The Handsome Road (34 page)

“Oh Lord, please don’t let the levee break. Please don’t let it break, Lord. We’re doing the best we can. We’ll work all day and all night and not mind if you won’t let the levee break. Please don’t let it break, Lord. If you’ll let us hold the levee I’ll go to Sunday School every single Sunday and not mind having no shoes and learn my Bible verses and not shoot no craps as long as I live. Please Lord, let us hold the levee. We honestly been doing the best we could. Please let us hold the levee. Please don’t let it break. Please, Lord, please. …”

There was a shiver under his feet and a rumble deep down in the earth and under the rumble was a sucking noise. The sandbag line quivered. From the men on the levee went up a yell that was like no human noise Fred had ever heard, and they dropped their hammers and braces and sandbags and began to run, howling like wild animals and knocking each other down as they tore along the top of the levee in two directions, away from each other. Fred felt his shoulder grabbed and found he was being pushed by Mr. Vance. He tumbled down and got up again and ran. The cattle under the levee howled and the women screamed and the men shouted; and under it all was that hideous rumbling, sucking noise like something laughing. Fred ran, hardly knowing why he ran nor where, knocking into men and women and mules and cows, and everybody screamed to everybody else and to heaven—

“Crevasse!”

He fell down again, against the sandbags. He stumbled up panting. As he got the mud out of his eyes he saw the men and women trying to drive the cattle up on the levee. The cattle were howling with panic. Fred felt a kick in the pants and heard Mr. Vance shouting,

“Run, you young fool! Run, I tell you! My God, why did I ever let a kid on the levee? Run, you damned little snipe!”

Fred ran. Everything was all mixed up, white people and Negroes, mules and cows and pigs and buckets of coffee and papers of sugar and children and sandbags and wheelbarrows. The mob seemed to be slowing down. He was so out of breath he couldn’t run any more. He rubbed his eyes, for they were still muddy, and looked back from where he stood on the levee top.

Away up yonder where he had come from there was a breach in the levee, and the yellow water was tearing through. The break was only about as wide as an ordinary road. But as he looked the sides tumbled in, caving faster than he could see; the sandbags they had piled fell down like marbles, toppling into the water as it rushed through the crevasse. A terrified cow kicked the end of the sandbag line and the levee caved under her and she fell into the water, trumpeting with panic. Across the widening crevasse Fred could see the men who had fled in the opposite direction from himself. Above the roar of the water he could hear them groaning and cursing as they moved backward. It was as though he stood on a world that had split in two, and he wondered if he would ever see those men again.

As he watched, the break was two hundred feet wide, four hundred, six hundred. The water was spreading over the fields in a yellow fan-shaped lake, sucking the levee under with a noise that was still like laughter, the way the man in Sunday School said God would laugh on the Judgment Day. Beyond the advancing edge of the water women were untying the boats they had made ready at their doorsteps and scrambling into them. Children were climbing into the trees where they had hung their toys. They screamed for their mothers, but their mothers could not reach them. The water pushed along the outer slope of the levee till the levee top was like a long island, twelve feet wide and reaching as far as they could see. Men and women and animals were jammed on it, moving backward in a lump, afraid lest the levee cave under them as the crevasse widened.

The two broken ends of the levee still crumbled. The crevasse was a thousand feet wide. The water had covered the fields and the road beyond and was still rising. Women and children were trying to row their boats toward the levee, but were making small headway against the current from the crevasse. Some of them were being pushed around in circles. The water had entered the houses. It rose and covered all but the chimneys of the little cabins. It was still rising.

On a branch of a tree near the levee Fred could see a nest with four little birds. The two parent birds were flying around them, screaming. The baby birds had their mouths open. The water rose to the lower branches and crept up. It crept up and up. It lifted the nest off the limb and the parent birds fluttered helplessly. The current turned the nest upside down.

“It wasn’t no good,” said Fred. “Our levee wasn’t no good.”

He was talking to nobody in particular. Everybody was making a lot of noise and no one paid any attention to him. All of a sudden Fred felt something hurt in his throat. It was a different hurt from the ache in his back and legs. He put his sleeve up to his eyes. He hoped nobody saw him. It made him ashamed, for he had not cried since he was a little bit of a kid. As he took his arm down he saw Mr. Vance, sitting on the levee, his legs hunched up under his chin as he watched the spreading desolation. Mr. Vance put the back of his hand to one eye and then to the other. At that Fred felt his own eyes smarting again. He surreptitiously raised up his arm. Mr. Vance caught sight of him and gave him a funny crooked grin. He reached out and pulled Fred to sit down on the damp earth by him.

