The River Widow

by Ann Howard Creel

  And yet that was exactly what had happened.

  Little Daisy had borne witness to it all.

  In December, Les had been rechinking the old log curing barn, furious that he hadn’t been able to afford a new one made of wood planking and tar paper. Adah had been disgusted. They weren’t going hungry; tobacco growers in general were holding their own better than others, as people found relaxation in smoking and chewing. But she said nothing. Anything she mentioned that was contrary to his feelings was met with fury.

  When a beam of sunlight poked through a slip in the clouds, she opened her eyes. Her eyes stung and her throat constricted. She sat on the slant roof, cranked her knees into her chest, and buried her head between them. At that moment, an icy wind swept in and captured her guilty soul, dumping it in a place of shame so intense that it paralyzed her, and she could not move, could barely breathe. Hell was not a place of fire; it didn’t burn. Hell was the opposite: arctic air so brutal it could break every bone. Numbness everywhere, no longer human, only a husk of a being. She was already dead.

  But still she breathed and her heart kept beating. She creaked open her eyes. She was alive even if she didn’t want to be. In her mind, Les’s body, that dent in his temple, the absence of breath, all of it by her hand. That truth would scream and reverberate in her head from this day onward.

  And yet there were so many shades of right and wrong, and who was to say which shade made the turn from goodness into sin? One thing was certain, however: no judge or jury in McCracken County would’ve let her off the hook with a self-defense exoneration. If she hadn’t floated the body away, the well-connected Branch family would’ve exerted all the pressure they could to make sure Adah was convicted of murder.

  Lester’s family history in the area went as far back as the first election for trustees in 1831, and distant relatives had had a hand in the construction of the Paducah market in 1836. Their forebears had been present when Grant occupied the town during the Civil War and had remained staunch supporters of the Confederacy. The limb of the family tree that led to Lester had never given up its prejudices, and Lester’s grandfather had been one of the first Ku Klux Klan members in Paducah.

  And now God or someone else had intervened, sending that surge of water to come at the very moment she was releasing Lester to the Lord. It swept Les away and had also delivered a nature-made indictment of its own, whisking Adah down the river, too. So why had she lived?

  Daisy. Thoughts of her stepdaughter made Adah’s chest clench, as if a hand had reached in and squeezed the blood right out of her heart. Affection for Daisy had grown slowly at first, but then love had struck like a thunderbolt.

  Daisy was dark haired and dark eyed like her father, and although she was but four years old now, she had a soft, sweet soul. She loved to pet the ducklings and chicks and handled the hens’ eggs as though they were precious gifts. She had cried when Les had to shoot an old mule gone lame. Adah had taught her to press wildflowers between the pages of books, and Daisy did so, only to cry afterward and exclaim that they had killed the flowers. No matter how Adah explained that a picked flower was already in essence dead, it did no good. Daisy must have inherited her gentle nature from her poor dead mother.

  What would happen to Daisy now?

  Adah carefully managed to lie back, and as the level of water below her steadily rose, she ignored the pain racking her body and watched the sun cross the sky through the patchy clouds that changed shapes over her head. Below her, icy, mucky water carried everything from bloated dead bodies of goats to power poles, window frames, and what looked like a car door. Above her, birds streaked fast across the patterned gray and blue beginning to break through. The sight was lovely—a gorgeous after-the-rain day—but the weight of a million rivers lay on her. What would she do now that she harbored a secret, one as dark as the depths of the river on no-moon nights?

  A hum of low voices reached her ears, and Adah sat partway up to look around. Two men in a johnboat were drifting by her, no more than a hundred yards away. They had not seen her. Were they looking for people who needed rescue or just surveying the flood? Either way, if she called out, no doubt they would come to her aid. Exhaustion seeped out of her pores, and she wasn’t sure she could make a sound pass beyond her parched lips. Was it worth the effort to go back and face a life in which she had committed murder? Could she live with such a secret?

  Swimming up from the murk of her brain, more thoughts of Daisy. The little girl would be left alone with the Branch family.

