When they topped the rise and stood overlooking Hebertown there was a
moment of silence and then a groan of horror burst from them all.
"Gutted," Arthur Chesbro said succinctly. "Not a thin dime left in
town; not a nickel."
The true flood crest which they had missed in the hills had left a
plain wake through the town. It was dark brown and even from their
height they could smell its stink. Sewage, chemical waste, mud churned
up from river bottoms where it had been rotting for a century. The
brown smear lay over two-thirds of Hebertown, and there was something
worse at its center, a long streak scores of yards to either side of
the river. It seemed almost to have been bulldozed clean.
The river still boiled many feet above its normal height, and flotsam
rolled past, dotting its swell. There were tree trunks, chicken houses,
timber and swollen things you didn't want to guess at. The bridges were
out, the stout PWA bridge and the two rickety county bridges.
Chesbro studied the view. "Gramatan Mills are wrecked," he said.
"They'll never come back. They rebuilt on the river in ninety-seven
right where the old waterpower mill was. Half their plant's--torn away."
"Let's get on down," Groff said.
McCue volunteered: "I'd try the school--if it's standing. That's where
you always set up cots and aid stations."
Chesbro said: "The junior high's standing. Built well on the outskirts.
Lucky it's on this side of the river."
They started down the hill. The stink grew worse.
First they came to frame houses with picket fences and vegetable
gardens in the back. The porches were full; exhausted people looked
dully at them. At the third or fourth house a man came to his gate to
watch them pass.
Groff said, "We've got your burgess here. He seems to have pneumonia.
Can we make him comfortable in your place and get a doctor for him?"
The man said tiredly, "There's no room in my place. I have twenty-five,
thirty people. And the doctors won't make house calls, not today. All
three of 'em are down at the school. Take him there."
Mrs. Goudeket said, "Could you maybe put me up, mister? We've been
walking and walking--?"
"No room," he said. "I'm full up. Everybody's full up. Go to the
school. They got stretchers there. The Air Force dropped 'em in the
athletic field. I hope Henry gets better. Go down to the school.
They'll take care of you there."
"For ten dollars, maybe--" Mrs. Goudeket began.
"Money's no good," the man said. His voice began to rise hysterically.
"Nothing's no good. I work at the Gramatan Mills and look at it. I
worked there twenty-seven years, I was going to get my pension in 1958,
and now the mill's gone. My father drove down into town before it hit
to see if he could help and he isn't back yet and I don't know if he's
alive or dead." He took sudden hold of himself. "I have to go and tend
the cookstove. You have to boil your water now. Thirty people drink a
lot of water, we keep boiling it all the time. Take care of Henry." He
went back up his path and inside.
Past the rustic houses on the fringe they came to a belt of substantial
older places, the homes of the borough petty aristocracy. Here the
smear of brown had reached; the horses picked their way uncertainly,
fetlock-deep in stinking mud. A mad-eyed woman in a housecoat was on
one of the handsome porches shoveling and shoveling; the silt plopped
into the silt that covered her lawn.
They passed a house with a broken back. A towering poplar, surely the
pride of the owner once, had stood in his front yard. The flood water
had come; it had loosened the soil to the consistency of porridge;
the tree had tilted a little, leaned; its wide shallow root system
had given way and the trunk had crashed across the roof, caving and
crumpling it in.
There was a house with black, dead eyes. Somehow fire had started;
candles, or a fireplace carelessly laid for warmth when the
electrically fanned oil heater clicked silent. The innards of the house
had burned, and the fireman had not come. There was a pathetic pile of
furniture outside, but where the people were you couldn't tell.
There was a house that, in all that chaotic destruction, had survived
unscathed. Its windows had their glass, its doors were neatly locked,
there were two spindly iron chairs on the porch. And then you looked
and saw that it rested in the middle of a road, where the water had let
it drop.
