High Water Mark

The marks started at the height of Enid’s ankle and went up the kitchen wall like the rungs of a ladder no one could climb.

Each one was a pencil line, gone over again every few years so it would not fade, and beside each line, in her small slanted hand, was a word or two. Not a date. Enid had never trusted dates; they told you when a thing happened and nothing about what it cost. So beside the lowest line she had written goat, because that was the flood that took the goat. Above it, fowl coop. Above that, Clive’s christening, because the water came the week of the christening and the whole district carried the cake up the hill to the church in a washtub held over their heads.

The lines went up. Mattress. Garden, all of it. Mama’s sewing machine.

The highest line was just above the height of the kitchen table. Beside it she had written one word, and she had gone over that word so many times that the pencil had worn a groove in the plaster.

Winston.

· · ·

The rain had been coming for three days when the young man from the parish council walked up her path in rubber boots.

She knew him. Everybody in Swift River knew everybody. He was Dwayne, Merline’s last boy, the one who went to Port Antonio for school and came back wearing a lanyard. He stood at the bottom of her steps with the rain running off the brim of his cap and a clipboard wrapped in a plastic bag.

“Miss Enid. Morning.”

“Dwayne.”

“They moving everybody up to the school tonight. The river too high already, and the rain don’t done.”

“I hear.”

“So I come to walk you up.”

Enid was sitting on the verandah in the chair she had sat in for forty years, shelling gungo peas into a bowl on her lap, and she did not stop shelling. “I not going up to no school.”

Dwayne looked at the clipboard in its bag as if it might have something to say to her. It did not. “Miss Enid, the water going to come in the house.”

“The water always come in the house.”

“Not like this.”

“Every time, somebody walk up that path and tell me, not like this.” She split a pod with her thumb. “And every time, it is like this.”

· · ·

He came back at noon, and again at three. The third time he did not stand at the bottom of the steps. He came up onto the verandah and took his cap off, and she saw that he was frightened, and that he was trying not to let her see.

“My mother say to tell you she will keep a cot for you by her. Right next to her.”

“Tell Merline thank you.”

“Miss Enid.” He was quiet a moment. The river was loud now, loud enough that you did not so much hear it as feel it in the boards under your feet. “Is because of Mr. Winston?”

She put the bowl of peas down on the floor beside the chair.

“Come,” she said.

She took him into the kitchen and showed him the wall. He had been in the house as a small boy, at Christmas, for sorrel and cake, but he had never been in the kitchen, and he looked at the pencil lines a long time. She watched him read them from the bottom up. She watched him get to the top one.

“He went to see about the cow,” Enid said. “That’s all. The cow was tied down by the gully and he said, I soon come. And the water come up to here.” She put her hand flat on the wall beside his name. “And he did not come.”

Dwayne said nothing, which was the right thing to say.

“Every flood since, I stand right here and I watch it come up. And it come up to goat, and to fowl coop, and to the sewing machine. And it never once come up to Winston.” She took her hand away. “That is the one thing the river cannot do to me again. It cannot go higher than that.”

“Miss Enid, it can.”

“Then it will have to come get me,” she said, “because I am not going to leave him on this wall by himself.”

· · ·

Dwayne went down the path in the rain, and she watched him go, and she did not watch long.

By dark the yard was water. By eight it was over the bottom step. Enid put her good shoes and her Bible and the tin with her papers in it on the top shelf of the cupboard, the way she had done a dozen times. She lit the lamp and set it on the shelf too. Then she pulled a kitchen chair to the wall and sat facing the marks, with a pencil in her apron pocket, and she waited.

The water came under the door at a quarter past nine. It came the way it always came, not in a rush but in a spreading, a darkening of the floorboards, as if the house were slowly remembering something.

It rose to goat.

She lifted her feet onto the rung of the chair.

It rose to fowl coop, and to Clive’s christening. It was cold and brown and it smelled of mud and cut green things and diesel from somewhere upriver. Something bumped against the leg of the table and turned slowly and went on. A calabash. A child’s slipper.

It rose to mattress. To garden, all of it. Enid stood up on the chair, holding the edge of the cupboard, and the chair shifted under her, and held.

It rose to Mama’s sewing machine.

The lamp on the top shelf threw her shadow huge across the wall, across all the marks, so that for a moment she could not see the top one. She leaned and moved the lamp. There it was. Winston. The groove in the plaster. The water was a hand’s width below it.

“Go on,” she said to the river. “Go on and try.”

The water was a finger’s width below it.

Outside, somewhere in the dark, a sheet of zinc tore loose from a roof with a sound like a scream and went clattering away. The house groaned in its bones. And the water touched the line, and filled the groove of his name, and went on rising, past the pencil, past the plaster, past the place where she had held her hand flat against the wall for twenty-two years, until the name was underneath it and gone.

Enid made a sound she had not made since the night they found him.

She did not know how long she stood on the chair after that. Long enough for the water to reach her knees. Long enough for the lamp to begin to gutter. Long enough to understand that she had been wrong about the one thing she had been sure of, that there had never been any line the river agreed to, that she had only ever been standing in a kitchen keeping count.

· · ·

The light came first, swinging across the window, and then the voice.

“Miss Enid!”

She thought at first she had imagined it. Then the light came again, and there was the knock of wood against the verandah post, and Dwayne was at the kitchen window in a fisherman’s boat with a flashlight in his teeth and two men from the district at the oars behind him, and all three of them were soaked to the skin.

“Miss Enid, come. Come now. Give me your hand.”

“I tell you I not leaving him.”

“He not on the wall no more,” Dwayne said. “The river take the wall. Come.”

And that was true. That was the plain truth, and there was nothing to argue with in it. She looked one more time at the place where the name had been, and there was only moving brown water with the lamplight on it.

She gave him her hand.

· · ·

They let people back down the hill on the fourth day.

The house was still standing. That was the first thing. The verandah was gone, and the fowl coop, and the chair she had sat in for forty years, and inside there was mud to the height of her shins on every floor, and the smell was a smell that would stay in the wood for a year. But the house stood.

Enid went into the kitchen in her rubber boots. The water had left its line on the wall, the way it always did, a brown stain running level across the plaster, high above the table, high above the top of every pencil mark she had ever made.

The old marks were still there underneath. The river had not washed them off. She could see them faintly through the mud if she tilted her head: goat, fowl coop, Clive’s christening, all the way up. And near the top, the groove in the plaster, with the silt packed into it so that the name stood out darker than the rest.

Winston.

She stood looking at it a long time. Then she took the pencil from her apron pocket, and she reached up as high as her arm would go, and she drew a line along the top of the brown stain.

For every other flood in that house she had written down what the river took.

Beside this one, in her small slanted hand, she wrote: Dwayne came.

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