  The johnboat was almost out of sight.

  “Help!” Adah cried with less strength than she’d hoped. “Help!” she yelled louder and louder, over and over, until she was heard.

  “Ho, there. We’re a-coming,” said the man in the stern as he dug in the oars and glided in her direction.

  She tried to answer but could form no more words. She gave them a feeble wave instead.

  “We’ve seen a goat in a tree, a dead dog on top of a house, and now you,” the older of the two men in the boat said as they reached her.

  The younger one helped her slip down, her bones groaning in protest, while the older man held on to the side of the barn. She sat in the bow facing the men. They introduced themselves, a father and son from the higher-ground Heath area, out to help those in need. They were strangers to Adah. The city of Paducah was home to thirty-five thousand residents, and in the three years she’d lived just outside the city limits, she’d met few others beyond Lester’s family and the people who attended their church.

  The father, who introduced himself as Chuck Lerner, took off his olive-and-red-plaid jacket and handed it to Adah. She slipped her arms inside and into the heat remaining from Chuck’s body. Heaven to be somewhat warm again.

  He said that workers had built two hundred of these johnboats in just one day for search and rescue. Then he pummeled her with questions she hadn’t the strength to answer. Her first encounter with humans since the dawn of a new life, and she was struck dumb. She wanted to say the right thing but couldn’t pull anything out of her brain or heart or even the frigid air.

  The two men exchanged glances.

  The boy said, “She’s scared out of her senses.”

  “Confounded, I’d say,” replied the older man.

  Adah swam upward into more complete awareness as her body warmed, and she found the strength to study the men who had rescued her. Clearly related, both had boxy faces, kind gray eyes, and soft brown hair—features that came together into comforting assemblies. Flannel shirts and wool pants, and the boy still in his hefty jacket—these things indicated they were better off than she and Lester had been, but the muddied work boots and callused hands showed they also worked hard for a living.

  The boy stared at her as if suddenly mired in a fog of wonder.

  The inside of her mouth was so thick and dry, she had to work to revive her vocal cords. “Do you have water?”

  Chuck pointed to a can in the bottom of the boat. Adah grasped it with both hands, twisted off the top, and drank heartily.

  “How did you make it?” asked the son, named Hugh, his eyes still gleaming amazement. He was probably only eighteen or so.

  Her throat thawed, then burned. Then her body stung and burned, too. “I just held on.”

  “How long you been out here?”

  Her lower lip quivered. “I don’t know. I passed out for a while.”

  “You got bumps and lashings all over. Looks like you took quite a beating.”

  Beating? A wave of nausea made her sway in the seat.

  The older man peered closer. “You don’t look so good. What happened to you?”

  Adah gulped back bile jumping into her throat. “The river rose so fast. I got too close.”

  “Where’re you from?”

  Adah blinked and focused, suddenly more mentally alert, although she was achingly tired and had to fight for each muffled breath. Their impression of her would matter later. “My husband . . . ,” she said w
ith forced sad desperation, although it took all of her attention and abilities to do so. She had to make herself into an actress. “He was swept away the same time I was. Have you seen him?” Raising her voice now as best she could. “Have you seen him?”

  They shook their heads. “What’s his name?”

  “Lester Branch. I’m Adah.”

  Father and son glanced at one another.

  The older man said, “We haven’t seen no one but you so far out. We been rescuing people from the second stories of their houses in town. Decided to take a look out here just to be sure no one got trapped in these lowlands.”

  She twisted her hands together. “We have to find him. He must be near.” She swept her gaze around.

  The two men didn’t speak at first. Then the father breathed out slowly, a sad slack about his jaw. “We’ll be on the lookout for him, ma’am, but right now, we got to get you someplace safe.”

  “And dry,” Hugh added.

  “I don’t want to go anywhere without my husband.”

  They kept paddling hard.

  Adah clutched the dress over her heart. “Listen to me, please. I have to get back home. I have to find my husband.”

