by Jake Halpern
Outside, in a quiet corner of the parking lot, Sam Knight, Thad’s oldest son, dialed the number of the cell phone that they’d insisted Thad get. It was odd happenstance that Thad was whisked into the world of global communication out of his stubborn desire to live in utter seclusion. On that night, however, it came in handy. Excitedly, Sam told his father the news: They voted for the dike—it’s all settled. Thad was greatly relieved, though even then he had worries. His house lay in ruins. He had very little money saved and no income to count on other than Social Security. Perhaps most daunting of all, a very long winter lay ahead. Thad braced himself for the worst, and within just two weeks, it came.16
In the days that followed the vote, the Army Corps of Engineers hurriedly assembled a crew to rebuild the dike. Every moment counted. By June another hurricane season would be under way, and the town of Princeville lay unprotected. The decision to turn down the FEMA buyout was pivotal, but now two equally important questions were on the table: Was it possible to build a better dike? And could it be finished on time?
The answers soon rested in the hands of a man named Prentice Lanier, the young builder who won the contract to rebuild the dike. In the world of government contracting, the dike was a modest project with a limited budget of roughly $768,000, little of which Lanier would see himself. Essentially it was a repair job. FEMA said it would pay only to restore the dike to its preflood level. The old dike was just a wall of red clay, roughly two miles long and on average twenty feet high. It had worked well enough for thirty years—then came Hurricane Floyd, topping the dike by a solid three feet. Floyd was a massive storm—some even called it “the storm of the century”—yet it cleared the dike with ease, proving that there was plenty of leeway for a lesser storm to do the same.*
Determined to make the best of a bad deal, town officials began exploring ways to raise the dike further. Eager to help, the Army Corps of Engineers petitioned Congress for money to conduct preliminary tests on the benefits of a higher dike. Meanwhile, at the edge of town, Prentice Lanier began a double-speed effort—bringing in truckload after truckload of red clay—trying to reach a base level of thirty-seven feet by the first of June, in time for the hurricane season.
Several miles to the south, at the opposite end of town, Thad Knight was dealing with pressing concerns of his own. One day in early December, as Thad sat in his carport, he started to feel his feet swell and his chest tighten. “I didn’t think much of it,” he later told me. “I just figured I’d gotten too much fresh air.” But that evening, as he undressed for bed, Thad discovered that his feet were so swollen that he couldn’t take his shoes off. The tightening in his chest had also gotten worse, so he called his daughter Cynthia and told her that he was a little worried.
One of Thad’s sons soon picked him up, and together they met the rest of the family in the emergency room of Heritage Hospital in Tarboro. Thad waited to be seen by a doctor for about thirty minutes, until a nurse realized he was having a heart attack and rushed him into an examining room. His circulation was merely trickling, and his heart was skipping beats. The doctor quickly put him on blood thinner and sent him to the hospital’s intensive care unit, where he stayed for the next few days.
When Thad’s condition finally stabilized, his children came to the hospital to help him check out. The doctor explained that Thad needed a lot of rest and constant supervision. He was lucky to be alive, and the last thing he should be doing was struggling to survive in the wilderness. So Thad’s children began discussing at whose house he would recover and how they’d move all his stuff. Finally Thad interjected and explained his intentions: He would return to Princeville. For a moment no one said anything. “We were shocked,” one of his daughters later told me. “Totally shocked.”
Eventually several of his children pushed him to justify his decision, but Thad was reluctant to explain himself. “He had just made up his mind,” his youngest son, Dennis, later told me. “There was no talking him out of it.” Finally the family reached a compromise: Thad would allow his twenty-year-old grandson, Tee, to live with him. Reluctantly, the doctor agreed. But when Tee showed up at his trailer later that night, Thad told him not to bother. Instead Tee agreed to join Thad for dinner every so often, and the arrangement became their little secret. “I’m still asking the Lord for forgiveness on that one,” Thad told me with a smile.
