Tina Mcelroy Ansa (2 page)

Other rivers in the region and to the south—the Flint, the Ocmulgee, the Green, the Withlacoochee, the Big Indian—all overflowed their banks, too, during the Big Flood of ’94. On the Ocmulgee, a gasoline pipe running along the overwhelmed banks was engulfed with the floods and burst, turning the waters into a river of fire and curling clouds of black and gray smoke.

An old woman dressed entirely in white stood on high ground near the flaming waters and preached for three days and three nights straight of the fire next time. Then she disappeared.

“See, see,” she had shouted, “He tried to tell you about your ways. He sent streams of water from the sky down through the valleys into the rivers to warn you. Oh, but you wouldn’t listen. You wouldn’t heed. Now! Now! It’s the fire next time.”

But neither the fiery Ocmulgee nor any of those other state rivers ever came up clear and pure. Only the Ocawatchee. And the river—Mulberry’s river—began to grow in state lore. The story began to be circulated in beauty and barber shops; on street corners and at office coffee machines; over store counters in the Mulberry Mall and under shade trees outside of churches, that the new reborn waters of the Ocawatchee were miraculous waters, healing waters, good for anything that ailed you.

The county officials felt it was their sworn duty to warn the people about the danger of their new fondness for drinking from the river during Cleer Flo’. Even after county officials discovered Cleer Flo’ water was purer than the water they pumped to nearly every household in Mulberry, they continued to crank out flyers and leaflets and lectures on the long-term danger of drinking the clear river’s waters.

Of course, it didn’t help a bit that the days of Cleer Flo’, summer and winter, also brought a kind of Gulf Coast “Jubilee” to the landlocked muddy banks of the Ocawatchee. Big fat mullet, catfish, croaker and whiting showed up in angler’s baskets all up and down the river, in record sizes and record catches. People who had spent their whole lives turning up their noses at anything that came out of the red muddy Ocawatchee River, people who had called mullet from the town’s river “mudfish” and made faces, now practically fought with their neighbors for first pick among the ice chests of mullet and catfish that men and women in trucks and station wagons brought to sell in certain lucky, money-in-hand neighborhoods.

The spring flood changed the town. The flood changed its citizens. For a few days, coffins from lowlying cemeteries raced down the
streets of Mulberry on the back of muddy orange water, bumping the doors of businesses near the old downtown river section. One plain-spoken rescue worker from Middle Georgia said on National Public Radio: “There was coffins all in the streets. But I was too busy trying to save the live ones to think ’bout the dead ones.”

Looking at television news reports of the Great Flood, people would forget that this was their hometown, the streets of Mulberry hidden under all that rushing muddy water, the tops of Mulberry’s trees peeking out from the new rush of a raging river running anew through the formerly dusty streets. Rushing water covering tops of cars, the tops of homes, tops of warehouses.

There were distinct signs of trauma throughout Middle Georgia and especially in Mulberry the year after the Big Flood. When the children went back to school in the fall, there were so many fights, outbursts and flare-ups in the halls, classrooms and rest rooms that school officials had to shorten the school day until after Christmas.

Children lost their way going home from school and became hysterical in the streets, throwing their books and backpacks on the ground. Some ran up on strangers’ doorsteps looking for something familiar and stood there crying and banging on the front doors.

It was the worst flood Georgia had ever experienced. Potable water had to be trucked in for six weeks. The property loss was in the hundreds of millions of dollars. And when it was all over, twenty-three people turned up dead.

Lena McPherson alone, it appeared, weathered the storm that brought the floods to her hometown without any repercussions.

But most folks weren’t a bit surprised at her luck. “Ain’t that just the way,” they said, thinking about their cheap little soggy sofas and mattresses, their portraits of Martin Luther King, Jr., and their Sears and Kodak photographs floating through the streets of Mulberry, ruined forever.

“That Lena McPherson know she got it made!”

“Q
uit!”
Lena said. She lifted one hand from the leather-covered steering wheel and brushed up the nape of her neck rapidly with the tips of her short pale polished nails a few times, briskly knocking her long thick copper braids into the air and making the large heavy gold hoops in her ears swing back and forth.

