Sarah's Window (17 page)

She fussed with his clothes that morning, put him into something stiff and new, and put shoes on him and took them off again. She could read his eyes, saw that intelligence that no one believed he had, and she knew he was confused and a little scared. He didn't want to be put down that morning, and he fussed over his breakfast. Finally she just gave him a bottle and sat in the porch swing rocking him, singing him silly songs and lullabies, waiting for them to come and take him away.

She did not know if Susan would come or if John would come alone. She tried to be generous, tried with all her heart to wish the other woman well, but when she saw them pull in the driveway, saw Susan's drawn face turn toward her then glance away sharply, she felt all the goodness drain away.

But Susan remained in the car, and John strode up the front steps and did not look her in the eye.

"Can you come in?" Sarah asked as she rose from the swing. "Grandma's made a peach cobbler."

John stood awkwardly with his hands on his hips, his eyes on Will. "I think it would be easier for everyone if we just took him and went."

"I know. That's what I told Grandma. But she insisted." She gestured behind her. "His things are all there. Just inside the door."

She had packed up all his clothes and toys in brown grocery bags, and she waited on the steps while John carried them out to the Range Rover. When he came back for his son, he paused at the foot of the stairs, wanting to say something, but then she realized Will's eyes were on him and Will was smiling, and his little brown arms were straining for him. Sarah smiled and leaned toward John and let Will climb into his father's arms.

"There," she whispered. "I knew it would be okay."

She worked a long day that day. She flew around the cafe, whisking out plates of the Mexican special and refilling glasses of iced tea, and if there was a smile on her face, there was no joy in her heart. As she bent down to serve Lew his chicken-fried steak and gently remind him he had ordered the green beans, not the corn, and he asked where her baby was, she felt her face fall, and she turned away and set down the pitcher. Then she strode through the kitchen and out the back door into the backyard and hid behind the old throw-away fridge Joy had dumped there. She leaned back against it and put her face in her hands and cried. She slumped to the ground and huddled there with her head on her knees and the hot sun beating down on her hair. She opened her eyes and her gaze swept across the backyard, the wooden produce crates stacked next to the trash can, Joy's stunted peach tree, and the sagging clothesline. For a long time she sat with her face turned up to the blistering sun, with the deafening roar of cicadas in her ears, until Joy came out and called her name. Sarah rose and came into the open, shielding her eyes from the sun, and said, "I'm sorry, Joy. I wasn't feeling well. Heat just got to me. But I'm fine now."

She swept around Joy and into the kitchen, leaned down to the sink and dashed some cool water on her face, picked up the dishes that had backed up on the service counter, and strode tall into the dining room.

That night Billy found her out in Warlord's stall saddling him up to ride. It had rained earlier in the evening and the ground cover was wet and slick. He sat out on the front porch for hours in the dark waiting for her to come back, praying she wouldn't take a fall and be lying out there in the hills with her head split open. At one in the morning he finally went up to bed. When he shuffled downstairs the next morning he found her asleep on the sofa wrapped in an old horse blanket, her red hair tangled and matted and flecked with bits of dried grass.

She clung to him after that night, seemed to need his presence if not his love, cooked his dinners for him, spent her evenings with him in front of the television or playing rummy, or working Warlord in the cooler hours of twilight. But she never came to his bed, hadn't shared his bed since that morning back in early March. She slept in his daughter Angie's room some nights; some nights she slept on the sofa, some nights he didn't know where she was. She seemed to go a little wild those weeks, wouldn't go back home, told him something about a mural she'd painted on her ceiling that she couldn't bear to live with. Even called in sick a few days and worried Joy so much that Joy came out to Billy's place, dropped by one evening after she'd closed up the cafe to check on Sarah. But Sarah just got annoyed by all the fuss, said she only wanted a break from everyone.

Her grandpa kept tabs on her, called Billy from time to time just to see how she was doing, but if Sarah was around she'd get upset, said she didn't like to hear them gossiping about her like two old crones. A few times Jack spied her truck parked right down the street in Bazaar and thought maybe she was visiting Blanche, but Blanche hadn't seen her. It was Jimmy Baird who recognized her coming out of the old Methodist Church around the corner, and the next time her truck appeared Jack hobbled down to the church, slipped up around the back and peered in one of the windows. There she was, alone, kneeling at the end of the second row. He waited awhile, thought perhaps he might catch her coming out, but he waited for nearly twenty minutes and all that time she didn't move so much as a hair. He went back home then.

Hardly a year goes by when the Cottonwood River doesn't overflow its banks at one point or another along its serpentine route through the Flint Hills. In the dry season it's a sluggish old river, and Jack Bryden would fish the South Fork on a late summer day and drift no more than a quarter mile downstream before twilight. But when the rains come, the Cottonwood swells with the runoff from hundreds of square miles of uplands. Once the high plateaus drink their fill and the earth is saturated with early summer rain, the waters trickle down those gentle green shoulders in rivulets and streams and wind their way into the gullies and creeks, and then the Cottonwood goes on the rise.

