The River Widow
Ann Howard Creel
Chapter One
1937
Her hands were lined and scarred and looked older than her thirty-one years. They had read cards and cooked and scrubbed and carried wood. They had turned the pages of books, touched love, and been betrayed by it.
These hands now dragged her husband’s body to the river to let the flood take it away.
Now they had touched death, too.
D ecember had been as mild as autumn, but in January, winter blew in cold and icy. A n ominous haze lay on the horizon, iron clouds streaked across the sky, speared icicles hung from the barn eaves, and frost on the ground spread like a savage web.
The sleet and rain started and wouldn’t let up, day after day, and then the flood warnings came. By the time they heard, the Ohio River had overrun its banks and inundated their lowland cornfields. She and Les raced with his daughter to Les’s folks’ farm on higher ground near Lone Oak, left Daisy there, and then came back to free the livestock and salvage what they could from the house, as everything inside was sure to be ruined.
While Les aimed for the livestock barn, Adah Branch ran through the driving rain up the creaking, peeling front steps to the house, flung open the screen and the door, and then stood inside looking around her loveless home while holding a big burlap bag in her hands. They should’ve evacuated days earlier; it was almost too late. Paducah was flooding, and swollen creeks had made many of the icy roads impassable. This would be their last chance to salvage anything before the water rose, perhaps high enough to submerge the house and everything else along the Ohio.
Eyes slowly adjusting to the darkness—the electricity was out—she perused the room while her thoughts spun. The fraying rag rug wasn’t good enough to save, the old blown-glass lamps too fragile, the sagging furniture too big. Their best piece, a polished oak secretary, was too heavy, as was the potbelly stove. What did one take from a house that had seen so little happiness?
She grabbed their old Atwater Kent radio and then headed to Daisy’s room and gathered her stepdaughter’s stuffed bear, Shirley Temple doll, some clothes, and her other pair of shoes into the bag, then hurried into the bedroom she shared with Les. Everything about that room a reminder of moments that sickened her. She stripped the bed and pushed the sheets into the bag, which was almost full. Lastly, from the closet she took the folded Lone Star quilt, the only thing she had left of her parents. Her mother had stitched it by hand, and every time Adah gazed at it, s he longed for love so deeply it felt like the hunger she could only imagine came from starvation.
She dragged the bag to the front door, hoisted it up on her hip, and then p lunged back outside into rain pellets, lightning forks that illuminated the fields and fences and trees with quivering bursts of blinding brightness, and wind that rattled the wood-frame house as if foretelling the arrival of a blustery demon or the lowest sinner. Blinking and gasping, she slipped across the saturated soil and flung the bag into the back of Les’s black Model A truck and grabbed another, now-drenched burlap bag and fought the slant rain back inside to get Lester’s and her clothing.
When she trudged outside with the second bag, Les was loading the back of the truck. She could barely see through the rain but discerned enough to gather that he’d carried tackle, saddles, and tools up from the livestock barn. The milk cow moved past them, trotting faster than Adah had ever seen her move before. The only hope for the livestock was for innate sensibility to drive them to climb higher and farther inland from the river. Maybe when it was over, she and Les would find at least some of them. One of their Plymouth Rock hens fluttered by. Then she noticed something else—the first burlap bag she’d packed sat sagging on the muddy ground beside the tools Les had yet to load.
Les lifted a saddle and threw it into the truck bed. “What the hell were you thinking? My guns is in the house. Why’d you go and pack clothes and pillows?”
Adah wiped her face. “Daisy’s toys are in there, too, and my mother’s quilt.”
Rain sluicing off his worn brown hat and falling on his shoulders, every inch of him except his face sopping, he yelled, “You ain’t taking them. Get yourself back inside and get my shotgun.”
Adah dropped the bag she held and pushed her drenched hair away from her face.
“Get the frying pan and some of the dishes, those good ones the old folks gave us. Are you some kinda idiot? Everything you brung out here is made of cloth, it’s going to get ruint by the rain.”
“We can cover it with a tarp or dry it later.” She stumbled toward the first bag on the ground. She would just grab Daisy’s doll and her mother’s quilt, then put them in the truck cab. Les always got his way, and despite the true words she had said—of course they could dry those things—there was no use arguing for the rest of it.
She dug into the bag for both items and then stood and turned.
A flash of Lester’s fist, and then a beam of light cut across her pupils, bringing on a familiar feeling rooted in her groin, the blow expelling the air from her lungs. Time lengthened and then froze. Something liquefied the bones of her knees and numbed her legs and mystified the world in front of her, all of it nothing but a moving periphery. She held on but swayed, vision blurring. Then the world turned upside down and on top of her at the same time.
“Ain’t you heard what I said? You leave that junk be and go git some things that matter.”