by Tim Poland
Sandy took a sip of her tea and waited. She knew there would be more.
“I couldn’t have been but ten years old or so. That government dam had only been built a couple years before. We weren’t used to it yet, to how it changed the river. Before the dam, when the river come up, it come up more slowly. A body could get a sense of it coming and get ready. Get ready better, different, anyhow. We hadn’t ever seen that big rush of water, all of a sudden, like now when they open the floodgates. Hadn’t ever happened yet.”
The river seemed to inch closer to them still, but the surging froth of the two currents had subsided, as if the river were settling into its new channel. Downstream to the southwest, low in the sky above the ridge, from a thin crack in the cloud cover, a hint of sunlight leaked out.
“It’d been raining pretty steady for some time, but it hadn’t ever been all that heavy. No one thought much of it.” Tommy slurped a mouthful of tea, a few drops of which dribbled down his chin. He wiped the drops away with the heel of his thumb. “Damn government people swear the warning signal was working that day, but I’ll be damned if any of us heard it. River started coming up out of its banks, caught us flat out with our pants down. Whole lot of us running around like a flock of damn fool chickens with they heads cut off, not knowing what to do first. Mama and daddy, granddaddy and mamaw, my brother—he was still around then—and my Uncle Elias, he was there too, I think.”
Sandy felt a momentary flush of something she thought might be envy for the ease with which Tommy could conjure a clan.
“What with running around getting all the cattle run into the barn, then trying to dig up a levee around the truck garden, damn, it was just too much for granddaddy. Heart give out. I can still see it. Dropped right down on his knees beside the cabbages. Slumped over on his side, still holding that shovel.”
“I’m so sorry, Tommy.” Sandy heard what she hoped was not the same formulaic, robotic tone of sympathy her voice carried when she was a nurse.
“Daddy called for an ambulance. Got through on the line, too. But no ambulance ever came. Road was underwater like it is now. We carried granddaddy up to the house and just sat there, watching him die, watching that river come up over the garden and wreck it, and not able to do a damn thing about either.”
“How terrible for you.” Sandy meant every word.
“Goddamn government dam.”
Tommy downed the last of his tea and set the mug gently on the deck railing. “Well, enough of that. Seems I always end up moping or complaining about something around you. Sorry about that. You give me a safe place for that old bull of mine to ride out this flood, even make me some . . . chamomile, and all I got to offer in return is to carry on about some sorrowfulness. Not right of me.”
“It’s fine, Tommy. Glad to help.” Sandy paused, then went ahead and said it. “It’s what neighbors do.”
“Well, I owe you my thanks.” Tommy nodded to the thick, heavy flow of muddy water flowing before them. “Looks like it’s crested. Still a hell of a mess, but it seems to have stopped rising. Be back in its banks by tomorrow sometime, I’m guessing.”
“So you think we’re safe up here?”
“Looks like it. Gonna go harder on some of the folks further downstream, though.”
Sandy knew that, for Tommy, “the folks further downstream” signified a complicated and detailed inventory of lives and locations. Sandy thought of Edith’s spot on the riverbank where the big hemlock no longer cast its shadow, of the river bending behind the Damascus Diner and the apprehensive face of the redheaded woman making her final exit from the diner yesterday.
SANDY washed the tomatoes in the sink and watched through the open kitchen window as Stink sniffed eagerly around the stock trailer, hiking his leg several times to mark this new and intriguing territory while the bull huffed and stomped inside. The tomatoes were a gift from Tommy, some of the last ones from that year’s garden.
After the flood crested, Tommy had left the deck briefly to tend to the bull—to get it settled in the trailer as best he could, with a fresh flake of hay and a tub of water. He’d returned to Sandy on the deck with a brown paper bag containing ten or twelve tomatoes.
“At least I didn’t barge in on you completely empty-handed,” he said as he handed her the bag.
“Thank you,” she said. “We may need them. Not all that much to eat here just now.”
