The Promise (29 page)

He came out of the barn, and I strained to see what he carried in his hands. A pitchfork, I thought. In his other hand, he carried what I thought was a feed sack. Walking backwards down the ramp, he shook the feed sack and a cow came out of the barn and followed him down the ramp. Then another cow came out, and the next, and the next. In the barnyard now, more cows behind him, Oscar plunged the pitchfork into the ground to steady himself as he shuffled and stumbled in the water. It was well over his knees and nearby, the four horses lunged, trying to bolt, but the water slowed them.

The wind tore a cupola off of the barn roof; it tumbled and flipped in the air. A horse fell onto its front knees, got up, and reared. In the barnyard, the cows milled, their tails whipping over their backs. Oscar dropped the feed sack, went up the ramp, and closed the barn door. He had gotten them out; he had done all that he could.

Through the driving rain, I watched each plunge of the pitchfork as he made his way toward us. The waves were higher, cresting and breaking. He fell and went under; terror shot through me. I cried out to him. He came back up and stumbled on, the water now to the tops of his legs. He fell again. A current carried him by a few yards. He steadied himself with the pitchfork and plunged his way back. I prayed, ‘Our Father who art in heaven.’ Andre held tighter to me. My hand on his head so that I could keep him from watching, I leaned toward Oscar and urged him on with each plunge of the pitchfork, with each small step. He was almost halfway home. The water was to his chest now, and the waves were white-capped.

A milk container crashed against the veranda. I flinched. My eyes closed only for an instant but it was long enough to lose sight of Oscar.

I searched for him, calling. I found him. He was caught in a current. His head was just above the water. He struggled, trying to catch a branch, a board, anything, but the waves carried Oscar toward the bayou, farther and farther away. He went under, came up floundering. A wave crested and broke. He disappeared. I held my breath, the wind shrieking. He didn’t come back up.

I tried to hurry to the back steps, desperate to do something, to help Oscar, to find him, but Andre was clasped to my legs. I couldn’t leave him, I didn’t know how to swim, and the waves were so high. Oscar would tell me, No, stay with Andre.

The rain blew in, stinging. I strained, looking and praying. Please God. Let Oscar be all right. Take care of him, please. I told myself that Oscar had come back up but it was me; I hadn’t been able to see him. Not in this light, not with this dense gray rain. He was all right; Oscar was strong.

‘Ma’am,’ Andre yelled, climbing up my legs. ‘Help me!’ Water rushed around our feet. The veranda was flooding.

I held Andre in the narrow stairwell that led to the attic. I rocked him as the wind struck the house and windows shattered. ‘It’s all right,’ I said when the water drove us from the third step to the fifth. ‘We’re safe here,’ I said when something slammed against the house, and the plaster fell in chunks from the stairwell walls. ‘Just a summer storm,’ I said each time the house cracked, the wood splintering. ‘Daddy’s taking care of the cows,’ I told him when he called for Oscar. When I could no longer hold on to these half-truths, I sang to Andre. The lyrics came in fragments, words I had not thought about in years.

It was a hymn from my childhood. ‘The troops sang it before battles,’ my father had told me. ‘Yankees and Rebels, it didn’t matter. We all sang it.’

I sang for Andre; I sang for Oscar. He had disappeared but only from my sight. I told myself that he had found refuge in a tree. Or he had caught hold of a board or driftwood, the water was full of them.

Something in the attic screeched, ripping, then crashed. ‘Ma’am,’ Andre said, his voice trembling. ‘Ma’am.’

I had scorned Oscar’s religion but now I needed it to keep him safe. A man who prayed before meals, who went to Sunday Mass, and who had a crucifix over his bed could not be forgotten by God. I had snatched up that crucifix before coming into the stairwell. It had fallen and was submerged in the layer of water that covered the bedroom floor. The sight of that terrified me. Rushing, Andre holding on to my skirt, I’d emptied a hatbox, tossing the hat. It meant nothing to me. I put the crucifix in the hatbox and then I searched through the wardrobe, my thoughts jerky. I found Oscar’s box with the inlaid W, his pocket watch, and the letters he had written to me. In Andre’s bedroom, I filled the hatbox with his crucifix, the white rosary beads, and the photograph of Oscar and Bernadette. In the parlor, I got Oscar’s book about the stars. The water to Andre’s knees, I’d carried the hatbox into the stairwell with us.

