Random Winds (2 page)

“Aw,” said Enoch, “why do I always have to?”

“Because you’re a big eight-year-old boy, and your sisters are small.”

The parents watched their three march down the road, the boy obediently between his sisters. There marched the future! Yes, and the sum of the parents’ pasts; such love, such hope encompassed in those chattering three, so carelessly kicking pebbles on their way to school! They watched until the children were out of sight, then smiled at each other. Jean went back into the kitchen and sat down heavily in the Boston rocker by the window to enjoy a second cup of coffee. Enoch went to the barn and hitched the horse. The storms had set him three days behind with his house calls and he would have to cover a lot of ground.

At noon, just as the children were having lunch, it began to rain again. But it was a very light rain this time. No need to send them home early, the young teacher thought as she glanced out of the window, especially since they had already missed a couple of days that week. The younger children played indoors during the lunch recess, while some of the older boys, wearing rubber mackintoshes, went outside. In any case, by two o’clock, shortly before school was dismissed for the day, the drizzle had stopped.

And at two o’clock, a mile and a half upstream, in one incredible, unexpected instant, an old earthen dam collapsed.
Rumbling and crumbling, with thunderous roar and colossal surge, it burst, it fell apart. A blinding spray rose into the air, tumbled, splashed and crashed, leaving a dazzle of fine mist upon the ruins. The lake behind the dam, swollen by tons of melted ice, poured into the river. And the river slid over its banks. It plunged through the narrow valley. It gathered strength and speed. Like a merciless, violent army come to pillage, it advanced.

At two-fifteen the children were dismissed from school to walk home. A quarter of a mile behind them the mighty wall of water rushed, flooding the whole valley now, flooding the houses up to the second story, wrecking and smashing. It gained on the little flock of children as they meandered and as the seconds passed. They heard its distant rumble before they saw it Towering doom rose high at their backs. They began to run. Horrified and screaming, they scrambled and raced. But the water raced faster.

Late in the afternoon Enoch came down from the hills and beheld catastrophe. He pulled on the reins and stared aghast. Water lay where farms and roads had been that morning. Stagnant at the edges, it was torrential in the middle, speeding in a dirty brown froth.

My God, the schoolhouse! That was the schoolhouse roof, the only red roof in the neighborhood! A dreadful faintness almost toppled him. Then panic came. He thought he heard himself screaming at the mare. He whipped her, which he had never done before, and the mare sped.

Here the road lay on an elevated ridge from where he could look down on the water, some twenty feet below. Treetops poked up from the swirling current, strewn with terrible debris: here a dead cow, its stiff legs spread as if beseeching the sky; there, drowned chickens in a coop; an ice-chest; a parlor table with a square marble top. On a flimsy branch a terrified cat clung, its mouth strained open in a wail too far away to be audible.

Enoch trembled and went cold.

His own house lay beyond the place where the river
curved sharply to the east, and he saw as he approached that the water had risen over the front steps. The stable, lying on lower ground, was covered to the eaves. One of the three strong, young maples that fronted the road had been ripped up. Flung into standing water in the yard, its fibered roots protruded like torn ligaments.

He jumped down, waded thigh deep to the porch, and banged the front door open.

“Jean! Jean!”

Water had seeped into the parlor, soaking the Brussels carpet, trailing long feelers down the hall toward the kitchen. Over everything lay the foul stench of wet wool.

“Jean! Jean!”

He ran upstairs, bounding two steps at a time. “Jean, for God’s sake, answer me! Where are you? Jean?”

He went back to the porch and stood in his waterlogged boots looking wildly around, up at the sky and down. Under his tongue there was a burning and the salt taste of blood. It was so quiet! The yard was always noisy. The first things you heard were the cackle of chickens and the dog’s bark. Then he realized that the chickens had been drowned and the doghouse was underwater.

He climbed back into the buggy, wrenching the mare’s head roughly, lashing her toward the road leading to the village center, which lay beyond the curve of the river and the flooding.

The crazed man and the terrified horse tore down the road. So quiet, he thought again. Eerie quiet. Even the birds were still. April, and no birds.

At the church there was a crowd of buggies and wagons and people on foot He pulled into the yard.

“Where—Do you know where—” he began, addressing a man whose face he knew. But the man looked blank and hurried past.

