The River Widow(8)

The boy stared at her as if suddenly mired in a fog of wonder.

The inside of her mouth was so thick and dry, she had to work to revive her vocal cords. “Do you have water?”

Chuck pointed to a can in the bottom of the boat. Adah grasped it with both hands, twisted off the top, and drank heartily.

“How did you make it?” asked the son, named Hugh, his eyes still gleaming amazement. He was probably only eighteen or so.

Her throat thawed, then burned. Then her body stung and burned, too. “I just held on.”

“How long you been out here?”

Her lower lip quivered. “I don’t know. I passed out for a while.”

“You got bumps and lashings all over. Looks like you took quite a beating.”

Beating? A wave of nausea made her sway in the seat.

The older man peered closer. “You don’t look so good. What happened to you?”

Adah gulped back bile jumping into her throat. “The river rose so fast. I got too close.”

“Where’re you from?”

Adah blinked and focused, suddenly more mentally alert, although she was achingly tired and had to fight for each muffled breath. Their impression of her would matter later. “My husband . . . ,” she said with forced sad desperation, although it took all of her attention and abilities to do so. She had to make herself into an actress. “He was swept away the same time I was. Have you seen him?” Raising her voice now as best she could. “Have you seen him?”

They shook their heads. “What’s his name?”

“Lester Branch. I’m Adah.”

Father and son glanced at one another.

The older man said, “We haven’t seen no one but you so far out. We been rescuing people from the second stories of their houses in town. Decided to take a look out here just to be sure no one got trapped in these lowlands.”

She twisted her hands together. “We have to find him. He must be near.” She swept her gaze around.

The two men didn’t speak at first. Then the father breathed out slowly, a sad slack about his jaw. “We’ll be on the lookout for him, ma’am, but right now, we got to get you someplace safe.”

“And dry,” Hugh added.

“I don’t want to go anywhere without my husband.”

They kept paddling hard.

Adah clutched the dress over her heart. “Listen to me, please. I have to get back home. I have to find my husband.”

“We’re heading back to Paducah now, but the town’s underwater. After all the power went kaput, we were cut off from the rest of the world. People that was flooded out holed up in the Cobb Hotel until the power failed. Lots of people now staying in the Southern Hotel. And the sick ones are at the Clark School.”

“Others are going down yonder to Mayfield,” said the boy.

“You got a place to go?” asked Chuck, but Adah didn’t answer.

The two men had to fight a ferocious current and dodge floating debris to slowly make their way back to the city. There, the extent of the devastation shocked Adah. The streets had become canals, and downtown buildings were flooded with filthy water almost to their second floors. Eerily deserted hotels and grocery stores, barbershops and drugstores, banks and laundries were battered by waves and beginning to smell of death and decay. Telephones, telegraphs, and even the local WPAD station were out. No power, no drinking water, and no sanitation had turned the city into a cesspool. No sounds save for sloshing water, not even a breeze or a birdcall, as if Judgment Day had already arrived and deemed this place done. Chuck Lerner and his son had to dodge semisubmerged cars and wooden pieces of houses, even an oil tank riding on the current.

The boy told her they were taking her near Twenty-Eighth Street to transfer her to one of several small barges, which were being hauled out to dry land by tractors. A makeshift dock three hundred feet long also reached into the icy, murky water on Broadway, gathering the homeless and taking them all by truck to the Arcadia School, which had become a clearing station for refugees.

“By the way,” said Chuck Lerner. “What were you and your husband doing down there so close to the river?”

Her head became a hollow chamber echoing with his question. Think fast. “We were going for our milk cow. Sweet thing was down at the edge lapping at the water. We went to get her, and then it was some kind of surge. Took both of us down.”

“Are you sure it knocked your husband down, too? You was being swept off, so how do you know?”

“We were right together in the water for a few seconds, then we weren’t.”

“What happened then?”

“I-I guess I don’t know.”

Neither the old man nor the boy said much after that. They had stilled, and Adah didn’t know whether it was because they were filled with sorrow for her or they doubted her story. Or because they knew the Branch family.

She hoped she would be taken away to Mayfield. It suited her just fine not to have to face Lester’s family yet. Based on what had just happened, she needed to work on her story.





Chapter Four

On the Avondale “hill,” eight hundred people had been relocated from the Cobb Hotel and other points in the city, and others like Adah were streaming in from rescue boats and barges. Red Cross volunteers were handing out mattresses and blankets, giving typhoid inoculations, and sending people to homes, schools, churches, and—once those places had filled—to trains and buses headed for Mayfield, Fulton, and Murray.