Run River (25 page)

She found Lily in the kitchen, pulling off Julie’s galoshes. “Where’s Everett?” she asked.

“Still working on the levees. I don’t know.”

“I’m going to see if I can find him.” Martha pulled on a raincoat, buttoned it briskly, and then, as if she had forgotten why she wanted the raincoat in the first place, sat down and slowly began to unbutton it again.

“You’re undoing your coat,” Julie said, laying her head in Martha’s lap. “Where you going?”

Martha smoothed Julie’s hair. “I guess nowhere. I guess I couldn’t find him.”

“I guess not,” Julie agreed. She was the kind of child who agreed with anything said by an adult. “You coming to the parade?”

“What parade is that?”

“The Saint Patrick’s Day Parade. It’s Saint Patrick’s Day in town.”

“Who all’s going?”

“Me and Mommy and Knight. Only Knight can’t go if he doesn’t apologize for breaking my pedometer.”

“Knight broke your pedometer? However will you figure mileage?”

“That’s the thing. Anyway, two of our cousins are in it.”

“In what?”

“In the par
ade,”
Lily said. “You aren’t following this very closely. Sally Randall’s children are marching and I thought we should go wave at them. We’re going to have hamburgers first. Why don’t you get dressed and come.”

“I guess I’m
dressed
all right. I don’t guess I have to get all done up for the Saint Patrick’s Day Parade, do I. You know what it’ll be. There’ll be a bagpipe band playing ‘The Campbells Are Coming.’ The Air Force Band playing ‘Loch Lomond.’ And a battalion of small girls in spangled two-piece bathing suits and white plastic Stetsons doing close-order drill to ‘Temptation.’
You-came-Ah was a-lone-Ah should-a-known—You were Taymp-tay-shun.”

“
Mar
tha,” Julie screamed, throwing herself at Martha’s knees. “Stop making fun.”

“I’m not making fun.” Martha picked Julie up and swung her around. “I am telling you gospel. Because baby, I have seen Saint Patrick’s Day before,
seen it all
. ‘Temptation’ will be
sung
—through a public-address system on a truck behind the small girls—by a mother wearing a rose crêpe dress with bugle beads, a short red car coat, and harlequin-framed glasses. So much for that. There will also be the Sheriff’s Posse: fifteen dentists on fifteen palominos. And Julie baby, we’re so wide open out here there’ll probably even be the Masons.”

“The Masons are not our cousins.”

“That’s right, baby. The Randalls are our cousins.”

Lily stood up and picked up a lipstick from the shelf beside the sink. “You coming or not?”

Suddenly listless, Martha did not answer.

“If you’re coming you better put on some shoes.”

“What time is it?”

“Six. A little before.”

“I was supposed to go somewhere. Sam Bradley and his brother were supposed to pick me up at six-thirty.”

Lily blotted her lipstick on a piece of paper toweling and looked at Martha. “Then you can’t come.”

“Yes I can. I can come all right.” Martha stood up and took from the pocket of her raincoat the dark glasses she wore almost constantly now.

“You want to call Sam before we go?”

“If I wanted to call Sam I’d
call
him, I mean wouldn’t I?”

By the time they had driven into town (“Knight can look for Nevada plates and Julie for Arizona. That’s right, there
are
more people in Arizona but you forget Nevada is closer. All right,
both
of you look for Arizona plates”) and stopped at a drive-in for hamburgers (“I said hamburgers, Knight, I did not say steak sandwich and I did not say chicken-in-a-basket. All right, chiliburgers. You don’t even
like
chili”), the parade was already underway: they had missed, a policeman told them as Lily was locking the station wagon, the Mayor’s Cavalcade and the Knights of Columbus. “Cheer up, sweetie,” he said to Julie. “There’ll be more.”

“You bet there will, sweetie,” Martha whispered, giggling with Julie as fifteen palominos pranced into view, and then Knight was yelling
Hey Horse! Why did the chicken cross the road?
and Horse turned out to be not a horse at all but the name by which Sally Randall’s son was known to his intimates; not long after Horse Randall and the Elk Grove Firehouse Five passed by, followed by a shivering blond drum majorette and a ragged line of high-school boys whistling and hooting, the rain began again, and when they looked for Martha she was gone. By the time they saw her, standing in front of the Rexall drugstore on the corner, the crowd was breaking up, going for cover, scattering into doorways and automobiles.

“Meet us at the car,” Lily shouted over the idling of motors, the shifting of gears.

Instead Martha ran back down the block to where Lily stood with the children. Rain streamed down her face, across her sunglasses, down the neck of her unbuttoned raincoat.

“I was trying to call Sarah. Nobody answered.”

