still standing in waist-deep water but at least my feet were touching earth. I
wiped clots of mud from my eyes and looked up at Dr. Curtis Parrish, who wore
a gray raincoat and a rainhat. The hat had no band, therefore it had no silver
disc and no green feather. I turned around, looking for the figure I’d been
trying to reach, but he had merged with the other people nearer the river’s
edge. He and the knife he’d drawn from his pocket.
“Where’s Dad?” I said, working up to another fever pitch. “I’ve gotta
find Dad!”
“Whoa, whoa, settle down.” Dr. Parrish took hold of my shoulders. In one
hand he held a flashlight. “Tom’s right over there.” He pointed the
flashlight’s beam toward a group of muddied men. The direction he indicated
was not the direction in which the man with the green-feathered hat had gone.
But I saw my father over there, working between a black man and Mr. Yarbrough.
“See him?”
“Yes sir.” Again I searched for the mysterious figure. Vanished.
“Cory, don’t you run away from me like that!” Mom scolded. “You scared me
almost to death!” She took my hand again in a grip of iron.
Dr. Parrish was a heavyset man, about forty-eight or forty-nine years
old, with a firm, square jaw and a flattened nose that reminded everyone he’d
been a champion boxer when he was a sergeant in the army. With the same hands
that had scooped me from the hole at my feet, Dr. Parrish had delivered me
from my mother’s womb. He had thick dark eyebrows over eyes the color of
steel, and beneath his rainhat his dark brown hair was gray on the sides. Dr.
Parrish said to Mom, “I heard from Chief Marchette a little while ago that
they’ve opened up the school gym. They’re puttin’ in oil lamps and bringin’ in
some cots and blankets. Most of the women and children are goin’ over there to
stay, since the water’s gettin’ so high.”
“Is that where we ought to go, then?”
“I think it’d be the wise thing. There’s no use you and Cory standin’ out
here in this mess.” He pointed with the flashlight again, this time away from
the river and toward the swampy basketball court where we’d parked. “They’re
pickin’ up whoever wants to go to the shelter over that way. Probably be
another truck along in a few minutes.”
“Dad won’t know where we are!” I protested, still thinking of the green
feather and the knife.
“I’ll let him know. Tom would want you both in a safe place, and I’ll
tell you the truth, Rebecca: the way this is goin’, we’ll be catchin’ catfish
in attics before mornin’.”
We didn’t need much prodding. “Brightie’s already over there,” Dr.
Parrish said. “You ought to go catch the next truck. Here, take this.” He gave
Mom the flashlight, and we turned away from the swollen Tecumseh and started
toward the basketball court. “Keep hold of my hand!” Mom cautioned as the
floodwaters swept around us. I looked back, could see only the lights moving
in the darkness and glittering off the roiling water. “Watch your step!” Mom
said. Farther along the riverbank, past where my father was working, voices
rose in a chorus of shouts. I did not know it then, but a frothy wave had just
swamped over the highest part of the earthen dam and the water churned and
foamed and men suddenly found themselves up to their elbows in trouble as the
river burst through. A flashlight’s beam caught a glimpse of brown-mottled
scales in the muddied foam, and somebody hollered, “Snakes!” In the next
second, the men were bowled over by the twisting currents, and Mr. Stellko,
the Lyric’s manager, aged by ten years when he put his hand out to seize a
grip and felt a log-sized, scaly shape moving past him in the turbulence. Mr.
Stellko was struck dumb and peed in his pants at the same time, and when he
could find his voice to scream, the monstrous reptile was gone, following the
flood into the streets of Bruton.
“Help me! Somebody help me!”
We heard the voice of a woman from nearby, and Mom said, “Wait.”
Someone carrying an oil lamp was splashing toward us. Rain hissed on the
lamp’s hot glass and steamed away. “Please help me!” the woman cried.
“What is it?” Mom turned the light onto the panic-stricken face of a
young black woman. I didn’t know her, but Mom said, “Nila Castile? Is that
you?”
“Yes ma’am, it’s Nila! Who’s that?”
“Rebecca Mackenson. I used to read books to your mother.”
This was before I was born, I presumed.
“It’s my daddy, Miz Rebecca!” Nila Castile said. “I think his heart’s
give out!”
“Where is he?”
“At the house! Over there!” She pointed into the darkness, water swirling
around her waist. I was about chest-deep by now. “He can’t stand up!”
