The Flood of 1931

Defeat exerts a geologic force on the spirit. Over time, parts of the mind sag under its tectonic pressure. Left untended, this burden sharpens and eventually punctures some vital organ of the soul. What hope and vitality remains bleeds out in a bitter ash, to be swept away on the currents of the world.

Lenn was a man meant to suffer such. He was aware of it too, for all the world whispered the message. Standing now under the overcast skies that spread across his homestead, he heard their voices.

In the foreclosed shack once called a home, it whispered his defeat in sad and plaintive notes. From the 1920 rotary cultivator, paid for with an exorbitant loan and rusting in yonder barren field, sprang a crackling symphony of expletives in mockery of his efforts. From the land itself came jaundiced, broken laughter at the suggestion it was meant to grow wheat.

The worst was the little mound outside the empty abode. Atop it sat a Cross. The name Nora was carved into it. From there no words were spoken. Only silence ushered from there, and it bore into him. Lenn looked at the black sky as droplets hit his face.

She had been skeptical at first. You’re a construction worker. We live in Chicago, what do we know about farming? He was persistent, though. Markets seemed good and the prices were right. His cousin had tipped him to a nice plot of land out in northern Arizona. They had a bit of money tucked away; they could afford it. We want children. Do you really want to raise them in this? he’d said, pointing out their window to the violent deformity of the city beyond. The gesture invited the world into their home, with its labor riots and tumorous growths of organized crime. She’d agreed to give it a chance.

They had arrived in ’28 to look it over and had been impressed. The property was spacious, with a plot of land and a quaint house nearby. There was a modest little river that meandered through the area. The river’s bank rose and fell on either side in a sharp grade, creating a natural levee between land and water. Well situated on the inner berm of this structure, the land was green and vital then, with two planting fields directly south of the house.

When he and Nora stood atop the riverbank, she looked up at him with a sweet smile, convinced of the purchase and sure in his judgement. Spring of the next year they officially moved in. The day everything was in place and the house was fixed up, they’d laid on the little mound outside, tired and contented. Under the open sky they made love.

That was two years ago. On this July morning of 1931, the rain was coming hard now, black and bloated. Wingless flies come to feast on dead land. He walked towards the river, gripping his shovel like a weapon. He trudged up the muddying slope of the rise and stood on its crest.

The voice of his neighbor now ran through his mind. The broad-shouldered and honest faced yeoman had come by a few days ago to try and talk sense to him once more. To leave. You haven’t been here long, friend, he’d said, palms open in frankness, the land is dry now, but all them clouds comin’ in mean rain and wind. And when they come, that’s flooding. Real flooding. That dike yonder is liable to spill over and break. With your land below the water table, the river’ll scrape your place clean. Hell, even Noah’d have a nasty time of it. Stay with my family, we have a cousin upland.

Lenn had stared hard at the man through sunken eyes, silence the only reply offered. The kind neighbor let his hands drop, and all troubled sympathy with them. He’d tried. The man shook his head and walked away. Lenn had watched him go.

Scrape your place clean. The hell it would. In the rain Lenn now stood looking at the bloated river. The thing hissed under the assault of piercing rain in ophidian menace. That God-damned river.

That river, which had made the land seem so bountiful when they first arrived, enticing their hopes, only to dry and shrivel up to a string within the first months under the hot sun and a two-year drought. That river, whose delinquency strangled his crops of life, sending them further into debt and eventual ruin. That river, on whose sluggish and bestial currents carried the typhoid which left Nora shivering and clutching her stomach in a fevered hell, as he watched powerless. That fucking river, which gurgled by in monstrous witness as he laid her to rest outside their home.

Like the rest of the place its waters spoke, carrying the chorus of all the others. Reminding him he had failed. As a provider, as a husband, as a protector and a man. Now the voices twisted into the words of his wife. Her very last words, spilling into his thoughts. Don’t leave me. He shook his head and looked down. The waters brimmed before Lenn, near to the top of the sharp bank and lapping at his feet. Threatening to break free and drown Nora’s grave with it. He gripped his shovel tighter.

No.

He would not leave her. He would deny it that last victory. Nora, the only good thing left in this place, would not be carried away in the muddy rage of some over-bloated stream. Crops could fail, bankers could call, and rain could tarnish. He spat at the waters.

Lenn turned and looked upon his preparations. He’d dug a series of three drainage canals along the foot of the inner slope. Neat and square befitting his builder’s vocation, they terminated in the southern portion of his farthest field that sat in downgrade away from his house. Above this depressed portion, he had dug cuts into the levee itself. His hope was that these efforts would direct any overflow of the river safely southward and downslope. Away from his home and Nora’s grave.

The place had taken on the look of some scoured battlefield, like pictures he’d seen of Europe’s trenches in the Great War. Mired under the pounding rain and mud his farm had become a Somme in miniature, an icon of pain awaiting its libation.

The rain picked up in degrees under a scouring wind. The river would overflow sooner than later. He trotted down the bank’s spine to the cuts he’d made over his southern field. Water splashed at his boots, but when he arrived, he saw it was still too low to begin draining through the channels. The sky screamed as his shovel hacked into the red clay, and thunder rolled off the hills and into the distance. He swung great heaps of muddy flesh over his shoulder as he worked the cutouts deeper.

