"Blackwater - 01 - The Flood" - читать интересную книгу автора (McDowell Michael)

For Mama El
BLACKWATER: I THE FLOOD is an original publication of Avon Books. This work has never before appeared in book form.
AVON BOOKS
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Copyright й 1983 by Michael McDowell Published by arrangement with the author Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 82-90483 ISBN: 0-380-81489-7
All rights reserved, which includes the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever except as provided by the U. S. Copyright Law. For information address The Otte Company, 9 Goden Street, Belmont, Massachusetts 02178
First Avon Printing, January, 1983
AVON TRADEMARK REG. U. S. PAT. OFF. AND IN OTHER COUNTRIES, MARCA REGISTRADA, HECHO EN U. S. A.
Printed in the U. S. A.
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The maenad lovesЧand furiously defends herself against love's importunity. She lovesЧ and kills. From the depths of sex, from the dark, primeval past of the battles of the sexes arise this splitting and bifurcating of the female soul, wherein woman first finds the wholeness and primal integrity of her feminine consciousness. So tragedy is born of the female essence's assertion of itself as a dyad. ЧVYACHESLAV IVANOV, "The Essence of Tragedy" (tr. Laurence Senelick)
I will spunge out the sweetness of my heart, And suck up horror; Love, woman's thoughts,
I'll kill,
And leave their bodies rotting in my mind, Hoping their worms will sting; not man outside,
Yet will I out of hate engender much: I'll be the father of a world of ghosts And get the grave with carcase.
THOMAS LOVELL BEDDOES, "Love's Arrow Poisoned"
AUTHOR'S NOTE
Perdido, Alabama, does indeed exist, and in the place I have put it. Yet it does not now, nor ever did possess the buildings, geography, or population I ascribe to it. The Perdido and Blackwater rivers, moreover, have no junction at all. Yet the landscapes and persons I describe, I venture to say, are not wholly imaginary.
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Perdido, Alabama
pop. 1,200 SITE OF LEVEE WA
1. OSCAR & ELINOR CASKEY'S HOME
2. MARY-LOVE CASKEY'S HOME
3. JAMES CASKEY'S HOME
4. DeBORDENAVES HOME
5. TURK S HOME
TO GULF OF MEXICO

PROLOGUE
At dawn on Easter Sunday morning, 1919, the cloudless sky over Perdido, Alabama, was a pale translucent pink not reflected in the black waters that for the past week had entirely flooded the town. The sun, immense and reddish-orange, had risen just above the pine forest on the far side of what had been Baptist Bottom. This was the low-lying area of Perdido where all the emancipated blacks had huddled in 1865, and where their children and grandchildren huddled still. Now it was only a murky swirl of planks and tree limbs and bloated dead animals. Of downtown Perdido no more was to be seen than the town hall, with its four-faced tower clock, and the second floor of the Osceola Hotel. Only memory might tell where the courses of the Perdido and Blackwater rivers had lain scarcely a week before. All twelve hundred inhabitants of Perdido had fled to higher ground. The town rotted beneath a wide sheet of stinking, still black water, which only now was beginning to recede. The pediments and gables and chimneys of houses that had not been broken up
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and washed away jutted up through the black shining surface of the flood, stone and brick and wooden emblems of distress. But no assistance came to their silent summonses, and driftwood and unidentifiable detritus and scraps of clothing and household furnishings swept against them and were caught and formed reeking nests around those upraised fingers.
Black water lapped lazily against the brick walls of the town hall and the Osceola Hotel. The water was otherwise silent and unmoving. People who have never lived through a flood may imagine that fish swim in and out of the broken windows of submerged houses, but they don't. In the first place, the windows don't break, for no matter how well constructed a house may have been, the water rises through the floorboards, and the windowless pantry is flooded to the same depth as the front porch. And beyond that, the fish keep to the old riverbeds, just as if they hadn't twenty or thirty feet more of new freedom above that. Floodwater is foul, and filled with foul things, and catfish and bream, though they don't like the unaccustomed darkness, swim in confused circles around their old rocks and their old weeds and their familiar bridge pilings.
Someone standing in the little square room directly beneath the town hall clocks, and peering out the narrow vertical window that looked west, might have seen approaching across that flat black unreflecting surface of still rank water, as out of what remained of the night, a solitary rowboat with two men in it. Yet no one was in that room beneath the clocks, and the dust on the marble floor, and the birds' nests among the rafters, and the gentle whirr of the last bit of machinery that hadn't quite yet run down, remained undisturbed. There was no one to wind the clocks, for who had remained in Perdido when the waters had risen so high? The solitary rowboat plied its stately, solemn course unobserved. It came slowly from the direction of the millowners'
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fine houses that lay beneath the muddy waters of the Perdido River to the northwest. The boat, which was painted greenЧfor some reason, all such boats in Perdido were painted greenЧwas paddled by a black man about thirty years old. Sitting before him in the prow was a white man, only a few years younger.
Neither had spoken for some time. Each had stared about in wonder at the spectacle of PerdidoЧ where they had been born and where they had been raisedЧsubmerged beneath eighteen feet of foul water. What Easter but that first in Jerusalem had dawned so bleakly, or stirred less hope in the breasts of those who had witnessed the rising of that morning's sun?
"Bray," said the white man at last, "row up toward the town hall."
"Mr. Oscar," protested the black man, "we don't know what's in them rooms."
The water had risen to the bottom of the second-floor windows.