Joan Didion - Run River

Suddenly listless, Martha did not answer.

“If you’re coming you better put on some shoes.”

“What time is it?”

“Six. A little before.”

“I was supposed to go somewhere. Sam Bradley and his brother were supposed to pick me up at six-thirty.”

Lily blotted her lipstick on a piece of paper toweling and looked at Martha. “Then you can’t come.”

“Yes I can. I can come all right.” Martha stood up and took from the pocket of her raincoat the dark glasses she wore almost constantly now.

“You want to call Sam before we go?”

“If I wanted to call Sam I’d call him, I mean wouldn’t I?”

By the time they had driven into town (“Knight can look for Nevada plates and Julie for Arizona. That’s right, there are more people in Arizona but you forget Nevada is closer. All right, both of you look for Arizona plates”) and stopped at a drive-in for hamburgers (“I said hamburgers, Knight, I did not say steak sandwich and I did not say chicken-in-a-basket. All right, chiliburgers. You don’t even like chili”), the parade was already underway: they had missed, a policeman told them as Lily was locking the station wagon, the Mayor’s Cavalcade and the Knights of Columbus. “Cheer up, sweetie,” he said to Julie. “There’ll be more.”

“You bet there will, sweetie,” Martha whispered, giggling with Julie as fifteen palominos pranced into view, and then Knight was yelling Hey Horse! Why did the chicken cross the road? and Horse turned out to be not a horse at all but the name by which Sally Randall’s son was known to his intimates; not long after Horse Randall and the Elk Grove Firehouse Five passed by, followed by a shivering blond drum majorette and a ragged line of high-school boys whistling and hooting, the rain began again, and when they looked for Martha she was gone. By the time they saw her, standing in front of the Rexall drugstore on the corner, the crowd was breaking up, going for cover, scattering into doorways and automobiles.

“Meet us at the car,” Lily shouted over the idling of motors, the shifting of gears.

Instead Martha ran back down the block to where Lily stood with the children. Rain streamed down her face, across her sunglasses, down the neck of her unbuttoned raincoat.

“I was trying to call Sarah. Nobody answered.”

“Sarah? In Philadelphia?”

Martha took Julie’s hand and followed Lily and Knight to the station wagon. “I wanted to tell her about the parade,” she said, lifting Julie into the middle seat.

“The parade,” Lily repeated after her, fumbling beneath the brake pedal for the keys she had just found and dropped.

“Honestly,” Martha said. “You’d think there might have been some body there.”

“You can try her again when we get home.” Lily fitted the key into the ignition with meticulous care while she tried to work the parade, the rain, and Sarah into some reasonable sequence. “By then it’ll be after midnight in Philadelphia. Maybe they’ll be home then.”

“Oh no,” Martha said. “It’s only five-thirty there now. The man in the Rexall told me.”

“It’s almost eight-thirty here. You know it’s later there.”

“I’m sure I don’t know why the man in the Rexall would have told me a deliberate lie.”

“If he told you that he just didn’t know . We know.”

Martha shrugged. “I don’t know. I don’t know what to believe.”

Lily switched on the windshield wipers but did not start the engine.

“Anyway it’s too late,” Martha said. “If it’s midnight there, as you insist it is, it’s too late.”

“Too late for what?”

Martha leaned against the window and took off her sunglasses. Her eyes were closed. “I don’t know,” she said. “I didn’t want to go home and I thought I might go there, but it’s too late.”

“I don’t know what you’re talk ing about.”

“Sarah. I’m talking about my sister. I wanted to talk to Sarah. If you don’t mind.”

They buried Martha’s body beneath the cherry tree near the levee on the morning of the twenty-second of March. Everett and Henry Sears (who had been sleeping off the flu and a four-day drunk when Everett had the night before begun shouting and pounding at the door of the foreman’s cottage Sears you bastard Sears get out here) carried the coffin: a long rope-handled sea chest, packed for the past thirty years with Mildred McClellan’s linens, ends of lace, a box of jet beading from a dress, and the ivory fan carried by Martha’s great-great-grandmother Currier at Governor Leland Stanford’s Inaugural Ball in 1862; unpacked the night before when Everett said I’m telling you for the last time, Lily, get McGrath out of here, get his deputy out of here, and get that son of a bitch quack doctor out of here, she’s my sister, I’m going to bury her, and I’m going to bury her on the ranch .

Lily walked behind them, her arms full of flowers. Everett had been out before dawn, pulling up every daffodil left after the rain, tearing down whole branches of camellias. When they reached the place Everett had chosen they laid the sea chest on the wet ground, and Everett spelled Sears digging the grave. Numb with the morning cold, Lily stood holding the flowers and listening to the water. Every hour now, the river ran faster and higher with the melting mountain snow: tearing at the banks, jamming together logs and debris and then smashing through the jams.

As she watched Sears dig it occurred to her that Martha’s body could well be washed out by evening, the unnailed lid of the sea chest ripped open and Martha free again in the water in the white silk dress with the butterflies. ($250, I should wear it every day, every evening, and every night to bed , she had said last night when she was dressing for the party and Lily had warned the rain might spot the silk, Just ask Everett if I shouldn’t.) It was not right to bury her this way: McGrath had said it (I’m telling you, Everett, it’s against the law of the State of California); Edith Knight had said it this morning when she came in her robe to pick up the children (I’m not talking about the law. I’m not talking about any law run through by the undertakers’ lobby. I’m talking about what’s right and what’s wrong); the doctor had said it; she had said it herself. Everett baby you don’t know what you’re doing . They had each said it for different reasons and Everett had listened to none of them.

“You hear it rising?” Everett said, looking up at the levee.

Sears stopped digging to fasten his jacket against the wind. “Going to crest at thirty-eight.”

“When’s that?”

“Near to noon. Thiel’s Landing.” Sears was coughing now. He wiped the back of his hand across his mouth and picked up the shovel again.

Everett put his hand on Lily’s shoulder.

“You want to move into town?”

She shook her head. “I don’t see any need.”

Sears looked up. “There ain’t no problem this far up. Downriver maybe.”

“The Engineers might blast it tonight. Upstream. We’d get some water.”

“They wouldn’t blast a levee until they’d evacuated,” Lily said. “We’d know.”

Everett shrugged and took the shovel from Sears.

Because she did not want Everett to see that she was crying Lily shifted the flowers close to her face. It would be all right, these next few hours, if she could keep her mind on the water. Where and when would the levee go, were the levee to go at all: there was the question to consider. Somewhere in her mind was a file of information, gathered and classified every year there was high water, and it was upon those facts that she must now focus her attention. At what point had they opened the Colusa Weir. How many gates were open at the Sacramento Weir. When would the Bypass reach capacity. What was the flood stage at Wilkins Slough. At Rough and Ready Bend. Fremont Weir. Rio Vista.