And there wasn’t. What groceries she’d purchased over the past two weeks had been taken to Keefe’s bungalow. Most of what little she found on hand in the refrigerator here on Willard Road had gone bad and had to be thrown out. All she’d eaten since she’d come home the day before was what she’d brought from the diner’s last buffet. The pork chop remained in its container. Once she’d gotten home and started in on her meal, the pork chop no longer seemed appealing. She’d saved it as a future treat for Stink, but now it looked as though she and Tommy might have to make do with it.
She selected two of the larger tomatoes and sliced them into thick rounds. Reviewing what little food she had to offer, she chose another tomato and sliced it, too. She had some eggs she could scramble. There were a couple of English muffins that would probably do if she pinched the bits of mold off the edges. And there was that one pork chop. Not much of a meal, but at least she could feed them something.
Wiping her hands on her jeans, Sandy stepped quietly back out onto the deck to find Tommy where he’d remained for most of the afternoon. He sat in one of the two cheap plastic chairs on the deck, slumped forward, one hand dangling at his side. For one involuntary moment she thought she might check for a pulse, until she saw the round lump of his belly rise with his breathing. His snoring rumbled low and resonant. Sound asleep. Bless his heart, Margie and Joyce would have said. In the rhythmic rise and fall of his rotund paunch, in the florid, unshaven cheeks, in his heavy, slouched body, Sandy could see, almost feel, the exhaustion incurred from his flood preparations. Further, she could sense the enduring weight he bore from maintaining his small farm single-handedly at his age, the weight of his lingering grief, of this gregarious old man’s life alone.
Bless his heart.
Only then did Sandy notice that Stink had come around the house to the deck and now sat on the other side of Tommy. His eyes were locked on the sleeping man, and there was a hint of a snarl in the twitch of his jowls. Her dog was not about to forgive his old adversary for the wad of birdshot still lodged in his back leg. Sandy hissed at Stink, opened the front door, and pointed firmly to the house’s interior. Stink bared his teeth briefly, then relented and waddled inside.
Sandy held her hand to her forehead to shade her eyes from the glare. As if there were a cause-and-effect relation, as if some level of satisfaction had been reached, once the flood had pushed its way into the valley, the rains had ceased. The thick cloud cover that had blanketed the Ripshin Valley for most of the preceding few weeks blew away to the northeast. It was late afternoon now, and the sun was dipping toward the ridges to the west, illuminating a disquietingly clear sky. For Sandy, something incongruous lurked in the scene before her. Down the slope from her, a murky, surging torrent, inscrutable and intractable. Above her, an alarming clarity. And reflected across the surface of the rushing current, a blinding shine. Still, in the end, Sandy thought, it was what it was—too much water pouring too quickly into too small and confined a space. Because the dam was never imagined to hold this much, and because it was all else that the water could do, the flood poured on down the valley, indifferent to human desire, effort, and explanation.
“Almost pretty, ain’t it.” Tommy had awakened and sat upright in the chair.
“Yes. In a way, yes, it is,” Sandy said.
“Goddamn government dam,” Tommy said.
For the remainder of the afternoon and evening, the floodwaters receded, at a glacial pace, back down the slope toward their customary riverbanks. At one point, while Tommy still slept on the deck, Margie had called. At first Sandy was uncertain of the sou
nd she heard, until she realized it was her rarely used cell phone, ringing inside her little canvas purse on the kitchen counter. Sandy noticed several missed calls from Margie on the phone’s display when she dug the phone out of her purse and answered. Breathlessly, Margie recounted calling the bungalow several times, never receiving an answer. Though there was nothing uncommon in Keefe being outside or, in fact, ignoring his ringing telephone. Margie said she didn’t think she could get through to Sandy’s cell, but gave it a shot, out of desperation, and was surprised to hear that Sandy had gone home to Willard Road just when the flood would be coming. Sandy had assured her the floodwaters had crested and that she and Tommy were safe.
“Tommy? That guy down the road that’s always giving J.D. a hard time?”
Sandy took her through a condensed version of the afternoon—Tommy’s arrival with his bull, getting stranded there when the floodgates opened and the road was submerged, the rising river having crested, the bag of tomatoes.
“Hell, you’ve got a regular party going out there,” Margie said.
