Acts of God Read online

  Now as I flew home, the flooded plain stretched below me. My father had always been opposed to the levees. He knew the rivers. He’d been born near them, grew up along their banks. He said when it came to rivers, and I suppose to anything else, for that matter, let them flow. Don’t try to contain them.

  A river will find its own shape and direction. There are two hundred sunken steamboats from the Missouri River that now lie at the bottom of plowed fields. This is because the river has chosen to go its own way. You can’t trust the river; you never know when it will burst its banks and reroute itself.

  My father knew better than to tell the farmers not to live on the silt-rich soil that lined the floodplain. Along the riverbanks you could reach your hand into the dirt and pull up the richest black earth in the world—fistfuls—and my father wasn’t one to tell anyone to live elsewhere. But he did try to convince them to build on higher ground.

  If my father were flying in this plane, looking down at this water-clogged land, if he were looking at what I saw from this height, he would have felt very sad and very vindicated. He would say, “They should’ve asked me. I would’ve told them.”

  3

  I spy, what do I spy, something that is yellow. Is it a truck? I asked my brother Jeb. Is it my father’s shirt or that yellow jacket that flew into the car? A freight train car, a street sign, that stripe down the center of the road? It’s corn, Jeb shouted back at me. It was the summer I turned nine as I gazed at fields and fields, but I didn’t see any yellow. All I saw were flowing carpets of pale green. But it’s in the husk, I said, and Jeb just threw up his hands.

  It didn’t seem quite fair, the rules my brother played by, but still it was all around us. Miles and miles of corn. I’d never seen it before. For years I’d waited for this. My father was letting me go with him for the first time to the floodplain. Jeb was twelve and he’d been going with for the past two years. You had to be ten to go along, that was the rule. But since I was almost ten, my father made an exception for me. That was how he put it, “I’ll make an exception for you, Squirrel,” and even though I didn’t know what an exception was at the time, I was happy to have one made for me.

  Art cried because he was only six and had to stay home and Lily tried to explain to him that when he was bigger he’d go. In the end she had to pry his fingers from the car door. “Another year or two, Squirt,” our father said, but Art just screamed that it wasn’t fair and in the end our father had to agree with him. “You’re right, son,” he said. “Life isn’t fair.” Lily stood in the driveway, in an apron, holding Art back with one hand, blowing kisses with the other as we drove away. Her skirt caught in the wind and she pushed it down.

  My father blew kisses back, a smile on his face, but the minute we turned north on Lincoln and drove under the railroad trestle, he put the radio on loud and started to croon. My father sang at home, but never loudly. Lily came from a big family and she didn’t like noise. “But it’s music, Lily,” he’d argue with her, but she didn’t agree. No shouting; no doors being banged. No music played loud. If you slammed a door behind her, my mother jumped in the air.

  My father moved silently through our lives, but as soon as we were past the railroad tracks, heading west, he was tapping his fingers, humming along. We weren’t half a mile from the house before we were all singing along to “You Ain’t Nothing but a Hound Dog.” We sang for miles at the top of our lungs.

  When we stopped for gas, I slipped into the front seat, but Jeb complained. “Trooper,” our father said, “you always get to sit there. Give Squirrel a chance.”

  It was hot even with the windows rolled down. The air smelled of pigs and fertilizer. The sun was boiling, heating up the vinyl seats of the car, but I didn’t care. This was an adventure. Where we were going there had been a flood. Last year it was drought; this year it’s flood, my father lectured us as we drove. Now the Everly Brothers were singing “Dream” and my father sang along. Though he was a little off-key, I was surprised he knew all the words.

  My father had a deep baritone voice that would sound good on the radio, I thought. I could imagine him announcing things—the weather, the news, sports. Sometimes when I listened to the radio, I pretended it was my father’s voice coming to me from far away. Now it almost made the car shake. I had only heard that voice at night when he sang to put me to bed, but it wasn’t this big. It seemed to take up all the farmland that stretched before our eyes. For the first time I saw the land as he did—wide and empty and flat. Every Monday he drove out this way and every Thursday he came home. “Get a whiff of this, kids.” He rolled down his window as we passed a pig farm. We held our noses, groaning, and our father laughed.

