When Lightning Comes

By DUANE KLAUS

Turnball, Texas is a hateful town, haunted by centuries of racial bigotry. In '52 lightning strikes down eight-year-old Willie Adams, leaving behind a painful mass of charred flesh. The electricity scars his pale skin so intensely, he now looks more like his best friend, Louis, the son of a poor black sharecropper. While struggling to survive, Willie finds out his family has been brutally murdered, leaving him alone, hunted.

Willie feels his life is over until the first of many miracles befalls him. Louis's father, Elroy Johnson, reluctantly accepts the deformed orphan into his meager shanty, hiding him amongst his wife and eight children. To survive Willie must embody a totally new existence---learning firsthand what it means to be black in a cruel white man's world. As the years pass a beautiful metamorphosis unfolds. In living amongst those his mother once despised, Willie discovers the indubitable gift of family and transcendental unconditional love.

At seventeen, Willie uncovers a supernatural gift given him by the lightning's fury so many years ago. On a gridiron, under a torrid sky, lightning returns, empowering Willie to stop evil from destroying everything he loves. Although Willie Adams might be fictional, the themes he represents are timeless and powerful. Readers will cheer on this triumphant, reluctant hero and the ideals he represents

• Language: English
• Publisher: DUANE KLAUS
• Release date: Feb 20, 2021
• ISBN: 9781393021872

DUANE KLAUS

Duane Klaus has been writing for over thirty years. The Life Or Death of Otto Krause is also available for digital download.  

Book preview

WHEN LIGHTNING COMES

A novel

by Duane Klaus

95,000 words

This is a work of fiction . Names, characters, businesses, places, events, locales, and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

Turnball, Texas

1952

Chapter 1

Willie Adams

GRANDMA ONCE TOLD ME lightning never strikes in the same place twice. Three years would pass before God, in all his painful wisdom, would debunk that piece of worthless knowledge. Why did He choose that day? I had no idea, but I was about to find out. For once, more lightning had set its sights on our family.

As I hurried up Cottonwood Road, anxious to get where I needed to be, the air around me felt as though it were alive. Towering gray-black thunderheads boiled in the western sky like some primordial stew endeavoring to spew life onto the despondent world below. Everyone knew Cottonwood Road was cursed, the people who lived on it damned, but unfortunately, the miserable souls who toiled amidst its dirt-laden banks had been given no other choice of where to plant their roots. In Turnball, Texas, poverty and skin color decided where a man lived, where he worked, who he married, and how he died. My family, the Adams family, were a dirt-poor white family, whereas the Johnson’s were black——a large family descended from a long list of grim tribulations. Both families walked that same damned road, worked the same sullied fields, each trying their best to survive in a place where death relentlessly seethed around them, like the vapid dust storms that came every summer.

About a half mile down from our rickety shanty, I left Cottonwood Road, walked across an inhospitable front yard, and hopped onto the half-rotten gray porch of the Johnson’s shanty. I knocked twice on the screen door before a shadow appeared, occupying the screen’s minuscule holes in the rusted metal. The door, barely holding onto its hinges, opened with a growling screech. My best friend’s mama, Mrs. Lettie, filled the entire width of the doorway. She was dressed in a faded yellow smock. Her hair was a coarse and tangled mess, looking like a used Brillo pad ready for the trash.

Anticipating my question, she said, Louis is sick in bed with the devil’s fever, Willie. He can’t come out today.

Seeing the disappointment in my face, her voice softened. I’ll tell him you came by.

Okay. Thanks, Mrs. Lettie, I said.

The sound of a baby crying pulled her away, leaving me to take in the overwhelming stench of hog shit disseminated on the back of a brisk west wind. I moved around the side of the shanty and forced myself to calm, the anxiety and fear bubbling inside me bidding to end my life right there.

