spot was now, as deep as the water lay, as fast as it ran, there was no way that any kid could build a dam there on their own the way I had when I was younger. Slowly I’d walked back the length of Miller’s Creek from that point to the river. It had always been bigger than a creek, but now it was much much bigger. Not from groundwater coming up, but from river water coming in. It was like a knock on the head, realizing that instead of reading books in some state office building I should have been here, that what Winston Bally knew that I didn’t wasn’t in maps or charts but in the way my feet were sinking deep into ground that used to be dry and now was wet.
Sometimes I wonder whether it would have made any difference if I’d said anything, if I’d leaned across the diner table to Winston Bally and said, “You all rigged it. Years and years ago, maybe before I was even born, you decided you wanted more water and less land. You blocked off the flow of the river out of the dam locks. You block off a little more each year. What we thought was nature letting more and more water take over the valley wasn’t nature at all. You all made it happen. It was slick and it was smart, deciding that one way to convince people to leave was to drown them little by little, by inches instead of all at once.”
Maybe I would have added, “You killed Donald’s grandmother, too.”
I wonder what he would have said. He would have known that there was nothing in all that microfilm, in any of the documents, that said, If we make the valley wet and then wetter, sooner or later all those dumb farmers will give up and move out. Besides, it was a different time then, when lots of people still believed the government always did the right thing, had our best interests at heart, and so he might have pretended to be shocked and amazed at my suggestion.
But maybe not. We’d developed a strange relationship, me and Mr. Bally. I think he liked the idea of talking things over with someone who’d been born and grown up in Miller’s Valley, who loved the place and would mourn it forever but who also knew that its time was past. He got a strange look in his eyes sometimes when he was talking to me, like he got a kick out of what I knew, and how I knew I couldn’t do anything about what was coming.
So maybe I would have spit out all those things that I had figured out while slapping the gnats away, and when I was done, my voice choked, my face all balled up in a battle against the tears, he would have leaned toward me and said, again, “I always knew you were the smart one.”
Out in the diner parking lot Mr. Bally pulled down the car visor to shade his eyes. I sat in the booth watching him and said, so low no one could hear me, “The biggest mistake they made in the original dam project is that they didn’t flood a large enough area.”
I stood up and handed Dee the ten. “Your table,” I said.
“Hot dog,” she said, shoving the bill into her pocket.
Eddie came for a visit. My mother took the day off to make dinner: lamb stew, green beans, a cake. He was in the area on business, he said, which is why Debbie wasn’t with him. He was wearing a tweed sport jacket and a plaid shirt and looked like someone from a Van Heusen commercial. Eddie was good-looking in a kind of average way, and his personality was not so different. He never got really angry, and he rarely got really excited. Or maybe he did. I didn’t really know him very well. By the time I was eight years old he was already gone at college. The difference between fifty and sixty is nothing; the difference between eight and eighteen is more or less a lifetime.
“Mom says you’re doing great at the high school,” he said as he dug into his stew. “What are you thinking about after?”
“She’s going to college,” my mother said from the stove. “I told you that.” My mother talked to Eddie on the phone every Sunday evening after the rates went down. Every time she got off the