COME HELL

LACY M. JOHNSON

It started raining in the fall and kept raining even as the temperature dropped, when the rain became snow, falling like scraps of wet cloth, which collected in giant drifts. In the spring, the snow turned back to rain and kept falling, and by summer, the creeks and rivers had filled and left their banks, submerging first the low farmlands, then the farmhouses and barns and steel outbuildings, and then also the train tracks, abandoned coal mines, the highways and bridges, so that an archipelago of grass and silos and trees stretched between the Missouri and Mississippi Rivers from South Dakota to the Gateway Arch. The rain kept falling even through the summer, when the rivers, grown to monstrous size, approached the edges of towns and then filled the streets. People moved their homes and businesses—moved entire towns—to higher ground. In the summer, when the river was at its widest and deepest, the days underwater accumulated: seventy-five, ninety-seven, one hundred fifty. This was Missouri in 1993.

A year before the rain started, my parents had sold the farm where I’d spent what felt like my entire childhood and moved into town to a house only five blocks from our church. Living so close to the pulpit meant that not even the worst flood in sixty-five years could keep us from attending service every Sunday morning and every Wednesday night. As thunder shook the stained glass in the sanctuary, our pastor, Brother Michael we’ll call him, told us, his faithful congregation, how God had sent the flood of the Old Testament to cleanse the Earth of sin and moral depravity, how he had instructed Noah to build the Ark and gather the animals, and how this flood, our flood, was also an instruction from God to gather to one another and to Him, to “be fruitful and increase in number and fill the earth.” God made the Earth for us, Brother Michael told us from the pulpit. He made the sun for us and the rain for us, even rain that falls for an entire year. My family sat, as usual, near the rear of the church; my father nodded as Brother Michael raised his voice and his hands. The rain will cease and the clouds will part, he told us, and the rainbow that God will bend down from Heaven will be the token of that everlasting covenant between us and Him: “Just as I gave you the green plants, I now give you everything.”

God had given me as many summers on the farm as I could remember, and now that we’d moved to town I could hardly find a thing to do. Our farm hadn’t even been very big—only seventy-six acres, and much of that was forested—but I could spend the whole day walking the perimeter and learn the history of the weather in the shapes of the land: the way the creek bottom held a millennium of flooding in its black soil, the way trees on the ridge that marked the edge of our property had died and toppled years ago in a drought. But our new house sat right next to our neighbors on both sides, and life felt enclosed and small. I could ride my bike across the entire town in less than a morning and see only ghosts of what the town had once been: an abandoned coal elevator behind the Benjamin Franklin downtown, the sharp bare ridges of surface mines that sloped into deep black pits, the rail lines that once carried coal from the local mines to the power plant where my father worked, and now carried it to the plant from much, much farther away. When it was raining, I’d sit on the floor of my upstairs bedroom and try to record songs from the radio onto cassette tapes while my sister read the funny pages from the newspaper in the other room, the headlines announcing the river cresting, another record, thousands losing access to drinking water, to electricity. Sometimes my sister and I would walk down the street to the edge of the water to throw leaves and sticks and watch them river away.

During the worst of the flooding, when my father would leave the house every morning to drive his pickup truck along the dry backroads on his way to the power plant, my mother would cross her arms and let out a long, tired sigh. I’d been to the power plant maybe only one time, but I could hold an image of it clear in my mind: the green fields cradling a deep blue lake that stretched for miles, surrounded by a forest of maple trees. At the southern tip of the lake the land was charred gray and black—no trees, no grass, no flowers or even any weeds—and in the middle of this burnt-out place, right against the edge of the lake, three churning smokestacks belched black smoke that on a clear day I could see from miles away.

I didn’t understand what my father did for work at the time, but I knew the power plant provided electricity to dozens of towns’ worth of stop lights, attic fans, refrigerators, and single lightbulbs swinging from wires in basements. I also knew my father had been raised on a farm, like me, and on the farm he had studied the gospel of the planting and the harvest, the cycle of hunting in the winter and swimming in the summer, and of watching fog roll down from the hills when summer turned toward fall. He understood what it meant to bale hay and birth calves, and also that he didn’t want to do that sweaty, back-breaking labor his whole life if he didn’t have to, so he went to college and learned how to turn coal into electricity and wear a collared shirt. Now that he worked at the power plant, my father believed what Brother Michael told him in church: that coal is a blessing if we use it to power our cities; that oil is a blessing when we turn it to gasoline. God gave humans the Earth, my father believed, and we please God when we use His gifts to fulfill our needs.

