Gathering of Waters (11 page)

“Stay calm, flock! Stay calm,” August warned.

Downstairs at the Payne home, Hemmingway was banging furiously on the back door when the upstairs window exploded and rained down shards of glass onto her head. Panic-stricken, she snatched up a nearby flowerpot, launched it through the window of the door, snaked her hand through the ragged opening, and turned the lock.

Upstairs, Cole walked back into the room. “It’s getting really nasty out there.”

Doll was in the bed, stretched out on her back, admiring her fingernails. “What?”

Cole was about to repeat himself, when he heard the clatter of glass downstairs.

“What now?” he muttered as he took up one of the three oil lamps and fled from the room. With the lamplight illuminating his way, Cole bounded down the stairs.

When Hemmingway saw the beam, she hurried toward the light, hands flailing.

Cole’s heart shuddered as he spotted the dark figure racing toward him. “Who’s that!” he yelled, raising the lamp high into the air.

“Hemmingway Hilson!”

Cole stalled and lowered the lamp. “Who?”

From above him, Doll called out, “Oh, that’s the reverend’s daughter.”

Both Cole and Hemmingway looked up to see Doll leaning girlishly over the banister, her bare breast swinging like church bells.

So here is the evidence
, Hemmingway thought to herself as her eyes moved from Doll to Cole and then back to Doll. “You roach!” she screamed, and took flight.

Upriver the levees gave way, and the Mississippi and all of her arteries breached their shores. The surge moved like a beast downriver, smashing through the wall of the church and toppling all but two homes on Nigger Row.

On Candle Street, Cole fought to separate mother and daughter as they clawed one another, and so none heard the growl of the approaching heave of water until it plowed through the front door. They scrambled up the stairs to safety, and stood mesmerized with horror as the water magically transformed the foyer into a pool.

Not one amongst them could swim.

“We need to go up to the attic, now!” Cole yelled.

Within seconds the lower half of the staircase was completely submerged.

Feeling scared and powerless, Hemmingway did what any child would have done in that situation: “Mommy,” she said, and reached for Doll’s hand.

Doll Hilson looked down at her daughter’s hand and began to laugh. If Hemmingway had any bit of hope that she could ever love her mother, Doll’s refusal to take her hand dashed it all away.

The house lurched; Doll swayed and shrieked with terror as she grappled to clamp hold of the very hand she’d just rejected.

Hemmingway swiftly pulled her hand from Doll’s reach.

“Help me!”

The house pitched again, the staircase buckled, and Doll went reeling down into water.

Cole was stunned mute and rendered immobile. Only his eyes continued to work, swinging unbelievingly between the placid indifference on Hemmingway’s face and the thrashing Doll who was struggling for her life.

“Hemmingway!” Doll gurgled as the swirling water pulled her under. “Hemm—”

Hemmingway didn’t move. Cole couldn’t move.

Doll’s head disappeared beneath the water, resurfaced, and then disappeared again. Soon after, Esther’s spirit floated up toward the ceiling and perched on the chandelier.

The next day, the sky spread itself across Mississippi in a serene blanket of baby blue. And after months of obscurity, the sun returned, white bright and hot.

Chapter Seventeen

T
he Manning brothers were blue-eyed, blondhaired young men who enjoyed fishing. They spent most Saturdays out in their rowboat drinking beer, smoking cigarettes, and reeling in bass.

When the rains stopped, they used their boat to rescue the living and the floating dead. They were the ones who found Cole and Doll.

Inside the Payne house on Candle Street, furniture, dishes, and silver picture frames holding sepia-colored photos bobbed lazily in the dark water. Overhead, the chandelier swayed, as if guided by an invisible hand.

Vance, the larger of the twins, sat at the helm of the boat slowly ranging his eyes over the water. His twin, Preston, rowed the oars.

“Hello! Hello, anybody here!” They called over and over in their baritone voices.

“Up here!” Cole shouted back.

Preston guided the boat to the staircase and Vance climbed out. The swell of water hit his six-foot frame at the chest. He grabbed hold of the banister and pulled himself up onto the remaining steps. On the landing, he sloshed down the corridor and entered the first room he came upon.

“Hello?”

“Up here! In the attic!”

