Acts of God Read Free

insurance policies scrawled. This would have driven my father wild. He’d be racing from farmhouse to farmhouse, helping the farmers file their claims.
    Before I was ten, I knew how to read a disaster, how to calculate the loss of life and limb. I understood what landfall meant, what an 8.2 on the Richter scale was; I knew the damage an F5 tornado (inconceivable) versus an F6 (unimaginable) could do. Debris paths, flood basins—none of this was news to me.
    And I’d learned a few things about odds. “What are the chances?” my father used to say. “If it’s three to one a tornado will blow through southern Illinois during the tornado season, then what’re the odds it will blow through the Loop?” Actuarial statistics were the subject of family dinners. The death of a child wasn’t worth a fraction of the death of a working spouse. Loss of income was greater than loss of consortium (the word my father used when he referred to companionship). Property costs more than grief. Dollar signs lurked behind every heartbreak. Over dinner I heard tales of farms foreclosed, policies lapsed.
    From an early age I came to associate my father with bad weather. I developed a fear of oncoming storms—a phobic dread of wind and rain. I can’t say I’ve ever gotten over it completely. When thick black clouds gather over the Pacific, I have to brace myself. When my father was on the road or even when he was home, I listened obsessively to weather reports, scanned the skies for that blue-gray sky that threatened snow, a yellow-green cast that foretold a tornado touchdown. It all meant claims. It meant that once again my father would be taken from me. I had no idea how much or how far, though in the end it wouldn’t be the weather that took him away.
    Now as I flew home, the flooded plain stretched below me. My father had always been opposed to the levees. He knew the rivers. He’d been born near them, grew up along their banks. He said when it came to rivers, and I suppose to anything else, for that matter, let them flow. Don’t try to contain them.
    A river will find its own shape and direction. There are two hundred sunken steamboats from the Missouri River that now lie at the bottom of plowed fields. This is because the river has chosen to go its own way. You can’t trust the river; you never know when it will burst its banks and reroute itself.
    My father knew better than to tell the farmers not to live on the silt-rich soil that lined the floodplain. Along the riverbanks you could reach your hand into the dirt and pull up the richest black earth in the world—fistfuls—and my father wasn’t one to tell anyone to live elsewhere. But he did try to convince them to build on higher ground.
    If my father were flying in this plane, looking down at this water-clogged land, if he were looking at what I saw from this height, he would have felt very sad and very vindicated. He would say, “They should’ve asked me. I would’ve told them.”

3
    I spy, what do I spy, something that is yellow. Is it a truck? I asked my brother Jeb. Is it my father’s shirt or that yellow jacket that flew into the car? A freight train car, a street sign, that stripe down the center of the road? It’s corn, Jeb shouted back at me. It was the summer I turned nine as I gazed at fields and fields, but I didn’t see any yellow. All I saw were flowing carpets of pale green. But it’s in the husk, I said, and Jeb just threw up his hands.
    It didn’t seem quite fair, the rules my brother played by, but still it was all around us. Miles and miles of corn. I’d never seen it before. For years I’d waited for this. My father was letting me go with him for the first time to the floodplain. Jeb was twelve and he’d been going with for the past two years. You had to be ten to go along, that was the rule. But since I was almost ten, my father made an exception