Fleetie's Crossing Page 8

  I said, “He looks so pitiful, Fleetie. Let’s dress him in his diaper, gown, and belly band and wrap him in a soft blanket.”

  “I want to keep him crying.” But as she said that, she reached for one of the diapers and belly bands lying beside the little tub. “Every time I let him get comfortable, he wants to go to sleep.” Her quick hands fixed the band and pinned his diaper as smoothly as one might expect from a mother with five babies of her own. “This little’un is going to have a time catching up. Kathleen, is Geneva about awake yet?”

  Mother nodded.

  “Too bad we can’t let her sleep. She has to be plumb wore out.”

  With the baby in the crook of her arm, Fleetie reached down and smoothed Geneva’s matted hair. “Lookie here, Gen, it’s over. You have your little boy. He’s so pretty and cryin’ up a storm. Can you hear him? How about you having a big boy? Fred’s gonna get the big head. Dr. Parks will go get him soon as you are good and awake.”

  I could see Geneva was struggling to open her eyes. “Can I hold him?” she whispered. “Is he all right?”

  “He’s doing just fine. He’s got all his fingers and toes, and it looks like he might have blue eyes like Fred.” Fleetie stepped to her side, and Geneva’s arms immediately wrapped around the tiny baby.

  I patted her arm and whispered to Geneva, “We don’t even have a gown and blanket around him yet. I’ll take him in a minute and dress him for you.”

  Geneva smiled. “A boy. The twins will spoil a brother.”

  She immediately drifted back to sleep, and I picked him up and gave him to Mother, who was standing with his gown and blanket. Because we all had fought so hard to save him, holding that tiny bundle made all of us want to fight the world for him. Just a few minutes ago, I had been pretty impatient with him for being so slow getting here, and now I would have fought a panther to keep him safe.

  Dr. Parks loaded his bag and issued orders that he knew would be carried out no matter how difficult they might be—cod liver oil, clean dressings, plenty of liquids for Geneva, sterile sugar water for the baby, and his first breastfeeding in the morning. They were to get to town for a follow-up in a week. Turning from his packing, he took his bag and pushed open the door and stepped into the living room, where the men were waiting.

  “Ed, what are the chances of our getting back to the car so I can get to town?”

  “If we stay on the tracks, we’ll get back to the car all right. Railroad people are too smart to put rails below flood level. Katie, I’ll be back by early morning. You all sit tight. The water won’t get this high.”

  Dr. Parks stopped and stared at Daddy. “How’d you get your chin split? Let me look at that.”

  “It’s stopped bleeding. It’s nothing. We better get going.”

  “Don’t tell me it’s stopped bleeding. It’s still dripping on your shirt. That needs a stitch or two. What have you been doing? Wrestling a bear? Goddamn, if it’s not one mess, it’s another out here. Sit down and let me see what it looks like. You could get lockjaw, typhoid, and tetanus all in one stroke if you aren’t careful.” He opened his bag and took out his flashlight and gave Daddy’s chin a long look. “You’re a bleeder. It’ll heal up without the embroidery, but you’ll have a little souvenir of the fight every time you look in the mirror.”

  “And not a drop of whiskey to blame,” said Daddy.

  Parks rummaged in his bag and found gauze, tape, and a bottle of iodine. It made my eyes burn just looking at it, but Daddy didn’t flinch. Guess his chin was numb after Fred socked it so hard.

  I followed as they walked out the door. The rain had slacked off to a fine mist. Across the way, Fleetie’s house stood engulfed by the spring tide. In spite of high water and swirling debris, a naked light bulb, hanging in the front room, cast a yellow light through the broken windows. The glare shimmered through the window and in the black of early morning. It caught the swirl of water and danced circles around the marooned house.

  “I wish you’d look. I’ve seen it all. How the hell is that light still burning?” said Dr. Parks.

  “Heavy-duty wire filched from the mines,” said Daddy.

