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

to lakes, dimpled with droplets. The brown and white rivers bulged in their banks and inally the two met, so that the whole countryside lowed with a confused collection of currents, and hilltops and rooftops and barntops turned to islands, and everyone moved to the second story and slept with the creaking of a restless river below them, gulping at their sofas and TVs and ovens and covering everything with weeds and muck and dead pigs. It was a state of emergency. It felt like the end of the world. And she was miles away, the news from the Midwest luttering in her peripheral vision, an ignorable lutter, while in the irritation of her passage a curse fell, careless, hateful, scouring out the homes of bachelored men to mud. I knew that she was unhappy here. She signed often, and angled her body unerringly westward, even in conversation, even in windowless rooms, at night, while sleeping. She stayed indoors and cried over the bendless, tired rivers. The species of dead birds. I showered her with love-gifts — cupboards and chests and cabinets built from white pine and oak and cherry that I cut and set and rubbed as smooth as oil. I distracted her with stories on full moon nights, or on dark ones, when night light slid through the curtains and her eyes went again and again to the latched door and the truck’s keys, hanging beside it. I loved her and made love to her and that held her attention for moments at least, and she laughed and ripped the comforter to shreds, and the look in her eyes was a deep and endless purpose that I drank and drank and was drunk on. Then one evening in the fall she was gone, the truck and key gone too, and a bath run hot and steaming, its white loor lined with smooth stones, the kind that only show their colors when submerged in water. Our bed was slung to one side, crooked and unmade, the boards under it pried up and the space below them empty of its treasure, the secret that held her here, lapping. Had she searched and searched each day when I departed? I imagined it: the lifting of each upturned mug. The groping at backs of cupboards, corners of drawers, beneath the mattress. I laid down on the crooked bed and cried. In the night the irst frost came, heavy and hard as glass.