Vernon Thaxter stepped up to the podium and faced the a.s.sembly. He was very pale under the lights. All of him was pale.

He was stark naked. Not a st.i.tch on him.

His doodad and b.a.l.l.s hung out in full view. He was a skinny thing, probably because he walked so much. The soles of his feet must've been as hard as dried leather. Rain glistened on his white flesh and his hair was slick with it. He looked like a picture of a dark Hindu mystic I'd seen in one of my National Geographics, though, of course, he was neither dark nor Hindu. I'd have to say he was no mystic, either. Vernon Thaxter was downright, around-the-bend-and-through-the-woods crazy.

Of course, walking around town in his birthday suit was nothing new for Vernon Thaxter. He did it all the time, once the weather started warming up. You didn't see him very much in late autumn or winter, though. When he first appeared in spring, it was always a start; by July n.o.body gave him a second glance; by October the falling leaves were more interesting. Then it came spring again, and there was Vernon Thaxter with his private parts on public display.

You might wonder why Sheriff Amory didn't stand up right then and there and haul Vernon off to jail for indecent exposure. The reason he did not was because of Moorwood Thaxter, Vernon 's father. Moorwood Thaxter owned the bank. He also owned Green Meadows Dairy and the Zephyr Real Estate Company. Just about every house in Zephyr was mortgaged through Moorwood Thaxter's bank. He owned the land the Lyric theater stood on, and the land where this courthouse had been built. He owned every crack in Merchants Street. He owned the shotgun shacks of Bruton, and his own twenty-eight-room mansion at the height of Temple Street. The fear of Moorwood Thaxter, who was in his seventies and rarely seen, was what kept Sheriff Amory in his seat and had kept forty-year-old Vernon naked on the streets of my hometown. It had been this way as long as I remembered.

Mom told me that Vernon used to be all right, but he'd written a book and gone to New York with it and a year later he was back home wandering around nude and nutty.

"Gentlemen and ladies," Vernon began. "And children, too, of course." He reached out his frail arms and grasped the podium's edges. "We have here a very serious situation."

"Momma!" the Demon suddenly squalled. "I can see that feller's dingdo-"

A hand with hairy knuckles clamped over her mouth. I guess the elder Thaxter owned their house, too.

"A very serious situation," Vernon repeated, oblivious to everything but his own voice. "Daddy sent me here with a message. He says he expects the people of this town to show true brotherhood and Christian values in this time of trouble. Mr. Vandercamp Senior, sir?"

"Yes, Vernon?" the old man answered.

"Will you kindly keep a record of the names of those able-bodied and good-thinking men who borrow digging utensils from you for the purpose of helping the residents of Bruton? My daddy would appreciate it."

"Be glad to," Mr. Vandercamp Senior said; he was rich, but not rich enough to say no to Moorwood Thaxter.

"Thank you. That way my daddy can have a list at hand when interest rates go up, as they are bound to do in this unsettled age. My daddy has always felt that those men-and women-who aren't loath to work for their neighbors are deserving of extra considerations." He smiled, gazing out at his audience. "Anyone else have anything to say?"

No one did. It's kind of difficult to talk to a naked man about anything but why he won't wear clothes, and n.o.body would dare bring up such a sensitive subject.

"I think our mission is clear, then," Vernon said. "Good luck to all." He thanked Mayor Swope for letting him speak, and then he stepped down from the podium and walked out of the chamber the way he'd come. The Red Sea parted for him again, and closed at his back.

For a minute or so everybody sat in silence; maybe we were waiting to make sure Vernon Thaxter was out of earshot. Then somebody started laughing and somebody else picked it up, and the Demon started screaming with laughter and jumping up and down, but other people were hollering for the laughers to shut up and the whole place was like a merry glimpse of h.e.l.l. "Settle down! Settle down, everybody!" Mayor Swope was yelling, and Chief Marchette stood up and bellowed like a foghorn for quiet.

"It's d.a.m.n blackmail!" Mr. Moultry was on his feet again. "Nothin' but d.a.m.n blackmail!" A few others agreed with him, but Dad was one of the men who stood up and told Mr. Moultry to shut his mouth and pay attention to the fire chief.

This is how it got sorted out: Chief Marchette said that everybody who wanted to work should get on over to Bruton, where the river flowed against the edge of town on its way to the gargoyle bridge, and he'd have some volunteers load the shovels, pickaxes, and other stuff into a truck at Mr. Vandercamp's hardware store. The power of Moorwood Thaxter was never more evident when Chief Marchette finished his instructions: everybody went to Bruton, even Mr. Moultry.