  If there was no more rain during the night, by morning, the swollen streams coming down the mountains would return to their banks, and in twenty-four hours, the river would begin to ebb. After daylight, more and more damage and misery would reveal itself throughout the whole valley.

  Mother came up behind us and gave both men a strong hug, and we watched them walk down to the tracks and soon out of sight. Standing alone in the wet darkness, we could hear the soughing sound of the swollen river.

  “Rachie, just think, all this is in the power of a rain drop. The same drop that feeds us and cleans us can turn around and sweep away and destroy all we have. And right through it all, a tiny bulb fed by a thin wire managed to stay high enough not to be swamped. Remember this when you feel too small to defeat big stuff. That little bulb and that thin wire beat the odds, and you can too.”

  That was one of the few times that I knew Mother realized how much I missed Pappy. What she said to me then was the kind of thing he would say to me, and that was the first time I knew she was aware of how he used examples to teach me about the world.

  “You could write that up in one of your poems. Too bad we can’t call the baby Stormy. It sort of fits his story,” I said.

  “Maybe so, but he is destined to be Fred Jr. Not quite so dramatic.”

  “I’m gonna call him Stormy anyway.”

  “You do that, and someday, he’ll chunk you in the back of the head with a rock for making him sound silly,” she said as she walked back in the house.

  Chapter 9

  DEEP WATER

  Helen felt dismissed from her own kitchen. Fleetie, Geneva, and the baby crowded the room that was small to start with, and then the doctor moved in, and the men came in and out, setting up the cot and bringing more coal for the stove. Helen perched herself at the top of the attic steps and watched the procession with a scowl on her face.

  The Willis place was the filthiest house in the valley. Up our holler, Helen was the only slattern of a wife and mother. All her neighbors took pride in white laundry, scrubbed floors, and swept yards filled with clean, well-behaved children. But Helen would have none of it. Her children were always dirty, hungry, and mostly left to care for themselves. Their behavior was a disgrace. They would beg from all the neighbors, and since that mostly didn’t work, they would steal. They had to learn early how to live by their wits, even daring to steal potatoes right out of the ground. Apples hanging on a neighbor’s tree were a sure target for their grimy little hands.

  Every July, Leatha and I battled them over the fruit from our old mulberry tree growing on our driveway. They had long since claimed it as their own, even though it was well past the property line. That the tree and its sweet fruit belonged to someone else did nothing to prevent the warfare they put up if they caught any of us under its branches.

  The once-substantial Willis home place was mostly in shambles, caused as much by Helen’s shiftlessness as by their poverty. There was never enough of anything after George’s spine and ribs were crushed in the mines. His accident also seemed to give Helen the excuse she wanted to abandon her responsibilities to the family. George did the best he could, but he could no longer hold up to the punishing labor needed to dig coal.

  He was a decent carpenter and did his best to pick up day work at the mines and in town, but there was little demand. Woodcraft was a part of every family’s heritage in our part of the world. Most men, by nature, training, and necessity, built their own cabinets, tables, chairs, and often their entire house. It was the rare household that needed George’s help.

  The impoverished Willis family subsisted on what they could grow, forage, and scavenge. Living off the land required constant work, the solid leadership of a strong woman, and several children for l
abor. There were plenty of children. Helen and George had six, but she let the children fend for themselves. She made only a minimum effort to fill the canning shelves in their dry cellar. She complained about the garden work and generally neglected it. She would rather try to bewitch a fresh cow than milk it. Plenty of us had seen her standing in front of the milk cow, almost head to head, as she talked to the cow as if both could understand each other. Often she would give up milking her altogether and just walk away. Maybe that was how they did it over across the mountain where she hails, but around here, we took charge of the cow and let her know who was boss. That was how you filled a milk bucket, not standing in the pasture, passing the time of day with good old Betsy.

