FLOOD

Kathleen Hill

On summer nights when my sister, Maddie, and I pursued fireflies, ajar in one hand and a perforated lid in the other, we sometimes stumbled through the bayberry hedge behind our house, scratching our bare legs on the thorns. On the other side of the hedge we headed for the rhododendron bushes surrounding our neighbors' screened porch. There the fireflies were thickest. Maddie and I thought that talking, even whispering, worked against us, so our barefooted approach was silent. Once we must have made some noise in our plunge into the rhododendrons, snapped a twig or rustled a branch, because as we sat there beneath the waxy leaves we heard the screened door open. We looked up to see Josephine Beecher standing on the step, the light from the porch falling across her back. "Yes?" she called so softly we wondered if she thought anyone could hear her. We sat perfectly still, not because we were afraid of being caught, but because it didn't seem to us that she was asking if we were there. Maddie scratched a mosquito bite on her leg and looked across at me. She had put her jar on the ground between her bare feet, and the fireflies, blinking on and off, were crawling up the glassy sides. I raised a finger to my mouth and Maddie made a face at me; I didn't need to tell her to be quiet. Again Josephine called, this time even more quietly than the first. We could smell the smoke from her cigarette although we couldn't see it through the pattern of leaves. After sitting perfectly still for what seemed a long time, listening to the cicadas, we heard Mrs. Beecher's voice, calling from inside: "If you don't close that door, Josephine, the house will be full of mosquitoes."Josephine turned, then, pulling the door behind her and we went back to our fireflies.       On another occasion, a Halloween, we were invited into the house we seldom entered. We had pushed through the hedge in our costumes and gone around to knock on the front door  of the Beechers' house. Josephine had opened it, drawling her mock astonishment. Standing a little behind her, Mrs. Beecher benignly regarded us before extending a plate of cookies frosted orange to look like pumpkins. We each took one and let it drop into our paper bag where it fell apart in crumbs down among the pennies and apples and Hershey bars. As we turned to go, adjusting our masks, Mrs. Beecher asked if we would mind coming into the kitchen; she had something she wanted to send home to our mother. In the kitchen, Mrs. Beecher opened a drawer and took out a knife with a flexible blade that curved forward at the end like a bent finger. She told us it was a knife for fixing grapefruit, that our grandmother had lent it to her years before, when Josephine and our mother were little girls, and she wanted to send it back to our house where it belonged. "Couldn't you have found some other time, Mother?" Josephine asked, leaning against the sink. "'They don't want to be bothered with that now." Uncomfortable, we looked out the window at the unfamiliar face of our house. Most of the leaves were off the tulip and oak trees that stood at either end of the hedge so it wasn't hard to see the chimney with its clay pots, the steep incline of the roof, the windows, some lighted, some dark, from which we ordinarily looked out at the Beecher's house.       On our way from the kitchen to the front door, we were led by Josephine through the dining room where their half-eaten dinners waited for them. Maddie and I were eager to get out, but Josephine stopped to ask if we'd seen the walls Mrs. Beecher had painted with scenes from Prairie du Chien, the town where she had grown up. While Mrs. Beecher stood with her hands folded in front of her, smiling at us, Josephine pointed to a wall where we could make out a picture of a river with some willow trees hanging over it. That was the Mississippi River, Josephine told us, bordering Prairie du Chien on one side. And on the other side, she said, turning to point to the adjacent wall, was the prairie. We turned and saw painted there long grass bending in the wind with a bird flying over it. "Mother spent years on these," Josephine said, drawling. She raised her cigarette stiffly to her mouth, drew on it deeply, then lowered her hand, twisted with arthritis, against the leg of her pants. Her eyes rested languidly on the  bird. "Years," she said again. We wondered if she meant that we should admire the paintings or ask ourselves how they could have taken so long. Josephine's gray hair that still had traces of red in it was fastened back from her face with brown combs that were failing loose. Mrs. Beecher reached toward Josephine's brooding head to secure one of them. "Will you not?" Josephine said and jerked her head away. Mrs. Beecher turned toward us, disregarding Josephine's glare. "With her poor hands, you know, it's difficult for her to do things."       