Things You Would Know If You Grew Up Around Here

by Nancy Wayson Dinan

  When Ruben at last reached the top and Lucy Maud untied him and tossed the rope back down, the yellow tip of nylon disappeared into the dark water. Nobody was left to pull up. The water, with a white noise that was its own kind of silence, had risen, until it was the only thing that remained.

  9:27 A.M.

  The live oak underneath Boyd was hundreds of years old, and she knew it had suffered these past few years, almost dying in the drought, and was now nearly submerged in the flood. It would be like this now forever: brief times between flood and drought, but the drought years growing longer and closer together. One day, maybe in Boyd’s own lifetime and certainly in Lily’s, this place would be a desert, the mesquite and juniper gone, the old live oaks crumbling into fields of dust.

  The scarecrow girl was now close enough to see the fear in Boyd’s eyes. It blinked and drew its chin back, surprised. Something about the girl was familiar, though Boyd could not say what.

  Lily—silent, watching Lily—had wormed her way up, and now she dangled from Boyd’s chest. Boyd, knowing what sort of life lay in store for the baby, held on to her even tighter. The child had no family that Boyd knew of—was there somewhere a father who falsely imagined that his daughter was safe?

  Boyd thought of her own father, and she wondered where he was. He was imperceptible at the moment; she couldn’t tell what he was doing or thinking. But he had never tried to possess Boyd in the way that other people had tried to possess her. He was bemused, standoffish, not given to emotion, and therefore not particularly impressed by Boyd’s ability to read it. She remembered the staring eyes of the woman on the floor of the trailer; Lily no longer had a mother.

  Now Sam pulled the boat underneath the live oak, as much as he could with the branch in the way. The water foamed here; it was deep and there was some obstruction. Boyd would have to jump as much as a foot, but Isaac and Carla both had arms outstretched.

  She leaned toward Carla, the closest. The only sound was the outboard motor stirring the water and the slow chugging of the gas engine. The light seemed splintered, the way it reflected back at her. Boyd tasted something metallic and realized that she had bitten her tongue. The gas engine grumbled, and she lifted Lily away from her own body, the child’s eyes registering alarm for the first time since Boyd had fled the trailer.

  Lily’s gaze on her, motherless Lily, Lily who possessed a certain understanding of the world, who would come to know so much more than she wanted to. Lily, here in a part of the world that was in trouble, a part that was at the moment drowning but would soon be parched and fissured again. Lily, here, in a time when the dead had awakened, when the earth wore its veneer of time only lightly, when there were rules of physics not necessary to follow. Lily, lying across Boyd’s forearms, an offering, outstretched, breathing, eyes wide, a hand reaching out to circle Boyd’s finger, the one that wore the band of tricolored golden roses. Lily, still and watching, an innocent on the cusp of life.

  And Boyd let go, relinquished the baby into Carla’s arms, into the safety of the boat. Only. Only Boyd let go too soon, and Carla didn’t catch Lily. She fell through their arms in the silver light underneath the live oak, and she slipped beneath the surface of the deep and roiling water.

  9:27 A.M.

  Here is what was lost under the water in the early years of the century, in a place that will look very different in the next: Entire families, washed away; property without measure; animals both loved and wild; a layer of earth scraped off. Parts of the past buried deeper, arrowheads and butter-churn shards and thimbles from pioneer homesteads and the silver of another era. Eyeglasses and books, including an eighteenth-century family Bible that had been brought to the New World from Bavaria by a man long dead. A bundle of letters from a man in the trenches of the First World War to a woman in Wimberley who had kept them long after she’d married someone else and had four children, then passed these letters to her eldest daughter. Another daughter’s recipe collection, passed down from woman to woman to woman, the only history that family had, kept in the language of Watergate salads, sinsolo dips, shrimp-and-lettuce cups. A way of being passing undetectably before our eyes, the loss only visible in hindsight. Also lost: Human lives, hundreds of years’ worth, old women who carried stories that were now gone forever, old men who carried old ways in hands now stilled. Children who left holes in both the present and the future. Babies. Among the babies, a girl. Slightly different, wound too tight, calibrated to the sun and stars. Lost by accident, by a miscalculation, and returned to where she came from.

  9:28 A.M.

  Boyd, accustomed to everybody’s grief but her own. Boyd diving into the water, boiled and bottomless. Boyd out of control, not knowing up from down, trying to find Lily but grasping only dark water. Boyd’s mouth full of the flood, which was full of the earth and full of the sky. Boyd swallowing, but not yet breathing it in, taking the flood into her stomach but not yet into her lungs. Then the scarecrow girl was in the water, gripping Boyd from behind, Boyd’s linen shirt tearing. The scarecrow girl did not let go right away; she held Boyd under, and Boyd bucked under her hands, pulling herself free momentarily, gasping for air when she surfaced.

  Boyd heard a splash as Isaac went into the water to find Lily, but the scarecrow girl had her again, and the distraction of Isaac disappeared. The scarecrow girl pressed her spongy palms into Boyd’s cheekbones, and again Boyd could not figure out why this touch felt so familiar. The fingers curled, the tips of her fingernails drawing half-moons into Boyd’s cheeks.

