A NAMELESS BROOK

by Tracy Winn

If the little woman with wide-set eyes and sleek hair looked up from her work in the dirt between her feet, she would have to see the stream bed, scoured and unnaturally wide, with its bald stones scattered like skulls.

She kept her back to the house. There wasn’t anywhere for her to look that didn’t hurt, except at the trowel, and the dirt where she dug. For nine years, Chloe’s crocuses had bloomed, pale but hopeful, in this spot. She thought it was this spot. The bulbs might be where she looked for them, and might not. The force of the floodwaters had rearranged everything, and half of their yard was gone. The blade of her trowel sliced into something. She hurled the trowel to the side, picked out a bulb’s severed halves and hurled them, too. She scrabbled with her fingers in the dense dirt and found a clump of five more. She cradled them like eggs into a paper sack.

Hal had insisted on going to the hardware store to get more batteries for the old transistor radio he’d salvaged. He’d promised to be back before the demolition crew arrived. No matter if she faced the house or the streambed – except when she distracted herself with something as immediate as dirt and the saving of crocus bulbs – she couldn’t escape the memory of her hand reaching for Hal’s to pull him from their house as it collapsed in the flood.

The brook, so small it never earned a name, had, within a couple of hours on Sunday, become a raging creek that undermined their foundation. The house, two and half stories, had fallen on its broken back, where it lolled now, knees in the air, with its windows lifted to the sky. For three days, like dragonflies, helicopters had zigzagged through that brilliant, duplicitous sky, bringing drinking water and “meals ready to eat” to the flooded town. Because of the power outage and damage to the town’s cell tower, Chloe didn’t know that someone in one of those helicopters had taken a photo of their house that made national news, an icon of the climate crisis — its blank windows staring straight up. The town’s ad hoc emergency management team had determined the house, a deathtrap, needed to be demolished fast. A ribbon of yellow crime tape, strung between trees and tied to a crippled lawn chair, buzzed in the breeze.

Too soon, the demolition vehicles chugged up the road, an oversized excavator and a beast of a dump truck. The earth shook. Where was Hal? Chloe rose, not knowing where to stash her bag of bulbs. What safe place was left?

She bowed her head in greeting the bow-legged, sweet-faced man, who stepped down stiffly from the excavator. Dorset Hutchins had been working since the storm began, diverting water, patching roads, working through the nights. He’d rescued tourists trapped on cemetery hill, carrying them to safety in his ‘dozer bucket. He’d reset culverts in the hollows so folks could get to town for supplies. He was worn down. Sciatica had moved in with him, to abide.

“I am very sorry for your loss,” he said, reaching a work-hardened hand toward her. Surprised by his kindness, her eyes brimmed. “Don’t be nice to me!” she said, shaking her head and wiping her eyes. She didn’t take his hand.

He introduced the burly kid in the truck as politely as if they were attending a funeral reception.

“Just get this over with,” she said.

He led the way to the highest ground that remained, where they looked down into the skewed living room. She’d squatted right there, screaming Hal’s name, peering across the porch to the dark interior. Hal had gone back in to find the cat. The house had started to give with a terrible sound, collapsing a notch, and catching on who knows what — a surreal crack and judder. Hal scrambled up the suddenly slanting porch, three-legged, with the cat under his arm — the cat’s tail swishing. Chloe reached for him and in her memory of it, her arm became almost cartoonish, stretchy, something rubbery and faintly lewd, seeking her husband’s hand and pulling him to safety. In those seconds of reaching, she’d sought his eyes, and finding them, eyes better known to her than her own, rounded with fear, there had been a moment, a flickery second, when her urge had been to yank back her hand, retract it into herself, and to separate her fate from his. There and gone, that slick and guilty little minute had slipped off, but not away. Because she knew it had been there, she couldn’t get rid of it now. She’d pulled Hal and the cat from the building as it tipped, and instead of being flooded with relief and gratitude that she’d found the strength, she was stuck with the fact of her dark impulse.

But this bowlegged man called Hutch, was pointing off to the side and saying, “Stand here, please, and no closer. We’ll start with any furniture I can salvage. I’ll pull it out as gently as I can, and you can say whether it’s a keeper.”

Like a monster biting a cracker, the machine’s first move shattered the living room window and clamped onto the wall with its new coat of yellow paint. The house had glowed when the painters removed the scaffolding. How upright and fine and sunny it had been. How frivolous, new paint. How thin a shield.

Metal teeth splintered clapboards and trim.

Her knees shook with the shock. Where was her husband?

Hutch shifted gears. Chloe clutched the little bag of bulbs. The room where she held afterschool art and computer skills classes was buried under the rest. Her teaching supplies, the donated laptops, child-sized chairs, her rainbow sets of markers and watercolors, the posters of keyboard fingering she’d made for the walls — must all have been crushed.

