TWENTY-THREE
There was one boat coming down on the same morning I landed; when they came in sight of the falls, the crew were so frightened at the prospect, that they abandoned their boat and made for the island in their canoe— two were left on the island, and two made for the west bank in the canoe— about the time of their landing, they saw that the island was violently convulsed— one of the men on the island threw himself into the river to save himself by swimming— one of the men from the shore met him with the canoe and saved him. —This man gave such an account of the convulsion of the island, that neither of the three dared to venture back for the remaining man. The three men reached New Madrid by land.
The man remained on the Island from Friday morning until Sunday evening, when he was taken off by a canoe sent from a boat coming down. I was several days in company with this man— he stated that during his stay in the island, there were frequent eruptions, in which sand and stone, coal and water were thrown up. —The violent agitation of the ground was such at one time as induced him to hold to a tree to support himself, the earth gave way at the place, and he with the tree sunk down, and he got wounded in the fall.— The fissure was so deep as to put it out of his power to get out at that place— he made his way along the fissure until a sloping slide offered him an opportunity of crawling out. He states that frequent lights appeared— that in one instance, after one of the explosions near where he stood, he approached the hole from which the coal and land had been thrown up, which was now filled with water, and on putting his hand into it he found it was warm.
Matthias M. Speed, March 2,1812
When the trees opened up again to show the big white frame house on its little green mound, Nick was taken completely by surprise. His heart turned cartwheels.
“We’re there,” he said, and his voice seemed unbelieving even to himself.
They had gone up the White River— flooded, filled with more debris even than the Mississippi— then spent a night on Lopez Bayou. He had tried to keep track, by dead reckoning, of how far they had come, but he knew that his estimates had to be wildly out of true. He was more surprised than anyone when a stretch of water opened up just where he expected Toussaint Bayou to be.
They hadn’t seen a soul the entire trip to Toussaint. Some flooded cotton fields, some abandoned farmhouses fallen into the flood, but no sign of a living human being.
Jason, in the other seat, turned to look at the big house with interest. Nick spun the wheel, aimed for the house.
One of the big oaks that shaded the house had fallen, he saw, but someone had turned the timber into a neatly piled stack of lumber. The windows had lost their glass, and the two brick chimneys had fallen. There had been some hasty repairs to the roof with plastic sheeting and mismatched shingles. Some of the outbuildings had collapsed into the flood. But the house itself was intact, and the sight of it made Nick want to laugh out loud.
“I’ve been meaning to ask,” Jason said. “What’s a Gros-Papa? If I meet him, I should know what it means, right?”
“It’s French,” Nick said. “It means Big Daddy. It’s a name they have down here for grandfather.” And then he added, “Tennessee Williams had a Big Daddy in one of his plays. I don’t remember which one.”
Nick cut the motor and ran the boat up onto the green slope below the house, then ran forward, tossed the mushroom anchor onto the grass so the boat wouldn’t float away again, then jumped to solid ground. He held the prow steady while Jason jumped ashore, then realized he was staring at the boy with a silly smile, just a dumb happy guy standing on green grass in the sun, like any idiot about to see his daughter for the first time in months, and then he shook his head and started for the house at a brisk walk.
They approached the back of the house across a grassy plateau, walking toward the kitchen door. The town of Toussaint, such as it was, was on the other side of the house, and Toussaint Bayou curved around to meet it. The only sign of the town visible from where Nick walked was the water tower.
A rooster crowed from one of the outbuildings. Chickens scurried away from their approach.
“This is an old Indian mound,” Nick said. “They built this house up here over a hundred years ago to keep above the floods, but they didn’t know the mound was artificial until some archaeologists came up here in the fifties.”
“There was a mound where we lived in Missouri,” Jason said, and then an expression of loss crossed his face, and he fell silent.
Nick put his arm around the boy and walked with him through the grass, through the old shade oaks, to the kitchen door. The back windows had lost their glass, but screens were in place to keep out insects. The kitchen door, he saw, was open and the screen slightly ajar. Someone was home. He wanted to sing.
“Hello?” He opened the screen door and rapped on the frame. When no one answered, he stepped inside the big kitchen with its tall old wooden cabinets and its large modern range, and suddenly a graveyard chill ran up his spine, and he felt the winds of desolation blow in the hollow of his skull.
There was horror here. Somehow he knew it— there was a smell in the house, or a peculiar, ominous brand of silence, or some kind of spectral, psychic echo of terror ...
