The Flood Read Free Page B

distracted. Her cheerfulness masked great courage. She laughed in order to fight off the growing fear that she felt around her. The game started;Aunt Agathe bundled Aimée, Véronique and Marie into chairs, stuffing cards into their hands, playing as if she wanted to win, packing, cutting and dealing, talking so much that she nearly drowned out the noise of the water. But you couldn’t fool our girls. They were keeping an ear out, pale, their hands restless. Every other minute, they paused. One of them turned to me and asked quietly:
    ‘Granddad, is it still rising?’
    It was, and at a frightening rate.
    ‘Not at all. Enjoy your game. Nothing to see here.’
    Never had I been so tormented as I was then. The men all stood in front of the windows, to block out the terrifying sight. We tried to smile. The lamps cast comforting haloes of light on the table, and I remembered our winter evenings gathered around it; the room was just as cosy now, warm from our love for one another. Inside, it was peaceful; behind me, I heard the roar of a river let loose, water rising all the time.
    ‘The water is three feet from the window,’ said my brother Pierre. ‘We have to say something, Louis.’
    I shushed him, grabbing his arm. But we couldn’t pretend any more. We heard the maddened cattle shrieking and whining in the stables. The horses were bellowing; they knew that they were about to die. You would have heard those screams no matter how far away you were.
    Aimée shot up, clutching her face, shaking all over. ‘My God! My God!’
    We couldn’t stop the girls from running to the windows. They looked out, mute and rigid, their hair standing on end. It was getting dark now. The moon cast a dull light, floating over the yellow expanse of water. The pale sky was like a shroud thrown over the ground. Smoke trailed in the distance. It was getting foggy. A day of fear was fading into a night of death.And there wasn’t a human sound to be heard; there was nothing but the roar of that sea, swollen to infinity, nothing but the bleating and braying of the animals!
    ‘My God,’ the women whispered, as if too frightened to speak. ‘My God!’
    A terrible crash silenced them. The animals, crazed, had burst through the stable doors. We saw them rolling along, carried in the current of the dirty water. The sheep were swept up like fallen leaves, in clumps, spinning in eddies; the cows and the horses fought to stay on their feet, then fell. Our big grey horse, especially, didn’t want to die; it bucked, twisting its neck, snorting like a smithy, but the water wasn’t going to let go. It snatched him up, rump first, and we watched him give in, defeated.
    That was when we started crying. The tears welled up in our throats; we couldn’t help it, we had to cry. We reached out to all our beloved animals, gone now; we had stayed calm, but now we wailed and bawled, mourning their death. We really were finished! The harvest was lost and the livestock had drowned. Our luck had changed in a matter of hours. God was unfair. We’d done nothing to Him, but He had taken it all away from us. I looked at the horizon and shook my fist. Our afternoon walk, the meadows, the wheatfields, the vines that we had believed were so full of promise – was all that a lie? Happiness is a con. The sun had set so softly and so peacefully on that mild evening. But it was a trick.
    The water was still rising; Pierre was keeping an eye out. ‘We must be careful, Louis – the water’s touching the window!’
    The warning lifted us from out of our gloom, and I snapped out of it.
    ‘Money’s nothing,’ I shrugged. ‘So long as we’re all still here, there’ll be no regrets. We’ll be ready to get back to work.’
    ‘You’re right.’ Jacques was fired up. ‘And we won’t be in danger. The walls are sound. Let’s get to the roof.’
    It was the only safe place left. The water had lapped stubbornly step by step up the stairs; it was already coming in under