Ruth, The Sun is Shining

"There is no such thing as heat lightning," Bobby Norton told his wife. "The illuminations of a hot summer evening, flashing and flashing again, with no following sound, are actually made by lightning strokes in electrical storms so far away that the thunder dies in the air long before it can reach the ear of the observer. While a lightning stroke is destroying something somewhere, it is flickering, you see, like the aurora, somewhere else. A thunderstorm over Washington can cause 'heat lightning' to appear in rainless skies in Connecticut. A thunderstorm over central Florida can produce 'heat lightning' that brings a second of daylight to a ship in darkness two hundred miles at sea."

Bobby Norton never required much of an occasion for one of these lectures. If he had the information, it would eventually come out; and he was full of information. He was, this time, at the helm of a 12-foot dinghy, powered by a small outboard motor, moving north across Lake Howard, in Winter Haven. Over the south shore of the lake, the sky was compounded with thunderheads, supported on brilliant stilts of lightning. His wife, Ruth, sitting in the bow of the boat, was worried. Bobby waited for her to ask him a question, something to show that, despite her fears, she was absorbing what he was saying. She said nothing. He paused in his discourse. Talking over the sound of the engine caused considerable strain in his throat. She kept her eyes on the storm. The thunderheads had not yet cut off the sun. In the sunlight, only Ruth would be afraid. Other boats were moving on the water in apparent unconcern.

• • •

Earlier in the day, Ruth's fear had been the sun itself. They had rented the dinghy at the far end of a chain of lakes. Going from one lake to another in the glaring light, she had begun to worry about the possible effects of too much sun and had become so preoccupied that he--annoyed, angered, impatient to get on with the boat trip, although it had no planned destination--had stopped at a marina so that she could buy a bonnet. "Why didn't you bring a hat with you?" he had asked.

"I didn't think there would be so much sun."

"What did you think?"

Her voice took on some anger of its own. She said, "I didn't think there would be so much sun."

Ruth, not hurrying, chose a straw bonnet patterned in white and orange checks, filigreed with strands of metallic thread. When she had returned to the dinghy, Bobby pulled explosively at the cord of the outboard engine and it started the first time. He shoved the throttle all the way over and they moved briskly away from the marina. Bobby had an eagle nose and eyes; and he watched everything, left and right, with an alertness that went beyond the demands of travel in a small outboard. Bobby had something of a flush in his face and was out of condition, but he did not look his age. He was 40. It pleased him that he was still called Bobby. He kept his hair shaggy. He never wore a hat; and he hoped that he would be called Bobby all his life. In the bow, Ruth seemed a little more at ease, under the wide brim of the bonnet, sitting with her arms around her knees. She sat with her legs toward the stern, toward Bobby; but, for some time after leaving the marina, she kept her eyes on the passing shore line.

Most of Winter Haven's lakes were edged with lawns, attractive houses and ornamental citrus trees bright with fruit. Emerging into Lake Eloise, the eighth lake in the chain, Bobby was impressed with its peripheral stands of cypress. The big trees seemed to wade out into the water on their thousand-legged roots. The shore line was hidden among them. They readily formed, in Bobby's imagination, an athlete's broken field, an irresistible network of dark channels. He swung the bow of the dinghy toward the shore, picked a likely opening and churned between two trunks into the cool labyrinth between the outer trees and the obscure beginnings of dry land. "Bobby, where do you think you're going? Bobby!" He swung the bow too far, missing one tree, and glanced off another. "Bobby! You're going to wreck the boat."

He found a clearer route among the trees and the dinghy moved on. They sped past the big trunks, sliding over outreaching roots. This was a series of challenges and crises, and Bobby faced each successive one with increased sureness. As the boat shoved past one giant cypress, the propeller guard struck a submerged root, the engine tilted forward and the propeller, coming out of the water, screamed in the air. "Bobby," Ruth shouted, "I am going to take the next train home."

