Read Online The Lives of Rocks by Rick Bass - Free Book Online Page B

eleven o’clock in the morning I couldn’t sleep anymore, and I got up and moved over to the window to see how hard it was raining, and I was surprised to see that it was raining much harder than I’d expected: a steady, straight, hard-falling rain, with no wind, a rain that was backing up the gutters and flooding the streets, and starting to lap up into the yards.
    Small children in diapers were sitting out in the middle of the street, waist deep, laughing and splashing and playing with yellow rubber ducks, as if the street were their bathtub. It made me hate Mississippi, then; I thought of how the sewage system would be stopping up, losing pressure, and would be backing its materials up into these same waters. The parents were out there with their children, wearing raincoats and rubber boots, holding umbrellas, laughing, silly, oblivious—thinking, perhaps, that this time their houses were not going to slide, and that all water was clean, all water was good, thinking that they were
lucky
because their street had decided to turn into a river, a river that flowed right past their houses, not understanding how dangerous any of it was. The children could be getting typhoid, salmonella, or worse. The young parents were just standing out there in the rain, ankle deep in the water, laughing.
    They should have all been feeling like outlaws—it was making my breathing fast and shallow, just to think about it.
Just because these people could afford to buy big houses and clothes for their children, to send them to private schools and such, did not mean they were safe. They were like hens, all of them, just gathered out in the barnyard, pecking grain, with Thanksgiving coming on. I was so mad that Vern was dying. When he was gone there would be no one; just his sons, but it would be a long time before they became him, before they filled his place, pouring into his space like water flowing into a footprint left in the mud, flowing across it, then covering it...
    But Wejumpka’s strength! He was wearing his Indian headdress and whittling on a stick of balsa wood. He looked like an adult, even with the headdress on, sitting back up on the porch out of the rain, watching the other children play. I picked up the field glasses and focused them on the kitchen behind him, and saw Ann eating chocolate ice cream out of the carton with a spoon, watching the children, too, and watching their parents. Ann ate slowly, transfixed, I think, by the sight of young couples, of married couples, of a man and a woman, together; though it’s possible, too, that she was seeing nothing, only tasting the ice cream—or maybe standing very still, very firm, and trying to feel if the clay was beginning to slide under her house.
    A station wagon came driving up, creeping slowly through the street’s floodwaters, sending rocking muddy waves out from either side of it, washing water up into people’s yards, moving down the street like a boat, and I recognized it as Wejumpka’s carpool, though it was not a school day.
    It stopped in front of Wejumpka’s house, parking in a puddle, and children began piling out of it, more children than I ever imagined, all wearing rubber boots and
raincoats, and they ran up to Wejumpka’s porch, jumping and laughing, delighted to see him, and I was amazed.
    Just a year ago he had been unpopular, had been teased unmercifully—teased about his name, teased about the way he hugged everyone, teased about his father, the drunkest man in town—but this was different, this was unexpected, and they had him up on their shoulders, then, and were carrying him, headdress and all, out into the rain, and the woman who’d driven the carpool was out with them, helping set up these sawhorses, across which she and another child placed a wide plank board that had been sticking out of the back of the station wagon.
    A little girl was there to take pictures; the carpool driver held an