We waited.
For fear of drowning, I couldn’t force my hand to turn loose of the tree branch.
My cat friend didn’t budge. She remain crouched over her feet, shoulders up in wet points, as though glued to the cypress bark. A wet cat is a very small animal.
“Cat, we’re stuck here in a low spot. The water’s possible thinner over yonder. But I wonder what’s below the surface, down under. It might be a deeper hole.”
No sense in leaving hold of a large tree that had floated us through a entire storm. So I stayed, and waited. So did my cat. Cats aren’t very tall at all. No cat was about to jump off a safe place and into unknowed water. I decided to let Cat decide for the pair of us. Whenever she left, I could also go.
I final spotted a person, a woman carrying a child and a small dog, wading through water that was above her knees. She plowed through one cautious step at a time. Then another.
“Hello,” I hollered.
She didn’t seem to hear.
As there was still so much water inside me, I could merely half yell and half cough.
“Hello. Hello.”
The woman, I could see as she waded closer, was a large colored lady. Both of her burdens (a dog and a child) was white. All three looked dirty and wet and as tired as I was. The colored lady was searching one way, then another, calling out a name.
“Wilbert.”
Again I yelled to her. “Hello. Over here.”
She couldn’t hear me a bit.
“Wilbert,” she kept calling. “Wilbert Day. Where you be, Wilbert honey? Wilbert. Wilbert.”
Her voice sounded as if she was crying.
Ripping off a long cypress twig, longer than I was tall, I waved it in the air, back and forth, splashing the water on one side of me and then on the opposite. It made the cat flinch.
“Hello,” I kept calling. “Over here.”
The hollering, plus the weight and labor of waving my branch to and fro in a half circle, made me real tired. But I didn’t quit. I kept it up until the lady noticed me.
She final looked my way. “Wilbert?”
“No, it’s me … Arly Poole.”
“You seen my man, my Wilbert?”
I shook my head.
“He gone,” she cried. “Wilbert be clean gone.”
The water wasn’t as deep now. I could stand without any help. So, it was time to be brave. Or act it. Grabbing a quick but firm hold on my cat, in spite of her hissing that she wanted to stick on the tree, I started wading to where the colored lady was still holding the child and dog.
As I got close, she spoke.
“You a boy.”
“Who you be?”
“Arly Poole. I’m a sort of a member of The Golden Prophets. You know, it’s a church. The Golden Prophets of Salvation.”
She just stared and said, “We Baptist.”
Wading closer, I said, “You’re the first person I seen alive. Everyone else is got drown. Honest.”
“It’s fearful bad,” she said.
“Yes’m. I’m sorry you’re missing Wilbert.”
“You a polite boy. I can tell you got raised up among a nice family. A proper family.”
Remembering my daddy, Dan Poole, a vegetable picker from Shack Row, I said, “Yes’m. My daddy was a rightful proper gentleman.”
“What be your name again?”
Near to her now, I said, “Arly Poole.”
She shrugged. “I don’t know no Poole peoples. Poole? No indeed I don’t. You from here in Moore Haven?”
I blinked at the half-dunked cars and washed-away buildings. Nothing looked like anything. “Where we at?” I asked. “Is … this …” I couldn’t believe I’d final found … nothing.
“Maybe it be Moore Haven … or close to.” She looked around. “But I don’t see anyplace I know. Nothing, or nobody.” She turned to me. “My name is Hyacinth Day.” She almost smiled. “My peoples all call me Hya, like it sound like saying hello.”
On all sides of us, as Mrs. Day and I stood in the knee-deep water and mud, there was near to nothing that looked like a town or a city. Moore Haven was mostly two things. Water and busted wood. Floating bits of boards. There was no land. Trees, most of them bare, sprouted up from the shallow water like stakes. A series of large logs, straight up.
Mrs. Day looked confused. “Maybe,” she said, “we ain’t here.”
“I don’t understand.”
“It sure don’t look like no Moore Haven,” she said. “Not a bitty grit like the place I got born at. Maybe we be miles away.”
Her dog had spotted my cat, and in a breath it was plain to see they wasn’t intend to be friends.
“I got a letter,” I said, feeling it inside my shirt. “What day is today? I’m supposed to git to Moore Haven before my new family forgits I’m coming.”
“It be Sunday … Sunday evening.”
For some reason I could recall the date … 16 September 1928. It was Delilah’s birthday.
We met people. Not many. A man, a old woman, and two children. Then a few more people appeared. Everybody asked everyone where we were. Nobody knowed for sure. We all guess. None of us were from the same place.
“There’s no water,” a woman quietly said. “All this water, and there’s no water to drink.”
“No food,” a man whine. All he wore was a shirt, badly tore, wrapped around his middle and crotch, just enough to cover him decent. Seeing him made me look down at my own clothes. My trousers had only one leg; my shirt only half of one sleeve, and no buttons. Needless to say, no shoes or stockings on me.
Not a one of us was proper dressed, because all of our clothes looked like rags, or less. Rags and string. Whether black or white or in between, we appeared to all be of one color:
Mud.
Everything and everybody had been coated brown.
We all sloshed around in circles, wading in the murky water, seeing that nothing looked like anything we’d ever see before.
My stomach was so empty I was hurting. I had to find something to eat, for myself, for my little wet cat, and for anyone else I could find food for. There didn’t seem to be stores, or houses. Just heaps of gray lumber that was twisted and tumbled into scrap.
Mrs. Day nodded at a tree. “Bless me,” she said slowly, “but I think I seen a tree like that someplace. It a split oak.”
From one of the oak tree’s large lower branches hung a rope, frayed and snarled, appearing as if a child’s swing had once hung there. Maybe a tire.
I tried to remember Mrs. Newell’s cousin. And then did. His name was Alfred Bonner.
But now there was no Moore Haven.
I looked at my soaked unreadable letter, as worthless as I felt.