“Do you know about Carey Novac?”
“What?” she cried back, then, “Who?”
The pain of shouting her name, but he felt all the better for it. “The lock!” he called, through the water. “It’s thirty-five-twenty-seven!” and he thought for a final moment, and swallowed the pins of rain. “If you forget, just look up The Spaniard!”
“The what?”
But now she was on her own.
He watched her a moment, then gone.
* * *
—
From there, there was only more rain.
It wouldn’t be forty days and nights.
For a while, though, it looked quite likely.
On the first of them, Clay walked out, for the next train to Silver, but the rest of us wouldn’t allow it. All five of us, we piled in my station wagon, and Rosy, of course, in the back.
Mrs. Chilman looked after the rest.
* * *
—
In Silver, we were just in time:
When we drove across the bridge, we looked down.
The water bit hard at the arches.
From the porch, in the rain, Clay thought of them; he remembered upstream, and those tough-looking trees, and the stones and the giant river gums. At this moment they were all being pummeled. Debris was flailing downwards.
Soon the whole world was flooded, it seemed, and the top of the bridge was submerged. For days, the water kept rising. Its violence was something magnetic; it scared the absolute life from you, but it was hard to not watch, to believe it.
Then, one night, the rain stopped.
The river continued to roar, but in time began to recede.
There was no telling yet if the bridge had survived—or if Clay could achieve its true finish:
To walk across that water.
All through the days the Amahnu was brown, and churned like the making of chocolate. But at sunrise and sunset there was color and light—the glow, then dying of fire. The dawn was gold, and the water burned, and it bled into dark before night.
* * *
—
For three more days, we waited.
We stood and we watched the river.
We played cards in the kitchen with our father.