When Butterflies Cry: A Novel

by Ninie Hammon

Grayson’s eyes blinked open. He came to full consciousness abruptly, didn’t go through any of the intermediate stages—like the time he’d fallen asleep standing up and awoke to find a hole in Haystack’s forehead.

  He knew instantly where he was, though he wasn’t clear what specifically had happened that’d knocked his feet out from under him and put him facedown in the dirt. But he knew the result of whatever it was as soon as he tried to move. Agony ripped up his left arm, made a hairpin turn at his elbow and exploded into his shoulder. When he eased over onto his right side, he saw that his left hand was extended at an extremely odd angle from his arm, courtesy, he was sure, of a broken wrist.

  He gritted his teeth against the pain, took his left arm in his right hand and held it to his body as he staggered drunkenly to his feet, fearing that each new movement would reveal another injury. An incapacitating one.

  He stood unsteadily, the pain making him nauseous, feeling a heartbeat throbbing in his head that made him suspect he might have given himself a concussion on the front of his skull to match the crack in the back. When he started to run again, the jolting motion set all the agonies screeching, each one determined to be the one his reeling senses attended to first. But he ignored them all.

  * * *

  Carter had misjudged. He didn’t plow into the side of the blue vehicle that had materialized out of the fog in front of him. Oh, he hit it all right, a screeching, scraping, sideswiping jolt that sent him flying headfirst over the steering wheel into the windshield.

  Sparklers exploded in front of his eyes, his forehead felt numb and thick, and a thousand bees took up residence between his temples and conducted a buzzing concert.

  Then he felt a hand on his shoulder, but it seemed to take a long time to turn his head. When the jumbled synapses began firing accurate information again, he actually managed a little smile.

  “Sheriff Cliff! Am I glad I ran into you!”

  * * *

  Grayson was not in great danger of falling again now because he couldn’t generate enough speed, being off balance with his arms clutched to his body and dizzy from getting his bell rung. How long had he lain there? How much time did he have left? He swallowed the vomit rising with an acid taste in the back of his throat—did not want to revisit the half-cooked venison from last night—and staggered forward into the white nothingness.

  How would he carry his mother with a broken wrist? And carry her he must; she couldn’t walk. The simple act of picking her up and hauling her out of the house at a dead run would very likely kill her. But what would he do now?

  * * *

  Sheriff Cliff had come to investigate reports from Cricket Hollow on the other side of Chicken Gizzard Mountain of an explosion up near the dam. It took less than thirty seconds for Carter to tell the big man everything he needed to know.

  “Come on!” the sheriff ordered and tried to yank Carter’s door open and couldn’t. The wreck had smashed it stuck. Carter quickly slid across the seat. He grabbed the pink blankie Sadie had left lying there and used it to wipe off the blood on his upper lip—courtesy, he was sure, of another broken nose. Riley’s face appeared and disappeared like the burp of a song when you spin the dial on the radio. The sheriff was already back in his cruiser, had whipped it around and barely slowed down for Carter to leap into the passenger seat before he tore out back down the road with lights flashing and siren waling, babbling into his radio to dispatch to sound the fire alarm.

  Even before they made the turn down Northfield Road toward town center, the sheriff had keyed the loud speaker on the roof and was literally shouting into the mouthpiece.

  “Dam’s busted. Get to high ground. Run!”

  As they raced down the road, Carter turned backward in the seat and saw people rushing out of their homes. Some, but not nearly enough. And the ones who were leaving seemed too dazed and unbelieving to be in the kind of life-and-death hurry needed to save themselves. The cruiser flew past the Carpenter’s house where Melanie Carpenter had the whole brood out in the yard in their Sunday best—which wasn’t much given that Rufus Carpenter was still laid up in the rehab center in Charleston with a crushed leg he got in a roof fall in the mine. She and the seven kids were standing by the road, apparently waiting for a ride to Sunday school.