People filled the narrow stairway to the basement, going down and struggling back. A fainting woman was being carried up. All about was a murmur of sound, soft crying and low talking.

Enoch pushed his way down. The taste of blood under his tongue was still salty sharp. He put his finger there and drew it out to look at it.

Against the back wall on the floor, the bodies lay in a long double row covered with sheets and blankets. A young man knelt on the floor next to a body from which the sheet had been drawn away. Enoch recognized the dead face. Madeline, he though, Madeline Drury; he felt nothing.

Beginning at the left, he lifted the cover from the faces. Nettie Rogers. The old woman who lived with her—he’d forgotten her name. Jim Fox’s boy Tom, the one who had had infantile paralysis last summer. He moved faster, hurrying down the row.

“Doc! No!” Someone caught his sleeve, pulling hard at him. “Doc! No! Sit down! Reverend Dexter’s been looking for you. He wants—”

“Damn you, leave me!” Enoch cried, wrenching his arm free. And then—

Oh God! Almighty God! His children! Enoch, Susan and May lay side by side in a row. Like dolls they lay, stiff as Christmas dolls, May in the pink scarf, the cotton-candy pink that Jean had knitted, still wound about her chest and secured with a safety pin.

My girls. My little boy. He heard a voice, a mad voice, his own, as if from far away, from another country. He sank to the floor, rocking on his knees.

“Oh my God, my girls, my little boy!”

Strong arms came at last and drew him away.

They had taken Jean and Alice to a house near the church. Reverend Dexter led Enoch there. “Have they told you about Jean?” he asked.

“What?”

“Jean,” the parson said gently. “The shock, you know. But the women knew what to do. They took care of her.”

“The shock?” Of course. Jean was in her seventh month. He hadn’t thought—But he must think. She would need him. And he quickened his steps.

In the kitchen of a strange house Alice was sitting in a
high chair while a stout woman spooned cereal into her mouth. She seemed to spend her life in a high chair, being fed.

“She’s in there, sleeping,” the stout woman said, nodding to Enoch.

He knew the woman, as he knew everyone in the village, but again he couldn’t think of the name. He walked to the bedroom door, then turned back, hesitating.

“Did she—did she see them?” he asked.

“Not exactly,” the woman said. “Reverend here, he wouldn’t let her see.”

“I’m grateful to you for that, Reverend,” Enoch told him.

He stood looking at his wife. Her face lay in the crook of her arm. Her dark hair was loosened. He drew the blanket up softly over her shoulder. Currents of rational thought, which in this hour past had been stopped, began to flow again. So tender, a human body, a human life! Nothing more to it than a few pounds of fragile bone and soft tissue. Yes, and years of nurturing and thousands of hours of loving care. Wiped out, gone as if they had never been, like last year’s leaves! And the marvelous years of youth, the dignity of adulthood and learning—all these forfeited, all these now not to be—Oh, my children! A cry caught in his throat.

“Doc?”

The man of the house—Fairbanks, yes, yes of course, that was the name—came to the door.

“Doc, have you got a minute? Me and my brother Harry was over to your place already. You know your pantry ell? Well, the roof is stove in where the maple fell on it. But we was thinking, if you can buy the material, Harry and me’ll fix it Harry owes you a bill, anyway. Did you know the branch breached at Lindsey Run? It flooded out for six miles downstream.”

“Thank you,” Enoch said.

“Think nothing of it, Doc. We all want to do what we can for you. Say, it’s a good thing you had your mare with you. The stable almost got drownded.”

A mare. When my children
—Get out! He wanted to cry. Kind fool, get out and leave us!

“I’ll go ask my wife to make some tea when your missus wakes up,” Fairbanks said.

Jean opened her eyes. “I’m not asleep,” she whispered.

Enoch knelt on the floor, laying his face against hers, his cold, wet cheek upon her wet cheek, and stayed there like that.

“God’s will,” she whispered after a long time. “He wanted them home with Him.”

God’s will that their babies should drown? Son of a minister he was, reared on the Bible, but he couldn’t believe that God the Creator, yes! And God the giver of righteous laws; but God who decrees the individual fate of every living creature on the planet and orders the death of a child? That was hogwash. Hogwash! Yet it gave her comfort.

“Yes,” he murmured, “yes,” and with his free hand smoothed her hair.

“I love you,” she said.

