“It’ll be excitin’, Luke,” she said, her voice still a whisper. “Trust me.”
“I guess so. Ain’t it cold up there?”
“Isn’t,” she corrected me. “There’s a lot of snow in the wintertime, but I think that’ll be fun. We’ll make a snowman and snow ice cream, and we’ll have us a white Christmas.”
I remembered Jimmy Dale’s stories about watching the Detroit Tigers play and how folks had good jobs and televisions and the schools were better. Then I remembered his wife, the rotten Stacy with her whiny nasal voice, and how I’d scared her in the outhouse.
“Don’t they talk funny up there?” I asked.
“Yes, but we’ll get used to it. It’ll be an adventure, Luke, and if we don’t like it, then we’ll come home.”
“We’ll come back here?”
“We’ll come back to Arkansas, or somewhere in the South.”
“I don’t want to see Stacy.”
“Neither do I. Look, you go to bed and think about it. Remember, it’s our secret.”
“Yes ma’am.”
She tucked me in and turned off the light. More news to file away.
Chapter 32
As soon as Pappy took his last bite of scrambled eggs, he wiped his mouth and looked through the window over the sink. There was enough light to see what we wanted. “Let’s take a look,” he said, and the rest of us followed him out of the kitchen, off the back porch, and across the rear yard in the direction of the barn. I was huddled under a sweater, trying to keep up with my father. The grass was wet, and after a few steps so were my boots. We stopped at the nearest field and stared at the dark tree line in the distance, at the edge of Siler’s Creek, almost a mile away. There were forty acres of cotton in front of us, half our land. There were also floodwaters; we just didn’t know how much.
Pappy began walking between two rows of cotton, and soon we could only see his shoulders and straw hat. He would stop when he found the creek’s advance. If he walked for a while, then the creek had not done the damage we feared. Perhaps it was retreating, and maybe the sun would come out. Maybe we could salvage something.
At about sixty feet, the distance from the mound to home plate, he stopped and looked down. We couldn’t see the ground or what was covering it, but we knew. The creek was still moving toward us.
“It’s already here,” he said over his shoulder. “Two inches of it.”
The field was flooding faster than the men had predicted. And given their talent for pessimism, this was no small feat.
“This has never happened in October,” Gran said, wringing her hands on her apron.
Pappy watched the action around his feet. We kept our eyes on him. The sun was rising, but it was cloudy, and the shadows came and went. I heard a voice and looked to the right. The Mexicans had assembled in a quiet group, watching us. A funeral couldn’t have been more somber.
We were all curious about the water. I’d personally witnessed it the day before, but I was anxious to see it creeping through our fields, inching its way toward our house, like some giant snake that couldn’t be stopped. My father stepped forward and walked between two rows of cotton. He stopped near Pappy and put his hands on his hips, just like his father. Gran and my mother were next. I followed, and not far away, the Mexicans joined in as we fanned out through the field in search of the floodwaters. We stopped in a neat line, all of us staring at the thick, brown overflow from Siler’s Creek.
I broke off a piece of stalk and stuck it in the ground at the edge of the advancing water. Within a minute, the stick was engulfed by the current.
We retreated slowly. My father and Pappy talked to Miguel and the Mexicans. They were ready to leave, either to go home or to another farm where the cotton could be picked. Who could blame them? I hung around, just close enough to listen. It was decided that Pappy would go with them to the back forty, where the ground was slightly higher, and there they would try to pick for a while. The cotton was wet, but if the sun broke through, then maybe they could get a hundred pounds each.
My father would go to town, for the second day in a row, and check with the Co-op to see if there was another farm where our Mexicans might work. There was much better land in the northeastern part of the county, higher fields away from creeks and away from the St. Francis. And there had been rumors that the folks up near Monette had not received as much rain as those of us in the southern end of the county.
I was in the kitchen with the women when my father relayed the new plans for the day.
“That cotton’s soakin’ wet,” Gran said with disapproval. “They won’t pick fifty pounds. It’s a waste of time.”
Pappy was still outside and didn’t hear these comments. My father did, but he was in no mood to argue with his mother. “We’ll try and move them to another farm,” he said.
“Can I go to town?” I asked both parents. I was quite anxious to leave because the alternative might be a forced march with the Mexicans to the back forty, where I’d be expected to drag a picking sack through mud and water while trying to pluck off soaked cotton bolls.
My mother smiled and said, “Yes, we need some paint.”
Gran gave another look of disapproval. Why were we spending money we didn’t have on house paint when we were losing another crop? However, the house was about half and half — a striking contrast between new white and old pale brown. The project had to be finished.
Even my father seemed uneasy about the idea of parting with more cash, but he said to me, “You can go.”
“I’ll stay here,” my mother said. “We need to put up some okra.”
Another trip to town. I was a happy boy. No pressure to pick cotton, nothing to do but ride down the highway and dream of somehow obtaining candy or ice cream once I arrived in Black Oak. I had to be careful, though, because I was the only happy Chandler.
The St. Francis seemed ready to burst when we stopped at the bridge. “Reckon it’s safe?” I asked my father.
“Sure hope so.” He shifted into first, and we crept over the river, both of us too afraid to look down. With the weight of our truck and the force of the river, the bridge shook when we reached the middle. We picked up speed and were soon on the other side. We both exhaled.
Losing the bridge would be a disaster. We’d be isolated. The waters would rise around our house, and we would have no place to go. Even the Latchers would be better off. They lived on the other side of the bridge, the same side as Black Oak and civilization.
We looked at the Latchers’ land as we drove past. “Their house is flooded,” my father said, though we couldn’t see that far. Their crops were certainly gone.
Closer to town, there were Mexicans in the fields, though not as many as before. We parked by the Co-op and went inside. Some grim-faced farmers were sitting in the back, sipping coffee and talking about their problems. My father gave me a nickel for a Coca-Cola, then he joined the farmers.
“Y’all pickin’ out there?” one asked him.
“Maybe a little.”
“How’s that creek?”
“She came over last night. Moved more than half a mile before sunrise. The lower forty’s gone.”
They observed a moment of silence for this terrible news, each of them staring at the floor and feeling pity for us Chandlers. I hated farming even more.
“I guess the river’s holdin’,” another man said.
“It is out our way,” my father said. “But it won’t be long.”
They all nodded and seemed to share this prediction. “Anybody else got water over the banks?” my father asked.
“I hear the Tripletts lost twenty acres to Deer Creek, but I ain’t seen it myself,” said one farmer.