“Quit!”

She drew the word out long, as if she were seven years old and talking to a playmate who would not stop messing with her or to one of the little boys who used to rip and run up and down Forest Avenue and visit her brothers in the basement.

“Quit!”

She said it again as she drove down the long dirt road and across the narrow wooden bridge that connected her property at the edge of town with the main road, U.S. 90, that led into Mulberry.

She sucked her teeth lightly with the tip of her tongue and wrinkled her nose and tried to act irritated, though she almost had to stifle
one of her deep throaty giggles as she did it. She wasn’t really angry, just bothered and distracted.

So distracted that she hadn’t even noticed as she drove above the river’s rushing water that Cleer Flo’ had started.

This early misty morning in April, however, Cleer Flo’ was the last thing on Lena’s mind. It was this light breeze playing around her ears and neck that had her full attention. It had been toying with her there for a week or so. The tiny gusts reminded her of tenderness mixed with lust.

Right then she felt it again across the nape of her neck at her “kitchen,” where the thick sandy hair thinned and curled. She shook her head sharply, brushing her braids around her neck like a wool scarf, and that seemed to drive the breeze off for a while.

“Uhmm.” Involuntarily, Lena let out a little sound.

She checked for the fourth or fifth time to make sure the lightly tinted windows were closed tightly and the breeze was not escaping into the car through the vents. She had even turned her favorite girl group from the seventies off the CD player so she could investigate just where this breeze was coming from. And she loved her Emotions in the morning.

“Come to me. Don’t ask my neighbor,” she sang to herself softly, absentmindedly, in her off-key voice as she pulled out of her dirt road past the bridge onto the main highway that ran side by side with Mulberry’s Ocawatchee River and brushed her neck again. Glancing to her left for traffic, she caught a glimpse of her long narrow buttery brown face and full copper-tinted lips in the side mirror. A perturbed, peeved expression was playing around her nose and mouth. It surprised her to see that annoyed look still there. She half expected to be blushing.

Actually, she felt she had to stop herself from dipping her head shyly, giggling from the touch that intruded on her as she drove her dark copper-colored 450 SLK Mercedes, a car that mirrored the color of her hair and didn’t even exist yet for most ordinary folks, toward her place of business in downtown Mulberry.

She was just puzzled by this breeze. It felt as if someone were playing an April Fools’ prank on her. She prided herself on figuring things out. Leaving questions unanswered disturbed her. And in the last couple of days, she was beginning to feel this puzzling wisp of a wind more and more often—as she washed herself in her huge shower or deep granite tub, as she looked for something to wear in the long walk-in closet where she kept some of her mother’s clothes, as she signed payroll checks at her all-female real estate office, Candace (motto: “We got on different colors, but we all look good”), as she visited former customers out at the nursing home, and as she put her head in the door at the stables at her own house out by the river to say good morning to Baby and the other horses. She had tried to pretend for a day or two that it was merely her imagination playing tricks on her. But the breeze had become so insistent against her neck and ears and hairline that it was beginning to feel that there was this real presence, vague though it was, hovering at her shoulder, blowing in her ear.

Now, as she sped along the Ocawatchee coming into town in the cool of predawn, she kept looking in the rearview mirror every second or two, but she wasn’t scanning the road for a spinning blue light. She never got stopped by the cops in Mulberry, or anywhere else for that matter. She was lucky like that. Even as she threw the stick into fifth gear and felt the sweet little car inch up to 78 mph, she didn’t worry.

What she was searching for was the
source
of that breeze. Maybe there’s a crack where the convertible hard top meets the window in the back letting a draft in, she thought, narrowing her eyes and trying again to inspect the car’s rear window through the rearview mirror.

But it seemed that the very thought of the warm breathy breeze evoked the wind itself again against her neck and, this time, to Lena’s surprise, halfway down her spine, kicking up her scent of almond oil in the car.