Whatever it was, he’d felt it once before. In Helena.
He put a hand on Jason’s chest as the boy was about to step into the kitchen, and held him back. “Stay here,” he said. The boy’s eyes widened in sudden comprehension and alarm, and he stepped backward, out of the doorway. Silently, carefully, Nick closed the screen door.
He could hear the buzzing of flies in the next room. If anything had happened to Arlette, he felt, his heart would tear open like the ground had torn in the quake, and he would die on the spot.
His nerves tingled as he walked past the big butcher-block kitchen table to the arched doorway that led to the dining room. There, by the dining table, he found Penelope, Gros-Papa’s younger half-sister, who had moved into the house to look after him after his wife died. She had been shot several times in the back. She had her apron on when she died.
Gros-Papa lay in the front parlor, all three hundred pounds of him, in the jacket and tie he wore even on informal occasions. His silver-rimmed glasses were perched firmly on his stern nose. Shot in the chest. The watch chain he wore across his big stomach was gone and, Nick presumed, the watch with it, the watch that played “Claire de Lune” when you opened it.
Nick went to the gun cabinet in Gros-Papa’s study, but the guns had all been taken. The drawers of the desk and file cabinets had been opened, and their contents strewn on the floor.
Gros-Papa’s second son Gilly— short for Guillaume— was on the stair, as if he’d tried to run upstairs and been shot as he fled. Near misses had punched holes in the wall above the stair and knocked down a small watercolor that someone had made of the house a hundred years ago.
Nick’s head swam. He hadn’t really dared to breathe since he’d entered the house. He forced himself to take in a breath, and then he searched the house for Arlette and her mother. He went to Arlette’s room first, found the closets ransacked, the drawers emptied. The scent of his daughter still hung in the room. His own image, a photo of Nick, gazed up at him from its frame.
The other rooms had been looted as well. Jewelry was gone, and probably money. Nick found no living persons, no additional bodies. Arlette and Manon and the others of the household were gone.
They’d evacuated, then. Got away before this had happened. Relief sang through Nick’s blood. But the relief died as a horrifying thought rose in his mind.
Where had the killers come from? Arlette and her family were moving down the bayou by boat, toward the White River and the Arkansas. They had probably left sometime yesterday. If the killers had been coming up the White, they would have encountered the David family, and the encounter might well have been violent. But Nick and Jason had seen no sign of any violent encounter, or any encounter at all.
Which meant that the killers were coming down the bayou, traveling on Arlette’s heels, possibly only a few hours behind. They hadn’t turned down the White, because otherwise they would have met Jason and Nick. So that meant they had gone upriver, right on Arlette’s trail...
He felt his lips peeling back from his teeth in a snarl. No. He would find the killers before they could find Arlette, and do what was necessary.
Nick went down the stair, avoiding Gilly’s body, and then crouched for a moment next to Gros-Papa. He steeled himself, then reached out and touched the old man’s large dead hand. Cool to the touch. He took the hand in his fingers and tried to raise it, but there was still a faint stiffness in the corpse: the rigor not yet passed. The death had been fairly recent, maybe last night.
Nick straightened, felt his head swim, then walked carefully back to the kitchen. Light glared in from the screen door. He paused by the butcher-block table for a moment, tried to clear his head and decide what he needed to do, and then he looked down and saw the envelope that rested on the table. The word Daddy was written on the back in Arlette’s hand.
Much of his burden of dread fell instantly away. He felt physically lighter, as if someone had removed a burden from his shoulders.
Arlette had left him a message, and if she’d done that she wouldn’t have been herded away at gunpoint. He picked up the envelope and headed out the screen door.
Jason stood in the shade of one of the oaks, pale and nervous. His lips were blue as if he’d been standing up to his neck in cold water. “What happened?”
“Three people killed,” Nick said. And then, in answer to the question he saw in the boy’s horrified eyes, he added, “Not Arlette. Not Manon. They must have left before it happened.”
“Is it gas again?” Jason asked. “Poison or something?”
Nick’s fingers trembled as he opened the unsealed envelope. He shook his head. “They were shot. Robbers.”
“Oh, Jesus,” Jason said. “Jesus, Nick, I’m sorry.”
Nick’s fingers were trembling so hard he couldn’t manage to get the paper out of the envelope. He paused, took a breath, pressed his hands together with the envelope between them. Then tried again, and succeeded. His daughter’s round, exuberant script opened before him like a flower.
