I call Jackie. She takes a while to answer and her voice is sleepy.
“It’s the dam,” I say. “I had a dream. There’s something wrong and I’m going to check.”
She says, “Should me and Tom come?”
“No. But y’all get dressed and get ready to run.”
“It’s probably all right,” she says. “The guards are up there and the pickets. They’ll notice if it’s looking bad.”
“It’s dark,” I say. “There aint no time for talk. I’m going.”
I pull on my trousers and shirt over my longjohns, and my leather jacket that Jackie gave me for Christmas, and walk the track to Winco. Rain pelts my head and shoulders. The vinyl seat of my truck is so cold it freezes me through all the layers, and I shiver until the heater starts to work. The hollow is dark, hardly a house shows a light. People will sleep late on Saturday. I lean forward, squinting to see past the rain and the whipping of the windshield wipers. I wish to God I had a thermos of coffee with me.
At Jenkinjones I stop at Sim’s to warn him, then I recall he has been living with his son at Felco since his wife passed away. I leave the houses behind, turn off my headlights, and drive slow so the gun thugs won’t see what I’m up to. I park near the ruin of the company store where the road climbs the hill to the tipple. The tipple and fence are lit with floodlights like at Number Thirteen, and the picket shack is a shadow outside the gate.
In the hollow it is still dark. The rain has slowed. I switch on my flashlight. The path up the side of the hill is muddy and pulls at my feet. At the top I stop to listen. A low moan swells from the water—it is the tormented spirit of Trace Mountain torn apart. I hear voices in the moan and I step toward them on the dam.
My leg sinks to the ankle.
I take another step and go in to my knee.
The water sighs. Above me there is no sound.
Then I hear a motor far off. I struggle back to the mountain, my legs coated with sludge and aching from the cold. I slip and fall on the path down the mountain and bang my left knee. When I finally limp to my truck, a gray dawn is lighting the hollow. A Cadillac pulls in beside my truck and a man gets out.
“What the hell!” he says.
“Arthur Lee!” I grab him by the coat. “That dam’s gone soft!”
“Soft?” He is looking up at the dam.
“Get in your car and drive like hell to let people know,” I say. “It’s all there’s time to do.”
He is still looking at the dam. He pushes me away and starts up the path.
I yell, “If you go up you’ll not come back down!”
He hesitates. I jump in my truck and start the engine. Then, comes a rumble. Arthur Lee is running back toward his car and I don’t dare wait longer, I have people to save, but Arthur Lee will not make his car, so I drive close to him and he wrenches open the truck door and climbs in.
“Drive!” he yells and I head for the turn, tires screaming through the gravel but I stop before I round the curve and roll down the window of my truck. Arthur Lee quits yelling and we stare.
The bone dam looms black and high as the mountain. Despite the wet, smoke rises from the base where the bone still burns, has burned for generations. A curl of water laps the top and runs like a tear down the front of the dam then the center of the bone pile sags and melts.
The water waits
Then the dull boom when the lake touches the fiery slate and a gray cloud swells, rises far up the mountain, another explosion and another and the rising cloud sweeps away the picket shack and the tipple fence before it falls to earth a whirlpool licks across the bottom, rips out a large electrical transformer
flames shoot to the top of Trace Mountain the sky crackles
I push the accelerator to the floor and drive.
Arthur Lee is holding onto the dashboard his head bent almost to his hands.
“Jesus God,” he says, “Jesus God Jesus God.”
I blow my horn through Jenkinjones, but I will not stop for I cannot save them all and I will choose who.
At Annadel I pull up to the pay phone in front of the grocery store and jump out with the coin already in my hand.
I drop in the quarter but the line is dead.
Arthur Lee is out of the truck.
“I’ll go on foot from here,” he yells.
I say, “You’ll never make it.”
“Goddamn you to hell,” he says, “they are my people too.”