  “We’re heading back to Paducah now, but the town’s underwater. After all the power went kaput, we were cut off from the rest of the world. People that was flooded out holed up in the Cobb Hotel until the power failed. Lots of people now staying in the Southern Hotel. And the sick ones are at the Clark School.”

  “Others are going down yonder to Mayfield,” said the boy.

  “You got a place to go?” asked Chuck, but Adah didn’t answer.

  The two men had to fight a ferocious current and dodge floating debris to slowly make their way back to the city. There, the extent of the devastation shocked Adah. The streets had become canals, and downtown buildings were flooded with filthy water almost to their second floors. Eerily deserted hotels and grocery stores, barbershops and drugstores, banks and laundries were battered by waves and beginning to smell of death and decay. Telephones, telegraphs, and even the local WPAD station were out. No power, no drinking water, and no sanitation had turned the city into a cesspool. No sounds save for sloshing water, not even a breeze or a birdcall, as if Judgment Day had already arrived and deemed this place done. Chuck Lerner and his son had to dodge semisubmerged cars and wooden pieces of houses, even an oil tank riding on the current.

  The boy told her they were taking her near Twenty-Eighth Street to transfer her to one of several small barges, which were being hauled out to dry land by tractors. A makeshift dock three hundred feet long also reached into the icy, murky water on Broadway, gathering the homeless and taking them all by truck to the Arcadia School, which had become a clearing station for refugees.

  “By the way,” said Chuck Lerner. “What were you and your husband doing down there so close to the river?”

  Her head became a hollow chamber echoing with his question. Think fast. “We were going for our milk cow. Sweet thing was down at the edge lapping at the water. We went to get her, and then it was some kind of surge. Took both of us down.”

  “Are you sure it knocked your husband down, too? You was being swept off, so how do you know?”

  “We were right together in the water for a few seconds, then we weren’t.”

  “What happened then?”

  “I-I guess I don’t know.”

  Neither the old man nor the boy said much after that. They had stilled, and Adah didn’t know whether it was because they were filled with sorrow for her or they doubted her story. Or because they knew the Branch family.

  She hoped she would be taken away to Mayfield. It suited her just fine not to have to face Lester’s family yet. Based on what had just happened, she needed to work on her story.

  Chapter Four

  On the Avondale “hill,” eight hundred people had been relocated from the Cobb Hotel and other points in the city, and others like Adah were streaming in from rescue boats and barges. Red Cross volunteers were handing out mattresses and blankets, giving typhoid inoculations, and sending people to homes, schools, churches, and—once those places had filled—to trains and buses headed for Mayfield, Fulton, and Murray.

  A mass of slow-moving, stunned humanity filtered everywhere. People who’d fled with only the clothes on their backs were hungry and thirsty and often rank smelling, stumbling about in shock. Paducah had survived the 1913 flood, so no one had imagined anything this horrific could happen. And yet no one complained.

  Adah pulled Chuck Lerner’s jacket, which he’d insisted she keep for now, close around her. The wind cut through her as harshly as a shovel cleaving frozen ground. A shovel.

  The sun sent down occasional spears of light to the water-soaked land. Gazing about, Adah was waiting her turn to be checked in. She didn’t know these people, as she’d almost never left the green fields and dark crumbs of earth on the farm. She’d gone to Rudolph’s Grocery on Saturdays and the First Baptist Church of Paducah on Sundays, but hadn’t ventured much farther. Lester hadn’t wanted her to have friends.

  Around her now were the downtrodden people of Paducah. The women in simple cotton dresses covered by worn coats, wearing soggy boots and holding the hands of young children. The men in overalls, threadbare jackets, and damp hats, carrying a baby or a hastily packed suitcase. Some city workers in hip waders. Younger people helping the elderly. Few people wearing rings or wristwatches. And as always, the colored—in even worse shape—kept separate from the whites.

