A Painted House (Page 65)

I worked my way through the crowd, looking for my father. The hardware store was ancient, and toward the rear it became darker and cavern-like. The wooden floors were wet from the traffic and sagged from years of use. At the end of an aisle, I turned and came face-to-face with Tally and Trot. She was holding a gallon of white paint. Trot was holding a quart. They were loitering like everybody else, waiting for the storm to pass. Trot saw me and tried to hide behind Tally. "Hello, Luke," she said with a smile.

"Howdy," I said, looking at the paint bucket. She set it on the floor beside her. "What’s the paint for?"

"Oh, it’s nothin’," she said, smiling again. Once again I was reminded that Tally was the prettiest girl I’d ever met, and when she smiled at me my mind went blank. Once you’ve seen a pretty girl naked, you feel a certain attachment to her.

Trot wedged himself tightly behind her, like a toddler hiding behind his mother. She and I talked about the storm, and I relayed the exciting news about the power going out in the middle of the matinee. She listened with interest, and the more I talked the more I wanted to talk. I told her about the rumors of rising waters and about the gauge Pappy and I had set at the river. She asked about Ricky, and we talked about him for a long time.

Of course I forgot about the paint.

The lights flickered, and the power returned. It was still raining, though, and no one left the store.

"How’s that Latcher girl?" she asked, her eyes darting around as if someone might hear her. It was one of our great secrets.

I was about to say something, when it suddenly hit me that Tally’s brother was dead, and she knew nothing about it. The Spruills probably thought Hank was home by now, back in Eureka Springs, back in their nice little painted house. They’d see him in a few weeks, sooner if it kept raining. I looked at her and tried to speak, but all I could think about was how shocked she’d be if I said what I was thinking.

I adored Tally, in spite of her moods and her secrets, in spite of her funny business with Cowboy. I couldn’t help but adore her, and I certainly didn’t want to hurt her. The very thought of blurting out that Hank was dead made me weak in the knees.

I stuttered and stammered and looked at the floor. I was suddenly cold and scared. "See you later," I managed to say, then turned and backtracked to the front.

During a break in the rain, the stores emptied and folks scurried along the sidewalks, heading for the cars and trucks. The clouds were still dark, and we wanted to get home before the showers hit again.

Chapter 28

Sunday was gray and overcast, and my father didn’t care for the notion of getting wet while riding in the back of the truck on the way to church. Plus, our truck was not exactly waterproof, and the women usually got dripped on while riding in the cab during a good shower. We rarely missed a Sunday worship, but the threat of rain occasionally kept us at home. We hadn’t missed a service in months, and so when Gran suggested we eat a late breakfast and listen to the radio we quickly agreed. Bellevue Baptist was the largest church in Memphis, and its services were broadcast on station WHBQ. Pappy didn’t like the preacher, said he was too liberal, but we enjoyed hearing him nonetheless. And the choir had a hundred voices, which was about eighty more than the one at the Black Oak Baptist Church.

Long after breakfast, we sat at the kitchen table, sipping coffee (myself included), listening to a sermon being delivered to a congregation of three thousand members, and worrying about the drastic change in the weather. The adults were worrying; I was only pretending.

Bellevue Baptist had an orchestra, of all things, and when it played the benediction, Memphis seemed a million miles away. An orchestra in a church. Gran’s older daughter, my aunt Betty, lived in Memphis, and though she didn’t worship at Bellevue she knew someone who did. All the men wore suits. All the families drove nice cars. It was indeed a different world.

Pappy and I drove to the river to check our gauge. The rains were taking a toll on Otis’s recent grade work. The shallow ditches beside the road were full, gullies were forming from the runoff, and mud holes were holding water. We stopped in the middle of the bridge and studied the river on both sides. Even I could tell the water was up. The sandbars and gravel bars were covered. The water was thicker and a lighter shade of brown, evidence of drainage from the creeks that ran through the fields. The current swirled and was moving faster. Debris-driftwood and logs and even a green branch or twofloated atop the water.

Our gauge was still standing, but barely. Just a few inches remained above the water. Pappy had to get his boots wet to retrieve the stick. He pulled it up, examined it as if it had done something wrong, and said, almost to himself, "Up ’bout ten inches in twenty-four hours." He squatted and tapped the stick on a rock. Watching him, I became aware of the noise of the river. It wasn’t loud, but the water was rushing by and streaming over the gravel bars and against the bridge piers. The current splashed through the thick shrubs hanging over the banks and pecked away at the roots of a nearby willow tree. It was a menacing noise. One I’d never heard.

Pappy was hearing it all too well. With the stick he pointed at the bend in the river, far to the right, and said, "It’ll get the Latchers first. They’re on low ground."

"When?" I asked.

"Depends on the rain. If it stops, then it might not flood at all. Keeps rainin’ though, and it’ll be over the banks in a week."

"When’s the last time it flooded?"

"Three years ago, but that was in the spring. Last fall flood was a long time ago."

I had plenty of questions about floods, but it was not a subject Pappy liked to dwell on. We studied the river for a while, and listened to it, then we walked back to the truck and drove home.

"Let’s go to Siler’s Creek," he said. The field roads were too muddy for the truck, so Pappy fired up the John Deere, and we pulled out of the farmyard with most of the Spruills and all of the Mexicans watching us with great curiosity. The tractor was never operated on Sunday. Surely Eli Chandler was not about to work on the Sabbath.

The creek had been transformed. Gone were the clear waters where Tally liked to bathe. Gone were the cool little rivulets running around rocks and logs. Instead the creek was much wider and filled with muddy water rushing to the St. Francis, half a mile away. We got off the tractor and walked to the bank. "This is where our floods come from," Pappy said. "Not the St. Francis. The ground’s lower here, and when the creek runs over, it heads straight for our fields."

The water was at least ten feet below us, still safely contained in the ravine that had been cut through our farm decades earlier. It seemed impossible that the creek could ever rise high enough to escape.

"You think it’ll flood, Pappy?" I asked.

He thought long and hard, or maybe he wasn’t thinking at all. He watched the creek and finally said, with no conviction whatsoever, "No. We’ll be fine."

There was thunder to the west.

I walked into the kitchen early Monday morning, and Pappy was at the table, drinking coffee, fiddling with the radio. He was trying to pick up a station in Little Rock to check on the weather. Gran was at the stove, frying bacon. The house was cold, but the heat and smell from the skillet warmed things considerably. My father handed me an old flannel coat, a hand-me-down from Ricky, and I reluctantly put it on.

"We pickin’ today, Pappy?" I asked.

"We’ll know directly," he said, without taking his eyes off the radio.

"Did it rain last night?" I asked Gran, who had leaned over to kiss my forehead.