The Tilted World (23 page)

How long he stood watching the lashing angry surges of dark water filled with boards and planks and poles he didn’t know, but at some point a raft came within ten feet, swinging around the corner. It carried three men and a dog, and Ingersoll yelled and ran to the edge of the roof. One of the men reached an oar to the building but it didn’t touch, so Ingersoll tied a rope that was on the roof to the chimney and flung the rope and it was caught and fist over burning fist he yanked that heavy load to the roof and pulled the men over the wall and they lay stunned and heaving and then Ingersoll got them to their feet to haul the raft over, too. With the same rope they reeled in a canoe that held three Negroes, one a pregnant woman. There were six of them now rescued from the water and a dozen more had come up from the hotel and they ran across the roof in a confusion of terror, the dog barking and leaping alongside them. One of the Negroes spotted a boy riding a bucking hogshead barrel, and they threw him the rope and he caught it but someone yanked it too hard and the boy was spun off and Ingersoll leaped to the top of the wall, about to dive in, when they saw the boy’s fist rising from the water, the rope in his hand, and they pulled him too onto the roof, where he spewed water. “My daddy!” he coughed out and pointed and they all looked and there was nothing in the direction of his finger and the boy let it fall to his side.

Ingersoll scanned the churning ocean pocked with fire. Only a few buildings, like dark ships, crested the water, but City Hall’s roof was filled with two dozen folks at least and someone was waving a towel or blanket and Ingersoll realized they must see a plane. Yes, the planes would be coming soon. Those in the treetops—for they could see what looked to be a few forms in the high oaks that lined Broad Street—and those on the roofs would be saved. But the others—

Another moan wrenched from the levee and chunks of earth spewed as the river burst through. The roof shook and men ducked or were jostled to their knees, but the shock wasn’t as severe as the last time—some of the power of the avalanche was siphoning off as the crevasse grew. Crouched behind the wall, two men shouted to each other—Did you hear the shots? The explosion? At his elbow, a man sheltered the whimpering dog and wept into his fur.

Strange, but the place the levee had burst wasn’t the weakest spot of the bend but the part right in front of the hotel, this front-row seat of a hotel that had withstood the flood.

Ingersoll walked behind the chimney and lifted a dark tarp he’d seen earlier and there was a wooden boat, about ten feet, with two benches and an outboard motor. The kind of boat you built from a lumberyard kit. There were oars crossed on the floorboards over coils of rope, a jug of gasoline, cans of food, a canteen. He let the tarp drop, then walked back to the roof wall. Gazing at the frothing water he was putting together how Jesse put it together, this plan. The saboteur hadn’t been a bad shot—he hadn’t been aiming at people. He’d been aiming at a sandbag. The sandbag that Jesse had placed there as he, Ingersoll, had ridden up. A sandbag full of dynamite. The gunman had detonated it with ammunition. My God. He could almost admire it. Again Ingersoll saw Jesse’s back, walking away, the grandiose hat waving, and understood it for what it was: the signal.

“Look,” somebody yelled, and pointed, and they couldn’t hear the buzz over the water but they could see the wings of a small biplane, the kind Ingersoll had seen on aircraft carriers. It circled the courthouse where people were waving and leaping. Another plane appeared on the horizon like a fly.

Ingersoll heard the crack of a tree and turned to see it crash into the water and hoped no one had clung in its canopy, waiting for rescue. He counted six buildings and two distant church steeples where people were scrambling to attract the planes or merely holding on.

Ham and Jesse? There was no telling. He yearned to tell Ham about the dynamite-stuffed sandbag, recalled him saying about Jesse’s antics, “I’ll figure it out or die trying.” There was a chance of that. But if anyone made it out of this flood alive, it would be Ham. That had always been the case.

Dixie Clay and Willy. Were they at Sugar Hill, low-lying Sugar Hill, cornered between the river and the stream? Ingersoll faced south and saw no end to the water. He strode across the roof to the boat and ripped the tarp away.

Chapter 16

D
ixie Clay was lifted toward the waking world on a surge of pain. She would have ridden it down again into the black oozing warmth but some idea of an idea, some thought she had to think, wrenched her, torqued her out, she was gasping like a crappie thrown up on the levee and left to die.

