Tornado

“‘Twister!’ Pete yelled. ‘Twister!’ I ran for the house. ‘Twister!’ He pointed. I looked over my shoulder. I could see it—a long, black funnel cloud in the west. It pointed from the dark sky right down to our farm.”

The repetition of “twister” with exclamation points introduces immediacy and tension to the beginning of the novel. It includes both the auditory detail of Pete yelling and the visual detail of the funnel cloud, which suggests the ominous tone and imminent danger produced by the tornado. The word choice “pointed” anthropomorphizes the tornado, suggesting that the natural phenomenon itself has an active role in pointing toward the family’s farm.

“My brothers and I sat on the dirt floor. My grandmother sat on a pickle barrel and my mother on an orange crate. We sat for a moment, silent. We listened to the storm and worried about my father in the cornfield. Something that sounded like gravel was thrown against the cellar doors. ‘Hail,’ my mother said, and bowed her head.”

The details about the items in the storm cellar—the pickle barrel, orange crate, and dirt floor different characters are sitting on—increase the vividness of the scene. The use of first-person plural “we” pronouns emphasizes the collective feeling of the scene, as the narrator, their family, and Pete all sit in silence, listen to the storm, and worry about Link. This emphasizes the fact that disaster can produce shared, communal experiences. Byars uses Beth’s gesture of bowing her head to indicate her worried emotional state.

“Pete cleared his throat. ‘You know what this brings to my mind?’ he said. We knew, and my brothers and I turned to him gratefully. We saw a flash of teeth as he smiled at us. ‘It brings to mind a dog I had one time.’ ‘Tornado,’ my brothers and I said together.”

This passage characterizes Pete as kind and perceptive. He realizes the family is fearful and that they will be in the storm cellar for a while.