Agnes

by Jaime Maddox

  Although she hadn’t been to Riverview to visit, Sandy remembered Jeannie through the years in a million little ways. Random acts of kindness. Charitable donations. Volunteering her time at the AIDS clinic in the Village. Adopting a child. She’d visited all the places around the world that they’d dreamed of together, and at each place she’d spoken the name Jeannie in a reverent whisper. She’d carved Jeannie’s initials in Alaskan glaciers and in the Berlin Wall, and written them on sandy beaches throughout the Caribbean. She’d lit a candle at the cathedral of Notre Dame in Paris, not because she was religious but because it was something she and Jeannie had done when they were twelve and had vowed to do again. She’d named a star after Jeannie, and somewhere on a preserve in Africa a giraffe named Jeannie was munching on the leaves of the tallest trees.

  “This is so strange,” Sandy muttered almost to herself, but Angie had heard and agreed with her mother. For fifteen minutes, Sandy and Angela walked back and forth among the gravestones, wiping away blades of freshly mowed grass as they methodically scoured every inch of the Bennett plot for some sign of Jeannie. They hadn’t found her stone.

  “Do you think she might be somewhere else?”

  Blowing a frustrated sigh, Sandy shrugged. Although all of the Bennetts were buried at Riverview, she supposed it was possible they had interred Jeannie elsewhere. She couldn’t begin to understand why they would do that. She sat and pursed her lips, looking around, thinking. Closing her eyes and shaking her head in sorrow, she suddenly realized why they couldn’t find the stone. “Son of a bitch!” she muttered. “There’s no stone. They didn’t give her a fucking headstone.” Sandy bit her lip and her shoulders sagged. She’d finally found the courage to come to this place, and now she couldn’t find Jeannie!

  Angie crossed the few feet of grass with quick strides, worry evident on her beautiful face. “What is it, Mom?”

  Sandy turned into her daughter’s arms and held her, crying for the first time in many years, for her first, lost love. An amazing girl, one who had meant the world to her, hadn’t meant enough to her parents to be remembered with a grave marker. It shouldn’t have surprised Sandy. Not long after Sandy’s arrival on Canal Street, Mrs. Bennett gave birth to a stillborn son. Though he was buried in the family plot, a marker was never placed. It was if he’d never existed. During their trips to the cemetery, Jeannie would spread flowers all around the Bennett graves, hoping to mark the site of the little brother she never had the opportunity to love.

  Remembering Jeannie’s whimsical but sweet gesture, Sandy rose to her feet and did what Jeannie did so long ago. Plucking petals from her flower, she tossed them into the air to land where they would. Angie scampered back to her grandmother’s freshly dug site and returned bearing an entire bouquet of flowers. She handed a few to her mother and then mimicked her actions, wandering between the rows of gravestones marked Bennett. Before long, the entire Bennett family plot was sprinkled with red and pink and white confetti. Wherever she was planted, Sandy thought happily, Jeannie had a flower.

  “Still love you,” she whispered to the wind.

  When they had finished, Angie sat back and admired their work. “It’s sort of a beautiful look, Mom.”

  Sandy had to agree. The sun was shining brightly, the grass neat and trimmed and covered with vibrantly colored flower petals. She fought more tears and took a deep breath. Her daughter didn’t need to see her crying over a woman who wasn’t the one who’d raised her. What would that say of Sandy’s love for Diane?

  Turning toward her car, she said, “Modern abstract. I think that style fits Ms. Bennett quite well. Now let’s get out of here.” At long last, Sandy had made her peace with Jeannie.

  As they walked hand in hand toward the car, they didn’t feel the prying eyes focused on them. They’d been so caught up in their search and then their frolicking that they didn’t notice the gravedigger. Why would they? No one ever noticed him, a detail that really didn’t bother him. In fact, it often worked in his favor. He was dressed as a cemetery worker in overalls and boots, and stood shoveling mulch a hundred yards away from the Parkers’ plot. They were too far away to notice that he hadn’t really done anything except push the pile around in circles—and watch them.

