Canning Season
written by: Zary Fekete
Oklahoma, 1950
The tornado took the Bell family on a Wednesday.
The storm whipped on through the night. By Thursday morning, there was no house. The slab was bare with some splinters here and there, and one cellar door twisted off its hinges. The trees ringing the yard were crippled, half-naked. A muddy quilt was crushed beneath a roof beam. The rest of the roof was gone. Jonah Bell walked along the edge of the wreckage, one hand in his pocket, the other dragging a bent shovel.
He buried the bodies on Friday.
He had no caskets. Only what he could salvage from the broken chicken coop and the old fence. The graves sat at the low end of the garden where the green beans and sunflowers grew. His wife, Liza. His four children…Jude, Ruthie, Caleb, and the baby girl. All lay under a stretch of hard Oklahoma clay.
He wore his good shirt to the burial. Didn’t say anything. He nailed the lids down, one by one, with a rusty hammer. No crying. There wasn’t time for it.
The neighbors started arriving on Saturday.
They brought casseroles and chicken salad. Sister Hall brought an apple pie, still warm from the oven. She handed it to him and looked down. The sort of thing you do when words can’t reach far enough.
“The Lord chastens those He loves,” she said, soft and cautious.
Jonah took the pie and nodded. He turned back up toward the slab and set the pie down under an awning he had made from the wadded quilt, now dry and dusty under the bright sun.
On Sunday morning, he went to church.
He shaved and wore the same shirt he had worn to the burial. Sat in his usual seat, fourth pew on the left. When the choir sang, “Power in the Blood,” Jonah sang it too. Some of the parishioners looked at him out of the corners of their eyes like he was a rare bird on display. Pastor Reeves opened the Bible and talked about questions for God and the trials of faith…Jonah stared up at the rafters and didn’t blink.
After the service, most went home, but Jonah stayed and helped repaint the fellowship hall. Nobody asked him to. He just picked up a brush and started covering over the faded yellow with a shade of green called “Early Fern.”
Sister Hall brought him lemonade and set it down without comment.
In the evening, he stood in what used to be the storm cellar. The empty slab behind him was an eerie white in the purple twilight.
The cellar doors were gone, but the stairs were there. Bracken and leaves blanketed the cellar floor. He’d walk halfway down, where the smell of earth still lived, and he’d scream. Just once. Loud enough to shake dust from the joists that weren’t there anymore. Then he climbed back up and go to bed on the cot under the old quilt.
It became a kind of liturgy. Raking leaves and debris at dawn. Painting in the afternoon. Screaming at dusk.
The insurance man came on Monday.
Showed up in a Studebaker with an out-of-state plate and a fine-grained clipboard. He took pictures with his portable camera and made several notes. When he was finished, he clicked his tongue.
“No coverage,” he said. “Act of God.”
Jonah stood in the shade of a blasted elm. “Isn’t everything?”
The man didn’t answer. He looked around a bit more and then asked Jonah if there was any place in town he could grab a bite. “Got ten more claims I need to get to.”
Before he left, the man said, “Sometimes it isn’t justice. It’s just gravity.”
Jonah didn’t move. Just stared at the man’s shiny shoes until they disappeared behind the Studebaker’s footwell.
Jonah watched him drive off in a cloud of dust. That evening, he stood again in the cellar. But rather than screaming, he prayed.
Nothing fancy. Fragments more than sentences. Afterward, he lay beneath the quilt and looked up at the black sky. He fell asleep waiting for answers.
Tuesday, the only thing that gave him comfort were the peaches.
The tornado had stripped the trees of everything, including their fruit, and the ground around Jonah’s yard was covered with the peaches’ bruised bodies, yellow and orange and shades of spoiling brown.
Jonah picked them in silence, dropping them into an old pail. He boiled the jars in the rusted kettle behind the shed. Set them on a broken piece of the table that had once held Christmas dinners.
He filled each jar slowly. Sugar, water, slices of fruit. No cinnamon. No nutmeg. Just the raw flavor. How he felt.
After the second week, the neighbors didn’t come back. They figured he needed time. Or maybe they knew they had nothing more to give him.
At nights, he still stood in the cellar. Spoke into the dark earth. Not for answers. Just so the dirt would remember their names.
On the third Sunday, Sister Hall came back. She didn’t bring a pie this time. Just stood at the edge of the yard in a raincoat, even though the sky was clear. She called his name once…soft, like it wasn’t meant to carry. Jonah looked up from the canning table, hands sticky with peach syrup.
She stepped forward, one foot, then stopped. “We’re all still praying,” she said. He nodded, slowly.
“Alright then,” she added, her voice a little too bright. She turned and walked back toward the truck, her boots leaving shallow prints in the clay. He watched until she was gone. Then he turned back to the jars. The last one hissed as the seal took hold.
When the peaches were gone, the jars lined up along the shelf, labeled with the names of his wife and children. Amber, glinting in the low light of the flickering lamp. Each one sealed tight against rot, against forgetting.
He looked from the jars to the sky. Patiently. Firmly.
Then he sat in the dark beside the jars. The wind had quieted for now. But if it came again, he’d be ready. He’d already buried what needed burying.
And his time in the cellar had taught him that prayers could be soft and sweet…
…or raw like a storm.
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