Zaddie and BilTy sat with Elinor long into that night. Billy moved his chair from near the door to a place near the window. When he sat near the door, he could hear the distant relentless sc.r.a.ping outside the sitting room door. When he was near the window he could hear nothing but the rain.

As Elinor grew weaker, the rain seemed to fall harder. So Zaddie and Billy sat, silent and watching, as Elinor Caskey moved slowly toward death. They waited for that death to come, or for the rain to stop, or for the siren's wail across the town through the sound of the falling water-though it might be, both Zaddie and Billy knew, that the water would arrive without any warning at all.

Suddenly there was a loud crash in the next room, and before Billy and Zaddie even had time to realize that it had been the sound of the sitting room door being broken open, they saw the k.n.o.b on the bed- 184.

room door turn, first slowly, then frantically. When that was of no avail, the scratching and low pounding began closer to hand, right on the other side of the door.

Billy and Zaddie glanced at one another, and then at Elinor.

Her eyes were open now, and her face was serene.

"Give me your hands," she whispered.

On her left was Zaddie, and Zaddie took Elinor's hand. On her right was Billy Bronze, and Billy took her other hand.

Billy and Zaddie leaned close to hear her words. The rain beat riotously against the windows. There was pounding against the door of the bedroom, incessant and now crazed sounding.

"Goodbye, Billy. You became my son."

Billy said nothing, but squeezed Elinor's unresponsive hand tighter.

"Goodbye, Zaddie. We were good to each other, weren't we?"

"Yes, ma'am," replied Zaddie. "We sure were."

Thunder now came, and the rain beat against the house, and in thunder the blows against the bedroom door were redoubled, and over the top of it all came two screams: one of frustration just beyond the shaking bedroom door, and one all over the town itself as the siren in the room beneath the town hall clocks began to wail. The levee had burst.

The door of the bedroom flew open, and Zaddie and Billy had one glimpse there of Mary-Love and John Robert, pale, white, and dead.

Elinor closed her eyes. "Goodbye," she whispered then, without hurry and without fear, and was gone.

The levee split in two places at once. The western side of the Perdido, just where the bridge had been, had always been a weak spot. The bridge, in tearing itself away, had taken with it many tons of hard-packed clay, and flowing water in patient and tenacious eddies had eaten away much more over the 185.

past few hours. Deeper and deeper inroads had been made, until at last, precisely at half past three in the morning, the water of the combined Perdido and Blackwater rivers broke through entirely. In a matter of moments, the line of stores along the eastern side of Palafox Street was shoved right across the street into the line of stores opposite. In another minute everything was splinters and shards of gla.s.s and mounds of paper, all blackened with water. The livelihoods of tradesmen were transformed in an instant into a battering ram of debris which, in a dozen different directions at once, hurled itself against the rest of the town. The flood swept swiftly along, tearing up streets, telephone poles, trees, and houses. Whole buildings were smashed into atoms of timber no larger than toothpicks. Others simply had their second stories sheared off, and whole furnished rooms coasted off on the surface of the inexorable black tide until they smashed against a tree or some other building, and became themselves instruments of destruction.

On the eastern side of the town, the levee was sundered just behind the Caskey mill, a hundred yards or so before the Blackwater reached the junction. That smaller river had less force than the Perdido below the junction, but the damage it did was complete. The Caskey warehouses, outbuildings, offices, trucks, and oil storage facilities were first inundated, then either shivered to bits or else lifted up and carried into Baptist Bottom where, one by one, as if G.o.d had possessed a munic.i.p.al map and were checking off the meager dwellings in malign sequence, the houses of Baptist Bottom and all the belongings of the poor people who had lived there were crushed beneath tons of black water and debris. Several large oil tanks had been broken open, and now the surface of the flood was covered with a lugubrious sheen.

And still the rain cascaded down upon the scene of destruction.

186.

The National Guardsmen stationed on the roof of the hospital peered through their field gla.s.ses. In the blackness they had seen nothing, and their first indication that the levees had burst had been the explosive noise of the water suddenly surging into the town. That was when the siren was sounded, but the siren blew for no more than a few seconds before all the power in the town was lost. Without further heralding, the water set about to wipe Perdido from the face of the earth.