I had to speak to Louis. It didn’t matter how sick he was. The piece of yellowed paper concealed in the front pocket of my dirty overalls felt like a hot iron next to my skin. The words scribbled on the scruffy parchment frightened me. All this insanity was well beyond my smarts, the smarts of a whitetrash eight-year-old kid who was about as worldly as a ground squirrel. Somehow, deep inside me, I knew those words could be as deadly as a loaded gun or as promising as an angel’s miracle. I just didn’t know which. But Louis would know. He knew everything. That was one of the reasons he was, and would always be, my best friend. Back then that kind of thing didn’t happen—a white and black boy being friends. But Louis and I didn’t care. We just were and that was that.

Pushing one foot in front of the other, I made my way around the side of the shanty to the only window looking into a paltry room where all eight of the Johnson children slept. I peaked in the glassless window to see ragged blankets spread across a floor filled with more holes than a block of swiss cheese. On one of the blankets lay Louis, his eyes closed, a line of sweat wetting his brow and neck as if he’d just stepped out of the cast-iron tub he took a bath in every Saturday.

Louis, I whispered. He didn’t move and for a moment I thought he might have died from that awful fever.

Louis. Wake up. It’s Willie.

Two tiny slits appeared where his eyes once lived, the white in them now an angry red.

Willie. What are you doing here?

I found it, Louis. I found the paper. The one we heard our Daddies talking about the other night when they been drinkin’. I could see his mind spinning, trying to clear the fog ushered in by the merciless virus.

What does it say, Willie? Louis asked as he pulled himself up slowly.

Not here, Louis. We need to go somewhere private.

Nobody is gonna care. Not here.

They will, Louis, because it’s about your family, too. That seemed to sober him up so that his eyes brightened slightly, making it look like someone poured a little life back in him.

The cottonwood. Meet me at the cottonwood, Louis. I’ll tell you everything.

Louis shook his head. Mama won’t let me out of the house, Willie.

Sneak out, Louis! It’s important! People are gonna die. Our famililes. Please? I need your help.

He tried to stand but his wobbly legs dropped him to the floor as if he’d been shot. Hands grasping his throbbing head, he mumbled, Okay, Willie. I’ll meet you there in an hour.

Okay. But hurry. I’m scared, Louis. Really scared.

Louis, one year older and much bigger and stronger, always protected me. Always had and always would. It was as if we were flesh and blood, kinfolk; but that couldn’t be possible. Especially in Turnball.

Don’t worry, Willie. You know I’ve always got you back, don’t you?

Yeah, I know it. That’s why I’m here. Thanks Louis.

Just hearing Louis’s voice say those words took my heartbeat down a notch. Taking in a deep breath, I sighed, liberating some of the fear growing in me. Disappearing from the window, I proceeded to walk past the foul-smelling outhouse, finding the worn path that led to the never-ending rows of young cotton plants unfolding into infinity. Picking up my pace, I began to run in a zigzag pattern, as if playing hopscotch, dodging the low-lying baby plants just beginning to bud. The dark, fine-grained soil crept through the multitude of holes in my ragtag shoes to caress my toes as I crossed the south field before turning due west. In front of me, I watched a long row of tall, dark thunderheads building in the distance, but I didn’t give their appearance much credence. Clouds often came and went this time of year, like waves rising and falling, not doing much of anything except making noise and watering the lifeline of Turnball County—-King Cotton.

Ten minutes later, I crossed a small creek, today just a trickle, to find the cottonwood tree, sprouting from the field like a misplaced omen—-the only tree in that entire boundless sea of black soil and white cotton.

My name is Willie—Willie Adams. All my childhood, we lived a stone’s throw down Cottonwood Road from the Johnson family. Daddy rented our shanty and the land he worked from the big man in the county, Mr. J.B. Stillwater. My daddy, Raymond Adams, worked as a sharecropper, tending to the fields, trying to keep food on our table and Mama less-miserable than she already was. It was a hard life that left little room for petty things such as fathering, kindness, or love. Those things belonged to rich people—-rich people and those folks God showed up to help.

Over the course of our childhoods, mostly with bare feet, Louis and I fashioned this trail I now trudged down. The cottonwood became our playscape as young boys; two restless kids growing up in a place where boredom was as ubiquitous as air.