  George lived his days in pain, and the only painkiller available to him was moonshine, cheap but dangerous. I once heard Daddy tell that George dreaded the sickening feeling the liquor left in his empty stomach and that he hated the loss of control, slurred speech, staggering steps, and fuzzy memory. When the pain got so bad that he had to resort to the mason jar of ’shine, he took himself out of sight far up the holler to Shelter Rock. He didn’t come back until he slept away the worst effects of the rotgut.

  Their one blessing was that the house was on the high side of the railroad crossing, elevated enough to avoid the flash floods that lashed the low-lying houses and fields. That was just about the extent of their good fortune. If their household goods were to go down the creek, there would be nothing left for their survival.

  As she sat there at the top of the steps, Helen’s face resembled an angry mask. Her main duty in her own home seemed to be to keep her own children out of the way. Seeing me coming and going in her house must have irritated her even more. I watched her move farther into the sleeping attic and walk to Lucy Nell’s sleeping cot. Lucy was her oldest daughter and the one who carried most of the burden of watching the rest of the kids.

  “Lucy Nell,” Helen said, “you keep these young’uns up here. I’m going to see what’s goin’ on with the flood.”

  Lucy Nell whimpered, “Don’t go, Mommy. That river is too high to mess with.”

  Ignoring her, Helen flounced down the steps and ran smack into George, who heard her footsteps creak the risers.

  “I’m goin’ out to see what the water’s doing,” she said. “I bet the road is gone.”

  George sighed, grabbed his hat, and went with her through the door into the driving rain. I went outside to watch them from the porch.

  “You can’t see a whole lot out here, Helen,” he said. But I expected he was just as glad to have something to do. Chasing Helen was better than sitting there and listening to the moans and muffled orders coming from his kitchen.

  Helen gasped and stopped him. “Look, George! Can you see them cows? What are they standing on? How can they be out there in the middle of the river? They’s not no island out there.” The dim outline of an animal against the stormy sky standing on water almost in the middle of the swirling river seemed an impossible sight.

  “They’ve got caught on something out there. That big poplar is down, I bet, and them cows is caught up in those big branches. It must be damming up the water on yon’ side of the bank,” said George. “It probably won’t hold ’em long. I can see four or five head out there.”

  “Pore ole things. It’d be pitiful to know how scared they have to be,” said Helen.

  George snapped, “Scared critters, lord! We could all be drowned by morning, and you’re mooning about cows. I swear, you beat all I ever seed in my life.”

  Helen ignored him as usual. “Fred and Burl’s gone up the hill drinking, and all them cows carrying calves is going to drown, practically in Burl’s backyard. That’ll set ’em back some, I’d say.”

  George’s lips had compressed into a thin slash across his face. Before he got hurt, he and the other men could have pulled the cattle out and saved some of them. But now all he could do was stand by, helpless as the doomed animals struggled in the flood waters.

  “I’m going back in the house,” Helen said. “It don’t do no good to stand here and watch them die. I can’t stand it. Move over and let me by, Rachel.” She pushed by me as if I was one of her own neglected brood.

  “Don’t pay her no mind,” said George. “’Times I think she’s about half daft, and on the other hand, I know it.” He slapped his knee at his own little joke as he walked down the steps and into the darkness toward the river.

  Chapter 10

  MORNING MISERY

  Along about daylight, George pushed open the front door, and his movement and the rush of cold air woke me up. I was stiff from my night on the floor, but I shook it off and pulled myself up and followed him. As far as I knew, Daddy was not back from town, and it was way past time for him to be here. George stood on the porch and shook his head at all the damage from the overnight flood.

  I said, “Did Daddy come in while I was asleep?”

  “Nope, little lady, but if you look down the track, you can see his car coming up the road. Looks like the water has gone down enough to let him by.”

  We stood there and watched the car pull over the crossing. He pulled in front of the Willis house, and I ran down the step to meet him.

  George was right behind me. He said, “Get Doc back to town, did ya? What’s it look like downstream?”

  “Pretty bad. It was worse a few years back, but there’s a mess everywhere you look. The boys have all left the picket line and, I guess, are trying to round up livestock and muck out their houses. Anybody get any sleep in there?”

