Mom? My mom? She had come to see him for a while but had stopped. He was remembering. And Berta Agard and Hilda Johnsson came to pray with him, to cast out the devil. They laid their soft hands on him. He liked their soft hands. If he could have gotten an erection, he would have. Maybe their hands did have healing power. He was awake, really awake.
Again, another memory came back to him: he was undressing Yelena. She was the Russian mail order wife of the minister of the Free Church. Then he remembered his wife, Astri. He was married. So where was she? Did she visit him? He had no memory of any visits. She never came to see him. Well, fuck her. He tried to lift his leg. He wanted to go down the hall to the nurses’ station and call that bitch Astri and tell her he was coming home. How long had he been here? Maybe he was divorced or something. He didn’t sign any papers, though. Well, not that he knew of, anyway. Besides, with this goddamn tree hand, he couldn’t have.
The rain pelted the window. It was a hard rain and, when Evert looked closer, he saw mud splatters on the window. Maybe the pond out back was overflowing. Then the radio announcer interrupted the music, telling people where to evacuate because the town was flooding. Flooding. Holy crap. Flooding? The mud splattered the window hard. He jumped. Or thought he jumped. The announcement was followed by a loud ringing sound, an emergency broadcast. In a serious voice, the announcer told people go to Mount Dewey or the reservoir hill behind town. Vans would pick up people at designated areas, the airport, the school, the library, Shoemaker Bay, and Wrangell City Hospital.
“Christ,” he mumbled, sounding only like a baby’s bawl. Surely he would be the first on the van, their miracle, their poster boy for healing. He tried to move his foot again and it came popping out of the covers. He wiggled and moved to the side a bit. Progress. He was actually doing it. It was a miracle. Since his arms were already bent strangely, he used them to lift himself up on his pillow, almost sitting up now. Beneath the door, muddy water poured in. The lights glowing around the doorframe flickered and went out. The bed lamp zapped and the radio buzzed off.
Evert sat in the dark. He opened his mouth to yell but only coughed. He coughed hard this time. Someone would hear it. He spit phlegm on the bed. “Fuck, fuck, fuck.” The words sounded like a dog’s bark.
Then he tried to cry out for his wife, Astri, but only whistled, “Eeeee, eeeee.”
A generator started up. Emergency lights flooded the hospital. After a few minutes, the generator sputtered and died. The lights dimmed but remained on. They can’t do anything right in here. Those goddamn smashed peas and pureed beef, those Filipino nurse aides.
One small emergency light came on above his bed. Outside his room, people sloshed around, beds clanked in the hall. Under the door, a dim light moved across like a searching flashlight. Over here! Over here! But wait, the hospital staff didn’t know about the miracle yet—that he could talk and walk, that he was awake. Awake! He heaved his legs to the side. The blanket fell away from the bed onto the wet floor, sinking like a worn-out magic carpet. His legs bent at an odd angle. A fluffy white brace covered one hand.
In his room, the water rose to the bottom rung of his bed. He could crawl or wade to the door. He could do it. He set his bent legs down on the floor. The cold water numbed him almost immediately. He was like a ninety-year-old man. His hands were useless. He tried to raise his feet to walk but he could only shuffle. He moved slowly toward the door, the water to his knees. He bent far over, almost in half so he faced the water. He heaved his arm toward the doorknob to turn it, but his hand clunked on the knob. He couldn’t wrap his fingers around it. Evert flopped against the door. “Help, help,” he barked. He flung his body at the door again. Nothing.
Evert leaned against the door and closed his eyes. He was so tired. He didn’t want to close his eyes again, to return to that dark, dark sleep. He opened his eyes. He raised his arm once more and hooked his curved hands on the doorknob. He moved his whole body in the direction of the twist and the knob turned, then flung back. He did it again. This time, the door opened slightly. Water rushed in, pressing against his legs, and he nearly went under. He leaned against the doorjamb, his head bent down, his nose nearly touching the rising water.
