Panama (17 page)

"He speaks so beautifully," says Mother.

Of course he does.

Hours later, long after dark, Father comes back and describes the evening: lots of wine and food he's never seen before.

"Spicy," he says, "and some of it hard to eat. They passed around those leather pouches—the wine streams into your mouth. All kinds of toasts ... to me ... to Spain ... other things. You know, most of them said they'd worked at my site one time or another, but I couldn't remember all their faces. That leader, though, I remember him—fellow named Federico. Nothing like the others." He sinks into a chair, full of food and wine, and says he's dizzy.

This shakes me, hearing Father say Federico's name.

"Their Spanish is too fast for me, but I got the gist of it. Spain must be a mess—starving population, bad king, corruption..." He shakes his head. "A shame ... All of them are good boys, bright. Any one of them could learn to do my job in no time ... and here they are..."

He waves his hand toward the Brown Spider and shakes his head again. He understates his own expertise to show his admiration for the hard-working Spaniards, typical of my modest father. Mother agrees with him and I stay silent, and in a little while the two of them go upstairs to bed.

The noise from the banquet continues, and I can see the edge of the cantina from my room overlooking the foliage and growth down the hill and across the tracks. Among the voices is Federico's, stronger and firmer than the others.

I try to figure out the whole thing. I don't doubt he's planned this ceremony to honor Father, the good-natured American they all work with from time to time who wishes them well, supports them, thinks of them as something more than faceless labor. He's a man to be respected. But in my fevered mind I believe Federico organized the whole elaborate scheme to make his presence known to me again, to make things right, and that's the thought I hold on to because it's what I want to believe: it was all for me.

Different versions of the scenario drift in my head for hours, but one thing sticks: Federico, the leader, the organizer, forced to flee king and country, has boldly stood on our steps leading cheers for Father and facing me with my parents. This is a new version of him that I never expected. It's exciting.

And it creates a new version of me: less secretive, more self-assured, less jumpy.

The next morning I feel stronger and ready for the day, and once again I feel there's nothing I can't do, nothing I can't overcome.

Entry in my diary:
We're a couple again.
That's all.

Mr. Herman from the school office comes in with a note for Mrs. Ewing, glances at me, and goes out.

Mrs. Ewing calls me to her desk.

"You have to go home immediately."

"Father's hurt?"

"Heavens no. Something that important, they'd come for you. It must be something else. Don't worry. Go on home."

But Mother's never called me home "immediately" for any reason and I know only something extreme would make her do it. I do worry.

The train ride to Culebra seems endless and so does the walk to our house in air heated to bursting, about to break in a downpour. I imagine awful things—Father hurt, Orville killed, Mother herself sick or injured somehow ... Up our hill two steps at a time, in the back door.

Mother calls down from upstairs.

"There's a terrible flood."

I bound upstairs and she's hurrying around the bedroom, talking and packing.

"We'll take the twelve-forty to Colon, board the
Advance
tonight. Start packing."

What?
WHAT?

"Every house on Hawthorne Street's flooded; every structure in Dayton is in deep water. Katharine called and said some of the single-story houses are covered to the roof—it must be terrible..."

It
is
terrible. Horrible. Leaving Federico just when things are bound to heat up again. (Not a single thought for my Dayton neighbors.) "This is awful," I say.

"Pack some clothes, something sturdy—there's mud everywhere. The water's deeper downtown than at our house. All the stores on Main are under water and mud on everything. Bring your hightop shoes and jodhpurs. Can you imagine it? Business files floating down Main Street? And chairs and tables. There's furniture floating all over—she said it looks like toys in a bathtub..."

All right. Stay calm. Think this through. How will I get word to Federico? I'm about to disappear and he'll have no idea what's happened.

I know the visit honoring Father signified we'll get together soon, but if I'm gone and not at any of our regular meeting places, he won't know what to think. He'll probably think Mother and Father have found out and I'm punished somehow for life. But how do I let him know what's really going on?

