After the flood, when the debris-filled
water of the river lapped against the last remaining piles of the broken pier,
we stood barefoot, with our pants legs rolled up, in the mud on the riverbank
and watched our neighbor’s sofa bob up in down in the water, trapped there by
the branches of a tree that had fallen on the opposite side of the river. The
mud was tepid and swallowed our feet up to our ankles, holding us in place as
if we were glued there, forced to watch the parts of barns, fences, furniture
and dead cattle drift by.
We stepped into the river, and holding onto
a broken pile we grabbed the rope of our sunken rowboat still moored to the
pier, and with great effort we pulled it up onto the shore. There we emptied
the water from the boat and inspected it for breaks in the wood or holes, but
there were none. Under the front seat we found lodged there the body of Tom
Goodboy’s orange cat. Drowned, its body was swollen and its hair matted. We set
it on a patch of grass to dry out to later take home to Tom. He loved that cat
more than anything else in the world.
We pushed the boat into the water and sat
in it and cleaned the mud from our feet and squeezed the water from our shirts.
The river knocked rhythmically against the sides of the boat, like hands
beating gently on hollow logs. We grabbed planks of wood that were floating by
to use as oars since the real oars had been taken by the river. With our shirts
off and our shoes tied around our necks,we rowed toward the middle of the
river. Along the way, branches, a white plastic lawn chair, and a bird cage,
smashed into the side of the boat. Once near the sofa, we stopped rowing,
turned the boat with the bow facing down river, pulled in the planks, and let
the river carry us along on its choppy currents.
We drifted by the ravaged farms along the
river, where murders of crows circled above the destroyed fields of corn. Trees
were stripped of their foliage and they stood naked, bent, and broken, amidst
the waterborne desolation. Houses that stood closest to the river and had been
submerged up to their roofs were the same dark beige color of mud as the river.
Their windows and doors were broken or gone, and most of the contents had been
washed away, carried downriver and possibly out to sea, or lay on the riverbed.
Nothing moved on the ground on either side of the river. We had drifted for a
couple of miles when we saw Tom Goodboy sifting through a mound of debris on
the riverbank. We put the planks in the water and rowed to the shore.
“What are you doing here?” we asked him.
“Looking for my cat,” he answered.
“We found your cat,” we told him.
We tied the rowboat to a bent sign on the
riverbank and got into Tom’s pickup truck.
After the flood, the road going back to
where we had begun was covered in dried mud and littered with debris. In
several places, cattle with bloated bodies, their faces twisted into
expressions of agony, were tangled in barbed wire fences. Tom stopped the truck
as near to the riverbank as he could. We
took off our shoes, rolled up our pants legs, and slogged through the mud to
the patch of grass where we had laid the cat. His cat was sitting up, licking
its fur. It looked perfectly fine.
Steve Carr
Tags:
Short Fiction