Authors: Tom Franklin,Beth Ann Fennelly
Ingersoll shook his head, though it was true that on the boat to the sheriff’s, he’d totted up how much these ribs would eat into his remaining four damp dollars.
“Oh, don’t be an idiot,” Ham said. “It’s hers, after all, she cooked the damn whiskey.”
Ingersoll looked at Dixie Clay, and she pursed her lips and gave a tiny shrug. She
had
cooked the damn whiskey. Ingersoll looked back at the roll yet felt powerless to reach out. Finally Ham backhanded it across the table where it skidded to Ingersoll’s fist. He uncurled his fingers and drummed them once on the roll and then picked it up and straightened his leg to push it into the pocket of his dungarees. He gave Ham a nod.
Broken vows and broken laws and blood and desertion and money—all that he’d needed to come to pass had come to pass. They were free to go.
The waitress came over with the coffeepot but they shook their heads. “We’re quittin’, sugar,” Ham told her.
“Alrighty, I put it on your tab, Ham.”
“Thank you kindly. By the way, I don’t suppose you’d fancy a trip to Kentucky, run barefoot through the bluegrass with a big tipper like Ham Johnson?”
“And give up all this?” Her gesture took in the ramshackle room, the displaced customers, the ribs on pulleys.
“You got a point.”
“Hey, I been meaning to ask. Where’s the name Ham come from?”
Ingersoll sat back in his chair and reached out to squeeze Dixie Clay’s knee, then turned, already grinning, to Ham.
But Ham’s gray eyes were serious. “Ham,” he said. He turned to Ingersoll. “It stands for Abraham.”
The waitress nodded and moved on, yet the men sat regarding each other. “Abraham,” Ingersoll said softly. He smiled and shook his head, a confused gesture, inadequate to convey all that sloshed in his heart.
Finally Ham slapped the table with his huge hands and the silverware jumped and the three rose.
There was nothing more to do then. Where before the men had hugged, now they shook hands, but there was so much in their grasp and in their eyes that it did not seem a lessening.
Dixie Clay stuck out her hand, and Ham stuck out his hand, and then she seemed to think better of it and raised on tiptoes to kiss Ham’s cheek, the whole exchange a little awkward, but it got the job done.
Then Ingersoll placed his palm on Dixie Clay’s neck and took Willy onto his shoulder, and they turned away and descended the steps. Just before Ingersoll’s head passed below the floor, he looked back to see Ham, who was facing away, thick legs crossed, gazing toward the window, the late-afternoon light making the air seem solid with the dust of the centuries.
H
obnob was ninety miles and three days behind them. They were in Arkansas now, the farthest west Dixie Clay had ever been. Each step the horse took became its own extremity, its own frontier. This was the farthest west she’d gone. No,
this
was.
This
.
When they’d left Greenville, they could have boated across the flat Delta to Greenwood, the beginning of the hills, fifty miles and four hours away, or so people said. Instead, Ingersoll turned the boat west. They crossed the river, if you could still call it a river when it was ninety miles wide.
They knew they were boating over places where houses and farms used to be. It was houseless, farmless. Treeless. Then, westward, a few trees, like broccoli dipped in batter halfway up. Then signs of houses—concrete steps, a brick chimney. Then a copse of woods, logjam that had trapped, like the mesh pocket in a pool table, a bank of school lockers, a pair of dead calico ponies hitched to a wagon, a planing mill saw, a mailbox, a sign reading
TALLULAH’S, WORLD’S BEST CATFISH
. Apocalyptic, this landscape they boated through. No need to worry about trampling anyone’s cotton, river had seen to that. No need to hop fences, river had seen to that. River had seen and seen. They began to pass humps of dry ground. Prosthetic leg sticking up out of the mud. Bloated carcass of a donkey beside a bloated Bible, as if he’d been reading the events of the end time when they befell him. Wild dogs circling a tree, snagged high in its branches a coop filled with dead chickens, rattling because of the buzzards that hopped and thrust their beaks in to pull out bloody cords of meat. They passed a hill with strange white arcs cresting the mud. Like baby’s teeth pushing through gums, said Dixie Clay. But Ingersoll shook his head. Gravestones, he said; a cemetery. Though where the church was now, God only knew.
