by Chloe Garner
––—
Dawn came.
The house stood.
The men set to work hauling sand out of the house using whatever implements they could find and get away with under Sarah’s watchful eye. When one of them started to use a kettle she boxed his ears.
“Damned fool,” she said. “You ain’t gettin’ sand in my tea set.”
She dipped water out of the flood waters and left it to sit on the part of the back porch that hadn’t washed away, coming back a few hours later to get the clean water, pouring it into the sink on in the kitchen carefully enough that it was nearly clear and with only minimal sand.
“Wash up,” she said. “Then use that to get the floors clean.”
“This is dumb,” one of the men said. “The house is a goner, and we all know it.”
“This house has been standing near-on forty years,” Sarah said. “Y’all ain’t got any idea how strong we are, in Lawrence. This happens every year, here.”
She swatted him with the broom and went to the stove, piling on more wood and getting the kettle hot. Dog whined at her feet, and she went to go get jerky from a cabinet for him.
She put her feet up on a chair so that the men could work around her, handing bits of meat to Dog while she waited for her tea to steep.
“How much longer, do you think?” one of the men asked.
“Water ought to be down enough to kick you lot out by tonight,” she said. “I’ll let you stay another night, given you get the floors clean enough to sleep on, but after that, you’re on your own again.”
“I thought things would be different here,” another man said. “There was supposed to be all this money out here, but everyone’s just as dirt-poor as at home.”
“There’s money,” Sarah said. “You just beat it here.”
“My brother froze to death last week,” another man said, standing against a wall. “I ain’t got any fancy notions that this place is any better than any other.”
“It’s a tough place,” Sarah said. “But things are gonna get better. Jimmy’s got ideas to make it a good place to live.”
“It’s supposed to be a desert,” one of the first men said. “Why in hell is so cold at night?”
“Ain’t nothin’ to hold the heat,” she said.
She looked around the kitchen. It was a wreck, really. The wood had soaked up so much water, the floor would never lay right again. She’d have to find a new set of lumber to re-floor the entire first story.
“There’s no way to make this a good place to live,” the man against the wall said. “It’s a place to come to die.”
“You can go any time you like,” she said. “You just walk right out that front door. Watch that first step.” She waited. He was cold, defiant, the kind of man who thought he was hopeless right up until he confronted what death really meant to him. “No?” she said. “Gonna hold on another day, then? Y’all show up in your swarms, expectin’ us to have home and hearth ready for you. Got news, kid. Nothin’ in life works the way you expect it to, and no one is makin’ a place for you. You get what you make happen.”
He shrugged.
“Depends on what you got to start, I reckon.”
“Says the man who walked away from everything he knew to come to Lawrence,” Jimmy said from the doorway.
“I left what I left, expected nothin’ for it,” the man said to Jimmy. “I ain’t one of your rich folk who are gonna pour money on you for absenta. I wasn’t born with money like that.”
“You think we were?” Jimmy asked. “Look around, man. This is where Sarah was born. Looks to me like where she plans on dying. You think she’s coming from wealth?”
“More than us,” one of the young men said.
“Enough,” Sarah said. “Wallowin’ never changed anything. Finish that floor, if you want to sleep on it. That’s all there is.”
“Another floor to clean, another battle to fight,” Jimmy said, jerking his head to indicate Sarah. “If you aren’t going to plan your life, it isn’t a bad way to live. Never disappointed with anything.”
“I ain’t an example, Jimmy. I’m just me.”
“No one else like you,” he said with a grin. He came to join her at the table and they sat with the sound of the men working and the water rushing by underneath them.
––—
The water finally went, and Sarah shooed the boys out of her house, Jimmy and all, and got back to the work of keeping the little house clean and standing. The black horse was glad to be out, though he didn’t care for the sloppy sand everywhere, and so was Sarah. The air was just beginning to dry out again but the sun on the wet ground still brought up an intolerable humidity by midday that had Sarah sweating through her clothes, her duster left on its hook in the hallway. She worked at the sand, moving it load by load away from the house and building a berm around the edge of the property that, once the sand dried out properly and the dry wind took over again, would blow away without any sign it had ever been there. It was why diverting the water around town had never been tried. Anything you built would either fill in or blow away within a year or two. Simple and inevitable.
She found the pillars under the house that had shattered, long, diagonal breaks in the posts that stretched deep into the ground. By the point that they’d given, it appeared that the pile of sand may have been the only thing that kept them up. As the wood dried, it creaked and cracked, shrinking back into new shapes. Most of it was aged hard enough that it was impossible to deform, but parts of the first story were unused to the flooding and were warping pretty badly in the drying air. She had a lot of work to do, and no time or resources to do it.
Sure she had money. But even there she was nervous. Her cash reserves from eight years as the protector of Lawrence weren’t going to stand up long to the needs around town to feed, shelter, and employ the men, not to mention rebuild where rebuilding was needed. The homesteads would look to her. They always did. And she would come through for them, arranging what they needed to get homes and barns back upright and solid, long before she did her own. Her pa’s estate was hardly something to be proud of, compared to the importance of the homesteads to Lawrence.
