Asher went back out to help the closest neighbors but there was nothing to do except watch their lives float away or pray that their houses would be spared. This was too much, they said. This one felt like a judgment. They stood on the ridges together as the night gathered in, black and thick. The electricity was off as far as they could see, a total darkness unlike any Asher had ever known. He wondered about the two men he had seen earlier, and felt guilty that he had not offered them a ride while some of the roads were still navigable. Nobody would be going anywhere now.

Back home they all sat in the living room without saying much. There was little to be said. Justin slept off and on, leaned against Asher on the couch, but he awoke at the slightest sound and sometimes at his own dreams.

Around midnight the rain fell only in thin lines for a time and then it finally stopped, just like that, like someone had snapped their fingers, the night’s stillness somehow more threatening than the showers had been. Now they could hear the roaring river, churning with trees and houses and animals. They might have heard the cries of calves or the terrified whinnies of horses right through the walls of the house itself but all the other debris was too loud for that, a cacophony of loss. They didn’t know it yet but the flood had killed more than forty people and soon, once the floodwaters began to drop, corpses would be revealed in the treetops, trapped in houses, or washed up on the banks of the Cumberland River.

Now that night had capped itself down around the world, Justin had grown more upset and was unable to go back to sleep after being awakened by a low, Rapture-like thunder.

“I can’t stand it,” Justin said. There were tears in his eyes and he was struggling to not shed them. “He’s lost out there.”

Sometimes Asher worried the boy might always be able to get along better with animals than other people. Other times he thought that might not be such a bad fate. If there was anything he had learned so far in life it was that dogs often made better friends than folks did.

“It’s alright, little buddy,” Asher whispered against his son’s forehead, patting his small back. “He’ll make it home.” As long as he kept telling Justin everything was okay everything would be okay. He felt his own assurances might be the only thing holding the entire world together at this moment.

“Hush crying, now, honey,” Lydia said, her voice sudden and stark in the darkness of the living room. Her face was lit with the glow from the candles. “Boys don’t cry and go on like that.”