He tilted his head at an odd angle, like the hunchback of Notre Dame. A nurse waded by the doorway with a small child slung over his back. “It’s me,” he wanted to say. Seeing Evert he frowned. “Sorry, Evert. Forgive me?” The child began to cry and the nurse moved through chest-deep water toward the large sliding doors, which were broken open.
An outboard motor idled outside. A rescuer yelled, “Johan, over here.” The nurse headed left with the child held above him in the rising water.
The small floodlight near the nurses’ station dimmed further until it finally went out. “Noo,” Evert cried. Was he ever going to get out of this room? Despite the darkness, he knew the direction of the doors: Straight ahead. With all his strength he pulled the door open farther. The water was higher now, rising faster as it rushed into the room. If he could just get to the boat, he thought. He heaved his body through the water, moving his crooked arms back and forth. They wouldn’t do what he wanted them to do. He moved like a deadhead log with limbs sticking out, bobbing along with the tide. Near the front doors, he tried to stand up, but the water pressed against him. As he shuffled toward the front doors his arms and legs weighted down. Near the door, the water deepened and he fell and rolled on his back. He floated outside.
He was free. The miracle. He would survive. Evert pushed his legs down trying to find a bottom to stand on. His back cracked again and he sunk. The current dragged him under and that’s when he remembered the night he drowned. In his mind, he pictured Karl, his brother-in-law, always helping pull bodies from the ocean, pulling him up by his hair. The women, it was those women. He’d been partying with a couple of girls. They’d gotten him drunk. He was going to pull a crab pot or something for the women that night, the Fourth of July. Red chrysanthemum fireworks blasted above him, and sparks fizzled down into the water beside him.
Evert saw the red lights again. Fireworks? He came sputtering up to the surface of the cold, muddy water. A big EXIT light still glowed. The wind howled like the pack of wolves he once saw running through town when he was a child. The stern of a white skiff motored about fifty yards in front of him. For a few moments, he floated on his back. He tried to swim again but he couldn’t. He tried to yell for them, but only the same seal bark came out from his throat. He felt a sudden force of water, like a river beneath the surface of the muddy water shove him forward, and before he knew it he was being carried away by the current down the hospital hill toward the highway. No! Stop! In a few minutes, he’d be out in the Pacific and they’d never find him.
The skiff moved toward him and Evert took in a small but painful breath. It motored closer and he could see it was Cooper Lee and another man.
“What the hell?” he heard Cooper say. With some difficulty, Cooper and the other fireman rolled Evert over the gunwales into the boat. “Must have floated out here like a goddamn log.”
Evert expected a warming blanket, a cup of coffee, or something, but they put him in a newfangled plastic rescue bag that felt like a space blanket. But at least he was starting to warm up. He wanted so much to hug them and to thank them. His arms ached, but at least he was out of that hospital. He was a miracle, a goddamn miracle. Why weren’t they excited about it? Cooper put his hand on his chest, leaned down, and looked him in the eye. Yes, it’s me. He didn’t say it out loud, but he’d thought it. He’d been in a coma for god’s sake. He’d swallowed water. He stared back at Cooper, too exhausted to cry out for Astri or grunt like a sea lion, too exhausted to move.
Cooper said, “Okay.”
The other guy said, “Do it.”
Cooper gave a hard tug at the blanket and Evert heard a zipper. He wanted to shout, but water bubbled from his mouth and the bag zipped closed. Why were they zipping the blanket all the way up past his face? He couldn’t feel the
cold anymore on his limbs. Maybe he was going to be okay. Yes, everything was going to be all right. He gritted his teeth. He would try to forgive Astri. She would see he was a miracle. He was. He was a real live miracle, and he would thank those lovely praying ladies with their softy praying hands.
Date: Sometime in the near future
Recorded by Tooch Waterson
Assisted by Tova Agard
The Flood Story
It rained and rained. A young woman stood with her baby, water rushing around her feet. She held her breath, and, as she submerged, she turned to stone. A house fell off its pilings near the harbor. A husband and wife rolled off their bed and out the door and transformed into logs. All around, the island sloughed and fell into the sea.