  He’d waited forty years for Nellie Parker to be laid to rest, and now he hoped, at last, he could rest, too. She was the only living soul who knew the secrets that could get him into trouble, and he’d hoped for her demise for all those years. If he’d known her precise whereabouts just after the flood, he might have even decided to kill her. As long as she stayed away, though, he felt safe. He’d allowed her to live.

  Sandy and Angie continued talking as they climbed into her car and drove away, and still the gravedigger watched, wondering. He’d never really given the old lady’s granddaughter a second thought. She was so young when Agnes came, and busy being a teenager, had she had time to notice what was going on around her? It had never occurred to him that she could be a threat. Seeing her, though, made him start thinking. Was it possible Sandy knew the secret?

  Chapter Four

  Home Again

  While it had taken over an hour to reach the cemetery in West Nanticoke from the funeral home in Tannersville, the next leg of Sandy’s journey took just a few minutes. As she drove down the mountainside from Riverview, she marveled that she’d been there a thousand times, but never behind the wheel of a car. She’d walked up and down that hill what seemed like a million times and had thrilling rides on her bike. She could picture Jeannie beside her, long hair flying behind her as they raced to the bottom. They were reckless, with no helmets, and it was a wonder one of them hadn’t been killed. But it had been fun. The speed of the bike and the wind in their hair brought a feeling of pure joy. Definitely not the same in the car. Maybe she should trade in the SUV for a sporty little convertible. She smiled at the thought. Maybe.

  She had insisted on limiting the visitors to the ceremony for her grandmother’s interment, sparing the distant relatives and her own friends a weary and dreary day. Only Angie sat beside her in the car on the long journey from the Poconos, following the hearse bearing her grandmother’s remains. After a service at the funeral home and a celebratory breakfast, she and her daughter laid her grandmother to rest.

  Sandy turned off Poplar Street and onto Houseman, marveling at the empty tracts of land that had once borne the homes of her friends and neighbors. Hudak’s Bus Terminal had been there, and dozens of school buses lined the street every day before they were put to bed in the underground garage. It was now an empty field. Everything that had been there was gone, destroyed by Agnes and removed by bulldozers. At the intersection of Route 11, just to her right, had been Farrell’s, where she’d first earned a paycheck. Now, only an empty patch of grass and weeds remained. She drove south a short distance and then made a left toward the river.

  It was difficult to find her bearings, for trees had been washed away and cut down and grown up. The ten-foot-tall vanilla ice-cream cone on the roof of Farrell’s could no longer guide her. It hadn’t survived the flood. Unlike Poplar Street, where the damage was scattered like the pellets of a shotgun, Canal Street had been blasted by an assault rifle. The houses were all gone, every last one of them.

  The mansion built by her ancestors in the mid nineteenth century had withstood a dozen floods over the years, as it was designed to, but couldn’t hold ground against the force of Agnes. The Bennetts’ home, nearly as big as the Parkers’, had been washed down to the Chesapeake Bay as well. As she remembered it, the Roberts’ house had been washed down the street and left on its side on the road. The dozen others on this quiet cobblestone street beside the river had met similar fates, their foundations crumbling and nails popping until only heaps of wood and stone remained of her neighborhood.

  Hers had been the last house on Canal Street, or the first, depending on the direction you were facing. It was the southern-most dwelling on the street, set back on a small hill where the road bent away from th
e Susquehanna back toward Route 11. She used that bend in the road now to guide her as she tried to map out in her mind where her house had been.

  She supposed all communities changed over time, evolving like living creatures in order to survive. A bank closed and a shop opened. A shop closed and a café took its place. The process continued, the town fulfilling the needs of the citizens. Like people, some lingered long after they’d fulfilled their purpose while others closed suddenly, leaving everyone wondering why. Sandy had seen this happen over the years in the Poconos and also in her little neighborhood in Greenwich Village.

