Child of God (15 page)

In the night the side of the mountain winked with lamps and torches. Late winter revelers among the trees or some like hunters calling each to each there in the dark. In the dark Ballard passed beneath them, scuttling with his ragged chattel down stone tunnels within the mountain.

Toward dawn he emerged from a hole in a rock on the far side of the mountain and peered about like a groundhog before commiting himself to the gray and rainy daylight. With his rifle in one hand and his blanketload of gear he set off through the thin woods toward the cleared land beyond.

He crossed a fence into a half flooded field and made his way toward the creek. At the ford it was more than twice its right width. Ballard studied the water and moved on downstream. After a while he was back. The creek was totally opaque, a thick and brickcolored medium that hissed in the reeds. As he watched a drowned sow shot into the ford and spun slowly with pink and bloated dugs and went on. Ballard stashed the blanket in a stand of sedge and returned to the cave.

When he got back to the creek it seemed to have run yet higher. He carried a crate of odd miscellany, men’s and ladies’ clothes, the three enormous stuffed toys streaked with mud. Adding to this load the rifle and the blanketful of things he’d carried down he stepped into the water.

The creek climbed his legs in wild batwings. Ballard tottered and rebalanced and took a second grip on his load and went on. Before he even reached the creekbed he was wading kneedeep. When it reached his waist he began to curse aloud. A vitriolic invocation for the receding of the waters. Anyone watching him could have seen he would not turn back if the creek swallowed him under. It did. He was in fast water to his chest, struggling along on tiptoe gingerly
and leaning upstream when a log came steaming into the flat. He saw it coming and began to curse. It spun broadside to him and it came on with something of animate ill will. Git, he screamed at it, a hoarse croak in the roar of the water. It came on bobbing and bearing in its perimeter a meniscus of pale brown froth in which floated walnuts, twigs, a slender bottle neck erect and tilting like a metronome.

Git, goddamn it. Ballard shoved at the log with the barrel of the rifle. It swung down upon him in a rush and he hooked his rifle arm over it. The crate capsized and floated off. Ballard and the log bore on into the rapids below the ford and Ballard was lost in a pandemonium of noises, the rifle aloft in one arm now like some demented hero or bedraggled parody of a patriotic poster come aswamp and his mouth wide for the howling of oaths until the log swept into a deeper pool and rolled and the waters closed over him.

He came up flailing and sputtering and began to thrash his way toward the line of willows that marked the submerged creek bank. He could not swim, but how would you drown him? His wrath seemed to buoy him up. Some halt in the way of things seems to work here. See him. You could say that he’s sustained by his fellow men, like you. Has peopled the shore with them calling to him. A race that gives suck to the maimed and the crazed, that wants their wrong blood in its history and will have it. But they want this man’s life. He has heard them in the night seeking him with lanterns and cries of execration. How then is he borne up? Or rather, why will not these waters take him?

When he reached the willows he pulled himself up and found that he stood in scarcely a foot of water. There he turned and shook the rifle alternately at the flooded creek and at the gray sky out of which the rain still fell grayly and without relent and the curses that hailed up above the thunder of the water carried to the mountain and back like echoes from the clefts of bedlam.

He splashed his way to high ground and began to unload and disassemble the rifle, putting the shells in his shirtpocket and wiping the water from the gun with his forefinger and blowing through the barrel, muttering to himself the while. He took out the shells and dried them the best he could and reloaded the rifle and levered a shell into the chamber. Then he started downstream at a trot.

The only thing that he recovered was the crate and it was empty. Once far downstream he thought he saw toy bears bobbing on the spate but they were lost from sight beyond a stand of trees and he was already nearer the highway than he wished and so turned back.

Ultimately he crossed higher in the mountains. A steep and black ravine in which a wild torrent sang. Ballard on a mossbacked footlog bent beneath his sodden mudstained mattress went with care, holding the rifle before him. How white the water was, how constant its form in the speeding flumes below. How black the rocks.

When he reached the sinkhole on the mountain the mattress was so heavy with rainwater that it staggered
him. He crawled through a hole in the stone wall of the sink and pulled the mattress in after him.

All that night he hauled his possessions and all night long it rained. When he dragged the last rancid mold-crept corpse through the wall of the sinkhole and down the dark and dripping corridor daylight had already broached a pale gray band in the weeping sky eastward. His track through the black leaves of the forest with the drag marks of heels looked like a small wagon had passed there. In the night it had frozen and he came up through a field of grass webbed with little panes of ice and into a wood where the trees were seized in ice each twig like small black bones in glass that cried or shattered in the wind. Ballard’s trousercuffs had frozen into two drums that clattered at his ankles and in the shoes he wore his toes lay cold and bloodless. He walked out from the sinkhole to see the day, nearly sobbing with exhaustion. Nothing moved in that dead and fabled waste, the woods garlanded with frostflowers, weeds spiring up from white crystal fantasies like the stone lace in a cave’s floor. He had not stopped cursing. Whatever voice spoke him was no demon but some old shed self that came yet from time to time in the name of sanity, a hand to gentle him back from the rim of his disastrous wrath.

He built a fire in the floor of the cave by a running stream. Smoke gathered in the dome above and seeped slowly up through myriad fissures and pores and rose in a stygian mist through the dripping woods. When he tried the action of the rifle it was frozen fast. He
knelt on the barrel and grappled with it, tearing at the lever with his hands. When it did not give he threw it into the fire. But fetched it out again and stood it against the wall before it had suffered more than a scorched forestock. He crushed wild chicory into the blackened coffeepot and dipped the pot full of water. It simmered and hissed and sang in the flames. Ballard’s shadow veering dark and mutant over the cupped stone walls. He brought out a pan of cornbread partly eaten and set it by the fire where the dry crusts lay curled like clayshards in a summer gully.