Gulls floated on logs, deadheads bobbed, tree roots stuck up like giant tentacled monsters. The river took over the ocean, turning it into mud and whirlpools. The logging roads, once high in elevation, became the island’s beaches. Melted glacier water rushed down the Stikine, not stopping for Wrangell Island in its way. Bicycles, swing sets, boat trailers, and chest freezers twisted, spun, and flipped. A small truck tumbled and rolled off the highway. The current seized it, shoving it toward the sea. It crashed against the post office before it got there. And, when the water receded, it became the story of the fleeing couple: a rock shaped like a truck, a woman cocking her head out the window.
It rained more. In the future, a large rock will be sunk deep in the yard of the rebuilt Presbyterian Church. It resembles a man pointing up. They say that’s the Man-Who-Saw-the-Light. Nobody remembers what light he saw, though. Some say it was an alien spaceship. Some say a huge forest fire in Canada. Some say it was God. Some say John Muir played god, pointing the way to Glacier Bay.
It kept on raining. Rocks tumbled into human shapes. Strange outcroppings appeared on the cliffs, like faces carved in the mountain: a Roman nose and chin. One large saucer-shaped rock balanced across a precipice as if it hovered there. Petrified trees stood in unusual places. Beach sand scattered on mountaintops. And on the beach there now sat a large cairn, resembling a man pointing in the direction of Seattle. Scientists speculated about these phenomena, but the stories told of a great flood and the Shakes Glacier melting and the Stikine River and all the other major rivers in Alaska overflowing their banks. The LeConte Glacier became a twenty-one-mile-long valley with a gravel wash. The Stikine Icefield transformed into a huge outwash plain with remains of a buried forest.
People lived in the hills for a long time. They rebuilt in the higher elevations, where they were shrouded in the clouds draping the mountains. The original size of the islands became a distant memory. They say it all started happening the year Raven came down the Stikine during one of the switching seasons—the seasons when everything gets messed up and weird.
Raven came to collect our stories, they say. He came in the form of a young man from upriver. Raven found a white guy wandering around town, John Swanton, and hired him to help. But, of course, the white guy got the author credit. That’s the way it’s always been. At least, that’s how the story goes. The stories were everywhere, and Swanton became confused. The people in Wrangell walked around talking story in the restaurants, in the coffee shops, in the post office, in the dentist’s and doctor’s office, on the Reliance float, Heritage Harbor, and at Shoemaker Bay parking lot. Stories were whispered among lovers and drawn as glyphs on their skin.
“See what the animals are doing?” Tooch said. “Do what they do.” This is how he was going to teach them: by example, by doing. This was how the elders did things. Just watch, they’d say. Sometimes that was hard to do.
Swanton followed Tooch, who was trailing several black bears up an old deer trail to the top of a mountain. When they lagged behind, the bears would turn as if to wait for them. The rain poured down, muddying the trail. On the way up, Swanton stumbled and fell, landing on his knees. The large bag he carried in his hand slipped and tumbled off a cliff into the rushing water below.
“Leave it,” Tooch said. What did it matter? Over the years Swanton had mailed dozens of notebooks to the Smithsonian. Occasionally, on Swanton’s instructions, Tooch had mailed them himself. But so far they hadn’t published a book. Sure, Swanton had spent several lifetimes collecting the stories. But they weren’t really his stories. Swanton would get credit for John Muir marrying a tree, for a boy who lit the town on fire.
“But the stories, how will I remember all those stories? That bag had all my notes, tapes, reels, CDs, even that digital tape recorder of yours.”
Tooch shrugged, and then tapped his own head. “They are in here,” he said, and then pointed to Swanton’s head. “And in there.”
Tooch then picked up a small pinecone. “And in here.” He tossed the pinecone into the brush. Tooch turned, leaving Swanton staring down at the water.
Swanton sighed and then followed him up into the alpine. The brown river water below met with the green ocean, like two competing elements. Beside them, the bears groaned, their black fur grayed, and, at once, they became stone.