As Thad recounted this part of the story months later from the comfort of his carport, I found myself empathizing with his children. What was he trying to prove? Was this one last gasp against the indignities and helplessness of old age? Or was it precisely the opposite? There was something undeniably moribund about Thad’s vigil. Granted, he had reason to be proud. His house was a physical reminder that he had stayed by his father’s side, that he had given up sharecropping, and that he had raised his family to live a better life. Yet all these things were in the past, and now even the house itself was crumbling and empty—a final and irrefutable reminder that his life was just a shell of what it once was. Thad never admitted it to me, but it had to be very depressing at times. And on quiet winter mornings, as he sat in a town that was all but dead, surrounded by several hundred snowcapped graves, wouldn’t it be natural to think of letting go? Wasn’t it possible that he had come home to die?
Thad assured me that this was not the case, but he conceded that during the winter death was occasionally in his thoughts, especially in February, when a work crew arrived to rebury the town’s dead. Thad walked down the road behind his house to meet the crew. He offered them bottled water, and together they chatted as a backhoe dug deep holes into the frozen earth. The unearthed corpses were now entombed in giant steel “hurricane-proof” coffins. For years corpses had been popping out of the earth during bad floods, as if to express some belated desire to leave. “You don’t have to worry about these things floating away,” a crew member told him. These coffins were pure ballast. Thad watched the crew rebury them one by one.
That winter, the workmen were not Thad’s only visitors. Occasionally, as people drove through Princeville, some of them stopped and asked Thad questions: Are you all right? What happened to this town? What are you still doing here? Glad to have the company, Thad would tell them his whole story, starting with the night of the flood. They would listen, and when he was done they would often hand him some money. Thad always protested, but they would insist, stuffing money into his coat pockets. By the end of the winter visitors had given him almost five thousand dollars in crumpled bills. Thad took that money and put it away. For the first time since the flood, it looked like he might have the means to rebuild his house.
By the end of winter, Thad was no longer the town’s only resident. A handful of other people, including Commissioner Anne Howell, had also moved their trailers back into town. By springtime the rudiments of civilization had returned: working phone lines, streetlights on every corner, and lawnmowers trimming roadside grass. A makeshift mayor’s office was even erected in the shadow of the old town hall. Slowly, life was returning to normal. Yet June was just around the corner, and repairs on the dike were well behind schedule. It rained often, and from a distance the dike came to resemble a giant, sloping pile of mud. For many it also carried an unshakable air of defeat. It was a broken fortification, a kind of earthen Maginot Line. Now, however, all anyone could do was hope that Prentice Lanier would fix it in time.
By the time I met Thad, it was already mid-April, and the air had warmed to a temperate sixty-five degrees. It was ideal camping weather; and as night finally fell, cloaking the town’s landscape, I began to feel better about my tenting situation. At least the tombstones were out of sight. In the meantime I continued to sit with Thad in his carport, chatting about the flood and admiring the glimmer of unchallenged starlight.
When I had first arrived earlier in the evening, I hadn’t gotten a good look at his house. The rubbish fire and Thad’s government-issue trailer had blocked my view. Now that I’d committed to spending the night, however, T
had insisted on showing me around. He opened the side door to the house, and I was taken aback at what I saw—a completely restored interior. There were brand-new walls, floors, ceilings, fixtures, and appliances. The outside definitely needed a little work, but on second glance, I noticed that the windows, shingles, and rain gutters were also new.
“Isn’t it amazing?” asked Thad. “Just like Noah and those Hebrew boys, I’m starting a new life.”
Thad explained that the house had been restored within the last month. A group of Mennonite volunteers from Ohio and Pennsylvania had done the work. They’d used some building supplies donated by celebrities, and when those ran out, Thad had bought the remaining supplies with his own money.17
The rebuilding process wasn’t easy, explained Thad. Just two years before the flood, he had paid to have his entire house remodeled. He’d put in new floors, a new roof, and new furnishings. On the day the Mennonites tore out the floorboards, Thad paced about restlessly. He was still repaying the bank for those slabs of wood—$250 a month—and he’d have to keep repaying this “home improvement loan” for the next few years. Eventually Thad retired to his small trailer and turned up the volume on his transistor radio, drowning out the clamor of construction.
