High Water

The boy from the all-night garage banged on Clara Reinholt’s door at four in the morning to tell her the river was in her shop, and she was dressed and in the car before she had finished being afraid, because there was no use being afraid in a nightgown.

It had rained for nine days. Everyone had said so to everyone, in the shop and on the sidewalk and in the line at the bank, nine days of it, and warm rain, which was the wrong kind, the kind that came up soft off the Pacific and ate the early snow off the Sierra all at once and sent it down the Truckee in the dark. Clara had lived in Reno thirty years and she knew the river the way you know a neighbor you have never entirely trusted. She had heard it getting louder all week under the Virginia Street bridge. She had not thought it would come up over the banks two days before Thanksgiving and walk into her store, but the river did not consult her, and by the time she got the car down as close as the water would let her, in the last dark before dawn, it had done exactly that.

The water was in the streets. It lay across the low blocks by the river shining black under the streetlights, moving, not still, with a current you could see, and there were automobiles in it up to their door handles, and one, farther down, turned sideways against a pole where the water had carried it and left it. She had never seen anything like it and she had seen a great deal. She left her own car on high ground and went the rest of the way on foot in her galoshes with the cold water climbing her legs, past men she half knew carrying things out of doorways, past the National Guard boys stacking sandbags at the corners where sandbags would do some good, and hers was not one of those corners.

Her shop was a dress shop on Virginia Street and she had opened it in 1920 with money that everyone she knew had told her she was a fool to risk, a divorced woman from Cincinnati with no husband and no sense, and she had run it thirty years and dressed half the women in this town for the biggest days of their lives, the going-away suits and the second-wedding dresses and the plain good black for the funerals, and now she stood in the doorway of it in three feet of moving brown water and watched her stock float.

That was the thing that undid her, for a moment, in the dark. Not the ruin of it, the ruin was just money and she had lost money before. It was the sight of the dresses off their forms, lifted by the water, turning slowly in the current in the middle of the room like women dancing with nobody, the good wool and the faille and the one ivory gown a rancher’s daughter was to be married in the second Saturday of December, all of it swimming in the filthy river in the light of the flashlight she had brought. She stood in the doorway and let herself look at it for exactly as long as she could stand to, and then she stopped looking at it, because looking did not save anything.

“Mother.” Agnes was behind her, come down from the ranch road in her husband’s truck the second the boy had telephoned, big and calm and already in her rubber boots. Agnes was forty and had married a rancher and had spent her married life around water that came and went and animals that died and weather that did what it wanted, and she was better in a flood than Clara would ever be, and Clara had never in her life been so glad to see her plain sensible daughter’s face. “The back room’s higher,” Agnes said. “The shelves. Anything that’s still up on the shelves is dry. We get that out first.”

They waded in together. The water pushed at their legs and it was cold enough to take the breath, and it stank of the river and of mud and of the gasoline off the drowned cars, and they worked by flashlight, the two of them, pulling boxes off the high shelves in the back room and passing them hand to hand out the door to a man Clara did not know who had simply appeared, the way men did in a flood, and started helping.

That was the other thing about high water, the thing Clara would remember longer than the ruin. The town came apart into single people and then, in the water, in the dark, it came back together into something better than it usually was. Nobody asked whose store it was. A man waded in and took the box you handed him and waded it out and came back for the next one, and you never learned his name, and it did not matter, and for one gray hour Virginia Street was not a street of competitors and strangers but a single cold soaked animal trying to save what could be saved.

Hats. Gloves. The good buttons in their cards. A bolt of velvet still in its paper. They carried what they could carry up onto the sidewalk where the water had not reached and stacked it, wet at the edges but whole, and went back for more, and the sky over the mountains began to go gray, and up above the low drowned blocks the Mapes Hotel stood twelve stories into the coming light with all its windows dark, the tallest thing in the state, dry as a bone, looking down on the old river doing the old thing it had always done.

By full light the water had begun to drop. It went as fast as it had come, the way the Truckee did, sliding back off the streets and leaving the mud and the smell and a tide-line of trash against every doorway, and leaving Clara’s shop a ruined dark cave with the counter tipped over and the mirrors starred with mud and the dresses she had not saved lying wherever the water set them down. She stood on the sidewalk in the gray morning next to the wet stack of what they had gotten out, and Agnes stood beside her with mud to the knee, and neither of them said the sensible thing, which was that she was sixty-one years old and this was a great deal of money and a great deal of work and perhaps it was a sign.

“The Miller girl gets married the second Saturday of December,” Clara said instead. Her voice came out steadier than she felt. “She’ll need a gown.”

Agnes looked at her mother. Then she looked at the wreck of the shop, and at the sky, which had finally, uselessly, cleared. “Then we’d better find where the water put the good scissors,” she said, and she rolled her sleeve and went back in.

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