"We can't go home," I said. "It's gone. Dad was right—"
"No!"
"Mr. Haddy told me. He wouldn't he. Please don't cry."
But he had started. He put his arm against his face to hide it.
"We'll go somewhere else," I said. "We'll go to Brewer's Village, or somewhere on the coast better than this." I kept talking to him this way to stop him crying, and then I swore him to secrecy about the gasoline and the spark plugs.
Clover was at the shore with Father and saying, "Our nice garden's ruined."
"It'll perk up in this sun," Father said, and he made us dig ditches to drain it.
Overnight the trees around the lagoon had turned bright green, their leaves washed by the rain. They glistened with a shine like fresh paint. The gray was gone from the whole place, and under the clear sky the lagoon was deep blue. The land was black. Bird honks skimmed across the water.
Driftwood had been scattered from the junkpile, but after Jerry and I picked it up and stacked it, the barrel of gasoline was hidden. I pushed the pouch of spark plugs under my hammock pad. What good were they to us if Father was determined to stay? But his outboard motor, which was the first thing I checked that morning, had not been shifted by the storm. It was still clamped to its stump, and was wrapped tight in plastic like a leg of meat.
Father said you had to admire this foolish waste of energy — nature running mad and drenching everything. It was a huge demented squandering of water, like an attempted murder that a quick-witted man could overcome by crawling into his leakproof hut: all that trouble for nothing, because we were still alive.
"But we weren't meant to die!"
The storm had terrified everyone except Father. He was impressed by the way it had destroyed trees, and he marveled at all the uprootings. He calculated that six inches of rain had fallen in the night. You had to admire that. And look at the beaten bushes. And think of the velocity. You could build a machine that operated on falling rain — the collected rain would spin a flywheel, the same principle as a water wheel but more efficient — no drag. Only the rain was undependable, because the world was imperfect. Nature tried to burn you, then starve you, then drown you, and it made you dig a garden like a savage with a stick It surprised you and made you fearful that something was going to go wrong That fear made people religious nuts instead of innovators.
"But it will be weeks before anyone plants a garden, and by then ours will be in blossom."
Mother said the damage scared her. We would have to fight to save the garden.
Father said, "I like a good fight."
In the course of that hot day, most of the plants perked up just as he said they would. Even the little shoots followed Father's orders, and what in the early morning had looked like the ruin of a drowned garden had begun again to grow.
The important thing now, Father said, was to protect the plants. It was not the amount of rain that was so bad, but its ferocity: the wind, the waterspouts, the erosion. "If we don't take care, the plants will be punched out of their holes," he said. "But we will take care."
We sawed lengths of bamboo and fitted some of the plants with collars, and others we banked with dirt to prop them up. Father said, Wasn't that ingenious?
"I'll believe it when we have vegetables," Mother said.
"Patience!"
Toward evening, the clouds sailed in and the first drops hit us like slugs. Father ordered Jerry and me to work naked at repairing the garden, and so we did, up to our ankles in mud, with the rain whipping our backs.
"He treats us like slaves," Jerry said. "I'd like to get that outboard working and escape from here."
"We've already escaped," I said.
"Even if America's burned — even if it's destroyed — it's better than this. This is a stinking dump. I want to go home."
"But the garden's all right now," I said. "When it grows, things will be different."
"Why are you always on Dad's side?"
"He was right about the rain — he was right about the garden!"
"It's still raining," Jerry said. Thunder compressed his face and gave him a frightened smile. The fat raindrops riddled on our little hut.
The next day, half the garden was gone. Some of the plants floated in the lagoon, where they had been washed with the storm's debris, and others lay broken in the furrows. The bamboo collars had done no good. They served only to bruise the plants under the strength of the falling rain.
"It's no use," Mother said.
"You make me laugh," Father said. "You talk as if we have an alternative! What we're doing is all we can do. There's nothing else. A garden is our only hope, Mother. Have you got a better idea?"
Mother said, "Why don't we just pack up and go?"
"Nothing to pack," Father said. "Nowhere to go."
"There's Brewer's Village. Mr. Haddy said—"
"Figgy is busy dying. They all are, except us." He had taken a shovel and was mucking out the furrows and replanting the stringy shoots. He saw us watching him and said, "Stick with me, people, or you'll die, too."
Jerry knelt down and said, "I hate him."
Clover heard. She said, "I'm going to tell Dad what you said."
"I want you to tell him, Crappo. I want to see him go buggy."
This made Clover cry. She ran to Mother and said, "Jerry just swore at me!"
"No one gives a hoot," Father was saying. He threw down his shovel and unwrapped the outboard. He spun it and throttled it with his rope, making it choke. Seeing him, I almost told him about the spark plugs and the gas. But he had said, Nothing to pack — nowhere to go. It would make him madder. He would ask me where I had got them, and why, and how. He would scream if I mentioned Mr. Haddy. I wished Mr. Haddy had never come and stuck me with that secret.
"That's to keep him sane," Jerry said.
I looked at Father tearing at the outboard's rope.
"It's not working," Jerry said, and he laughed.
We concentrated on what was left of the garden. But down here at the shore I could see that it was not the rain that had done the worst damage. The level of the lagoon had risen, as Mr. Haddy had predicted, and submerged the plants that had been near the water's edge. Jerry wanted to tell Father, to show him he had been mistaken, but before he could, it began to rain again. We stripped our clothes off and began bailing. It rained five times that day. At noon it was so dark we had to use candles in the hut to see our crabs.
A few days ago, it had all been dust and gray trees. Now we were in a wilderness of mud and water. There were frogs where no frogs had been, and snakes, and animal tracks everywhere. Lizards left their marks all over the bank, like bars on sheet music, with little noteprints above and below the lines of their tails. There were more birds, and crabs, and crayfish, all stirred into life by the rain. We caught them with ease. Mother boiled them on the cookstove. It made me think that we could survive without the garden.
Father came sneakily into the hut one morning. There was mud all over his chest and the front of his thighs, and gunk on his hands and dripping from his beard and on his nose. He was angry. He had not wanted us to see him. But we stared, and even Mother was puzzled.
"Pushups," he said, and snatched the rope of the outboard.
***
"The scavengers are back," Father said, looking up. The gray gulls and fat pelicans had flown inland to feed on the creatures that had sprung out of the mud. Vultures followed them, but instead of feeding they found perches in the trees and waited. Father screamed at the birds, to frighten them away. They screamed back at him. He hated scavengers, he said — hated their mad eyes and their filthy beaks, the way they pounced, the way they fought over garbage. And, as if in revenge — but what had they done to us? — he caught them by letting them swallow baited hooks, and he plucked and roasted them. He ate them. His hunger was hatred. He used their grease on his outboard motor, and left their blood and feathers in the mud. One morning we saw that he had killed a vulture and hung it high on a tree. It stayed there, lynched, until the other birds tore it apart.