  “The kids is ’bout all. Fleetie and Helen is making breakfast. Come get some coffee. You must be plumb wore out.”

  “We’re gonna need a big pot before we get that mess across the road cleaned up. Burl seen his barn tipped on its side yet?”

  “He’s inside, on the floor. I figured might as well let him sleep. With what he’s got facing him when he wakes up, he can see it soon enough.”

  The three of us stood and looked through the hazy dawn at Burl and Fleetie’s place. All the small riverside farm looked like the pictures of WWII battlegrounds I had seen in Life magazine. The river was still running five feet high through the east windows and out the west. The barn had been swept fifty yards down the riverbank and was leaning against a giant sycamore tree. When the water receded, the barn was going to be pitched at least thirty degrees off level with the front doors now facing upstream. Two of his cows, both nearly ready to calve, had either been swept or had swum to the far bank and were now stranded in a cornfield below George Saylor’s place. By some miracle, the toolshed stood its ground, but the smokehouse and outhouse had tipped all the way over. The old cabin at the east corner of Burl’s land stood, but water was running through the logs.

  “Lordy, lordy, George. It’s going to take all hands and the cook to put that place back, and then what do they have? A cabin and a shotgun just waitin’ there for it to happen again.”

  “Low ground crops good.”

  “Hell, George, you can crop the land without living on the riverbank and taking the chance of being swept into Bell County every spring.”

  The fear of being flooded out never bothered George. His location, well above most danger, had insulated him against the misery of a water-ruined house. Daddy, on the other hand, would start to dread flood season almost as soon as Christmas passed. The pervading smell, unlike any other torturous scent you might have to endure, could be triggered in him by any moderately heavy rain. He told us often, “No matter where I traveled, even across the ocean during the war, the memory of the smell of a flood never left me.” He made it plain how it bothered him that he, Burl, and the others would restore the house and the barns and they once again would be right back in the path of the next swallowing tide. The two men dropped the subject.

  “Daddy, let’s go in, and you can see the baby. He is so pretty. You won’t believe it.”

&nbs
p; “You bet we will, but you know, Rachel, I don’t know as I ever saw a ugly baby in my whole life.”

  As we stepped inside, all you could see were sleeping bodies strewn about the living room. They looked as if they had been bewitched where they lay. Even Mother was curled up in the horsehair armchair.

  Daddy leaned over her and whispered, “Rooster’s up, sleepyhead!”

  Mother never woke willingly. Each morning would find her hungry for more sleep. This morning, with not even one restful hour to count as hers, her mood was light as Christmas. “Oh, Ed, the baby has taken some sugar water. The little fellow is putting up a good fight. Come in the kitchen and see him.”

  I went ahead of them and pushed open the door. Daddy pulled Mother up out of the chair, and they stepped in behind me.

  Helen was at the stove, scraping blackened grease off the grimy top, while Fleetie held the tiny baby and rocked him in a straight-backed chair. The chair’s rock and bump looked too noisy and jolting for sleep, but somehow, mountain babies loved it.

  “’Bout ready to get on up the hill, Katie? We need to head up before Burl has to face the carnage across the road. It’ll be harder with all of us gawking at his misery.”

  “You go on with Ed,” Fleetie said. “Them kids will be hungry as bears. Soon as they’s awake, Nessa can take them over to Susanny’s. This baby and us is going to be fine!”

  Daddy had a way of knowing what the other fellow was suffering. It was a big reason so many people, including me, thought he hung the moon by himself. Whatever it looked like across the tracks, Daddy figured Burl would face it better if Mother wasn’t there. He was a troubling and troubled man, and as much as Fleetie would suffer from the flood, Burl would hate it even more. He would feel mocked by the very land he built on and the very stream he crossed and fished and dammed. Fleetie would take up for Burl and his foolishness. I had heard her tell her girls, “Hit’s a whole lot harder to be a man. Be good to him.”