The barn would wait. She had until she brought the cows back down from the high country before she would need it again, other than for feed and equipment storage. Storage she’d just do without, for now.
Later, maybe after the barn was rebuilt and the cows were in and butchered, maybe then she would think about what to do about the foundation of the house.
Jimmy was right that it wouldn’t survive another big flood. Not like this one, certainly, and maybe not like a normal year.
She couldn’t think about it now.
She shored up what she could, putting long bolts through the split foundation timbers and tightening them down as much as she could by herself, then returning to cleaning up.
There was too much else to do. She only gave herself a day at it, half a day really, before she went into town to see after the buildings there.
The tavern and the general store still stood, but the little shops across from them had taken a beating, as Sarah had expected. Three of he abandoned ones were gone, and it looked like the tailor might be a total loss. The dress shop was untouched, as were several of the other abandoned stores, because of a large bank of sand that had formed behind them. It would take days to dig out that much sand, but the pile had saved the shops from much of the brunt of the flooding, it appeared.
Sarah went to check on Granger first.
“How did things fare here?” she asked, leaning on the counter and looking around.
“Water never made the sidewalk,” Granger said. “Just another year, for us. Heard some of the homesteads had it up inside.”
“Four inches at my place,” Sarah said. Granger nodded sagely, wiping the top of his head.
“Big year for the rains. Sand didn’t help none, either.”
“No, it surely did not,” Sarah agreed. “How did the boys
behave?”
“They were fine, mostly,” Granger said. “Nothin’ I couldn’t handle. They kinda went back and forth ‘tween here and the tavern, mixed up as they liked.”
“And how did Paulie and Willie behave?” Sarah asked.
“You’ll have to ask them,” Granger said. “We ain’t been friendly neighbors this long without knowin’ better than to check on how the other is farin’.”
Sarah nodded.
“There’s stuff going on,” she said. “Don’t know what it is yet, but keep a weather eye out for what Jimmy Lawson is up to.”
“If you don’t know, I doubt that young man knows his own mind, either,” Granger said.
“It ain’t like that, Granger,” she scolded. “And he ain’t a young man. Just looks one.”
“He is in my book,” Granger said. “And you’ve always been his only confidant. You know that just as good as I do.”
“You ain’t helpin’ nothin’,” she said. “I don’t need to hear it from you today.”
He looked sheepish, adjusting his spectacles and turning away.
“You done good, Sarah,” he said. “The young ‘uns, they were all in buildings that stayed upright. All the rebuildin’ we’re gonna have to do, there ain’t gonna be bodies everywhere, and that’s somethin’.”
She slapped the counter twice by way of ending the conversation and went on to the tavern.
Paulie was sitting at a table inside drinking something amber-colored out of a deep glass.
“How’d it go here?” Sarah asked.
“Look around and see for yourself,” Paulie said. Sarah took a moment to see what was there, finding much the same mess she had at her house. Sand everywhere, chairs and furniture out of place.
“I can’t tell a difference,” Sarah said. “Ain’t it always like this?”
Paulie glared at her, and Willie stuck his head out from a back room.
“That you, Sarah Todd?”
She turned to face him, blank-faced.
“Expect you to pay for the damages,” he said.
“You run a tavern, Willie. No way a bunch of men did more damage in here sober than they would do any other day of the week, drunk.”
“Yeah, but none of them were buying drinks,” he said. “I ain’t got no income to show for all this.”
“You got a building to show for it, and that’s more than some,” she said. “You ain’t gettin’ a dime from me.”
He shook a fist at her, starting to sputter something angry, then thought better of it and shook his head, turning and muttering his way back into the back room. She watched him with dampened bemusement, then touched her hat to Paulie and left, going to look at the side of the street that hadn’t fared so well.
The buildings that were missing were just gone. The ground was slushy with loose sand and undrained water, no marks, no holes, no debris where someone had once made a livelihood. It was chilling, each time she saw it. It happened often enough that she thought she should have been used to it by now, but that didn’t change anything. To cover over a place like that so completely that someone who knew where they were and what they were looking at couldn’t find a single sign of human occupation, this was what extinction looked like. Like sand and water and desert. She turned, finding a group of men watching her.
“What happens now?” one of them asked.
“You get to work,” she said. “You get shovels from Granger and you start digging everything out.”
There was a hesitation, a moment as they silently consulted with each other to see if anyone was going to complain about it, but no one did. They migrated, haltingly, hesitantly, toward Granger’s, and she waved them on.
“Keep movin’,” she said. “We got more work than time. Keep your hands busy.”
There wasn’t anything else for them to do. That was the problem. They’d have argued, protested, had there been anything at all for them to spend their time on, but she suspected that the purposefulness of digging sand, as meager as it was, was mana to them. She found the black horse at the end of the street and mounted up again, forcing him through the unpleasant surface in town onto the perhaps worse ones outside of town, visiting each of the homesteads before dark.