  The scarecrow girl’s mouth was open in disbelief, so that Boyd could see the hollow in her cheeks. Boyd felt a need that was impossible to meet, a hunger that could not be satisfied. Not enough of the world was left. Help me, the scarecrow girl thought. Boyd had done this all of her life.

  Then Boyd realized where she had seen the girl before—in the late-afternoon light of the sleeping-beauty house. In a hospital bed, and next to it, a novel open facedown on an end table, a novel that had been read by a woman who had been endlessly faithful. Boyd had put her hands on the girl, had felt the girl’s warmth travel up her arm, had said that she wished the girl would return to her mother.

  But now Boyd could do nothing. This helplessness, this mindless vacancy, mingled with her own pain. She could not take back the baby’s slip into the water, nor the call to this girl to come back from whatever darkness she had occupied; Boyd could do nothing to temper or assuage this.

  And what pain it was. She had never before encountered anything like it. A grief to madden, unbearable to live with. Her breath hitched and her mouth hung open. Lily was lost.

  The girl’s dark brows were tensed, sloped down on the outside corners. Boyd could see the whites of her eyes, the pupils and irises riding high in those whites, as if they might roll back at any moment. The spongy palms were still on Boyd’s face, and again they drew Boyd under. In a second, the world was muted and dark, and Boyd was gasping.

  But then Isaac’s arm went around her waist, and he wrenched her away from the scarecrow girl’s grip, a colossal heave that bent Boyd double. The girl’s fingernails on Boyd’s face ripped deep gashes as the girl struggled to hold on.

  Now Isaac had her against the boat, and Carla and Sam were pulling her up, ripping her shirt even further as they lifted her over the side. Isaac went under suddenly, and Boyd could tell that the girl had grabbed him from behind. She thought of Isaac’s panic, how she had known that Isaac was in the water, and he had looked exhausted when she’d seen him, but he swam away quickly, reaching the other side of the boat, where an old woman sat still and watching.

  The scarecrow girl came up once, gulped air, and headed back under, her head sloped down, eyes scanning. Then they didn’t see her again.

  Sam and Carla leaned on the edge of the boat, and instinctively the older woman leaned back to balance it.

  Finally, Boyd climbed into Carla’s arms, her own arms now empty. She lay back in the hull of the boat, and the old woman took the blanket off
herself and laid it over Boyd. Boyd blinked, wide-eyed, and stared up into the canopy as Isaac said, “Let’s go, let’s go,” and Sam turned the boat around and headed back down the river. It was too soon, Boyd thought, but none of them protested. They all knew that nobody was coming back up, that the river had taken what it wanted. They’d dangled something too close to greedy jaws, and the flood, hungry, bit. Boyd thought about the mothers involved: the woman on the floor in the trailer, the woman in the strange and sleeping house. Boyd had broken her promise to the woman on the floor, and the other woman, the one in the house, now completely alone, though she had been nearly so for years.

  Carla knelt next to Boyd in the hull of the boat, though Boyd’s eyes were closed. Boyd was dirty, and her clothes were shredded. She was scratched all to pieces, bleeding from scrapes on her forearm, the blood thinned by floodwater. Carla was happy to see her, relieved that she had made it through whatever adventure she had had.

  This part of Carla was happy, but there was another part of her, too, a part that wanted more of Lucy Maud, which Carla could maybe have if Boyd was gone. But Carla was ashamed of herself for this thought, and then she remembered Kim and Bess and the shingled house. Lucy Maud was not the only thing anymore, and as Carla knelt beside Boyd, she took the girl’s hand and shuddered at its heat.

  Isaac knelt on the other side of Boyd, thinking of the mouse that had chewed his thumb in the night, the spiders on his eyelids. One of his hands rested on his own thigh, one on hers. Through her tattered pants, he could feel the incredible heat that rose from her body. He could hardly believe it was Boyd—what a gift from the universe to find her so easily, and after such a night—and he wondered how she’d ended up here, on this river, in such a state and carrying a baby. He remembered the splash the baby had made going under, the small wake of the body, the way the wake was swallowed almost immediately by turbulence.

  When Boyd had gone in, some kind of instinct had kicked in for Isaac, and he’d found himself in the water before he’d realized it. But he’d been glad that he had when that girl had grabbed Boyd, had looked as if she was trying to drown Boyd. Now he dripped water on her, wanting to reach for the hand that Carla didn’t hold. But he didn’t. He was cautious as ever, sick with all of the possibilities of life, warming himself at the fire of his oldest friend.

  On her back, headed down the river, Boyd did not see the people on the banks, but she knew they were there. She knew others were with them, too, people who had lived in other centuries. She knew these centuries went way back; people had been on this ground for millennia.

  But it was too much, the knowledge of what she’d left behind in the water. A line of future truncated. A girl who could have listened, who could have helped. Who would have seen the suffering that Boyd saw, who would have done her best to take that suffering away. Already the earth was quieting; soon the communication would be severed altogether. Whatever had happened to Boyd the night she was buried was temporary; the earth wanted her to know something, but the window of knowing was finite and closing.

