“The River Reaps What the People Sow”
I came into Louisa County after the river had already said its piece. The fields were slick with a gray shine that took boot prints and held them like the ground remembered. The air reeked of river rot and dead fish. Along the bend, the long line of cottonwoods had wrung themselves out, yet their leaves still fell, tears for the missing souls.
The men at the road’s edge watched the water slide back into itself with their hats low, each one looking like he’d misplaced a prayer.
The office out of Des Moines had sent me with a folder, a camera, and a list of subjects to be observed. Flood damage. Relief claims. Local folklore as it pertained to displacement. They like that last word in offices; it keeps the story clean on the page.
I took a room above a tavern in a town whose church steeple wore a black tide mark halfway up like a collar. The owner gave me a key and a plate with eggs that tasted faintly of smoke. He told me the river had behaved like a canoe lost to the rapids and had not yet met the falls. He said if I wanted stories, I should ask at the ferry house though there was no ferry, only the remains of one.
“Ask for old Doyle,” he said. “Or better yet, walk yourself to the bluff and read what the Dead left for the Living.”
I asked him what that meant. He shrugged like I gave you the warning. Leave!
The road to Bald Bluff ran between fields that had become shallow, mosquito-infested backwater. Here and there the mud had set into a smooth pan with a skin you could almost mistake for water if you were foolish. Crows fanned over the flats like loose charcoal. Out in that gray there was an overturned skiff caught on a stump. Someone had painted words along the ribs with barn paint and an unsteady hand. I had to wade thigh-deep to read it.
The river gives its own communion.
It blesses with black loam.
There were other marks on the wood where the paint had not taken. Someone had carved a name with a knife, and then, below it, the letter A pressed in hard over and over until the plank began to split. I touched the cut and pulled my finger away filthy. Every piece of wood on the river learns a language. Most of it is just drift. Sometimes you find a warning, sometimes a blessing.
The bluff itself rose ahead like a foreboding skull. Up close the limestone showed engraved lines where water once lived cries from the earth for the eroded land. The air was still, heavy with the damp patience that follows ruin.
"The Chapel of Bald Bluff"
The bluff took me slow. The path narrowed to slick clay and roots, the river keeping its gray eye below, broad and indifferent. Halfway up, the insects stopped, and for a while there was only my boots against the dirt.
A bell rope waited in the weeds. Brittle. Gray. It led nowhere, but when I pulled it, the ground exhaled, a small cough from something that had been holding its breath too long.
The bluff’s crown held what was left of a chapel, limestone scattered like bones picked clean by vultures. One slab still bore its name, the letters holding on longer than the faith that built them.
ALTARE DEVOTE.
The letters were sharp. Lichen had taken the lower half as if to remind the world that every word returns to dust eventually.
Inside the ruin, puddles had gathered in the hollows of what had been the aisle. A cracked font sat sideways, green water pooled in its lip. Beneath the surface I could see a rosary tangled around a fish skeleton. Even the dead here had to share space.
I stood in the doorway and let the quiet stretch until it felt like someone listening back. It is one thing to read about a place lost to a flood; it is another to hear the wind move through the gaps where hymns used to live.
Below, the Mississippi surged against its own banks. For a moment the water caught the light just right and I could see two pale shapes standing in it twin spires, stubborn and scarred. The Gustafson Pillars. They looked less like stonework and more like relics from something the earth was trying to forget.
A man’s voice came up from the slope between us. “You’re on sacred ground, if that word still means anything.”
He came through the weeds slow, carrying a pole for balance. The hat on his head had been mended more than a fishing net. His coat hung open and smelled of tar and stale tobacco. The river had made him lean, all tendon and river-worn patience.
“Doyle?” I asked.
He nodded once. “Depends who’s asking.”
“Field work,” I said. “Looking into local histories. Folk accounts.”
“That what they’re calling ghosts now?” He smiled without humor. “You’re a bit late for confession. Most of the sinners left with the first flood.”
He walked past me into the ruin and set his hand on one of the fallen stones like he was feeling for a pulse. “My grandfather worked this ferry before the river changed her mind. Said these stones chant when she’s angry. You hear it yet?”
I told him I hadn’t.
“You will,” he said. “They start low, like a throat clearing. Then the sound comes up through your boots till you forget what silence is.”
He crouched and brushed away moss from a carved line. The words underneath were nearly gone, but the first letter was still clear an A carved deeper than the rest, as though someone had pressed the knife too hard.
“Abaddon,” Doyle said quietly. “Name doesn’t mean much now, but it used to scare the fish out of the water. He built this place, said he could make the river holy. Mother Nature took that personally.”
He straightened and pointed down toward the pillars. “See those? The Gustafson Pillars stood half-submerged, slick with moss and time, sticking out of the water like the river’s own silt fangs. They caught the light in a way that made them seem alive, glistening where the current licked at their bases. That’s where he baptized them. Held ’em under till they stopped kicking, pulled ’em up coughing silt. Whole congregation went down with him when the thaw came. Some say they come back every time the river remembers.”
The breeze shifted. It smelled of algae and old limestone. Down below, the pillars glimmered just above the surface, and for a heartbeat the ripples between them shaped a dark outline that looked too deliberate to be trick water.
Doyle noticed me staring. “You see it?”
“I see something.”
He nodded like that was enough. “Best you write what you see and not what you think. Seeing is believing, not believing will get you killed."
He started down the path toward the river, leaving me with the ruin. I stood for a while, watching the light change on the stones, and I could almost believe they were breathing, each block swelling a little, exhaling what it had been forced to swallow.