Upon reaching the old tree, I hurriedly kicked off my shoes and reached as high as I could to grasp the lowest branch. Putting one hand over the other, limb by limb, I pushed ever closer to the sky until I found myself high in the tree’s upper branches—-the place where Louis and I built a treehouse out of an assortment of unwanted rotten lumber laid across three of the tree’s largest branches. Countless times we sat there looking out over the only world we had ever known, listening as a generous summer breeze carried on its back the melodic voices of the cotton pickers working for miles around us. Cotton pickers loved to sing. The time-honored melodies took their troubled minds off their aching backs, sunburned skin, and blistered fingers, the uplifting words lifting their souls above the pain of this savage earth.

I found the piece of paper last night, stuffed in a bag someone had placed deep down a ragged hole behind the outhouse. If I hadn’t have been half-asleep, wandering outside to do my business, not a bit of moonlight to light my way, I’d never have found it. A misplaced foot fell into the pit sending me falling to the hard, cold ground, my face inches away from being crushed by a good-sized white rock. When I reached down to pull my naked foot clear of the hole, I felt the cloth bag rub against my skin, its texture as peculiar as finding a large diamond, its surface hard and sharp, resting in the pocket of my tattered jeans. Upon returning to my room, I lit a thin candle and read the mysterious note under the flickering gold light. After reading the document, I could no more sleep than fly to the moon. So I stayed awake, waiting for that lazy sun to peak over the horizon.

From the treehouse, I waited anxiously, staring out at the fields, waiting for Louis’s head to breach the horizon. As more time slipped by, I began to worry. Where was he? Exhausted from a lack of sleep, I lay back on the knotty wood and closed my eyes. Sometime later, I wasn’t sure how long, a loud crack startled me awake. My eyes sprang open and for a moment I couldn’t remember where I was.

Holy shit! I fell asleep! What time is it? As I sat up the fog slowly receded from my mind and my eyes grew clearer. Something, an inner calling, pulled my attention east. The menacing clouds, previously confined to the west, had pushed clear across the field, the eastern horizon now angry and black. Out of the heavens, a flash of intense light illuminated the entire sky, blinding me for a moment, a thousand twinkling stars igniting the corners of my eyes. A frightening roar of thunder chased the lightning from left to right, and for a moment I thought it might knock me right off the treehouse. I was awake now. Wide awake.

Lightning! I need to get down before I end up like Grandpa. Remembering the sight of grandpa’s scarred body lying in that open pine casket sent a terrifying chill up my spine. My heart beat wildly as the black sky opened up, hurling balls of hard ice onto the treehouse and me, the balls stinging as they ricocheted like bullets off my body.

Quickly, I scrambled off the boards and onto the trunk, scurrying down the tree like a frightened squirrel. Getting down seemed to take forever, every step arduous, thunder and hurried flashes of light emboldening me to move faster. As I dropped from the last branch, I hit the ground, lost my footing, and rolled like a loose marble down the hill of black mud. The hasty descent down the rough bark carved deep cuts into my hands and legs. The rain rinsed the blood free from the open wounds, mixing it with the dirt to create a black and red slurry of soil and boy. Dark sheets of cold rainwater made it difficult for me to see a foot ahead of me, the incessant thunder and lightning surrounding me like an approaching army. The storm had rolled in on the tails of an approaching cold front, the temperature plummeting twenty degrees in less than fifteen minutes. Struggling to get my wet shoes on, I felt panic overcome me. The sky held onto an eerie, yellow glow, a reflection of billions of swirling molecules in a torrid atmosphere of electric peril. Years ago, Grandpa taught me about this kind of sky—a tornado sky, he called it. A dead man’s sky.

Willie boy, if you see that kind of sky, find a low spot in the ground and stay there. Keep your head down. Don’t move, no matter what happens. Everything in you will want to get up and run, but don’t do it. Stay down until it passes.