After we had grown up and moved away, we saw Josephine and Mrs. Beecher very rarely but heard about them from time to time. During a September hurricane, a branch from the oak tree crashed through the roof of their house, waking them up in the middle of the night. Josephine went to the third floor to look and was startled by the sight of a room filled with slimy wet leaves stretched against a length of black bark. A few years later Mrs. Beecher embroidered a tablecloth with purple iris around the edges and walked through the hedge to give it to our mother. As she worked on the tablecloth, Mrs. Beecher said, she sat by a window looking out at our house and it seemed to her it belonged there. Then when Josephine was sixty-three she took early retirement because of the arthritis in her hands. This was only two years before she would have had to retire in any case, but her retirement was spoken of as an astonishing event, perhaps because no one had ever thought that Mrs. Beecher, by this time ninety, would still be at home waiting for her. For the next five years there was no news from Josephine but Mrs. Beecher called our mother now and then to report that one of them had a cold, that there would be a lunar eclipse that night, that Josephine's hands were so bad she could no longer manage her buttons.       "Neighbors for seventy years," our mother said when she called me one winter morning to say that Josephine was dead. "That's rare."       At seven o'clock our mother had been awakened by a call from the police who in turn had just been telephoned by Mrs. Beecher. She had mentioned our mother's name, asking that she accompany them when they came to the house. Our  mother threw on her coat and walked through the hedge. Mrs. Beecher, her eyes hooded at the corners, met her at the door. The ambulance had come and gone and now Mrs. Beecher thought she would rest. When the police arrived a few minutes later, she was already in bed. Our mother told them what Mrs. Beecher had told her. Thev walked through the house, turning off lights, looking at the collapsed ceiling in the dining room. Together they stared at the brown combs in the bathtub, their cusps arched away from the drain, at the three-legged stool standing in several inches of water where Mrs. Beecher sat all night, holding Josephine's head.       This night of cold so fierce the rhododendron leaves were curled into cones, I imagine it like this: the house with the three lights burning, one on the table next to Josephine's bed where the Reader's Digest lay open face down, another light in Mrs. Beecher's room on the table next to the sewing basket, and the last in the bathroom. Outside the moon made shadows on the snow, forked streaks of blue cast by the trees, an oblong extending from the house. Everywhere, quiet. Crossing the sky, the moon rearranged the shadows but made no noise. Inside, at first, there was the sound of water running in the bathtub. Later on, the house was still. It wouldn't have been possible to have heard the water seepliig through the dining room ceiling onto the muraled walls, running in streaks through the prairie grass, the bird's extended wings. The wall blistered and broke, clumps of plaster fell to the ground damply, without making any noise. Silently the water overflowing the bathtub engulfed the perpetual summer day that had surrounded Mrs. Beecher and Josephine every night while they ate their dinner.       It seemed to Mrs. Beecher, who was dozing on her bed, the water had been running long enough. She called Josephine's name before she went to look. When there was no answer she lowered her legs over the edge of the bed and felt with her bare feet for her slippers. When she didn't immediately find them she thought they must be under the bed but didn't bend down to look. Stooping took time and she wanted to see about Josephine. Crossing the floor, her feet were cold. When she reached the hall she could see the bathroom door was closed but without her glasses she wasn't able to make out  the stream of water slowly flowing from under the door, across the hall and down the stairs. She felt for the knob and became aware, as her hand closed over it, that her feet were wet. It was only after she'd turned it, however, and pushed open the door that she suddenly felt the splash rising around her. At the same moment she saw Josephine floating face down in the bathtub, her hair lightly rising and failing with the steady flow of water over the edge of the tub. The orange robe that covered her was dry just across her back where the water hadn't touched it; her feet, toes pointing toward each other, extended stiffly in the direction of the door.       The first thing Mrs. Beecher did was to turn off the water. She leaned across Josephine's body and twisted shut each faucet, the cold, then the hot. Despite the fact that she was trembling, her fingers obediently tightened, then relaxed their grip. Straightening, she thought that this was what Josephine had not been able to do; struggling with the knobs, she must have lost her balance and pitched forward. The thought of Josephine frightened, clutching at the edge of the tub, made her want to sit down. It wasn't until she'd drawn the stool close and had lowered herself onto it that she looked down and saw that her feet were resting in a pool of' water that came up to her ankles.       