American Struggle

by Veda Boyd Jones

  The night wore on. Emma and Rob curled up in heavy quilts near the fire. Noises downstairs woke Emma several times, and each time she sat up in the darkness, wondering for a moment where she was. Then she realized debris and furniture were floating against the walls or the staircase. Miss Clara’s snore, almost as loud as her laugh, was nearly as disturbing as the thuds that echoed from below them.

  Late in the night, Emma awoke to find the fire nearly out. Something was different, something she couldn’t put her finger on at first. Then she realized the rain had stopped at last. She got up to look outside and found that the clouds had moved away, leaving the stars twinkling in the dark sky. Moonlight reflected off the water that lapped against the houses, but the churning and swirling she’d seen earlier had calmed. Emma fed the fire a couple sticks of firewood and settled back on the floor.

  “Rob! Rob!”

  Emma was startled awake at daybreak. She sat up sleepily and watched as Rob rushed to the window and pushed it open. “Father!”

  “Thank the good Lord you’re safe.” Emma could hear the relief in the voice from outside. “I knew you’d be here. I knew you would be. Is Emma there with you?”

  Emma got to her feet and joined Rob at the window. The two sisters crowded in beside her. Uncle Anthony was below the window in a rowboat!

  “Good morning, Anthony.” Miss Clara laughed. “Come to take these children home?”

  “I suspect they’ve overstayed their welcome.” Rob’s father smiled up at Emma. “Your mother will finally be able to rest once she knows you’re safe.”

  “Oh, they were both a big help to us yesterday evening.” With attention to each smallest detail, Miss Ruthann related the story of moving their belongings upstairs.

  While she was talking, Rob put on his dry stockings and shoes, and Emma combed her fingers through her tousled hair. The children walked to the top of the stairs. Emma hung back while Rob opened the door, but curiosity overcame her fear. The floodwater had risen to four steps below the second floor. Rob quickly shut the door again.

  The bedroom was cold from the opened window, so Emma slipped on her coat as Rob put more logs on the fire. Emma cast a worried glance at the two old ladies. Now that it was time to go, she was having second thoughts. Could the sisters manage without them here? She looked at the window doubtfully. She wasn’t sure she and Rob could get them out the window to the boat; somehow, she couldn’t picture Miss Ruthann having the strength to hold on to a rope … and Miss Clara might break it.

  “Rob?” came his father’s voice from below the window.

  Rob scurried to the window.

  “I’ll throw this up, and you can tie it to something that will hold.” Rob caught the rope on the first throw and tied it to the bedpost.

  “Will you be all right here?” he asked Miss Ruthann.

  “We’ll be fine if you keep us supplied with water and firewood,” Miss Clara answered. “And maybe some food, too.” She laughed.

  “I’ll bring you supplies every day,” Rob promised.

  “Thank you for dinner last night,” Emma added politely. Then with a sigh of relief, she reached for the rope.

  Climbing out the window and holding on to the rope at the same time was no easy feat. The sisters never could have done it. Emma struggled to wrap her legs around the rope and lower herself hand over hand, but her skirts kept getting in her way, and the palms of her hands burned. Rob’s father held the other end of the rope and guided Emma’s feet to the hardwood flooring of the rowboat. Then he reached up to guide his son down the rope. Once they’d untangled themselves, Rob’s father hugged both children tightly.

  “Thank God you’re all right,” Uncle Anthony said again. “Let’s get you home, Emma, so your folks will know you’re safe.”

  “It’s got to be ten feet deep here,” Rob told Emma four days later as their rowboat floated down Elm Street. The shingle that jutted out over Barnett’s Mercantile was almost that high off the street, and only the tip of it was above the water. Emma looked up at it; if she’d wanted, she could have reached up and touched it. “I can’t believe it’s so deep,” she said.

  A light snow started as Rob turned the boat onto Front Street. A couple minutes later, they slowed the boat as they reached the sisters’ dwelling on Plum Street.

  “Ahoy,” Rob shouted, and the Davis sisters waved from the second-floor window.