Her mind wasn’t right. Cloudy, pierced with lightning bolts of moving pictures. Red lipstick on white teeth. A roll of dirty dollars thudding to the floor. She tried to open her eyes. Her lashes stuck together, then tore apart. She was looking through a blurry window—no, it was just her eyes. She was lying on her side, she knew that now, she was on the floor. She tried to lift her head, Oh God her head was a drawer yanked forward sloshing with knives. And then: Willy, where was Willy?

Her body didn’t receive the telegram to move. Why. She couldn’t move. Why. She was bound.
Willy.
She said this out loud but couldn’t speak or couldn’t hear, there was no noise at all.
Willy,
she said again. She looked through her eyes until they stopped bobbing and she was looking at a fruit basket, which was the wallpaper in the kitchen.
Willy Willy Willy Willy;
she scrabbled her legs, she threw her shoulders forward, her sides were branded with fire, she bumped the wooden chair against the floor, she thought she could turn it, she turned it.

Yes, the clothesline. Yes, Jesse had bound her wrists. She twisted her hands back and felt the thick rope, too fat for tight knots, and she grabbed the ends, she folded her right hand and yanked against the knot, with her left held she held the rope, she worked and tugged and yanked the right hand out. It slipped a finger in the knot and loosened it and her hands were free, numb, they felt not a thing and then they did feel, they wore gloves of hot tar, they wore gloves pierced with a thousand needles. Dixie Clay pushed them into the floor heaving and her left arm gave, collapsed. She rolled to her knees and unfolded the legs and pulled against the stove to stagger to her feet. She put a hand to her head and felt gummy oozing that she knew was blood.

Willy.
She pushed herself away from the stove and spun toward the parlor, no Willy, her afghan was bunched on the sofa and she yanked it up, no Willy. The wicker laundry basket, no Willy, the peach basket, no Willy, no Willy on her bed, she dropped to her knees with a thud and peered under the bed no Willy, no Willy in the room she thought of as the baby’s though the baby slept with her. Back in the parlor she yanked open the small drawer of the secretary and knew she was hysterical, the baby couldn’t fit in there. Gallery, Willy was on the gallery, she crashed against the doorjamb and almost tripped on an inside-out umbrella—the gallery was empty, the rocking chair ghost-rocking in the wind. Beyond it was an eerie yellow-green sky, color of a luna moth. A cackle of rain crashed against her house, loud as a busted strand of pearls.

Then she knew because she heard herself screaming. They’d taken him. Jesse and that woman had taken Willy.

On the gravel driveway there was no car, just slashes where water had filled the Ford’s tracks. She remembered its headlights coning through the rain last night, if last night had been last night, now it was day though the sky was dark. Jesse was going to Hobnob, that was what he’d said last night, Jesse was going to Hobnob and that woman was taking Willy to Greenville.

Dixie Clay started to run toward the barn, tearing up the path and down the ridge, knocked back by a tree limb and falling and then scrambling in the mud and running again, her voice a long howl the shape of her son. Rushing past her on the footpath was a string of jackrabbits and then a white-tailed deer was leaping over them and changing direction midflight to avoid crashing into her. Dixie Clay didn’t even break stride.
I’ll get Chester and ride to town—

She yanked open the barn door. The wind wrestled her for it. A coil of leaves whirled up and hissed at her knees and then a real snake, a black racer, zipped between her ankles into the darkness. The ground seemed to be trembling, so she must be woozy from her head wound. The trees beside the barn were jittery and dropping their leaves. Inside, Chester was rearing onto his hind legs, galloping through the air, then throwing his hooves against the door of his stall, and the cow was moaning.

Maybe the police were coming. She could hear a terrible rumbling, like a hundred Indian motorcycles racing on a wooden board track. She shut the barn door and ran out to meet them and she was nearly trampled by the panicked animals darting from the woods, deer and muskrats and beavers and mice and raccoons, wings flapping over her head, water shaking from the trees, and everything ashudder. The noise deepened into a roar like a locomotive bearing down on her, the terrible black locomotive of her nightmare, and then she knew. Oh God she knew. She had been told of a thing that sounded like a locomotive. And that thing was a flood.