Now Thad was once again living in his own house, but he was far from safe. Hurricane season was just a few weeks away, and Prentice Lanier was more than a month behind schedule building the dike. Thad’s early decision to rebuild had clearly put him at risk, and I had to wonder why he couldn’t wait just a few more months until the dike was fully restored. Thad seemed to be taking one brazen risk after another. His life was quickly taking on the epic dimensions of the Bible stories that he spent all day reading. And as everything swung precariously in the balance, Thad told me that he had begun to taste Daniel’s and Jonah’s gnawing fear, Job’s spiraling sense of loss, and Noah’s cautious hope. “They almost felt like real people in my life,” explained Thad. It was an intoxicating religious experience, a crowning test of his faith in self and God, and gradually even Thad’s children were won over by his fervor and his apparently unstoppable momentum. Later in my stay Thad’s youngest daughter, Cynthia, explained: “Dad kept telling us that God was going to work things out for him—was going to restore everything he lost—and after a while, we just stopped worrying.”
As Thad and I finished out the evening on his carport, we marveled at the strange twist of events that had brought him here. It was an odd life, filled with renewed faith and strange new curiosities—like air-conditioning, cell phones, and sneakers. Thad had only recently discovered the comfort of sneakers. Currently he had two of his favorite pairs on display on the table at the far end of the carport: a pair of Saucony running shoes and a pair of Nike Air high-tops. “I never wore sneakers before the flood,” he told me. “Now I have ten pairs.” Apparently, during the relief effort, the town of Princeville was inundated with donations of sneakers.
“It’s hard to go back to shoes after wearing sneakers,” I told him.
“Yeah,” he said, “but I think I have enough to last me a long time.”
A cool breeze blew across the lawn, stoking the dying embers of the rubbish fire and sending a slight shiver up my back. It was almost time for sleep, which meant my returning to the graveyard. I needed to get going, but first I had to ask, “Does it bother you living next to a cemetery?”
“Oh, I don’t worry about the people in the cemetery because those folks are bygones. It’s the people out here you have to worry about,” he said, pointing to a passing car.
Somehow I doubted whether that would calm me later that night as I returned to my tent to sleep with those bygones. Unfazed, Thad continued talking about the cemetery, explaining that all of the deceased relatives from his immediate family were buried back there—except his son Carlton, who had killed himself a few years before and was buried elsewhere.
“One day my son just went back over there and shot himself,” said Thad, pointing with his finger to almost the exact location where my tent was pitched. “The thing is, he told his mother he was going to kill himself. She called me at the mill and gave me the message, but I said that he must be joking. When I finally came home, it was around this time of night, and some of the neighbor children told me that he had gone around back with my shotgun and they had heard a noise.” Thad paused. “I never did know why he did it, or why he drove the eight miles from his house to do it over here.”
I wasn’t sure why Carlton wasn’t buried in the graveyard with the rest of the Knights, and Thad didn’t offer much of an explanation. In some cultures the corpse of a suicide is deliberately buried as far away from home as possible so that its ghost might not find its way back. Suicide ghosts are considered particularly restless because of the desperate state of mind in which they leave life. The Baganda tribe of Uganda buries a suicide’s corpse at a distant crossroad; the Bannaus of Cambodia bury suicides in a far corner of a forest; and the Alabama Indians simply throw them into a river.18 No matter where Carlton was buried, however, it was clear that his choice to kill himself at home had a haunting effect. Every day, Thad couldn’t help but glance at the spot where it happened, remembering the excruciating details of the day he found him, again and again, until it seemed that Carlton’s ghost had also made its way home.