The levee behind the Caskey houses held, but it made little difference. Before the levee had burst downtown, water had begun to spill over the top of the embankment. Black water tumbled through the kudzu vines and covered the yards with a sheet of water that grew higher by the minute. When the levee finally did cave in downtown, the water increased even more rapidly, but because a small residential hill and several thick stands of trees lay between the Caskey houses and the major break, the debris was kept at bay. Only the water came, lapping in waves against the foundations of Elinor's house, then breaking against the first-floor windows, smashing in the stained gla.s.s in the front parlor, spilling into the rooms, swirling about under the legs of the furniture, surging into the hearths and gouging out all the acc.u.mulated years of ashes and soot. Water rose through the floorboards into all the rooms, overturning delicate furniture, smashing small objects against the walls, pushing debris from room to room. Water crept up the stairs to the second floor. And all this in blackness, and with not as much noise as the continuing crashing of the rain outside the house.

But the rain was slackening.

Upstairs, Elinor Caskey lay dead.

At the moment of her death, the terrible apparitions in the doorway-Mary-Love and John Robert-had simply disappeared. They were no longer 187.

there. The broken, battered door swung shut of its own accord. Zaddie sat on the edge of the bed, still holding Elinor's hand. Billy went to the door and opened it. He looked out and saw nothing. He went through the sitting room and into the hallway. What he heard was the water sloshing about downstairs; he leaned over the banister and looked down. He saw black water on the lower stairs. It was already three feet deep on the first floor and still rising.

He returned to Elinor's bedroom and looked out the window. The water was about eight feet deep in the yard. He could see it spilling over the top of the levee.

He walked over to the bed and took dead Elinor's other hand.

"I don't expect we can get away, Zaddie," he said.

Zaddie shook her head, and said with proud solemnity, "Miss Elinor say to me, long time ago, 'Zaddie, that levee gone hold up till I die, and then that water gone wash this town away.'"

They sat and they waited; gradually the rain tapered off. The effect of so much silence was eerie to Billy and Zaddie, much eerier than the fact that they were sitting and holding the hands of a dead woman, much eerier than the sounds they heard from below of the furniture knocking against the walls and ceilings of the first-floor rooms.

After a time, Zaddie looked down at the floor and lifted her feet experimentally. The carpet was sodden.

"Starting to come through," she remarked.

Billy only nodded; he had already seen that.

Zaddie and Billy waited with infinite patience, not once thinking of rescue, or attempting to get away. Now and then Billy turned to the window and glanced to see if the dawn was near, but the sky remained absolutely black. It was still covered with clouds, but the clouds now merely scudded past, and dropped no more rain.

Both Zaddie and Billy were lost in their own 188 thoughts; Elinor's hands grew cold in theirs. Finally, dawn began slowly to creep in upon them. The water was more than a foot deep in the room, and Zaddie and Billy had pulled up their feet into their chairs. Small objects floated in from the hallway like tiny curious animals and, after abiding awhile, floated back out again. As the dawn became strong, the two weary people were roused by a b.u.mping sound that was louder than the others.

"What was that?" Zaddie said quickly.

Billy shook his head. "Something knocking against the side of the house, that's all. I imagine pretty much everything in this town is floating around. I'm surprised we haven't had any telephone poles poke through the window."

The knock was repeated, twice in rapid succession. It sounded insistent.

Billy slowly let go of Elinor's hand, and placed it on her breast. He went to the window and looked out, blinking against the light.

"What is it?" Zaddie asked.

"A boat," said Billy calmly. "Somebody has tied a boat to this window." He turned back to Zaddie. "Come on, Zaddie. It's time for us to go."

"Cain't leave Miss Elinor," said Zaddie.

"Yes, we can," said Billy. He waded across the room and out through the sitting room into the hallway. "Frances!" he called, not with questioning or timidity, but with complete confidence that she was there. No answer came, but Billy went on, "Frances, Zaddie and I are going on now. You take care of Elinor, will you?"

Without waiting for a reply, he went back into the bedroom. Zaddie was leaning over the bed, pressing her cheek against Elinor's, cold and wasted.

"I'm ready, Mr. Billy," she said.

Billy was at the window. He reached out, pulled the boat nearer, and with some awkwardness, climbed into it. He grasped hold of the sill and tried to hold 189.

the boat steady while Zaddie, with much greater awkwardness, somehow got into it.

Immediately, Billy untied the boat and began to row away from the house. Zaddie, seated in the stern, turned to look back, but Billy said, "No. Don't." But his own gaze never moved from the open window through which they had climbed. And what he saw there through that window made him weep as he paddled away.

So through the dawn of that morning that broke on the destruction of Perdido, Billy Bronze and Zaddie Sapp rowed slowly toward high ground.

190.