When Sandy asked, Margie assured her she and her family were likewise safe and sound. The river was wider through Sherwood, and though it was getting “pretty damned deep and scary,” no one expected it to break out of its banks in town.
“So you’re sure you’re okay?” Margie asked as they wrapped up their conversation.
“Just fine. High and dry, sort of.” Sandy glanced through her living room window, as if to confirm the truth of her own words. “And if we weren’t? What would you do, jump in your boat and come to our rescue?”
“Point taken,” Margie said.
When Sandy set their meal on the counter, it looked every bit as meager and unappealing as she’d expected, with the pale yellow of the scrambled eggs and the dull brown of each half pork chop in contrast with the bright red of the fresh tomatoes. But Tommy was more than grateful for the hospitality. As they sat to eat, Sandy was caught off guard when he closed his eyes, nodded his head, and mumbled a short grace.
“A flood at the door, that qualifies as prayin’ weather if ever I seen it,” Tommy said when he finished and recognized the uneasy surprise on Sandy’s face.
They ate the paltry meal greedily. Given the taste of the eggs, meat, and muffins—flat and stale from long refrigeration—the flavor of the homegrown tomatoes exploded in their mouths. They passed the salt shaker back and forth and devoured them.
Tommy had seemed genuinely disappointed when he discovered that Sandy didn’t own a television. Miraculously, Sandy found an old deck of playing cards in her kitchen junk drawer, unable for the life of her to remember how they had come to be there. Tommy sat on the couch, Sandy sat cross-legged on the floor on the other side of the coffee table, and they played gin rummy, the only card game for which either of them could recall the rules. From time to time, while one of them shuffled the deck for the next hand, the other would step out to the deck to monitor the flood’s retreat.
At the tail end of the evening, Sandy stood on the deck. A gibbous moon had crept above the ridge. She marked its glow captured in the floodwaters, a mottled, flickering glimmer emanating from within the pine grove at the bottom of the slope. It appeared that Tommy had been right. The river should be back in its banks by morning.
When Sandy stepped back inside the house, Tommy had slumped back on the sofa, asleep again, snoring softly. Sandy gathered the cards and finished cleaning up their dinner dishes. She retrieved a blanket and draped it over Tommy, who snorted slightly during her ministrations, then slipped back into his rhythmic snoring.
For Tommy’s sake, Sandy had put Stink outside for the evening, during which he’d spent the greater part of the evening pestering Tommy’s bull, a hapless, captive stand-in for his owner in the dog’s eyes. Sandy let her dog in the house and sternly directed him away from Tommy and down the hall to her bedroom. “And stay off the bed,” she whispered. Stink pulled himself up onto the bed, pawed the covers into a mud-streaked nest, and curled up to sleep for the night. “Good boy.”
Sandy left the hall light on, so Tommy could find his way if he woke during the night. “Scoot over, you,” she said to Stink. She closed her bedroom door, peeled off her clothes, and climbed into bed with her dog.
When she woke at sunrise the next morning, Tommy was gone, his blanket folded and laid neatly over the back of the sofa. From the kitchen window she saw that his truck and the trailer carrying his nervous old bull were gone, too. From the deck she could see the flood had receded, leaving a sodden carpet of brush, debris, and flood wash across the bottom of the slope. Where her driveway cut into the pine trees, she saw Tommy had dragged some of the larger branches to the side, clearing a path, so he could drive on out to the road.
Bless his heart.
Already he’d returned to the skinniest farm in the valley. Aging, exhausted, alone, he’d begun the process of reclaiming his place from whatever havoc the flood had wrought. Sandy looked off in the direction of Tommy’s farm and hoped the damage was slight. All the family he’d had and loved had either died or left him, and yet he persevered on his long, narrow plot of family ground, a place heavy with a history of love and loss, with that tangled weave of the hope and disappointment, of the joy and sadness that composed a life, any life. For Tommy, Sandy realized, the love he carried for the place he lived and the people who’d inhabited it over the years were one and the same. Who they were and where they were, one and the same, and to try to distinguish between the two, a pointless and foolish exercise.