Vance turned around and started back the way he’d come. Spotting a closed door catty-corner to the room he had just walked out of, Vance grabbed the doorknob and turned. He was startled to see a wide-eyed, shivering Cole standing at the top of the short staircase.

“Hey, good to see ya,” Vance said.

“And you!”

Cole extended a trembling hand. Vance took it and the two men shook.

“You alone?”

Cole shook his head. “Me and a young girl.”

Hemmingway peeked out from behind Cole’s back.

Vance considered her before declaring, “Well, we got enough room for both of you.”

In the boat, Cole surveyed his surroundings in quiet horror. Hemmingway folded her knees to her chest and nervously chewed on her bottom lip.

“I see something,” Vance said, pointing toward the drawing room. Cole strained to see and was sorry that he did. There was Doll, floating on her back, eyes wide and staring, breasts bobbing in the water like buoys.

“Don’t look,” Cole whispered to Hemmingway.

“We’ll have to come back for the body later,” Preston said as he navigated the boat through the opening where a beautiful oak door had once hung.

As they floated out of the house, Esther swooped down from the chandelier and settled on Hemmingway’s shoulder.

Outside, it seemed to Cole that all of the waters of the world had converged in Mississippi.

They headed upriver to Greenwood, where there was dry land. On their journey, the group passed dozens of somber-faced men piloting rowboats crammed with people wearing stricken expressions. Some boats hauled dead bodies stacked one atop the other like sacks of potatoes. One boat carried a pair of bleating goats and a grim-faced old woman.

Every so often, someone would cry out, “Over here!” and the boats would make their way across the water and encircle the corpse like sharks.

Along the way, Vance reached into the bib of his overalls and pulled out a bag of tobacco and rolling paper. He shoved it in Cole’s direction.

“No, thanks,” Cole murmured.

Whistling a chipper tune, Vance sifted the tobacco onto the paper, rolled it into a line, and slipped it into the corner of his mouth.

With her eyes closed against the sun and the horror, Hemmingway allowed her body to lean and rock in tempo with the sway of the boat.

“Hemmingway?” Cole called.

“Yes?” she responded without opening her eyes.

“You okay?”

When her eyelids slowly parted, the steely gaze she fixed on Cole spoke volumes:
My mama’s dead, the rest of
my family probably dead too. The town is underwater. I’m hungry
and I’m scared. So what do you think?
Hemmingway silently watched him until Cole felt his cheeks blaze.

“You see that?” Vance pointed at a balloon of white material.

Preston leaned over the side of the boat and squinted. “Yeah, I see it,” he answered, and began to pull the oars with great ferocity.

The nose of the boat rammed into the body with a loud thump. The collision tilted the craft dangerously to one side and both Hemmingway and Cole yelped in terror.

They’d rammed into a young boy dressed in slacks and a white shirt knotted at the neck with a bow tie.

“Oh God,” Cole whispered.

Preston sucked air, and shook his head in dismay. “That’s Eula’s boy.”

“Oh yeah?” Vance looked closer. “Which one?”

“J.W.”

Preston set the oars, reached down between his legs, and retrieved a large hook normally used to move bales of cotton. He leaned over, slipped the hook beneath the waistband of the boy’s trousers, and tugged.

The body slammed into the side of the boat.

“Lemme help,” Vance said, and caught hold of the boy’s shoulders. Together, the brothers hauled the lifeless body into the boat.

Short dark hair fanned out across J.W.’s scalp in slick, wet points. His eyes were open and vacant. The mouth hung ajar, and was filled with swarming bottle flies.

“Yeah, that’s J.W. for sure,” Preston said as he slapped water from his hands.

Vance combed his fingers through his hair and moaned, “This is going to kill Eula.”

Preston nodded in agreement.

Vance removed his shirt, and just before he placed it over J.W.’s face, Esther executed a perfect swan dive off of Hemmingway’s shoulder and plunged right into that boy’s open mouth.

***

In Greenwood, the riverbank looked like a battlefield. Scores of people walked aimlessly about hauling items they had rescued from the waters. Many huddled under trees and beneath makeshift tents. The infirm lay stretched out on the wet grass, with friends or family members stationed at their hips.

When the Manning brothers hauled their boat up onto the muddy bank, Hemmingway leapt out, staggered to a nearby tree, and puked.

