by Rae Meadows
For a moment, Samuel felt himself rise up, lifted by awe and belief. Could this be more than rain? He felt a warmth pulse in the center of himself. My God, you are here, he thought. I have built a boat and you are here. He closed his eyes and felt waves crashing in his head. You were right, Freddie, you were right.
“This is more than rain,” he said finally, his voice loud and strange.
Annie had forgotten what a real rainstorm was like, how it boomed to life with its cymbals and snare drums. Like those tantrums Birdie used to throw as a toddler, fists to the floor. Her face was wet. But she would not move away from it. Grief had made fear a powerless object she could hold in her hand. One child had not been enough for God, He had to take two, she thought. We know everyone we love is going to die, but we don’t know it, can’t possibly believe it, she thought, or long ago I would have gone and started digging until I had a hole big enough to lie down in.
In a flash of lightning, Annie glimpsed the water rushing below the porch, like those summer storms when she was a girl and the saplings would bend all the way to the ground, the runoff from the roof a waterfall against the front steps. Her mother would worry the edge of her apron, fretting over her peonies.
Fred oh Fred my little Fred, Annie thought. Her anger was still there, red and shapeless, but it had settled some into a bone-deep sadness. There were moments now too that dug out a little space. Like the ruby blooms of Texas paintbrush that had begun to appear. Or Samuel’s gentle hand on her back when she was at the sink. Or even the boat. It was a thing of beauty. Even she could see that.
Birdie went into the house to get dressed. The girl was ready to burst. But Annie forgot it sometimes, her mind distracted. Haul the water and turn the soil and plant and weed and coax and tend, keep going another day. There would be a baby and wasn’t that a wonderful thing? She knew she should tell Birdie that. She should tell her that all the other mess didn’t matter.
Annie stood next to Samuel on the porch. He would never know her cruelty of heart. Samuel, Samuel. His kindness and his faith. Here she was. She took his hand.
I will come back to you, she thought, if you come back to me.
CHAPTER 16
Birdie returned to the porch with a cardigan, its buttons straining over her bulging nightdress. She clutched a small suitcase she’d found days before in the dugout, one her mother had brought out from Kansas, its clasps rusted, the leather ripped along the seam. She held her shoes in her other hand.
“Are you going somewhere?” Annie asked. She still did not believe a flood was coming.
“I figure it’s now or never for the boat.” Birdie had packed a few things, underwear and socks and the dress her mother had made her, which wouldn’t fit now but would fit then, after, when she was herself again. She didn’t really believe a flood would wipe out the land, either, but she felt excited by the gathering water. Here was something different. And just maybe her father had been right.
Now that the moment was upon him, Samuel didn’t quite know what to do. He’d imagined them dashing aboard for safety. The water was rising, but it was a slow ascent, only up to the first porch step.
“It’s just a rainstorm,” Annie said, but she had to yell over the din.
Birdie held her palm out into the pummeling rain.
“It looks like a flood to me,” she said to her mother. Jack Lily is not here anymore, Mama, she thought then, and we are. “Better to be together, isn’t it?”
Annie didn’t answer, but she knew Birdie was right. These were the two people she had left.
They looked at Samuel, his shirt soaked through. It was his moment and he looked unsure, his eyes darting from the rain to Annie to the darkness where the boat waited for them. His feet felt shackled to the splintered boards of the porch. Above them a gutter yawned and snapped free of the house.
“We can stay dry under the roof there.” He pointed, even though he couldn’t see the boat. “I built a bench under it.”
He had not thought about how to get the milk cow onto the boat. Should they get some of the chickens? Fred would have insisted.
“I’m going inside,” Annie said.
“Annie,” he said.
“I’m getting on,” Birdie said, and walked down the steps and into the water and stinging rain.
“Barbara Ann!” Annie tried to reach her hand but Birdie was off, stepping carefully, water over her ankles, wading toward the boat with her suitcase.