Because Josephine was floating so close to the rim, it was easier than Mrs. Beecher had thought to tip her out. The water spilled over the side in a rush, drenching Mrs. Beecher's lap and hitting the tiled wall behind tier. Josephine's body fell onto the floor topside up, the orange robe sticking against one side of her body. Her hair, completely white now, stretched in wet bands along her face and down her neck. Mrs. Beecher looked at her face upside down and the eyes, wide open beneath brows drawn a little together, looked like little smiling moons. The edges of the nostrils were white, her mouth round and surprised. Nowhere in her face could Mrs. Beecher see the signs of' terror or exhaustion she had dreaded.       As she struggled to raise Josephine's head from the floor and bring it to her lap, she remembered how she had lifted Josephine, just turned one, from another bathtub. To be free to work on a sketch, she had put a few inches of water in the tub so that Josephine could play there and be out of the way.  At first everything had gone well. She knew the repeated splash meant Josephine was slapping water with her hand, and she gave herself happily to her work. Wonderful, she thought, the baby, lines taking shape on paper. Then the splashing had stopped and Josephine had begun to coo, softly at first, then more insistently, and finally with the desperation of a long wail. At first she had tried to ignore the change, to concentrate more firmly on the shape that was emerging, but Josephine was crying in earnest now. She called out that it was all right, she would be there in a minute. In a minute, she thought, her sketch would be finished and she would gladly go. The crying subsided gradually to sad breathless gasps, then to an occasional long shudder, and finally to silence. The quiet worried her as the crying hadn't and she had put her paper down and gone to look. Josephine's head with its red curls were resting on the edge of the tub, her chin upright against the rim, her eyes closed. That she herself should have been the agent of Josephine's defeated collapse into sleep, her surrender at the limits of exhaustion, gave her a feeling of desolation she'd never known and she snatched Josephine up, waking her, kissing her face, her little shoulders, her neck.       By extending her legs straight out in front of her in the pool of water, Mrs. Beecher managed to use them as a support in sliding Josephine's body forward and raising her shoulders off the floor. When Josephine's head was at last resting against her knees, she was glad to turn away and look at the ceiling, into the dip of the basin and, by turning her neck, out the window. The mirror over the basin was still clouded with steam but the windowpane had begun to trickle. In one corner of the window she could see a brightness that she recognized as the moon. As she watched, it gradually floated clear of the window frame, emerging isolate and whole. As a child she had liked to think that her moon was the same one the Indians, not so long before, had looked up at as they were running across the prairie. Now it seemed to her just as remarkable that the moon crossing the sky as she sat there with Josephine's head on her lap was the same moon she had loved to watch, ninety years ago, reflected in the river. It shone now on the shrivelled oak leaves whose  hold would be broken only by the push of new leaves in spring, on the upright remainder of the blossoms on the tulip tree. Then she had been entranced by the gleam it made on spring nights across the dull surface of softened ice, in the black depths of the newly released flow.       Water at floodtime, she thought, and turned her head back to Josephine. Her hair was drying in ringlets as it had always done until she was about thirty and started fastening it with combs. One cluster fell forward and Mrs. Beecher extended a hand to push it back. Reassured by the familiar curve of bone resting in her hand, Mrs. Beecher stroked Josephine's forehead over and over, smoothing her hair. "Never mind," she whispered and shifted her legs so that Josephine's body could rest more securely against the inside of her thighs. Drifting a little, her eyes half closed, she thought of rising water, of the sudden burst that had preceded Josephine's birth. Then her husband had been with her, stroking her forehead just as she was now stroking Josephine's. There had been the terrible bearing down, the push, and then the baby sprawled against her leg, flesh against flesh, its limbs even then flailing in the uncertain spaces where it would labor always backward toward rest.

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