Sarah Todd

by Chloe Garner

  “I can get the rest of this,” she said. “Put those upstairs.”

  Old photos, down at the bottom of the safe, and letters. Things that she didn’t get out often, but that she needed to know they were protected. She carefully arranged them in a pile and re-locked the safe, kicking the rug back over it and following Jimmy upstairs.

  “You can have the other room if you want it,” she said, indicating her pa’s room.

  “You’re still in your old room?” he asked, looking in. She started unloading his arms, putting things in drawers that she wanted to be out of sight and into a water-tight box that went under her bed, when she needed them to stay safe in the event that the house deteriorated around them.

  “Got no need to move out,” she said.

  “Isn’t your pa’s room nicer?” Jimmy asked, looking over his shoulder. She shrugged.

  “Might be. Don’t much care. Only sleep up here.”

  Jimmy saw the tub in the corner of the room.

  “You don’t have running water up here?”

  She glanced at the copper tub.

  “Don’t use it much,” she said. “Too much effort.”

  “I didn’t realize just how primitive you really are, here,” he said, dropping his arms as she took the surveys from him and put them into the box that went back under her bed.

  “It is what it is,” she answered. “You can go.”

  He took one more moment, imposing his presence now for effect, then shrugged and turned. Downstairs, there were voices.

  She pushed the waterbox further under the bed with her foot then went downstairs, putting her duster on the hook where it went and going into the kitchen.

  “All right,” she said, looking out the window. “From the look ‘a things, we got at least three days of each other, here. It ain’t gonna be fun and it ain’t gonna be comfortable, but that’s how it is. Stake out a space big enough for a blanket, and I’ll get you set. You leave your blanket folded where you sleep all day, that’s your space, but we need it to get around. Mind other people’s sleepin’ space and they’ll mind yours. I’ll brew as much tea as you can drink, but if you want somethin’ nicer than raw gremlin to eat, you’d best figure out how to make it yourself. I ain’t feedin’ ya. I ain’t your cook, your maid, or your ma.”

  She turned, finding the young men milling a bit aimlessly.

  “Well,” she said. “Go. Pick a spot and be done with it.”

  There was only the front hallway and the kitchen to work with, if you didn’t trust the horses not to step on you in your sleep, and the square footage was quickly allocated. She took the stack of blankets out of the pantry and passed them out.

  “No fightin’, no peein’ where it don’t go, no backtalkin’ me or Jimmy, I don’t care how tired of what’s goin’ on here you might be. This is Jimmy Lawson. He and his family run Lawrence. You don’t want him recognizin’ you for bad reasons.”

  “And that’s Sarah Todd,” Jimmy called from the stairs. “She’s got a nasty temper and a way with grudges that you wouldn’t believe.”

  “Shut up, Lawson,” she answered. Once the blankets were set out, marking where each of the men would sleep, she nodded.

  “And that’s that.”

  She went to the back door and opened it, stepping out onto the porch and leaning against the house to watch the water roll in. It had been clean, at the beginning, the flow of water too weak to pick up too much sediment and mostly just rolling across the desert through the open paths between sand dunes, but as the rain up in the mountains - visible from the back porch and gradually making its way out onto the plains, where things would only get worse - continued to fall, the roll of water became more and more powerful. There were two days’ worth of clouds up there, if she knew the pattern at all, two days of solid rain, solid flood. The water would crest maybe tomorrow afternoon, below the kitchen floor if they were lucky, and continue to run for nearly another day.

  She looked over to find Jimmy standing against the other doorpost and the men back in the kitchen, looking out the door or the windows.

  “Damn,” someone said. She nodded to herself, crossing her arms and looking back out at the water.

  The tell-tale serpentines were beginning to form in the water as sand started to break loose from the ground under the force of the water. They’d push this way and that, the sand and the water reacting to each other like animals wrestling, and then the sand would give completely and just flow in the dirty water. She went to the edge of the porch and looked down at the posts driven down into the bedrock there. Right now, they only showed slight signs of accumulation of dust and sand, but like the closing stone out on the flats, they would serve as the starting point for huge dunes of sand brought in by the water. That much sand and that much water would stress them, but they’d held for more than forty years. She could only hope they’d continue to do it, this year.

  “You suppose they made it to your house?” she asked.

  “They made it,” Jimmy answered.

  She nodded.

  “You want tea?”

  He crossed his legs at the ankle, leaning against the post and watching the water.

  “Yeah,” he said. “Sure.”

  ––—

  The barn gave the next afternoon. Sarah sat at the kitchen table sipping tea as the men whooped and yelled at it, taking bets, rooting for it, against it. Jimmy sat across from her, smoking a cigarette. She heard the slough as the foundations gave, as the sand won. It was piling up against the posts of the house, making inroads onto the porch. She went out every hour or so and swept it back, knocking it off of the leading posts and then doing her best to clear out the sand from the posts under the front porch, but they were hard to reach and falling into the water now was certain death.

  She’d never seen it this bad before.