There were other questions I had about Carlton’s death, but somehow I didn’t have the heart to ask them. Instead I sat quietly for a few more minutes, listening to the crickets and the sound of cars. Finally, I bid Thad good night and trudged back toward the graveyard, wanting nothing more than to fall fast asleep. But just as I was zipping up my tent, I heard a rather unsettling screech. I poked my head back outside and noticed for the first time that there was an old barn set back about a hundred feet in the woods, with a rusty door that looked like it would be swinging all night long. Just then, I heard what sounded like a pack of dogs barking in the distance.
Before I’d left the carport, Thad had invited me to stay in his guest room if the rain or wind kicked up. But I could see from my tent’s screened-in moon roof that it was pretty much a perfect night. I lay sleepless for a good hour, and then I swallowed my pride, put on my shoes, and exited my tent. Moments later I was knocking on Thad’s door. To my relief, he was still up. It was clear he knew what had happened. “It is a bit chilly out there,” he said casually. “Come on in. I’m just making some hog’s head.” He led me down a narrow hallway past a faux oil painting of Jesus, and into his guest room, where I would end up sleeping for the remainder of the week. Thad said good night, and I drifted off to the sweet, synthetic scent of new carpet and fresh paint.
The next morning I awoke to the sound of rain, and before I knew it I found myself thinking about the dike. The thought seemed to come with the weather; the two are inseparable in Princeville. It occurred to me that there should be a small gauge in everyone’s house indicating the water level.
An hour or so later I was treading through a light rain to have a look at the dike for myself. On the way, I passed Glennie’s General Store, one of the town’s oldest business establishments. Now the two-storied building was in shambles, and a backhoe was loading wreckage into a dumpster while three men looked on idly from the street. These three men made up the building’s work crew, though calling them a “work crew” is a bit misleading, as I’m not sure I ever saw them do much work. In theory, however, they were in charge of gutting Glennie’s and getting it ready to be rebuilt. Throughout my one-week stay in Princeville, I stopped and chatted with the crew, usually in the mornings, on my way back from buying coffee in Tarboro. Today their only real responsibility was to ensure that the backhoe didn’t tear up the gas line leading to the pump in front of the store.
“My biggest worry is that snakes could be slithering all around in the store,” said William, the leader of the crew. This apparently was the wrong thing to say around Arthur, the crew’s one senior citizen, who was already quite uneasy about the whole arrangement.
“If I s
ee a motherfucking snake, William, just one of those slithering motherfuckers, I’m out of here like that.” William rolled his eyes. “And if they hit that gas line,” continued Authur, who was now on a roll, “I’ll run the other motherfucking way, and I’m never coming back.” Arthur had the highest rate of “motherfucker” usage per sentence I’d ever heard; it almost served as cadence, lending a pleasant rhythm to everything he said. Arthur talked for a while more, delivering an epic soliloquy on the dangers of the workplace and cracking us all up as the backhoe drew dangerously close to the gas pump.
When I mentioned that I was headed over to take a look at the dike, the crew seemed interested. “The dike, huh . . .” said William. “My mom is still too scared to go near the river or the dike. Doesn’t trust it, and I don’t blame her.”
“Yeah, something about that dike doesn’t look right,” affirmed Arthur.
“What’s that?” I asked.
“It’s not motherfucking high enough.”
After saying goodbye to the crew, I continued onward through a steadily intensifying rain until I reached the dike. As I climbed up its muddy side, I struggled to keep from sinking. The clay had become so damp that it was literally sucking my shoes into the ground. When I pulled them out, big chunks of the dike clung to my soles, turning my sneakers into platform shoes.
On the top of the dike I was relieved to find that it stood a good distance above the river, but as I headed down a bit farther, I soon discovered a number of giant gaps through which water could easily rush in. I continued walking until I found a parked tractor with a thirtyish-looking man in work boots and a hardhat standing next to it. I introduced myself. He shook my hand, gave me a hardhat, and told me his name was Prentice Lanier.
