Miller's Valley

Perhaps home is not a place but simply an irrevocable condition.

—
J
AMES
B
ALDWIN

I
t was a put-up job, and we all knew it by then. The government people had hearings all spring to solicit the views of residents on their plans. That's what they called it, soliciting views, but every last person in Miller's Valley knew that that just meant standing behind the microphones set up in the aisle of the middle school, and then finding out afterward that the government people would do what they planned to do anyhow. Everybody was just going through the motions. That's what people do. They decide what they want and then they try to make you believe you want it, too.

Donald's grandfather was at every meeting, his hands shaking as he held some sheets of loose-leaf he'd been reading from so long that they were furred along the edges. He carried a big file with him everywhere, even when he went to the diner for breakfast. Early on he'd switched out the original file for the accordion kind because the first one got too full. But it was full of the kind of stuff old guys pull together, newspaper clippings with uneven edges, carbon copies of letters ten years old, even the occasional sales receipt for a sump pump or a new well, as though someone was going to be inclined to pay him for all the years he'd spent fighting the water. I always wondered if they wrote him off because his name was Elmer. The government people talked a lot about the future. Elmer was such an old guy's name, a piece of the past.

“The best we can do is make sure we get as much as we can out of the bastards,” Donald's grandfather said at what turned out to be the next-to-last meeting.

“There's no need for that, Elmer,” my mother said. She meant the profanity. She was as interested as the next person in milking the government for money. A lifetime working in hospitals had shown her the wisdom, and the ease, of that. She was upright but not stupid.

My mother was a person of stature in Miller's Valley. She'd lived there all her life. Her mother had raised her and her younger sister, Ruth, in a one-story three-room house at the edge of the valley with a pitted asphalt roof and a falling-down porch, and when she'd married my father and become a Miller she'd moved to his family's farm, right at the center of the valley, in its lowest place, where the fog lay thick as cotton candy on damp mornings. She was a Miller of Miller's Valley, and so was I. People thought my mother could take care of just about anything. So did I, then.

The government people were all job titles instead of proper names. They dealt out thick business cards with embossed seals; we found them in our pockets and purses long after there was any point to it. There were geologists and engineers and a heavyset woman with a sweet smile who was there to help people relocate after the government took their houses. A resettlement counselor, they called her. She had the softest hands I'd ever felt, pink and moist, and when she'd come toward my mother, her hands like little starfish in the air, my mother would move in the opposite direction. It's hard to explain to kids today, with everybody touching each other all the time, kissing people who are more or less strangers, hugging the family doctor at the end of a visit, but my mother wasn't a huggie person, and neither were most of her friends and neighbors. “She can just forget about patting me, that one” is what she always said about the resettlement counselor.

I felt kind of sorry for the woman. It was her job to make it sound as though one place to live was just as good as another, just as good as the place you'd brought your babies home to from the hospital fifty years before, just as good as the place where your parents had died and, in a few cases that you could tell made the government people really uncomfortable, were buried. They could make moving to a new house with a nice dry basement sound like a good deal, but there was no way they could put a pretty face on digging up a coffin that went into the ground before the First World War.

When people would talk about the government's plans, at the hospital, in the market, someone would always say, “Can they really do that?” The answer was yes. “They can do what they want,” my mother said, and when she did, Donald's grandfather held his file in front of him like a shield and said, “Miriam, I don't think you understand the situation.” But that wasn't true. My mother always understood the situation. Any situation.

“I figure by my breathing I'll be gone by Sunday,” she said years later when she was dying, and she was right on schedule.

At all the meetings they handed out little pamphlets with a drawing on the front of people walking around the edge of what looked like a big lake. There were sailboats, too, and a woman behind a motorboat on water skis with one arm held up in the air. Inside the pamphlet said, “Flood control, water supply, hydroelectric power, and recreation: these are the advantages of water management in your area!” On the back it said, “A bright future through progress.” It's a wiggly word,
progress:
a two-lane gravel road turned into four lanes paved that makes life a noisy misery for the people with houses there, a cornfield turned into a strip mall with a hair salon, a supermarket, and a car wash. Corn's better than a car wash. We washed our own cars with a garden hose until our kids got old enough to do it for us.

