Once we had a flood. It took only a few hours for the river to crest. The waters came through in a hurry making the roads impassable and disturbing the graves in the cemetery. Quite a few caskets washed down the streets. Some empty and others full. A few kids stood on top of the coffins pretending to surf. Other people used them as fishing boats. I watched the waters for a few hours from the porch. We were safe. We were on high ground. Then one coffin floated close to where the lawn used to be. A woman was inside using a broken plank of wood as a paddle. It was Grandmother. We had buried her a few weeks earlier. She looked about as ugly as you might expect from a buried grandmother. She paddled her way to dry ground, then stumbled up the grassy slope over the sandbags toward the house. Water dripped from her hair and burial gown. I took a long breath. It aimed to be a long evening.
She sat beside me on the porch in her old rocking chair. She said she was exhausted after all that paddling and such rain was giving her a headache and wasn’t I going to offer her something to drink? She was parched. She was covered in a lot of mud, almost unrecognizable. But a boy always remembers his nana.
I pulled the hammer back on the pistol and placed it on the table between us. Just in case. I didn’t offer her a towel. I did offer her a glass of whiskey. She had worked up quite a sweat getting the coffin this far.
“Nana,” I finally said, “I thought we agreed you would remain deceased.”
Nana didn’t say anything. She took little sips of whiskey.
At the sound of my voice my wife came through the open doorway. “Is it thieves?” she asked, holding a baseball bat almost as big as her.
“No. It’s no thief,” I said calmly. “Just Nana.”
My wife looked at me, perplexed as an old shoe. “What is she doing back? Isn’t she dead?”
“That was the arrangement.”
“Then what the hell is she doing here?”
“She won’t say,” I said. I looked over at Nana. Nana watched the flood. She hadn’t been invited and didn’t want to be impolite. My wife took a long look at Nana sitting on the porch having her sips of whiskey.
“If she won’t talk then shoot her,” my wife said.
Then she left us to fix supper.
“You look nice,” Nana said once we were alone. “Not exactly happy, but nice.”
“I’m very happy,” I said.
“Are you, sweetie?”
I took a few sips of whiskey. I listened to the flood. It rippled. It murmured. The water in the street was turning more and more to mud. It was rising. If it kept up like this the high ground would get flooded. A crowd had gathered on the embankment to throw things into the flood. It was as if they weren’t sure they would ever have another chance.
“I’d hug you,” I told Nana, “but I just put on a clean shirt.”
“It was niggers,” Nana said suddenly. “They were looting graves. I thought it was the trumpets of the Lord calling me to my eternal reward but it was just niggers laughing. One minute we were there in our peace and quiet and the next we were floating away.”
“No,” I said, correcting her because I knew there was nothing she disliked more than being corrected. “We’re having a flood. It’s just one of those days when nature rears its ugly face.”
“Whatever it is my dress is ruined,” Nana said, flecking the mud off her hem.
She lit a cigarette. This was a new development, one I did not quite understand. The Nana I knew never smoked. Maybe this was not Nana? Her skin was pale, almost the color of lavender. She did not seem bothered by all the mud on her. This was also not like Nana. She was always one for cleanliness, a proper kind of Southern woman. She wiped her nose with the back of her wrist.
“You’re not upset, are you, Nana?”
“Nope. I appreciate a good flood.”
I could tell she was being polite. She was madder than a cat birthing a litter.
“You didn’t leave us much choice,” I started to explain, but then quit before trying.
The muddy waters pulsed and turned, coughing up all kinds of waste: a baby grand piano, clocks with no hands, a mattress, a record player with Leadbelly tunes, even a light bulb still clinging to the last of its glow. It all washed down the road in a patient ebb and flow.
“I wasn’t dead,” Nana insisted.
“In fairness, you weren’t exactly living either.”
We saw a few bodies floating in the water. Elderly or young we could not tell.
After a few hours we had suffered just about enough of Nana. She complained why had we buried her in such a terrible part of town where niggers rob graves. She complained that the man buried next to her smelled like a Jew. She tore down the curtains my wife put up because the color gave her a pain in the ocular zone, then hugged my wife and said it must be hard to keep a clean house with her condition, and told us if she was going to stay we would have to get rid of the pussy.
“I’m allergic to cats,” Nana said.
“This is our house now. We inherited it,” my wife said. “We can do with it what we want.”
“What are you going to do with this big house, dear? You can’t possibly use all the space.”
“We want to start a family, Nana,” my wife said.
“Oh dear, you’re not going to nurse a baby with those tits, are you?”
While Nana was in the kitchen fixing the mess my wife had made of supper we stood in the parlor and spoke in low voices.
“Get rid of her. It’s already a lousy anniversary,” my wife said.
“She’s family.”
“We’re trying to make a family, remember?”
I didn’t want to argue. Her insistence on having a family frightened me.
“Can she at least stay for dinner? We can’t send her away on an empty stomach.”