“Go get some clothes,” Samuel said.
“I’m going to bed,” Annie said. It was the one last fight she had in her, but it didn’t take.
“No, you’re not,” he said. “Come with me.”
She was crying now, relinquishing her position, relinquishing everything. She went into the house and grabbed a dress and some shoes from the wardrobe that had been hers as a girl, the one that had made it out in the wagon all those years ago. She didn’t bother with her small box of keepsakes—she couldn’t really believe the world was being washed away—but she did take the picture Fred had drawn of the barbed-wire crows’ nest. They would not get to start over, but there was a relief, she admitted, in the rain, in something she didn’t understand. She let the tears come to a hiccupy end. Who knew what would happen now, but she might as well wait it out with what remained of her family.
The water was up to her knees when she stepped in, surprisingly cold, and it pulled at her with an insistence that teased her balance. Her feet slipped in the mud below. Rain pelted her head and ran into her eyes. Samuel held her arm and led her to the boat where Birdie waited, hair matted to her head, her hands resting atop her belly, a borrowed tabletop. Looking at Birdie, it struck Annie that something wasn’t right, hadn’t been right for a while. The girl seemed divorced from her condition, neither anxious nor hopeful, as if her body were not her own. She squeezed next to her daughter on the rough-hewn bench, and the smell of wet wood and pitch made her nose itch. The rain went on and on, but there they were, Annie thought, safe. She took Birdie’s hand, rigid at first and then limp.
Samuel could not stand straight in the boat’s shelter without knocking his head, but neither could he sit, his restless feet dancing forward and back. His hands jittered at his sides. He stuck his head out the doorway and brought it back in, water running off his chin.
“I’ve water and some food below,” he said. “But it’s too late for a ramp to get Greta up. Water’s too deep.”
The water curled around the boat, swirling in eddies, and splashing up the sides.
Part of Annie wanted the water to rise and rise. If Samuel was right, she would have to believe, would have to find peace. She couldn’t tell how high the water was, but it seemed threatening, gaining strength. Something banged into the hull, but whatever it was disappeared in the rushing water. And then she felt it. A lurch.
“Pop?”
Samuel scrambled out to the bow and stood in the rain, his eyes outward to the darkness.
The boat moved again, and then the front began to slide a little back and forth with the current.
“You did it, Pop!” Birdie shouted, laughing. “You were right.”
Annie stood in the doorway looking toward the house, her body hard and still, as if she were carved from some pale stone.
The boat slid forward an inch and then stopped, slipped again, dragging against the ground.
Samuel felt himself expand, filled with a joyous kind of light. The boat lifted, starting to float. The land would be wiped clean, they would be wiped clean. They would be saved. “Praise,” Samuel said. “Praise be.”
The boat inched its way atop the water, yawing and pitching in the storm. The water swallowed the ground and the bases of the locust trees, flooded the dugout up to its roof. They couldn’t make out the house through the darkness; it was as if it had already floated away. Samuel had a pole he’d fashioned that he tried to use to steer, but the boat was too heavy in the current and it listed one way and then another. They were moving, really moving, and
Samuel grabbed the gunwale just before slipping off himself.
“Samuel,” Annie said, a new force and clarity in her voice. She held her hand out to him.
He scrambled back to where she and Birdie sat soaked, despite the roof, and wedged himself between them.
* * *
NOW THAT THEY were on the boat, he feared the destruction that was to come. The house he had built would be brought down. Mulehead would be gone. There was room on the boat for others. But he knew they were miles from anyone. There would be death and ruin. It was too much to think about.
He had felt such lightness only moments before, but now he was falling hard, dread dragging him down. I have done what you asked, he thought. But what about everybody else? How is that right?
The stern got stuck and the boat pivoted a quarter way around before spinning back. Annie, drenched and oddly calm, waited for Samuel to tell her what was next, or just waited for where this vessel would take them. She could see no further than the rain. The night was black. She braced herself against the frame of the hutch as the boat jerked back some, then forward.
