The remaining roof beams and panels creaked. Fortunately, Larry noticed, he and the crane were under open sky.
The aftershock stopped. Meg gave a nervous laugh. Larry waited a few moments to see if it would begin again, then gingerly approached the end of the platform and looked down at the grab on the end of its chain.
“Bring ’er back up,” he said.
Jameel stopped the chain, then threw another lever. There was a brief electronic hum from the winch motors, and then a hiss and a pop as one of the control panel fuses blew. Jameel jumped back from the control panel as if stung, then gave a nervous chuckle at his overreaction.
“Cut power!” Larry bawled into his handset.
Lights on the control panel died. Meg was already down on one knee, reaching for her tool box. “Just a short, Mr. Hallock,” she said. “I’ll have that fixed in a jiff.” While Meg and Jameel worked on the board, Larry took off his glasses and rubbed his aching eyes. There seemed no end to the problems. Solving one just meant another reared its ugly head. The fuel handling machine was normally computer controlled, but the computer that did the job was now under the surface of the Mississippi. Control would have to be by hand and by eye, and that was going to result in awkwardness and lengthy delays in extracting over 1000 tons of nuclear waste from the pond. Lost also were the records of exactly which fuel assemblies had been racked in which place, both those on computer file and the paper hardcopy, which had been stored in a destroyed building. Larry had no records that told him which of the rods in the pond below were the old safe ones, and which the new hot ones. He was going to have to drop radiation detectors into the pond on the end of a line to find out, and that was going to produce results that were messy and had a high degree of inaccuracy. One problem after another, he repeated to himself. You’ve only got to solve one problem at a time. At one time, he thought, that had seemed like a good thing.
TWENTY-THREE
There was one boat coming down on the same morning I landed; when they came in sight of the falls, the crew were so frightened at the prospect, that they abandoned their boat and made for the island in their canoe—two were left on the island, and two made for the west bank in the canoe—about the time of their landing, they saw that the island was violently convulsed—one of the men on the island threw himself into the river to save himself by swimming—one of the men from the shore met him with the canoe and saved him.—This man gave such an account of the convulsion of the island, that neither of the three dared to venture back for the remaining man. The three men reached New Madrid by land.
The man remained on the Island from Friday morning until Sunday evening, when he was taken off by a canoe sent from a boat coming down. I was several days in company with this man—he stated that during his stay in the island, there were frequent eruptions, in which sand and stone, coal and water were thrown up.—The violent agitation of the ground was such at one time as induced him to hold to a tree to support himself, the earth gave way at the place, and he with the tree sunk down, and he got wounded in the fall.—The fissure was so deep as to put it out of his power to get out at that place—he made his way along the fissure until a sloping slide offered him an opportunity of crawling out. He states that frequent lights appeared—that in one instance, after one of the explosions near where he stood, he approached the hole from which the coal and land had been thrown up, which was now filled with water, and on putting his hand into it he found it was warm.
When the trees opened up again to show the big white frame house on its little green mound, Nick was taken completely by surprise. His heart turned cartwheels.
“We’re there,” he said, and his voice seemed unbelieving even to himself. They had gone up the White River—flooded, filled with more debris even than the Mississippi—then spent a night on Lopez Bayou. He had tried to keep track, by dead reckoning, of how far they had come, but he knew that his estimates had to be wildly out of true. He was more surprised than anyone when a stretch of water opened up just where he expected Toussaint Bayou to be. They hadn’t seen a soul the entire trip to Toussaint. Some flooded cotton fields, some abandoned farmhouses fallen into the flood, but no sign of a living human being.
Jason, in the other seat, turned to look at the big house with interest. Nick spun the wheel, aimed for the house.
One of the big oaks that shaded the house had fallen, he saw, but someone had turned the timber into a neatly piled stack of lumber. The windows had lost their glass, and the two brick chimneys had fallen. There had been some hasty repairs to the roof with plastic sheeting and mismatched shingles. Some of the outbuildings had collapsed into the flood. But the house itself was intact, and the sight of it made Nick want to laugh out loud.
“I’ve been meaning to ask,” Jason said. “What’s a Gros-Papa? If I meet him, I should know what it means, right?”
“It’s French,” Nick said. “It means Big Daddy. It’s a name they have down here for grandfather.” And then he added, “Tennessee Williams had a Big Daddy in one of his plays. I don’t remember which one.” Nick cut the motor and ran the boat up onto the green slope below the house, then ran forward, tossed the mushroom anchor onto the grass so the boat wouldn’t float away again, then jumped to solid ground. He held the prow steady while Jason jumped ashore, then realized he was staring at the boy with a silly smile, just a dumb happy guy standing on green grass in the sun, like any idiot about to see his daughter for the first time in months, and then he shook his head and started for the house at a brisk walk. They approached the back of the house across a grassy plateau, walking toward the kitchen door. The town of Toussaint, such as it was, was on the other side of the house, and Toussaint Bayou curved around to meet it. The only sign of the town visible from where Nick walked was the water tower. A rooster crowed from one of the outbuildings. Chickens scurried away from their approach.
“This is an old Indian mound,” Nick said. “They built this house up here over a hundred years ago to keep above the floods, but they didn’t know the mound was artificial until some archaeologists came up here in the fifties.”
“There was a mound where we lived in Missouri,” Jason said, and then an expression of loss crossed his face, and he fell silent.
Nick put his arm around the boy and walked with him through the grass, through the old shade oaks, to the kitchen door. The back windows had lost their glass, but screens were in place to keep out insects. The kitchen door, he saw, was open and the screen slightly ajar. Someone was home. He wanted to sing.
“Hello?” He opened the screen door and rapped on the frame. When no one answered, he stepped inside the big kitchen with its tall old wooden cabinets and its large modern range, and suddenly a graveyard chill ran up his spine, and he felt the winds of desolation blow in the hollow of his skull. There was horror here. Somehow he knew it—there was a smell in the house, or a peculiar, ominous brand of silence, or some kind of spectral, psychic echo of terror…
Whatever it was, he’d felt it once before. In Helena.
He put a hand on Jason’s chest as the boy was about to step into the kitchen, and held him back. “Stay here,” he said. The boy’s eyes widened in sudden comprehension and alarm, and he stepped backward, out of the doorway. Silently, carefully, Nick closed the screen door.