By the Iowa Sea by Joe Blair

Author:Joe Blair
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Scribner

DEB READ IN THE Press-Citizen that volunteer sandbaggers should bring work gloves and rubber boots, but she can’t find any gloves in the house other than the yellow Playtex gloves she uses for doing the dishes, so she brings those. The closest thing she has to rubber boots are her faux L.L.Beans, so she pulls them on. The sky is heavy and there’s a steady breeze from the west. The forecast calls for more thunderstorms. Deb likes rain. She always has. Still, apart from the childhood memory of her mother and the smell of soup, I can’t help but believe it’s not rain she loves, but being protected from it.

Lucy doesn’t stop asking questions about sandbagging.

“Are we going to be in the river?” she says.

“No, honey,” I say. “We’re going to be beside the river.”

“Can I go in the river?”

“No, honey.”

“Why can’t I go in the river?”

“The current is too strong,” says Deb. “Besides, it’s polluted.”

“Why is it polluted?”

“I don’t know. Runoff from the fields and stuff I guess.”

“You don’t know?”

“No, honey.”

“Then how do you know it’s polluted?”

“I’ve read about it, Lucy.”

“Will there be other kids there?”

“I don’t know.”

“Can I dig in the sand?”

“I think so. I don’t see why not.”

“How much sand will there be?”

“Lucy, I’ve never done this before. It’s my first time too.”

“Will they let me help?”

“I’m sure they will, sweetheart.”

Mike isn’t so talkative. Deb believes that he is very smart. Mike, she maintains, has “an intelligence in his eyes.” “He knows what’s going on,” she says. On the way down to Normandy Drive, Mike is holding Deb’s hand and watching his feet very carefully as he walks. He might be thinking a thousand things.

“What if it rains again?” says Lucy.

“I don’t know,” I say.

“What if the river goes way up all of a sudden?”

“I don’t know.”

“Why are we going down there anyway?”

“We’re going to help build a levee.”

“What’s that?”

“A wall. Out of sand.”

“Why?”

“To stop the water.”

“That won’t work.”

“Why do you say that?”

“Sand doesn’t stop water.”

“I think it does, honey. If it’s in bags.”

“I don’t think it will,” she says.

We know everyone down on Normandy Drive. We bought a split-entry on the street seven years ago. Sam and William were just starting school when we moved in. I needed to build a fence around the front yard so Mike could play outside. I started digging the postholes right along the driveway and I had already dug a few holes and poured the dry concrete and plumbed the posts when Deb told me that she wanted at least a foot between the driveway and the fence for her plantings. She wouldn’t have a fence directly along her driveway. I managed to get the posts pulled out of the ground and I began to dig again, this time a foot back from the driveway like Deb wanted. She planted wildflowers. They grew high and crazy all along the fence. The Schirrocks and the Davises across the street hated them, Deb was sure. They never said anything, but she knew

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