  But the window had been enough. She knew. This drought and this flood may have been cyclical—a similar drought occurring in the fifties, a similar flood occurring in the eighties—but things were worse now; things were accelerating. She knew that in another few years, the storms in the Gulf would start: monster things that would flood a third of the state’s inhabitants. This year’s highest temperature would become the summer average, and the new high temperature would be something Texas had never seen. Boyd knew that she—well, that Lily—was born to see the end of a very long story. A part of Boyd thought that Lily was better off, that she would be lucky not to bear witness to what was coming. Already the water was taking something from Lily, siphoning off her body’s heat until she was the same temperature as everything that surrounded her. Already, parts of her were oxidizing, skin cells were being shed; the water was underneath her fingernails and eyelids, flowing between all of the alveoli in her lungs. Boyd imagined the same thing happening with other bodies, but for them, the process was biological, physical, a result of the natural laws of the universe. For Lily, as it would one day be for Boyd, the process was a sentient hunger. To Boyd, it was like the guinea pig who ate her own children in Boyd’s second-grade classroom. Blood and fur and bone on the wood chips, but whatever was important—whatever was alive—returned to the source.

  What would it be like for Boyd to live in the pre-apocalypse? She didn’t know. She wanted to cherish every moment, but she has not yet cherished one, not in her whole long life. She wanted to love the people she loved, but she wanted them to love her—her—back. She wanted to eat things where the grease ran down her forearms; she wanted to have a wedding cake.

  But most of all, she wanted freedom. “Please,” she said. “I wish not to know anymore.” It was like that day in the cafeteria—unbearable—and she couldn’t live with it. Was it selfish to cut the ties of pain here, on the threshold of the end? Or was it survival?

  She didn’t know. But now, on a river swollen to twice its normal size, she blinked up into the lacework of leaves and sunlight, and she turned her mind and heart away from the things she no longer wanted to see. Who would love her when she was only composed of herself, when she was not made up of the people who surrounded her?

  She didn’t know.

  And as Boyd cut off this part of herself, as she closed down and shrank, as Isaac and Carla both jerked their hands away because Boyd’s body suddenly scorched them, she imagined Lily, she of the red cheeks and chin, slipping through time, perhaps coming to rest in a house down by the old course of the river, a house where the tongue is German and the parents whisper about the young boy a neighboring family lost in the night. Perhaps teaching Latin to barefoot children in this hot country. Perhaps living with her family on that mountain north of Llano, in the last years of the Comanche, just before the ranchers found cause to change the mountain’s name.

  When Boyd started shivering, Isaac gathered her to him, surprised that the heat was gone, that she had off-loaded such energy, had spent something bodily. She was different—something was different about her—and he pulled her to him, one shoulder in his palm, the other nestled into his chest, and he wanted her to open her eyes and look at him. Boyd, Boyd, open your eyes, he thought, but there was no reaction. Something about Boyd was not the same.

  The people on the bank disappeared. Not the real ones, not the ones who had come out for this flood. But the ones who had been there for a long time—for ages, from before any of the six flags flew over Texas, from before the rivers were dammed into lakes, from before cars were on the roads and airplanes were in the air—they were gone. Boyd did not see them go—she was still at the bottom of a boat, nearly catatonic. But she felt their departure like a drawing in of breath. Gone, gone, gone, breathing quickly in, until she began to hyperventilate.

  Gone Boyd’s grandmother Karen, who had died in a stranger’s house in Galveston in 1978, a woman Boyd had never met but who had loomed large in Boyd’s imagination simply because of the magnitude of Aunt Lou’s heartbreak. Karen shimmered on the bank—not the woman of later years but the woman Homer had met so long ago—and held a hand out to her granddaughter as she passed, before Karen crumbled into the water like an airy pillar of salt.

  Gone, too, Alice, who had been poisoned by her sister, antifreeze in the well, her mouth still moving as she disappeared, though no sound came out. Gone, too, the woman Hettie Meyer, huddled on the ground underneath the hanging tree with the bodies of a boy and a girl, still blue from the drowning, her wail unheard but felt as she took her sad burden with her. On Carla’s dead acre, men rose from unmarked graves and pulled nooses from their necks. In another part of the county, Mary Elizabeth, a baby used as a pawn in a game with no results, straightening her head on her shoulders as she faded into a haze of speckled sunlight. Gone, too, the inhabitants of the pioneer cemetery, newly awake and confused, sitting on their own tombstones when they disappear, asking t
hemselves, What do we do now?

  ***

  Also departing, farther north in San Saba County, the men hurriedly trying to bury treasure underneath the wall of Fort Bowie, throwing down their shovels and turning their faces to the sun. Pedro Yorba, throwing silver into a deep well, let the coins and ingots fall through his fingers so that they looked like water. Is Maximilian with him? Hard to tell. Maximilian last seen in front of the firing squad in Querétaro City, Mexico, on the early morning of June 19, 1867, after paying his executioners gold coins not to shoot him in the head. The source of so many rumors, so many unanswered questions. All of them gone, briefly here and then not—resigned to a different set of suns, a different series of stars, a different spread on the axis.