He shouted back, "Cypresses were derived from pines during the Mesozoic era." The propeller bit into the water again. He looked at Ruth. She was clutching a gunwale. "Cypresses were sacred to Pluto. If a cypress is cut down, its stump will not put forth new stump sprouts, and the cypress is therefore a symbol of the dead." He turned suddenly, almost at a right angle, and headed toward a slot between two great trees, beyond which was open lake. He was heading for pay dirt now, shaking off the secondary. The boat picked up speed and the hump of white water behind it increased. "Cypress knees breathe," said Bobby. The boat started to go between the two trees. The propeller hit another root and bounced up out of the water again, raging.

"Bobby!" Ruth screamed. The propeller dropped back into the water, but the boat, as it moved out of the shade of the cypresses and into the sunlight, was drifting and had no power. The engine was still going. Bobby looked over the stern. The propeller was not moving.

"Something must have knocked it into neutral," he said to Ruth. The boat was drifting farther out from the trees. He shut the engine off. "I don't know what's the matter with it," he said.

"You hit a root--that is what is the matter with it," said Ruth. "Why do you take chances only when you know you can't really get hurt?"

Bobby picked up an oar, angled its blade, slapped the surface of the lake and sent a sheet of water in her direction. It missed her and fell back into the lake. He lifted the oar, as if to try again, but this time he waved the oar at a man and a woman in a cabin cruiser that had rounded a point and was moving toward them. The couple waved back. Bobby kept swinging the oar back and forth over his head. The other boat slowed down and turned toward them, drifting to a stop beside them.

"Something wrong?" asked the man who was operating the cabin cruiser.

"The engine goes, but the propeller doesn't," said Bobby. "Do you know how these things work? This isn't my boat."

"Let me have a look at it," said the other man, who was wearing bathing trunks and had an emphatic tan. Leaning far over the rail of his boat, he reached down and inspected Bobby's outboard motor. In a moment, he straightened up. "You've broken your shear pin," he told Bobby. "I think I probably have something here that will at least hold for the rest of the day." He tossed a seat cushion to the deck of his boat, lifted a lid and began to hunt around in his tool chest. He found what he was looking for and, with a wrench in one hand, again cantilevered himself toward Bobby's motor.

"My name is Norton. I'm glad you came along."

"Mine is Johansen," said the other man. "I'm the photographer at Cypress Gardens. My wife here was Miss Florida at Atlantic City two years ago. Can you believe it?"

"Oh, Joey," Mrs. Johansen said complainingly. She was going to have a baby, apparently within the week.

Bobby looked with interest at Mrs. Johansen. Actually, Ruth was the better looking of the two women. Ruth had green eyes and dark-brown hair. Her appearance suggested aggressive health, but fears of illness and disaster rotated endlessly through her mind. What Ruth needed most in the world was diversion, something to push aside her self-propagating suspicions. Her marriage to Bobby, whom she had met one summer in Rhode Island, had happened largely because Bobby diverted her. She was brighter than he was, but he knew more. He became a kind of intelligence in waiting for her, delivering cadences of fact while she listened. He described the solar system to her on one early occasion and, on another, explained the making of hail. He knew unbelievable things about the Six Nations of the Iroquois. Amused, impressed, distracted, she married him. At breakfast, his encyclopedic monologs were better than the backs of cereal boxes and, at other times, he replaced magazines. Bobby received as much as he gave. He not only liked to be listened to, he needed to be listened to. Unfortunately, the couple had, by now, in other respects, developed between them a friction that went beyond the reach of any kind of insight. Ruth no longer found Bobby either interesting or diverting. When he talked to her now, he often realized that he was only talking to himself; and at these moments, she sometimes enraged him.

Above their heads, a man on water skis was flying. He had a large framed-canvas sail and he had turned himself into a human kite. A Chris-Craft was towing him and people on the shore were clapping sincerely for him as he swooped and soared high above the water. Bobby's boat and Johansen's boat had drifted into view of the main waterfront of Cypress Gardens. Beyond the grandstand of the water-skiing show, college girls in ante-bellum gowns were posing on sloping lawns before the cameras of tourists, with rare blooms and Japanese rialtos in the background. Three water skiers, side by side, went up an inclined platform and sailed through the air to perfect and simultaneous landings; and the human kite descended climactically and landed with a distinguished splash. Ruth didn't seem to notice. She had, a moment before, heard the first sound of thunder.