I learned only later that coal had once been abundant in the part of Missouri where we lived—fields of it as wide as entire counties; seams of it tatted under the land like black lace—but when the coal mines started to run dry, and mining local coal got more expensive than shipping it in, the mines closed, the miners left, the town withered, and new coal, “cleaner” coal, started arriving at the power plant by the truckload to be spray-cleaned, cracked, crushed, pulverized, and burned to produce the dirtiest kind of electricity—each ton of coal producing almost two tons of carbon dioxide, a billion tons of coal burned in the United States every year, polluting the air we try to breathe as much as all of our cars, trucks, buses, and planes combined, enough to melt glaciers in the Himalayas and the ice caps on the planet’s two poles, enough to raise the sea level of every ocean on Earth, and to cause increasingly severe disasters every year—decades-long droughts that turn farmland to desert, wildfires that turn ancestral forests to ash. I didn’t know whether my father knew that then. I didn’t know that then.

All I knew was that when my father came home from work every evening, we’d gather at the dinner table and he would ask us to bow our heads to pray. Some nights we’d thank God for the food on our table and the clothes on our backs; other nights we’d ask God to help the men who’d lost their farms in the flood, who’d lost their jobs at the power plant, who’d lost their homes, who’d lost everything. After my sister and I cleaned up all the dishes and loaded the dishwasher, my father would fall asleep in his armchair while the rain filled the streets and the news played on television—the living room flickering with footage of the swollen rivers, brown and fast and so wide in some places that I held my breath while the camera tried to take it all in: cars underwater, crops underwater, women walking through water carrying baskets, men carrying their children on their backs, houses bobbing in the water, grain silos underwater. The weatherman ran his hands through his hair while water rushed through broken levees. Baseball stadiums filled with water; American flags flapped from submerged poles; men stacked sandbags outside their storefronts; coffins bobbed in shallow lakes—semi trucks underwater, gas stations, train cars carrying coal to the power plant where my father worked. The coal he burned at the power plant had no more to do with the flood that was drowning every farm from here to South Dakota, my father believed, than the way he tied his shoes.

I never once heard my father say the phrase “global warming” or “climate change”—not until decades later, when he had already decided he didn’t believe they exist—though I often heard him say “Heavenly Father” and “Amen.” One night in late summer, when the rain had finally started to let up, my father had just finished blessing our dinner when the phone rang in the kitchen. My father stood up, folded his napkin onto his plate, and walked to where the phone hung from the wall. He lifted the receiver and listened for a moment before holding it out to me. I pulled the long spiral cord into the bathroom and a friend on the other end whispered that there was a party later, out where all the roads were flooded, out past our old farm, where the sheriffs couldn’t reach us in their low Crown Victorias. I didn’t hesitate to lie to my parents about where I would be. I rode in the backseat of a tiny hatchback packed with more teenagers than seat belts down a long gravel road to the water’s edge, then climbed with the others into the bed of a tall pickup truck and sat on the wheel well and held tight to the edge. The driver eased us forward into the water—a dark, glistening mirror for the cloudless night—and ferried us slowly to the dry ground on the other side, to wet hay bales and a fire that burned while my classmates passed bottles and bottles of cheap alcohol. Hours later, I lay back in the wet grass and looked up into a sky of stars spinning above me and though I wanted to feel God in everything, to feel certain of Him like my father did, all I felt was the movement of the water all around us, carrying us toward a future I couldn’t yet see. The gospel I learned from the forests and the trees, the creeks and the water, the crops and the land, I decided, was that the Earth belonged to itself; none of it belonged to me.

After the water receded, and the farmland dried, and the old pit mines drained, and the farmers began tilling the river sand deep into the fields that produce less and less every year, my father left for work each morning, driving to the power plant on the highway instead of the back roads, and the three smokestacks went on belching black smoke day after day, year after year, like nothing had changed. We went to church every Sunday morning and every Wednesday night, and before dinner my father asked us to bow our heads to pray. For a while, my sister read the funny page from the newspaper, and I sat on the floor of my bedroom recording songs from the radio onto cassette tapes while trying to imagine what I would take with me when I left. What I loved most about that place was the warm black soil on the creek bottom, the fog rolling down from the ridge of trees, the way the wind rippled the fields of grass in waves. But none of those things were mine to take, and besides, by then they were already gone.