"...it started Sunday. Katharine said you could hardly hear the closing hymn, it poured so hard, but this time of year, you know, there's always rain and some flooding ... Bring all your underwear—we won't be able to wash easily."

"Why?"

"Everything's under water..." She stops and looks at me, frowning. It's pretty obvious I'm rattled but not for the same reason she is.

"Right, right," I say. I duck my head and get busy.

It's a disaster of major proportions. It's not one of our standard Ohio Valley spring floods. There are injuries, deaths, and terrible damage. Mother says waters from the Miami and two other rivers rampaged toward Dayton and a dam collapsed, so it was a wild torrent by the time it reached the city. The levee on Stratford Avenue overflowed, flood breaks on East Second and Fifth streets gave way, and the city was inundated. This is biblical.

Mother's agitation doesn't keep her from moving fast, neatly folding her garments and placing them into cases while she advises me what to bring and relays Katharine's news.

"...she says she and Orville overslept on Tuesday and rushed out to appointments in another part of town, and the flooding happened so fast, they couldn't get back to the house..."

I follow her orders, pack what I'll need, but I'm knotted inside and completely stressed.

An hour later we're on the train.

***

Mother stares out at Zoners as we pass but I don't think she sees them. She's silent, deep in worry. The flood is grinding in her like Federico is in me.

Suddenly she says, "Milton and Mrs. Wagner were rescued by a man in a canoe. Imagine that—took them to Mr. Hartzell's house."

"Incredible," I say.

"Our living room and dining room and kitchen are floating..."

There's a catch in her throat, and that's the last she says about the flood. She can't go on and I'm glad; she's upset.

Nothing in the Dayton house means much to me, but I know it does to her. The furniture and the pictures on the walls and small articles were carefully chosen and placed, and they're Mother's entire life. I have no attachment to any of it, but I can't keep from feeling for her, and just for a second, Federico is out of my mind. I hug her.

I've never done that before, never been the one to give comfort to her. She's hurting and fearful, no doubt, of what we'll see when we get to our house half submerged in river water and unlivable, only the upstairs high and dry.

Mother wipes her nose, gives me a quick smile of gratitude, and looks out the window.

It feels good to console her but I'm hating this, every minute taking me farther away from Federico.

That evening we sail for New York.

On the train from New York to Ohio I can only agonize over how long we'll have to stay, still no concern or sympathy for my Dayton neighbors. I don't ask Mother; she couldn't possibly know, and considering the suffering and destruction we're going to see, it's all wrong to mention.

I ride along in a daze of Federico scenarios—him searching for me, giving up, sweating in the Cut, wondering why I've dropped out of sight. No longer his good-natured, totally reliable American girl after all? I shudder at the thought. When we pull into Dayton Station, I look out the window and thoughts of Federico vanish.

Nothing Mother said has prepared me for this: Dayton is submerged in yellow ooze. Fences and hedges are torn and twisted in the mud. It looks like the aftermath of a cyclone, a flood in its wake.

We arrive at Hawthorne Street and it reeks. There are heaps of refuse moldering where flower beds used to be. The Wrights' perfect lawn and rock garden are jumbled with debris and unrecognizable objects.

A tricycle has been deposited with mud against the Wrights' wraparound porch, the one the boys built. Their beautiful turned railings are slime caked and smeared. Porch rockers have all but disappeared, pushed against the wall, plastered with sludge. The expert handwork Orville did on the uprights is covered with silt that's dried to a strange ochre gloss. And near the second floor, a dirty yellow line makes a high-water mark as it does on all the houses on the street—on ours, too.

It's a shock to see.

Our house looks much like the Wrights', with nothing done to clear away the litter packed with mud on our porch. Mother stiffens but doesn't say a word.

We go inside, Mother in high boots and heavy clothing, me beside her with Mrs. Wagner, a neighbor, who warns us, "Slowly—you don't know what's under the mud."