Daddy,
I am sorry but we have to leave. The phone exchange was flooded and I couldn’t call you to let you know, and the water plant is flooded too and the water is not safe to drink. We are going in boats to Pine Bluff and I am drawing you a map.
I love you and I hope to see you soon. Don’t worry about me, I will be safe.
Love, your daughter.
Below the words were a row of hearts and then the map, which looked as if it had been traced off a highway map. Nick crushed the paper to his face, inhaled the scent of paper and ink and, maybe, Arlette.
Don’t worry about me, I will be safe. It was up to Nick to make certain that remained true.
“Come on,” he told Jason, “we have to hurry.” And he began walking off before Jason began asking questions.
Nick didn’t want to leave the bodies unburied, to leave the house open. But his duty was to the living, and every moment might count.
*
There was decay in Toussaint’s general store, and for a moment Nick felt faint, expecting more bodies. But then he realized that the smell was coming from dead minnows in the galvanized bait tanks that lined one side of the store. The bayou hadn’t reached high enough to wash the minnows out.
Toussaint consisted of about a dozen buildings grouped around a crossroads, most of them owned by the David family. People’s farms and private residences spread for miles up and down the roads, and they all gave ”Toussaint” as their address, but what passed for the village itself was tiny.
It was tinier now than it had been. The brick office building had been wrecked, along with its post office, and so had the brick filling station. The David family, who between them owned all these properties, had taken a couple big hits.
The general store had come off its foundations in the quake and had collapsed to one side. The roof sagged. Clapboards and shingles were missing. The flood had risen to the middle of the doorframe. Nick tied the boat to one of the supports of the sagging porch, then dropped into the cool water. He felt ahead with his feet as he carefully made his way into the store’s interior.
When he returned he was armed with weapons that had been stored high above the flood. He had a Winchester Model 94 lever-action 30-30, a pump shotgun, and a couple of revolvers, a pair of .38s, one large and one small. He hadn’t handled firearms since he’d left high school, and they felt heavier than he’d remembered, solid and purposeful. The weight of them in his hands didn’t make him nervous, but he found they didn’t give him an increased sense of security, either.
In a rucksack he carried boxes of ammunition, holsters for the pistols, a cleaning kit, and a sling for the rifle. Holding all this over his head, he waded back to the front porch and put it all on the speedboat’s foredeck. .
Jason looked down at the pile of weaponry with a stunned expression, as if he was trying to work out what horrible, apocalyptic movie scenario he’d just wandered into. “Jeez,” he said.
Nick hoisted himself onto the boat. Water sluiced from his soaked clothing. “Can you take the boat down the bayou?” he asked. “Back the way we came? I’ve got to sort out these guns.”
“Yeah. I guess.”
Nick untied the boat and then carried his gear into the cockpit. He loaded the larger of the two pistols, put it in the holster, and clipped the holster to his belt in the back. He practiced drawing it a few times, but he saw Jason looking at him, and he quit. It’s not like he was going to turn himself into a gunfighter overnight.
He worked the action of the rifle, dry-fired it a few times, then loaded it and the shotgun, leaving the chamber empty in each instance so that the gun couldn’t fire accidentally. He left the long guns on one of the bench seats that ran the length of the cockpit, then moved forward to sit in the bucket seat next to Jason.
“Have you ever used firearms?” he asked.
“No. My parents just didn’t— don’t— have them around. Muppet and I were going to go shooting over the levee when the water dropped but—” Jason swallowed. “We never got to it.”
“In that case, I don’t want you touching the guns.”
“No problem.”
“I really don’t want you touching them.”
“Okay!” Jason said, his voice loud over the roaring engine.
“I need to confirm this, Jason. Because your record at following orders isn’t very good.”
Jason glared at him, his cheeks reddening. “I won’t touch your guns, okay?”
Nick took a long breath. Maybe his insistence on this would just make Jason mess with the guns out of sheer contrariness, but he thought he needed to make his point. “Maybe I can teach you how to use them when we get the time,” he said, conciliating, “but until then I want you to take this very seriously.”
Jason nodded again. Then he turned to Nick and said, “What are we doing, exactly?” he said. “Are you trying to get into a fight or something?”
Nick looked at Jason in surprise. He had been so absorbed in his own grim thoughts that he hadn’t considered how this would look to the boy. Finding his in-laws murdered, loading the boat with guns, then heading down the bayou, all without a word of explanation.