  As her eyes drifted over the horde, Adah became weightless, not really alive, not yet one of them. She blinked against the haze and the bitter drizzle that had started again, and then filled her lungs with an expanding breath of air. These people were kinder, more honest, and more giving than she had ever been. And they had never killed anyone. They were not murderers.

  A relief worker from the Civilian Conservation Corps was peering at her, and Adah realized the man was asking her a question. He wanted to know if she had any family or friends with whom she could seek refuge. All she had to say was I killed my husband , and it would be over. The police would lock her up, the truth would be out, she would pay the price, and the lives of these good people would be unaffected.

  Did she have family?

  Daisy. Only Daisy. Each day under Lester’s domination, Daisy had lost more of her innocence. She already knew the most painful things in life, and her face often resembled that of a skittish kitten separated from its mother. How Adah had wished to escape with Daisy! But as a stepmother, Adah had few choices. She’d tried to make up for Lester’s meanness by being a loving and attentive mother, and she had helped, she knew that.

  But not enough. Not enough to provide a full antidote to Les’s poison. Nothing could do that. Adah closed her eyes and pictured Daisy—rag doll held loosely in the crook of her pudgy, sweet elbow, her knees scabbed from running after goats and falling. She loved trinkets, so Adah had made her little bracelets using string and tiny buttons and beads. The bracelets had become Daisy’s most prized possessions. She kept them on her dresser, laid out in perfect circles. Adah had felt the same way about the buttons her mother had collected for her.

  And then Adah recalled the way Daisy managed to disappear, as though the walls could absorb her, when her father’s anger began to rear its ugly head. All the years Adah had watched Daisy, seeing her suffer, it was like witnessing the death of joy and hope.

  But Lester was gone now.

  Adah focused on the relief worker’s hands—fleshy, soft, kind—and then his eyes. Telephones were a luxury, but Lester’s folks had one. Maybe some of the telephone lines had been restored. People were also communicating by ham radio, and some of the helpers were delivering messages and giving people rides to friends’ and families’ homes.

  “No,” she said. “No one to go to.”

  Not yet. She had already heard that, as expected, Lone Oak was fine, but she couldn’t face Lester’s family this soon, even though that m
eant she wouldn’t see Daisy yet. Like Lester, his father and brother harbored no kindness in their hearts; his mother was only barely better. Adah had overheard enough whispered conversations to know: the Branches were reputed as landowners who broke the backs of their farm labor, cheated on business deals, and sought revenge on anyone who crossed them. They brought to mind a flock of vultures feeding off the lives of others. No wise man would ever choose to cross them. The family had never accepted her, and she had once overhead a comment about Lester’s little witch , concluding they meant her, based on her former fortune-telling occupation.

  Now she asked if Lester had passed through this station and relayed her hastily assembled story. The man said he would check for her.

  When the relief worker returned and told her that Lester had not been seen, Adah’s grief and remorse were not disingenuous. The relief worker said, “People are still coming in. He’ll show up.” He patted her shoulder. “And I’ll tell him you’ve passed through here.”

  “Thank you,” she said.

  On one of the white buses, she sat in the midst of misery, even as some tried to find humor in the situation. A woman was saying she’d seen a cow on someone’s second-story porch, and others were scoffing at that claim.

  As they moved through the countryside, Adah stared through the window at barren and frosted farmlands that held perfectly still, as if trapped during an ice age. A man nearby said in a more somber tone, “Nothing’s going to be left of the town after this.”

  “No reason to go back there,” someone replied.

  “Where’ll you folks go?”

  “Not sure yet, but I do know it’ll have to be nowheres near a river.” The man smiled.

  Adah closed her eyes and for the first time let relief wash over her like a wave. She was free now. She could likewise leave and never look back. In Mayfield she could send word to Lester’s family about what had happened and tell them she was moving on. Or she could just disappear. The Branches could probably find her name on the refugee lists at some time in the future, but she would be long gone by then. In the midst of this chaos, she could vanish like smoke swept away by the wind. She had no money or possessions, but she had survived that way before. She could go anywhere and never make contact with the Branch family again.