  There was almost as much sand as water, dark red sand like dying blood, and it clung to everything. The floors were coated with it where the men tracked it in. The rain had reached them the night before, late in the night as dawn struggled to win out over the clouds, but it had retreated again under the heat of the sun, and the air was suffocating with humidity. She let the men wash twice a day, once before lunch and once after dinner, using a tub and a cloth in the kitchen, but it wasn’t enough to get rid of the sweatsalt or the sand. Her bathing up in her room wasn’t much better, though she had cleaner water to work with. Mostly she kept her hat on and her mouth shut. No sense in complaining and no sense fighting. The water would win.

  About an hour after the barn gave, one of the men came to tell Sarah that the sand was coming up on the porch again. She went to get her broom again, but he hadn’t been as accurate as he should have been.

  The water was coming up onto the porch, bringing sheets of sand with it.

  “Everyone in the house,” she said. The men complained, throwing cigarettes into the water and getting up.

  “Now,” she said more emphatically, looking at the water.

  The porch had been built level. The water shouldn’t have been able to peak up over the edge. The porch was tipping under the force from underneath it and the weight of the water pushing up onto it, and it could go.

  If the porch went, she wasn’t sure the house would hold. The two structures were twined together, but it was possible.

  The men went in past her, and she stayed for another minute, looking down at the water. Eventually, out of a sense of stubbornness, she swept the wet, sticking sand off of the porch, pushing the water around to either side while she did it, just to have beat it for a minute.

  “How bad?” Jimmy asked, coming out with a cup of tea.

  “Water’s still comin’ up,” she said. The high-water mark on the wood kept inching its way up. She did a quick estimate. “If it don’t quit at the rate it’s comin’ now, we’ll have water goin’ through the house before dinner.”

  He sipped his tea again.

  “Worse to fight it than to let it run,” he said. She no
dded. She knew it was true, but she didn’t like to give up, either.

  “Gonna make a mess of everything.”

  “You’ve got eight able-bodied men in there,” he said. “Have them move anything you want moved, and then clean it after the water goes back down.”

  She didn’t like having other people working in her house, but she couldn’t argue with him. She went inside, handing Jimmy the broom on the way by. He looked at it like a strange animal.

  “All right,” she said. “We’re gonna get water in here. I want everything off the floor. The rug in the front room goes upstairs, and everything else goes on a shelf or a counter.”

  They looked up from their card game and she glared.

  “Now.”

  There was the briefest of hesitations, and then they stood and started work. She crossed her arms, watching.

  “That ain’t how you roll a rug,” she complained as one of the men moved the black horse off of it. Both the black horse and Jimmy’s horse were getting stir crazy there in the front room, and the black horse didn’t like being handled by a stranger like that.

  She went to intervene while someone else made a mess of her medical supplies in the pantry.

  About an hour later, Jimmy came in, leaving wet footprints across the kitchen.

  The men had gone back to cards, and Sarah was sitting at her pa’s desk with her feet up on it, watching the water rolling away out the front window as the black horse danced back and forth across the window.

  “They can feel it,” Sarah said.

  “What’s that?” Jimmy asked.

  “The house shifting,” she said. “I think it’ll hold, but I bet it doesn’t, next year. Can only take so much.”

  “The water is coming,” he said. She nodded, not looking. It was inevitable. The water would come and tear down everything the town had ever built. It was just how it worked. Jimmy sat down on the desk and watched with her as the sound of water, first trickling and then rushing, came through the hallway next to them.

  ––—

  Sarah was reasonably sure no one slept that night. There was nothing to do, if the house went. There was no safety, no one to rescue them. So they went to bed.

  The water came down enough that she was making the men stay downstairs, but she didn’t actually expect any of them to lay down to sleep. The floor was an inch deep in sand along the edges where the faster water hadn’t kept it slightly more clean, and the flooding hadn’t actually peaked until the run of water from front door to back was a little more than three inches deep. The house creaked and strained under the force of the rusty red water, but it held.

  The rain came out onto the plain again, washing against the windows in sheets that drowned out the sound of the floodwaters below them.

  The desert just wasn’t made to hold that much water. It simply couldn’t. The water would continue on for miles and miles, probably flooding Jeremiah this year, until the sandy soil either sopped it all up or the big rivers on toward Mont Blanc drank it. Mont Blanc could grow oats and wheat. The soil was better, and they had good rainwater and ground water all year round. Their rivers drained the groundwater from underneath an entire continent of desert.

  Sarah thought a few times of town, wondering how the homesteads and the little single houses were holding up, whether the general store and the tavern would still be there, how much of Main Street they would lose.

  Around midnight, by her guess, Jimmy came into her room with a lantern.

  “There’s no sleeping with all this noise,” he said. “I figured we always used to sit up when we were kids.”

  “We did,” she said. He sat down on her bed.

  “I’m not going to let this happen again,” he said. She laughed.

  “Lawsons all think they’re gods.”

  “I mean it,” he said. “This cowering and hoping that the flood doesn’t kill us all, this isn’t how it should be.”