“All right, Nila. Settle down.” My mother, a framework of little terrors
with skin stretched over it, was amazingly calm when someone else needed
calming. This, as I understood it, was part of being a grown-up. When it was
truly needed, my mother could reveal something that was sorely lacking in
Granddaddy Jaybird: courage. “You lead the way,” she said.
Water was rushing into the houses of Bruton. Nila Castile’s house, like
so many others, was a narrow gray shotgun shack. She led us in, the river
surging around us, and she shouted in the first room, “Gavin! I’m back!”
Her light, and Mom’s light, too, fell on an old black man sitting in a
chair, the water up around his knees and newspapers and magazines swirling in
the current. He was clutching his hand to his wet shirt over his heart, his
ebony face seamed with pain and his eyes squeezed shut. Standing next to him,
holding his other hand, was a little boy maybe seven or eight years old.
“Grandpap’s cryin’, Momma,” the little boy said.
“I know he is, Gavin. Daddy, I’ve brought some help.” Nila Castile set
the lamp down on a tabletop. “Can you hear me, Daddy?”
“Ohhhhh,” the old man groaned. “Hurtin’ mighty bad this time.”
“We’re gonna help you stand up. Gonna get you out of here.”
“No, honey.” He shook his head. “Old legs… gone.”
“What’re we gonna do?” Nila looked at my mother, and I saw the bright
tears in her eyes.
The river was shoving its way in. Thunder spoke outside and the lightning
flared. If this had been a television show, it would’ve been time for a
commercial.
But real life takes no pauses. “Wheelbarrow,” my mother said. “Have you
got one?”
Nila said no, but that they’d borrowed a neighbor’s wheelbarrow before
and she thought it might be up on their back porch. Mom said to me, “You stay
here,” and she gave me the oil lamp. Now I was going to have to be courageous,
whether I liked it or not. Mom and Nila left with the flashlight, and I stood
in the flooding front room with the little boy and the old man.
“I’m Gavin Castile,” the little boy said.
“I’m Cory Mackenson,” I told him.
Hard to be sociable when you’re hip-deep in brown water and the
flickering light doesn’t fill up the room.
“This here’s my grandpap, Mr. Booker Thornberry,” Gavin went on, his hand
locked with the old man’s. “He ain’t feelin’ good.”
“How come you didn’t get out when everybody else did?”
“Because,” Mr. Thornberry said, rousing himself, “this is my home, boy.
My home. I ain’t scared of no damned river.”
“Everybody else is,” I said. Everybody with sense, is what I meant.
“Then everybody else can go on and run.” Mr. Thornberry, whom I was
beginning to realize shared a stubborn streak with Granddaddy Jaybird, winced
as a fresh pain hit him. He blinked slowly, his dark eyes staring at me from a
bony face. “My Rubynelle passed on in this house. Right here. I ain’t gonna
die in no white man’s hospital.”
“Do you want to die?” I asked him.
He seemed to think about this. “Gonna die in my own home,” he answered.
“Water’s gettin’ deep,” I said. “Everybody might get drowned.”
The old man scowled. Then he turned his head and looked at the small
black hand he was clutching.
“My grandpap took me to the movies!” Gavin said, attached to the thin
dark arm as the water rose toward his throat. “We seen a Looney Tune!”
“Bugs Bunny,” the old man said. “We seen ol’ Bugs Bunny and that
stutterin’ fella looks like a pig. Didn’t we, boy?”
“Yes sir!” Gavin answered, and he grinned. “We gone go see another one
real soon, ain’t we, Grandpap?”
Mr. Thornberry didn’t answer. Gavin didn’t let go.
I understood then what courage is all about. It is loving someone else
more than you love yourself.
My mother and Nila Castile returned, lugging a wheelbarrow. “Gonna put
you in this, Daddy,” Nila told him. “We can push you to where Miz Rebecca says
they’re pickin’ up people in trucks.”
Mr. Thornberry took a long, deep breath, held it for a few seconds, and
then let it go. “Damn,” he whispered. “Damn old heart in a damn old fool.” His
voice cracked a little bit on that last word.
“Let us help you up,” Mom offered.
He nodded. “All right,” he said. “It’s time to go, ain’t it?”
They got him in the wheelbarrow, but real soon Mom and Nila realized that
even though Mr. Thornberry was a skinny thing, they were both going to have a
struggle pushing him and keeping his head above water. I saw the predicament:
out beyond the house on the underwater street, Gavin’s head would be
submerged. A current might whisk him away like a cornhusk. Who was going to
hold him up?