She didn’t have time to stay long at any one of them, even the Goodsons, who had lost a substantial part of their house, but she promised to do what needed to be done to get everyone back up and running as soon as she could.
It was strange having adequate labor, for once. They were woefully short on lumber, she knew, and that would take time to get sorted out, and she would need to find more men from Lawrence who could lead teams of unskilled workers, once it came to the actual rebuilding, but she could see the path forward from here.
She just couldn’t make the timeline work.
She found herself at the Lawson house at the end of the day as the sun was falling behind the mountains. One of the staff opened the door at her knock and let her in, disappearing once Sarah was seated on a couch in the front room with a cup of tea in her hands.
Lise was the first one to find her. For a woman who had played hostess to an uncouth bunch of young men for the last three days, she looked smug.
“Hello, Sarah,” she said.
“Lise,” Sarah answered, giving her a quick nod.
“How have you been?” Lise asked, coming to sit on an armchair facing her. Sarah was confused.
“I been fine, thanks.”
Lise raised an eyebrow, perfect blond arch above startling blue iris, and Sarah did the same.
“Aren’t you going to ask how I’ve been?” she asked.
“Don’t figure I much care,” Sarah said. Lise pursed her lips.
“I know breeding isn’t your strong suit, but I thought you were at least able to be civil when you chose.”
“Reckon I could, if I wanted,” Sarah said, almost laughing when Lise shifted in her chair, betraying the surge of energy she was trying to mask. Sarah sighed.
“Fine, Lise. How ya been?”
“Awful,” the woman said. “Just terrible. I can’t find anything in this terrible little place that’s fit to eat, the climate doesn’t suit me at all, I’m completely exhausted all the time, and there’s no one here to talk to about anything.”
“That’s too bad,” Sarah said, standing as Jimmy came into the room. He gave Lise a small frown, and the woman curled in her chair, looking defiant. Sarah started across the room, pausing near Jimmy to turn and look at Lise.
“Whose baby is it?” she asked Jimmy.
“What?” Jimmy asked. Lise opened and closed her mouth like a fish. Sarah blinked at her.
“That was what you were here to tell me, weren’t it, Lise? That you’re knocked up?”
She swallowed hard, eyes big.
“What?” Jimmy asked, his voice louder.
“So I figure the right question is which Lawson put it in you,” Sarah said. “Seems like the right question, anyway.”
“I...” Lise said, outrage strangled by surprise.
“Lise?” Jimmy asked.
The woman recovered masterfully.
“Your friend is the most insulting woman I have ever met in my life,” she said. “I chose to share my news with her because she’s a woman and that means something, and then for her to go and accuse me of something like that...”
Sarah shrugged.
“Seems like an easy question, then. You got a few minutes, Jimmy?”
“Outrageous,” Lise said, standing. “Jimmy, you can’t allow her to speak to me like that. Not her.”
“You’re the one who told her,” Jimmy said.
“Actually, I didn’t,” Lise said. “I was complaining about how awful this town is, and how much I hate it here. She’s the one who...”
She paused and Sarah shook her head.
“You’re a fine liar, Lise, but you need to be less emotionally invested in things to do it. Either you is or you ain’t pregnant, and you done already gave that away.”
&nb
sp; “Jimmy, I want her out,” Lise said. “I was going to offer her an olive branch, but this is beyond the pale.”
As much fun as it was to poke the poor woman, Sarah had better things to do with her time.
Maybe.
She turned to Jimmy.
“We need to talk about a sawmill.”
“Sawmill,” he said. “Hadn’t considered that. Will you come to my office?”
“James Lawson,” Lise thundered. “You cannot simply ignore this.”
“Oh, I have no intention,” Jimmy breathed softly. “We’ll speak about it later.”
Lise colored, trying to muster indignation and anger to point at Sarah, but finding her surprise spoiled and her thunder stolen, she turned and left instead.
“Honestly, Jimmy,” Sarah said as she followed him into his office.
“I know,” he answered. “Jezzie is so much simpler.”
She stopped in the doorway as he went to his chair and sat.
“You really are out to make every woman in this house hate you, aren’t you?”
“I don’t think Kayla or Sunny have done anything to warrant that,” he answered. “Tell me about the sawmill.”
“Bastard,” she said, going to sit across from him.
“There were better ways to handle that,” he said, steepling his fingers and watching her with level eyes.
“Better, maybe,” she said. “But it was an awful lot of fun.”
“And I’m the bastard?” he asked.
“Didn’t figure you’d want to talk about it,” she said.
“I don’t,” he said. “But you’ve put me in a bad spot.”
She sat back in her chair, crossing her legs and then her arms in a slow display.
“From where I sit, you done that all on your own.”
He waited a long, long pause, then blinked once.
“I suppose you think I deserve that.”
She shrugged.
“If the sex-induced dilemma fits,” she said.
“Tell me about the sawmill,” he said again.
“We need to be runnin’ one,” she said. “For all the buildin’ we got comin’ at us, we don’t want to have to import all our lumber from Jeremiah and beyond, and we don’t want to have to wait for the folk in town to have a chance to fell and harvest the trees themselves.”