  “What have you brought us today?” Miss Clara called once she’d opened the window.

  “Fresh eggs,” Rob answered. “Lower the rope.” He caught the free end and tied it to the water pail. Miss Clara pulled the pail up. Emma rocked the boat as she crawled toward the bow. Yesterday Miss Clara had spilled a good portion of the water from the pail, and it had splashed on Emma. She wasn’t going to risk that again. Her hat and coat were already getting wet from the snow.

  “Is that Emma with you again?” Miss Clara asked as she lowered the now-empty pail.

  “Yes, Miss Clara,” Emma answered.

  “She brought the eggs and milk in from the farm,” Rob said as he untied the rope and knotted it around the basket of food Emma held. Once again Miss Clara pulled up the rope.

  “Tie on the wood rug,” Rob said. Once it was lowered, he filled it with firewood. “Do you need anything else today?”

  “No, we’ll be fine until tomorrow,” Miss Clara said. “Thank you.”

  “We’ll see you tomorrow.” Rob paddled the boat toward Main Street.

  “God bless you,” Miss Ruthann called after them.

  “I wouldn’t want to be stuck on the second floor like that,” Emma said. “It would be like living on a deserted island.”

  “Except they’re not really alone. They see us and others from church every day,” Rob said. “Father says this could last a couple of weeks, and I’m in charge of taking them supplies.” This was the second day Rob and Emma had been allowed to take the boat out on their own. The first few days, the water had been too swift, but now that it was starting to recede, Uncle Anthony had turned responsibility for the Davis sisters’ care over to Rob.

  “It’s weird seeing snow on water,” Emma said. “It doesn’t stick.” She was almost eleven, and she’d never seen it snow on this much water.

  Rob guided the boat through the whirl of white toward what was normally a busy wharf. “The flooded area’s about a mile wide. That’s a powerful lot of water to get downstream.”

  “Look there!” Emma exclaimed. At the public landing, three steamboats were tied to trees because the wharves were underwater.

  “Father says there’s too much debris in the water to travel, even for a steamship. See how fast the water’s moving out in the channel?”

  The cousins explored the flooded streets, with Rob occasionally calling out for any other stranded townspeople. No one answered. The eerie quiet was in stark contrast to five days earlier when shouting merchants, with every hand they could find, had been moving their goods to upper floors or higher ground.

  “Look there!” Emma said again. Water poured into the fourth story of the steam mill. “How deep do you think the river is?”

  “Maybe seventy feet in the channel,” Rob said. She knew he was parroting what he’d heard his father discuss with the men of the families who were staying with them until they could return to their flooded homes. “Have you seen enough? We ought to be getting home. Aunt Kristen might be waiting on you to start back to the farm.” Emma’s mother wasn’t really his aunt, but that’s what he called her.

  “I’m sure glad Mama’s been letting me come see you again. After me being gone all night, I was afraid she was never going to let me go anywhere again. Those first few days, she’d barely let me out of her sight.”

  “Father says the flood of ‘32 will be remembered for a long time.”

  “It’s the worst I’ve ever seen. But why do you live here and get flooded year after year? That makes no sense.” Emma felt suddenly impatient with her relatives for putting up with this mess again and
again when they could have lived on higher ground outside of town the way her own family did.

  “Father can’t build steamships and carry them to the river,” Rob said defensively. “His yard has to be on the water.”

  Emma shrugged. “I’d never live here. It floods every year. It’s never missed one year.”

  “We’re used to it,” Rob said. “And nobody drowned this year.”

  “Thank God for that,” Emma said.

  She knew Rob couldn’t argue with her on that point; he gave his energy to rowing the boat back toward his house. When they got to the edge of the floodwaters, he jumped onto a sidewalk and tied the boat to a hitching post. He held the skiff steady while Emma climbed out, holding her skirts up so the hem wouldn’t get wet and muddy. Rob carried the empty water pail, and Emma carried the basket on the quarter-mile walk to the Etingoff house.