  “But it’s how it is,” she said. “You think you’re going to get everyone to move up into the hills, you’re a fool.”

  “I know,” he said. “But I’m going to figure it out.”

  “You thought about the railway?” she asked. “It’s gonna be under a foot of sand. No telling how long it takes them to dig it out.”

  “Wade and the ones we took in are under instructions to go start digging as soon as they can get out,” Jimmy said.

  “What about town?” Sarah asked.

  “You think we’re short on labor?” he asked. “It’s just a question of splitting it up well enough to get everything done before the investors get here.”

  “I don’t even know where they’re going to stay,” Sarah said. “Everything is going to be a ruin.”

  “I’ve got that figured out, too,” he said. “You just show up with the list of properties and take their money. I’ve got the rest of it.”

  She shook her head.

  “You’re so full of yourself you can’t see out anymore.”

  “Mama used to say that,” he said.

  “Still true,” she said.

  “No, I know...” he said. “Just... Haven’t heard that in her voice in a long time.”

  She looked over at the window, the gold of the lamp reflecting off of the random water shapes running down the glass, and everything beyond just darkness.

  “It was different back then,” she said. “Everything was.”

  “It was,” he said. “It was always going to be like this, someday, but... I thought it would be different.”

  “Different how?” she asked. He was studying her.

  “Did you ever think about the future, back then?” he asked. She shook her head.

  “Knew you would.”

  He nodded.

  “I did. All the time.”

  “Different how?” she asked again.

  “Easier, maybe?” he said. “No. Not easier. Just... better. I thought that we would have had all this time to get things worked out and set up the way we wanted them. Us against the world.”

  “Jimmy, are you being romantic?”

  “No,” he said plainly. She hadn’t stung anything sensitive there at all. “I just knew that, even more than any of my brothers, you’d always be on my side. I didn’t even think of you like that until after you went away to college.” He paused. His fingers fidgeted over the grip on the lantern in a way that she recognized. His mind worked best when his fingers were working at something, as well. She’d once spent an entire afternoon cleaning guns with him, once, just watching the ideas come to him. “You never did look at me like that, did you?”

  “I don’t know,” she lied. “You could argue that I was a lot more faithful to you than you were to me.”

  “We never had anything like that,” he said. “You know that.”

  “I know.”

  “No one is like us,” he said.

  “No.”

  What was more true, or so it seemed to Sarah, was that no one was like her and no one was like him, so obviously when you combined the two of them, you got something completely new, again, but she didn’t argue the point. He laughed as if she had.

  “Yeah,” he said.

  She pulled her feet in, having flashbacks to the days when she lived at the Lawson house, when Jimmy would sneak down to her room or she would sneak up to his and they would sit up and talk. She couldn’t remember what they used to talk about, specifically, or even if they’d always talked, but the familiarity of it made her feel childish and slightly off-kilter.

  “I though we’d be like my parents,” he finally said. “That you’d be like my mom.”

  “I think it’s the Perpeto,” she said impulsively. He tipped his head the other way, fingers playing on the lamp faster.

  “Why?”

  She shrugged. It was a theory that had been stirring under the surface for a while, one she hadn’t given any voice to because who in their right mind would complain about looking and feeling twenty-four for their entire life?

  �
��No one ever has to grow up,” she said. “Not really. There are no milestones. Nothing forcing you to move on and do things. It’s like we can get stuck in this one year of our lives over and over again, and nothing has to change.”

  “Would you give it up?” he asked.

  “Hell no,” she said. “But maybe we would have been different, if there had been consequences.”

  “You don’t think there are consequences?”

  “It didn’t feel like it, did it?” she asked. “You thought we had forever.”

  He looked away, fingers going still.

  “Still do,” he said. “I’ve got such big plans, and they’re going to take decades.” His eyes went to the ceiling. “The things I can see in my head, Sarah. The things I can do.”

  “I know,” she said. “I’ll be there for them.”

  He sighed, landing on the bed again in his awareness of where he was.

  “Is that enough for you?” he asked.

  “I don’t ask questions like that,” she said.

  The house gave a shudder as something, somewhere gave, and they both stiffened. Mentally, Sarah was looking for the things she would need to survive being washed away, if she had any chance of it. Where was her jacket, where was her hat.

  Nothing else happened, and he looked at the lamp again.

  “Rebuilding isn’t going to fix this,” he said. She shook her head.

  “Sometimes things are broken enough that you can’t ever fix them.”

  “I need a cigarette,” he said. She reached into her nightstand and took out the papers and the gremlin, outing herself as a nighttime bed smoker. She handed him one, then lit one for herself.

  “Tell me about the Joiners,” he said.

  “What about them?” she asked.

  “I need land,” he said. “If you were going to buy a big piece of land close to town, who would you start with?”

  She drew a breath and let it go.

  He did have big dreams. Nothing was going to shake him from chasing them, not her, not a storm, not a flood, and certainly not the absurdity of how big those dreams really were. They spent the rest of the night talking tactics.