“See,” he said to Swanton, “the stories are already telling themselves.”
Someone would carve a totem pole to remember this story. Someone would hike up here in the future and point out the rocks.
“Come on,” Tooch said. “Let’s build a shelter.” He didn’t feel cold; he usually didn’t. As the story goes, Raven was created because his mother swallowed a rock. Tough. You had to be tough to live here, to survive this. Swanton looked ragged.
As they gathered wood for the shelter, they were joined by a few dozen others: the lost and bedraggled who wandered up during that same day. There on the mountain, they built a few small shelters from spruce and hemlock and huddled that first night as the rain kept coming down.
The next day, several men went hunting and later returned with two deer.
Swanton kept talking about rescue, as if someone out there would come sweeping in like a hero and whisk them away in the middle of a disaster. He should’ve paid attention to history. Swanton left the camp and wandered back and forth and back and forth along the mountaintop, walking to the alpine lake and back to their camp again.
“What’s the matter?” Tooch finally asked.
“Do you think we’ll be rescued?”
“I think we’ve already rescued ourselves.”
“No, do you think someone’s coming for us,” Swanton asked, “to check on the communities, I mean. The government.”
“Government?” he said, nearly choking on the word.
“Yes, the United States government.”
Tooch frowned. “I don’t think we need the government.”
“Well someone will eventually send someone,” Swanton said, “and, if we’re way up here, how can anyone find us? We should be on the beach.”
“But what if the water rises further? You don’t want to be down there with the current. Besides, there’s nothing left.”
Like two lone spruce trees on the mountain they stared at the water below, only a mile or so down to the logging road, which was now the shoreline. Swanton said, “Yeah, but I need to go home. Get back to Seattle at least.”
Tooch shrugged. “Well, I can’t stop you, but it’s not the best thing to do. Don’t you listen to the oral traditions about waiting forty days and forty nights?”
“No, I should pack up and head down to the road,” Swanton replied.
“Suit yourself,” he said. “I can walk you down part way.”
Two Tlingits in a large canoe found a white man walking on the beach.
Swanton waved madly at the canoe. He had a small pack strapped to his back and wore a rain hat and a raincoat too small for him. All these days walking the beach road, he didn’t find the bag with the notebooks in it, and it seemed he’d looked everywhere. Probably at the bottom of the ocean by now. It was heavy. More important to get to safety. More important to get home.
The canoe approached the beach where he stood. When they landed he
explained he needed help. They seemed willing. The two young men held the canoe steady and he maneuvered himself in. Swanton sat in the middle. “I can’t thank you enough. I had just about given up hope.”
The young man behind him spoke up. “Well, good thing for us, too,” he smiled. “My name is Jorma Agard and up there is my friend Henry Turrpa.”
He nodded. Did he know these young men? He’d met so many people over the years and years he’d lived there. “I’m John Swanton. I was living in Wrangell and when the flood came, we all headed to the hills. See that beach? It’s really a logging road. All this,” he pointed to the water, “is fresh river water down this far. It’s amazing isn’t it?”
“Yeah,” Henry said, “but I wouldn’t call it amazing.”
“I know you,” Jorma said. “I’m from Wrangell. Your friend, Tooch, recorded one of my stories. It was about a killer whale.”
“Oh,” he said, remembering the transcript. “Big Jon Keats. Quite a tale.” This kid was Tova’s brother. Tova, the enigma. Tova the storyteller. Tova the story. How was he ever going to make sense of this? Who would believe him? Maybe losing his bag wasn’t so bad after all.
“Hey, it really happened,” Jorma said.
Yeah, I suppose. He chuckled as Jorma pushed the canoe out farther with his paddle. The two men started to paddle away from the shore. He thought about Tova. Where was she? Did she survive? He asked, “Where’s your sister, Tova?”
“She’s gone.”
“Gone?” Did he mean she was dead? Or, god forbid, drowned?
“She’s not dead. She and her friends are … are going to save people. She’s helping out. In her own way.”
The Dead Go to Seattle Page 23