Jason probably thought that Nick was involved in some kind of gang war and bent on vengeance.
“No,” Nick said. “No, not at all. I’m trying to get to Arlette and her family, and protect them from the robbers who killed her relations. Those robbers might still be around, and I don’t want Arlette to be without help.”
A look of relief crossed Jason’s face. “Okay,” he said. “I understand.”
“Good.”
Jason looked ahead and steered the boat around a tangle of cypress trees that the quake had cut off just above water level.
“Faster,” Nick said, and Jason looked surprised again. “We need to go faster.”
They found the place where Toussaint Bayou opened out onto Lopez Bayou, then instead of turning left, to retrace their path, they turned right, following Arlette’s map. Nick kept wanting Jason to go faster. Jason didn’t mind: he liked standing in the cockpit as he boomed up the quiet bayou, scattering ducks and herons and sending the boat’s big wake surging out among the trees.
Nick was nervous and had a hard time sitting still in the passenger seat, and eventually he took over the driving.
Jason went to the back of the boat and ate his lunch out of cans, and looked thoughtfully at the guns that sat on the bench seat opposite his own.
In the movies, he thought, there were a number of things that happened during every big disaster. And one of these involved some bad people with Really Great Hair, who, the very first thing broke into biker stores and stole all the cool leathers. And then they got some guns and some wheels and went on a general rampage until the good guy chilled them out in the last reel.
Something like those bad guys had happened to Nick’s in-laws. The cinematic prophecy seemed to be coming true.
Jason looked at the guns and wondered if Nick was the hero who was destined to destroy the bad guys at the end.
No, he thought. He knew who he and Nick would play in the movies. We’re the bad guys’ victims, he thought. The people the bad guys kill on their way to dying at the hands of the hero. That’s who they were. Corpses.
He turned away from the guns and looked ahead, at the still, silent bayou ahead. He didn’t want to think about the guns anymore.
It proved fairly easy going up the bayou. The obstructions had been cleared away by chainsaws and axes, presumably by the David party, and for the most part this left a channel wide enough to take their craft upstream. On occasion Jason was called to shove some piece of wreckage out of the way, and Nick tapped the steering wheel impatiently until the obstacle was clear and he could gun the engine ahead.
By late afternoon they came to a two-lane road that dead-ended on the bayou. This, Nick said, was where the David party had turned south, and turned south himself.
The road was narrower than the bayou, and choked with debris. Some of the debris had been cleared by the Davids, but some had just been shoved aside and drifted back, and other debris had floated into place since the Davids had passed. The road, though flooded, was elevated several feet above the surrounding country, and Nick tilted the Evinrude forward to keep the propeller from striking the roadway.
It was hard going. Jason stood on the foredeck and tried to clear away the obstructions with his pole. Within minutes he was bathed in sweat. Nick detoured off the roadway and around the obstructions where possible, but often this just led them into dead ends, or areas where the trees were too thick to permit passage.
When Jason was exhausted, Nick took his place on the foredeck, and Jason steered.
The sun was far to the west when they came to a debris field, hundreds of tree trunks piled over and across each other into a huge lumber raft that stretched as far as they could see. It looked as if a thousand beavers had labored on the dam for a thousand years. There was no way through the mass, and no indication that anyone had ever tried.
Nick looked at the obstruction in despair. “Did they go around?” he asked. “Or did they turn back?”
Jason looked left and right in the fading light. “Let’s see if we can go around.”
They tried, but every attempt to leave the roadway was blocked, either by falling or standing timber. It didn’t look as if anyone had tried to get through.
“Where did they go?” Nick moaned. Shiny cables stood out on his neck, and sweat made big blotches on his T-shirt. “Where did they go?”
“They had to have turned back from here,” Jason said. “They probably went farther up Lopez Bayou, then tried to cut south on another road.”
Nick bit his lip. “If they’d gone the other way, to the White, we’d have run into them,” he said.
“Right.”
“Turn the boat around, then.” Anger entered his voice. “We’ve wasted the whole day.”
“It’s getting dark, Nick.”
“Just go!”
The return journey began. Jason turned the boat around, banging into the trailing bass boat in the narrow passage, and crept forward toward the first obstacles. Nick stabbed furiously with his pole at the floating debris until it was completely dark and he couldn’t see it anymore.
“Flashlight!” he called. “Give me a flashlight!”