She screamed and the wind snatched her sound. She changed direction and was running up the hill behind her house now and when she crested the ridge, she threw herself against a trembling slick ash tree. The noise was coming from the left, a wall of sound, and she looked down at her house and looked toward the noise and saw the trees, which appeared to be marching toward her because they were being lifted up and then laid flat and she saw what was mowing them down, a hill tumbling over itself. But it was not a hill, it was the brown water seething with lumber and a chicken coop, and a cow, a bale of barbed wire, a section of fence, all of it tumbling and crashing, a thing malevolent and alive churning through the hollow where her house stood and then where her house had stood. Yes, had stood: as she clung to the tree she saw the water explode against the house and the house exploded, wrenched and splintered, consumed by those living waters, which rushed on.

Dixie Clay left the quaking ash and ran for the biggest tree on the ridge, the oak must be a hundred years, a hundred feet. She had to jump to reach the lowest branch and she did and hung there and her left arm was a fury of searing and she released the branch and dropped. She lay stunned and rib-burst on the rumbling earth and turned to prop on an elbow and peer down, and the hill of water in the hollow where her house had been was surging and screaming higher, rushing on through the hollow but also rising up the ridge toward her. She clawed to her feet and jumped for the branch again and cried out to feel her weight jar and tear on the arm, but she held fast as she swung her right leg and wedged her foot into the branch’s crotch and then heaved her body up and pulled her broken wing into her chest and bellowed at the sky. Whether she called for God or Willy she didn’t know, it was all the same now and dependent on her climbing higher and she did, leaping to the next branch like a squirrel and clinging there and rocking her body to swing herself up, grit of wet bark in her teeth, sleeve gashing open. She leaped again, to the next branch, and scrambled her feet up the trunk until she could hook them around the limb and swing herself over.

Then she was in the thicker canopy, climbing one-handed and with fingers digging into the bark. She came to a rest at the top where three branches flared, two to couch her back and the lower one to rest her feet upon. These boughs were swaying in the gusts, and she had broken glimpses of surging chocolate water and she craned her head but couldn’t see the barn or the still, though she should have been able to, and she had a terrible vision of Chester galloping into the frothy waves. She shouldn’t have been able to see the Gawiwatchee behind her but there it was, boiling and odd, and then she realized it was flowing the wrong direction, not into but away from the Mississippi, not flowing but windmilling, a stream become a river filled with things that were not water. A church steeple. A brace of mules. A mailbox. A tree, a tree, a tree, lifted and thrown, then a tree shooting out of the water like a rocket. Between her and the Gawiwatchee was another ridge poking out of the water and as she watched, a coyote swam to it behind a deer, and they scrabbled up and then turned and looked at each other. It was shrinking their ridge to an island.

It was also climbing the base of Dixie Clay’s tree. The root ball was submerged and then the wide trunk and as she watched, the lowest branch, the one she’d grabbed and then fallen from, began to go under. A cottonmouth was curled there and lifted the fist of its head and S-curved up the trunk. She didn’t even care. A wooden placard shot from the current:
GOOD OLD LICORICE FLAVOR! BLACK JACK GUM!

Dixie Clay looked down—she was about twenty feet above the water—and looked up—she had about twenty more feet in the tree. She heaved from her perch to climb. The branches were thrashing and when she reached the highest one that would hold her, about as thick as a man’s thigh, she clung, panting, wrapping both arms and legs around it. The tree swayed under her like a ship, and she the masthead, facing into the storm. She heard a noise over the shrieking water, which she realized was her teeth chattering, the rain a cold rain and her blouse a slick wet plaster, her wool skirt and apron a hundred pounds each.

A tree to her left boomed like a cannon and thundered into the water, and a huge wave soared over her and her branch dipped crazily and she vised her thighs around the rough bark and squeezed her eyes, and when she opened them, the water had risen. What may have been the smokestack from the lumber mill shot by, was caught in a vortex, swung like a propeller. How much water was in the Mississippi anyway, yet it kept coming. It approached the three-limb platform where she’d just been resting. A fox in a nearby branch gave a strange, almost chipper bark and leaped into the water and paddled away with its neat black gloves, tail rising from the water like a question mark. Maybe it could make it to the island where the deer and coyote were. Dixie Clay turned to see them but they were gone, no sign of the island at all.

