The Jon Boat We Took to His Mother

I had always liked Oleta. She was the kind of old woman who sends a card on your birthday with a two-dollar bill in it, even when you are thirty-nine.

When I married Gage, she taught me her pie crust, standing right beside me at her counter.

Then on the last day of August, it rained. A slow, soaking, all-night rain, the kind you pray for.

I stood on the porch in my nightgown at two in the morning and listened to it on the roof and cried a little, I am not ashamed to say.

Our stock dam caught water within a week. Not full, but enough. On the fifth of September, I stopped driving the cows to Ferris’s gate. We had paid for August, and August was done.

Up north, in the counties above us, a storm sat over the river valley on a Monday night in the third week of September and dropped six inches of rain in a few hours. We got a half inch. I barely noticed it.

But all that water up north had to go somewhere, and the somewhere was down the Big Sioux, toward us.

Dry ground does not drink fast. It sheds water like a tin roof. By Tuesday morning, the river was rising.

Gage was out on the grader that morning, up in the north end.

I was home, doing laundry and making a hamburger hotdish for supper. The scanner sat on the kitchen counter where it always sits, turned low.

Out here, everybody keeps a scanner on. You hear about grass fires, cattle out on the highway, a car in the ditch, an ambulance going to a neighbor.

It is how you know who needs a casserole and whose church to pray for.

All morning it had been chatter about water over roads up north. I listened with half an ear.

Then at about a quarter after twelve, Gage came home for dinner, which he does when he is working close by, and he turned it up a little.

“River’s coming up fast,” he said. “Faster than they thought. They’ve got the county closing roads down this way.”

At about ten minutes after three, the scanner crackled with a voice I knew, one of the county deputies.

“Water’s over the bottom road south of the old Lindahl place. Road is closed. I’m turning around.”

I stood still at the counter with a dish towel in my hand.

The old Lindahl place was Oleta’s.

I knew Ferris was not home. He had told half the township he was going to the big fall calf sale out west, three hundred miles across the state.

He had left Monday to look at calves and planned to bid Tuesday and drive home that night.

I called Gage on his cell phone. He was already turning the grader around.

“I heard it,” he said. “I’m coming.”

While I waited, I called Ferris. It rang four times and went to voicemail.

Sale barns are loud, and the cell service in that country is thin. I left a message. My voice did not sound like mine.

Then I called Oleta’s landline. It rang and rang. Twelve rings. Fifteen. Nobody picked up. I stood there counting rings the way Ferris had counted our cows.

Gage came up the lane in his pickup twenty minutes later, fast for Gage.

He had parked the grader at the county shop and driven straight home. He walked in the kitchen door with his boots still on.

“Fire department’s boat is up north,” he said. “Somebody’s car went off a low crossing. They’ve got everybody on it. The deputy says it’ll be an hour, maybe two, before anybody gets down to Oleta’s.”