Bruton's narrow streets were already awash. Chickens flapped in the water, and dogs were swimming. The rain had started falling hard again, slamming on the tin roofs like rough music. Dark people were pulling their belongings out of the wood-frame houses and trying to get to higher ground. The cars and trucks coming over from Zephyr made waves that rolled across submerged yards to crash foam against the foundations. "This," Dad said, "is gonna be a bad one."

On the wooded riverbank, most of the residents of Bruton were already laboring in knee-deep water. A wall of mud was going up, but the river was hungry. We left the pickup near a public basketball court at the Bruton Recreation Center, where a lot of other vehicles were parked, then we slogged toward the river. Fog swirled over the rising water, and flashlight beams crisscrossed in the night. Lightning flashed and thunder boomed. I heard the urgent cries of people to work faster and harder. My mother's hand gripped mine, and held on tightly while Dad went on ahead to join a group of Bruton men. Someone had backed a dump truck full of sand to the riverbank, and a Bruton man pulled Dad up into it and they started filling little burlap bags and tossing them down to other rain-soaked men. "Over here! Over here!" somebody yelled. "It ain't gonna hold!" someone else shouted. Voices crisscrossed and merged like the flashlight beams. They were scared voices. I was scared, too.

There is something about nature out of control that touches a primal terror. We are used to believing that we're the masters of our domain, and that G.o.d has given us this earth to rule over. We need this illusion like a good night-light. The truth is more fearsome: we are as frail as young trees in tornadoes, and our beloved homes are one flood away from driftwood. We plant our roots in trembling earth, we live where mountains rose and fell and prehistoric seas burned away in mist. We and the towns we have built are not permanent; the earth itself is a pa.s.sing train. When you stand in muddy water that is rising toward your waist and you hear people shouting against the darkness and see their figures struggling to hold back the currents that will not be denied, you realize the truth of it: we will not win, but we cannot give up. No one on that disappearing riverbank, there in the pouring rain, thought the Tec.u.mseh was going to be turned aside. It had never been so. Still, the work went on. The truck full of tools came from the hardware store, and Mr. Vandercamp Junior had a clipboard where people signed their names as they accepted a shovel. Walls of mud and sandbags were built up, and the river surged through the barricade like brown soup through a mouthful of weak teeth. The water rose. My belt buckle submerged.

Lightning zigzagged down from the heavens, followed by a crash of thunder so loud you couldn't hear the women scream. "That hit somethin' close!" said Reverend Lovoy, who held a shovel and resembled a mud man. "Lights are goin' out!" a black woman shouted a few seconds later, and indeed the power was failing all over Bruton and Zephyr. I watched the lights flicker and disappear from the windows. Then my hometown lay in darkness, and you couldn't tell sky from water. In the distance I saw what looked like a candle glowing in the window of a house about as far from Bruton as you could get and still be within Zephyr's boundaries. As I watched, the light moved from window to window. I realized I was looking at Mr. Moorwood Thaxter's mansion up at the high point of Temple Street.

I sensed it before I saw it.

A figure stood to my left, watching me. Whoever it was wore a long raincoat, his hands in his pockets. The wind shrilled in off the thunderstorm and moved the wet folds of the coat, and I almost choked on my heart because I remembered the figure in the woods opposite Saxon's Lake.

Then whoever it was started wading past my mother and me toward the laborers. It was a tall figure-a man, I presumed-and he moved with purposeful strength. Two flashlight beams seemed to fence in the air for a few seconds, and the man in the raincoat walked into their conflict. The battling lights did not reveal the man's face, but did reveal something else.

The man wore a drenched and dripping fedora. The band of that hat was secured by a silver disc the size of a half-dollar, and a small decorative feather stuck up from it.

A feather, dark with wet, but a feather with a definite glint of green.

Like the green feather I'd found on the bottom of my sneaker that morning.

My mind raced. Might there have been two green feathers in that hatband, before the wind had plucked one out?

One of the beams, defeated, drew back. The other pranced away. The man walked in darkness.

"Mom?" I said. "Mom?"

The figure was wading away from us, and had pa.s.sed no more than eight feet from me. He reached up with a white hand to hold the hat on his head. "Mom?" I said again, and she finally heard me over the noise and answered, "What is it?"

"I think... I think..." But I didn't know what I thought. I couldn't tell if that was the person I'd seen across the road, or not.

The figure was moving off through the brown water, step after step.

I pulled my hand free from my mother's, and I went after him.

"Cory!" she said. "Cory, take my hand!"

I heard, but I didn't listen. The water swirled around me. I kept going.

"Cory!" Mom shouted.

I had to see his face.