There they sat, Samuel, Annie, and Birdie hand in hand in hand on the small bench, when the boat crashed headlong into the barn, taking out part of the wall and narrowly missing the milk cow whose distressed cries could barely be heard over the rain against the roof.
The ark was grounded, half in the barn and half out, its brief journey at an end.
* * *
THE RAIN BEGAN to ease soon after, as if on command. The Bells righted themselves, but they did not speak. They sat for a long while on the boat as the storm dripped to a halt. They watched the water slowly recede.
“Everyone all right?” Samuel finally asked.
“Sure, Pop,” Birdie said. He smiled a naked smile such as she hadn’t seen since before Fred died. He stood and peered up, the last drops falling in a languid rhythm.
And then he laughed.
“I didn’t want a flood,” he said, “when it came down to it.”
He could hear the runoff sluice below, a shallow pond around them. He pulled off a hanging slat from the barn wall and tossed it onto the deck.
“I’ll put a kettle on,” Annie said.
Samuel felt calmness like a fire-warmed blanket over his shoulders. He had been tested and he had been spared. He believed that. He felt neither pride nor regret, delight nor despair. He just was. A man, a farmer. It was the most solid he had felt in months. There was flickering sadness there, too, for the feeling of purpose that was gone. He was just like everybody else. Returned. He thought of Fred and his small arms sawing in the lamplight and how together they had built this beautiful, worthy thing.
* * *
SAMUEL DIDN’T KNOW that there would be years of dust storms yet, years before the conservationists and tree planters came, before terracing and crop rotation transformed the fields, before grasses held the soil down again, before the end of the drought, before farmers tapped the Ogallala Aquifer, that endless-seeming source of water, before waterwheel irrigation turned the Plains into a grid of giant green circles, before the Ogallala began to run dry, a resource only thousands of years of rainwater could replace. But in the still of the aftermath of the almost-flood, he felt something restored in him. He had his small family. He had his old farm. It had rained. He had hope.
He didn’t yet know that Styron would have the boat towed to town, to the center of an old parcel of land that had once held the feed store. Crows would make a nest in the hutch. People would come to see it from neighboring towns, and, when Styron finally got his sign up on the highway, the curious would trickle in to see the Ark of the Plains. Samuel wouldn’t mind. He’d let go of the boat as soon as the rain had stopped.
“I’m going to bed,” Birdie said, yawning. “What time is it? It must be almost morning.” She climbed off the boat on her own before Samuel had a chance to help her.
The birds had begun, twittering and chirping, the air heavy with the smells of mud and wet spring green. Annie thought of the wildflowers that would burst up in the coming weeks. She would burn the old letter from Jack Lily. She would not begrudge Samuel his faith. Maybe God posted signs visible only to those with eyes to see. She wasn’t one of them, but she could accept that maybe her husband was.
“Let me help you down, Annie,” Samuel said.
She took his hand. There is grace here, she thought.
* * *
A DAY PASSED and the water was sucked into the earth. The dugout had filled, leaving it a dank and mucky pit. Inside, the trunk of Fred’s things had floated, most of its contents spared. Annie saved a lot of what she had canned, though some of the pickle jars had cracked. The last of the wheat sacks were sodden and would soon mold. Samuel would fill in the old rooms and raze the roof. It was time to dig a proper cellar.
* * *
AT THE KITCHEN table, Birdie closed her history book. She laid her head on her arm on the table. Annie stood near the sink peeling and cutting carrots for roasting. They could hear Samuel repairing the barn wall, pounding in slats of lumber he had at the ready.
“I thought you had a test this week.”
“Tomorrow.”
“You haven’t done much studying.” Annie glanced at her and went back to the carrots.
“I’m sleepy,” Birdie said. “What does it really matter?” She would have to leave school when she had the baby anyway.
