Fire and FloodGrace Buckner

The leaves didn’t change this year. I needed them to, more than ever, but they didn’t. I sit out on the front porch in the mornings with Glenn and all that’s in the trees is dried leaves, making me think of the wildfires that came through the winter I turned thirteen. Watching them burn across the river while my daddy said they wouldn’t make it into town. Seeing the embers glowing at night when we drove back from church. I told Glenn it would be fires here next. He only handed me coffee and gestured toward my book. He told me to read instead of thinking.

When I go to class, my teacher makes me get up in front of everybody and read my stories. People can’t hardly stand to look at me while I’m talking, because all they ever do is write stories about things they don’t know nothing about, things they ain’t never touched or seen, and all I’ve ever wrote in my life is what I’ve held with my own heart, my own hands, and I don’t know of folks who care a whole lot about another person’s heart. I listen to folks, some of them even older than me, who ain’t never had to see their daddy dying of his lungs just shriveling up, ain’t never seen the only home they’d ever known float down the river. Last time I was in class, I read the story where my daddy dies while I’m holding his hand and I’m listening to the death rattle in his lungs till it just finally stops. I know my voice was shaking while I was reading, but I couldn’t hardly breathe with the way they were all looking at me with eyes too wide and shifty, faces too twisted up with not wanting to listen about my daddy and how he loved daffodils before he got the death rattle last spring. Daddy and I used to plant marigolds at the end of the walk every spring, and I saw him watering them the week before he died, laboring with every breath and still wanting to make sure I had the prettiness of them when he left. I’ve never known a man to love flowers like my daddy did. 

I don’t like writing for school. It’s how I pay for my teaching degree, all these stories that folks outside of the English department like to read. I told Glenn that it’s because they feel sorry for me. He shook his head. He says I’m a good writer. He says writing is how he met me. He starts telling me the story like I wasn’t there, like I didn’t have it published last spring. He tells me about how when I stood up in front of the class, he knew he was going to love me. He says he could see how I moved through life, what I carried, and he wanted to move with me. Glenn thinks he’s a romantic. 

The year the mountain burned was the year I couldn’t sleep for knowing that I was going to hell. I’d shake the whole drive to church on Sunday mornings and sleep all afternoon so I didn’t have to shake until evening service. I’d sit on the fellowship hall steps with David, eating banana pudding and telling him how I’d begged God to save me, but my heart still beat with conviction every time Pastor Jenkins preached on hell. He’d hold my hand. He’d tell me I was saved and let me have the rest of his pudding. David died riding a four-wheeler in our freshman year of high school. I thought I was going to marry him. I sat at his funeral and thought about those nights we could smell the forests burning and he’d try to convince me it was just people’s woodstoves. I’d told him I was afraid of dying. It was a long time before I went to David’s grave. I rode my bike to the cemetery one day after his family moved away. It’d been years. I don’t think he was there.

Glenn’s never set foot in a church. His mama went to Catholic School, but she said that was enough hell for at least three generations and wouldn’t even let Glenn or his sisters get baptized. When I met Glenn’s parents, they already knew that me and Glenn lived together, but they didn’t say anything. They’d put a picture of the two of us on the wall. His sisters talked to me about books, even though they didn’t want to. His mom showed me his baby pictures and his daddy said he’d looked up some of my stories online. I cried that night asking Glenn why he’d ever left home. He said it was so he could meet me.

I grew up by the river. Me and my brothers never learned how to swim, but our daddy tried to teach us as long as we lived there. Sometimes I’d hear the rain move in, and I’d look out my window and the river would be lapping at our front steps. In the morning, it’d always gone down. Daddy kept a canoe tied to the porch, just in case the water ever got so high that we couldn’t drive out. One time, a tropical storm was moving in and the men from the fire department came out to the house to tell us we needed to leave. I cried when Daddy said we were staying. I sat in the window and watched the river wash up onto the porch, taking away our welcome mat that my grandma had made. I saw Daddy walk out the door and stand in the water up to his knees. He stood there a long time, then went back inside. I heard him snoring, but I still didn’t sleep. That’s all I could think about the morning Glenn turned on the news and I saw the river twelve feet deep on Main Street. I knew the house on the river was gone, even though we’d moved away a long time ago. Glenn tried to turn the TV off when he saw what had happened, but I made him keep it on. I saw folks I knew waving from the roof of the hospital that flooded, waiting to be helicoptered off. Glenn held me and I still couldn’t breathe. I knew somebody I loved had died. It was four days before I heard from anybody I knew back home. I woke up in the mornings and couldn’t hear Glenn telling me he loved me. I went to school and couldn’t answer when people asked me if I’d heard from my family. Somebody shoved their phone up in my face and asked me if I’d seen this picture yet. It was at Gentry’s Hardware. I knew everyone in the picture from church. They were smiling and shoveling mud. They were the first people I knew were alive. 