Now I rocked Andre. The wind was a frenzied scream of terror.

The water might have carried Oscar to the Ogdens’. The idea of it lifted me; I clung to it as Andre clung to me. I had never been there, but I pictured Oscar with Nan, Frank T., Wiley, and their parents, Frank and Alice. They were all in a stairwell. Oscar argued that he had to get home, but the others talked him out of it. ‘No, sir, none of that,’ Nan said. ‘Won’t have it. It ain’t safe.’

Stay where you are, I thought. But, Oscar, if you’re close, come home, come home.

Water slapped against the lower steps in the stairwell. Glass shattered. ‘Daddy,’ Andre said, the word a whimper.

The dogs were in the attic, and I thought I heard them whimper as well. They had run up the stairs as soon as I’d opened the door to the stairwell. Before that, the water had driven the two out from under Andre’s bed where they’d been hiding. The other two left the washroom and they all paced, frantic, jumping up onto the beds, the chairs, trying to get out of the water. I sang for them, too, these friends of Andre, these animals that had frightened me when I first arrived. That was before I knew true fear, a fear that at first numbed my senses and then heightened each one so that the splintering of the house was deafening, the smell of salt was suffocating, and the beat of each wave against the stilts ricocheted in the stairwell.

The air hummed. In the attic, pieces of the roof tore, long painful screeches. Rain and wind tunneled through the stairwell. The door at the foot had flown open long ago and had stayed open, the water trapping it. Andre shook. I huddled over him. No one could survive this storm out in the open. No one.

On and on the storm raged, once seeming to pause for a few minutes only to unleash a fury that was more vicious than before. How much longer before the flood rushed up the steps? Before the stilts broke? Before my heart shattered into countless pieces, the image of Oscar caught in the current imprinted in my mind?

*

Something changed. The storm still pounded, but the sound was different. The shrieking and the howling had lessened. I listened, waiting. The rain swept in gusts but there were pauses between the gusts now, each pause lasting longer than the one before.

A patch of light flickered on the stairwell wall, then disappeared. I held Andre and waited for the next terror.

Rain pummeled the house, then tapered and stopped. The light returned. It wavered and brightened. A signal, I thought. From heaven. Or from hell.

‘Ma’am?’ Andre said, pointing at it.

‘The moon,’ I said. I didn’t know where those words came from but as soon as I said them, I realized they were true. The moon. It shone through the broken roof at the top of the stairwell.

The water at the foot of the steps gurgled as if a plug had been pulled in a drain. It was retreating, I thought, receding as quickly as it had appeared.

A gust slammed against the house. The walls shuddered. But not like before. Nothing was like before.

‘It’s over,’ I said finally. ‘It’s over.’

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Wiley

Three nights ago, Oscar took me outside to see the night sky. ‘Moon’s working its way to full,’ he had said. Now, in the stairwell, that same moon guided Andre and me as we went from the fifth step to the fourth. We held hands, his so small in mine.

‘Go slowly,’ I said.

‘I am.’

‘Whisper, please.’

I felt his nod.

Everything – the house, my courage – felt precarious. A sudden movement or a raised voice, I felt sure, could cause the house to rock and slide from its stilts. I was afraid to move; I kept the palm of my free hand pressed against the wall. I was like a woman who had been suddenly blinded, unsure of what was before me.

We continued down to the third step. I could not begin to guess how long the storm had lasted. It felt like days, but it might have only been hours. Nor did I know how long we had waited in the stairwell once its fury had passed. Oscar considered it the safest part of the house, and I would have stayed there until daylight. But once I said that the storm was over, Andre begged for water. ‘My mouth,’ he kept saying. ‘It’s dried up. I’m thirsty. And hungry.’

The second step. Andre sucked in his breath. The step was gritty with dirt. My fingertips clutched the wall for balance. Not dirt, I realized. Sand. ‘From the flood,’ I whispered as if Andre had asked. I gave his hand a quick squeeze of reassurance but I was sure of nothing.