“It matters to do well. To learn. It’s easy to be common, Barbara Ann.”
The comment nettled her. She stared at the red loops of her mother’s apron strings, which hung uneven and limp. After Fred, Birdie had tried to bury what she suspected about her mother. But she suddenly felt so tired, of secrets, of the whole past year, she wanted to fling open the door and be done with it. She said it before she could change her mind.
“Your apron.”
Annie stopped chopping.
“Fred found it, he told me. At Woodrow’s.”
Annie shrank into herself, pulled in close around a cold polished center. She had thought the affair had been hers to put away. But that was too tidy an ending, she knew, to how she had strayed. Of course Birdie had caught on. How reckless Annie had been.
“He did find it there,” Annie said. She kept her voice up, holding on to the slim chance the moment would pass without incident. “Didn’t even know I’d lost it.”
She started again with the knife, but nicked her finger. She held it in the faucet stream before bringing it to her lips. She closed her eyes and waited.
“I can’t make sense of it,” Birdie said, quietly.
Whatever Birdie knew, it was enough. The truth, with its steely resolve, had a way of making itself known.
“Neither can I,” Annie said.
So it was true, Birdie thought. Her steadfast mother. Birdie had hoped against reason that she had been mistaken. But she wasn’t really surprised. Even Fred had known something. Oh Freddie, how she missed him.
“The mayor,” Birdie said.
Annie stood still and silent.
“You and the mayor,” she said. “Mama.” But the words fell sad and soft. Birdie could not make her anger rise.
“I stayed,” Annie said, barely above a whisper. “I would have never left you and Fred. I’m your mother above everything.” She squeezed her bleeding finger in a towel and held it to her chest. There was a pause in the hammering outside, and then it began again.
Birdie started to cry, couldn’t help it. She wanted to go back years. It was dizzying how you could just send your life in a different direction. One choice and then another.
“I’m sorry,” Annie said. “I’m sorry.” Her chin quivered. “I don’t forgive it.”
“Does he know?”
Annie shook her head. “I love your father. Will always.” She dropped the blood-dotted towel in the sink.
Birdie thought of Fred’s small coffin and knew that more punishment was not hers to mete out. So much sadness let loose. She felt so old. Older than
sixteen, older than the moon. Birdie couldn’t help but feel a kernel of wonder. Her mother, who never seemed to yearn for anything. All that I don’t know, she thought.
Annie walked closer and placed her hands, firm and warm, on Birdie’s head.
* * *
THE PAIN STARTED in the early morning a couple weeks later, like a low ache Birdie couldn’t quite locate. She didn’t think much of it until it felt like monthly cramps, and it took her a moment longer to realize she didn’t get monthly cramps anymore and oh, Lord in heaven it was April. Flashes of tightness came through the morning as she milked Greta and fed the chickens, rising through her until they died back down. It should not have been a surprise that this day would come but she was shocked, overwhelmed by how her body had taken over.
Annie came in, dirt across her forehead and rare color in her cheeks, to find her daughter doubled over, the bones of her knuckles straining against skin, clutching the table ledge.
She pressed on Birdie’s lower back until the spasm passed.
“I don’t know what to do, Mama,” Birdie said. “I don’t want a baby.” She cried then, her hands in fists against her forehead.
“We will be fine, Barbara Ann. Let’s walk.”
The wind was up, but the ground was sticky with new mud. They passed the mangled barn Samuel had begun to repair, the boat still sticking out.
“Think people will ever stop talking about us?” Birdie asked.
“People are always going to talk,” Annie said. “If it’s about us or not is neither here nor there.”
Birdie winced as the grip of labor rose to its height, and she squeezed her mother’s strong hand until it passed.
“No one will ever see me the same.”
“You won’t be the same, after today.”
“I know it.”
“It’s not a bad thing. Even if it’s not what you want.”
“Like lima beans.”