In The Falling Light (5 page)

Bailey nodded again, wiping a clump of hair
from her eyes. She was trembling. Dell wasn’t sure she would move
at first, thought she might freeze up, but then she started to her
feet. She held onto her brother as she edged past him, her sneakers
sliding over the wet shingles. Her legs were shaking and she began
to whimper, gripping Ricky’s shoulders hard while he in turn clung
to the roof.

“Mama…”

Her right foot shot away and she went down
with a scream, banging her chin, losing her grip on Ricky, and for
one terrible moment Dell saw her sliding, sliding, falling and
swept away. But one hand caught the roofline and the other snagged
on Ricky’s jeans.

“Mama!”

“Pull yourself up!”

“I’m falling!”

“You pull yourself up, Bailey McCall!”

The girl’s sobs were torn away by the wind
as she obeyed her mother’s voice, clawing her way back to the
roofline and throwing a leg over, hugging her brother’s back and
burying her face in his wet shirt.

“Now you get to scooching,” Arlene
commanded.

Bailey shook her head, hiding her face.

“Do it
right now
, girl!”

She pulled her face out of hiding. “I hate
you!” she screamed, but did as she was told, easing her butt
backwards six inches at a time, holding the roofline with both
hands while Arlene cooed a steady stream of encouragement. “That’s
it, baby, you can do it, you’re doing fine, honey, keep going…”
Five endless minutes later she pressed her back against the bricks
of the chimney.

“I’m sorry, Mama,” she cried, wiping at her
eyes.

“It’s okay, baby, Mama knows. I’m so proud
of you.”

Dell gave his daughter a smile, and she
managed a weak one in return. His wife’s voice cut through the wind
again. “Ricky, your turn, just like your sister.”

The eleven-year-old needed no encouragement.
He scooted backwards with the fearless agility of boys and crossed
the distance in seconds, into Bailey’s waiting arms. Arlene was
murmuring to Dylan, keeping his face shielded from the biting rain
as the toddler shivered close against her and cried. Dell looked
away, at what had become of the world.

The McCall ranch sat twelve miles outside
Leesville proper, the house and a cluster of outbuildings and trees
alone on the flats of Gonzales County, not another structure in
sight. It was sheep country, wide open and green, dotted in places
with clumps of Texas oaks. Now, however, they might as well have
been at sea, for eight feet of brown, turning water was moving
across the flats like an ocean in every direction, endless,
hammering at the gutters of their one story house. The white roof
of Arlene’s Durango could still be seen a quarter mile off as the
SUV was carried away, and the wheels of Dell’s Chevy poked just
above the surface where the overturned pickup had floated to rest
against the tree in what had been their front yard.

The water around them was fast and
unforgiving.

Just beyond the house were the rooftops of
the sheep shed and the second story of the barn. None of the
smaller buildings could be seen. They were already underwater.

Arlene looked back into the wind and rain at
her husband. “Together?”

He nodded, and they began to scoot forward
across the space separating them from their children, slowly,
carefully. Dylan was starting to squirm, and Arlene clamped him
tight against her while she used the other hand to stay balanced
and pull herself along. Dell kept close, prepared to grab them both
if she should tip over one side or the other, not thinking or
caring that he would most likely be pulled over with them if they
went.

They stopped once, Dylan’s squalling
competing with the driving wind, and Arlene used both hands to rock
and soothe him. Then they were off again, the rough shingles
grating beneath them, knees gripping the wet roof like the withers
of a bareback horse. Lightning split the sky, followed close by
sharp, rippling cracks as they reached the far end, Arlene’s knees
touching Ricky’s. They rested for a moment, his wife’s forehead
pressed against the toddler, Dell’s against his wife’s shoulder. A
surge of wind rocked them and the rain fell harder, coming in
sideways for a moment, both conspiring to send them off the roof.
They hung on.

“Bailey,” Arlene was shouting, “I want my
hands free to grab anyone who might slip, so I’m going to pass
Dylan forward. Ricky, you’re going to help. Put him tight in
between the two of you.”