My eldest nephew, the smart one, did a project once about Miller's Valley, and he interviewed me one afternoon. “Why didn't you fight?” he said.

I understand. He's young. Things seem simple when you're young. I remember. I'm not like some older people who forget.

There were people who fought, although there were fewer and fewer of them as the years went by. Donald's grandfather had printed up bumper stickers and buttons and tried to get people riled up, but there weren't that many people to begin with in the valley, and by the time it was all over there were hardly any at all.

I may have been the only person living in Miller's Valley who had read all the geologists' reports, looked over all the maps, knew what was really going on. Somewhere there's an aerial photograph taken before I was even born, and if any reasonable person looked at it, at the dam and the course of the river and the unused land and the number of houses involved, they'd conclude that there was a big low area just begging to be filled in with water. I'd seen that photograph when I was seventeen, sitting in a government office with gray walls and metal furniture, looking at the center point of that big low area, at the roof of our house. I knew better than anyone what the deal was. When I was a kid I'd play in the creek, stack up stones and sticks and watch the water back up behind them, until finally it filled a place that had been dry before. The difference is that with a real dam, sometimes the place that fills up with water has houses and churches and farms. I saw a picture once of a big reservoir behind a dam in Europe that had a church steeple sticking up on one side during a dry spell.

That's what they meant when they talked about water management, the government people, except that we didn't have a steeple high enough in the valley to stick up and remind people that there had once been a place where the water would be. A bright future through progress. There was just a handful of us in the way.

Everyone was waiting for my mother to fight, although no one ever said that. Everyone was waiting for her to say that they couldn't do this, take 6,400 acres of old family farms and small ramshackle homes and turn it into a reservoir by using the dam to divert the river. Everyone was waiting for her to say that they couldn't just disappear our lives, put a smooth dark ceiling of water over everything as though we had never plowed, played, married, died, lived in Miller's Valley. It wasn't just that my mother had lived in the valley, had dealt with the water, her whole life long. It wasn't just that she was the kind of person who preferred to solve her problems by herself, not have some people come in from outside in suits and ties and work shoes that weren't work shoes at all, to handle things for her and her neighbors.

It was that she was someone, Miriam Miller. There are just some people like that. Everyone pays attention to what they say, even if they don't even know them well or like them much.

My mother went to every meeting the government people held, but she never spoke, and when people would try to talk to her before or after she was polite but no more, asking after their children or their arthritis but never saying a word about the plans to drown Miller's Valley. I drove up from the city for that one meeting at the church, even though she said there was no need for me to miss school or work, even though my desk was piled high with things that needed to be done. I guess I did it because I'd been there from the very beginning years before, when I was a kid selling corn from a card table outside of our barn, when the talk about turning Miller's Valley into a reservoir first began, when no one really thought it would amount to anything.

It's so easy to be wrong about the things you're close to. I know that now. I learned that then.

When the meeting was over my mother and I drove home together down the dark back roads to the farm, and as I took the curves fast, curves I'd been taking since I'd gripped the wheel of the truck while sitting on my father's lap, she stared out the window so that the sickly green of the dashboard dials just touched the corner of her set jaw.

“You do understand this, right?” I'd said. “If this goes through they'll take the house and the barn and the little house. If this happens you'll have to move. You'll have to pack up all your stuff. You'll have to find a place for Aunt Ruth and pack up all her stuff. You'll have to find a way to get her out of there. Then it's going to be like none of it ever existed. They're going to put the whole place under forty feet of water.”

“I'm not stupid, Mary Margaret,” my mother said. The night was so quiet you could hear the wood doves comforting themselves with their own soft voices in the fields.

“If this happens they're going to make the valley just disappear,” I said, my voice harsh in the silence.

A deer ran through my headlights like a ghost, and I slowed down because, like my father always said, there's almost never just one. Sure enough, two more skittered out. They froze there, staring, then moved on. I was ready to start talking again when my mother spoke.

“Let them,” she said. “Let the water cover the whole damn place.”