  Melanie gawked at the sheriff’s car, the loudspeaker blaring, “Run. Get to high ground. The dam’s busted!” And Carter was absolutely certain the woman wasn’t capable of forming the intent to run or carrying it out in time to save her family.

  “Stop the car!” he yelled.

  Sheriff Cliff obeyed out of instinct.

  “What are you—?” he began.

  “You go on; I’m staying here!”

  * * *

  When Grayson stumbled out of the woods onto the road, he almost tripped over his own feet. He could hardly see at all now. Blood from the cut on his forehead had flowed into his left eye, blinding him, and he couldn’t let go of his broken wrist to wipe the blood away.

  He knew that with the roaring in his ears, he wouldn’t likely hear the rumble of the impending black tidal wave until it was right on him, and he had been running for—how long? Ten minutes? Two? A week?—with the hair standing up on the back of his neck the way you cringe away from a blow you know is coming at you from behind. He had no idea how long he had left but figured it might only be measured in seconds. And he thought all these thoughts as he turned without so much as a pause and began to run down the road toward the house.

  “Down” was a relative term. There wasn’t much of an incline, which meant he was very close to the house. The road climbed the mountain in switchbacks, but after the last one down from the house, it leveled out, passed in front of the house and stayed more or less level, parallel to the top of the ridge, until the final switchback that went steeply up to the church.

  With nothing in front of him, he could actually run now. At least as fast as his body would allow. He willed his legs to pump madly—jarring his screaming wrist, jolting his throbbing head, every contact with the road sending daggers of pain into so many places he couldn’t even distinguish exactly where he hurt. It was an everywhere agony that didn’t matter in the slightest and didn’t slow him down in his mad dash to—

  The house materialized out of the mist. Like a dream, the white of the fog took on form with shadows and outlines. The roof. The porch. The fence.

  The question of how he would get the gate open with a broken wrist formed even as he saw that it wasn’t latched. He heard himself begin to shout when he was sure no one could possibly hear him yet.

  “Piper! Piper. Come on! We have to—”

  And then she appeared on the porch. He watched an incredible wave of emotions wash over her tear-stained face.

  “Oh, Gray. What happened to you? Did you find the girls?”

  “No time!” he barked the words harshly, a verbal slap to shut her up. “We have to get Ma and—”

  “Gray, your Ma’s…gone.”

  Don’t react. Do the necessary!

  “Come on!” he cried, ignoring the shock on her face. “The dam’s blown! “

  She sucked in a gasp.

  “Where’s Sadie?”

  “Safe.” Then he let go of his left wrist, ignoring the vision-blurring pain. He grabbed her hand, turned and yanked her toward the road.

  “Run!” he screamed.

  And they ran.

  * * *

  Carter bolted down the road toward the frightened, confused family, told himself his decision didn’t have anything at all to do with the fact that every last one of those kids had red hair.

  He slid to a stop in front of the Carpenters, grabbed the two youngest children—about two and three—one under each arm.

  Melanie was holding the baby, so he said to a teenager and a boy of about twelve, “Grab the little ones and come on, or you got less than five minutes to live!”

  At as close to a dead run as he could manage hauling two small children, Carter took out across the
road, over the railroad track and started up the hillside on the other side. The valley curved. Safest place, if there was such a thing, was on the east side. How high up would depend on how much water came tearing down the valley at once. If the smaller dam let go in pieces, allowing only a portion of the water to escape at one time, then…he could barely see ten feet in front of him as he ran and the others were merely terrified voices behind him in the mist. Both children he was carrying were silent, had never let out so much as a peep when a total stranger yanked them up and hauled them away like he was stealing pigs.

  Then he heard what could have been distant thunder. But he knew what it was, and the sound knocked the breath out of him so he staggered a step, slowed just enough for the others to catch up.

  Melanie was running but looking over her shoulder, yelling, “Tommy! Tom—!” She literally stumbled into Carter. “Tommy went back for his dog, for Buttons.”