  The place was bursting with activity. Mama and Papa plus Emma’s little brother and sister, Rob’s sister and parents, and the two extra families filled the house with noise.

  Emma described the flooded area to her mother.

  “Anthony,” Mama said to Rob’s father, “do you remember the big flood a few days after we moved to Cincinnati? We were scared to death we couldn’t get all our belongings moved out of the warehouse before the Ohio ruined them.”

  “I remember,” Rob’s father said. “We almost lost my dog.”

  “That dog was a pesky animal,” Mama said. “And I think your new one might be just like him.” She motioned to the window where Rob’s little brown dog was whining to get inside.

  Rob’s father grinned. “We call him Jackson.”

  “Why did you name your dog after the president?” Mama asked.

  “Reminds me who’s in office.” He laughed.

  The grown-ups talked a few more minutes before Emma’s parents rounded up their children. Rob stood on the porch with the others while Emma’s father hitched the team to the wagon. Then they loaded empty egg baskets and milk containers.

  “We’ll bring more goods into town tomorrow,” Mama said.

  “Thanks for taking me with you,” Emma called to Rob. “I’ll see you tomorrow. And then pretty soon school will start up again.”

  Rob nodded and waved, but Emma could see from his face that the excitement of having extra people around was wearing off. She knew people were bound to get more irritable as the water slowly receded.

  School, which both Emma and Rob loved and where they excelled, had been called off because homeless people were living there until the water went down and they could reclaim their homes—if their homes were still there.

  Every day Rob and Emma delivered supplies to the Davises, and every day the walk to the boat got longer as the water receded. Now they could see through the Davises’ opened front door that the water in the parlor stood about three feet deep. It took a longer rope to reach the water bucket. And the longer the rope, the more water Miss Clara spilled on Rob and Emma. “It smells awful,” Emma said.

  “You get used to it,” Rob defended his town. Emma saw him gag sometimes, but he never liked her saying anything bad about it.

  After they’d made his delivery to the Davis sisters, he rowed over to the public landing.

  “The steamboats are gone,” Emma said.

  “They’ve been running for several days now. Some will dock here later this afternoon.” He maneuvered the rowboat to avoid a roof sticking out of the water. It was all that was left of a house that had finally caved in.

  “You can see more floors of the steam mill,” Rob pointed out.

  “This place is a mess,” Emma said. “It’s going to take years to get all this cleaned up.” She made a gesture with her hands that encompassed the entire downtown. “It might not be cleaned up in time for next year’s flood. Our creek is already flowing normally.” She always felt like the country was more in charge of nature than the city was.

  “It’ll be hard work, but we’ll get it cleaned up,” Rob said. He wound up the tour and took Emma back to his house, where Emma’s mother, brother, and sister were waiting.

  As their wagon pulled away from the house, Emma let out a tiny sigh of relief. Usually she and Rob got along well; sometimes she even liked arguing with him. She was always pleased when she could hold her own against him.

  Rob was a year younger than she was, but now he was a reader ahead of her in school, much to Emma’s annoyance. But if there was one thing Rob loved to do, it was read. He had read nearly every book in the school and quite a few that he had gotten from the public library. The more he read, the more their teacher gave him to read. There was no way Emma could keep up with him, what with all the chores she had to do around the farm. Sometimes it just didn’t seem fair.

  “Reading is the basis of knowledge,” the teacher had said. “The more you read, the more you know. The more you know, the more you’ll get out of life.”

  Emma agreed with the teacher. She liked feeling as though she could travel to faraway places in the books she read. And she liked arithmetic, too. Working with numbers made her feel as though she had a better handle on the world, as though by counting and tallying, adding and subtracting, multiplying and dividing, she could map out her life in manageable chunks. She had added up all the chapters in every book in the Bible, for example, and figured out if she read five chapters a day, she could read the entire Bible in one year. She was already about a third of the way through the Old Testament.

  But Rob was more than halfway through, and he had begun the same time she did. She just never seemed to be able to keep up with him. She liked discussing religion with Rob, but he usually seemed to know more about the Bible than she did.

