The River Widow(5)
She shimmied farther up on the door that had become her lifeline and thought the frigid air on her wet body would surely freeze her to death. At one point, something slammed into her door, and she teetered to the side, but Adah held on, trying to keep heading lengthwise down the drowned valley. Exhaustion poured out of her marrow, and it took all her might to keep clenching on and blinking and breathing. Sticks flew into her face, and she pushed them away until she realized she had just passed the top of a tree. She was over what used to be dry land. If only she could work her way to the edge of this monster and out of its reach.
More and more branches and twigs slapped her as she swept past them. She clambered all the way on top of the door and began to paddle to her left, hitting treetops. Maybe she was passing what had been a riverside orchard or a wood. Sitting on her feet, she dragged both arms through the water, trying to get out of the current, but it was of no use. The river would take her to a painful death, whether by trauma from a passing object or by drowning in that roiling, cold, and clotted abyss for all eternity.
The door slammed into something that held it in place for a few moments, and Adah reached out into branches and felt bark. Something large and steady and strong. She put one arm around what was indeed the trunk of a tree, held on, and gathered her wits about her. Don’t let go of the door.
Without movement, her body stiffened and numbed; she would surely die of the cold. The tree had thick, long arms reaching out, and she found a way to control herself by grabbing its branches and moving along until she reached some kind of structure. Probably another farmhouse near the riverbank. She was working her way out of the river surge and farther onto the floodplain, where the flow had quieted to an insistent whisper and birds shrieked overhead. She could paddle and steer the door somewhat now, making her way into more slowly moving water and into what seemed to be a lake. Then paddling for what felt like hours, miraculously going in the right direction until the door slid to a stop.
Adah put her foot in the water and found land. Nothing had ever been so life sustaining and hopeful as finding that muddied but firm earth beneath her feet. Still holding the door afloat beside her, she got off and walked into shallower water until she was completely out of the flood’s grasp, on soaked but solid ground. She left the door floating and walked into darkness, bleak and cold.
And then she remembered what she had done.
Even on land and with smudged moonlight offering some scant visibility, she saw herself as lost to humanity, forever doomed to wander alone. With little awareness of her surroundings, she plodded onward until a murky mass loomed ahead out of the gloom, one of man-made dimensions. Likely some kind of farm structure. Drawn closer, she reached a barn, doors open. Inside, she collapsed into what felt like hay and covered herself with it. Then she curled up and prayed to whoever might be listening.
It looked as if her life might be spared. But why? She, of all people, probably deserved to die. If Lester had not taken away her cards almost as soon as they’d married, would she have been able to read the signs and know this was coming? No, she could never have foreseen this.
Freezing cold, hiding in an old structure that might still become flooded, its walls lashed by wind and rain, somehow, some way, she drifted off to sleep.
After their first encounter in Louisville, Lester had returned a week later to her tent and taken her out to dinner. He presented himself as a moderately successful farmer despite the Depression, a man whose wife had died six months before, leaving behind a baby girl. He explained that his misery had come from losing his wife and from loneliness. His elegantly boned face, which summoned imaginings of actors and singers rather than farmers, gave him a special charm. And how he had turned it on! His laugh was deep and rolled like thunder. His hands, which he’d stopped hiding, moved like lightning through the air when he talked. So it was no surprise that love struck with the strength of a sudden storm.
After a swift courtship, he offered her a comfortable life in a comfortable home.
But the cards! Over the years, she had learned that at times they revealed pasts and predicted the future correctly. Yet Lester assured her they were nothing but hocus-pocus, and Adah had known them to be wrong at times, too. By then she was fiercely in love, and so she ignored her doubts, grasped her chance, and married Lester in a church. She and Lester stood before God and pledged their lives to each other. The wind was still, like a wild thing holding its breath, but a chill strapped the morning air, and the sky refused to surrender to blue. Outside, a strange bird called out with a high-pitched caw that seemed to ask a question rather than announce an event.
On her wedding day, she stood as thin and strong as a strip of rawhide, wearing a trembling white dress and carrying a bouquet of wildflowers—lupine, daisies, and Indian paintbrush. After the wedding, she moved to the farm, where she met and began to care for Daisy, who was then about seven months old. Daisy, who fit perfectly in the curve of Adah’s arm. Daisy, whose innocent trust and need for Adah made her believe for a short time that this was exactly where she was supposed to be. But it wasn’t long before Lester endured some bad harvests, and he took up drinking and gambling in between banging her around. Love left in spurts with each push, shove, slap, and hit.
Once, she had thought there were a thousand good things ahead of her. But after she married Lester, her dreams, which had at one time seemed so close she could stretch out her fingers to touch them, drifted away like dying stars—shining brightly, then blinking and blinking slowly away into nothingness.