In the black midday he woke half frozen and mended up the fire. Hot pains were rifling through his feet. He lay back down. The water in the mattress had soaked through to his back and he lay there shivering with his arms crossed at his chest and after a while he slept again.

When he woke it was to agony. He sat up and gripped his feet. He howled aloud. With gingery steps he crossed the stone floor to the water and sat and put his feet in. The creek felt hot. He sat there soaking his feet and gibbering, a sound not quite crying that echoed from the walls of the grotto like the mutterings of a band of sympathetic apes.

T
HE HIGH SHERIFF OF SEVIER
County came down the courthouse steps as far as the last stone above the flooded lawn and gazed out over the water where it lay flat and gray and choked with debris, stretching in quiet canals up the streets and alleys, the tops of the parking meters just visible and off to the left the faintest suggestion of movement, a dull sluggish wrinkling where the mainstream of the Little Pigeon river tugged at the standing water in the flats. When the deputy came rowing across the lawn in the skiff the sheriff watched him with slowly shaking head. The deputy swung the rear of the skiff about and backoared until the transom banged against the stone landing.

Cotton, you a hell of a oarsman.

You goddamn right.

Where the hell you been?

The oarsman stayed the oars, the boat dipped heavily.

You goin to ride standin up like Napoleon? Reason I’m late I had to give Bill Scruggs a ticket.

A ticket?

Yeah. I caught him goin up Bruce Street speedin in a motorboat.

Horseshit.

The deputy grinned and dipped the oars. Ain’t this the goddamnedest thing ever you seen? he said.

Rain drizzled lightly. The sheriff peered out at the flooded town from under his dripping hatbrim. You ain’t seen a old man with a long beard buildin a great big boat anywheres have ye? he said.

They rowed up the main street of the town past flooded shops and small cafes. Two men came from a store with a rowboat piled with stained boxes and loose mounds of clothing. One oared the boat, one waded behind.

Mornin Sheriff, called out the man in the water, raising his hand.

Mornin Ed, said the sheriff.

The man in the boat gestured with his chin.

Did Mr Parker see you? said the man in the water.

We’re just goin up there now.

Seems like trouble ought to make people closer stead of some tryin to rob others.

Some people you cain’t do nothin with, the sheriff said.

Ain’t that the truth.

They rowed on. Take care, said the sheriff.

Right, said the man in the water.

They rowed into the hardware store entranceway and the deputy shipped the oars. Inside by lamplight people were moving about sloshing heavily through the water. A man climbed into the showcase window and peered out at the sheriff through the broken glass.

Howdy Fate, he said.

Howdy Eustis.

Biggest thing they took was guns.

That’s what they take.

I don’t even know how many. I expect we’ll find stuff missin for a year.

Can you get the numbers on em?

Not till the waters recede. If they ever do. The inventory sheets are in the basement.

Well.

It’s supposed to clear tomorrow. Although at this point I really don’t give a shit. Do you?

It’s the worst I ever saw in my time, the sheriff said.

It was supposed to of flooded in 1885 they said the whole town was under water.

Is that right?

So I’ve heard, said the deputy.

I know it’s burned down about a half a dozen times, said the storekeeper. You reckon there are just some places the good lord didn’t intend folks to live in?

Could be, said the sheriff. He’s got a bullheaded bunch to deal with here if it’s so though, ain’t he?

Damned if he don’t.

Anything I can help ye with?

Naw, hell. We’re tryin to salvage some of this stuff. I don’t know. It sure is a hell of a mess.

Well. When you get those numbers let me have em. They’ll most likely show up over in Knoxville.

I’d rather have the sons of bitches that stole em as have the guns back.

I know what you mean. We’ll do our best.

Well.

Well, let me get my inboard cranked up here and we’ll go pick up the mail.

The deputy grinned and dipped the oars into the gray water among the bottles and boards and floating fruit.

I’ll talk to you later, Fate, said the storekeeper.

Okay Eustis. I hate it about your bein broke into. Well.

They rowed on up the street and beached the skiff on the front steps of the post office and went in.

Mornin Sheriff Turner, said a pleasant woman from behind the barred window.

Mornin Mrs Walker, how you?

Wet. What about you?

Ain’t this somethin?

She eased a bundle of mail beneath the bars.

This it?

That’s it.

He leafed through the mail.

You ever find any of them people missin from them cars?

When we find one we’ll find em all.

Well when are ye goin to find the one?

We’ll find em.

I never knew such a place for meanness, the woman said.

The sheriff smiled. It used to be worse, he said.

Rowing back down Bruce Street they were hailed from an upper window. The sheriff leaned back to see who’d spoke, eyes squinted against the fine rain.

You goin to the courthouse, Fate?

Sure am.

How about a ride?

Come on.

Just let me get my coat I’ll be right down.

An old man appeared at the top of a flight of stairs that ascended the side of a brick store building. He shut the door behind him and adjusted his hat and came down the steps with care. The deputy backed until the rear of the skiff came up against the stairs and the old man, taking a vicious grip on the sheriff’s shoulder, stepped in and sat down.

Old woman told me today, said: It’s a judgment. Wages of sin and all that. I told her everbody in Sevier County would have to be rotten to the core to warrant this. She may think they are, I don’t know. How you, young feller?

Fine, said the deputy.

Here’s a man can tell ye about the White Caps, said the sheriff.

People don’t want to hear about that, said the old man.