John.
The night before the flooding of Bird’s Mill we decided to say goodbye by having a party out at Thompson’s barn. Everything had been packed: linens, silverware, furniture, photographs, and handmade quilts, along with bags of wheat, root vegetables from the cellars, and the canned tomatoes and applesauce from the previous year’s growing season. Anything that remained behind would sink to the bottom of the new lake.
Bird’s Mill was founded in 1806 by Eustace Bird, a farmer at heart, but a businessman by profession. He’d grown tired of city life on the East coast, moved back to the Midwest, and built a grain mill in hopes of processing wheat crops for the local farmers. He was kind and fair, a gentleman through and through, they say. The government offered us five thousand dollars a household, a little more for the farmers who made a living off the land, to pack up and leave Bird’s namesake so they could use our land to build a dam and a reservoir — a nice big reservoir that would help manage the river and give us a place to fish was what we were told. Fish didn’t matter much to us, but a check for five thousand dollars did. It’s more than I had, so I signed the papers. And one by one my neighbors followed suit.
About ten miles down the road, Wilburn was being flooded too. The residents had packed up their things and left without fanfare. Mike Dawson said he drove down there to the feed store and everything was closed, gone, not a soul around. It was like a ghost town, he said. I supposed there was no reason to celebrate your house being demolished and your land becoming a lakebed.
There was one thing I didn’t mind leaving — that rusty old tractor behind the house that I never could get to start. It’s tangled up in a bramble of hawthorn and honeysuckle now, worthless. I lost a lot of money. Used up all my savings on it. The thought of that tractor sitting at the bottom of a lake where no one would have to deal with it was all right with me. It was justice.
We thought we wouldn’t have much to decorate the barn with that night. Everything had been packed up, but folks rummaged through their belongings and found enough candles to make the inside of the barn glow with soft puddles of light. The children had made paper chains with anything they could get their hands on. Summer wildflowers had been picked and tucked into tin cans. Every surface was decorated, from the dirt floor to the rafters, and I don’t think there was a barn more beautiful anywhere in the world. The Thompsons filled the night air with fiddle music so lively that even the old folks shuffled around to it, barely able to lift their feet from the dirt floor. The children danced too, throwing their little bodies around in all directions, keeping time to their own beats over the music. At midnight, John Hall brought out his remaining stock of blackberry wine, which wasn’t much, but it was enough for every person in the barn to get a swig, and for every swig, we shouted, “To Bird’s Mill!” For a while, laughter replaced the tears so many had shed when the government boys first knocked on our doors.
We left the barn as it was — in pools of melted wax, rings of papers, and wilting flowers from tipped-over cans — a memorial to our presence. We said our last goodbyes, our voices echoing through the empty rooms and out into the streets. I bet when we die we’ll come back to this place, the place where we were born, the place we raised our kids. We’ll glide through the water, dark shadows searching for what’s left of our homes.
Mary.
I think I should set the record straight about Bird’s Mill. I grew up here too and truth be told I have more unpleasant memories than happy ones. It’s not that there weren’t some good times. It’s quite nice to think about the Sunday picnics, when all of us would eat together in the center of town, and the holiday dinners when Christmas trees sparkled in the windows and the smell of cinnamon and roasted chestnuts filled our homes. But for some reason, Bird’s Mill seemed cursed from the beginning. If it wasn’t too hot, it was too cold. If we didn’t have a drought, we had too much rain. Mothers birthed hard and long, babies had croup, crops died, and the men drank too much. It was a hard life.
Eustace Bird, founder of our town, was a damned fool. He built the foundations of this place on infertile land, probably the worst in all of Indiana, not suitable to grow much of anything. At one time, rumors went around town that Eustace was a philandering cheat, charming several women to fall in love with him so he could pay them regular visits in the middle of the night, and the next morning raising his prices so their husbands would have to pay double to process the meager amounts of wheat that did grow. Mr. Bird was having his cake and eating it too if you ask me. A statue of Mr. Bird stands in our town square. Several pigeons have taken up residence in the trees above it so the statue’s head is covered with bird droppings. Seems as though Mr. Bird is getting a little of his comeuppance.
As for the tractor, my father gave it to John. John didn’t pay a dollar for it, and it worked just fine until John got his hands on it. He ran it around the field one time then came huffing and puffing through the back door saying it had quit working and that my father had sold him a lemon. I told him we should get my father over right away to talk about it, but he refused. He parked the tractor behind the house where hawthorn and honeysuckle took it over. A waste of money all because of pride.
The day those government boys knocked on the door, I was in the kitchen doing the wash and I listened as they proposed to give us a nice sum of money to leave. I would have rushed through that door and accepted it if John hadn’t. But he finally did, with a little reluctance, and I danced a little jig in the back room where he couldn’t see me. After they left, John was somber, and I played somber too, but my heart was happy and my thoughts were aimed on a new home, a fresh start and fields that fed us, or a factory job for John that would feed us even better.
At the party to celebrate Bird’s Mill, I drank too much because I was so happy to be leaving. Several of the women, still nursing, decided not to drink, so I took their swigs of blackberry wine along with my own. I saw John across the barn with his friends, my friends’ husbands, patting each other on the back and offering each other comfort while we women sat in the shadows and talked about this godforsaken town and how much it deserved to be drowned and forgotten. We talked about a new life, a better life.
I hope we never have to come back to this place, living or dead. John feels differently, but I’ve had enough.
Robin Littell holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Miami University. Her flash fiction has received honorable mentions from Glimmer Train and has appeared in Tin House, Gravel, Literary Mama, Visual Verse, Found Polaroids, and Mud Season Review. More work is forthcoming in Adanna Literary Journal and Fiction Southeast.