small for a family of our size. It was what we had, though, and frankly we were fortunate to have that. It was a company town in those days: Dad worked at the factory like most everyone, and Mom waited tables and rang up groceries and basically took whatever little jobs she could to help us through.

And somehow, it was enough. We never did have much, really—I think we may have been the last people in town to finally break down and get a television—but what we had was ours, and it wasn't until I grew up and got out into the world that I realized how close to the bone we had been all those years.

I suppose I must have been about eight or so when it happened. I don't remember the exact way it came about, but somehow or other we had gotten on to discussing the weather, and how it worked. My teacher had quoted to the class what Mark Twain said—that everybody talks about the weather but nobody does anything about it—and I wanted to know why. Dad said he wasn't for sure, but he bet one day we'd figure it out. “Why, it's just like A/C, isn't it? We can make it hotter or colder inside, so it can't be that difficult. Just a question of making it work outside as well!” He laughed, and ruffled my hair, told me to go outside and play.

I forgot about it shortly thereafter, but something must've caught Dad's fancy about it, because a few days later he called me into the living room. There, sitting on an old Kit Carson TV tray was a block of wood, probably a scrap from the factory, about ten inches long and half as many high. It had been painted gray, and on it were three black dials, each with a gauge fastened carefully above it. If you turned a dial, the gauge above it would go up or down. Below each dial, printed on red tape with an old label maker, were the controls:

TEMPATURE

SUNNY – RAINY

SNOW

Along the top was painted, in Dad's careful block print, “WEATHER MACHINE”.

He grinned, watching me as I picked it up and looked it over. “You didn't know your daddy was an inventor, did ya?” He called me over, sat me on his knee. “Now what you do is, you use this first dial to control the temperature. See, the more it goes this way, the hotter it gets. And this one, the more you turn it, the more rain we get. Be careful with that one!” He chuckled, and went on. “And of course the last one is for snow. The more you want, the further you turn it. 'Course, that one only works in the winter.”

Now, bear in mind, I was only eight—or about eight, anyway—so my grasp of meteorology wasn't much to speak of, but of course I knew full well it was a joke. Still, it was just about the neatest looking thing I'd seen in a while, and it wound up being mounted on the wall in the living room, taking pride of place just to the side of the family photos and underneath the cedar Moccasin Prayer plaque. From time to time we'd adjust it, if the weather wasn't to our liking; I remember dad boosting me up, holding me level so I could turn the dials myself.

The funny thing was, it actually seemed (at least to my young mind, anyway) to work. Summers were warm and sunny, the rain came when we needed it, but never too much. There was always just the right amount of snow. We'd laugh when we talked about it, of course, but we never took it down, and we always made sure to set it right. Sometimes in the winter I'd sneak down and push a chair up against the wall, so I could climb up and turn the snow to maximum, hoping the schools would close. And sometimes, they would.

I was eleven when things started to go bad. The factory decided they could do better for themselves elsewhere, so they wound up moving the entire works to some place where the local language didn't have a word for “union”. That put a whole chunk of the town out of work at once, and the city fathers went mad scrambling to find someone new to come in. Dad, who up to that point had spent every day of his working life fastening the same five rivet points over and over, found himself on the street with the others, with nowhere to go and nobody hiring. He did his best to cope, of course. But there'd never been that many jobs to begin with, and with the glut of laid-off factory workers, you were lucky if you could get anything.

In the end, I think, it just got to be too much for him. Weeks of searching for work became months, and still nothing showed up. It seemed like the whole town was slowly grinding to a halt, and taking us with it. Dad began to drink, just a little in the evenings at first, then during the daytime too. Eventually, it got to the point where it seemed like he just gave up: he'd been turned down everywhere; there was nowhere else to go. He would spend his days in the bar with his old factory friends, trying to drink the world away.

Fortunately, Mom still had her jobs, and between that and the unemployment relief we managed to keep a roof over our heads, but sometimes it was close, very close. Things started to get bad between Mom and Dad. She was angry at him for his drinking and for not finding work. He was frustrated and resentful, and when he'd come home there'd be fireworks. Me and the others would stay upstairs when this happened, but we could still hear them. Dad started bringing alcohol home with him. He'd sit in his chair in the living room, drinking and staring at nothing.

About this time we started giving him a wide berth—it was a bad idea to disturb him. Once my brother Rick—the eldest of us—got into an argument with him and, in the heat of the moment, called him a drunk. Dad hauled back and sent him sprawling across the room. I remember watching in terror as Dad, standing over him, told him if he ever “smarted off” like that again then so help him he would make sure he wished he'd never been born. After that, we kept our distance.

Things went from bad to worse. The fighting continued, to the point where it seemed that was all they did anymore. Dad would drink himself sullen, and mom would lock herself in the bedroom so we couldn't see her crying. The final straw came about a year later, when the spring rains were coming in. I remember that day: angry clouds, hanging dark and low. The rain had come the night before, and had kept up a steady stream ever since. Mom and Dad had been shouting at each other all day. I don't remember the things they said, but, as we cowered in our room upstairs, it seemed like a dam was about to burst. They'd had plenty of fights of course, but this time was different. They were saying things they hadn't said before, things they must have had bottled up, or had been saving. Outside, the thunder punctuated the hurled imprecations down below. By the time Mom came up and called us for dinner, we were mute with terror.

We managed to sit down at the table and start the meal without incident, and indeed for a few minutes it looked as if we might have an uneventful meal. But then Dad muttered something under his breath, and Mom snapped something back, and next thing we knew they were shouting at each other across the table. He stormed into the living room, and she followed after. We boys lingered in the doorway, watching as Dad fumbled a bottle of whisky open and bolted it down. Mother screamed at him, tried to wrestle the bottle away. He drew back his hand, brought it fast against her, sending her flying back against the wall. There was a sickening crack when her skull hit the SUNNY - RAINY dial, and when she slumped down, I saw that there was blood on it.

And that's when the storm hit.

There is no way to describe the cacophony of hell that came when the lightening struck. I remember the noise, the lights going out, the house shaking. Someone grabbed my arm, and I was outside. The house was folding in on itself, the flames where the lightening had come quickly being doused by the rain which now fell in blinding sheets around us. As we watched—me, Mom, and my brothers—our home gave up the ghost, and crumbled into a wreck, lifeless.

#####

Things changed a lot after that. We wound up living with our grandparents for a while, while Mom got her life back together. We moved to a new town, made new friends, started over. Mom got a good job in an office, and though it was hard minding all three of us by herself, she never married or even dated a man, that I ever knew of. We didn't take much from the old life with us: when we went back to clean the place out, most everything had been ruined. Still, I managed to pick up a few things. One of them was the Weather Machine, which I found on what was left of the floor. The rain had long since washed the blood away, but the board was cracked and split, and the rain dial wouldn't turn. I don't know why, but I took it with me anyway.

If you asked me why I've kept it all of these years, I'm not sure I could tell you. Perhaps it's just sentimental value, or perhaps it's because it's a tangible reminder of the man my father used to be, something made with his own hands, just to amuse his family. Maybe it's something else altogether; I couldn't say. All I know is, as I write this, the old Weather Machine is sitting on my bookshelf, among the other mementos and souvenirs of a lifetime, still there. Sometimes I'll pick it up and look it over, maybe tweak one of the dials this way or that, but it doesn't seem to work any more.

In the end, I know it was all a childhood fancy. These days, I'm a responsible adult who knows better than scrap parts nailed to a bit of wood. But there is a part of me that was, and will always be, amazed by the Marvelous Weather Machine.