Faye’s work team was moving so slowly that they seemed to be traveling through molasses. When she considered the wet heaviness of the air, she realized that they might well
be
slogging through something as syrupy as molasses. And it was still “springtime,” if a weather this oppressive could ever really be considered springlike.
She had not considered that there might be a climate damper than the weather at her home on Joyeuse Island. Logic suggested that water in all four directions would keep the air pretty saturated. Here, though, water on all sides meant that it was underfoot, too.
Nobody was talking, because there was nothing to say. Nobody’s trowel had uncovered anything of importance all day. They hadn’t even found anything mildly interesting. Monotony had become the enemy.
Nobody was happier than Faye when Dauphine crowed, “Hey! This is a pretty thing.”
She had turned up a fragment of pottery, a tiny little find considering the size of the endless piles of backdirt that were piled around her.
“It’s majolica, I think,” Nina said, cradling it on her palm and letting light play over its colorful and iridescent glaze.
It was indeed majolica, decorated marineware, unless Faye missed her guess. Lustrous colors on the pure white ground of a tin glaze led her to agree with Nina. “You’re right. It
is
pretty.”
Joe came to look over her shoulder. “So, is this good news? Were you hoping to find Spanish pottery in this spot?”
“Yup,” Faye said. “The great house for the Beluche plantation was near here. It’s likely that it was destroyed in 1792 or 1793, which was still during the Spanish period. Not that there weren’t any Spanish goods in the area during times that the French were in charge. But for something so small…” It was hardly bigger than her fingernail. “For something this small, that’s a very tidy connection. I’d love to find the kitchen. It was probably somewhere near here. Maybe this sherd came from a platter or crock used by the cook.”
Everyone went back to work, but a moment with an old but pretty chip of pottery had lifted some of the boredom. Even the air seemed to be made of a thinner grade of molasses.
When a group of people is looking for something, whether it be artifacts or a place to stop the car so a child can visit a rest room, the laws of probability do not seem to apply. Hours or days or miles can pass with no sign of something that the lookers know just has to be somewhere close. But the moment comes when probability and statistics have been completely violated for so long that the pendulum swings the other way. Suddenly, there are pottery chips and bathrooms everywhere.
Faye’s team was overdue for one of those streaks of good luck. Within half an hour, Faye had found two more sherds of majolica, one of them fairly sizeable. Within an hour, something way more significant saw the light of day. Dauphine, who seemed to be having a lucky day and should probably buy a lottery ticket, raked away a thin layer of dirt with her trowel and, in so doing, uncovered the brick foundation of something old.
“Anybody want to bet me that’s not the Beluche house’s kitchen?” Faye asked as she whipped out her camera. “We could have a pool. A dollar a guess.”
“I’ll take that bet.” Dauphine looked at the battered old bricks like a proud mother. “I think it’s the
Rodriguez
kitchen.”
Joe ambled over in time to jump in the pool with, “My money’s on a smokehouse.”
Nina scooped up some soil with her snub-nosed trowel and spoke without making eye contact. “I think it was an ice house.”
There was a second of silence before Faye said, “In eighteenth-century Louisiana? I haven’t read about any ice houses here earlier than the 1830s.”
Nina’s deadpan cracked, and everybody laughed, because they all had a soft spot for geeky history jokes.
Faye took a step toward the bit of foundation that Dauphine had uncovered. She heard an unwelcome “sploosh” underfoot and stifled a completely unladylike word. On cue, the asthmatic pump that she’d been nursing all week coughed and expired.
“Take a break, guys. I need to resurrect Old Wheezy. Again.”
Her workers scattered like confetti on a gusty day.
Faye stared morosely at the damp (and growing damper) soil at the bottom of the excavation. She knew it could have been worse. They were working near the river, so the water table was conveniently far from the surface, especially for south Louisiana. This had seemed paradoxical to Faye until Joe had looked it up just that morning and explained to her that the land was shaped the way it was, because the river had flooded every year, forever.