  By the next market day, when Emma saw Rob again, the floodwaters had gone down fast. It was as if someone had knocked a big hole in a washtub, and whoosh! the water was gone. All that was left was a stinking mess. If before the place had the stench of sewer and stagnant water, now it was worse than ever.

  Emma agreed to help Rob hand-carry supplies to the Davis sisters. He wore a bandanna sprinkled with cinnamon oil around his neck to pull up over his nose when the smell got too bad, and he handed an extra one to Emma. She tied it on, and they started toward the Davises’.

  As long as they were on the high sidewalks of the stores, which were covered with sand and silt, Emma was happy enough to walk along at Rob’s side. But once they had to cross the street, she balked. Driftwood littered the streets, but that was the least of the problems; it could easily be carted away and burned. But caught among piles of broken lumber were the swollen bodies of dead pigs. Before the flood, they had prowled the streets and eaten the garbage of the town. Now the dead ones stank and were covered with maggots.

  “I’m not going in that filth,” Emma said.

  “You’ve got to,” Rob said. “I can’t carry all this alone.”

  Emma set her basket and water pail on the sidewalk. “Then you can make a trip back here and get it. I’m not going one more step.”

  “Fine.” Defiantly, Rob stepped off the sidewalk and sank knee-deep in mud and slime.

  Emma just folded her arms and watched him. A girl had to have her limits.

  CHAPTER 3

  The Snakes

  I should never have told Mama I didn’t go with you yesterday,” Emma said as she and Rob walked down Elm Street toward the Davis sisters’ home. They both carried pails of water, and Rob carried a bag of lye soap and some scrub brushes from the shipyard. “Then she wouldn’t have made me go today.”

  Rob just snickered. Emma knew he was glad to have her with him even though he was still annoyed with her for refusing to go with him the day before.

  The streets were passable today, but only a lane wide enough for a wagon had been cleared of the silt and debris. Merchants were cleaning out their stores, but it was slow work, and great mounds of sand and mud swelled in front of the businesses. Rob and Emma stayed in the lane when they could and dodged two fires in the middle of cross streets where
the carcasses of dead pigs were being burned. The stench was horrible.

  Finally, they turned onto Plum Street. The Davises’ front door was still open, since it wasn’t possible to shut it yet. The river had deposited sand and silt and mud six inches deep, and although Emma knew Rob had spent two days shoveling sludge, there was still more. The sludge was piled in front of the house, but she’d heard Rob’s father say they’d shovel it onto a wagon and take it to the low marshy area on the edge of town whenever he had free time and an extra wagon. Right now his equipment was in use at the shipyard. “Good morning,” Rob called.

  Miss Clara opened the door at the head of the stairs. “Good morning, Rob. I’m glad to see you brought fresh drinking water.”

  “Yes, ma’am. And I brought Emma to help us, too.”

  “Many hands make light work.” She laughed loudly as usual.

  “Where do you want me to start?” Emma looked doubtfully inside the house. It looked like a hopeless task.

  “We’ve got the sludge out of the kitchen,” Rob said. “You can start scrubbing the walls in there.”

  With a heavy sigh, Emma went into the kitchen. Rob carried the water pails upstairs and then returned to the kitchen.

  Emma got to work and, after a couple of hours, she had the cookstove cleaned. Of course, it needed a good scrubbing, but by nightfall the sisters might use it to prepare their evening meal. The place still smelled unbearable, but that wasn’t going to change anytime soon. Emma wrinkled her nose. The musty, stinky odor would probably linger until the Fourth of July.

  “Guess I’ll go shovel the parlor,” Rob said.

  Emma giggled; it was such a funny thing to say when you thought about it. Her arms and shoulders ached from scooping the heavy mud and slime, but she felt a tired sense of satisfaction as she looked around the kitchen and saw the clean surfaces emerging from the silt.

  Then Miss Clara let out a shriek. Something long and black flickered between her ankles. She grabbed a butcher knife from the countertop and held it high.