  There were dozens of things my father could have done with his life besides sell insurance and settle claims. He had a keen sense for business and as he grew older, he constantly chastised himself for the mistakes he’d made. He was always kicking himself for not giving a few thousand bucks to the friend who came to him with a new invention—a little spray gadget you put on the top of bottles for hair spray and household cleaners. He and Lily had sat, watching the little demonstration. “No,” she’d said afterward, “we can’t take the risk.” Aerosol cans. My father missed his opportunity to invest in aerosol cans. “I could’ve made millions,” he muttered as he patched the roof or fixed the plumbing on Saturday afternoons.

  His ambition once had been money—to make lots of it and get rich, then do what he wanted with his life. But he fell into the insurance line through a distant relative of my mother’s, a man who said that insurance was a good, steady way to lay your foundation. In the end all the schemes for getting rich fell through and insurance was what he did. He learned to take pleasure in it as he took pleasure in most things.

  Though he was a city boy by birth, he came to love the loamy smell of soil, the rich, earthy odor of dirt being overturned, of the freshly planted fields. Even the piquant odor of fertilizer or the stench of a pig farm was somehow pleasing to him. It was not what he ever expected to come to love, but then there were other things Victor Winterstone had not expected he would love. For example, our mother, Lily, the plain, freckle-faced girl who made a beautiful home and ran it like a tight ship.

  He was a claims adjuster who adjusted. That’s what he was, my father who chuckled to himself as he drove; that’s how adjustable he’d become. He was happy as he drove, whistling, two of his children at his side. Head tossed back. He listened to the radio, tapping out the rhythms. Rolling down the window, he got a smell of the fetid earth. Compost. Dead things decaying out there in the fields. The promise of new life.

  In the city he’d never felt the cycles of life. He’d felt the bars he frequented and the music and the parties and the girls who clung to him, but he didn’t feel this. The way life moved on from one moment to the next. Seasonal change, things growing and dying. He wanted to reach out and grab it. Take what was left, hold it by the throat. And never let go.

  I stuck my face out the window like a dog, breathing in the air my father breathed. In the backseat Jeb groaned, “Dad, I’m gonna be sick.” He was mad that I’d displaced him.

  “Jeb,” my father said sternly, “cut it out.” Jeb had a turkey feather he’d found in the gas station parking lot and he kept tickling my ear. I stuck my tongue out at him in the rearview mirror.

  Illinois was flat. No one had ever told me this before but it was very flat. Sometimes there was a hill or two but then it was flat again. And green, but mostly it was corn and soy. Wheat. The wheat bent in the wind. I waved at farmers on their tractors. If they saw me, they waved back. Some kept waving until we were far away.

  * * *

  It took all day to get to where we were going and when we got there, it was all lakes. I’d expected rivers, running streams, but it was as if people were living in the middle of lakes. A cow floated on her back in one. Someone’s bed was in the middle of another. “No one should live here,” my father said under his breath and I knew we’d reached the
floodplain.

  My father had an office to go to in town that had the name of the company he worked for on it. Farmers Protection. He said he didn’t just insure farmers, but that’s how it began so they called it “Farmers.” He insured all kinds of people for fire, theft, life. But in the office, people who looked like farmers were sitting, waiting for him. Men in overalls. A woman in a smock was in tears; a boy gripped her arm. Everyone looked weary.

  My father was a practitioner of sleight of hand—small magic tricks he did to amuse children, mainly his own. He pulled quarters out of ears, turned a silver wand to gold. He could cut a rope in two, then make it whole. He made eggs disappear. Jeb told me on previous summers when he’d gone from farm to farm with my father that this was what he did to entertain people who’d lost everything they owned.

  I kept expecting him to do one of his tricks—pluck a quarter from the ear of the boy who wouldn’t let go of the woman in the smock. Instead my father sat at a desk. “Crop insurance,” I heard him say, “that’s what these farmers need.” Then he told me and Jeb to go outside. He gave us money to buy a hamburger and a milk shake. “Now you watch out for her,” my father told Jeb. The river had left its banks.