Both kids nodded that they understood, and
whatever fear they might have had for themselves momentarily
vanished as they undertook the deadly serious task of protecting
their youngest. Within moments, Dylan was safely tucked between his
brother and sister, Bailey covering him with her body. In the midst
of the horror, Dell McCall felt a burst of pride for his
children.

It was short-lived, as the situation and
bitterness crashed back in on him. He could have evacuated them
days ago, when Sophie was crossing Florida. They could have left
when she brushed Louisiana, showing no signs of diminishing, then
again as she made landfall on the Texas Gulf Coast. But everyone
was so certain she would slow down and blow out in the Hill
Country, even the TV weathermen, that it would just be hard rain
and high wind by the time it reached them. What Texan picked up his
family and ran from that? They had been through heavy weather
before. Dell supposed that had been at the heart of it. Pride. Too
proud to be chased off his land.

And then there she’d been in all her
terrible glory, ripping overland at record speeds, and it had been
too late. The wind and thunder had gotten them moving in the early
hours, and the dreaded grumble of water rushing across the main
road – cutting off any hope of driving out – had sent them up an
aluminum ladder and onto the roof mere seconds before a dark tide
bristling with uprooted trees had surged across the flats,
surrounding their house.

He looked at the barn, with its safe, dry
loft and much higher roof. I should have taken them there, he
thought.

New gusts attacked out of the early morning,
rain cutting hard through their clothes, making them all tuck and
hunch against it, closing their eyes. Dylan cried loudly until a
long barrage of thunder drowned him out.

You did this to them, Dell thought. You led
them up here to die.

He clenched his teeth so hard he thought
they might crack.

The wind lifted for a moment as the storm
drew a breath, and he looked around once more. All gone. The horses
drowned in their stalls, his fine Dall sheep either swept away on
the Texas tide or drowned in their pens. The house. Arlene’s photo
albums. Troy’s flag. All gone.

The thought of Troy McCall’s flag – handed
to Arlene two years ago by a somber Army colonel and later placed
reverently over the mantle, now just another piece of floating
debris – caused an ache in his chest. Nineteen-years-old and killed
by a roadside bomb on some obscure, numbered highway outside
Baghdad, dead in a war that began when he was still Ricky’s age. It
was Dell who had given his approval to the enlistment, caught up in
his eldest son’s excitement over adventure and patriotism and
career possibilities, the chance to be more than a sheep
rancher.

He looked at his family shivering in the
storm. Troy wouldn’t be the last McCall child to be led to
destruction by their father.

Dell looked to the barn again, remembering a
night shortly after they’d gotten the news, him alone in the dark,
surrounded by the warm sweetness of hay and horses, alone with his
shotgun resting across his knees. He had been beyond crying, his
body exhausted and drained, eyes distant and raw, a single shell in
the chamber. It was this fine woman in front of him who came along
in the dark, taking the shotgun and holding him, and he’d
discovered he did have more tears, the two of them crying together.
She had saved his life.

And as repayment for that gift, he had now
sentenced her to death.

“Daddy?”

Dell squeezed his eyes shut, his fists tight
and shaking.

“Daddy, look.”

He opened his eyes to see Ricky pointing to
the sheep shed, and Dell wiped away tears and rain as he saw what
had caught his son’s attention. An animal was scrambling out of the
floodwaters, nails scratching and slipping as it clawed furiously
up the corrugated tin slope, finally gaining purchase and moving on
unsteady legs to the peak. It was a coyote, a female he had seen
before, recognized by her drooping left ear. She gave herself a
shake from tail to head, then stood there shivering, looking down
at the brown sea churning all about the shed.

“She’s alone,” said Ricky, who remembered
her too, and now they were all looking. “Where’s her pups?”

Dell and Ricky had been out riding a few
weeks ago, and saw her fifty yards off, loping across the
grasslands, three little pups trotting behind her in a line. As a
rule, sheep ranchers will shoot a coyote on sight, and Dell was no
exception, in fact he’d had his rifle with him that day. He could
have easily made the shot, but allowed her to go on her way, not
sure why. Not because of Ricky, who was old enough to know what a
plague coyotes were to a sheep herd, and not because of her pups.
Every rancher Dell knew would have dropped each one in turn without
hesitation, getting them before they got bigger and could do real
damage. But he didn’t, hadn’t even wanted to. He had no explanation
for his son or himself, other than a private suspicion it probably
had something to do with Troy, but it was confused and they were
thoughts he had no desire to explore.