He is trotting as fast as an old man can trot toward the fire station, and as I drive the highway below Spencers Curve, the wail of the siren follows me.
JACKIE
Tom and I are sitting at the kitchen table drinking coffee and wondering if we should be worried when the light goes out and the refrigerator stops humming. The clock on the stove shows 8:01 in the winter morning gloom. The second hand doesn’t move.
Tom says, “Maybe we should call the sheriff’s office.”
He picks up the telephone but sets it back again. He says, “The line’s dead.”
We put our coats on and go out on the porch. From far up the hollow we hear distant thunder, then an eerie singing sound.
HASSEL
I always get up early, even on a Saturday. It is the way I get things done. So does Louelly. She says she can’t sleep in after all them years of getting up at five to get Homer ready for the mines.
A body couldn’t sleep this morning no way, what with every dog in Number Thirteen cutting such a shine. They are howling and barking and the ones penned up are pulling on their chains. But while me and Junior are walking toward Louelly’s, they stop all at once. It is the blamedest thing I ever did hear.
When we get to Louelly’s, Toejam’s dog Blue is whining and trying to dig a hole to get under the house. Then we open the front door. I smell the bacon and eggs frying.
ARTHUR LEE
Got a stitch in my side from running and I can’t get my breath. My ears are pounding. And I still hear the roar, still I hear it.
Most of the houses in Annadel are on the hillside and I won’t get to them. A few people have come on their porches to see what the siren is about. They will think it is a fire up the hollow somewhere. They will turn over in bed and go back to sleep. I want to holler and tell them but I got no air. No air.
I run again, toward Spencers Curve in the bottom.
There is the Church of God. I start to pass it by when I notice the car parked outside. Up the steps and pound on the door. It’s a little boy opens it. Doyle Ray Lloyd and his wife are standing in the middle of the aisle with a mop and broom.
Got no air.
“Mr. Sizemore?” says Doyle Ray. “Are you all right?”
“What the hell—got no—what you doing here?”
“This is the Lord’s house,” he says. “I’d appreciate if you didn’t cuss.”
“Go home. Get out of here.”
“We always clean the church on Saturdays,” says that woman. His wife.
Got no air. I turn and point outside. Then they hear it. Doyle Ray comes to the door and looks and the ocean busts around Spencers Curve a wall higher than the telephone poles, and Doyle Ray has a boy in his arms and the woman has another boy and Doyle Ray says “Children, pray to Jesus.”
The ground shakes and I am down on my knees never in a church since I got married I try to recall my wife’s name and I can’t think of it but that Tommie she was little and mean as fire and God I loved her
DILLON
I am behind a slow driver and there are only curves ahead but I pass anyway, honk my horn and pull crossways in the road, yell a warning, and go on. I am driving faster than the water is moving. I sense that, can feel the power grow fainter behind me, and the air is very still, waiting.
At Felco I stop at the first house and pound the door. A little girl in pajamas answers and I see the cartoons on the TV in the living room. “Who is it?” a woman calls from the bedroom. I say, “Get everybody out, the dam has broke,” and I leave before I can see what
they will do.
I am back in the truck and I don’t stop until I reach Jackie’s house. She and Tom are standing on her front porch.
I yell, “It’s broke.”
“God help us!” Jackie cries. She looks old, older than her mother ever did.
Tom grabs my arm. “When?”
“Right after I got there. No time to talk. Jackie, you go up and down this street and knock on doors. When you hear it coming, you climb that mountainside.”
“I’ll get Colored Row, too,” she says.
I grab her shoulders.
“Go wherever, but you climb when you hear it!”
I push her away.
Tom is already in his car. “I’ll warn lower Felco,” he says, “and if there’s time I’ll go farther.”
I head for my truck. Jackie is already going down the road. She stops but I wave her on.
“I love you both,” she calls.
I watch her in my rearview mirror as I drive away. She is running up the steps of a house when I lose sight of her.