Time passed under his labors. The sky cracked once more, this time in explosive tandem with a spiderweb of brilliant lightning. He could have sworn that within the cacophony, his name was spoken. The effect was with such suddenness and force that he felt the speaker was just over his shoulder. Involuntarily turning around in his startlement, one leg proved immobile in the suction of the mud as he shifted his weight. He staggered and tumbled over the side, shovel in hand.

Down and through the pouring water he fell until he landed with a sickly splash at the bottom, the river’s spittle draping itself over him. He collected the shovel and looked up. The falling stream of water had thinned, and under the darkened skies he could see that his fall had loosened one of the scoured channels. Having softened in the rain, its muddy side had collapsed in on itself. This weight had a domino effect, and it seemed the entire complex had fallen apart. In his fall he had brought the whole structure down, affecting an earthen plug to his efforts.

 He began to scramble back up the embankment when a liquid flash of black motion to the north caught his eye. Water had begun to pour in a furtive invasion over the bank. Towards his home and Nora. Cursing, he clamored to the summit once more and attacked the collapsed structures with abandon until they were open and flowing once again. Then he ran towards his home.

Water was splashing at his ankles by the time he reached the overspill. He reassured himself that between the southern cutouts and the drainage canals, the flood could still be averted. He slid down with the water to the foot of the incline and jumped into the first canal. He had dug down to his shoulders, but he worked still to deepen it as the river drooled in, cutting through the water with his shovel’s steel blade. Lightning continued to flash, and thunder declared itself in a snarl.

He labored, an automaton of motion and purpose. In the drainage canal water was pooling around his elbows now. He stopped and looked under the pelting rain to the water that poured forward as Vandals into Rome. The flow around him was moving south, but not fast enough. He retreated to the second canal and continued his work.

An hour passed, perhaps two. The river kept up its march, over the second redoubt and finally the third. It followed the course prescribed, but he could not keep up as the water relentlessly continued to spill in. In that last canal, his muscles began to give. With water to his chest and his strength spent, he crawled out of the battle and staggered to Nora’s grave. He dropped to the ground. His chest rising in gasping heaps, he looked at the brook that had formed from his creation. Its currents moved south in mimicry of its older brother that watched over its progress.

For a moment the rain lessened and stopped. He looked up. Jesus Christ, he could see light through the clouds. He returned his gaze to earth and appraised the assault. Southward, a grand little waterfall had formed out of the cutouts into the bank. Before him, although the waters hugged the ground just over his canals, they carried towards the far field which had become a definitive pond. If the rain quit now, there might just be a chance.

And it did. First, in subtle and ebbing waves of the downpour, and then in retrograde to a misting. An hour passed, and finally the rains ceased altogether. The sky did not clear, but the dark blanket which had smothered the land broke in places and cracked like dirty suds in a washbasin. One of the tenuous slivers of day peeked through an opening and found itself gazing upon Lenn. With this, he cracked a smile, the first in a long while. Resting on one elbow, he reached over and placed a hand tenderly on the wet surface of his wife’s grave. I love you, Nora, he breathed, the words touching her name with affection.

In the throes of adversity, the death of hope feels like a murder. Such a crime was sensed in Lenn’s heart when he saw the spindly appendage of a massive object peak over the rise of the bank’s apex. It looked like some great and twisted digit, and in the moment before his thinking mind was able to operate the gears of reason, he imagined it a finger. One finger that preceded others, to wrap around the edge of the bank, and the demon river would lift itself up and peak its terrible and rotting head over, rising with a grin. He imagined that it would open its cursed mouth, and from there his wife’s voice would finally usher in cognates of broken dreams at his feet.

In that moment his inmost fear and suspicion sprang to the surface – that the river was not just a dumb and blind vehicle of natural misfortune, but an evil thing that lived with scintilla of purpose towards the wreckage of his life. That it had eaten his land, had eaten Nora, and now would devour him.

Lenn stood up and stepped back unthinkingly onto Nora’s grave. Then his heart downshifted, for he realized what he was looking at. It was a tree. A grand hickory by the look of it, probably having been ripped from some far-off bank. He allowed himself a sigh. But this was cut short, for the tree continued moving, reaching further and further over the embankment, pushed by the thick currents of the flood. It continued until the great weight of the titan came to bear in totality on the sodden levee.

And cracks formed. Great dendric lines spread in the embankment under the trunk, stretching the entirety of its length. And through it, floodwater, seeping and bleeding through like rising blood under a fresh cut. These wounds quickly progressed into an exsanguination that eroded surrounding soil until the weight of the floodwaters joined that of the tree. Great chunks of the levee collapsed and were ripped away. The river broke through in a fury, as if an artery had been cut in the vein of its body.

As gigantic waves rolled hungrily over his meager efforts, he realized his hubris. That the voices of this place were not meant to mock or challenge, but to warn. To leave, as his neighbor had begged. But he could not, and as such was meant to suffer this. He did not run as water swept around him in cold embrace, crushing his chest and throwing him back onto Nora’s mound.

As the rush of the black and hateful river washed over his body he heard its voice, as with all the others of the place. Don’t leave me. He opened his mouth to join in their chorus, but felt nothing leave him, save that of a bitter ash that ushered from some unknown place within.

Years on, neighbors would talk about that flood. In grasping memory, one might recall in conversation that fool Yankee who had refused to leave with the rains. His property had been over on the river, next to that damned weird bank with the hole in it. Place had been scraped clean. Others would then nod or shake their heads, before talk turned to more agreeable things.

No one remembered Lenn, Nora, or the struggles that endured in the name of love. They had been swept away on the currents of the world.

Such was the flood of 1931.