“I was trying to call Sarah. Nobody answered.”
“Sarah? In Philadelphia?”
Martha took Julie’s hand and followed Lily and Knight to the station wagon. “I wanted to tell her about the parade,” she said, lifting Julie into the middle seat.
“The parade,” Lily repeated after her, fumbling beneath the brake pedal for the keys she had just found and dropped.
“Honestly,” Martha said. “You’d think there might have been somebody there.”
“You can try her again when we get home.” Lily fitted the key into the ignition with meticulous care while she tried to work the parade, the rain, and Sarah into some reasonable sequence. “By then it’ll be after midnight in Philadelphia. Maybe they’ll be home then.”
“Oh no,” Martha said. “It’s only five-thirty there now. The man in the Rexall told me.”
“It’s almost eight-thirty here. You know it’s later there.”
“I’m sure I don’t know why the man in the Rexall would have told me a deliberate lie.”
“If he told you that he just didn’t know. We know.”
Martha shrugged. “I don’t know. I don’t know what to believe.”
Lily switched on the windshield wipers but did not start the engine.
“Anyway it’s too late,” Martha said. “If it’s midnight there, as you insist it is, it’s too late.”
“Too late for what?”
Martha leaned against the window and took off her sunglasses. Her eyes were closed. “I don’t know,” she said. “I didn’t want to go home and I thought I might go there, but it’s too late.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Sarah. I’m talking about my sister. I wanted to talk to Sarah. If you don’t mind.”
21
They buried Martha’s body beneath the cherry tree near the levee on the morning of the twenty-second of March. Everett and Henry Sears (who had been sleeping off the flu and a four-day drunk when Everett had the night before begun shouting and pounding at the door of the foreman’s cottage Sears you bastard Sears get out here) carried the coffin: a long rope-handled sea chest, packed for the past thirty years with Mildred McClellan’s linens, ends of lace, a box of jet beading from a dress, and the ivory fan carried by Martha’s great-great-grandmother Currier at Governor Leland Stanford’s Inaugural Ball in 1862; unpacked the night before when Everett said I’m telling you for the last time, Lily, get McGrath out of here, get his deputy out of here, and get that son of a bitch quack doctor out of here, she’s my sister, I’m going to bury her, and I’m going to bury her on the ranch.
Lily walked behind them, her arms full of flowers. Everett had been out before dawn, pulling up every daffodil left after the rain, tearing down whole branches of camellias. When they reached the place Everett had chosen they laid the sea chest on the wet ground, and Everett spelled Sears digging the grave. Numb with the morning cold, Lily stood holding the flowers and listening to the water. Every hour now, the river ran faster and higher with the melting mountain snow: tearing at the banks, jamming together logs and debris and then smashing through the jams.
As she watched Sears dig it occurred to her that Martha’s body could well be washed out by evening, the unnailed lid of the sea chest ripped open and Martha free again in the water in the white silk dress with the butterflies. ($250, I should wear it every day, every evening, and every night to bed, she had said last night when she was dressing for the party and Lily had warned the rain might spot the silk, Just ask Everett if I shouldn’t.) It was not right to bury her this way: McGrath had said it (I’m telling you, Everett, it’s against the law of the State of California); Edith Knight had said it this morning when she came in her robe to pick up the children (I’m not talking about the law. I’m not talking about any law run through by the undertakers’ lobby. I’m talking about what’s right and what’s wrong); the doctor had said it; she had said it herself. Everett baby you don’t know what you’re doing. They had each said it for different reasons and Everett had listened to none of them.
“You hear it rising?” Everett said, looking up at the levee.
Sears stopped digging to fasten his jacket against the wind. “Going to crest at thirty-eight.”
“When’s that?”
“Near to noon. Thiel’s Landing.” Sears was coughing now. He wiped the back of his hand across his mouth and picked up the shovel again.
Everett put his hand on Lily’s shoulder.
“You want to move into town?”
She shook her head. “I don’t see any need.”
Sears looked up. “There ain’t no problem this far up. Downriver maybe.”
“The Engineers might blast it tonight. Upstream. We’d get some water.”
“They wouldn’t blast a levee until they’d evacuated,” Lily said. “We’d know.”
Everett shrugged and took the shovel from Sears.
Because she did not want Everett to see that she was crying Lily shifted the flowers close to her face. It would be all right, these next few hours, if she could keep her mind on the water. Where and when would the levee go, were the levee to go at alclass="underline" there was the question to consider. Somewhere in her mind was a file of information, gathered and classified every year there was high water, and it was upon those facts that she must now focus her attention. At what point had they opened the Colusa Weir. How many gates were open at the Sacramento Weir. When would the Bypass reach capacity. What was the flood stage at Wilkins Slough. At Rough and Ready Bend. Fremont Weir. Rio Vista.
Obscurely comforted by her ability to remember, however uselessly, flood stages which bore no relation to this year’s flood, she stood with her eyes closed and did not think of Martha for half an hour.
“All right,” Everett said then, propping the shovel against the tree. “That’s enough.”
He took one end of the chest by its rope handle and Sears took the other; together they lowered it into the grave, already filling with seepage. Lily kneeled in the mud to drop the flowers on the chest, but Everett pulled her up.
“Not yet.” He motioned Sears to stand back from the grave.
Oh Christ, Lily thought. He’ll say that prayer and they’ll cover her with dirt and that’s all there is. Christ in heaven. How many people did you bury before you stopped screaming inside at the thought of that first night in the dark.
“Gentle Jesus, meek and mild,” Everett repeated without inflection. It was the prayer he and Martha had learned as children. “Look upon a little child. Pity her simplicity and suffer her to come to thee.”
“God bless Martha, amen,” Lily whispered.
Everett did not look at her. “Now,” he said.
She dropped the camellias into the grave and stood back.
“Henry’s going back to the house with you.” Everett picked up the shovel. “Get him some breakfast.”
China Mary was not in the kitchen: she had gone, late the afternoon before, to visit her sister in Courtland. They should have called her after it happened. They should have called and brought her home before they buried Martha; she had raised Martha. But there had been so many people last night: the sheriff, the deputy, the respirator squad, the doctor, Sears, even the children, wakened by the sirens; and by the time they were alone there was no use calling anyone because Everett wanted no one there. They should have called Sarah. They should have called maybe fifty people but above all they should have called China Mary and they should have called Sarah. Sarah can’t come, there’s no reason to call her, Everett had said. It’s too late. She left here of her own will and anyway it’s too late now. She had said You’re getting worse than your father was, knowing that Sarah would hear about it from her, would read that her sister had drowned when the mail arrived one morning next week at her ivied brick house in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania, for Lily could never call her alone. She had tried to call Everett when his father died but had been unable to say it. Martha had finally taken the telephone and said it.