Out through the hole in the house, Hutch lifted the wing-back chair that had once graced her grandmother’s little sitting room. His machine swiveled. Behind the controls he pointed and asked. The ice-blue brocade shone naked in the great outdoors. She nodded. He set it upright, taking care, two legs at a time, in a mossy patch of the yard. The truck, standing by, chugged out the stink of diesel. Then the old scroll-top desk, dangling at a precarious angle, came to land. Hal’s vinyl record collection in the milk crate crumpled as the excavator turned, and the albums arced like cards being dealt to the lawn, discs slipping from their sleeves, rolling and sliding. Hutch shook his head and made signs of apology from behind the glass of his cab. They never listened to them anymore, anyway.

She and Hal would live in her mother’s old house on Main Street. The tenants had left at the beginning of summer, which had been calamitous at the time – good tenants were so rare. Hal had said FEMA money would be enough to give them a new start.

When she turned, there he was, seated in the brocade chair, legs folded like a skinny Buddha, wearing the bright tee shirt that made his eyes blaze true blue. He waved to her, a short flat-of-the-palm wave. She shivered with the surprise of him, an electrical tingle up her spine that radiated through the back of her head, pleasant and unpleasant at once.

“Where were you?” The noise of the demolition canceled her question right out of the air. He mimed eating popcorn in front of the big screen, his eyes glued to Hutch’s excavator. His hair was cut across his forehead in bangs like a boy’s.

When she didn’t smile, he bounced out of the chair like an acrobat, and draped his arm over her shoulders. She stood for it.

When he’d first moved to town, he’d taken her for rides on his motorcycle, winding along the dirt roads through the hills and hollows above the river valley, swinging his weight into the curves with her hanging on, the dizzying views whooshing away. He’d brought her small entertainments, a candle-powered toy merry-go-round, a sculpture of bicycle parts that sang like falling water when he dropped ball-bearings into it, a couple of frogs in a terrarium with a daily supply of moths which he caught in the rooms above the hardware store where he’d lived. He played guitar for her and would say—knowing she was anxious enough to be holding her breath—“Okay, you come in on the count of three,” and then he’d skip one and two altogether, “THREE!” catching her short and releasing her to laugh. He ran a thriving bicycle shop, sales and service for all of central Vermont, and he worked hard. His riding a bike through town and back, and up the steep rise to the church six or ten times a day made it seem he was always playing, even as he tested the brakes and gears he’d repaired. He was tireless, easy, full of surprises. He could, for example, balance a peacock feather or a kitchen chair on his chin, and for ages she couldn’t help but laugh whenever he did. There were only so many times, though, that washing up, she could be amused to see him juggling the dishes instead of drying them.

Hutch’s machine roared more loudly than the rain that had beaten the windows, the walls — the terrible rain that wouldn’t stop. Clamp. Crunch. An indelicate surgery into where they lived, the good and bad of them. Where she tried so hard. Winter days of snowfall and fire in the woodstove, and soup. The effort of making the kind of love that would make a baby. Taking her temperature. Hiding in the closet to cry when they failed. Leftovers and repetition. Her attempts to relax and laugh, to match his energy. His jokes. A punchline delivered in an Irish accent, “Ah Faither, hit would have done your heart good to hear the dishes rattle.” Hal’s casual acceptance when he’d said, “If I was meant to be a father, I’d be one by now.” TV shows in silence. His diversions, his endless fun. The machine’s grinding shook the ground, shook her. She held herself around the middle not knowing if she would have to throw up, or weep.

No. Neither. She would not.

Hutch stacked yellow pieces of the wall like pancakes just where she’d thought they would put a swing set. Squealing, the machine rotated and pulled out their chest of drawers. At least they’d finally have clean clothes. Then the little straight-back chair that no one ever sat in. Why should they keep that?

At first light, Hal had gone down to cast a fly in the river to see if there were any fish left. She didn’t understand why he had to do that today. Their dog had returned alone. When she put his food bowl down, there’d been a piece of filament sticking out from his head like a stray hair. Hal appeared for breakfast, and she asked, “Did you know Roo has a hook in his scalp?” He answered, “I wondered where that fly went.” They’d spent the next while rounding up tools and hydrogen peroxide and gauze. He held a saucer of peanut butter for the poor pup. She had to push the hook through. She was so angry, she thought she might need nothing more than her teeth to snip off the barb.

Climbing up from Main Street through the trees, came a few neighbors, acquaintances and strangers, volunteers organized by the town emergency team. A van pulled up. Hal said, “I called in the cavalry.”

“I don’t want them here,” she whispered, “Why do people have to see this?”

“There’s no shame. They want to help.”

She slipped out from under his arm, and couldn’t look at the small crowd gathering. Her pulse ticked.

Sierra Fisher, wearing skimpy shorts and Uggs, her legs too long for the rest of her, came to stand next to Chloe in that embarrassing and bold way of tenth-graders trying to do the right thing. She said, “I’m so sorry about your house, Ms. Dickinson.” Sierra’s nearness softened her. She’d been one of Chloe’s favorite afterschoolers, funny and opinionated, who refused to follow the keyboard fingering exercises because she had her “own palindromes to write,” and who helped the younger children as if they were all her siblings.