  The changes on Canal Street, though, weren’t part of an evolution. This was annihilation. The wise men who governed the township had sacrificed an entire street. Deeming this ground too vulnerable to flooding, the redevelopment authority had claimed all of it by purchasing every property on the street. The homes that had survived Agnes were victims of the wrecking ball. The foundations of the homes washed into the river were filled in and leveled. Even the cobblestones that had formed the street were gone, replaced by gravel.

  A park had been built in what was once her backyard. A field of green, dotted with swings and slides and a fitness trail, wound from the Parkers’ to the Bennetts’ and all the way to the Simons’ property at the other end of the road. There were all the expected things—trees, picnic tables, a ball field—yet Sandy hadn’t expected them and needed to take a deep breath to calm herself.

  A family with a dog was playing a game of fetch. The mother had watched as Sandy’s Mercedes pulled to a stop in the grass and they exited the car. The woman studied Sandy and Angie for a moment, making no effort to hide her surveillance. No doubt two women in an expensive car was an unusual sight in this modest neighborhood, but the woman assessed the new arrivals and must have deemed them harmless, for she quickly turned her attention back to her family.

  “This was my backyard.” She motioned to Angie. “The house was here, and I could sit on my front-porch swing and watch the mountain and the river right here at my feet. Over there was the basketball hoop my grandfather built for me. The court was made of fieldstone because Gram wanted it to match the walkways. Created a lot of bad bounces but improved my ball-handling skills!”

  Sandy leaned against the car and just stared, from the railroad bed that had bordered their property in the back to the river across the canal in front, to the luscious foliage on the trees and up to the clear blue sky. It was a beautiful scene, but devoid of the children and flowerbeds and cobblestones and beautiful homes that had once made it grand. Absolutely nothing was left of the block she’d called home. Every single house was gone, along with the wonderful people who had lived there. For the first time, Sandy wondered what had become of them all.

  The pain over losing Jeannie had been so intense that she’d found it necessary to just walk away from her life here and never look back. And walking away had been so easy, because there was nothing left to come back to after Agnes. She had unleashed her greatest wrath here. The Wyoming Valley had been decimated. Agnes had ruined twenty-five thousand homes and claimed the lives of fifty Pennsylvanians, two of them who had lived just a few feet from where she was standing.

  Suddenly the memories Sandy had buried were floating free and flooding her brain. Being back in town made her regret her decision to leave it all behind her. These had been good people, and Sandy hoped they’d been able to pick up the pieces, as she and her grandmother had, and move on.

  Angie walked around the car and put an arm around her shoulders. “It’s hard to imagine that river,” she nodded to where a glimpse of the Susquehanna could be had through the trees, “doing this much damage. How did you manage to go on?”

  Sandy pursed her lips and reflected before answering. On this calm, clear day, with the river resting peacefully in its bed, it was indeed hard to imagine the violence that had done such damage. Yet Sandy had witnessed it, and she would never forget what she’d seen. She blocked her emotions, something she’d gotten good at over the years, and tried to just focus on the facts. “All that rain has to go somewhere, and this is where all of the little streams and sewer pipes drain. It doesn’t take much to make a flood. We were fortunate, Angie. We had money. My grandfather had been in college when the stock market crashed, and while his family survived, they had some losses. But they learned and became even more diversified. They invested in land and real estate, and a few businesses that brought in money. My grandfather never really trusted the banks and the market after 1929. He used to joke that he invested in the Canal Street Bank.”

  “You had a bank here on Canal Street?”

  Laughing, Sandy shook her head. “Buster Brown shoe boxes in the attic.”

  Angie’s jaw dropped. “You’ve got to be kidding me!”

  “It was a different time, Ang. There were no credit cards then, and people did everything with cash. For years, my grandfather took all of his rental collections and the cash he brought in from his medical practice and put it in the attic. Not to mention the money from the various Parker enterprises. If he needed a new car, he went upstairs for money. If Gram wanted something for the house, he’d pull out a shoe box. After he died, my grandmother started using the bank more, because she preferred to write checks. Less driving around that way—she could just drop a check in the mail.”

