The Winner of the Short Story Competition 2020

1st Prize – Jean Cooper Moran:

Walking Water

My home is in Louisiana, a land of natural magic, of winding water roaming through a wildwood city, curling and coiling with the burden of a billion dreams. In the summertime, in the slow, wet air of July and August even the trees perspire, slumbering in humidity. Winter and spring months bring curtains of black cloud pierced by the spears of a hard rain. The fields lie prostrate beneath it and the coiling Mississippi river grows ever wider, larger, higher, a mighty animal testing the strength of the levees reining it in. One night they failed to hold the river back: I lost my son and thousands lost their homes.

My name is Amy-Ella Cross, but I was Amy-Ella Boudeaux that evening of 12th April, 1927 when the skies slaughtered so many. Before the flood I lived in Placquemines parish with my ten-year-old son George. We were hardworking sharecroppers, still working the fields after my husband Tobias was killed over money owed to bad men. Wild, tormenting weather in that winter of 1926 was nothing rare for us, just something more to work through and survive. Spring the following year brought no relief, just more mauling from the weather gods in the form of three monstrous tornadoes shrieking through the lower Mississippi Valley.

The levees protecting us and our crop-fields grew fissures and cracks as continuous rain fed the river’s belly. After the levee burst above Placquemines many of our kind, poor folks and sharecroppers, were left homeless. River water burst through the breaches, pouring down south, tearing apart flimsy cabins which collapsed into the streets to be borne away by the swollen river. My son and I worked together on the levee near our fields, watching the relentless waters rise by inches, patching with frantic hands where we could. Another levee on the Bayou des Glaises in Avoyelles parish cracked under the pressure, adding floodwaters to the horrors of the storms.

Our families had endured severe storms a-ways before, so when the wild wind rose in that spring, we protected our cabins as best we could. We shuttered the windows, hunkering down together to wait it out as we’d always done. Only this time the waters kept rising, rising day by day, a slow, ominous swelling inch by foot. Our cabin rocked in the blasts that April night and George, scared though he was, said reassuringly, ‘We’ll be OK, Ma, rain never got us yet.’

He was wrong. The thick-bellied water snake climbed and clutched at the cabins along the banks, tearing the small wooden pontoons from their stakes and whirling them into the current with the canoes and skiffs. I was scared for myself: I was scared to death’s door for my son.

Roaring floodwaters burst into the cabin at dawn and we clung on to the rooftop he and I, hidden in the hurricane rain, clutching each other. When the sky split to release the deluge, he lost his hold, slipping like a fish out of my arms. He toppled from our roof-ridge, sliding into the heaving water with its freight of ripped wood and carcasses, screaming ‘Ma, Ma!’

I threw myself down beside him, choking in the muddy current that roared through the bayou like a hell bound train. Kicking and struggling, spitting murky water, we reached for each other. His small, dusky fingers coated in Mississippi mud clung to my outstretched hand. I have you: you’re safe. His pink palm slapped against mine one…last…time… He strained desperately as a rolling log pushed him from my grasp and he was swept downstream, his face stiff with horror. I dived into the current, screaming his name until the river stopped my mouth and a neighbour’s hand pulled me from the flood: my son was swept away. He is all I have in this life and the river took him.

After that night each second lay on my heart like lead on a fishing line. Wherever we survivors looked we saw a drowned landscape. No-one seemed to know what would happen now. We heard that over a wide area of the Delta the flood reached from Illinois to the Gulf of Mexico; in some places the water was thirty feet deep.
In a nation of 120 million souls thousands died, many unrecorded, and over one million were left homeless. Seemed our saviour was the wide mouthed Atchafalaya River which sucked up flood waters and spewed them into the bay.

I found someone who knew where the refugee registration office in New Orleans was, and they took me, our feet slapping on sodden, muddy sheets, carpets and furniture, squelching into the sucking mounds of sand on every street. Police were sitting around in the registration office surrounded by piles of paper, a missing persons mountain to climb.

Some bored trooper chewing on a beignet, chin on hand, lazily penned my details, sugar falling on his collar. So many deaths, so much pain drowns the kindliest spirit in the sorrows of an entire city. I left my son’s name and details. All I knew of him I left there and returned to our land.

Life was a desperate struggle for years after for the soil was salt-silted and the earth barren. My days were spent holding body and soul together, that’s all. George lived: I knew it, my heart told me so.

Some nights I sat on the floor, hunched under a cold cloak of lonesomeness and self-pity. I stayed like that for hours a-waiting for God’s voice until my gut wrenched and I had to get up and eat. Those times I despaired. I took no care of myself and nearly starved.

I lived on fishmeal and forgot how to make roux, how to boil good coffee, fry beans. I forgot how to pray. My skin, once gleaming brown like a pecan globe, was grey and flaky. My once-white teeth got browned and chipped. I sawed my tangled, braided hair off close to the skull, not caring it made me look like a female convict. I was a prisoner of my hopes, after all.

Somehow, I kept going. What kept me in this world was a flame of hope in my heart: George lived: I knew it for true.

Believing that God and His angels had left us to die, I turned to what I remembered of Grand-mere’s belief in the spirit world. I hitchhiked back into Orleans on a Red Cross truck and went to find Maman-tataille, a fortune teller I knew who lived there still. She listened although I couldn’t pay her. Who could, those days?

‘You want me to tell you your son is still alive. Non, cher, non, I can’t do that.’ She paused, her eyes unfocused, looking past me, and I knew she’d lost family to the wild water and the screaming winds.