In a bad year, with heavy rains, the tributaries slough their water downstream only to meet with an already swollen waterway; then, mile after mile of river begins to back up. With nowhere to go, the Cottonwood gathers itself up in great roiling currents; it climbs higher and higher, clawing away at the banks, ripping the earth from beneath the trees and tearing off ledges until it has broken free of its man-mapped boundaries and reclaimed the land.

Then it begins to move over the land like the living thing it is; it creeps up the fields, between the rows of corn and maize, and farm wives barely sleeping at night listen for the water rising. They look out their windows and hear it coming up the fields toward them in the dark, and they open the door to the basement stairs and see the black water glistening on the bottom step. The next time they get out of bed to check, it's risen three more steps and so they stay awake then, sit in the kitchen by the fight of an oil lamp and listen to the radio and wonder how high it'll rise this time. Come morning it has swept away the chicken coop and the doghouse, and the farmer's wife watches with her waders on, the wau now eight inches up the ground-floor wall, while an eddy roils past the barn and carries off her old stove, and she wonders whose land she'll find it on once the waters recede.

That summer they recorded the longest rainy spell in white man's history of Chase County. Nearly all of Kansas was affected, and the panhandle of Oklahoma, but Chase County had the worst of it. The intensity varied from hour to hour, but the rain never stopped for long. At times it lightened to a drizzle, but then turbulent clouds would harden into a mask of gray and the sky would empty itself with such torrential force that Donnie Henryson, who on the second day started moving equipment to higher ground, commented later to his wife he feared he might drown if he so much as dared to look up. The skies are vast in Kansas, and there were times when they could see sunlight flooding Marion County to the west, or stars in the eastern night sky over Lyon County. Overnight the river rose from eight feet to seventeen feet, and since seven o'clock that morning the sirens in Cottonwood Falls had been wailing. Folks had been up since before dawn erecting a wall of sandbags down at the end of Broadway where the Cottonwood winds by the town.

John was taking books from his shelves and packing them into boxes when Billy Moon called. John could hardly hear him over the deafening roar of the rain on the roof.

"John?"

"Yeah?"

"This is Billy Moon."

A drawn-out pause, the sound of rain cutting in and out.

"Hello?"

"Can you hear me?"

"Barely."

"I'm on my cell phone in the barn. Phone line's out. I need to ask a favor. When you leaving?"

"Tomorrow."

"Oh. Well, I imagine you're pretty busy."

John shot a swift glance around the room, at the jumbled piles of books and boxes strewn over the floor, at Will toddling toward him gripping a wad of papers in his fist.

"Yeah," he said with a twist of humor as he leaned down and swept the child into his arm. "I've pretty much got my hands full right now."

"I won't keep you then. I was just calling around to see if we could round up some extra help over here at my place."

Another strung-out pause before John replied tersely, "I wish I could help."

"Hey, no problem. I wasn't even sure you were still in town. Sarah said she thought you'd already left."

Another silence, this one taut with tension, punctuated by the sound of pelting rain.

Billy asked, "You think you'll get some flood damage?"

"Not here. We're up too high."

"Sorry, didn't catch all that."

"No, I think we'll be okay. How are you doing?"

"Well, tell you the truth, I'm afraid that river's gonna make it to my back door before we get finished. Trouble is, everybody else's got the same problem."

"Sony I can't help."

Billy said something else, but the line was cutting in and out and John couldn't make any sense out of it and so he hung up.

Since seven o'clock that morning, Susan had been scrambling around behind the movers, dashing from kitchen to parlor to bedroom to make sure nothing was forgotten. At long last, Clarice had decided to put the house up for sale. She had come back from Dallas the week before, having gained a little weight and looking years younger. She had quietly confided in Joy that she had not had a drink since she'd left Cottonwood Falls, and she planned to return to Dallas and settle down there. Susan was to take what she wanted out of the old prairie mansion; Claire wanted only to purge herself of the place and start anew.

The two of them had spent the previous week going through the house, and with the exception of a few antiques Susan was shipping back to their home in San Francisco, and some old clothing and linens they had donated to the Salvation Army, the rest was to be left behind to go into an estate sale.

Obsessed as she was with detail and organization, Susan compulsively sorted and categorized and labeled every item in the mansion. Nothing was too small or insignificant to escape her attention. These tasks energized her the way nothing had done since her accident. She rose early, fairly popped out of bed chatting before her feet hit the floor about all that needed to be accomplished that day. She tackled room after room, closet and drawer, surrounded by packing boxes and lists and labels, by yellow and pink Hi-Liters and all the paraphernalia she deemed necessary to establish order. Even though Clarice was home, John had kept his word and taken on nearly all responsibility for child care, and tranquillity was momentarily restored to their lives.