  As we wandered out into the street, people started shouting at my father. The woman in tears cried harder. We found a drugstore and sat at the counter. We ordered cheeseburgers, fries, shakes, but I didn’t eat that much. Afterward we walked around town. It was a small town, but we found a playground. Jeb and I got on swings and pumped our legs harder and harder until we were swinging way up, then came way back down again. We swung until our legs ached.

  Then Jeb took me down to where the river had burst its banks. It was only four or five blocks from where we were, but even as we walked there, I could see the strange sight of streets filled with dark ooze. A rushing stream of roiling water pushed just ahead of us. Houses sat in the middle of it with water up to the first-floor windows. In one house a dog barked mournfully on the roof.

  Jeb stood, staring at the water. At its dark, brown color, churning, angry as Jeb’s face. Why should my brother look so angry? So responsible, as if he were the cause of this flood? He picked up a stick and hurled it in with all his might and we watched the stick being carried along with the current. Then he hurled another. Then he pretended to walk toward the water, to put his foot in and I screamed, holding him back. But he pushed me away and started to walk again toward the water’s edge and this time I grabbed his shirt. Real tears came down my cheeks and when he saw my tears, he stopped. He laughed at me. “You didn’t think I would, did you, Squirrel?”

  I was still pulling on him, afraid to let go, until he stepped back from the river’s edge. When we went back to my father’s office, the people were gone. My father looked weary. We’d been thinking of driving straight back, but my father said he was too tired. He decided we should spend the night so we drove for an hour or so, which our father said was all right because it was on our way home.

  When the air cooled and it began to grow dark, we stopped at a roadside motel that was mostly a parking lot. A big neon vacancy sign blinked on and off and the “V” was burned out so it read “acancy.” I don’t know why, but Jeb and I found this word very funny. Acancy. The motel was painted turquoise on the outside and had a TV in the room, and a small pool with lots of dead bugs in it.

  The room was plaid and smelled of stale cigarettes, but we swam in the pool, though I was more tentative about water now than I’d been before I saw the flood, the water rising to the windows of houses. My father used a strainer to get the bugs out of the pool. Then he let us swim in our T-shirts and underwear. In the morning we had to put on wet clothes.

  Then my father took us out for steaks and French fries. We ate in a restaurant that had green and pink Formica tables and a steer’s head over the door. I got to eat my steak with a serrated knife and it cut smooth as butter. That night in the room we watched TV and Jeb and I jumped from bed to bed, pretending that below us there was a roiling sea. We had a pillow fight, something we could never have at home, while our father sat watching the news. We didn’t go to sleep before we were tired.

  When it was time to go to sleep, Jeb grabbed some covers and headed for the floor, but our father stopped him. “No way, young man. Only Indians or barbarians sleep on the floor.” After some back-and-forth, they eventually shared the bed. I got the bed closest to the window, where the amber light from the parking lot shone in. It was a big bed but with scratchy sheets. It was also soft, not like my bed at home, which was harder. I found a cozy place to slip into. Jeb and my father both fell asleep right away, my father sputtering in his sleep, and I drifted off, listening to the heavy breathing of men.

  In the morning we drove back to Winonah. It was a long, hot drive and the way back looked different from the way there. It was flat farmland, but as you got closer to Winonah and the lake it closed up on you. The trees made the landscape thicker. They broke the flatness, but I felt as if I couldn’t breathe. I missed the open stretches of road.

  When we got home, Lily was sitting on the front porch, crying. She looked like one of those farmer’s wives from the floodplain. When she saw us, she dashed off the porch. “Oh, I expected you last night. You should have called,” she scolded my father, shaking a finger, but she was hugging us. I thought my mother was going to be angry. Instead she held us very tight.

  * * *

  That night as I was going to sleep, my mother came into my room. I had heard my parents arguing downstairs. Now she looked tired, but she didn’t seem so upset anymore. She sat on the side of my bed. “So how was your trip?”