Willy was often sleeping on her lap, lulled by the motor of the boat as he’d always been by the rumbling of the thumper keg. Sometimes when he fussed, Ingersoll sang a bit. It didn’t rain, which was another record.
On the far side of the river, they traded the boat for a horse. They were not sad to ride away from it. The land was scraped-clean mudflats, cracked like so much poorly thrown pottery. Dark brown in low spots where the mud was thick and lightening toward the edges as it dried. They didn’t talk much. They peered strangely at the strange world they passed through, Ingersoll’s arms around Dixie Clay’s arms around Willy. Sometimes she rested her chin lightly on the baby’s head and Ingersoll rested his on hers.
Then a clapboard house rising from a mud moat, slanted but still upright, said Ingersoll, because the owners had the smarts to leave the doors and windows open so the floodwaters could rush through.
They rode up to the door and Ingersoll yoo-hooed but no one came out so they dismounted and went inside. In the kitchen Dixie Clay found two cans of carrots and two of spinach and they ate one each and fork-mashed bites for Willy. They were tired and pulled down the straw ticking that someone had wedged over the armoire to stay dry. It smelled moldy but they were happy to lie down and stretch their saddle-sore legs. And they were happy on their sides with the baby sleeping between them as they spoke in low voices. Then Ingersoll’s feet on Dixie Clay’s feet and then a raising-up-on-elbows-to-lean-over-the-baby kiss and then he’d rolled over her and they were making love and it was not the wild frenzied mudlove of the Indian mound but a probing tender molasseslove. Even so, Dixie Clay was not able to bite down on a cry, which woke Willy, so Ingersoll cradled him with one arm against his bare chest as they finished and Willy was rocked back to sleep, Ingersoll asleep almost immediately after. Dixie Clay thought,
Not me, I’m too happy to sleep, I’ll stay up all night and look at them sleeping.
That’s the last thing she recalled until waking.
They left at dawn with the sun spooling gauzy mist from the puddles. The rhythm of the horse released her thoughts, which were easy. She felt calm and unplagued by questions, even concerning their destination. They hadn’t discussed it except briefly, the first night when they’d found some strange island of land and made camp. They’d gathered someone’s blasted barn for firewood. When Dixie Clay dumped her fagot near where Ingersoll crouched, trying to light some tinder, she stretched her horse-jolted back and said, gazing up at the darkening cloud cover, “I miss stars.”
Ingersoll looked up and nodded. “We’ll keep on until we’re in star country.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah. The Ozarks. Fellow there named Jim, fought with him in the war.” Ingersoll was flicking the flint wheel of his lighter and produced a small blue flame. He held it to the tinder. “Part Indian. Came home with shrapnel in his skull. No one thought he’d live. But he lives, all right.” They heard the tinder begin to crackle.
“How do you know he’ll help us?”
“I know.” Ingersoll poked the fire a bit and smiled. “The Ozarks, Dixie Clay. Mountains so old they’re just hills now.”
She liked that and repeated it. “Mountains so old they’re just hills now.”
That was enough to know for the present.
What she wanted now was a simple life. Small cottage. Books. Tidy garden with rows of peas and corn and tomatoes. Flowers if Ingersoll liked them, but as for herself, Dixie Clay preferred vegetables, hardworking, practical, her blossoms squash blossoms, honeybee wriggling its fat furred bottom down the creamy throat, then lurching drunkenly off to forge its gold. Maybe a stream somewhere so the three of them could fish. Oh, and she wanted a dog. A big dog, a big and hairy dog. A boy should have a dog. She wanted chickens again, the daily trade of feeding them and being fed by them. She wanted honest work. Go to bed with the dark, tired, and wake up with the sun, rested. She wanted to bake scratch cakes and pick blackberries and can jam and when her boy came hungry from school she’d take bread from the oven and he could tear off a steaming feathery hunk and give it a fat swath of blackberry. Ripe June in his red October mouth. Yes, she would feed her men.