“We’ll have to come back for the boys,” Mom decided. “Cory, you take the
lamp and you and Gavin stand up on that table.” The tabletop was awash, but it
would keep us above the flood. I did as Mom told me, and Gavin pulled himself
up, too. We stood together, me holding the lamp, a small pinewood island
beneath our feet. “All right,” Mom said. “Cory, don’t move from there. If you
move, I’ll give you a whippin’ you’ll remember for the rest of your life.
Understand?”
“Yes ma’am.”
“Gavin, we’ll be back directly,” Nila Castile said. “We’ve got to get
Grandpap to where people can help him. Hear?”
“Yes ma’am,” Gavin answered.
“You boys mind your mothers.” Mr. Thornberry spoke up, his voice raspy
with pain. “I’ll whip both your butts if you don’t.”
“Yes sir,” we both said. I figured Mr. Thornberry had decided he wanted
to live.
Mom and Nila Castile began the labor of pushing Mr. Thornberry in the
wheelbarrow against the brown water, each supporting one handle and Mom
holding the light. They tilted the wheelbarrow up as high as they could, and
Mr. Thornberry lifted his head up, the veins standing out in his scrawny neck.
I heard my mother grunt with the effort. But the wheelbarrow was moving, and
they pushed it through the water that was swirling around the open doorway and
across the flooded porch. At the foot of the two cinderblock steps, the water
came up to Mr. Thornberry’s neck and splashed into his face. They moved away,
the current at their backs helping them push the wheelbarrow. I had never
thought of my mother as being physically strong before. I guess you never know
what a person can do until that person has to do it.
“Cory?” Gavin said after a minute or so.
“Yeah, Gavin?”
“I cain’t swim,” he said.
He was pressed up against my side. He was starting to shiver now that he
didn’t have to be so brave for his grandpap. “That’s okay,” I told him. “You
won’t have to.”
I hoped.
We waited. Surely they’d be back soon. The water was lapping up over our
soggy shoes. I asked Gavin if he knew any songs, and he said he knew “On Top
of Old Smoky,” which he began to sing in a high, quavering yet not unpleasant
voice.
His singing—more of a yodel, actually—attracted something that suddenly
came paddling through the doorway, and I caught my breath at the noise and
swung the light onto it.
It was a brown dog, matted with mud. Its eyes gleamed wildly in the
light, its breathing harsh as it swam across the room toward us, through the
flotsam of papers and other trash. “Come on, boy!” I said. Whether it was a
boy or girl was incidental; the dog looked like it needed a perch. “Come on!”
I gave Gavin the lamp, and the dog whimpered and yelped as a slow wave slipped
through the door and lifted the animal up and down again. Water smacked the
walls.
“Come on, boy!” I leaned down to get the struggling dog. I grasped its
front paws. It looked up into my face, its pink tongue hanging out in the dank
yellow light, as a born-again Christian might appeal to the Savior.
I was lifting the dog out by its paws, and I felt it shudder.
Something went crunch.
As fast as that.
And then its head and shoulders were coming out of the dark water and
suddenly there was no more of the dog beyond the middle of its back, no
hindquarters, no tail, no hind legs, nothing but a gaping hole that started
spilling a torrent of black blood and steaming guts.
The dog made a little whining sound. That’s all. But its paws twitched
and its eyes were on me, and the agony I saw in them will last in my mind
forever.
I cried out—and what I said I will never know—and dropped the mess that
had once been a dog. It splashed in, went under, came back up, and the paws
were still trying to paddle. I heard Gavin shout something; wannawaterMars? it
sounded like. And then the water thrashed around the half of a carcass, the
entrails streaming behind it like a hideous tail, and I saw the skin of
something break the surface.
It was covered with diamond-shaped scales the colors of autumn leaves:
pale brown, shimmering purple, deep gold, and tawny russet. All the shades of
the river were there, too, from swirls of muddy ocher to moonlight pink. I saw
a forest of mussels leeched to its flesh, gray canyons of scars and fishhooks
scarlet with rust. I saw a body as thick as an ancient oak twist slowly around
in the water, taking its own sweet time. I was transfixed by the spectacle,
even as Gavin wailed with terror. I knew what I was looking at, and though my
heart pounded and I could hardly draw a breath, I thought it was as beautiful
as anything in God’s creation.