His words sounded silly at the time, and they sounded even sillier now. With a possible tornado and lightning bearing down on me, lying still in a ditch didn’t sound like a good idea. He was right. I wanted to run like hell!

My eyes combed the area, searching for the lowest spot in the field—in case I needed it. That’s when it came. Out of that wicked black sky came a horrible sound. I’ll never forget that noise for the rest of my pitiful life. It was the sound of an approaching train. A colossal locomotive speeding forward unabated. But sadly, it wasn’t a train. I knew it the minute I heard it. My head instinctively turned towards the noise to see the atmospheric monster spinning like a mad top wildly out of control. From the east, the tornado tore its way through the cotton field as it headed toward town. Frozen in place, I watched as it devoured trees, a tractor, and a tool shed, taking them into its grasp like a child playing with his toys.

The tornado appeared to reach all the way to heaven, randomly touching the ground, here then there, picking up whatever stood in its path. It grabbed a plow then a tree, sending them into elliptical orbits like planets spinning around the sun. Running east, I dropped into the muddy ditch next to the cottonwood and I waited—-just like Grandpa told me. My cold, wet clothes hung heavily on me as the sky opened up with an onslaught of cold hail, this time larger, more painful. Placing my hands over my head, I tried to protect my eyes from the ice pellets that felt like bee stings every time they connected. With all of nature raining down on me, I laid there praying to Jesus, Moses, and anyone else who might listen. The roar in the distance grew ever louder and deeper. The powerful train was getting closer. My mind raced as I tried to think my way out of this horrible mess. Grandpa said to stay in the ditch. Not only to avoid the tornado, but the lightning as well. But the lightning won’t strike here, right? I’m exactly where Grandpa lost his life to the electrical monster less than a year ago, and Grandma told me it was a scientific fact that lighting never strikes the same place twice. I’ll be safe here.

The sky was so black I thought night had come. Lightning illuminated the cottonwood’s branches in quick successions, like those of a camera strobe, while under me the ground shook as if a huge giant was running frantically across the field. Daring to lift my head, I saw it, the tornado, now within reach. Up close it looked unworldly, massive, its unbounded circular motion a raging machine intent on death and destruction. The wind whirled about me, and I felt myself momentarily being lifted off the ground, out of the ditch, levitated like a volunteer on stage, my body submitting to the will of a magician’s hands. From my pocket, I pulled out the piece of tightly-folded paper, placed it in the palm of my hand, and held onto it as firmly as humanly possible. Where was Louis? I needed to show him. He needed to know.

Then it hit me. Maybe Grandpa didn’t know what he was talking about. I’m going to be sucked into this tornado, meet Grandpa in heaven, and he’s gonna say, Why’d you take weather advice from a man who was killed by lightning!

Time was up. I couldn’t stay in the ditch one moment longer. I had to go somewhere, anywhere but here. The last thing I thought about before everything changed was the deadly piece of paper I held in my hand; a piece of paper that held the key to so many lives.

For the remainder of my existence, my life would forever be defined by before and after rising out of that muddy ditch. I stood, and in that instant, that microsecond of ineffectual time, white lightning shot from the sky and connected, its limitless power igniting my flesh into a fiery mass of burnt organic matter. The raging fire started at the top of my head and shot clear to my feet—a snake of electricity crawling down my body, leaving a blazing trail of burnt destruction. Before losing consciousness, I gazed up to the cottonwood looming over me, its spidery arms blowing wildly in the violent wind. With the tornado whirling about me, I whispered my last words, Oh God, help me. Don’t let me die. I don’t want to die. Not here. Not like Grandpa. In my hand, I felt a strange texture upon my skin. That’s when I realized the lightning had turned the important piece of paper into a pile of useless ashes. Oh my God. It’s gone. I need to tell someone. I need to tell Louis. Those were my last words before all hope faded and everything went black—unearthly black.

Motionless, I lay in the ditch where Grandpa had ordered me to stay, oblivious to the menagerie of ice pellets bouncing playfully off my inanimate body.