From below came the faintest sound, a slap of water against stone, followed by another, slow and steady. Like someone with pneumonia breathing wrong.
"And the Silted Men Were Reborn"
By the time I reached the bottom of the bluff again, the light had changed.
The sky wore a tarnished color that comes before a storm, when the clouds can’t decide between dark fury and release. The wind crawled out of the west, pushing the scent of rain ahead of it. Somewhere upriver a dog barked once, then nothing answered.
Doyle waited by the pillars, his pole planted like a staff.
“They always come when the sky looks like this,” he said. “That’s when the river babbles, and the Silted Men are reborn.”
The waterline had crept higher in the hour I’d been on the hill.
Each wave nosed a little farther up the mud, each one staying a heartbeat longer before sliding back. The sound was steady, deliberate, as if the current were counting.
I asked him if he truly believed in the Mud Men.
He gave a tired laugh. “Believe? I rowed this bend forty years. I’ve seen fog move against the wind. I’ve seen handprints where there shouldn’t be hands. Believe’s got nothing to do with it. It’s just what the river does when it remembers.”
He handed me a small tin flask, and I took a swallow that tasted of corn and stale cigarette. The wind lifted, and the waves slapped at the pillars there was a haunting chant, a low chant, faint but certain.
Doyle nodded toward the water. “Hear it?”
“I hear something.”
“That’s her throat clearing.”
A sharp crack rolled across the valley thunder or something older. The first drops came down fat and warm, stippling the mud. The pillars glistened more with each strike of rain. The chant deepened, became a sound you could feel in your chest.
The air thickened. Doyle’s coat clung to him, the patches darker now. When he spoke, his voice was nearly lost in the rush of the howling wind.
“She always starts with a name,” he said. “Sometimes yours, sometimes someone you forgot.”
The chanting grew steadier. Between gusts, it almost formed a rhythm, a prayer dragged through water. Then the surface below began to churn not with waves, but with movement, something pushing up from beneath.
The water turned the color of ash, then darker the kind of gray that forgets light. And out of it rose figures, mud clinging to them, forming a silt skin. Tall, hunched shapes wading from the shallows, robes heavy, faces blank as stone. They moved with the patience of the river itself.
Doyle’s pole slipped from his hand and vanished into the dark. He backed up until his shoulders met the limestone wall of the bluff. His lips moved without sound.
One of the shapes stopped at the base of the pillars. It raised a hand, slow and sure, and pressed its palm to the cold surface. The chanting ceased. The world felt hollow, like the life had been drawn out of it.
Then I heard the voice bubbling up from the mud and the water.
“The river gives its own communion.
It blesses with black loam.”
Doyle whispered, “Don’t move.”
I couldn’t.
The figures began to sink again, folding back into the water without ripples, as if they had never broken the surface. The chant faded to nothing. Only the rain stayed, heavy, almost like a cleansing confession.
When I finally looked for Doyle, he was gone.
The pole still lay on the ground at the base of the pillar, slick with mud, but the man himself had vanished into the downpour.
I turned to climb the bluff. Every step felt heavier, as though the ground were trying to sacrifice me. At the top I stopped and looked back. The pillars were gone beneath the rising tide. The air smelled faintly of mud and iron.
The Last Witness
By the time I reached the road, night had taken the fields.
The rain didn’t fall so much as drift sideways, sheets of it, shining in the lamp light from the tavern windows. The whole town looked half-drowned already lanterns glowing underwater.
Inside, the same men sat where they always did, their eyes on their glasses, waiting for something none of them wanted to name. I must have looked like I’d crawled out of the river myself.
“Back from the bluff?” the barkeep asked, though he didn’t wait for the answer.
I left a wet trail to the counter and ordered a whiskey.
He poured without speaking. Behind us, the radio fizzed through static farm reports dissolving into a low hum that might have been thunder.
“It’s coming again,” he said finally. “You feel it?”
I did. The floorboards shook once, faint but certain, like something beneath us had turned over in its sleep.
Outside, someone shouted. We both turned.
A boy ran down the middle of the street, pointing upriver. The sound that followed wasn’t thunder. It was the bell from Altare Devote.
The bartender’s face went pale, the color of the death. “That bell’s been gone seventy years.”
He reached under the counter, not for a weapon, but for a rosary, blue glass beads, a silver crucifix. “Lock the doors,” he said to no one in particular.
I stepped out onto the porch. The river was already in the street, rolling over the curbs, impatient and hungry. Every house carried the same glow in its windows, the same silhouettes moving behind curtains. The words were on their lips before the water reached them.
When the pillars disappear beneath the water, and the mud smells like iron, lock your doors and still your prayers...
The voices overlapped, old and young, men and women, all repeating what they swore they’d never been taught.
Down the street a steeple light flickered, then went black.
A shape moved past it tall, deliberate, robes dragging on the flood-stained land. Others followed, slow and silent, heads bowed as if in procession. The rain ran down their faces but didn’t change them.
I stepped back into the doorway. The whiskey trembled in my hand.
The bell tolled once more, deeper now, as if rung from beneath the earth.
...the Father walks the water again.
The words rolled through the town like thunder, and every light went out at once.
For a long moment there was only the sound of water filling every hollow it could find.
Then, very faintly, from the direction of the bluff, came a voice.
Not calling, not warning, but praying.
A shiver ran down my spine, and I knew the name before my mind dared to think it.
Abaddon.
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