at all, to handle things for her and her neighbors.
It was that she was someone, Miriam Miller. There are just some people like that. Everyone pays attention to what they say, even if they don’t even know them well or like them much.
My mother went to every meeting the government people held, but she never spoke, and when people would try to talk to her before or after she was polite but no more, asking after their children or their arthritis but never saying a word about the plans to drown Miller’s Valley. I drove up from the city for that one meeting at the church, even though she said there was no need for me to miss school or work, even though my desk was piled high with things that needed to be done. I guess I did it because I’d been there from the very beginning years before, when I was a kid selling corn from a card table outside of our barn, when the talk about turning Miller’s Valley into a reservoir first began, when no one really thought it would amount to anything.
It’s so easy to be wrong about the things you’re close to. I know that now. I learned that then.
When the meeting was over my mother and I drove home together down the dark back roads to the farm, and as I took the curves fast, curves I’d been taking since I’d gripped the wheel of the truck while sitting on my father’s lap, she stared out the window so that the sickly green of the dashboard dials just touched the corner of her set jaw.
“You do understand this, right?” I’d said. “If this goes through they’ll take the house and the barn and the little house. If this happens you’ll have to move. You’ll have to pack up all your stuff. You’ll have to find a place for Aunt Ruth and pack up all her stuff. You’ll have to find a way to get her out of there. Then it’s going to be like none of it ever existed. They’re going to put the whole place under forty feet of water.”
“I’m not stupid, Mary Margaret,” my mother said. The night was so quiet you could hear the wood doves comforting themselves with their own soft voices in the fields.
“If this happens they’re going to make the valley just disappear,” I said, my voice harsh in the silence.
A deer ran through my headlights like a ghost, and I slowed down because, like my father always said, there’s almost never just one. Sure enough, two more skittered out. They froze there, staring, then moved on. I was ready to start talking again when my mother spoke.
“Let them,” she said. “Let the water cover the whole damn place.”
I grew up to the sound of my parents talking in the kitchen on my mother’s nights off, and the sound of the sump pump when it rained. Sometimes, all these years later, I wake up in the middle of the night and think I hear one or the other, the faint pounding of the throttle or the murmur of those two low voices. On a wet night the best I could ever make out was a little muttering even if my mother and father were talking loud. If you properly maintain it, and my father did, a sump pump makes a throaty chug-a-chug noise, sort of like a train without the whistle. My brother Tommy always said he liked the sound, but I think it was because it meant he could sneak out at night without anyone hearing. My mother didn’t mind it because her shift work meant she was hardly ever at home at night, and so tired when she got home that nothing kept her awake.
My room was in the back corner of the house, right over where the sump pump sat on the cement basement floor two stories below. From the window in my room you could see the path up to the back end of the property and the lights through the trees of my aunt Ruth’s house. She kept at least one light on all night long. I liked looking out and seeing that light in the darkness, something that had always been there, that I could count on. It was real quiet most of the time around our house at night, so quiet that sometimes I could tell what Aunt Ruth was watching on television because I could hear the theme song