A Good American by Alex George

Author:Alex George
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Group, USA
Published: 2012-01-25T16:00:00+00:00

While Jette and Rosa gingerly picked a way through their sorrows, a new sadness came knocking for my parents. Since their wedding, Cora had suffered two miscarriages. The second of these had come on Christmas Day of 1926. After that, nothing. It was as if her body had taken matters into its own hands, determined to spare her further heartbreak.

Cora continued to work at the restaurant, but a light had gone out inside her. The bright, vivacious girl Joseph had married slowly disappeared from view, her existence reduced to wretched monthly cycles of hope and despair. Dr. Becker could find nothing wrong with her. Keep trying, he would gravely suggest, patting her hand in sympathy. Everything happens for a reason. Keep trying, and just when you least expect it, your little miracle will arrive.

It began to seem as if a miracle was precisely what was required. At church Cora and Joseph got to their knees and prayed for God to bless them with a child. As they knelt together in the pew, Joseph would glance sideways at his wife and watch her lips move in desperate supplication. Neither of them could look beyond the impossible promise of the next four weeks. The future was for people with the luxury of hope.

But the future came looking for them, all the same. In the spring of 1927 the Mississippi burst its banks in the worst flood in human memory. All along the great river, from Leeville to Cairo, the levees collapsed and sent tidal waves crashing across the cotton fields of Louisiana. The Missouri River rose in sisterly sympathy, with catastrophic results. In Beatrice, half the streets were submerged beneath a lake of stinking brown water. Anything that could not be raised out of harm’s way was destroyed. Pets and livestock drowned. Crops were decimated. Every day Joseph waded to the restaurant and bailed sludge out onto the street.

Jette’s house was built on elevated ground, and the water stopped two blocks away from her front door. When the river finally retreated, a crusted waterline of dirt marked the walls of the town’s buildings, showing the high point of the flood. Jette stepped out of her house for the first time in months and walked through the town, inspecting the damage. The pungent odor of rotting food and dead animals was everywhere. To Jette it was the sweet smell of revenge. Lomax’s murderers might have gone unpunished, but this collective retribution had been administered instead. Her grief loosened its grip.

Despite all of Joseph’s efforts, the flood had devastated the restaurant. It seemed that no amount of scrubbing or cleaning could eradicate the lingering stink of putrid floodwater. The old tables and chairs had been submerged for too long, and had begun to rot. The kitchen equipment was beyond rescue. The old piano that Lomax had loved to play was ruined forever. My father gutted the interior, knocked down the wall between the dining room and the kitchen, and waited for his insurance check to arrive.

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