"There she is," said Johansen, pulling himself back into his boat. "Try it now. It should be good for five or six hours' use. Tell the man who rented it to you that he needs a new shear pin."

The two boats separated with a flourish of motors. Deciding to start back, Bobby headed for the outlet that would return them to the seventh lake in the chain. Thunder sounded, and Bobby studied the cumulus formations to the south, trying to see which way they were moving. "I don't think we ought to be out on the water in a lightning storm," said Ruth.

"The sun is shining," said Bobby. (continued on page 126)Ruth, The Sun is Shining (continued from page 116) "I don't care. That storm is coming this way."

"How do you know?"

"The wind is blowing this way."

"Not necessarily up there."

"I don't like it."

"I suspected that."

Both Ruth and Bobby were watching the cloud front a moment later, when a lightning bolt stood out clearly against the gray. Ruth gasped. "One, two, three," said Bobby with measured slowness, "four, five...." He went on counting. When he said "Fourteen," thunder came tumbling from the cumulus front. "The lightning is almost three miles away," said Bobby.

"But this boat is slow," said Ruth. "And we're out in the middle of a lake."

"Ruth, the storm is three miles away."

She remained quiet for a while and did not protest when, emerging from the canal between Lake Eloise and the lake beyond, he headed out into open water. The storm seemed to be keeping its distance. Its rumblings did not noticeably become louder until Bobby and Ruth were on Lake Shipp, the next one in line. The rumbling was harsher, more pounding. Bobby looked back at the clouds and watched them until he saw a stroke of lightning. This time, he counted silently. When he reached nine, the thunder seemed to renew itself. The storm was now less than two miles away. The canal from Lake Shipp into Lake May was a short one. There was a bridge across it and Ruth said she wanted to stay under the bridge until the storm had passed.

Churning under and past the bridge, Bobby said, "Don't be absurd. There is no sanctuary from lightning. You can die in bed from lightning. If lightning wants you, it will get you. It is the artillery of the gods. In Illinois, a barn was once hit by lightning and every living thing inside it died. If you had been there, you would have dashed into the barn. The farmer who owned the barn was not hurt, because he was still out in the open when the lightning struck."

Glancing around, Bobby saw another bolt and began to count. He got up to five before a loud detonation stopped him. "One mile," he said.

"Bobby, let me out of this boat."

"Ruth, you're unnecessarily nervous."

"I want to get out of the boat."

"Ruth, the sun is shining. A week later, lightning hit a metal hayshed owned by that same farmer in Illinois and the hayshed was shattered. Crumpled. Twisted. Wrecked. Where was the farmer? Outdoors. Two days after that, he was leaning against a fence on his property. Lightning hit the fence, danced along it for maybe seventy-five yards and knocked him flat. He lost consciousness, but he wasn't hurt. A month later, though, he was standing inside a neighbor's barn, talking to three other men, when a bolt of lightning, striking on a slant, shot into the barn and got him. Killed him right where he stood. The three other men weren't even touched."

The canal between Lake May and Lake Howard was a short one. "Bobby, I don't want to go out on this lake," said Ruth, as they moved through the canal and once more approached open water.

"It's only a mile across," Bobby said, heading straight for the middle. Seeing another flash in the sky behind him, Bobby waited for the thunder. When he heard it, he said, "The storm is hardly gaining on us at all. We'll give it a run for its money."

"Bobby, turn around!"

"The sun is shining. There are more electric storms in central inland Florida than anywhere else in the United States. This is the home of the lightning storm. You have to learn to live with it. You can't run and hide every time there is thunder in the sky. There's thunder in the sky all the time. Look at the other boats."

"People down here don't care whether they live or die," said Ruth.