The movers had arrived early that morning. The truck was backed up to the porte-cochere to provide shelter from the rain, but this necessitated moving everything through the narrow kitchen pantry. When John came into the kitchen with Will riding on his hip he found Susan watching with an eagle eye as they maneuvered an antique buffet out the back door.

He asked her, "Do we have any rain boots?"

"Rain boots?"

"Yeah."

"I don't think so. Why?"

"How about fishing boots? Does your mom have any old waders or anything like that down in the basement?"

"We gave all that stuff away. Why?"

He shook his head. "Just wondered."

"You're not thinking about going out..."

He seemed to be hesitating, his eyes cast down.

"No. No, I'm not going anywhere," he said and turned to leave the room.

"Who called?"

"Billy Moon," he answered over his shoulder.

She called after him, "What did he want?" but he was out of earshot and all she heard were his footfalls as he jogged up the stairs with Will.

Susan stared after him, the movers momentarily forgotten. He had been distant and taciturn since the night she had driven off and left him at Billy Moon's place. He had made no excuses, and she had asked for none. They had always forged through difficult times like that. Brushed off those troubling incidents, neither of them wishing to confront the other. They had just simply moved on with their lives, and this had always worked for them, until now. Ever since that evening things had been different, and Susan could feel it. In her own mind she felt an urgent need for familiarity, to have things the way they had been before, insulated by their own small coterie of friends in San Francisco and John's colleagues at Berkeley. She sensed that Will was somehow the key to holding them together until they came through this tempest. She had done her best to act the part of the loving mother, although most of the time she resented the child with all her heart.

John no longer had the slightest doubt about Will, knew his instincts had been true from the start, knew he had done the right thing to make him his son. If he had failed Hortense once, all those years ago, he redeemed himself now.

Susan had followed the movers back upstairs to supervise the dismantling of Jacob Blackshere's old four-poster bed, and when she came back downstairs she found John rifling through some boxes stacked near the front door. He straightened, pulled an old baseball cap out of the pile, and fitted it on his head.

"John!" she scolded. "What are you doing?"

"I was looking for a raincoat." He bent over to dump the pile of clothing back into the box and she noticed then that Will was dressed in the little slicker they had bought for him back in San Francisco. It was still too large for him, but he tottered there next to his father, gripping John's pant leg to steady himself, his dark little face peering out with bright anticipation from underneath the yellow hood.

"Where are you going?"

"I thought I'd take a ride into town. Check up on the flood situation."

"You're taking Will?"

"You don't want me to leave him, do you?"

"No... I mean, I can't keep an eye on him and keep up with the movers."

"No problem. I'll take him." He bent down to pick up the child, then opened the door and stepped out onto the front porch. A gust of cool wind blew a fine spray of rain over them, and Will recoiled and buried his face in his father's shoulder.

Susan followed them outside.

"You'll get drenched like that."

He seemed not to hear her, was following the clouds with his eyes.

"You won't be gone long, will you?"

"I don't know. I may drive over to Billy Moon's place. Give him a hand sandbagging."

The look on his face stalled her rising frustration. She said nothing to him about the movers or his books or his office.

"You'll call me if you do."

"Of course."

There was a sense of urgency gripping the town as John drove down Broadway. Storefronts had already been sandbagged, and merchants were scrambling to move their goods out of the reach of the oncoming waters. There was a pickup truck backed up to the doorway of Cleo's Antiques, and two men in rain ponchos were hoisting a heavy oak dresser into the back.

Parked at the curb in front of the Senior Center were a half dozen cars and pickups with hastily loaded belongings—dry goods and cookware stuffed into bags and crammed into backseats, clothing and tennis shoes plastered up against rear windows—all signs of families fleeing disaster. The center had been transformed into a community flood watch, gathering information from throughout the county—what towns were being evacuated and where the evacuees would be sheltered, what roads were impassable—giving advice and counsel and serving coffee and doughnuts around the clock.

A hand-drawn graph was tacked to the door charting the flood level, and a tall, gangly farmer clutching a cup of coffee in one hand and a tattered straw hat in the other had his nose up against the chart. Ray turned, settled his hat on his head, and shuffled down the sidewalk. John recognized him then, had seen him at the Casso-day Cafe, and he stopped and rolled down his window, shouted a greeting through the rain and offered him a lift. Ray said he would be grateful if John would take him down to the bottom of Broadway, down to the old bridge to check the flood level.

"Hell, I ain't never seen it like this," Ray said as he settled into the front seat. He laid his hat on his knees and smoothed back his sparse white hair with a huge liver-spotted hand. "This is gonna be worse than the flood of 'fifty-one, I can tell you that for sure."

He had taken on the job of monitoring the flood level every few hours, he explained, and when John asked where he wanted to go, Ray pointed straight down Broadway. "To the old bridge. 'Course you can't see it no more. Went under two days ago."