Chapter 2

Willie Adams

GRANDPA ADAMS ONCE told me, Every boy needs a road to to race down, to throw rocks across, to skip to school on. Cottonwood Road is your road, Willie boy.

At first glance, Cottonwood Road looked like any other haggard country thoroughfare composed of dirt, rocks and too many potholes to count, as it meandered along the gentle curves of the emerald-green Saline River just south of Turnball, Texas. Broken-down shanties, our shanty included, fought to stay erect, up and down both sides of that damned road. The shanties, intermittent piles of weathered lumber and rusted tin, sought to break up the monotonous landscape of black cotton fields, short grass, and thorny mesquite trees. We were white, but most of the folks on Cottonwood Road were black. In those days discrimination, much like hunger and poverty, was a way of life in Turnball County. But it seemed Cottonwood Road didn’t care what color you were. The only qualification for living south of Turnball was to be dirt-poor or desperate—or, as it was for my family, both.

Daddy was a soft-spoken, simpleminded man. God made him average in just about every way a man could be measured—height, weight, looks, but unfortunately, not intelligence. No, as far as smarts went, Daddy must have stepped out of line to go to the outhouse the moment God decided to hand out brains. Daddy sported such an indistinct face most people couldn’t recall him five minutes after they’d met him. Mama always cut his hair into a crewcut, his tawny colored hair looking like tiny spikes sticking out of his bumpy scalp.

Mama spent most of her days making my daddy’s life totally miserable. I often heard her say, You are a worthless excuse for a man, Raymond Adams! I should have listened to Mama and not married your sorry ass. Do you hear me?

Daddy heard her; we all heard her. If there really was a man in the moon he would have heard her, too. Daddy did all he could to make her happy, but it was never enough. Deep down, I think he realized he could never make her happy, so to blow off steam, he retreated to the Johnsons’ house a short stroll down Cottonwood Road. Whenever I could, I straggled after him, Mama’s roaring voice trailing behind us.

Just keep walking and don’t look back, he’d tell me as we tiptoed away from the shanty towards freedom and some desperately needed peace and quiet. We kept walking until Mama’s angry voice disappeared into the distance like a train’s whistle heading south.

Mama grew up much better than she had it living with us on Cottonwood Road. Years back, she met Daddy at the Fourth of July picnic in Turnball, my sister Mary promptly falling into this world nine months later. They had what Daddy called a shotgun wedding. I never exactly knew what that meant until I found out it was Mama’s daddy holding the gun, an unfortunate but compulsory instrument needed to assure the quick joining of my mama and daddy into holy matrimony. Knowing she had a part in all this repulsive misery floating around her made her even more bitter. She couldn’t just blame Daddy. But she still did.

Daddy, on the other hand, approached life much differently. Despite persistent bad luck when it came to everything from his station in life to Mama’s tantrums, he tried to make the best of every situation. I loved my daddy, and I think he loved me, too. He never actually said it, but I sensed he did by the way he purposely slipped tiny slices of peculiar fascinations into my everyday life.

My older brother and sister, Randy and Mary, didn’t have much to do with me. They lived in that important world of teenagers, spending most of their energy trying to do the impossible—-fit in at the white high school. It wasn’t an easy thing to do. Being known as white trash, we lived in a precarious gray zone somewhere between normal white folks and the poor black ones. The white school went for six months and the black school for four. Most of the white kids I knew were jealous of the black kids, for who in their right mind wanted two more months of school? When I wasn’t at school, I was working in the cotton field alongside all the other poor kids in the county, black and white.

Most kids my age didn’t like working the cotton field. It was hard, endless work for very little pay. But I had never been and would never be like everyone else. I was strange, different. I heard some adults call me an odd duck, whatever that was, behind my back. For some reason, I felt more comfortable working alongside the black kids in the cotton field than at white school sitting in a too-small-for-me desk, trying to learn Math and English.

