Jo Christian
It was 2010, only a year after everything came a part, my
father’s depression and job loss, my mother awash in her
web of affairs, finances dissolving like glaciers in the arctic.
The sky bottomed out and the whole of middle Tennessee
and the Nashville area was underwater from May 1st
through the 7th.
***
The Doppler Radar measured over 20 inches of rain in some
locations, and news reports estimate 33 people died, ten
of which were in Nashville itself. Four were found in their
homes, four were stranded outside, and two were trapped in
their cars.
***
Genesis chapter six tells the story of Noah and God’s
judgment of the first peoples of the earth.
The Lord saw how great the wickedness of the human race
had become on the earth, and that every inclination of the
thoughts of the human heart was only evil at the time. The
Lord regretted that he had made human beings on the
earth…
I will wipe from the face of the earth the humans I have
created.
While the Bible describes the sinfullness, the murdering,
the rape, the carnage, the biggest crime is that He was
forgotten, worshiped by no one, save Noah.
I am tempted to blame humanity for forgetting; but more, I
wonder about a God who would do such a thing, to have to
wipe the slate clean, start a new, as if we were but a model
being built, and had somehow, grown a miss.
***
My father found his last job the same year, but it was in
West Tennessee. To take it, he had to move, traveling back
every other weekend when he was able. After training, a
technician he worked with, Becky, died in her house, so my
father took over her lease. It was a bermed house, a house
half buried in the ground, and suited my father because it
got next to no light.
Sometimes he joked about the house being haunted, about
finding her bible flipped open to verses highlighted or
underlined.
Becky was a woman of faith, someone who had also battled
with and lost to addiction.
My father said before she died, she looked like a wire frame,
upright and walking.
During one of his visits back home, I asked him, as he was
chain smoking in the laundry room, why God would let such
a thing happen to people who practiced a love for him.
“The challenge of addiction is like any challenge or trial. The
more you fight it, the more you grow.”
“Or you die trying?” I interrupted.
He scoffed.
“Something like that.”
***
The 2010 Tennessee Flood was the first of its kind since
1937, when the Cumberland river crested below 50 feet,
before the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers constructed any
infrastructure to control the floods. In 2010, even with
these measures of control, the Cumberland river crested
just over 51 feet.
News sites report over 31% of Tennessee was declared a
major disaster area.
***
My mother and the rest of us remained in a small town,
in middle Tennessee, called Portland. Portland had many
man made ponds and lakes. One of which, Richland, was
neighboring our tiny subdivision, overflowing into creeks
which were too narrow, too shallow to hold the water.
Our backyard, our deck, looked as if it had been blotted out
by ink, engulfed in water.
***
I am going to bring floodwaters on the earth to destroy all
life under the heavens, every creature that has breath of life
in it.
But God made a covenant with Noah and his family, because
he found him to be righteous. He told him to build an arc.
When I first heard this story, I was in vacation bible school,
which my grandparents—my dad’s parents—had brought us
to with my parent’s permission.
My father had been religious growing up, loved the bible,
but saw the hypocrisy of it all, and went to find faith in all
kinds of places, one of which was himself, a self-proclaimed
Christ in his own mind.
He was much like Noah this way, believing he was doing
what God told him to, even while the world was swallowed
around him, even while his own family was drug along with
him.
At bible school, we learned there was preciousness in being
chosen by God, in being God’s elect.
When I asked my dad if I was one of the elect, he told me to
be careful.
“You will suffer, just like me. Just like Noah.”
***
I asked my mom whether the waters would reach indoors.
She shrugged.
Outside, people rowed kayaks, fishing boats, small kiddy
pools. I was just getting into the church, and there was
rumor some of the boats were church people, fishing for
men. They would save them first from drowning, and then
from hell. Or so I hoped.
When it wasn’t flooding, my mother was forced to stay
home after my dad got his job—not disappearing to the city
with her lover, but home, with us. And she was miserable.
Before my mom ever admitted she was an addict, years after
this, I knew she took prescription pills, always.