Jason passed forward one of the two flashlights. They kept going down the roadway, while Nick juggled his pole and the flashlight. Jason could hear Nick cursing under his breath as the bow ground against debris. Finally Jason saw Nick’s shoulders sag in the fading light of the flash.
“God damn it!” Nick jabbed at a floating tree trunk as if it were an enemy to be impaled on his spear. “This is useless!”
Jason said nothing. Nick’s pole clattered on the foredeck.
“Eat,” Nick said. “Sleep. We’ll get an early start at first light.”
Nick stalked aft, the flashlight reflecting the fury in his eyes. Jason pulled the bass boat up close and climbed aboard to get access to the stores.
When he had stowed away, Jason thought, he’d expected to spend the summer in some big farmhouse, with Nick’s daughter and in-laws. Instead he’d been thrown back into the river again, and he was trapped on a small boat, in a dead-end waterway, with a heavily armed man who was in a bad mood. To put the icing on the cake, there were a bunch of murderers loose in the area.
It occurred to Jason that leaving the Beluthahatchie might not have been the smartest thing he’d ever done.
After their meal Nick didn’t insist they continue their journey to the bayou, but he was too agitated to sleep. He paced up and down the short length of the cabin, pausing occasionally to pick up one of his guns or drum his hands on the steering wheel.
Eventually exhaustion claimed Jason, and he fell asleep despite Nick’s restlessness.
He woke with a full bladder hours later. Nick was asleep on the bench seat opposite. Jason rose stiffly from his bed, stepped aft, leaned against the fiberglass hull, and relieved himself into the water. He looked up and saw past the overhanging branches of the trees the stars wheeling overhead.
He looked for M13— a million stars— and found the cluster easily enough, a bright smudge against the hard, brilliant light of the stars. Twenty-five thousand light-years away. No matter what happened here— no matter what catastrophes, horrors, anguish— whatever lived in M13 wouldn’t know about it for twenty-five thousand years, not even if they were interested.
He finished and zipped his pants, but he still stood gazing skyward, looking into the silent beyond.
And then the night’s darkness faded. Suddenly the entire country began to glow, as if hidden floodlights had suddenly switched on, bathing the still waters and the trunks of the trees in golden radiance. The suddenness and silence of this ghostly flourishing was breathtaking.
“Nick!” Jason called. “Look!”
“Wha?” came Nick’s sleepy voice.
“Look!” Jason could see leaves outlined perfectly in the glow, the patterns on tree bark, the vines coiling up the trunks.
“Oh my God,” Nick breathed in awe.
And then the quake struck, and the world again turned dark.
A roar filled the air like the earth moaning in pain. Spray spilled into the boat as the water turned white around them. The air filled with leaves and twigs. Debris ground against the hull, and Jason fell, heart hammering, into the bench seat next to him.
“Get into cover!” He heard Nick shout, but all he could do was cling to the side of the boat as it leaped up and down to the music of the quake. Tearing sounds filled the air as tree limbs began to crack and fall.
Nick’s strong hand grabbed Jason by the arm and pulled, and suddenly Jason was able to move. He crawled forward, past the driver’s seat, and wormed into the damp space below the foredeck. Nick crawled in after him. A falling limb dropped onto the bulwark where Jason had been lying, then ground against the hull as it slid into the water.
“It’s a bad one!” Nick shouted in his ear. Jason knew that already.
Jason clamped his eyes shut. The boat vibrated, banging up and down on water that seemed hard as concrete. His inner ear spun as the boat slewed to the push of the water. He could feel his teeth chattering.
Something heavy mashed the boat’s canvas top, and he gave a cry at the thought of being killed here, in the darkness. The cold waters pouring in as he struggled, trapped, in the close little space under the forepeak. He gulped down a sudden flood of stomach acid that had poured into his throat.
“It’s okay!” Nick chanted. “It’s okay, it’s okay, it’s okay!” But Jason knew it was pretty clearly not okay.
He heard the shriek of wood as a tree limb tore free, and then the limb thundered off the gunwale as it splashed into the water next to the boat. The boat tilted alarmingly to port. Jason gave a shout as Nick rolled onto him, squeezing the breath from his lungs.
“It’s okay!” Nick said. “It’s okay!” The boat righted itself, and Nick’s weight fell away.
“It’s okay!” Nick said.
Jason bit his knuckle to keep from screaming.
The earth roared on, and the boat danced to its anguished tune.
*