I love you, she says, out of her blood and grief
. She reached up her arms to draw him near, but they fell back weakly. He understood that she wanted him to kiss her, and he bent down and pressed her lips.

Then he said, “Jean, Jean, my girl, well start again. We’ll have to love each other so—And I’ll take care of you and Alice and me. We’re all that’s left.”

“You’re not forgetting him, the new one?”

“Him?”

“The baby, the boy. You haven’t seen him?”

“But I thought—”

Mrs. Fairbanks, coming with the tea, overheard. “You thought it was a stillbirth? No, no, Doc. Look here.”

She raised the window shade. A sad lavender light slid into the room from the quiet evening sky. On a table near the window lay a box, and in it one of the smallest babies Enoch had ever seen. Scarcely larger than a raw, young rabbit, he thought.

“I bought a new pair of arctics on sale last week. Luckily, I still had the box,” Mrs. Fairbanks said.

And Jean called out, “I want his name to be Martin!”

“Not Thomas, after your father?”

“That’ll be his middle name. I want him to be called Martin.”

“Well, all right.” He looked at the child. Four pounds, if that. Nearer three and a half, he’d guess.

“Poor Jean, poor lamb,” Mrs. Fairbanks whispered.

“Likely she’ll be losing this one, too.”

The baby fluttered. Its toy hands moved, and under the blanket its legs jerked weakly. Then it wailed, the doll’s face crumpling and reddening, the eyes opening as if in protest or alarm.

Mrs. Fairbanks shook her head. “No,” she repeated.

“He can’t live. That’s sure.”

Something welled up in Enoch, and he shook a furious fist at the universe.

“No!” he cried fiercely. “No! Look at those eyes! Look at the life in those eyes! He will live, and he’ll be strong, too. So help me God, he will.”

At the top of the long rise, Pa guided the horse toward the shade and drew in the reins. He pulled off his woolen jacket and laid it on the seat next to Martin.

“Professional dignity be darned!” he said. “The next patient will have to look at me in my shirt-sleeves whether he likes it or not.”

The sun was ahead of the season, Ma had remarked that morning. Shadbush was still in bloom, and barn swallows were barely back from the south in time for Decoration Day.

“We’ll just wait a minute here,” Pa said, “and give the mare a rest.”

The sweating animal stamped, slapping her tail. She had been making a strange sound for the last half hour, more like a plaint than a whinny.

“Something’s bothering her, Martin.”

“Black flies, do you think?”

“Don’t see any, do you?” Pa climbed down to examine the mare. He pulled the harness aside and swore. “Damn! Damn, look at this!”

The flesh along the horse’s back was rubbed bloody raw in a line as long as three fingers put end to end.

“Laid open with a whip,” Martin said.

“No doubt, and left to suppurate.”

Martin nodded, feeling a twinge deep inside at sight of the wound, feeling also a certain pride at being the only boy in the fourth grade who knew the meaning of words like “suppurate” or who, for that matter, had a father like his.

“Poor little livery stable hack!” Pa cried. “At the mercy of every drunken lout who has the money for its hire. Reach in my bag for the salve, will you?”

The little mare quivered, her muscular back rippling and twitching.

“Now a wad of gauze, a thick one.”

When he was finished, Pa got the water bucket. The mare drank gratefully. Martin gave her an apple. Then the two stood watching, pleased with themselves, while the mare chewed, salivating in a long, thick rope.

“She’s a nice little thing,” Pa said. “Wish I had the money to buy her and give her a decent home.”

“But we’ve got Star, and she’ll be ready to take out again as soon as her foal’s a month old, won’t she?”

“You’re right. I daresay the man would want thirty dollars for her.” Pa sighed. “Well, might as well start. One more call at Bechtold’s and then home in time for the parade.”

They moved on again. “Just look up there, Martin, at the side of that far mountain! You can gauge the height by the kind of trees you see. At the bottom there’s oak, but oak won’t grow more than twelve or thirteen hundred feet up. After that, you get balsam. Way up top there’s spruce, all that bluish-green stuff.” He leaned over Martin, pointing with outthrust finger. “Those are the oldest mountains in the United States, you know that? See how the tops are rounded? Worn away, that’s why. And I’ll tell you something else.” He pointed to the left. “Down there, all that level land was once buried underwater. Can you believe that?”