Miller's Valley - Anna Quindlen Page 0,10
to the attic was down. She was up there sitting on a stack of suitcases, her legs pulled up under her nightgown. My mother was forty-five, which meant Ruth was thirty-eight, but sometimes she looked like a little girl, maybe because she didn’t give life a chance to wear her down. I’d always wondered why she had those suitcases. She’d never gone anyplace.
“Just go back down there, Mary Margaret,” Ruth said sharply from the half dark, and for just a moment she sounded a lot like my mother.
“Come on with me. The water’s getting really high.”
“It won’t ever get up here. This is the highest spot on the whole farm.” I thought she was right about that. My father once said that the little house was built on a kind of ridge so that his grandmother could look down and keep an eye on everyone.
“Then I’ll stay here with you,” I said.
“I got to get going,” called the fireman from below.
“You go with him,” my aunt said. “Your mother won’t be pleased if you don’t.” I knew she was right about that, too.
The water was deeper as I climbed back into the boat and we sailed, like a dream, down our underwater driveway and onto what I knew was normally our road. It was hard to see much, no house lights, no streetlights, no moon. What I could make out, it looked as though someone had mistakenly put an ordinary midsize lake in the middle of an area filled with things that had no business being there. The firefighter maneuvered the boat around power lines that came up suddenly like black snakes spitting and skittering along the surface, and pieces of things, of roofs and fences and strange unidentifiable brown chunks that in the dark might be floating firewood, or a drowned raccoon, or a piece of someone’s house. We stopped at the McEvoys’, but they were already gone, and we floated past the Derwents’ barn, where the cows were standing in the hayloft, mooing loudly. We helped Mr. and Mrs. Bascomb into the boat and they wanted to bring their shepherd dog, but the firefighter said we couldn’t take the weight. The dog barked from inside the house. We picked up Mrs. Donovan, who lived alone and was on her front step holding an umbrella that was already in tatters from the wind. You could tell she was afraid, trying to step into the boat, and finally the firefighter took the umbrella out of her hand and laid it down carefully on the edge of her kitchen steps, as though she was going to be back to get it soon. He put out a hand to help her in, but she stumbled, and the boat rocked and a little bit of water slopped in. Mr. and Mrs. Bascomb both opened their mouths but because of the rain I couldn’t hear the sound they made. It was probably the same one I did, like a little goat noise.
When we got to the church hall at First Presbyterian, Mrs. Bascomb opened her coat and took out a bag she’d wrapped in plastic and tucked in there. It was full of knitting. “It’s the boredom I can’t stand,” she said as Mr. Bascomb went off to get coffee. Mrs. Donovan found her sister in the robing room. I could hear her crying all the way down the hall, saying she almost fell in and drowned, which I guess was technically true.
Mr. and Mrs. Langer were there because their house was a single-story ranch with a slab foundation; my father used to shake his head sometimes at the foolishness of building that way on low land. Cissy Langer was my mother’s best friend from grade school, which I had a hard time imagining even though they had the pictures to prove it, black-and-white photographs with white edges crimped like a piecrust of the two of them in Sunday dresses standing outside of one or the other of their houses, squinting. Cissy and Mr. Langer, whose name was Henry, weren’t surprised that my parents weren’t there. Cissy said the last time we had a bad flood my parents sat upstairs in their bedroom eating baloney sandwiches and playing Go Fish. I was a toddler at the time and my parents had let Cissy take me and my brothers to the firehouse.
“It wasn’t anywhere near as high that time,” Cissy said. “Tommy was nine, I think, and he taught the other kids to play poker.