My oldest brother called me from Tennessee while Glenn and I were out for dinner. His voice was shaking. He said him and his little girl had made it out before all the roads closed. He still hadn’t heard from my other brothers, but he was going to drive home and try to find them in the morning. I told Glenn we had to go too. 

The sky was still dark when we drove into the mountains. I’d never taken Glenn home. When I left for college, I told my brothers I wouldn’t be back. I worried about them, but I never came home. After I met Glenn, he used to ask me why I wouldn’t go back to the place I always wrote about, why I wouldn’t show it to him. I told him about having to gather up the pieces of my heart every morning when the air was crisp with fall because it reminded me of the morning my daddy died. How I’d see the mountains breathing and know they were more alive than my daddy would ever be again. Glenn never asked me again to go back. 

I started crying when I saw the ridges start to rise on the horizon. I hadn’t been able to remember what they looked like until then. Glenn drove slow down the highway into the river town, letting me lean across him and look out over the bridge into the valley. The riverbanks were scoured and filled with debris. A car was crushed in tree limbs against the bridge piling. I saw a tree caught by the roots in another tree, forty feet off the ground where it had been ripped away. A small waterfall ran down Main Street, past the library where my daddy used to take me. I stopped crying after a while. I felt a dam that wouldn’t break being built inside my heart.

The neighbors said my brothers had left the day after the storm. They told us that the water in the creek had gotten ten feet above the bridge, where it normally ran six inches deep and ten feet below the road. They told us that my brothers took our daddy’s old canoe when the creek water got to the second story and started knocking on all the neighbors’ upstairs windows and paddling them to the bank, one by one. Glenn thanked them. I couldn’t say anything. He held my hand while we drove through the dark, passing David’s grave without stopping. He said we couldn’t know where they were, but we knew they’d been safe. 

We spent the night with my brother in Tennessee. He told us about his friend who worked at the fire department, how he got a call to help some folks caught in a landslide and the mountain gave way again right as he pulled his truck into their driveway. He told us they still hadn’t found him. My niece curled her body up against mine and trembled every time a helicopter flew over. I told her it was all alright. My brother said she was afraid of the world ending. Her Sunday School teacher had told her we were living in the End Times, and every time one of the emergency alerts went off, she’d thought it was the Trumpet of God and that her daddy was going to leave her all alone for the Tribulation. I whispered that I’d stay with her, even if the Rapture came. 

My brothers called the next morning. They’d driven to South Carolina because they couldn’t find any gas or cell service in the mountains. The youngest cried when he told me the water had ripped up Daddy’s marigolds from beside the walk. He told me he’d plant them back before I visited. The next day, we drove back into the river town. I stood on the bridge with Glenn and showed him where the mountain was scarred from the fires. We had to wear hazmat suits to see the dark waterline in downtown, high above our heads. I saw soldiers out in boats, floating the river and searching the piles of debris. I knew I wouldn’t come back.

The night we came home, Glenn ran his hands up and down my body. He told me he could trace my ribs from how much weight I’d lost since the storm. I tried to remember what it was like to have my heart in my body, flowing without a barrier. I let him hold me while I watched the dead leaves flying in the wind outside the window. I thought of my daddy raking in the fall, letting us jump in the pile and smiling while he raked it back into place. He told us he did it so the forest bed wouldn’t burn as easy. I knew I’d write that story soon.

I could smell smoke washing in on the breeze. On the news, they said there was a burn ban. I dreamed of embers, beautiful and bright in the dark with David beside me. My brothers standing on the banks of the river, never stepping foot into the canoe, the water never rising above my daddy’s knees. I felt the dam inside me getting taller. I dreamed of going back.