"Mister!" I called. It was too noisy, what with the rain and the river and the working; he couldn't hear. Even if he did, he wouldn't turn around. I felt the Tec.u.mseh's currents pulling at my shoes. I was sunken waist-deep in cold murk. The man was heading toward the riverbank, where my dad was. Flashlights bobbed and weaved, and a shimmering reflection danced up and struck the man's right hand as he pulled it from his pocket.

Something metallic glinted in it.

Something with a sharp edge.

My heart stuttered.

The man in the green-feathered hat was on his way to the riverbank for an appointment with my father. It was an appointment, perhaps, that he'd been planning ever since Dad dove in after the sinking car. With all this commotion, all this noise, and in all this watery dark, might not the man in the green-feathered hat find a chance to drive that blade into my father's back? I couldn't see my dad; I couldn't make out anyone for sure, just glistening figures straining against the inevitable.

He was stronger against the current than I. He was pulling away from me. I lunged forward, fighting the river, and that was when my feet slipped out from under me and I went down, the muddy water closing over my head. I reached up, trying to grab something to hold on to. There was nothing solid, and I couldn't get my feet planted. My mind screamed that I'd never be able to draw a breath again. I splashed and wallowed, and then somebody had gripped me and was lifting me up as the muddy water oozed from my face and hair.

"I've got you," a man said. "You're all right."

"Cory! What's wrong with you, boy?" That was my mother's voice, rising to new heights of terror. "Are you crazy?"

"I believe he stepped in a hole, Rebecca." The man set me down. I was still standing in waist-deep water but at least my feet were touching earth. I wiped clots of mud from my eyes and looked up at Dr. Curtis Parrish, who wore a gray raincoat and a rainhat. The hat had no band, therefore it had no silver disc and no green feather. I turned around, looking for the figure I'd been trying to reach, but he had merged with the other people nearer the river's edge. He and the knife he'd drawn from his pocket.

"Where's Dad?" I said, working up to another fever pitch. "I've gotta find Dad!"

"Whoa, whoa, settle down." Dr. Parrish took hold of my shoulders. In one hand he held a flashlight. "Tom's right over there." He pointed the flashlight's beam toward a group of muddied men. The direction he indicated was not the direction in which the man with the green-feathered hat had gone. But I saw my father over there, working between a black man and Mr. Yarbrough. "See him?"

"Yes sir." Again I searched for the mysterious figure. Vanished.

"Cory, don't you run away from me like that!" Mom scolded. "You scared me almost to death!" She took my hand again in a grip of iron.

Dr. Parrish was a heavyset man, about forty-eight or forty-nine years old, with a firm, square jaw and a flattened nose that reminded everyone he'd been a champion boxer when he was a sergeant in the army. With the same hands that had scooped me from the hole at my feet, Dr. Parrish had delivered me from my mother's womb. He had thick dark eyebrows over eyes the color of steel, and beneath his rainhat his dark brown hair was gray on the sides. Dr. Parrish said to Mom, "I heard from Chief Marchette a little while ago that they've opened up the school gym. They're puttin' in oil lamps and bringin' in some cots and blankets. Most of the women and children are goin' over there to stay, since the water's gettin' so high."

"Is that where we ought to go, then?"

"I think it'd be the wise thing. There's no use you and Cory standin' out here in this mess." He pointed with the flashlight again, this time away from the river and toward the swampy basketball court where we'd parked. "They're pickin' up whoever wants to go to the shelter over that way. Probably be another truck along in a few minutes."

"Dad won't know where we are!" I protested, still thinking of the green feather and the knife.

"I'll let him know. Tom would want you both in a safe place, and I'll tell you the truth, Rebecca: the way this is goin', we'll be catchin' catfish in attics before mornin'."

We didn't need much prodding. "Brightie's already over there," Dr. Parrish said. "You ought to go catch the next truck. Here, take this." He gave Mom the flashlight, and we turned away from the swollen Tec.u.mseh and started toward the basketball court. "Keep hold of my hand!" Mom cautioned as the floodwaters swept around us. I looked back, could see only the lights moving in the darkness and glittering off the roiling water. "Watch your step!" Mom said. Farther along the riverbank, past where my father was working, voices rose in a chorus of shouts. I did not know it then, but a frothy wave had just swamped over the highest part of the earthen dam and the water churned and foamed and men suddenly found themselves up to their elbows in trouble as the river burst through. A flashlight's beam caught a glimpse of brown-mottled scales in the muddied foam, and somebody hollered, "Snakes!" In the next second, the men were bowled over by the twisting currents, and Mr. Stellko, the Lyric's manager, aged by ten years when he put his hand out to seize a grip and felt a log-sized, scaly shape moving past him in the turbulence. Mr. Stellko was struck dumb and peed in his pants at the same time, and when he could find his voice to scream, the monstrous reptile was gone, following the flood into the streets of Bruton.

