The Bloody Country by James Lincoln Collier & Christopher Collier

Author:James Lincoln Collier & Christopher Collier
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: AudioGO
Published: 1976-12-15T00:00:00+00:00

7

e took them up to the mill, let them dry out in front of the fire, and gave them some hot soup. The man told us all about it. “There’s water fifteen feet deep back there at Jacob’s Plains. There’s whole villages gone, twenty or thirty houses just wiped out—farms, livestock, barns, everything. There’s more food in the river right now than in all the barns in the Wyoming Valley. Hell, there aren’t hardly any barns left, anyway. Back at Swetland’s there’s water over the whole plain, back to the hills. The river’s two miles wide there.”

“How long do you figure before it’ll get down here?” my father asked.

He shrugged. “Hard to tell. Nightfall, maybe. When she comes, she’ll hit real fast. If I was you I’d be up in the hills long before dark.”

“What are you going to do?”

“Give up and go back to Connecticut, I guess,” the farmer said. “My house is gone, my barn’s gone, my livestock’s gone, my winter rye’s under five feet of water.”

“You’re just going to let the Pennamites walk in and take over your land?”

“They can have it. Let them suffer for a while.”

My father looked at Annie, and then he looked away again. Annie didn’t say anything, but she kept her eyes on Father. “What’ll you do back there?” he said.

The farmer shrugged. “I’ll find something. It won’t be like owning your own piece, but I’d rather that than see my kids drowned or scalped or locked up in the fort.”

Father didn’t say anything about that. They finished up their soup, and left to go back up into the hills and wait for the flood waters to roar through Wilkes-Barre. “It’s coming,” he said. “No doubt about that.”

After they’d gone Father and me and Joe walked down to the Susquehanna. The water had come up a good foot in the time we’d been gone. “Do you think it’ll flood the mill, Father?”

“Hard to tell,” he said. “If it gets high enough it’ll start backing Mill Creek up. And if that ice on top of the dam lets loose all at once you’ll have water all over the place.” He shook his head. “Can’t tell. I guess we’d better move whatever we can onto high ground.”

So that’s what we did. Annie and Little Isaac began packing our dishes and pots and our clothes into baskets and barrels and boxes, and Father and Joe and I carried the stuff up the hill in back of the house and a good half mile into the woods. We were pretty far above the Susquehanna there. It would take some flood for the water to get that high. We kept on working until it got too dark to see anymore. I never realized we had so much stuff. Besides the things we had in the house there were all our tools—saws, axes, shovels, awls, planes, hoes, rakes, and then of course all the special tools we used in the mill. Spread around the way it normally was,

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