The Trouble With Eden - Lawrence Block [130]
Business in New Hope fell off sharply. The bulk of weekend trade consisted of visitors from Philadelphia and New York who came to spend a day or two or three walking along the town’s determinedly quaint streets and browsing its little shops. As neither of those activities was much suited to a downpour, those tourists remained in Philadelphia or New York. Others, who liked Bucks County as a stopping place between Washington and New England, tended to stay in their cars and keep on the road; if they did stay a night, the hotel bar would get all their trade.
There were a clutch of bright days in early August. Then the rains came again, and the winds took down electric lines faster than the power company could tack them back up again. A dairy farmer on the Titusville-Pennington Road in New Jersey shot to death his entire herd of milkers, several barn cats, his wife’s bantam hens, a collie-shepherd cross, two of his three sons (the third was in Vietnam), his wife, and himself. Acquaintances said he’d always been a trifle strange, but a majority of people held the weather at least partly accountable for his behavior. It was generally agreed that it was a hell of a shame about the cows, as they’d been one of the best Holstein herds in the county.
Times of tragedy draw people together, and if the Delaware had given up and overflowed its banks, this might well have been the case. But the interminable rain was not sufficiently dramatic a tragedy. The rain continued for a period of almost four full weeks, but each time it broke just long enough for the river to do its job of running off the water. The promise of catastrophe hung in the humid air, while on a day-to-day basis life was less tragic than inconvenient. People were not drawn together. Rather, they were kept apart, staying in their own houses and contending with the incessant parade of minor irritations in their own lives. Basements were pumped dry, fallen trees sectioned and stored for firewood, dollars stretched, and homeowners sat with pencil and paper working out ways to transform flood damage (uninsured) into wind damage (fully covered).
Until, late in August, the rain stopped. This, too, was less dramatic than it might have been. No dove returned bearing an olive branch. There was one day with a little rain, another day with less, and then a day when, although clouds blocked the sun, no rain fell at all. When a full week passed without anything falling from the skies but pollution, the valley realized that it was over. The rains had come and gone, the river had held, and a repetition of ’55 was postponed for at least another year.
“Well, it’s over and we got through it,” they said. “As bad a season as we’ve seen in years, and God willing we won’t see it as bad again for some years to come.” They said this and meant it, and thanked God it hadn’t been worse than it was. And yet there was an undercurrent to the words, never voiced but almost always present, a resentment after the fact that the level of catastrophe had never been quite attained. If the governors of two states had declared the valley a disaster area, this was small comfort; the residents knew what true disaster was supposed to look like, and they had fallen short of it. There would be few stories to tell of this summer, and few ears interested in hearing them. They had endured, to be sure, but endurance, if easier in present time, is less thrilling in retrospect than survival. What might have been a moment in their lives of triumph and heroism was to have been no more than discomfort. So they resented this, and felt guilty at their resentment, and stood outside in the warmth of the sun.
TWENTY
She stood on the sidewalk in front of the Shithouse watching Hugh’s Buick until it took a right at the corner and vanished from her sight. She took a last puff on her cigarette and let it fall from her fingers to the pavement, then ground it underfoot. It was early, not yet midnight,