Now, as he looked at her, scrawny and
shaking and alone on a rooftop with no understanding of what was
happening to her, he was glad he hadn’t done it. “Her pups are
gone,” he told his son. “She couldn’t save them.”

Arlene reached back and squeezed her
husband’s knee. It was small comfort.

For a while no one said anything, just
watched the animal pace from one end of the roof to the other,
turning her head from side to side, tail tucked. Finally it was
Ricky who asked the question.

“Are we going to get rescued, Daddy?” Behind
him, Bailey looked up to see the answer.

“Of course we are.” He had to raise his
voice so they could hear him over the wind, and doing that allowed
him to hide the way it cracked.

“Is a helicopter going to pick us up, like
we saw them do on TV during Katrina?”

“They can’t fly in this,” Bailey said. “The
wind’s too strong.” It was snapping her hair around her head and
face as if she was being electrocuted.

Arlene shot her daughter a look. “They’ll
just have to use a boat, won’t they, honey?” She gave her husband’s
leg another squeeze.

Dell said that yes, a boat would come for
them. He couldn’t see his wife’s eyes, and that was just as well.
They wouldn’t have to watch each other lie.

Another rising surge of wind ended further
conversation, and the McCall’s tucked down as lightning flashed
within the violent clouds, rain pelting them without relent while
thunder rolled across the Texas sea. They were all shivering, the
wind and rain turning cold. Only Dell kept his head up, looking at
the coyote which had ceased pacing for the moment and stood midway
along the rooftop, her pelt hanging in wet straggles. She winced at
every crash of thunder, and though he couldn’t hear her, Dell
imagined she was whining as well. Wet and whining and hopeless.

He saw that the water was halfway up the
shed’s metal slope, and a glance down to the right showed him that
the gutters of his house were gone, a good foot under now. The
brown sea rolled against his roof, and a huge oak tumbled past,
branches turning slowly as it floated quickly by. Some debris was
tangled with it; a red cooler, a lawn chair, the bloated shape of
an armadillo corpse, a telephone pole with a snarl of wire trailing
behind, thumping briefly against the house before it was gone.
Something swollen and gray with stiff legs sticking out of the
water chased the debris, and Dell realized it was a dead mule.

Minutes later the white box of a delivery
truck cruised past on the far side of the front yard tree, leaning
at a sharp angle, and Dell recognized the logo of bright flowers on
the side as Dawson’s Orchids. Gonzales County was one of the
biggest orchid suppliers in the U.S., and Dell knew the owner. The
truck’s cab was submerged, and with a chill he wondered if Lyle
Dawson might not still be in the driver’s seat, buckled in tight
with his dead hands on the wheel.

While Dell watched Texas float by, the water
climbed another foot up his roof.

Arlene was tugging at his pants leg to get
his attention, and she half turned and moved her head close so the
kids wouldn’t hear her. “What are we going to do?”

Dell looked at her for a long moment. “We
have to hang on as long as we can, and hope someone comes.”

Her green eyes never left his. “No one’s
coming.” It wasn’t a question.

“Not in time to make a difference.”

She turned back to face her children and
said nothing more.

Dell silently cursed the storm, cursed
himself, then just stared at the coyote. She was pacing again,
looking and sniffing, back and forth, but nothing had changed
except the water was closer. He wondered if she realized she was
finished. He doubted she could grasp a concept like that, and
didn’t really expect her to start howling as if lamenting her fate.
Animals didn’t do that. He suspected she would go out with more
dignity, anyway. She was lucky. She wouldn’t have to stand there
helplessly and watch the storm take her pups. The wind screamed at
them then, the rain an endless lashing of needles, and they tried
to become as small and tightly wrapped as they could. No one made a
sound, not even little Dylan who just cowered and shook against his
mother, and they waited. Waited for a salvation Dell knew wasn’t
coming.