Elmer Blizzard gazed across the land he might be the last to ever see. He took a long drag on a cigarette and flipped the butt onto the ground and stamped it under his heel. Up the hill from the river in a clearing used for a cow pasture stood an ancient oak, its bare branches stretching high into the clear sky like they were reaching for something, hopeful even after hundreds of years of nothing, while waiting in the cresting field. Sherman himself had stopped for a smoke under that tree when the Yankees burned a swath through here ninety-one years ago. Wouldn’t be long till the lake would come and that old tree would be nothing but deadwood where catfish would gather if Georgia Power and the government’s plan played out correctly.
He reached into the back of his britches and pulled out his .38 revolver and aimed at a bobtail squirrel in the neck of a tree, pulling back on the trigger and firing three times at the varmint. It shrieked and scurried down the trunk and across the ground. Elmer pulled the trigger a fourth time but he had used his last bullet so the empty chamber clicked hollowly. He put the gun back in his britches and scowled at the squirrel as it dashed away.
He turned to take in the landscape. Down the slope the river streamed through the gully, narrow but deeper in the cut of red clay between gently rolling hills. Pulpwooders had clear-cut all the pines where the lake would go, leaving only a field of stumps, but most of the hardwoods they left behind. Across the river and further up, sapling pines took over and stretched a long way back, the new trees courtesy of the Georgia-Pacific Plywood Company. Lake must not be going that high over there, Elmer figured, and that’ll be beyond the shoreline.
It was December but the sun was warm and the brown grass rustled in the easy wind. The road where he’d parked curved down toward the Oogasula and ran parallel and close to the water for about fifty yards before it veered back the other direction in a lazy curve, a mirror image of the river’s course. He ambled down to the water’s edge where he stood in plain view of old Mrs. McNulty’s house, the little shack across the road from the kudzu-covered junkyard situated in a flat low spot at the bend in the river. From about a hundred yards away he could see her, squatting on her porch by an antique bathtub, fooling with something under it, her back to him. She was a big-boned woman who carried herself proud, her posture like that of an old Indian chief, her hair dark despite her age. She’d been living in the house without electricity or running water as long as he could remember, that tub sitting out front the whole time. A black chow came hesitantly out from under the porch and stood next to her, his wide tongue hanging from his mouth. The dog looked at Elmer and then back at her.
Elmer turned to face the river, unzipped his fly, pulled it out and peed into the current. “Big water’s coming,” Elmer said. A long golden stream arched through the air and glittered in the sunlight before splashing in the water. “Yep,” he continued, looking back at Mrs. McNulty’s shack, not opening his lips very wide when he spoke but still speaking loudly in a scratchy drawl, “the power company gonna flood you out, honey pie.”
He zipped up and spat, the little white gob floating on the surface like a water bug until it submerged in a riffle about twenty feet away. “Big water’s sure nuff coming.”
Mrs. McNulty didn’t turn to look at Elmer until he was up on the top step, the board creaking like it always had. He was a little man, wiry, 150 pounds at most, so it didn’t squeak much. Wasn’t any point in fixing it now, that old step, all those years of being loose. She’d let all those things go when Ralph died. Ralph never was a finisher anyhow. He had been promising to do something about the bathtub he had brought home and abandoned on the porch a generation ago. The tub was chipped and dirty and it was packed full of rags and shoeboxes containing car parts, mainly door handles and hood ornaments. All the things Ralph had left behind.
“Hey, Elmer,” she said, regarding him cautiously but friendly—she’d heard stories and knew he wasn’t a deputy anymore. “What you shooting at over there?”
“Hey . . . Mrs. McNulty. Aw, just an old squirrel. I figure I’d get him ’fore he drowns.”
“My old dog here is scared to death of guns. Didn’t you hear him whining?”
Elmer looked at the dog, sitting next to Mrs. McNulty.
“No, ma’am. He looks all right to me. I know he’s seen guns before.”
“But that don’t mean he likes ’em.”
“Well, I’m sorry if I disturbed him.”
He glanced around her yard and then down toward the river. “What you still doing out here? They want everybody out today. Paper said you got to clear out by sunset.”
“Yeah, I know it.” She was still squatting by the tub. “I’m just trying to figure how I can get the feet off this thing.”
“You worried it’s gonna up and run away?” He spat off the porch into one of the wild hydrangeas alongside Mrs. McNulty’s steps.
“Now that I’d like to see,” she said. “Who knows what’s gonna happen when that water comes? This old tub just might try to run.”
She laughed, a hacking chuckle, and continued, gesturing across the road to the vine-choked junkyard.
“Man from the state said all these cars will make this part of the lake one of the best fishing spots in the whole mess. Sumpin’ about the fish wanting somewheres to hide.”
“Yeah, I reckon they right,” Elmer said, turning to look at the leaf-covered old cars dating back to the beginning of automobiles—Model A’s and T’s and old trucks, a tractor here and there, a Stanley Steamer, all rusting away. “How long ago did Mr. McNulty start hauling vehicles out here?”
“It’s been near forty years, I guess.”
“Yeah, I wonder what he’d think of this. I guess this part of the lake’ll be fifty feet deep down here in the gully. And I bet the top of that old oak tree will be sticking up through the surface of the water.”
“I wonder why they didn’t cut it down, like they did all those pines?”
“Ain’t no telling,” Elmer said.
Mrs. McNulty put her hand on the tub and looked toward the river beyond the junkyard.
“You think that dam is really gonna fill up the land, like they say it is?”
Elmer spat again. Her hydrangeas were getting wet.
“Aw . . . hell, naw,” he said. “I don’t think those damn fools know what they’re doing.” Elmer spat one more time. “You think it’s gonna take, this big lake here?”
“I don’t know, Elmer. I don’t know. The first I heard about it a few years back, it didn’t make a dadgum bit of sense to me. I thought they was all talk. Then, last year, they came around with a five-hundred-dollar check and court papers. Didn’t give me no choice. It was then I started to believe. They say it’s progress. I guess you can’t stop it . . .”
“Shit,” Elmer said, not caring if he cussed in front of her. He knew she’d heard uglier, all but two of her children either in prison or the crazy house or dead or worse—run off up north. She put her hands on the end of the tub and stood up out of her crouch. At her full height she was six inches taller than him. She brushed her black bangs from her forehead.
“Progress,” Elmer said, taking a step back. “Monkeying with the land God made ain’t progress. It’s just plain craziness if you ask me. God didn’t build no lake here.”
“Old Percy and I here would tend to agree with you.”