Cole, weak and nauseous himself, offered to help the brothers carry the dead boy, but Vance waved him off, plucked J.W.’s body from the boat, and slung him over his shoulder as if he was as light as a twig.

“There’s a house up the hill there,” Preston announced. “The people will give you water and food.” His eyes moved to Hemmingway and lingered. “Uhm,” he moaned, pointing his chin downriver, “she gotta head that way, to the colored camp.”

Cole nodded as he watched Vance make his way over a small mound of mud and rubbish.

“Where is he taking him?” Cole asked.

“Funeral home,” Preston responded.

Six months earlier, Charles Williams and Thomas Lord had opened the doors to their brand-new funeral parlor. Since then, they’d only managed to snag three percent of the business in and around Greenwood. That equaled thirty-two corpses. Thirty-two and a half if you counted the stillborn baby. The remaining ninety-seven percent went to the forty-year-old community staple: Ross and Sons.

Business was so bad that Williams and Lord had decided to throw in the towel, and just two days before the flood they had officially closed their doors.

But the havoc God wreaked on Mississippi had resulted in good fortune for Williams and Lord. Business, of course, was now booming. They couldn’t believe their good luck, and when out of sight of the bereaved, it was all they could do to keep from grinning.

Vance delivered J.W. Milam’s body to the funeral home and then went off to locate the dead boy’s mother.

J.W.’s body was taken to the brightly lit preparation room. Williams and Lord owned only two silver gurneys and those were already occupied—so they undressed J.W.’s body and propped one chair beneath his head and another beneath his feet. A large block of ice was positioned below his body to keep it cool and a penny was placed on each eyelid.

Chapter Eighteen

E
ula Milam was a short, rotund woman with large dark eyes. She wore her wavy black hair pinned in a loose bun atop her head. She arrived at the Williams and Lord funeral home flanked by her son Fleming and Vance Manning. Mr. Lord led them into a large room with walls covered in bright white tile in the shape of playing cards. The room was filled with more than a dozen bodies and at the sight of so much death, Eula’s legs turned to rubber.

“He’s just over here,” Mr. Lord said.

Vance and Fleming hooked their hands under Eula’s arms and guided her toward her son.

“He look like he’s asleep,” Eula whispered. She wrung her hands and wailed, “Oh, my boy. My sweet, sweet boy!”

In a moment of dramatic grief, Eula Milam threw herself onto J.W.; the weight of her body caused the chairs to shoot out from beneath J.W. and both mother and dead son crashed down onto the melting block of ice. The pennies went skidding across the floor and fell into the drain.

Fleming ran screaming from the room, while Vance and Mr. Lord stood watching in stunned silence as Eula flopped around like a fish on land.

Eula grabbed hold of J.W.’s hand and cried, “Oh, God, why, why!”

The men took her meaty arms and tried to pull her upright, but she remained sprawled on the floor, clinging for life to her son.

“Please, Mrs. Milam, please,” Mr. Lord begged.

“Goddammit, Eula, turn that boy loose!” Vance ordered.

“Ouch, Mama, lemme go!”

Mr. Lord stared at Vance and Vance returned the man’s perplexed gaze. They both peered down at Eula, whose eyes were fixed on J.W.’s heaving chest.

Now, you may doubt that this actually happened. But I have no reason to lie to you. People coming back from the dead is a phenomenon that can be traced all the way back to the Old Testament of the Bible. Just the other day I became aware of a sixty-year-old woman who was hospitalized for an unexplained illness. In the night, her heart stopped beating and the physician pronounced her dead. She was taken to the morgue and her children were called. When the children arrived to identify the body, the old woman’s eyes popped open and she began to cough.

Across the world in Nigeria, a Muslim woman died in childbirth and within twenty-four hours, her still body was bathed, wrapped in white muslin cloth, turned onto its side, and placed in the ground. As the mourners recited the Quranic verse and poured handfuls of soil into the grave, the woman flipped over, sat up, and began clawing at the shroud she had been encased in.

Medical officials blame the occurrence on human error. They even have a term for it: Lazarus syndrome. The religious, of course, give the glory to God. However, the culprit in the resurrection of J.W. Milam was none other than Esther.

Days later the waters started to recede, and the dead began to thoroughly reveal themselves.