TOM
I have reached the end of lower Felco, still knocking on doors, when I hear the thunder and I see the water. It caroms up one side of the hollow, then the other, as though the earth were tilting back and forth. I run for the hillside and climb.
Pieces of buildings are riding the waves, the houses of upper Felco jumbled together like a herd of elephants, jostling, disappearing beneath the roaring surf and reappearing as bits of lumber tossed high in the air. I look for Jackie’s house but I can’t tell. Low water surges ahead of the moving wall and covers the road and the railroad track, laps at the foot of the hillside. Then the wall passes the sound so loud I cannot think
My arms are wrapped around a tree and I hold it in a death grip though I am above the water that moves so fast I am dizzy and I turn away for my feet want to go from under me it moves so fast
I see the church. It is only part of a church, a steeple and roof. The current pushes it toward me. A tiny figure clings to the steeple. The roof hits the mountainside and the child holding onto the steeple reaches an arm to me and screams. Then the water has the roof again and wrenches it away from the bank, back out into the current.
I leap into the water. Cold. I grab the roof, pull myself up.
He is soaking wet and coated with black muck. I pry him from the steeple and his arms grip my neck.
Hard to breathe.
We are moving whirling and I am dizzy.
The waves wash over us and my grip loosens. The boy screams.
A trailer tumbling end over end We rush toward it and it raises up to crush us I let go of the roof and we are free in the water
I go under
Up and the boy screams
Wood is all around it hits me stunning
I grab a tire we ride fast a shelf smashes against the side of my head
I go under
Wider
The sky is wider
The water slows
I go under
The water slows
The mountain grabs me and lifts me
I hold the boy tight
It is not the boy
The boy?
It is not the boy it sticks in my chest wood hold it tight Cold
JACKIE
Silence. Steam rises from the earth. All the houses are gone, except for one turned upside down like a turtle on its back.
The world is gone.
It is raining again. I am so cold I cannot feel my body.
No one is with me except Sim Gore, who lies beside me, wrapped in my coat. I knocked on his door but no one answered, so I went on until I heard the water. Then I climbed until I had no breath left.
Sim washed up against the mountain on a slab of wood. When he opens his mouth he coughs up black sludge. His eyes are open wide.
“Leon?” he asks when he can talk.
I say, “I don’t know where Leon is.”
He coughs up black sludge.
“Kill me,” he says.
He dies before he can say it again. I cover his face with my coat but I am so cold. At last I put the coat back on. Sim stares at me, his face twisted in a horrible grimace. I try to turn him on his stomach so I don’t have to see his face. I put my arms under his shoulders, and the wet soaks my coat. He smells like kerosene and is heavier than he would have been in life, things take on weight when they die.
The earth hisses and smokes.
DILLON
I have run ahead as long as I can. I have stopped at houses, trailers. I pass the Lloyds Fork turnoff, drive across the Winco bridge. I cannot reach Number Thirteen and I pray they will be safe because they are a mile up the fork. I park outside Doyle Ray’s trailer.
I hear the roar.
I can still make the high ground but I knock on the door, call for Doyle Ray. He is kin, my cousin’s boy, his Papaw was brother to my daddy. When he doesn’t answer I kick in the door. No one is home.
I stand in the living room and smile at the chickens on the wall. I hear the roar.
I limp outside, my knee paining me where I fell down the hill. As I walk the leg begins to stiffen and I have to drag it behind me. I reach the scrap of fence where I buried the red fox, buried the Japanese skull.
Buried my father’s hand.
Would have buried Rachel, but I will find her now.
The water shrieks like all the lost souls, but it carries with it the top of Trace Mountain where I lived my life now dumped and scattered to the wind, the heart of it
is there
water reaches my thighs, pulls at my legs, I turn to face the wall and stretch my arms wide
JACKIE
Night and I sleep beside Sim. He is a comfort there even dead. I take off his shirt and put it on. I sleep again.
Light.
I am walking.