“We won’t tell on each other, will we, son?”

Fred shook his head. He was afraid to try to talk lest he be unable to swallow the hurt in his throat. But it was comforting to sit by Mr. Vance and know that even a big bossy man like him could get tears in his eyes at the sight of a crevasse.

The water had covered the smaller trees, and the branches of the bigger ones poked above the surface, thick with birds. The sun was tauntingly bright on the ripples. Here and there in the swirling lake Fred could see a chimney or the crest of a roof. The men on the levee called encouragement to their wives struggling toward them in the rowboats. Bouncing in the water were chairs, tables, mattresses, bodies of drowned cows and pigs.

After awhile Fred thought maybe he could speak.

“Mr. Vance,” he said, “ain’t there no way to build a levee so it won’t break?”

Mr. Vance gave a long slow sigh. “I don’t know, son. They say they can. But so help me God, I don’t know.”

Fred watched the carcass of a cow thump against the levee. Her udder was heavy with milk.

“When I get grown up,” said Fred, “I’d like to build levees. Levees that can’t break so people won’t have to have things like this happen to ’em.”

“Hell,” said Mr. Vance.

Mr. Vance was mad. Fred didn’t blame him. Only he himself didn’t feel exactly mad. He felt defeated. All that backbreaking work, and now it was exactly as if they hadn’t worked at all.

It was getting to be night. The sun went down. The day halted for a moment, with stark white light in which everything was clearer than it had been in the sun. Then, abruptly, it was dark.

The folks on the levee had built a bonfire. Fred could smell coffee. Some of the women had stocked their boats with provisions, so he guessed they wouldn’t starve.

“How long do we stay here like this, Mr. Vance?” he ventured.

“What?” Mr. Vance turned his head sharply, as though his mind as well as his eyes had been on nothing but the yellow destruction before him.

Fred repeated his question.

“Oh, a day or two. The state has a fleet of boats out for relief. Soon as they hear there’s been a crevasse up here they’ll send for us. We won’t drown. That water’s as high as it’s going to get.”

“You know all about the river, don’t you?” Fred asked enviously.

“I ought to,” Mr. Vance returned grimly. “Been working it most of my life. But I reckon don’t anybody know all about this river.”

Fred wished he could run away. He felt he wanted never to see another crevasse as long as he lived. Bodies of animals kept bumping against the levee. Furniture and pieces of clothing floated by, all sorts of things, things people had and took care of. In spite of Mr. Vance, Fred kept thinking there had to be a way to build levees that would keep things like this from happening.

He sat there in the dark, while the bonfires glittered over the water and the refugees huddled around them. Mr. Vance stretched out on the ground, his arm under his head.

“Better try to sleep, son,” he suggested.

Fred lay down too.

“Mr. Vance,” he said, “before you go to sleep—”

“Yes?”

“Do you work on the river all the time?”

“Pretty much. Why?”

“I’d like to work levees. Maybe if I worked them all the time I could help think up ways to build ’em stronger. You reckon I could work with you?”

Mr. Vance reached over and patted Fred’s arm. “Well, I tell you, son, if you grow up to be smarter than the river you’ll be a mighty big man. I don’t reckon you’ll ever be that smart. But—let’s see. You ever been to school?”

“All the way through the fourth grade,” said Fred eagerly, though he didn’t quite see what that had to do with piling dirt on a levee.

“Take arithmetic?”

“You’re mighty right I did,” Fred exclaimed. “I was the best in the class. We was up to problems about decimal fractions. I could do every one of ’em.”

“Well, I tell you,” said Mr. Vance. “I don’t see why you shouldn’t work regular.”

“You mean it?” Fred sat up.

“Sure. You shut up now and go to sleep.”

“Yes sir.” Fred lay down. But even as he watched the bonfires flickering over the terrible water he felt happy. He was going to fight the river, and besides he had a regular job. Maybe ma had been right after all about making him go to school. He hoped the rescue boats would come in a hurry so he could get home and tell her.

