Michael Smith - Rivers

It beat against the roof and it beat into the church where pieces of roof were missing above the choir loft and the baptismal. He rolled under a pew, his shoulder throbbing as the hail attacked the earth and what was left of the church, the sound of a hundred hardworking men and their sledgehammers. The lightning snapped and the crack of snapping wood and the scurrying of four-legged creatures sharing the church with him. He rolled over onto his stomach and crossed his good arm and put his head down and his other arm lay limp at his side. More thunder and more lightning and more hail as he lay shivering.

He folded his arms and squeezed, breathing in short bursts and wary of what might be in there with him. The hail beat beat beat against the church and he heard limbs cracking and breaking and thuds to the ground outside. He leaned back, anticipating any moment that the ceiling would give with the hailstorm, but the frequency of thuds became less and less until they stopped and then there was a strange dead calm.

He climbed out from under the pew and sat. Something moved toward the front of the church, the clatter of paws across wooden pews, and then several more to follow and Cohen sat on the edge of the pew as if he might have to make a run for it but then whatever it was moved again and it didn’t seem big enough to worry about.

Everything seemed to pause. There was no more hail. No wind. No rain. All was still, dark, quiet, like an empty theater.

He knew what that meant.

He waited and then a soft rain began to fall. He listened to the trickles of rain coming down into the church and he was reminded of the sound of the spring creek that he played in as a boy. The creek buried in the shade of the trees and the spring-fed water ice-cold and the chatter of his chin as he played in the clear, crisp water. The same chatter of his chin now as he sat there cold and wounded. The rain fell and the thunder echoed and he looked across the shades of black in the broken sanctuary and saw her. Something hazy and gray but he saw her only the way that he saw her now, in undefined, ghostlike images, the clarity of her face and figure beginning to fade some even though she was all he had in his isolation. He watched her move, coming down from the pulpit, moving along the aisle toward him, standing there and waiting for him to say something.

He reached out his hand.

He was shaking and he took heavy breaths to try and stop it but he could not. She hovered there in front of him as if waiting for something and he closed his eyes and it was then that she became more clear as she was lying there with her head in his lap and his hand on her pregnant stomach. On the asphalt of Highway 49, underneath an eighteen-wheeler, surrounded by the screams of those who were running for it as they had all seen them coming, the handful of tornadoes breaking free from the still black clouds, like snakes slithering down from the sky, moving toward the hundreds, maybe thousands of gridlocked cars that were only trying to do what they had been told to do. Get the hell out of here. Don’t pack anything. Don’t stop. Get your family and get in your car and get the hell out of here and that was what they had done. Like they had all done so many times in the last years but this time there had been no head start. No window. Only get in and get out. And the tornadoes splintered out of the sky and weaved toward them and then exploded through the bodies and the cars and trucks, metal and flesh being lifted and catapulted.

As Cohen and Elisa had run between the rows of cars, she had gone down and when he had bent to help her up, a piece of something shiny was sticking out of the back of her head and her eyes were like the eyes of someone who had seen something from another world. Elisa, Elisa, he said, but she didn’t answer and her body was limp and he lifted and carried her and he slipped underneath the eighteen-wheeler and she lay with her head in his lap and the blood puddling underneath their bodies and her eyes open through it all and his hand on her belly that was as big as a volleyball and there was nothing that he could do but scream out against the chaos of the world. Cohen on his knees and her head across them and the rig swaying with the power of the earth and nothing to do but hold her and watch her go with her eyes never closing. Her lost, wandering eyes. As if the dead didn’t understand anything more than the living. The life going out of her and Cohen’s face on her stomach, talking to the baby, telling the baby things he couldn’t remember now, talking to her so that she could hear him and know she was not alone with this terrible thing coming for her. His bloody hands on Elisa’s belly, his mouth against it, his child within, his voice begging the child to somehow know she was loved. The rig swaying but holding and the tornadoes breaking away and tearing off in other directions and the sky blue-gray and nothing to do. Nothing to do.

He opened his eyes and the clarity dissipated and there was only her hazy image out before him and then it was gone like a drift of smoke. And he tried to remember, like he always did, if he had even said goodbye to Elisa.

His lips were dry and he licked them and he was so thirsty but he would have to wait. He adjusted himself on the hard wooden pew and shook and tried to figure how far a walk he had ahead of him back to his place but his thoughts would not settle and for the moment he wasn’t even certain of the direction. The rain fell and the wind picked up and something nasty was coming on now. He lay down across the pew. His chills staggered his breathing and his thoughts twisted in knots and he thought he might be better off if he took off the wet clothes but he didn’t move and then he heard the voice of the black-haired girl.

Shoot him. Shoot him now.

The rain began to crash and the wind roared like an approaching war. It roared and the little church cracked and swayed and held on, the wind whipping around inside, and outside the trees bent and some gave way and he knew it was only the beginning.

He rolled off the pew, underneath again. The vision of Elisa and the child had awakened his mind. She’d be three years old now. No, four. No, three. And Elisa would be how many? He subtracted the five years between them and she would be thirty-four and he made himself stop thinking about it all and then he began to think about the house and how foolish he must have looked with the long flatbed trailer, loaded with enough lumber for several tries, driving down toward the coast while everyone else drove in the other direction. Look at that idiot, he imagined them saying. What the hell does he plan on building? Don’t he know what’s going on? Don’t he know it’s over down here? Even if he gets something up it won’t belong to him no more. Soon as that Line is drawn, we’re all done.

He imagined their conversations. Looks like they were right, he thought. Ain’t no way to get anything built. Not enough time in between them. And now the rain that never stopped. But that hadn’t kept him from trying to finish the child’s room, because he and Elisa had set out to build a child’s room, and he had the foundation to build the child’s room before she and Elisa went away, and fuck all the storms and fuck the Line and fuck the government and their bullshit offer for my house and my land and I’m building this room for this child no matter how many times I gotta build and rebuild and no matter how long it takes. He realized how ridiculous it all looked but there wasn’t anyone around to look anymore and he wasn’t going anywhere until it was done, but for the first time, lying under this pew, with this shoulder, with this whelp around his neck, with his Jeep taken away, with this church cracking and swaying, with the water soaked into his bones, with this goddamn rain that wouldn’t stop, he wondered if there would ever be a child’s room. Wondered if the lumber would ever dry out. Wondered if he would one day be an old man, no longer beaten by the weather but beaten by time.