It's a damp, trashed cave. Mud is thick on the floor. Walls are streaked with slime, paper peeled and hanging in strips. Several pictures still hang in place but they're slimed and twisted. The furniture rises from the mud in clumps like the steam shovels under the Cucaracha slide.

Mother looks around and with no sentiment or shock says, "Our work is cut out for us."

She sounds like Colonel Goethals—no self-indulged simpering from her.
Let's get to it.

We start digging.

The grim job goes on for hours. We lift saturated chairs off the sofa, set tables upright, stand the breakfront back up against the wall. We throw out books; their pages are so swollen, they'll never be readable again. We clear through mess after mess, and Mrs. Wagner, who has already done this at her own house, is cheerful and keeps urging us on.

"It will soon be as pretty as ever, you'll see," she says.

Not a chance.

She's the neighbor who gave me bread and jam when I was little and came to visit her. Those words are more bread and jam, meant to keep us happy. But Mother knows they won't fix a thing. No possibility of putting this back together in a few days.

We arrange for workmen to come, and one by one they show up. They dig and clear inside and out. Whole crews of them are moving through the town. Some of them are part of Dayton's civic maintenance, and others are hired groups or day laborers.

"Everybody gets help whether they can pay or not," says the wiry guy lifting a tree limb in our yard.

It's Dayton's version of West Indian workers in the Zone, and like them, these Dayton men work without complaint. They pull, haul, wash down. They restore order. They're cheerful, too, and optimistic. They are my people in a way Federico or the undulating Panamanian women can't be. I begin to feel that strongly as the hours pass. Dayton doesn't seem so provincial, just good folks helping one another. I've been hard on my hometown. Federico seems very far away and our indulgence seems like ... indulgence.

At some point late in the morning, after hours of work, Mother says, "Better go next door—get their news." I don't need persuading, and as I turn to go she says, "You should plan on going back. I don't want you missing so much school."

"All right."

With those words joy washes over me and overwhelms my thoughts of homey Dayton. Panama is where I'm adult and myself. Dayton reminiscence is nice, but it means nothing now that I'm older.

I stand at the door watching Mother as she goes back to work on a small china tea set, wiping a cup clean and placing it in a cardboard box. That tea set is old-fashioned to me, the sort of thing I'd never have in my own house—useless decoration. But there it is, still in its place on the table in the living room. That little inanimate piece of our life bravely peeping out through the slime—it looks so helpless, I want to cry. I can't wait to get back to Panama.

I set out for the Wrights', feeling good. I try to go the usual route across the little hedge separating our backyards, but that won't work. It's heaped with mud and it's impossible to tell what's under there or if I'll hurt myself plunging knee-deep into ooze. I go the front way, where workers have used snow shovels to expose sidewalks and paths.

Orville is in the kitchen.

"Well, well," he says.

He's hardly changed. It's been almost three years since I've seen him. I was fifteen; now I'm eighteen—child to woman.

"Everything seems smaller." I have to laugh.

"You're larger," he says. We sit at the kitchen table. "The Bishop's helping across town."

"Katharine and Carrie?"

"They're at church dispensing food and water."

I look around at the kitchen, cleared and clean and usable, electricity restored, refrigeration, running water—just like the Wrights to be the first on the block back in working order.

"How's your father?" he asks.

"Good. And loving his work."

He asks about Mother and says he'll step over and say hello to her later.

"So little's changed," I say. He nods.

We talk, find some dried apricots, and Orville makes coffee. He isn't wearing his starched collar—he's in a flannel shirt and boots like everyone else.

"We're all in strange getups these days," he says.

"And how about the machines?" Our common interest. "Are they okay?"

"The ones at the factory are fine, but everything here and at the shop is gone. Total loss..." He shakes his head mostly in bewilderment. "You never saw anything like it—be glad you were gone. And how do you like it down there?"

"Very much. I didn't at first—you know, nobody interesting. Nobody building flying machines, anyway."

"I don't know why not—they're doing it everywhere else."