"Help me! Somebody help me!"

We heard the voice of a woman from nearby, and Mom said, "Wait."

Someone carrying an oil lamp was splashing toward us. Rain hissed on the lamp's hot gla.s.s and steamed away. "Please help me!" the woman cried.

"What is it?" Mom turned the light onto the panic-stricken face of a young black woman. I didn't know her, but Mom said, "Nila Castile? Is that you?"

"Yes ma'am, it's Nila! Who's that?"

"Rebecca Mackenson. I used to read books to your mother."

This was before I was born, I presumed.

"It's my daddy, Miz Rebecca!" Nila Castile said. "I think his heart's give out!"

"Where is he?"

"At the house! Over there!" She pointed into the darkness, water swirling around her waist. I was about chest-deep by now. "He can't stand up!"

"All right, Nila. Settle down." My mother, a framework of little terrors with skin stretched over it, was amazingly calm when someone else needed calming. This, as I understood it, was part of being a grown-up. When it was truly needed, my mother could reveal something that was sorely lacking in Granddaddy Jaybird: courage. "You lead the way," she said.

Water was rushing into the houses of Bruton. Nila Castile 's house, like so many others, was a narrow gray shotgun shack. She led us in, the river surging around us, and she shouted in the first room, "Gavin! I'm back!"

Her light, and Mom's light, too, fell on an old black man sitting in a chair, the water up around his knees and newspapers and magazines swirling in the current. He was clutching his hand to his wet shirt over his heart, his ebony face seamed with pain and his eyes squeezed shut. Standing next to him, holding his other hand, was a little boy maybe seven or eight years old.

"Grandpap's cryin', Momma," the little boy said.

"I know he is, Gavin. Daddy, I've brought some help." Nila Castile set the lamp down on a tabletop. "Can you hear me, Daddy?"

"Ohhhhh," the old man groaned. "Hurtin' mighty bad this time."

"We're gonna help you stand up. Gonna get you out of here."

"No, honey." He shook his head. "Old legs... gone."

"What're we gonna do?" Nila looked at my mother, and I saw the bright tears in her eyes.

The river was shoving its way in. Thunder spoke outside and the lightning flared. If this had been a television show, it would've been time for a commercial.

But real life takes no pauses. "Wheelbarrow," my mother said. "Have you got one?"

Nila said no, but that they'd borrowed a neighbor's wheelbarrow before and she thought it might be up on their back porch. Mom said to me, "You stay here," and she gave me the oil lamp. Now I was going to have to be courageous, whether I liked it or not. Mom and Nila left with the flashlight, and I stood in the flooding front room with the little boy and the old man.

"I'm Gavin Castile," the little boy said.

"I'm Cory Mackenson," I told him.

Hard to be sociable when you're hip-deep in brown water and the flickering light doesn't fill up the room.

"This here's my grandpap, Mr. Booker Thornberry," Gavin went on, his hand locked with the old man's. "He ain't feelin' good."

"How come you didn't get out when everybody else did?"

"Because," Mr. Thornberry said, rousing himself, "this is my home, boy. My home. I ain't scared of no d.a.m.ned river."

"Everybody else is," I said. Everybody with sense, is what I meant.

"Then everybody else can go on and run." Mr. Thornberry, whom I was beginning to realize shared a stubborn streak with Granddaddy Jaybird, winced as a fresh pain hit him. He blinked slowly, his dark eyes staring at me from a bony face. "My Rubynelle pa.s.sed on in this house. Right here. I ain't gonna die in no white man's hospital."

"Do you want to die?" I asked him.

He seemed to think about this. "Gonna die in my own home," he answered.

"Water's gettin' deep," I said. "Everybody might get drowned."

The old man scowled. Then he turned his head and looked at the small black hand he was clutching.

"My grandpap took me to the movies!" Gavin said, attached to the thin dark arm as the water rose toward his throat. "We seen a Looney Tune!"

"Bugs Bunny," the old man said. "We seen ol' Bugs Bunny and that stutterin' fella looks like a pig. Didn't we, boy?"

"Yes sir!" Gavin answered, and he grinned. "We gone go see another one real soon, ain't we, Grandpap?"

Mr. Thornberry didn't answer. Gavin didn't let go.

I understood then what courage is all about. It is loving someone else more than you love yourself.

My mother and Nila Castile returned, lugging a wheelbarrow. "Gonna put you in this, Daddy," Nila told him. "We can push you to where Miz Rebecca says they're pickin' up people in trucks."

Mr. Thornberry took a long, deep breath, held it for a few seconds, and then let it go. "d.a.m.n," he whispered. "d.a.m.n old heart in a d.a.m.n old fool." His voice cracked a little bit on that last word.