Asher walked up toward Kathi Hoskins’s house, situated on a shelf overlooking the Cumberland. In the aftermath of the last flood she had housed several of her homeless neighbors in her home high above the flood-line, and it was to her that Asher had sent the newly homeless men. But as he came up the ridge he saw Kathi’s house was gone. There was only the concrete foundation. A toilet and shower stall stood on it along with half a wall of crumbling Sheetrock. All else had been washed away. He found her sitting on the ridge with her three dogs crowded close, two of them curled against her and sleeping tired sleeps, one with his ears alert as if the house might come floating back and reassemble itself if he kept good watch.

Asher sat down beside her, the two sleeping dogs stirring just long enough to make sure he was someone they knew and trusted. She did not speak but after a time she laid her head on his shoulder. Her eyes were fixed on the spot where her house had stood. Her flannel shirt was damp. He had never seen her without eyeglasses and wondered if she had somehow lost them in the race to get out of the house before the flood swallowed it whole. He sat with her and felt more at home here with the silence and his childhood friend and her dogs sitting in the pasture with the wet ground beneath them than he did back at his house.

He reached home just as the sky was purpling into night. The dimming of the day yawned itself out over the troubled land as he stood looking at his house. He had to go in; Justin was in there.

Just as his hand reached the knob, the front door swung open and Lydia stood large there. “Lord, Asher, you’re covered in mud. Won’t you undress here on the porch? I’ll get you a towel.”

I have been on the road to Damascus, he wanted to say.

He strode past her and Justin came bounding across the room, arms out to wrap around Asher’s waist. He knew the boy would be muddied and Lydia would have a fit, but he didn’t care. After what he had gone through today. The corpse. The dead cattle, eyes milky and bulbous. The people walking like ghosts. Roscoe. After all of that, he didn’t care about anything but this one moment of his little boy running to him.

“Did you find him? Did you find Roscoe?”

Asher told him that maybe Roscoe had gotten carried downstream and someone was taking care of him now and he was just fine and happy and was thinking of them but couldn’t get back. Asher told him that Roscoe dreamt of them when he slept. “I bet his new owner laughs at him for running and wagging his tail in his sleep,” he said.