Our landlord, J.B. Stillwater, owned almost all of Milam County—-including the town of Turnball, the county seat, making Mr. Stillwater the richest and most powerful man any of us had ever known. His large white mansion sat perched on top of the only hill in the county, looking like a castle out of one of the storybooks at school. A stark white wooden fence, freshly painted every year whether it needed it or not, circled Stillwater Ranch, and the fields inside that fence were so green it was rumored that each year he hired a whole mess of black folks to paint the land with giant buckets of bright-green paint.

Compared to Mr. Stillwater’s house, our shanty looked like a decaying outhouse and smelled like it too. The town of Turnball wasn’t much better. A row of exhausted red-brick buildings stood like a group of disheveled homeless on each side of Main Street, Texas Highway 85. All the stores in Turnball were found Main Street: the grocer, the dry goods store, the hardware store, the saloon. Over the last century, cotton money and black sweat stacked each and every one of those blood-red bricks. Halfway up Main Street, the courthouse, made of pink Texas marble, occupied the center of the town square, an extension of land off Main Street littered with several large oak trees, benches, and the courthouse. The concrete benches dispersed around the green lawn gave folks a place to rest while lady justice looked down from above. Turnball consisted of Main Street, where everyone did business, South Town and glorious White Town, with its manicured streets and tall stately mansions.  South Town, some knew it as Colored Town, held the black school, black diner, and the black Baptist church within its boundaries, boundaries set by a pair of rusted railroad tracks cutting a racial divide through a town still proud of its antebellum roots.

Elroy Johnson, Louis’s daddy, and my daddy were both sharecroppers. They worked side by side in the dusty heat of central Texas: planting, growing, harvesting cotton. Despite all the hatred swirling around them, those two did something very unusual for the time. They became friends. One night, when Daddy was drunk-as-a-skunk on dewberry moonshine, he told me Mr. Johnson was his best friend.

It shocked me. "A colored man is your best friend, Daddy?"

That’s right, he said proudly. Don’t you go telling your mama because she’ll get her knickers all up in a knot. That’ll do nothin’ but bring misery down on the both of us.

That’s the last thing I wanted, so I kept his secret deep inside of me, in a tiny drawer inside my heart. They kept their friendship to themselves, not telling a soul for fear of the trouble that would surely follow. In the 1850s South, black and white men were like oil and water; they didn’t mix. Despite Daddy’s and Mr. Johnson’s efforts, some town folks found out about their unorthodox friendship. That got Mama thrown out of her women’s Bible study faster than you could say, Holy Moses! For a month after that, Mama ran around the shanty like a tornado destroying everything in her path.

Mama worried every minute of every day about what people thought about her and her family. Even though she lived church-mouse-poor in a dirty, rundown shanty, she walked through town with her head held high as if she was the duchess of Turnball.

Thank God for the Johnson family. They were the best thing about living on Cottonwood Road. They had a large family. Mrs. Lettie Johnson (we all called her Mrs. Lettie) birthed kids like a dog birthed puppies. Two of her children died before they could ever lay down one root in this earth; that left the Johnsons with an even eight. Out of the eight, Louis and I were the closest in age. When we weren’t working in the fields, he and I spent most of our spare time together. Thick as thieves we were.

During harvest time we worked from what Daddy called can’t see, to can’t see, meaning we worked from before sunrise to after sunset. The rest of the time I spent with Louis. Mama called my friendship with Louis downright unnatural. Daddy didn’t mind one bit. I knew he would understand, and he did. He said we were like chocolate and milk—we mixed well together just like he and Mr. Johnson. Our favorite place to play was high up in the cottonwood camouflaged from the rest of the world by its feathery green branches flowing around us. We played all kinds of make-believe: army, cowboys and Indians, pirate ship. High in the cottonwood, we never had to worry about anyone seeing us together. Unlike church people, the cottonwood didn’t care about the color of our skin. It took us both in just the same, black, white, it didn’t care. It liked having us there, playing, laughing, enjoying its decades of life and growth.

The old tree was not just a playscape for kids. It had a darker side. Over many years, it became a favorite place for the Klan to perform its evil deeds. I know it made the tree sad to see so many die