SmokeLong Quarterly

In 1961, the Army Corps of Engineers drowned my Granny’s town on purpose, put First Baptist, the school, and the Rexall soda fountain under a lake, threw a ribbon-cutting at the dam, a senator, a band, a pair of gold scissors, and called it flood control, I am thinking about this at nine in the morning while the med line shuffles up to the window, because the med line is a baptism, all of us in grippy socks, each tipping back a pleated paper cup, a mouthful of creek, everything in this hospital operates on water for anybody who cares to look, the fluorescent light lying in one long ripple on the waxed linoleum, the drinking fountain running warm however long you press it, the retention pond out past the parking lot where one gray heron stands government-still, our own little lake, and whoever drew the blueprints knew what kind of people this place would harbor, Nurse Carol Ann checks under my tongue and winks, the one thing that nobody writes down, Granny used to row me out over Main Street in Otis Prewitt’s johnboat in the drought years when the steeple broke the surface and tourists came to photograph it, the bell they salvaged hangs in the new church in town and rings different now, cracked someplace nobody can find, she would name every mailbox under forty feet of water, and the graves they moved got new plots, a brass plaque, a service, and the ones they didn’t got three words from the county, left undisturbed, the lake said amen, and she taught me to hold my breath in the shallows over the post office, a two-dollar egg timer going on the boat seat, one Mississippi, two Mississippi, until I could sit on the bottom step of a drowned porch through four turns of the timer, longest breath in three counties, a talent, she called it, piano for the lungs.

The talent ruined me, because in August, at the Prewitt girl’s baptism, Brother Dale tipped her back into the brown water in her white dress and I started counting, at nine Mississippi a baptism is a sacrament, at twenty it is a man not paying attention, and at thirty-one, her little hand opening and closing like a bluegill, I went in shoes and all and took Brother Dale by the wrist, the Prewitt girl came up and gave half the lake back onto the fellowship hall carpet, it took three deacons to get me off him, the paperwork says disrupted a religious service, attempted to seize a minor, combative, poor insight, the paperwork does not say she coughed, and my sister signed where the X was, because in June I had stood up at Granny’s funeral and said put her in the old cemetery with her own people, lake or no lake, and my family calls that the day I got sick, so they brought me here, where the pipes of a building this old carry water up the risers all night, gurgling, and I mean that, put an ear to the plaster and there runs the whole hidden river, loudest around two when the boiler cycles, I counted those nights too, and I reported it, calm, like a citizen reporting smoke, the chart says auditory hallucination, water-themed, consistent with presentation, so I stopped reporting, and now the chart says cooperative, which is their word for a swimmer who has stopped kicking.

Of course the third-floor riser picks review day to burst, the corridor an inch deep in warm rust-colored water, techs sandbagging the nurses’ station with bath towels, Weldon from maintenance telling nobody in particular that these old pipes have been talking for a year, the whole wing could have said so, nobody looks at me, I walk to my review through the very water they charted me for, socks soaked through, and Doctor Land keeps the chart high and dry in his lap and asks do you still hear the water, Wynona, while it comes in under his door, dark at the baseboard, gaining on his loafers, he does not look down, and I say no sir, because his language is No and I am fluent now, he writes longer than he listened, chronic, guarded, transfer to C Building, the far one, where the doors lock from the hallway side, my things go into a paper grocery sack, halfway down the breezeway, rain loud on the tin roof, the count comes due, one long Mississippi held since August, Granny’s talent put to its last use, saved for the day somebody would count my seconds the way I counted the Prewitt girl’s, nobody ever counted, so when the heron lifts off the retention pond, a sheet pulled from the furniture, Main Street lays itself out ahead of me, the Rexall open, the porch step swept, the church doors propped wide and the singing coming out to meet me, Shall We Gather at the River, the pews full of everybody the county left down there in its perpetual care, and Granny scoots over in the third pew and sets the egg timer going between us, so I take my seat inside that sound, I breathe out every no sir I ever gave them, and under the hymn she counts my seconds out loud, one Mississippi, two Mississippi.