A few eons worth of mud had settled out of the river’s floodwaters, lifting the level of the nearby land a little bit every year. This raised ground spread out so gently from the riverfront that the difference in elevation wasn’t obvious, but the dirt she stood on was higher than land further away from the river by several feet. This was called a “natural levee,” and land on that God-made dike had come at a premium for all of recorded history. It was no coincidence that the New Orleans neighborhoods left unscathed by the post-Katrina floods had been the oldest neighborhoods, constructed on the natural levee before all the high ground was gobbled up.
Even though Faye was lucky enough to be looking for artifacts that should be above the water table, there was still a slow constant ooze of groundwater that collected in the bottom of her excavations. This was because, as she was constantly being reminded, every last thing was damp all the time in this part of the country. Old Wheezy had been sufficient to keep things dry, but its decrepit condition had cost her some valuable work time. Faye was the only team member with any mechanical skills whatsoever.
Joe was lying on his stomach, with most of his top half hanging down into the excavation so he could get a good look at…something. Faye got the impression that he was looking for the source of the water, because he was poking first at one stratum of earth, then at another, as if he were looking for a soft, wet layer that was serving as a conduit though drier soil. He was probably correct in his theory about the source, though practical Faye hadn’t given the matter much thought. Even if she could find the offending layer of dirt, there was no way to stop its ooze, so she saw no point in wasting her time on it.
Instead, she was wasting her time on a pump. She aimed a kick at a sturdy part of its housing that she knew she couldn’t hurt. She wanted to express herself, but she didn’t want to break it. Faye was frustrated, but she wasn’t stupid.
Joe lifted his head out of the unit at the sound and asked, “You want me to take a look at that for you? You could go get a Coke and calm your—”
A dark look from Faye sent him scrambling to his feet. “I’ll just take myself a walk till you get that thing fixed. Want me to bring you back a Coke?”
Faye knew that he would interpret her wordless grunt as what it was: a plea for understanding from a woman who needed a quiet moment with her recalcitrant pump, and then a Coca-Cola. He hastened to oblige her.
Faye threw the lid of her toolbox open, hard. It made a satisfying clang. Newfangled tool totes could be bought cheap these days, with pockets that kept tools organized. They didn’t weigh a ton like old-style metal toolboxes, either.
Nevertheless, Faye had not invested in one. “Cheap” was not the same as “free.” Plus, those wussy canvas totes were completely unsatisfactory when a mechanical problem required her to make some noise. She picked up a pair of channel-lock pliers, decided they weren’t the right size, then dropped them—okay, threw them—back into the metal tray. The resulting clang was just loud enough to be satisfying.
Later, when she was asked how much time passed between the time the work crew scattered and the moment when she heard Joe call her name, she couldn’t hazard a guess. For Faye, mechanical work involved disassembling the offending objects and scattering them around her, willy-nilly. Then she sat cross-legged among the far-flung pieces, like the survivor of an explosion, until a solution to her problem magically appeared. She was deep into the rumination portion of the process when she heard Joe.
His voice was muffled, indistinct. Still, she was deep-down certain she heard him call her name. And she sensed a looming darkness in the sound, as if a cloud had passed in front of the sun.
Where was he? The sound seemed to come from the levee, but if six-and-a-half-foot-tall Joe were standing on it, then she’d have been able to see him. She hurried that direction anyway, breaking into a run when she couldn’t shut out her deepest fear.
What would life be like if something happened to Joe?
Faye’s earliest memory was of an old photo of her father in her mother’s hands, and the sound of her mother’s voice as talked about what it would be like when Daddy came home from the war. When the bad news came, her mother had locked that photo away and refused to look at it again or show it to Faye, for the rest of her life.
It was Faye’s now, and she kept it on her bedside table. She never wanted to live through that kind of loss again.
What could have caused Joe to call out to her in that dreadful voice, then fall silent? She almost stumbled at the thought. There were so many terrible possibilities. Climbing the levee, she prayed to find Joe safe on the other side.
There was no Joe. There was nothing but the river.