She wanted to grow old with Ingersoll. Sit with him of an evening on the gallery after supper, Willy a man now, though that would take some getting used to, her pulling a book from the shelf Ingersoll had built. Then maybe listening to him strum his guitar and sing in his dungaree-spearmint voice while she did some small useful task. Shelling pecans, say, that she’d gathered into her apron from beneath the trees earlier that day.
She indulged in this vision and then realized that in it she’d been cracking pecans with the bell-end, hickory-handled hammer she’d brought to Hobnob from Alabama. But that hammer, well made and well used, freighted with the fate of ten thousand pecans, lay at the bottom of the lake that filled the gulley that used to nestle her house. The trusty little hammer knew no touch now but the fins of fishes, the undulant stroke of long grasses. She had a flicker of something—pity? For the hammer? For herself ? But then it passed, the way troubling things pass when you recall they happened only in a dream.
There was the before world, and the after. It was a kind of freedom. Starting from scratch, she was. As was Ingersoll. Freed even of the silver weight of his occupation, freed even of the bronze weight of his valor. They could be anyone now.
She’d live out her days in the space his arms made.
The events that would form the great story of her life were nearing their close, and she was glad of it. She was not by nature a dramatic person, but dramatic events had befallen her, and she’d endured, had been compelled to endure. But now she was ready for what came next. Common days.
And there would come a time, when Willy was old enough, to tell him the story. She would have told him bits already, enough for him to know there
was
a story, and he’d know that she wasn’t his natural-born mama. She’d tell him that from the start so he didn’t have to swallow some terrible truth when he was older, a truth made more terrible because it had festered in shameful silence. No, he would know already, important that he know already. So he’d understand she’d had to work to be ready for the gift of him, to work and wait and wait and work.
By the time she’d be ready to tell him the story, she’d know how her part fit into the whole. Historians would have described to her what she’d lived through. So later, when she is ready, she will be able to say,
Son, it was the greatest natural disaster our country had ever known
. How big, Willy, was the area that was drowned? About the size of Connecticut, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, and Vermont. Of course, if it
had
been those states, we’d have had help right quick. Supplies. Money. Later, chapters in the history books. Monuments everywhere. But it was Delta dirt, the richest dirt in the nation, though under the boot soles of the poorest folk. The official death toll would be reported as 313, though we all knew the real number was much higher, Willy, much higher. Coolidge never came to the suffering people. In the months that followed, four governors and eight senators would beg him to come, to turn the eyes of the nation on the South. But Coolidge did not come. And was not reelected. Hoover, darling of the newsreels, star of the Sunday supplements, did surf the flood to the presidency, as he’d predicted. This flood, now forgotten by much of our nation, changed what our nation became.
She’ll know all this then, but not now. Now, three days after fleeing, it is not yet the story of the Great Flood of the Great River. It is just their story. And so when she imagines telling it, she imagines telling it like this:
It is time to tell you a story, a story that will surprise you
.
The year was 1927, and Lord, the rains did rain.
Your mama was a bootlegger, and your daddy was a revenuer, so they were meant to be enemies, natural enemies, like the owl and the dormouse. But instead they fell in love.
This story is
a story with murder and moonshine, sandbagging and saboteurs, dynamite and deluge. A ruthless husband, a troubled uncle, a dangerous flapper, a loyal partner. A woman, married to the wrong husband, who died a little every day. A man who felt invisible.
But most of all, this is a love story. This is the story of how we became a family.
