May 31, 1935
Did you ever hear that you’ve got to be careful what you wish for? It has always seemed a weird thing to say—until it rained.
All morning, we watched the clouds billowing and building, turning darker and darker. At about eleven, it began rumbling in the west as we went about our chores—abbreviated as they were by lack of livestock to tend. The sky towered above us when the flash blinded us and the giant red cedar in the yard sizzled. We watched the top of the tree blaze—and then the clouds opened up and quenched the flames.
It rained four inches in half an hour, filling the rain gauge, and it kept on raining. Pop stood in the open doorway watching the deluge as our house filled with the sweet smell of rain, of ozone, of wet soil. We all took the deepest breaths we’d taken in years.
“None of this is soaking in,” Pop said, shaking his head. “If there was any topsoil left after the windstorms, it’s headed down to the Missouri River now.”
It rained, and it kept on raining. I went outside and danced a jig in the mud, splashing myself with filth and laughing.
Our farmstead sits on a tall hill, but the creek in the bottom became a brown torrent, taking out the bridge and all the little critters that couldn’t get to high ground fast enough. At chore time, we slogged through slimy yellow clay in our four-buckle boots. The mud would grab our feet, slurping us into its grip. The boots would have pulled off if not for the buckles. When we finally managed to pull one foot loose, the mud made a loud sucking sound as if it were sad to lose its grip. Sometimes, the release of tension on one foot with the other still stuck, would send us sprawling.
Even though her hair was plastered to her head and her clothes were soaked, Mom told us how happy it made her to walk outside and breathe at the same time—without a mask. She milked the cows and fed the chickens, and she didn’t even seem to mind when she ended up face down in mud soup.
After sixteen months of dust storms and two years of drought, we thought it was over. As soon as the fields dried up, Pop would plant a crop. He’d have to buy seed corn because what he’d already planted had washed down the hills and into the creek. Maybe somewhere in the Mississippi Delta it would come up.
A couple of days after the rainstorm, we managed to get the horses across the creek, which ran inside its banks by then. Pop and Mom and I rode down to the Republican River at Red Cloud. Our little town got its supplies from the rail depot there. It was a long ride—we didn’t often ride the horses, but we’d have to rebuild the bridge before we could take the wagon.
We heard the river long before we saw it, the Republican River flooding, the roar of surging water punctuated with thumps and bumps. When we got to the south edge of town, we got our first glimpse of the carnage. Water filled the valley almost bluff to bluff. The depot, where Pop picked up his carload of fenceposts, was half under water. Whole houses and barns swirled past, smashing into trees that hadn’t given up to the flood. I saw a bloated cow and a bunch of waterlogged chickens sweeping past our vantage point where we stood among a crowd of others there to assess the damage.
Then I spotted a man in a red and white checked shirt, face down, on the crest, turning lazily—head first, then feet first.
“Get him out,” I screamed.
Mom gathered me in her arms. “We can’t, Nora. Anybody going out in that torrent would only drown. Nothing anybody can do for him.”
“Bury him,” I said.
“There’ll be a lot of burying when this is over. They won’t find everybody.”
“But Mom . . .”
“I know, Nora. We are so lucky. We’re all here and we’re all safe.”
“Not Connor.”
“I know, Nora. He’s not here and I miss him every day. But I have to believe he’s safe in that CCC camp.”
I wanted to throw up. That poor man. And what about his family? What if it were Connor and I would never see him again. What if I never knew what happened to him?