  I told her I’d seen a cow floating on its back and a bed drifting down a stream. She seemed to like this so I told her more. I told her I’d seen a dining room set in the middle of a lake and a family picnicking on the roof of their house and when we’d driven by the waters had parted like the Red Sea.

  Now she seemed a little annoyed with me. She ruffled my hair and rose from the bed. “No fibs, Squirrel,” she said, pulling the covers to my chin. “Always tell the truth. Don’t tell stories.”

  4

  I never thought I’d be driving down this road again, but suddenly there I was, following the shore, on my way to Winonah. I followed the dips of the old Hiawatha trail that the Potawatomi had blazed a century ago when they traveled these bluffs. The steel-blue lake was to my right and I caught glimpses of it as I took each turn. I drove by the dome-shaped Bahai temple that my brother Jeb christened “God’s orange juice squeezer” when we were kids, hot and bored in the backseat. After that we laughed whenever we passed it, making slurping noises until our father told us to pipe down.

  I careened through the twisting section of road called the Hills, carved by Ice Age glaciers, and took the turns as if I were driving the bumper cars at Riverview. As a child, the Hills seemed to promise some kind of adventure. When I drive along the Coast Highway where I now live, I get this same surge—as if anything is possible. Above me loomed maples and oak, the sturdy trees I’d grown up with. I eased the car around each turn on the narrow road I knew like the back of my hand.

  We used to take this road all the time when I was a girl and we’d visit our grandparents “in town.” My father preferred the highway because it was faster, but my mother always said, “No, let’s take the Drive.” “The Drive” was slower with its winding turns, but there were things to see—stone houses where rich people lived tucked behind blooming shrubs. Famous houses designed by Frank Lloyd Wright. When we passed one of those, my mother pointed. “How’d you like to live here? He made everything small, like he was.”

  It had been almost three decades since I’d gotten on the Drive and headed north. But I wanted to go this way and not the highway. I wanted to come back slowly, to take my time. But still Winonah came upon me suddenly. When I crossed the town line and saw the sign, I felt a twinge as if I’d taken a wrong turn. But there was no wrong turn. It’s the way Winonah is—a town where it seems as if
you can’t go wrong. But, of course, you can.

  As I came into town, even in the dark I could see how Central Avenue had changed. A Gap was at the corner where we used to buy school supplies. Coffee bars with green awnings dotted the main drag. A fancy restaurant with curtains inhabited the spot that had once been Irv’s Deli. Irv and his wife, who both had numbers tattooed on their arms, had shouted at each other day and night.

  Some things hadn’t changed. Crawford’s Clothing was still there—the dresses in the window looked as if they were frozen circa 1970. The old drugstore was the same as it had been the last time I chained my bike to the rack and walked in to buy Prell shampoo. The big and brassy clock on the Bank of Illinois building told the time as it always had.

  I’d arrived in Chicago that afternoon, stopped home to see my mother, Lily, who had a tunafish sandwich with chips on the side and a Coke waiting for me, as if I’d just walked in from school. Lily looked the same—her nose still turned up with freckles along the bridge, her hair streaked with gray, her green eyes watery. She was too thin, perhaps. Her hands felt cold, her skin was pale. I wanted to open the blinds, air out the place. I never liked being in my mother’s apartment. It seemed as if she’d never unpacked, never quite settled in. The furniture from the old house was crammed into three rooms. My baby brother, Art, who lived nearby, tried to get her to sell some things, but she wanted to hold on to most of what she had.

  The apartment was dark, slightly overheated, and smelled of cigarettes, though she swore she’d quit years ago. In each room was a copy of the Comprehensive Crossword Dictionary next to a pair of store-bought reading glasses. While my mother shuffled between the kitchen and the dining room with my sandwich and Coke, I opened to a random page: “Continent. 1) chaste 2) land mass as in Africa 3) legendary or lost as in Atlantis.” She put the sandwich in front of me, removing its Saran Wrap cover, and watched as I ate it and sipped my Coke.