“Sarah? In Philadelphia?”

Martha took Julie’s hand and followed Lily and Knight to the station wagon. “I wanted to tell her about the parade,” she said, lifting Julie into the middle seat.

“The parade,” Lily repeated after her, fumbling beneath the brake pedal for the keys she had just found and dropped.

“Honestly,” Martha said. “You’d think there might have been
some
body there.”

“You can try her again when we get home.” Lily fitted the key into the ignition with meticulous care while she tried to work the parade, the rain, and Sarah into some reasonable sequence. “By then it’ll be after midnight in Philadelphia. Maybe they’ll be home then.”

“Oh no,” Martha said. “It’s only five-thirty there now. The man in the Rexall told me.”

“It’s almost eight-thirty here. You
know
it’s later there.”

“I’m sure I don’t know why the man in the Rexall would have told me a deliberate
lie.”

“If he told you that he just didn’t
know
. We
know.”

Martha shrugged. “I don’t know. I don’t know what to believe.”

Lily switched on the windshield wipers but did not start the engine.

“Anyway it’s too late,” Martha said. “If it’s midnight there, as you insist it is, it’s too late.”

“Too late for what?”

Martha leaned against the window and took off her sunglasses. Her eyes were closed. “I don’t know,” she said. “I didn’t want to go home and I thought I might go there, but it’s too late.”

“I don’t know what you’re
talk
ing about.”

“Sarah. I’m talking about my sister. I wanted to talk to Sarah. If you don’t mind.”

21

They buried Martha’s body beneath the cherry tree near the levee on the morning of the twenty-second of March. Everett and Henry Sears (who had been sleeping off the flu and a four-day drunk when Everett had the night before begun shouting and pounding at the door of the foreman’s cottage
Sears you bastard Sears get out here)
carried the coffin: a long rope-handled sea chest, packed for the past thirty years with Mildred McClellan’s linens, ends of lace, a box of jet beading from a dress, and the ivory fan carried by Martha’s great-great-grandmother Currier at Governor Leland Stanford’s Inaugural Ball in 1862; unpacked the night before when Everett said
I’m telling you for the last time, Lily, get McGrath out of here, get his deputy out of here, and get that son of a bitch quack doctor out of here, she’s my sister, I’m going to bury her, and I’m going to bury her on the ranch
.

Lily walked behind them, her arms full of flowers. Everett had been out before dawn, pulling up every daffodil left after the rain, tearing down whole branches of camellias. When they reached the place Everett had chosen they laid the sea chest on the wet ground, and Everett spelled Sears digging the grave. Numb with the morning cold, Lily stood holding the flowers and listening to the water. Every hour now, the river ran faster and higher with the melting mountain snow: tearing at the banks, jamming together logs and debris and then smashing through the jams.

As she watched Sears dig it occurred to her that Martha’s body could well be washed out by evening, the unnailed lid of the sea chest ripped open and Martha free again in the water in the white silk dress with the butterflies.
($250, I should wear it every day, every evening, and every night to bed
, she had said last night when she was dressing for the party and Lily had warned the rain might spot the silk,
Just ask Everett if I shouldn’t.)
It was not right to bury her this way: McGrath had said it
(I’m telling you, Everett, it’s against the law of the State of California);
Edith Knight had said it this morning when she came in her robe to pick up the children
(I’m not talking about the law. I’m not talking about any law run through by the undertakers’ lobby. I’m talking about what’s right and what’s wrong);
the doctor had said it; she had said it herself.
Everett baby you don’t know what you’re doing
. They had each said it for different reasons and Everett had listened to none of them.

“You hear it rising?” Everett said, looking up at the levee.

Sears stopped digging to fasten his jacket against the wind. “Going to crest at thirty-eight.”

“When’s that?”

“Near to noon. Thiel’s Landing.” Sears was coughing now. He wiped the back of his hand across his mouth and picked up the shovel again.

Everett put his hand on Lily’s shoulder.

“You want to move into town?”

She shook her head. “I don’t see any need.”

Sears looked up. “There ain’t no problem this far up. Downriver maybe.”

“The Engineers might blast it tonight. Upstream. We’d get some water.”

“They wouldn’t blast a levee until they’d evacuated,” Lily said. “We’d know.”

Everett shrugged and took the shovel from Sears.

Because she did not want Everett to see that she was crying Lily shifted the flowers close to her face. It would be all right, these next few hours, if she could keep her mind on the water. Where and when would the levee go, were the levee to go at all: there was the question to consider. Somewhere in her mind was a file of information, gathered and classified every year there was high water, and it was upon those facts that she must now focus her attention. At what point had they opened the Colusa Weir. How many gates were open at the Sacramento Weir. When would the Bypass reach capacity. What was the flood stage at Wilkins Slough. At Rough and Ready Bend. Fremont Weir. Rio Vista.