  Carter grabbed a teenager as the boy surged past, dragging his little sister by the hand, and thrust the two-year-old at him.

  He set the three-year-old on the ground and told the little boy to “Run!” and the kid took off up the hill faster than Carter had been carrying him.

  Then Carter plunged back into the mist, yelling, “Tom! Tommy!”

  Chapter 33

  Edna Turpin was the only person who actually saw the collapse of both dams that hurled a wall of black water down into Sadler Hollow on that foggy morning in August of 1969. She would say until her dying breath that it was the single most horrible sight her eyes ever beheld.

  She stood on the top of the ridge, trembling, after the blond man—which Addington brother was he?—shoved the pretty little girl into her arms and went barreling down into the fog in her truck. The child was drenched, overalls and T-shirt soaked in nasty black water. The ends of her long hair was wet, too, musta hung down in it, and she was missing a shoe.

  But what had happened to the other little girl, the redheaded child? She’d been down there with the men and then the little girl fell into the rocks and…Edna’s eyes wasn’t good as they once was, and she’d had to strain to see what was going on. They’d got the little one out—but where was the other one? The one who had dreamed of a black monster, a demon that at this very moment was about to come out of her nightmare to gobble up the world!

  Edna understood that she was in no danger, far as she was above the two dams in the valley. But it was so awful and scary she wanted to run and hide anyway. She couldn’t have dragged herself away even if she’d tried, though, which she didn’t. She was transfixed, nailed to the spot in horrid fascination.

  The angelic little girl—her name was Sadie!—had stopped crying, just sucked her thumb and sniffled that hitching sound of young’uns who’ve cried for so long their breath won’t go in and out proper for a while after. Even she, little as she was, stared at the spectacle in wonder—with eyes that was purple! Can you beat that! Watching what was happening was like sitting in your car at one of them drive-in movies she’d seen one time when they was in Charleston. Only wasn’t no movie screen nowhere big enough to hold the size of this catastrophe, and she and the child had the only seats in the house.

  Edna wouldn’t let herself think about them folks in the holler. She knew some of ’em, though she didn’t have no kin there. She’d only come over from Burnt Stump Holler last night to stay with an old lady had the palsy. She was the granny of one of the ladies in Edna’s church, the Burnt Stump Full Gospel Fire Baptized Holiness Church, and there’d been a sign-up sheet just inside the front door for folks to help out the family. She’d come, slept sittin’ up in a chair and left soon’s the lady from next-door come to take her place.

  Those ladies—the granny and the one from next-door—they wasn’t going to live to see another sunrise. But Edna wouldn’t let her mind go there, just stared as the huge black coal dam with a rip in its side came completely apart before her eyes.

  For a little bit after the young blond fella left, didn’t nothing new happen to the dam. Water kept coming out the rip and over the top where them hunks had washed away. The water flowed down hill and filled up the lake they’d come to see, and like a bathtub, soon’s too much water come in one end, it started overflowing out the other.

  Within minutes after water started pouring over the top of the dam directly below her, she could see where pieces of it was starting to wash away, too. It didn’t have no crack blown in the middle like the other one, but it couldn’t possibly hold out for very long. There was too much water pushing on it and more coming every minute.

  The little girl’s hitching breathing had calmed almost back to normal, and Edna was getting real tired of holding her. She was a little mite of a thing, and Edna was strong as a woman half her age. But her back had commenced to ache and her arm where she held the little girl’s weight was starting to cramp.

  She’d about decided she had to sit down right there in the dirt and hold the child in her lap when she heard a rumble. It was the rumble of thunder, of a storm cloud the greenish-purple of a day-old bruise, full of lightning and hail. Only it wasn’t thunder. The sound wasn’t coming from the sky and real thunder didn’t go on and on, neither, getting louder and louder. The little girl commenced to crying again, but not the wailing hysteria like when her uncle’d handed her off to a total stranger and run off in the truck. This cry was a whining, terrified cry. And Edna didn’t realize at first that her own voice had joined the little girl’s in a horrified wail.