But when she was forced to stay with us, when she
couldn’t disappear, when her reality made her shift back to
motherdom, her drinking got worse—whole pints of Crown
Royal and Coke.
She sat on the back deck with a neighbor, Kim. And they
were together, rain or shine, come hell or high water. Even
when the deck was still surrounded by water, she drank,
and drank, and drank all night.
From where they sat, it was as if the whole backyard had
sunken, giving way to an endless pit, which light bobbed
over like a life raft. Sometimes reflecting back the moon’s
light, stabbing through the clouds.
***
A famous evangelical pastor, Francis Chan, published a
book two years before this, called Crazy Love. It became
famous in my youth group for its radical nature. We
watched video sermons on Wednesday nights, and in one
sermon he spoke of Noah and the flood. How devastating of
an event it was.
“If we really understood the flood, we wouldn’t be satisfied
with cartoon depictions. Dead bodies, human and animal,
floated around the arc. Think about a God who would do
that? Aren’t you at least a little scared of him?”
***
My mom’s drinking only intensified the longer she had to
stay with us and the longer her lover refused to marry her,
increasing their distance apart.
I awoke one morning to a phone call from my sister. She
told me she’d pick me up, that we had to go see my mom in
the hospital.
On our way there, the sky spit sleet and the road rolled with
fog. She explained to me that mom had taken some pills she
got from who knows where, that she OD. Her friend Kim
called the police when she collapsed on the porch.
Kim had said her face started sinking, like half of the
muscles melted with the drinking and the rain and the tears.
When we arrived at the hospital, her face was
disproportionate, like half had been scrunched up.
A stroke, the doctor’s told us.
She apologized profusely, saying how sorry she was, how
she knew we shouldn’t forgive her, but she begged us.
I tried to hold her hand, to comfort her.
“Why are you touching me like that?”
She drew her hand back, as if mine was too hot, as if
affection hurt.
***
The damage to Portland, TN, after the 2010 floods, were
only structural, but the flooding has continued being a
problem in the area due to manmade ponds in 2016 and
2017.
Residents fear they have been forgotten.
***
After Noah and his family survive the flood, after he and
God had fulfilled their covenants to each other, Noah is
said to have planted a vineyard and gotten lost in a state of
drunkenness. The most memorable part of the story is his
sons, who don’t shame Noah, but try to clothe him and give
him back his dignity.
I have always wondered how they found the love, how they
were able to hide the shame and embarrassment; how they
were able to show affection.
***
It was after this attempt on her life, after all the drunken
rages, after I was sure she was also an addict, and wose, not
close to admitting it. Not close to her bottom, that I decided
I needed to get out. I needed to get far away, far away from
the need to disappear, the need to numb yourself under
alcohol, to feel as though you were always underwater;
sounds and light always muffled—
I needed to find a reason to live for myself.
So I thought the only solution was to live with my dad, and I
told her. Asking her what she thought.
She said nothing.
The next morning I woke to my mom throwing my stuff
onto the porch. It was raining, the sky dropping like a tarp.
My father arrived only an hour after I woke up.
Kim and my mother were sitting on the porch when I came
outside.
“You are breaking your mom’s heart, you know?” Her friend
said.
It was after I was in the car, on my way to my dad’s bermed
house west of Memphis, that I didn’t cry at my mom’s
reaction, but sent her a text—
“Don’t worry, mom, I forgive you.”
“Who made you, God? You can’t judge me.”
I remember the rain rippling across my dad’s windshield
on the highway, as if we were driving underwater. As if
the whole interstate had been awash with water, like the
Tennessee floods; like the great flood. A rainbow arced
between nimbus clouds. And I asked my dad—
“Didn’t God say he wouldn’t end the world again in
flooding?”
He was silent, cigar smoke slipping between the lip of the
window and into the rainy deluge. I watched as the rainbow
disappeared behind the overpass, behind the tree line,
behind the clouds, thicker than my bed comforter I clung to
the whole drive.
And I thought about a mother’s promise to love, a father’s
failings, how they both disappear as fast as light, as slow
water.