I made up something about a new policy in the town bylaws. There is a twenty-four hour moratorium for the disposal of the recently deceased during floods, I told my wife. It was the law.
My wife took the pistol and aimed it on the lamp across the room. Before I could say anything she had shot out a window. It made a terrible noise, like a halo being ripped in half. That’s the sound when a gun goes off—like a church bell calling after you.
“You have a choice to make. Get rid of her,” my wife said as she handed me the pistol, “or I will.”
She was serious. Once I had seen her crush three ladybugs. Some of the parents at church had complained she told dirty jokes to the children in Sunday school. There was no telling what she was capable of, but getting rid of Nana was probably one of them.
It made me sad to think of what would happen next. When it floods we lose our wits. When it floods, we are no longer the person we see in the mirror. We have to be somebody else. When it floods there is no natural order, just the one we make with our hands.
“Come on, Nana,” I said. “Help me throw these curtains into the flood.”
Nana was happy to help. She took one bundle and I took another. We walked down the grassy slope onto the muddy embankment. I kept my eyes ahead of me on the gray stretch of neighborhood. It was that hour of night when the rain fell sad and nameless.
“This looks like a nice spot,” Nana said.
“Just a little farther,” I said.
We kept walking, careful not to slip in the mud. I asked Nana if she remembered the time right after my father died when I lost the lucky nickel he gave me. A bird had swallowed it at the park. And how my mom followed that bird for three miles into the swamp before she finally shot it with one of grandpa’s pistols. But when we brought it home and cut it open we never found the lucky nickel. For a while every time we saw one of those birds we grabbed our slingshots until it got to the point we ran out of pebbles and the birds avoided our land. We had to let go.
“It was a pheasant. You don’t soon forget something like that.”
“Will you do me a favor? Will you tell my father I’m sorry I lost the nickel?”
“You can tell him soon enough, dear,” Nana said. Even though I could no longer see her face, I knew she was smiling.
Then I hit her with the butt of the pistol. I did it gently. I didn’t want to hurt her. She folded up like an accordion. It didn’t take much effort to toss her into the flood. She floated for a few seconds, then drifted away.
I followed the mud back to the house. People on the other side of the flood were bringing out new sandbags. A few preachers were standing on the sandbags with outstretched hands, commanding the muddy waters in the name of Jesus to recede. The waters didn’t listen. The waters rose. The mud thickened. Valdosta was going under.
A short ways from the house I saw a woman on the embankment holding a baby wrapped in a bed sheet. She turned in awkward circles. When she looked at me I could see she was crying.
“Have you seen my baby?” she shouted.
I eased myself down the mud bank. When I got closer I shook my head. “Sorry, lady. What did it look like?”
Without saying a word she pushed the bundle of sheets into my arms and jumped into the flood. I saw her bobbing in the waves for a second, this angelic and serene look on her face, and then she was gone.
When I pulled open the bed sheet it was filled with mud. Then I had the horrible feeling the woman had gone crazy and buried her child in the mud. I started searching for it, pulling back heavy mud slops into the flood water.
A man walked by with his teenage son. “Over here!” I screamed. They came running. I told them some woman lost her baby in the mud.
We pulled back heaps of mud. Pretty soon there was a crowd of people looking for the lost baby. Whenever somebody walked by, they wanted to help. It made you feel good about the world, especially on a day like this.
Some people were more serious than others. After an hour of looking I looked up and saw a few teenagers had begun to sculpt some of the mud into the shape of an enormous baby. They kept massaging handfuls of mud into the pile. People thought this was funny and strange and amusing. Pretty soon people stopped looking for the lost baby and took turns sculpting the mud baby. Nobody said anything. It was an awful silence. Too many people had lost something in the flood that now they were determined to find something, even if they had to make it out of mud.
“It’s just mud,” I said.
But they were having none of it. They brought more and more mud until the mud baby had a head and belly and big fat arms and big fat legs. It was huge. And it kept getting bigger. Now people were laughing. This was all just a game to them.
I ran away. I thought I was losing my mind.
My wife was waiting for me back at the house. She had a bath ready, which was good because I was covered in mud. She said supper would be ready soon.
“We’re good people, right?” I said, putting my arm around her waist.
“Of course. We’re happy, right?”
“Right,” I said, but less sure than when I said it before.
I looked out the window. Not far away I could see the tower of mud taking shape. It looked like it might touch the sky, it looked like it would cover the town. Someday that mud baby would rise up and get rid of all of us. That’s what happens after the flood. During the flood nothing makes sense. But after the flood—that’s when the towering things emerge and make themselves known. It was just the nature of things. Just like sooner or later everything is replaceable and the young bury the old to make room for more young. We were not outside that circle.
I could hear the church bells, calling out far away.
I found the pheasant my wife had shot in the yard on the kitchen table. I cut it open and was not surprised when I didn’t find my lucky nickel. I cut out its heart and watched it beat seventy-two times in my hand. Each beat sounded like a tolling bell that between beats liquefied with the rest of Valdosta.