Actually, most of the other boats were beginning to head for shore. The way out of Lake Howard was diametrically across from them, and Bobby continued to head for it. "Lightning is considerate," he told her, hesitating to see what effect such an idea would produce. She said nothing and continued to look at the storm, holding her lower lip between the thumb and forefinger of one hand. "Lightning once struck a house in Pennsylvania, set the house on fire, jumped across the street to a fire-alarm box and started the alarm," he went on. "Out came the fire department and put down the blaze. Lightning is chance itself. A writer in Minneapolis was once sitting at his typewriter when a lightning bolt came crashing out of nowhere and hit the typewriter. The typewriter shot up to the ceiling with such force that it remained embedded there. The writer wasn't even singed."

The dinghy was now about 500 yards from shore. A stroke behind them was followed quickly by an explosion of thunder.

"Bobby!"

"Ruth, the sun is shining. In the summer of 1769, lightning hit the Tower of St. Nazaire, in Brescia, and the electric fluid, as people called it then, went down into a powder magazine under the tower. More than two million pounds of gunpowder, property of the Republic of Venice, exploded. Three thousand people died." The bow had gradually swung off course. Bobby studied the far shore for a moment and re-established his direction. "Some people ring church bells to drive lightning away," he continued. "Some fire cannons. The emperors of Japan used to hide in caves hollowed out under lake bottoms. They thought the lightning would go into the lake and fizzle out like a torch in a bucket of water. People used to hide from lightning in cages made of glass. Only eighty years ago, they tried carrying metal umbrellas that had chains that dragged on the ground. Casualties were one hundred percent. Roman generals slept in sealskin tents. They thought seals were immune to lightning. How do you know what people are going to believe two thousand years from now? Last year, a man at a little-league ball park in Elizabethport, New York, ran into a ticket booth to get away from lightning. He had, no doubt, been taught to seek shelter in a storm. Lightning hit a power line, then ran along it and down into the ticket booth, where it charred him like a frankfurter."

Ruth was looking at Bobby with an unnatural steadiness. A wide spray of light illuminated the walls of the black clouds behind them. "That was sheet lightning," Bobby explained. "There were clouds between us and the actual stroke, so all we could see was the light on the clouds. Forked lightning, bead lightning, ball lightning, chain lightning--they're all the same. They were once called thunderbolts. Each bolt of lightning has component parts. First, a stroke shoots downward out of the clouds at a hundred miles a second. This is the pilot leader. The pilot leader. Are you listening? Then, one after another, brighter and faster, come the stepped leaders. Each step goes about a hundred and fifty feet farther than the one before it and they're all meshed, like a braided cable. When they finally hit the ground, they shoot upward again, all together, up the same path, at twenty thousand miles per second. Two hundred thousand amps. Four million volts. Down from the top comes another stroke--the dart leader. It hits the ground and grows as it rises again, always in the same path. Down comes another dart leader. Then another. Then another. All of these parts together make a single bolt of lightning, striking in one moment, at one place. Sometimes a single lightning stroke has forty parts. Usually it has three or four. If the parts widen out a bit, the bolt as a whole is called ribbon lightning. A lightning bolt is never jagged. It meanders in curves, like a river."

It was at this moment--about half a mile from shore--that he explained heat lightning; but Ruth's eyes had taken on a panoptic glaze and she was obviously not listening. Bobby looked up at the sun. The black front of the thunder-heads was now so close to it that the sun appeared to be on the point of setting into a dark and tilted sea. Feelers of (concluded on page 186) Ruth, The Sun is Shining (continued from page 126) cloud wrapped around it and the sun passed quickly into obscurity. In the sudden absence of glare, Bobby felt no rush of coolness and Ruth seemed to notice nothing at all. The boat continued toward the center of the lake. The engine noise was insistent and steady. The thunder was really ponderous now. "On August 14, 1872," he said almost reflectively, "a storm passed over Arlington, Massachusetts, and for thirteen minutes, the thunder was so concentrated that it was never punctuated with silence. A man in Arlington counted three hundred and thirty-one discharges in one span of seven minutes. But not a single lightning stroke hit Arlington. Lightning takes what it wants and leaves what it doesn't want. When lightning does kill people, they die at once. Their faces are placid. It is apparently a painless and perfect death. Sometimes there are marks on the victims' bodies. A sailor was once killed by lightning in his cot between the decks of a man-of-war. On his chest appeared the number forty-four, burned into his skin by the lightning. The ship's number was forty-four. The metal numerals forty-four were nailed to the mainmast, down which the lightning had traveled on its way to kill this one particular man."