Chloe wanted this colt-like girl to take her in her strong arms and hold her up, put her hands over her ears, and shield her from the wreckage. She wanted it so badly, she started to lean into the smooth trunk of her, only understanding at the last instant how inappropriate it was. She pulled back and answered, “Thank you, Sierra. That’s very thoughtful of you to say.” Like a robot. But it satisfied Sierra, who nodded and returned to the edge of the crowd, to stand with a beautiful boy whose name Chloe had forgotten, who had not ever been able to stay in his seat. The guy who owned the junkyard skulked, probably scavenging for his “antiques” business. Behind him, a tall man with wild hair caught Chloe’s eye and held it: Zed Hathaway. She hadn’t seen him for years. He tipped his head sideways at her, an acknowledgement and a question — did she know him still? His question went over the heads of the small crowd and touched her, as if they were the only two people there. He’d been her secret friend all through school, a mysterious, brainy boy, State Spelling Bee champion, awkward and emotional. The only person she hadn’t been too shy to have serious conversations with, out by the school dumpster. He’d been intense and respectful, and lost. His younger sister drowned, and he’d gone off to the University and never returned until now. Chloe tilted her head to the opposite side, mirroring his gesture in reply, a strange and special salutation that connected them and, briefly, grounded her. He was older, of course. It had been at least fifteen years. There was still something feral and neglected about him. He had the look of someone life has not been kind to.

Hutch shifted his machine into neutral – there was a lull as he climbed down to speak with Hal. He was as square as the cab he’d sat in, almost as wide as he was tall. Hal bounced on his toes past the collection of furniture and stood nodding at Hutch’s words, which were lost under the low stutter of the machine. Hal carried the fake ficus tree over to her. It had been collecting greasy dust on the stair landing for years.

She said, “I hate that tree.”

He said, “That’s it for the furniture he can rescue before he pulls the rest apart. I’m going upstreet to direct the move in. You coming?”

She shook her head.

“You sure you want to stay and see this?” Hal gestured at the demolition vehicles.

She shook her head again, and started to cry.

“You think this isn’t hard for me, too? It happened, okay? How long are you going to keep this up? It’s only a HOUSE.”

His tee-shirt, glaring blue, stained her view as he hustled over to organize the crowd of helpers. He handed the ficus tree to the junk man. Some of their neighbors carried the desk to the van. Hutch’s machine clawed off a section of the roof. Sierra and the boy hefted Chloe’s sewing machine table. The dump truck, beeping, backed into position. Hutch dropped the chunk of roof into the truck with a crash and a burst of plaster dust. Hal pointed at Sierra and the boy, who followed him down the path to the street.

Chloe blew her nose on an old tissue she found in her pocket, turned toward the chicken coop, untouched in the side yard, and let herself in. The hens chortled at her in their bubbling mother tones. One of the shy pullets, hysterical at the intrusion, rushed out down the ramp. Chloe sat in the hay and leaned on the wall. It stank in there, a pungent assault, but better than the jumbling rubble outside. The bag of bulbs was damp and wrinkled where she’d held it. The broody hen, who wouldn’t leave her nest, grumbled at her. She stroked the hen’s slippery-feathered, forgiving shape.

Out of her sight, Hutch maneuvered his machine like a claw. It shattered the walls, the boards twisting as they splintered down into a heap, dust rising like smoke. The claw gradually collapsed the remains into a heap that fit tidily within the footprint of the house. He scooped them, trip after trip, into the truck. By day’s end, he would have broken up and removed everything but the concrete basement floor. He’d seal that over by tucking the wrist of his excavator and using it like the back of a hand to smooth the earth. When he finished, he’d climb down, from his rig, sciatica flaring, and spread grass seed in an arc, like a bow-legged farmer sowing a cover crop.

But now, the doorlatch of the chicken coop lifted, startling her. Zed Hathaway stuck his head in. “I didn’t know it was your house.” She stood, as if welcoming a guest into her living room, not knowing how to hold herself, or how to be. He closed the door behind him with care. The hens muttered. He was too tall for the space except in the exact center of the little building. He said, “I didn’t know it was you we were sent to help.” It seemed perfectly natural that he would pull her against him, though he had never touched her before. His wool shirt smelled of cigarette smoke. She barely reached his chest, but she leaned into him, and stilled. She felt weighted, heavy and dense, elemental. He braced her easily. They held each other. The pullet that had fled, peered in the ramp door, tilting her head nervously. The sun through the small window caught and lit a column of dust motes. Plaster? It was accidentally beautiful, a warm-gold block of light. Chloe breathed, and breathed in what might have been glimmering airborne bits of her old house.

Tracy Winn is the author of MRS. SOMEBODY SOMEBODY, Random House 2010, winner of the Sherwood Anderson Foundation Award. With support from the Massachusetts Cultural Council and MacDowell, she recently completed RIVER IN THE HOUSE, a story cycle about a catastrophic flood. Her stories about the effects of climate change on a small Vermont town have been published, or are forthcoming in Epiphany, Four Way Review, Fifth Wednesday Journal, Harvard Review, Prime Number Magazine and Waxwing Magazine.