At the touch—soft and seductive—Lena flinched sharply, drew her shoulders up by her ears and sucked in her breath suddenly at what felt like the fronds of a feather that had been lying in the sun slowly
making its way down her back under the row of small pearl buttons on her downy cream-colored cashmere sweater. She felt the fine burnished hairs on her arms stand on end, and she let out a small “Ooo” with her mouth hanging open. She felt her legs fall apart at the knees below her new short satin skirt. Sinking into an orgasmic sensation, she closed her eyes, took both her hands off the steering wheel and began to slip them down the back of her sweater on either side of her neck to touch the feather-caressed spot.

Suddenly with no one at the wheel, the small car, sensitive to the slightest deviation, swerved across the yellow line and headed straight for the river’s pristine waters. Lena’s eyes shot open and she let out a long piercing scream. If her mother, Nellie, had heard her, she would have said, “Lord ham mercy, Lena, you sound just like Cousin Screaming Mimi.”

But she did not have time for her mother’s third cousin’s histrionics. She had to grasp at the wheel of the car with her two hands and maneuver it smartly back within the two white lines to avoid running head-on into an oncoming honking big Mach truck.

The driver of the truck, a burly-looking fellow in a faded reddish plaid shirt, was not impressed. He leaned out of his window with scarlet veins popping in his bulbous nose and bellowed down at her, “You stupid fucking bitch!!” shaking his hairy fist at her as he whizzed past with a
WWWaaaaaaaa
sound.

Lena wanted to cover her ears with her hands and block out all the sounds of the truck and its driver’s nasty voice, but all she could manage to do was keep one hand firmly on the steering wheel and the other clasped over her heart, clutching her pearls. She tried to catch her breath and find a safe wide place to pull off on the side of the road so she could break down completely. But her heart kept thumping so hard in her chest and her throat, the adrenaline rushing so wildly through her veins, she could barely see or think. Finally, she said, “Screw this,” and just pulled off the two-lane highway right where she was in the dim light of dawn.

She drove off as far as she could on her side of the road through a
narrow bed of gray, black and white gravel, slammed on the brakes, kicking a shower of pebbles into the air, and stopped just short of a brown wooden telephone pole. She took one deep breath and dropped her sweaty forehead on the top of the tan leather-covered steering wheel, leaving a wide stain. Panting like a dog, she breathed through her mouth, blowing noisily over her full wide lips, rustling the fine hairs over the cleft under her nose, until she could feel the stream of oxygen come and go a little more regularly.

Between breaths, she chanted, “Jesus, keep me near the cross.” Pant, pant. “Jesus, keep me near the cross.” Pant, pant. “Jesus, keep me near the cross.”

Lena didn’t know what scared her more: the fact that she had just almost killed herself in a foolish traffic accident or the fact that she had just almost come by herself in the soft tawny leather front seat of her car because of a little breeze down her back.

Shoot, Lena thought as she continued to press and massage the pounding spot right beneath the cleavage of her breasts with the tips of her middle fingers, Sister just told me last week when we were trying to hoodoo me up a man that all I needed was to have my cat scratched. Lena blew through her mouth in tiny puffs like a woman having a baby.

Thought I was so cute telling her it had been so long, whew, I indeed needed my cat, dog
and
birds scratched, Lena recalled as she still tried to breathe normally.

She brought her right hand across her forehead to wipe away the beads of sweat that were threatening to trickle down her narrow face and saw that her unadorned hand was trembling. She couldn’t stop it, and that scared her even more. She rested her face in her quivering cupped palms and inhaled her own carbon monoxide.

If I nearly kill myself just ’cause a shiver run down my spine, Lena thought as she tried to ignore the tingle still dancing along her long curved backbone, I guess I need even more than
that menagerie
scratched.

When she felt she could hold her head up, she leaned back against
the driver’s broad headrest with her hands braced firmly on the wheel, but she still couldn’t completely catch her breath or forget the feel of a summer wind quick with life down her back.

She tried to take another deep steadying breath and instead felt a shudder travel through her body, rattling her entire being and leaving her fingers and toes tingling.

“Woooo,”
she said.