Dear Lord, I need to live, I need to live to find my baby.

T
he water wasn’t rising up the tree anymore, but it wasn’t falling either. She peered between the branches at a landscape wholly alien. No, not a landscape, a seascape. She was on an ark, but there was no dove with an olive branch, and no two of anything, just her, alone.

Rescue yourself, girl.
But how? She could swim. The water seemed calmer, no big swells, surface plucked by raindrops. Perhaps she should try. But even as she considered this, a surge of brown froth from the left butted her tree—maybe another chunk of levee or a road giving in, giving up—and her branch dipped as if to shake her loose. She clung with her whole body as beneath her a Brahma bull swept by sideways, eyes bulging and tendons in its hump neck cording as it brayed. It was show cattle belonging to Joe York, this she knew even before it barreled flank side up, showing its Y brand. She’d passed this cow dozens of times on Seven Hills, watched it tonguing long grasses into its mouth. Joe York’s bull, but where was Joe? And then: Where was the bull?

No, she would not leave the tree to swim.

A navy seaplane with those curved, canoelike rails flew above her, the kind of plane Dixie Clay avoided while shining, and now she clung with her bad arm and flung her other overhead, screaming, but the tree that protected her also obscured her, and the plane was too high and passed on. Without the house here, how would they know to look for a body clinging like a lichen? Would the Red Cross even search this far out, land of hardscrabble shiners, no telephone wire to lead them?

She put her forehead down on the wet bark and closed her eyes, the chilled rain sluicing the nape of her neck where her braid swung over her shoulder. She thought she heard another plane and lifted her head, but this one was even higher in the porous sky. Above her in the top branches was a clump of mistletoe. As a girl she’d shot mistletoe from the treetops, and once at a Christmas party, Ruben Lippens had complained: “Dixie Clay would rather shoot mistletoe than be kissed under it.” Why remember that now? She needed to calm herself. Her head throbbed in the hurt place and she brought her fingers to the blood-gummy gash.

“Yoo-hoo!”

Dixie Clay snapped her head—the wind, or a man? “Here! I’m here!”

“Whose leg is that?”

“Dixie Clay Holliver!”

“So you are.” The boat nosed under the branches that were nearly resting on the water, and the ducking figure lifted and beneath the hat brim was Old Man Marvin.

“Marvin, thank God.”

His boat was sitting low in the water, filled with cases of whiskey. Marvin wore a yellow slicker and matching hat and bit down on an unlit pipe, dripping rain. He paddled closer, pulled himself in, hugged the tree with one arm. Dixie Clay shifted her legs so he couldn’t see up her skirt, even as she was aware that it was a stupid concern.

Marvin took the pipe out of his mouth. “Dixie Clay! Looks like those levee inspectors were a bunch a liars.”

“Marvin, help me. Please.”

“Why, I reckon I might could. ’Course I’ll lose some profit, making room for you in my boat. I was loading it when the flood came. Lifted my house right offen its slab and brung it away. If I hadn’t been loading whiskey, I’d a been in that house. Whiskey saved my life! But I’m up a creek without a paddle. See?” He lifted the shovel he’d been navigating with and grinned, even from this distance his teeth the color of tea.

She couldn’t grin back. She just needed to get out of the tree and into his boat.

“I’m getting to Greenville,” he said. “Red Cross is evacuating us there.”

“Greenville’s not flooded?”

“Hell, yeah, it’s flooded. Everything’s flooded. But not near so bad as here, from what I heard. Ran up on a rescue boat, a twenty-two-footer, rigged out with a Model T engine, can you beat that? And with a mailman sitting stern, telling the driver where the houses along his route was, so they could peel folks outta trees—”

“Greenville,” she interrupted. “That’s where people are going?”

“Yup. Greenville got water, but it’s got tents on the levee, supplies and the like, headquarters of flood relief. This here’s the worse spot, girl. Triangle-lated between the Mississip and the Gawiwatchee—”