W
e wish to thank some of the many folks who helped us write this book:
Dr. Luther P. Brown, director, Delta Center for Culture and Learning, shared his expertise on the Mississippi Delta and the flood, and the ’27 Break Hunting Club allowed Dr. Brown to show us the location of the ’27 crevasse. Andrew P. Mullins, chief of staff to the chancellor of the University of Mississippi, shared anecdotes of the Delta and Prohibition. Richard P. Moore, colonel, U.S. Air Force (Retired), vetted this book for inaccuracies about firearms, explosives, and World War I. Barry Bradford—librarian, historian, and cousin—provided sources and suggestions that were timely and serendipitous. Jane G. Gardner loaned us her grandmother’s photos of the flood. Those, and the materials housed at the Flood of 1927 Museum in Greenville, assisted our research greatly. One String Willie provided diddley bow tips. Michael Knight, author and pal, provided helpful and only slightly smart-ass notes.
Several books were of crucial importance to our research. Those who wish to read more about the flood could do no better than to read John M. Barry’s
Rising Tide: The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 and How It Changed America
, an amazing work of research and journalism, to which our novel is indebted.
Lanterns on the Levee: Recollections of a Planter’s Son
, by William Alexander Percy, is a fascinating memoir with vignettes of Delta life and landscape, including an interesting account of the flood. Other books that proved useful are
Deep’n as It Come: the 1927 Mississippi River Flood
, by Pete Daniel;
Wicked River: the Mississippi When It Last Ran Wild
, by Lee Sandlin;
Where the Wild Animals Is Plentiful: Diary of an Alabama Fur Trader’s Daughter, 1912–1914
, by May Jordan, and
1927: High Tide of the Twenties
, by Gerald Leinwand. Films that provided inspiration include
Prohibition
, a documentary by Ken Burns, and
The American Experience: Fatal Flood
(PBS).
Many thanks to the Mississippi Arts Commission, which awarded each author an Individual Artist Grant. The University of Mississippi has been deeply supportive: thanks to Chancellor Dan Jones, and to Dean Glenn Hopkins of the College of Liberal Arts, which provided a summer grant to Tommy, and to the Office of Research and Sponsored Programs, which provided a travel grant to Beth Ann. Deep thanks to our collegial English Department, especially our chair, Ivo Kamps, who read the manuscript in an early version, and Jay Watson, the Howry Professor of Faulkner Studies, who encouraged us, and our colleagues in the MFA Program. Surrounding the university community is the community of Oxford, Mississippi, home to a whole bunch of readers and writers and one of the world’s best bookstores, Square Books. The authors are proud to call Oxford home. For the Lafayette County Literacy Council’s Mardi Gras Ball fund-raiser, we auctioned off the right to name the two boys paddling the canoes in Greenville. Thanks to Nicholas Brown for the winning bid.
We wish to thank our families, especially Betty and Gerald Franklin and Mary Anna McNamara Malich, who encouraged and who babysat while portions of this book were written.
The folks at William Morrow/HarperCollins have been a delight. Sharyn Rosenblum in PR is exceptionally good at her job. The company’s president, Michael Morrison, makes it look easy. Our editor, David Highfill, is always a pleasure. Liate Stehlik, the publisher of William Morrow, offered valued support. Across the pond, our UK editor at Mantle, Maria Rejt, and her assistant, Sophie Orme, suggested some thoughtful changes that prevented a few embarrassments, such as renaming the baby in the UK version because over there, “ ‘Willy’ is a silly word for penis.”
This novel grew out of our collaborative short story, “What His Hands Had Been Waiting For,” which first appeared in
The Normal School
, edited by Steven Church, and was reprinted in
Delta Blues
, edited by Carolyn Haines, and
Best American Mystery Stories, 2011
, edited by Otto Penzler and Harlan Coben. It was our agents, the husband-and-wife team Nat Sobel and Judith Weber, who first suggested the story be expanded into a cowritten novel and who then read it several times along the way. We dedicate this book to them, and to another collaboration of ours and inspiration for this book, Nolan McNamara Franklin.