The mess of flood wash across the slope before her house would take some time to clean up, but it could wait. As soon as she could get ready, she’d load Stink and her gear into the truck and drive down to Tommy’s skinny farm to help him put things back together in any way she could. And when she and Tommy were finished at his farm, only then would she turn her truck out onto flood-strewn Willard Road and drive straight up to Keefe’s bungalow along the headwaters.
A Country unto Himself
Both hunt and harvest had gone better than planned. With his usual steady aim, he’d calculated he might take as many as three at once. He’d taken four. Two bears pawing into the bait pit and two others several yards back, circling, waiting their turn. Before he squeezed off the first shot, he waited as his breathing evened out into a controlled, stable, rhythmic intake and exhalation of five breaths. One. Two. Three, four, five. He’d hit three of them dead center before the fourth could even make a move to flee, and he took that one, too, only a few strides into its attempted escape. So often, terror led them in exactly the wrong direction. These black bears, they offered a respectable target, providing the means and sustenance he required, but in the end they were simple, easy prey.
The hides were fleshed, cleaned, salted, and stored away to dry. All the bloodstains had come out, and the fur combed out nicely. A single bullet hole, only one, in each skin. Each bullet hole pleased him, the record of his precision and skill. Soon enough, they would be ready for tanning. His dealer would gladly wait for hides prepared the right way. He’d keep one, a rawhide, for himself, for the winter.
The meat had dressed out at nearly 140 pounds. By his estimate, one bear was easily over 300 pounds. His freezer and storage cellar were now full—more than enough for him and the dog until next summer. The bladders were large, the claws thick and long. The dealer, pleased by the abundance of the harvest, had paid handsomely.
He had acted singly, merciless and dispassionate, as any man unto himself must. And in acting singly, he had justified himself, no law to obey but his own eternal law, his isolation an elevation. He was prepared, well equipped, ready for the cold, lean season. Now he could concentrate on the cat.
The rain had subsided, but water still dripped from the surrounding trees, splatting loudly on the tarpaulin stretched over the fire pit. Two ridges over, down in the valley, the river would probably be flooding by now, but the petty struggles of the fools down there were of no concern to him. They did not belong
to him, nor did he belong to them.
He sat on his haunches by the fire pit and fed another length of wood into the flames. The mongrel redbone lay on the opposite side of the fire, just within the cover of the tarpaulin, gnawing methodically on the forearm bone of a bear. The midday light under the forest canopy was dim and gray, yet the rain coated the surrounding foliage with a certain sheen.
He’d first caught the scent back in the spring when he stopped to collect the man collapsed on the pavement along the road north of Sherwood. At that time he hadn’t known specifically what the scent heralded, only that it was something purely wild, something he might even respect. Now he knew.
It had been a casual hunt, without his usual degree of focus, driven more by whim than need. After so many days of bear meat, he sought variety, something lighter, less greasy and fat-laden. A turkey, perhaps a grouse. Safety on, the Winchester hung casually from his shoulder by its sling. Looking for birds, he’d merely stumbled onto the cat. Well over a hundred yards down the slope, partially obscured by brush, his eyes barely caught the flash of tawny hide, a slight snap of the long tail. Mountain lion—it could be nothing else.
He’d unslung the Winchester as he dropped to his knee, winding his arm firmly through the sling. His thumb flicked off the safety as he adjusted his eyeglasses and sighted through the scope. The cat pawed slowly from the brush into full view as he sighted. Feeling the wind at his back, he knew his scent would quickly arrive downwind to reveal his presence. No time to settle his breathing, he fired too quickly, and the shot veered to the right. The cat had already caught his scent and turned. By the arc of the lion’s leap, he knew he had hit it. By the speed of the cat’s flight, by the elongation of its stride, he knew he had merely grazed it, perhaps nicking the rear flank, but doing nothing to hurt it or slow it in any meaningful way. There would be no wounded animal to track down.
The work of the season was complete. Now that he knew for certain what his prey was and knew that it now roamed somewhere within his range, he would be ready. He would be alert, on point, unencumbered by any frivolous distraction. He would stalk this ancient prey with the vigilance and respect such a formidable predator deserved.