We took the next step down, and then the last one. Our feet sank into ankle-deep mud. ‘Ohhhh,’ Andre said.

The house creaked; something groaned. We froze. Water dripped somewhere, plopping and pinging. The creaking stopped. The moon was out, I told myself. The worst of the storm was over. The house was settling back into place. It would not collapse.

I began to breathe. ‘We’re all right,’ I said, my voice low.

‘We are?’

‘Yes.’

‘But, ma’am. This mud. What’s it doing here?’

‘Whisper. Please.’ Then, ‘The flood carried it in.’

‘Why?’

‘I don’t know.’ I looked over my shoulder and into the stairwell, the moonlight faint on the wall. The one safe place, I thought. It was only a few steps away.

We inched into the parlor. The wet sandy mud crunched beneath our feet and seeped into my shoes between the soles and the leather. It was cold, and my stockings were quickly soaked. Before us, the house was filled with shadowy shapes. The two chairs in the parlor were overturned. The upright piano was in the middle of the room.

‘Where’d the door go?’ Andre said. His words boomed and echoed. I tightened my grasp on his hand. The front door had blown off, leaving a dark, gaping hole.

We were exposed and defenseless. Anything – snakes and rats – could come inside. The line between us and nature had crumbled. What once had been outside was now in the house. Mud. Sand. And water. It leaked from the parlor ceiling, plopping and splattering.

We took a few more steps, both of us shuffling in the dark and unsteady in the thick mud. We tripped over the door that was prone on the floor. In the moonlight, the mud glittered. Shards of glass, I realized. The storm shutters were broken and the windowpanes had shattered inward.

Andre stumbled, kicking something. He bent over, pulling my hand. ‘Look,’ he said. ‘Daddy’s shaving mug. It’s on the floor. Why? What’s it doing here?’

‘Andre. Please. Lower your voice.’

‘But why’s it here? Nobody’s allowed to touch it. Only Daddy. Mama gave it to him. For Christmas. Who did this?’

‘Please. Talk softly. No one did anything. It fell. The water must have carried it. We’ll put it back.’

I picked it up, a gift from Oscar’s first wife but now in my hands. Mud slid from it. The soap inside of the mug had been hollowed out so that only a thin rim of it was along the sides. I held it to my nose. It smelled of fish, seaweed, and dank mud, and I felt the sudden need to sit down and cry.

‘Ma’am?’ Andre pushed against me. I took his hand and we walked on, tripping over unseen objects. The sandy mud sucked and pulled at our shoes. The table bench that Oscar had pushed against the front door was on its side. The piano bench was upside down by the roll-top desk. The icebox was face down on the floor. The stove was angled away from the wall as though someone had picked up one end and moved it. Some of the buckets that I had labored to fill with water had fallen onto the floor and were on their sides.

‘I want my house back,’ Andre said. ‘The way it was.’

‘Oh, Andre,’ I said.

‘Where’s Daddy? Why isn’t he here? And where are my dogs?’

Oscar. I saw him in the barnyard, the water rising and the horses rearing.

I put Oscar’s shaving mug on the kitchen table and said, ‘The dogs are in the attic. They’ll come down when they’re ready. And your father …’ I stopped. During the storm, Andre had called for Oscar, and I’d told him that Oscar was helping the cows and horses. My words had not consoled him. He continued to ask for his father, and in turn I sang to him, the only thing I knew to do to comfort him.

‘I want to go to the barn,’ Andre said. ‘You said Daddy’s there. Why won’t he come home?’

Oscar in the water, the waves crashing over him.

‘Why?’ Andre said. ‘Why won’t Daddy come home?’

Oscar swept away, disappearing from my sight.

Andre pulled my hand. ‘Why?’ he said.

He was five, too old and too bright to be easily fooled. I had been younger than he when my infant brother died. No one said a word to me; the baby simply disappeared. When I asked my father what had happened or why my mother stayed in bed, he did not answer my questions. Instead, he sent me to my room and told me to be quiet and to behave. To this day, I recalled how bewildered and frightened I had been.