  “So what happened to the money in the attic? Did you spend it all?”

  Sandy laughed again. “Oh, no. I think we could have purchased a few cars and a new house with the cash Grandpop had up there, but unfortunately it all washed away.”

  “You’re kidding me, right?”

  Shaking her head, Sandy gave her a sad smile. “I’m not, Ang. No one knew it was going to be as bad as it was. We thought we’d get water on the first floor, so we moved everything to the second. We thought we’d be back in a few days, so we weren’t really worried about leaving everything. No one expected the house to get washed down the river.”

  “So you took nothing with you when you left?”

  “Clothes, a book, my toothbrush.”

  “Our entire family history, washed away. There must have been so many treasures, Mom. Antiques, huh?”

  Sandy sighed. “All the furniture was beautiful. Finely constructed, real wood. Of course the household things like the silver and china were special, gifts to my grandparents on their wedding. My grandfather had a coin collection, with Indian-head pennies and buffalo nickels, that was quite valuable. He owned an original Wyeth that he bought when he was in med school. That painting would be worth millions today. My grandmother had a Norman Rockwell painting—not a print, an original painting—over the buffet in the dining room. Also worth a small fortune. And from my great-grandfather Parker, we had an array of old American West art and artifacts. A Remington bronze of a cowboy—like the one I own—and some old guns and a poster promoting the Buffalo Bill show with Annie Oakley.”

  Ang smiled, biting her lower lip, as was her habit. “That must have been cool, growing up with all that stuff.”

  Sandy smiled in memory. It had brought her grandfather such joy to talk about his treasures, and she’d played Wild West with him so many times she couldn’t count them. With real guns. “I did have a great childhood,” she admitted.

  “I’m sorry you lost all that stuff, Mom.”

  Sighing, Sandy shrugged. “We lost a lot, but we had a lot. We did okay after the flood. The redevelopment authority bought our properties for a fair price. And my grandfather’s family had owned heavy equipment since the days of the mines. His brother was running the company then, but my grandmother was still a partner. They made millions cleaning up after Agnes. Some people were too poor to rebuild their homes and ended up living in low-income housing complexes until they died years later. Others were moved into trailer parks. Agnes destroyed those people. Us, she just kicked our knees out from under us. We got back up.”

  She again thought reverently of her neighbors, this time recalling their personal treasures. Mr. Babc
ock, who’d lived just a few doors away, had still proudly displayed the medals he’d earned serving America during World War II. As a young man he’d been part of Operation Overlord, one of the brave soldiers who landed on Normandy Beach on that bloody June day so long ago. Another neighbor had been a member of the Nanticoke boys’ basketball team that won the Pennsylvania State Championship in 1961. Sitting proudly upon the mantel, his trophy had been one of his prized possessions. Had he taken it with him? The china in Mrs. Bennett’s closet had come from her family in Ireland. It was an irreplaceable treasure, and Sandy knew it hadn’t gone with the Bennett family to higher ground. She’d helped them move it to the second floor just hours before they fled their home.

  Everyone had lost something. Some lost everything. The value of their loss could sometimes be measured in dollars—her grandmother’s Rockwell, for instance—but other treasures, like trophies and pictures, were far more valuable and equally irreplaceable.

  “Everyone lost something,” she said again, this time out loud, for Angie’s benefit. She was speaking of family fortunes, of course, but also of her very personal loss. I lost everything.

  “Do you want to see the river?” Angie asked.

  Wearing low heels had seemed like a good idea in the morning when she was heading to the funeral home, but now they gave Sandy pause. They complemented her skirt, but she’d sink to her ankles if this grassy plot was wet. Because it was so close to the river and the water table so high, the ground beneath their home had never drained properly, and every good rain left their yard a soggy mess. She tested the ground before putting her full weight down. It was dry. She laughed to herself as she thought about that fact and about the last time she’d been in this very spot. On that occasion, she’d stood in six inches of mud.