  The rumble came from the big dam, the sound of it…buckling. The black water finally had its way and smashed the whole rest of the dam backward out of its path in a massive, roaring collapse. Set free all at once, a wave of churning black water and coal waste—thick, almost like tar—careened down the ever-narrowing valley toward the smaller dam. It roared up the north side of the valley, back down and up the south side, zigzagging its way, gathering speed. Edna hadn’t never seen no real buffalo. Just pictures. But a million of them stampeding couldn’t have made a sound loud as that.

  A wall of water rushed out over the little lake and slammed down with a hammer blow on the dam at the end, exploding it out of the top of the hollow like the cork out of a bottle of champagne. Pieces of the smaller dam flew into the trees below like shards of a crystal glass dropped on a hardwood floor.

  Then water roared through the opening between the two ridges with a mighty rumble, crashed into the valley beneath the ridge and thundered on down the hollow, wiping out everything in its path, dragging a flood of black water behind it like the tail of a kite. A black monster—that’s what the little red-haired girl said, a bogeyman that wouldn’t fit in nobody’s closet, a horror whose roar would fuel Edna’s nightmares for the rest of her life. And then the monster disappeared in the mist. Edna could hear it rumbling on down below, eating trees and houses and only the good Lord above knew what else. At first, water gushed over the empty space between the ridges that looked like the hole where a little kid’s tooth had come out. But the water level dropped fast, and soon there wasn’t much of a flow at all.

  In the silence that followed, Edna walked slowly and carefully forward a few steps, far enough that she could see what there was to see above the mist. A swath of bare black mud wide as a football field lay before her that only a few minutes ago had been forest. Even the uprooted trees were gone. The black monster had eaten it all, then vanished into the mist.

  Chapter 34

  Grayson had that awful sensation of running in slow motion, of being stuck in quicksand, of every movement taking ten times longer than it ought to.

  Piper had taken his left elbow, allowing him to use his right hand to immobilize his wrist again against his belly. He was dragging him along with her long strides. He wanted to tell her to run on ahead, not to wait for him, but he didn’t have the air to say it and knew it wouldn’t do any good if he did. They’d both make it out of this, or they wouldn’t. But whatever happened, they were in it to the end together.

  H
e was grateful the road wasn’t steep here, that the sharp incline didn’t start for another half mile, because he was using up the very last vestiges of his strength. This final push would leave him totally spent. They had to make it far enough north on the mountainside to be beyond the path of the flood that would be released when the little dam at the top of the hollow could no longer hold back the ever-growing lake behind it.

  Then they heard a rumble, a grumbling thunderous roar. Reverberations shook the earth, went on and on, growled louder and louder. Grayson knew instantly what it was and comprehension momentarily staggered him. Not the big dam…

  Oh, dear G…

  Even with his damaged hearing, he heard the roar. But he’d have heard even if he’d been deaf because it was the sound of death itself, and even the deaf can hear death coming.

  The world got brighter as he and Piper neared the edge of the blanket of fog. Here, the mist merely obscured and faded images. Somehow the blurring was worse. It stole colors, softened shapes and made the ordinary alien. And then it was gone altogether, and they were out in the bright morning sunshine. As he ran, he looked back over his shoulder at the black smile between the ridges where water three feet deep gushed over the crumbling top of the dam and poured in a thick black waterfall down the forty-foot drop to the creek bed.

  Then the black monster of his nightmare—of Maggie’s nightmare—reared up behind the dam like an evil sea serpent. Life held its breath for a heartbeat. Then the wall of churning black water crashed down on it, shattered it, fired huge hunks of the dam out into the air like shrapnel.

  The monster dived down the side of the mountain, then leaped like an attacking leopard. Black and oily, more viscous solid than water, it ripped trees out of the ground as it roared through them. He and Piper were both looking back now as it loomed above them, the outside edge hurling at them like an avalanche of black snow.