After the Flood. Kassandra montag
the radio that the president had been assassinated. But then a month later, a migrant passing through said he’d fled to the Rockies. And then later, we heard a military coup had taken over a session of Congress and members of the government had fled after that. Communication was breaking down by that point, the whole world reduced to a rumor, and I stopped listening.
I was nineteen when the Six Year Flood began and had just met Jacob. I remember standing next to him watching footage of the White House flood, only the flag on the roof visible above the water, each wave soaking the flag until it lay sagging against the pole. I imagined the interior of the White House, so many faces staring out of its paintings, water trickling down hallways into all its chambers, sometimes loud and sometimes quiet.
The last time my mother and I watched television together it was the second year of the Six Year Flood and I was pregnant with Row. We saw footage of a man lying on an inflatable raft, balancing a whiskey bottle on his tummy, grinning up at the sky, as he floated past a skyscraper, trash swirling around him. There were as many ways to react as people, she always said.
This included my father, who was the one to teach me what the floods meant. The blinking on and off of communication was familiar to me, the crowds of people at soup kitchens normal. But when I was six I came home early from school with a headache. The garden shed door was open and through the opening I saw only his torso and legs. I stepped closer, looked up, and saw his face. He’d hung himself from a rafter with a rope.
I remember screaming and backing away. Every cell in me was a small shard of glass; even breathing hurt. I ran inside and looked for my mother, but she wasn’t home from work. Cell towers were down that month, so I sat on the front stoop and waited for my mother to come home. I tried to think of how to tell her but words kept wincing away from me, my mind recoiling from reality. Many days, I still feel like that child on the stoop, waiting and waiting, my mind empty as a bowl scooped clean.
After my mother had gotten home, we found a mostly empty bag of groceries on the table with a note from my father: “The shelves were bare. Sorry.”
I thought when I had my own children I’d understand him more, understand the despair he felt. But I didn’t. I hated him even more.
PEARL TUGGED ON my hand, pointing to a cart of apples sitting just past the dock.
I nodded. “We should be able to get a couple,” I said.
The village was a clamoring, crowded throng of people and Pearl stuck close to me. We slung the baskets of fish on two long poles so we could carry them on our shoulders and we started up the long winding path between the two mountains.
I felt relief at being on land again. But as the crowd closed around me, I felt a new kind of panic, different from anything I felt when I was alone on the waves. An out-of-control sensation. Being the foreigner, the one who had to relearn the ever-changing rules of each trading post.
Pearl wasn’t ambivalent like I was, hovering between relief and panic. She hated being on land, the only benefit being that she could hunt snakes. Even as a baby she hated being on land, refusing to fall asleep when we camped on the shores at night. Sometimes she got nauseous on land and went out for a swim to calm her nerves while we were at a port.
The land was filled with stumps of cut trees and a thick ground cover of grasses and shrubs. People seemed to be crawling over one another on the path, an old man bumping into two young men carrying a canoe, a woman pushing her children in front of her. Everyone’s clothes were dirty and torn and the smell of so many people living close together made me dizzy. Most people I saw in ports were older than Pearl, and Apple Falls was no different. Infant mortality was high again. People would talk on the streets about our possible extinction, about the measures needed to rebuild.
Someone knocked one of Pearl’s baskets to the ground and I cursed them and quickly scooped up the fish. We passed the main trading post and saloon and cut across the outdoor market, smells of cabbage and fresh-cut fruit lingering in the air. Shacks littered the outskirts of town as we traveled farther up the path, toward Beatrice’s tent. The shacks were cobbled together with wood planks or metal scraps or stones stacked together like bricks. In the dirt yard of one shack, a small boy sat cleaning fish, a collar around his neck, attached to a leash that was tied around a metal pole.
The boy looked back at me. Small bruises bloomed like dark flowers on his back. A woman came and stood in the doorway of the shack, arms crossed over her chest, staring back at me. I looked away and hurried on.
Beatrice’s tent stood on the southern edge of the mountain, hidden by a few redwoods. Beatrice had told me she guarded her trees against thieves with her shotgun, sometimes awakening at night to the sound of an ax on wood. But she only had four shotgun shells left, she had confided in me.
Pearl and I squatted and slid the poles from our shoulders. “Beatrice?” I called out.
It was silent for a moment and I worried it was no longer her tent, that she was gone.
“Beatrice?”
She poked her head through the tent opening and smiled. She still wore her long gray hair in a braid down her back and her face had deeper creases, a sun-etched rough texture.
She sprang forward and grabbed Pearl in a hug. “I was wondering when I’d see you again,” she said. Her eyes darted between Pearl and me, taking us in. I knew she feared there’d come a day when we didn’t return to trade, just as I feared there’d come a day when I’d come to trade and her tent would be taken over by someone else, her name a mere memory.
She hugged me and then pulled me back by my shoulders and eyed me. “What?” she asked. “Something’s different.”
“I know where she is, Beatrice. And I need your help.”
BEATRICE’S TENT WAS the most comfortable place I’d been in the past seven years, since Grandfather and I took to the water. An oriental rug lay over the grass floor, a coffee table sat in the middle of the tent, and off to the side several quilts were piled on top of a cot. Baskets and buckets of odds and ends—twine, coils of rope, apples, empty plastic bottles—were scattered around the periphery of the tent.
Beatrice scurried around her tent like a beetle, wiry and nimble. She wore a long gray tunic, loose pants, and sandals. “Trade first, talk later.” She set a tin cup of water in my hands.
“So what do you have?” she asked. She peered into our baskets. “Just fish? Myra.”
“Not just salmon,” I said. “There are some halibut. Nice big ones. You’ll get a big fillet off this one.” I pointed to the largest halibut that I had positioned on top of a basket.
“No driftwood, no metal, no fur—”
“Where am I supposed to get fur?”
“You said your boat was fifteen feet long. You could keep a goat or two. It’d be good for milk, and later fur.”
“Livestock at sea is a nightmare. They never live long. Not long enough to breed, so it’s hardly worth it,” I said. But I let her scold me because I knew she needed to. A maternal itch, the pleasure of scolding and soothing.
Beatrice bent down and sorted through the fish. “You could tan leather on a ship easily. All that sun.”
We finally agreed to trade all my fish for a second tomato plant, a few meters of cotton, a new knife, and two small bags of wheat germ. It was a better trade than I expected and only possible because Beatrice was overly generous with Pearl and me. She and my grandfather had become friends years before, and after he passed away, Beatrice became more and more generous with her trades. It made me feel both guilty and grateful. Though I was known in many of the trading posts as a reliable fisher, Pearl and I still barely scraped by with our trades.
Beatrice gestured to the coffee table and Pearl and I sat on the ground while Beatrice stepped outside to light a fire and get started on supper.