The road is gone, the ground is scored with deep ridges and littered with boards tires garbage odds and ends of twisted metal. Pieces of houses were caught and piled high with electrical poles and railroad track looped like roller coasters.
I see stone foundations.
I see a severed arm lying beside an upturned washing machine.
I see pools of black water.
I see a body covered with black sludge hanging upside down from a tree.
I am walking to Number Thirteen.
I can’t feel my feet. The inside of my nose is frozen hard. I breathe through my mouth and the cold cuts my throat.
Tom and Dillon will be at Number Thirteen. Hassel will keep them safe.
The soil has been stripped clean and I am walking on bare rock. Walking on bone.
I reach where Winco bridge should be but it is gone. Then I see Hassel and Junior and Toejam standing on the far shore like angels of the Lord.
I wave at them and sit down. I cannot move. I lie down sideways.
Junior and Toejam carry me. Hassel walks beside and holds my hand. He talks the whole time.
“You wouldn’t believe,” he says. “Number Thirteen is still yet there. My trailer is washed away, and Dillon’s, but the houses just took on high water. We missed the worst, just got a backwash, because we’re that mile up Lloyds Fork. And the bridge at the tipple, hit’s still yet there. Water took out the tipple fence and the guard towers so we can walk wherever we want to. We’ll carry you right on across that company bridge.”
“Dillon,” I say. “I want Dillon.”
“I aint set eyes on Dillon,” says Hassel. “I reckon he’s all right. That Dillon always could take care of hisself.”
“Tom,” I say.
Hassel stops talking.
Hassel says, “The Holiness church is on the hill, so it didn’t take on a drop of water.”
They take off my clothes and wrap me in blankets. They lay me beside the coal stove in the Holiness church.
Tom is already there. He lies on his back, covered by a blanket. His eyes are closed.
Hassel puts his hand on my forehead. “Jackie,” he says. “To
m’s hurt real bad. You want to hold his hand?”
Yes, I say.
His hand is cold.
“We found him just above the golf course after the water passed,” says Hassel. “He had a piece of wood stuck in his chest. We pulled it out but I think he’s bleeding inside. He needs you to hold his hand. You got to fight and make it, Jackie, because Tom needs you. You talk to Tom.”
Yes. Tom needs me.
Someone pulls the blanket over Tom’s face.
“No,” says Hassel. “Take it off.” He leans over me. “Jackie. Talk to Tom.”
Yes, I say.
I start to talk again. I tell him I love him. His eyes are closed. He says, We’re not done yet.
He tells me about Honduras, about the children. He says Honduras is lush and green with lovely red flowers, and you can pick bananas right off the tree. Oranges and lemons. Coffee beans from shiny-leafed plants. The children are lovely. They run barefoot like we did at Number Thirteen.
Helicopter, Hassel says. Civil Defense helicopter.
Civil Defense, Civil Defense.
We are on the helicopter, but they cover Tom’s face. No. I pull off the blanket. Then I try to stand. I can see out the window. I will tell Tom what I see.
The mountains are falling away below us. They are ripped and torn like a rumpled gray quilt where the cotton batting shows through. The crown of Trace Mountain is gone, a flat rocky moon pocked by green ponds of acid water.
I say, Don’t cover Tom’s face, I’m talking to him.
A man turns and says, “Christ get her to lie back down.”
THE NEW WORLD
HEADLINE New York Times
International Oil Calls Flood ‘Act of God’
SPOKESMAN ASKS FOR PRAYERS
Dillon has never been found. The search parties recovered nearly a hundred and fifty bodies on Blackberry, men, women, and children, but Dillon was not among them. I was told his body might have been washed all the way to the Levisa, or the Big Sandy, or even the Ohio.
Perhaps the Mississippi, I suggested.
Of course it wasn’t so. He was close. I dreamed of his skeleton stripped and blackened and mired in sludge, becoming one with the bones of the mountains.
The Unquiet Earth Page 36