‘Do you want me to read for you?’

We exchanged that glance that mingles hope and fear, for the tarot is a powerful tool and the cards must be handled with respect.

For an hour we placed them, talking about what they could mean, and how I could go forward with their counsel. My world frightened me, and I told her so. She nodded. ‘Now: you have a direction. The cards tell you to seek an answer in the place you come from. There’s nothing for you here.’

She slumped a little. I watched her closely hoping for more: for the impossible.

‘What do you mean? I don’t see. Our home was destroyed. Our fields and crops are underwater. I’m living in a ruin. What’s left for me?’

She looked beyond me; her pupils dilated. ‘Go back there, find out where your son is by asking those who know. He’s not in the city.’

I felt a chill in the air as her voice deepened. ‘Go to your own country. There you’ll find Kroko deilos, PebbleMan: he knows where all the bodies lie.’ Her voice fell into a low chant. ‘He talks to Lagarto, keeper of the deepest secrets of the swamp and the low places.’

‘He’s a legend, maman, nothin’ real.’

‘In dark times, don’t we all look to legends and lore to guide us when the world goes bad?’

She relaxed in the chair again, exhausted. I thanked her and left. Her words meant nothing to me then but I drew comfort from her faith in the future and I weren’t disappointed. In my swampland home I’d try to make peace with my loss as much as I could.

Sitting in the dusk on my thrown-together porch by the waterside I breathed again the scented, humid air freighted with bird calls. White egrets and ibises sailed past on wind-currents. Insects hummed and rasped, and in the deep purple night the bayou’s shadow-haunted depths harboured a million invisible eyes.

My neighbours were the great blue herons, owls, turtles and snakes. Squatting bullfrogs lived under my porch and sometimes ruminating gators glided past my door, jaws opening wide in welcome as I smiled back, shaking out my fishing nets to dry on the porch railing. Many days passed in calm currents of healing as I fished, worked my vegetable plot, mended the cabin and cleaned myself and my home. Some kind of peace grew inside me.

One day my small iron stove cracked. Paul Burdette, a fisherman, told me of a clever mechanic some miles downriver who could fix anything made of metal. He and his son were known to charge reasonable rates. I followed the map he gave me, paddling the pirogue with a light heart.

What I didn’t expect was to find George living – and not be recognised. In the tall, crop-haired young man standing on the jetty I saw Tobias’ features, his eyes and my mouth. I sobbed, cried his name and threw myself at him without thinking. His father caught me back, his hard fingers digging into my shoulders as I tried to reach my son, straining against his strength.

‘Whoa there, Missy. What’s the matter here, Noah?’

‘Don’t know, Dad.’

The boy looked at me, curious, and something passed behind his eyes: a gleam, a memory? Then it vanished and he shrugged, concerned for the crazy woman.

I turned in the arms holding me back and looked up into a hard-planed face sculpted from grey, pebbled stone: Pebble Man. It was only a peculiarity of his skin, maybe old sores, but it made him look alien, reptilian, fitting for the swampland he inhabited. I looked into his dark eyes, the colour of swamp water, and placed my hands over his.

‘We need to talk, Mister. Look at this boy’s back and you’ll see a star-shaped scar. He got it fallin’ off a walnut tree and his Daddy sewed him up. He’s mine.’

‘He’s mine, my son. He don’t know where he came from, who his folks were. The river battered him. He lost every memory. Now he’s mine; we work together, live together, I teach him as I taught my son…my…’

He broke off and turned his back to me, grief making him hostile. I waited, then saw the boy I knew as George remove his work-shirt to expose a broad, muscled back tanned from outside labour. There on the right side was a raised star lined in old, yellowed scar tissue. Pebble Man gazed at the evidence confronting him. My claim was good, he saw that, and miserable understanding deepened the lines on his face.

I looked at the large, trim cabin, the well-tended vegetable patch and solid wooden pirogues tied to a workmanlike pontoon. George lived here and all his memories centred around this home. I had no place in his life now. But maybe I could create a new one. Maybe by giving more of myself, I could give him back his memories. Make him see me again. I smiled up at Pebble Man, ready to take the next step.

‘Mister, we need to talk.’

About the Author

Comments from Competition Adjudicator,
Diana Nadin

As usual, I enjoyed reading  the entries and feel that all the winners and runners up deserve a round of applause! But the story that took first place – Walking Water – really is in a league of its own.

It’s a beautifully crafted short story, starting from the very first paragraph with its deft imagery and alliteration (winding water roaring through a wildwood city, curling and coiling with the  burden of a billion dreams) to the final paragraph which ends the story on a perfect note. Enough said; no more needed.

It’s based on an actual event (look it up and see the pictures to appreciate the scale of the devastation) and is told in a matter-of-fact, autobiographical way that draws in the reader as though they are sitting with the narrator, listening to her story.

But probably its main strength is that it is a masterclass in ‘show don’t tell’.  We have:  “Some bored trooper chewing on a beignet, chin in hand, lazily penned my details, sugar falling on his collar.” It says everything about bureaucracy in times of crisis, doesn’t it? Or how to encapsulate despair: “I lived on fishmeal and forgot how to make roux, how to boil good coffee, fry beans. I forgot how to pray.”

The imagery is imaginative and sustained. At the beginning the Mississippi is likened to a mighty animal flexing its muscles and then later it becomes  “The thick-bellied water snake” that “ climbed and clutched at the cabins along the bank.”

Above all, it’s a compelling tale whose narrative push never slackens and which has pace and tension throughout. A worthy winner!