Seen up-close, the Mississippi River was unfathomably broad. Its muddy blue-brown water rushed past her, swollen by spring rains. Whole trees spun slowly in invisible eddies.
She was startled to see that the water lapped just a few steps from where she stood. Faye was accustomed to seeing large rivers at a distance, from the span of a high bridge, while she was safe in the comfortable confines of a car. It was disconcerting to realize that she could just walk down there to the most notoriously treacherous river on the continent and wade right in, boots and all.
Where was Joe? The only thing in her field of vision that was moving was the rushing water.
Logs and clumps of trash floated past. After a long moment, two of those fast-moving objects caught her eye. They were both downriver from where she stood, past the park’s dock, and getting further away by the instant. She had been staring at them for five seconds, maybe ten, before she realized that they didn’t belong where they were.
They were gasping faces. One of them was Joe’s.
His long, powerful arms were cutting into the roiling water as he swam toward the other face—Nina’s—but Nina wasn’t reaching out to Joe for help. She just hung motionless in the water, passively letting the insistent current carry her out to the Gulf of Mexico.
In horror, Faye watched as Nina sank beneath the water, then, buoyed by an eddy, bobbed back to the surface, perhaps for the last time. She was sinking again when Joe grabbed her and Faye’s heart rose with Nina, until she realized the truth. Even Joe couldn’t fight that current.
Nobody human could swim against the Mississippi, dragging dead weight. Certainly, nobody could do it long enough to regain the park’s dock, which is where Joe must have jumped in to help Nina. And what about Nina? Did she slip? Or did she jump?
That seemed like a silly question. Nina’s career and schoolwork seemed to be going well. She was clearly crazy about Charles, and he’d walked back into her life. Why would Nina jump?
Faye looked downriver, hoping to see something Joe could grab while she rushed to fish them both out. No luck. The next dock was way too far downriver. There was no sandbar, no curve in the bank to catch them.
Faye’s first impulse was to just jump in and help. She owned an island, for God’s sake. She was a strong swimmer.
No. If Joe couldn’t fight the mighty Mississippi, then neither could she. She had to do something to help him. But what? There was no boat tethered to the dock where she stood, and Joe and Nina were way too far to reach with a pole, even if she had such a thing.
One of Faye’s grandmother’s old sayings popped into her head.
“Tools are the thing that separates man from the beasts.”
Nice try, Grandma,
Faye thought,
but my toolbox would take me straight to the bottom
, yet all the time she was being disrespectful to her dead grandmother, she was looking around. There was a wooden sign advertising an upcoming park event near the end of the dock. She yanked it out of the ground.
It was about half as tall as Faye, and almost as wide as it was tall. It wasn’t much of a boat, but it would have to do.
Faye sat down and yanked her boots off her feet. Trying not to think about what she was doing, she held the sign tight against her stomach and ran, launching herself as far in Joe’s direction as she could muster. Like it or not, she was going on a riverboat ride.
Faye didn’t weigh much, so her makeshift boat dipped underwater when she landed, but quickly surfaced. It held her up, until a slight shift of her weight toward the front sent it submarining, and she swallowed her first gulp of river water for the day. Why did she think it wouldn’t be her last? She leaned back and her craft righted itself. Fully realizing that the action was insane, she started to paddle away from the dock and safety, and toward Joe.
***
If his mouth hadn’t been full of muddy water, Joe would have cursed. What was that woman thinking?
His
woman. What was
his
woman thinking when she jumped in the Mississippi River?
She certainly couldn’t be thinking that she’d be able to swim out here and save him. Because he had been in the process of accepting the fact that he wasn’t going to be able to save himself.
He certainly wasn’t going to be able to save Nina. He’d clamped an arm around her waist—an arm he really wished he could use to help himself swim—but she just slumped in the water like a woman who was dead already. He knew she wasn’t, because he could feel her shallow breaths against his ribs. So there was no way he was letting her go. Unfortunately, this meant that they were probably both going to die.
Then, just as he was working to accept that unpleasant fact, his woman—his Faye—had launched herself into a river swollen by spring floods.