WE LIVED WITH THE INTENSITY OF FERAL CATS. The river seeped through the ground beneath the dike, and as they became sodden, the bags were like pulpy fruit oozing sour juice. We took turns minding the pumps. We became an island. The fields of wheat or snow surrounding treed islands, at night the lights of our cottages blinking. More recent were the windbreaks, planted since the Depression, breakwaters of maple or willow in single rows, bending south. Eli took up his guitar, partly to entertain himself through flood-inspired insomnia, partly to insure its safety. We discovered that Jack liked to sing. The bitterness I’d seen that night did not resurface.
I hadn’t yet told Eli. He was working so hard against the flood that I was afraid he too would die. My own pain entered a place bordered by a sort of untested hypothesis. I relived the moment before the firing squad over and over. I would just stay there, could go no further. I didn’t sleep, but under the circumstances no one noticed. I relived my daughter’s life. She was vivid. I experienced every moment of my time with her.
We stuffed everything we could into the rafters: furniture, food, bedding. We tied Jack’s white glider to the roof. All else stood on the sandy floor, cleansed of value. Dianna occupied a couch balanced precariously in the beams above the kitchen, the warmest spot on our island. I brought her beetles and white worms, moles and voles from the sump pits, lifting them up to her perch as if I were feeding a barn owl. She preferred drawing flora, but fauna must do on the ark. She watched our proceedings with disapproval. And she never questioned Jack again.
The phones were still working. During this time, Bill seemed released from the tension of listening for Helen’s return, and he spoke more that month than at any time before or since. “Something’s clicking the line,” he said and looked accusingly at Ida. Ida’s muskrat coat, soaked with sand and river, weighed two hundred pounds. Proudly, she puffed up her chest, nodded and smiled. Her right incisor had died and turned grey, but her face was fatted, so age flattered her and she had become one of those handsome pigeon-women. At that moment, we all were thinking, It isn’t just Ida who’s brought the RCMP into our lives. Anyone who had gone to fight for the republicans in Spain was considered a subversive. Our eyes flitted to the window to look at the trench warfare of our yard, searching for Helen. There was only water, liver grey. When the Mounties asked for Helen, we told them, “Off with the Mac-Paps. Off with the anti-Fascists. Is there a problem?” They looked at us strangely. One officer blinked in disbelief and said, “Since 1936?” Still, we had harboured her; she was a gate left open, a light left on. I didn’t change that; I couldn’t extinguish the light.
We had one cow at the time—thank God only one—a good milker, so we were getting loaded up with milk. Steel canisters lined up as clean as bombs on top of the potting table on the porch. It was on a Wednesday, near the end of April, that Jack took my arm. “Time to go,” he said. “The road’s wiped out, and we can’t put Bossy on the wagon.”
He was right. And as always in the flood, it was too late. We had to grit the sand in our teeth and wade through a cold current that boiled the gravel off the road. I tied the cow to my wagon, which was loaded with several of the milk canisters, and tried to walk west, to the railway tracks. Jack gave the cow a thwack on the butt. No time, ever. Water came over my boots, rode up my pants, made walking painful. The kind of cold that amputates.
Eli’s hand was frozen in mine. “She’s dead, isn’t she,” he said.
We slid on the broken road. I didn’t look at his face. I looked at the ice and branches in our path, so it’s that face, the face of the river, I see when I remember Eli’s voice that day, when I hear his reckoning. In the rain on the day the road went under, we came to our loss as if it were a presence, a constant. Our daughter’s death had always been so, and would be ever-more. That was the utopia of the flood. The singular means of Helen’s death would strike at us later.
We put Ida in the wagon and pinned her down with luggage. Eli and I held on to each other. We didn’t know where Bill and Dianna were. We reached the tracks and boarded Bossy, milk, Eli, Ida, myself. And Jack.
Jack was cheered by the walk out. He went off to talk to the conductor. It was the first I would see of Jack’s explorations. Jack travels. Then I remembered that he’d literally dropped in. Jack had simply become part of the broken machinery of our lives. All around the rail line lay the vengeful old lake. Resuming. Bill would’ve stayed behind with Dianna. Fugitives have to stay near the source of their innocence.
Bill and Dianna were having an argument. Dianna was refusing to leave the house. She could only picture her mother coming back through all that water to reclaim her. And find Dianna gone.
When the dike broke, they watched the oil-like patch enter the front door and cross the floor till it reached all the walls, where it climbed up. The windows exploded, now one, then another. The smell of mud was rich and exclusive. The river entered our home with an animal persistence, sliding up steadily. Then it stopped a couple of feet below their perch. Bill looked at Dianna with the mildest reproach. “Here we are,” he said.
Dianna crawled over to look out the small porthole under the eaves. Her mother would need a boat.
The sky cleared in May. The prairie was an open sea except for the giveaway windbreaks, just the fingertips of the drowned. It warmed up. There was much to observe. Things reduced to a minimum give a slow, ample yield. Every day, Dianna measured the river’s erratic ebb with charcoal, dangling from the rafters with Bill holding her upside down by her feet. Only the two of them, waiting for Mama, who would come in a boat. They’d be like two boats on the sea. They would give her all their attention. There is time here. Everything changes into the next thing, but slowly. So you’re ready. So you know, you can draw it. They lived on raw potatoes, carrots, wrinkled rutabagas we’d hauled up from the root cellar. She refused to eat her parsnips but was otherwise uncomplaining. Through all the discomfort, Dianna never grumbled. She was afraid that her dad would make her leave.
Marie was at large, hovering over the sallow sea. Helen’s return was imminent, especially now that there was only water. Dianna listened. She could not keep her eyes focused when the bullfrogs droned. Even in the sun, while her father was reading and water slapped against the house, she heard the footstep, felt the caress, and she slept.