But it was the smell that hurt. You could imagine a hurt town mending
itself and growing again. But this stench from the river bottoms was
the stink of death. "I'll bet," said Artie Chesbro with a dreamer's
eyes, "you could pick up any mortgage in town for five cents on the
dollar today."
* * * * *
Dr. Soames was the town's only specialist. He had built a white
Georgian house and a three-car garage out of something less than a
quarter of a cubic foot of the human female anatomy. He was an expert
on every fold and canal from the _labium minus_ to the hydatid of
Morgagni, and of the hundred and four babies born in the borough of
Hebertown and surrounding territory in the past twelve months, he
had delivered ninety-three. They told scandalous anecdotes about his
extra-official life--"Mrs. Hoglund? Hoglund? Oh, I didn't recognize
you with your pants up"--and there had been a suggestion at the County
Medical Association that some of his most profitable pregnancies
were not permitted to come to term. But there was no human being in
Hebertown and environs who doubted that Dr. Soames was the greatest
doctor on earth.
And what good was he doing now, he demanded silently, swabbing alcohol
on the morning's twenty-fifth rump to ready it for the needle.
He sighed and jabbed home the needle of yellowish fluid. The kid jumped
and howled; Dr. Soames's hand was not as dexterous with injections as
it might once have been. They were working themselves into a coma, all
three of the doctors, with routine shots against typhoid and penicillin
to keep the sniffles of the kids from getting worse; but any ambulance
driver could have done as much. What these people needed--homes; help;
money--was not in their little black bags.
"Dr. Soames!" Chief of Police Brayer was coming into the school's gym.
The tired old face looked worried--almost panicked; Soames had thought
the time for panic was over. "They're bringing Henry in, Doctor. He
looks bad."
The burgess came in, under clean blankets, on an aluminum-frame
stretcher at last. Soames took a quick look. Fever; coma; and the
unmistakable racking, hard-fought breaths. Pneumonia? "Wake up Doctor
Brandeis," he ordered; but he found a hypodermic and loaded it without
waiting.
The other doctor's eyes were bleary when he staggered in, but there
wasn't much doubt. "Pneumonites, all right," he said, auscultating
the burgess's chest. "We ought to have oxygen, Frank." Chief Brayer
listened to the doctors. He cut in, "Don't we have any oxygen?" Soames
shook his head; and Brayer remembered. The oxygen was there, all right,
in the firehouse, where it was handy for the pumpers to take along in
case of drowning or asphyxiation or any of the other things Hebertown
called out its fire department for; but it wasn't handy at all in case
of floods, since the firehouse was in the Borough Hall. You couldn't
even see the roof yet, though the water had gone down.
He blundered out of the room and buttonholed one of the other
volunteers. "Who've we got who can swim underwater?" he demanded. "We
have to get the oxygen out of the firehouse--Henry needs it."
They found a couple of high-school kids, on the swimming team, and they
went down to survey the drowned-out hall. The water had slowed enough
to put a boat out; they rowed down Front Street, over the back yards of
the cottages, into the River Road. "Must be around here," Brayer said
doubtfully, staring at the muddy water. "Some of the houses got moved,
I guess...."
It wasn't there. One of the boys eventually went down, but only for a
moment. He came up sputtering and grunting, his eyes squeezed tight;
when they got him into the boat and he could talk coherently again he
said, "Sorry, Mr. Brayer. Maybe there's still some of the firehouse
down there. But that isn't water, it's plain mud. Even if I had a face
mask, I couldn't see--and I don't have a face mask." They took him
back to the school to have his eyes looked after. Chief Brayer leaned
dizzily against the door frame, watching Dr. Brandeis bathing the kid's
eyes. What, he wondered, was Hebertown going to be like without Henry?
* * * * *
Mickey Groff woke up. They must have given me a shot of something, he
thought clearly, and sat up.
A girl in a white uniform with gold bars at the collar leaned over him
and said, "You ought to go back to sleep. You've only had about two
hours."