Doug Allyn - Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 32, No. 13, Mid-December, 1987

In nothing but the moonlight it was an eerie sight, let me tell you. The moon glistening easy on the water. And the house all black.

John was done for, that I knew. He was finished.

Well, the house started to creak and groan now, from the heavy tow of the river, and the pressure got to pulling at it and pulling at it until it started to come up and away. It began to break apart and splinter, with awesome tearing sounds, and it wasn’t too long before there wasn’t no house there at all. The house was gone, torn all to pieces.

And then all the pieces of it floated slowly away, almost like each piece took its own turn, until there wasn’t even nothing left to see. And the river smoothed down again, as if the house in the moonlight never even existed.

There was one great deep swirl in the water right out in front of me. It lasted for only a few seconds, and then it was gone too.

John and Carrie Lehmann and their farm had disappeared forever, just like that.

That’s the story.

I know how crazy it sounds, but there was a live thing in the water, that I know. I don’t know what it was, or where it come from, but something smashed a hole in John’s cellar, right through from the river, and the high water that come in took away the house and everything in it and left only that silent inlet when everything was gone. Right in front of my eyes. And there was that great swirl. Something alive did that. So I know what I’m talking about.

But there are lots of things I don’t know.

For instance, I know what happened to John. I know how he died. There is no question about that. But I don’t think I or anyone will ever know what happened to Carrie.

I hope she died natural. I know deep in my heart it wasn’t John that did it, I know him too well, but I just hope she died natural. I hope it wasn’t nothing else. I mean, I hope it wasn’t nothing she did, or caused to happen.

I’m sure as I’m sure I’m gonna die myself one day that she was down there, though. And whatever happened to her, John just went crazy with grief. It had to be that.

I never told anyone what I saw. Right away when it happened there was talk about the bad flood in the valley below Garlock’s Bend, about all the heavy rains, and about poor John and poor Carrie.

But I never told. I figured it was no one’s business but mine. It was me that seen it, and I had to deal with it in my own way.

Just about that time there was some trouble right up in Garlock’s Bend, in the church, and I was there through the whole of that one, too, but I hid the fact that some of it seemed so much the same to me.

I don’t know, I guess I thought that one problem at a time was enough. But partly I kept quiet on account of Carrie. She was scared about something, she said. And she wanted to get back home because of the high water. She said it wasn’t safe because of the high water. And she used a line about the water being high enough for “...it to...” What the it was, and what it could do, those are good questions.

She had to know something, or she wouldn’t have talked like that.

So, I guess somehow not to stir things up, I didn’t tell. Maybe, considering everything, that was wrong.

Maybe.

But then come all the maybes.

Maybe Carrie was innocent of anything bad, and I’m doing her a terrible injustice, thinking the evil things that go through my mind so often. I hope so. I hope to God she was innocent. I hope to God she was.

But maybe, just maybe she was involved in something or controlled by something or even just aware of something so wrong that I can’t even comprehend it. She had predicted the trouble to come, so at the very least, she knew of this thing in the water. She had to know of it. How she knew, and why, no one will ever get a handle on that.

Some things, I guess, it’s maybe even better not to understand. What good would it do anyway?

John now, I don’t know. That time we talked and I wanted to come in to see him, he did say that he was forbidden to let anybody in, he was “...just not allowed to.” Whatever that meant. He sounded so weak and so frightened. Somehow, though, I get the feeling that he knew a whole lot less than Carrie did.

All of this sounds crazy, and just even impossible, but there it is. I know it happened because I went through it, and I’m telling the truth. The sad thing is, I’m sure in my heart of hearts that I’ll never have the answers. That’s the terrible thing for me, not knowing the truth about Carrie.

But one thing is certain — something alive was in the water. That much I know. I know that. Something alive that come from the river.

My guess is it’s still there. Wherever it come from, it’s still out there somewhere. Waiting, maybe?

You get these little hints at Miller’s, like maybe a few other people have been through something, too, but they have decided to keep quiet.

There’s a thought could make anyone afraid.

Carrie’s been on my mind a lot lately. In my quiet times. Her and those ice blue eyes and all the passing years. And what I thought was lifelong innocence. And always I’m left with the questions that keep coming back. What did she know? What did she do? And why?

And the question of questions — what took her?

Well, whatever came for them out of the river, whatever it was that happened to them both, John did love her, no matter the cost to him in the end. He hung on like a man, too, and you can’t ask for more than that. Even if he died because of her, because of something she did, I believe he still loved her. I do.

And maybe, at the last, that’s partly why I’m so troubled by the whole story myself, why I have so many questions, why I feel so much dread.

I loved her too, you see.

Copyright © 1956 by John Steinbeck, renewed 1984 by Elaine Steinbeck, Thom Steinbeck & John Steinbeck IV. First published in The Atlantic Monthly. Reprinted by permission of McIntosh & Otis, Inc.

On the Saturday before Labor Day, 1955, at 9:04½ A.M., Mr. Hogan robbed a bank. He was forty-two years old, married, and the father of a boy and a girl, named John and Joan, twelve and thirteen respectively. Mrs. Hogan’s name was Joan and Mr. Hogan’s was John, but since they called themselves Papa and Mama that left their names free for the children, who were considered very smart for their ages, each having jumped a grade in school. The Hogans lived at 215 East Maple Street, in a brown-shingle house with white trim — there are two. Two fifteen is the one across from the street light and it is the one with the big tree in the yard, either oak or elm — the biggest tree in the whole street, maybe in the whole town.

John and Joan were in bed at the time of the robbery, for it was Saturday. At 9:10 A.M., Mrs. Hogan was making the cup of tea she always had. Mr. Hogan went to work early. Mrs. Hogan drank her tea slowly, scalding hot, and read her fortune in the tea leaves. There was a cloud and a five-pointed star with two short points in the bottom of the cup, but that was at 9:12 and the robbery was all over by then.

The way Mr. Hogan went about robbing the bank was very interesting. He gave it a great deal of thought and had for a long time, but he did not discuss it with anyone. He just read his newspaper and kept his own counsel. But he worked it out to his own satisfaction that people went to too much trouble robbing banks and that got them in a mess. The simpler the better, he always thought. People went in for too much hullabaloo and hanky-panky. If you didn’t do that, if you left hanky-panky out, robbing a bank would be a relatively sound venture — barring accidents, of course, of an improbable kind, but then they could happen to a man crossing the street or anything. Since Mr. Hogan’s method worked fine, it proved that his thinking was sound. He often considered writing a little booklet on his technique when the how-to rage was running so high. He figured out the first sentence, which went: “To successfully rob a bank, forget all about hanky-panky.”