THE FLOOD Mara Bateman She didn’t know her own strength, and when she left a curse came down upon the place. Through the winter cold crept into that vacancy, cold so sharp there was nothing it couldn’t cut. It froze the sap in trees, splitting them open from the heart. It killed cars on the highway in lonesome lines, their twin tracks dragging out behind them and only the white, lat winter ahead. Birds departed, all of them. Even the cardinals went missing, when most Christmases they hopped merrily from bush to bush. Ponds froze to the bottom so that bass hung suspended and bulging and dead as old insects in amber. It had never been so cold. Wives left their husbands for the blazing beacon of the Des Moines airport, shining escape across the plains. They emptied their accounts and lew south or westward and the frozen, black parking lots were strewn with station wagons and hatch-back Hondas, doors popped and empty as eggs. The earth froze so hard it moaned. Men moaned, alone with their microwaves and trap-lines and abandoned, truculent children. And then spring came, abruptly, from the east, cracking the rigid world in a lurry of rain and mud, gasping back to life. Dead ish popped to the surface of ponds, corklike. Reeds and last year’s grass fell limply to the mud. What buds had survived, burrowed deep in the memories of trees, burst forth, white and yellow, and men sighed with relief and removed their mittens and called their wives long distance leaving messages: “Come home now, honey, the worst is over.” But they were wrong. It had begun to rain. The rain fell and fell and would not stop. Lightning forked the horizon, or lashed in thundering, bright banners. Flocks of thunderheads lew grey and heavy across the plains, an endless tide, as if some far away ocean had been lifted into the sky and was now upturned over southeastern Iowa. Some people even swore the rain that fell that spring was salty as the sea and someone said they saw seaweed and small silver ish, the occasional crab, spinning in the downpour. First the ields turned to mud, ashy gray and gluey. Then they turned
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