2

Corrie May knew she shouldn’t be worried about Fred. He was a sensible boy and could look out for himself. But when she heard there’d been a crevasse up the river she was troubled in her mind. As she could not make out what the papers said about the flood, she spent as much time as she could around the wharfs, asking the men there if they’d heard anything about Fred. No, they said, they hadn’t, but they supposed he was all right. But she found their optimism far from satisfying.

So one noontime a week after the crevasse, when she came out of her alley with a basket of clean clothes on her arm and caught sight of Fred walking toward their lodgings, Corrie May dropped her basket right there on the street and rushed toward him, calling his name. Fred came running along the sidewalk to meet her.

“Oh, Fred honey,” she cried, “I been so worried! Oh, praise the Lord you’re all right, Fred sugar—”

She hugged and kissed him, too happy to remember he was a big boy now and averse to such goings-on.

Fred gave an embarrassed laugh and wriggled himself out of her arms. “Oh ma, can’t you see I’m all right? Quit kissing me!”

“But Fred, I been so upset! Was you there when the levee broke?”

“Sure, I was there,” he returned like a fellow who knew all about everything and found it boresome to recount his adventures.

“Tell me about it.”

“Oh, I’ll tell you sometime,” Fred answered nonchalantly. “Take too long now. Say, you better get them clothes. Somebody’s gonta walk off with ’em.”

Together they went back to where she had dropped the basket. “I’ll tote it for you,” Fred offered as she reached for the handle.

Corrie May’s excitement was subsiding enough to let her take a good look at him. “Fred Upjohn,” she exclaimed, “you sure is a sight.”

Her eyes went over him. Fred’s clothes were stiff with dried mud. His shirt dangled in strips, one sleeve entirely gone, and the bottoms of his trouser-legs flapped like fringe about his dirty shins. Even his hair was caked with earth.

But Fred laughed at her shocked gaze. “Man does get dirty up on a levee,” he said airily. “Say, it sure is getting hot. You feel like some lemonade?”

“Lemonade?” she gasped.

Fred was already strolling over to a stall where refreshments were offered for sale, and she heard him grandly giving orders for two glasses of iced lemonade. “And mind you squeeze the lemons fresh,” he directed the boy.

Amazed, Corrie May followed him. Except for the year she had spent with Gilday she had never been affluent enough to buy such luxuries. She stared as Fred laid down a dollar bill in payment for the drinks and gathered up the change. He grinned, handing her the glass.

“Right nice, ain’t it?” he commented. He had set the clothes-basket on the ground by him.

She nodded. “But Fred, you ain’t got no business wasting your money like this. You ought to get yourself some clothes. That outfit of yourn ain’t fit to be a dishrag.”

“Oh, I’ll get some clothes,” said Fred. Corrie May was suddenly aware that she had to look up to him as he talked. Fred began to stroke the ground with his toes. “And—er—ma,” he began.

“What?”

Fred got a little bit pink. He stammered. “Er—you—I mean—you better get a dress too. Here.”

He reached into his pocket and offered her a five-dollar bill.

“Fred! What you been doing?” Corrie May demanded in alarm. She gripped his elbow. “Is you been up to something you shouldn’t?”

“No, no. Lemme go, ma. Holding me like I was a baby! You know I been working on the levee upriver! These is my wages. Ten cents an hour I got, and I worked twelve-fifteen hours a day, Sundays and all. We even got paid for the time we sat on the levee waiting for the relief boat.”

Corrie May swallowed a scrap of ice from the lemonade and coughed. “Well, well,” she said when she could speak. For the first time she felt almost ill at ease with him. He was so grown up. She asked politely, “Was it bad, the flood?”

“Yes. Right bad,” Fred answered briefly. “But ma, that ain’t what I was gonta tell you.” He set his empty glass on the counter.

“Look, Fred,” she interrupted, “there comes a carriage. If they get out maybe they’d give you a nickel to hold the horses.”

“I ain’t holding no more horses.” Fred did not even glance at the carriage. But as she set down her own glass Corrie May noticed that it was the carriage from Ardeith, so it was just as well. She didn’t want Fred to have to work for the Larnes. “Listen, ma,” Fred was saying. “I got a job. I mean a real sho ’nough job, regular.”