"For ten dollars, maybe—" Mrs. Goudeket began.
"Money's no good," the man said. His voice began to rise hysterically. "Nothing's no good. I work at the Gramatan Mills and look at it. I worked there twenty-seven years, I was going to get my pension in 1958, and now the mill's gone. My father drove down into town before it hit to see if he could help and he isn't back yet and I don't know if he's alive or dead." He took sudden hold of himself. "I have to go and tend the cookstove. You have to boil your water now. Thirty people drink a lot of water, we keep boiling it all the time. Take care of Henry." He went back up his path and inside.
Past the rustic houses on the fringe they came to a belt of substantial older places, the homes of the borough petty aristocracy. Here the smear of brown had reached; the horses picked their way uncertainly, fetlock-deep in stinking mud. A mad-eyed woman in a housecoat was on one of the handsome porches shoveling and shoveling; the silt plopped into the silt that covered her lawn.
They passed a house with a broken back. A towering poplar, surely the pride of the owner once, had stood in his front yard. The flood water had come; it had loosened the soil to the consistency of porridge; the tree had tilted a little, leaned; its wide shallow root system had given way and the trunk had crashed across the roof, caving and crumpling it in.
There was a house with black, dead eyes. Somehow fire had started; candles, or a fireplace carelessly laid for warmth when the electrically fanned oil heater clicked silent. The innards of the house had burned, and the fireman had not come. There was a pathetic pile of furniture outside, but where the people were you couldn't tell.
There was a house that, in all that chaotic destruction, had survived unscathed. Its windows had their glass, its doors were neatly locked, there were two spindly iron chairs on the porch. And then you looked and saw that it rested in the middle of a road, where the water had let it drop.
But it was the smell that hurt. You could imagine a hurt town mending itself and growing again. But this stench from the river bottoms was the stink of death. "I'll bet," said Artie Chesbro with a dreamer's eyes, "you could pick up any mortgage in town for five cents on the dollar today."
Dr. Soames was the town's only specialist. He had built a white Georgian house and a three-car garage out of something less than a quarter of a cubic foot of the human female anatomy. He was an expert on every fold and canal from the labium minus to the hydatid of Morgagni, and of the hundred and four babies born in the borough of Hebertown and surrounding territory in the past twelve months, he had delivered ninety-three. They told scandalous anecdotes about his extra-official life—"Mrs. Hoglund? Hoglund? Oh, I didn't recognize you with your pants up"—and there had been a suggestion at the County Medical Association that some of his most profitable pregnancies were not permitted to come to term. But there was no human being in Hebertown and environs who doubted that Dr. Soames was the greatest doctor on earth.
And what good was he doing now, he demanded silently, swabbing alcohol on the morning's twenty-fifth rump to ready it for the needle.