Obscurely comforted by her ability to remember, however uselessly, flood stages which bore no relation to this year’s flood, she stood with her eyes closed and did not think of Martha for half an hour.

“All right,” Everett said then, propping the shovel against the tree. “That’s enough.”

He took one end of the chest by its rope handle and Sears took the other; together they lowered it into the grave, already filling with seepage. Lily kneeled in the mud to drop the flowers on the chest, but Everett pulled her up.

“Not yet.” He motioned Sears to stand back from the grave.

Oh Christ
, Lily thought. He’ll say that prayer and they’ll cover her with dirt and that’s all there is.
Christ in heaven
. How many people did you bury before you stopped screaming inside at the thought of that first night in the dark.

“Gentle Jesus, meek and mild,”
Everett repeated without inflection. It was the prayer he and Martha had learned as children.
“Look upon a little child. Pity her simplicity and suffer her to come to thee.”

“God bless Martha, amen,” Lily whispered.

Everett did not look at her. “Now,” he said.

She dropped the camellias into the grave and stood back.

“Henry’s going back to the house with you.” Everett picked up the shovel. “Get him some breakfast.”

China Mary was not in the kitchen: she had gone, late the afternoon before, to visit her sister in Courtland. They should have called her after it happened. They should have called and brought her home before they buried Martha; she had raised Martha. But there had been so many people last night: the sheriff, the deputy, the respirator squad, the doctor, Sears, even the children, wakened by the sirens; and by the time they were alone there was no use calling anyone because Everett wanted no one there. They should have called Sarah. They should have called maybe fifty people but above all they should have called China Mary and they should have called Sarah.
Sarah can’t come, there’s no reason to call her
, Everett had said.
It’s too late. She left here of her own will and anyway it’s too late now
. She had said
You’re getting worse than your father was
, knowing that Sarah would hear about it from her, would read that her sister had drowned when the mail arrived one morning next week at her ivied brick house in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania, for Lily could never call her alone. She had tried to call Everett when his father died but had been unable to say it. Martha had finally taken the telephone and said it.

Lily dropped her raincoat on the table and held out her hand for Sears’s jacket.

“Sit down. I’ll fix bacon and eggs and biscuits. I had the biscuit batter made for Everett but he didn’t eat.”

“No bacon.” Sears paused. “He don’t seem so good.”

“He’s upset. That’s all. All his family’s gone now.” She forgot for the moment Sarah, and when she did remember Sarah it did not much change the sense of what she had said to Sears.

“Got you and two kids. That’s family.”

Lily did not say anything.

“I didn’t figure her that way,” Sears said after a while.

“What way.”

“I didn’t figure her to do something like that. She grew up on the river, she should have known enough not to take a boat like that out when it’s in flood.”

“I don’t know.”

“Where’d she think she was going to get to?”

“I don’t know,” Lily repeated.

She knew, she knew better than that:
Everett had said it, almost shouted it, after he carried Martha’s drenched body up from the dock. Down there on the dock he had not said anything much to anyone. He said nothing to Lily from the time he first shouted from the driveway
Get McGrath the hell over here with a respirator
until the time, almost an hour and a half later, he laid Martha’s body on her bed upstairs. By the time she had called McGrath at home and run down to the dock, Everett was already in the water, on the end of the rope Sears was still knotting around a piling.
What happened
, she kept saying, and finally Sears said
Martha. She was holding onto the boat but I don’t know how long
. In the dark (they did not have the flares until McGrath arrived a few minutes later) she could see nothing, neither Everett nor Martha, not even the boat, overturned and caught on a trunk off the far bank. If Sears had not told her about the boat she would not have known that much, because Everett, after he brought Martha in with him on the rope, said nothing. In the brilliant cold light of the flares they had watched then for an hour while the boys with the respirator knelt over Martha on the wet dock, but it was nowhere near an hour before they all knew, all but Everett and maybe Everett knew too. “Thank Christ he didn’t lose his head and go out there without the rope,” McGrath said to Lily after the first fifteen minutes. “You’d have lost them both.” “We haven’t lost anybody,” Everett said flatly, looking up from where he crouched at Martha’s head, staring at McGrath with confused malice; McGrath looked at his deputy and they both looked away from Lily. It had been five or six minutes later when the doctor arrived and two or three minutes after that when he pronounced Martha dead. “She’s alive,” Everett said. “You don’t know anything about her.” Thirty minutes later he admitted what they all knew: “All right,” he said. “All right.”