The River Widow(9)
A mass of slow-moving, stunned humanity filtered everywhere. People who’d fled with only the clothes on their backs were hungry and thirsty and often rank smelling, stumbling about in shock. Paducah had survived the 1913 flood, so no one had imagined anything this horrific could happen. And yet no one complained.
Adah pulled Chuck Lerner’s jacket, which he’d insisted she keep for now, close around her. The wind cut through her as harshly as a shovel cleaving frozen ground. A shovel.
The sun sent down occasional spears of light to the water-soaked land. Gazing about, Adah was waiting her turn to be checked in. She didn’t know these people, as she’d almost never left the green fields and dark crumbs of earth on the farm. She’d gone to Rudolph’s Grocery on Saturdays and the First Baptist Church of Paducah on Sundays, but hadn’t ventured much farther. Lester hadn’t wanted her to have friends.
Around her now were the downtrodden people of Paducah. The women in simple cotton dresses covered by worn coats, wearing soggy boots and holding the hands of young children. The men in overalls, threadbare jackets, and damp hats, carrying a baby or a hastily packed suitcase. Some city workers in hip waders. Younger people helping the elderly. Few people wearing rings or wristwatches. And as always, the colored—in even worse shape—kept separate from the whites.
As her eyes drifted over the horde, Adah became weightless, not really alive, not yet one of them. She blinked against the haze and the bitter drizzle that had started again, and then filled her lungs with an expanding breath of air. These people were kinder, more honest, and more giving than she had ever been. And they had never killed anyone. They were not murderers.
A relief worker from the Civilian Conservation Corps was peering at her, and Adah realized the man was asking her a question. He wanted to know if she had any family or friends with whom she could seek refuge. All she had to say was I killed my husband , and it would be over. The police would lock her up, the truth would be out, she would pay the price, and the lives of these good people would be unaffected.
Did she have family?
Daisy. Only Daisy. Each day under Lester’s domination, Daisy had lost more of her innocence. She already knew the most painful things in life, and her face often resembled that of a skittish kitten separated from its mother. How Adah had wished to escape with Daisy! But as a stepmother, Adah had few choices. She’d tried to make up for Lester’s meanness by being a loving and attentive mother, and she had helped, she knew that.
But not enough. Not enough to provide a full antidote to Les’s poison. Nothing could do that. Adah closed her eyes and pictured Daisy—rag doll held loosely in the crook of her pudgy, sweet elbow, her knees scabbed from running after goats and falling. She loved trinkets, so Adah had made her little bracelets using string and tiny buttons and beads. The bracelets had become Daisy’s most prized possessions. She kept them on her dresser, laid out in perfect circles. Adah had felt the same way about the buttons her mother had collected for her.
And then Adah recalled the way Daisy managed to disappear, as though the walls could absorb her, when her father’s anger began to rear its ugly head. All the years Adah had watched Daisy, seeing her suffer, it was like witnessing the death of joy and hope.
But Lester was gone now.
Adah focused on the relief worker’s hands—fleshy, soft, kind—and then his eyes. Telephones were a luxury, but Lester’s folks had one. Maybe some of the telephone lines had been restored. People were also communicating by ham radio, and some of the helpers were delivering messages and giving people rides to friends’ and families’ homes.
“No,” she said. “No one to go to.”
Not yet. She had already heard that, as expected, Lone Oak was fine, but she couldn’t face Lester’s family this soon, even though that meant she wouldn’t see Daisy yet. Like Lester, his father and brother harbored no kindness in their hearts; his mother was only barely better. Adah had overheard enough whispered conversations to know: the Branches were reputed as landowners who broke the backs of their farm labor, cheated on business deals, and sought revenge on anyone who crossed them. They brought to mind a flock of vultures feeding off the lives of others. No wise man would ever choose to cross them. The family had never accepted her, and she had once overhead a comment about Lester’s little witch , concluding they meant her, based on her former fortune-telling occupation.
Now she asked if Lester had passed through this station and relayed her hastily assembled story. The man said he would check for her.
When the relief worker returned and told her that Lester had not been seen, Adah’s grief and remorse were not disingenuous. The relief worker said, “People are still coming in. He’ll show up.” He patted her shoulder. “And I’ll tell him you’ve passed through here.”
“Thank you,” she said.
On one of the white buses, she sat in the midst of misery, even as some tried to find humor in the situation. A woman was saying she’d seen a cow on someone’s second-story porch, and others were scoffing at that claim.
As they moved through the countryside, Adah stared through the window at barren and frosted farmlands that held perfectly still, as if trapped during an ice age. A man nearby said in a more somber tone, “Nothing’s going to be left of the town after this.”
“No reason to go back there,” someone replied.
“Where’ll you folks go?”