At this moment, without hitting so much as a floating branch, the temporary shear pin in the motor gave way. The pitch of sound changed slightly, but Bobby did not realize at once what had happened. The dinghy's momentum subsided. With its engine whirring, it soon was at a standstill on the water. Bobby was annoyed, looking back at the storm that was now upon them and might have been outrun. Ruth did not notice the change. She had withdrawn completely and her head was no longer inclined toward the sky. Her gaze, which had for some minutes trailed along in the water beside the boat, seemed uninterrupted by the sudden stillness beneath it. The thunder stopped rolling and began to crash. Rain fell and obscured the shore in all directions. Uselessly, Bobby let the engine run, hoping that it would somehow solve its own difficulty and move them forward again. "Don't worry," he called out. "It takes a tall ship to be wrecked by lightning. June 17, 1793--H. M. S. Duke, ninety guns, attacked French positions on Martinique. The Duke fired on the battery at Point-à-la-Mer. The battery bombarded the Duke and cut a mizzen shroud. Forty-five guns pounded back. The battery was wrecked. The Duke sailed on. At La Prêcheur, she took several balls in the mizzenmast, then splattered the batteries of La Prêcheur. The Duke might have conquered all of Martinique; but just then, a stroke of lightning hit her maintopgallant masthead, blew the topgallant mast and topmast to pieces, split the mainmast almost to the deck and shattered all her hoops in rings of fire. Lightning favors the French. June 24, 1811--two French frigates ran the British blockade of Toulon. Three British warships--H. M. S. Ajax, H. M. S. Unité and H. M. S. Resistance--were sent to make the kill. At dawn, they closed in on the French ship and prepared to sink her, but--crack, crack, crack--three successive bolts of lightning wrecked all three British ships, and the French one got away."

With a shivering crash over Lake Howard, lightning struck the water within 100 yards of the boat and Bobby's ears were left ringing. He could scarcely hear himself. He stood up in the boat. "July 3, 1846," he shouted. "The brig Columbia, off the Belize, was hit and destroyed by lightning, and all hands were lost except the captain. Except the captain. H. M. S. Lowestoft: March 8, 1796--three bolts hit within twenty minutes. Men were blinded at the halyards. Fell like flies from the tops. Mainmast split to the keelson. Lightning shivered the main-topmast, broke the hoops of the mainmast, split the foretopmast and blew off the fore-topsail yard. Everyone between decks was left motionless and dumb. Everything smelled of sulphur. Bodies were burned and blackened but almost everyone survived. H. M. S. Dictator: October 8, 1794--struck without apparent damage. Without apparent damage. Two days later, smoke and flame burst from the figurehead. The figurehead had been burning within itself for forty-eight hours. That figurehead had been struck in the heart. September 26, 1844--"

In the sudden absence of Bobby's voice, Ruth slowly looked up. Bobby was not there. The rain seemed to smell of sulphur. A thunder crash that had come a few seconds before had been so loud that she had not actually heard it. She had only felt a rush of air. Her bonnet had blown off. The crash had, for a time, deafened her. She was reaching for the bonnet when she noticed one of Bobby's shoes on the floor boards of the boat, in just the position it had been in when it contained his foot. Three times, lightning struck around her but did not hit the dinghy. Eventually, after the storm passed, another boat took her in tow. When Bobby was found, his features were so placid that Ruth hesitated before identifying him. When his shirt was opened, it was discovered that his chest was burned in a pattern of light and dark checks, in the shape and manner of her new checkered sunbonnet that was filigreed with strands of metallic thread.