After the river came up and went back down here in Paducah, our church group went out to help clean up the bank, the mud, the trash, all the sorry stuff a flood drags up and leaves behind. I am one of the ones who does not mind getting filthy, so I waded right into the tangle of driftwood down close to the water while the others worked the higher ground. And I pulled a suitcase out of there that, for one long minute, I wish to God I had left for the river to keep.
It was wedged under a big snag, half buried in the muck, swelled up fat with water. Old hard-shell thing, the latches rusted near solid. I knocked them loose with a rock, took a few good whacks, and flipped the lid back to see whose it was.
And I stood straight up and called for the pastor to walk the kids on down the bank, away from me, right now. Because in that first second my mind went to the worst place a mind can go, the place anybody goes when they open a locked suitcase dragged out of a flood.
Then I made myself look again. And it was not that. Thank God, it was not anything like that.
It was money. Cash, bundled in freezer bags and rubber bands, band after band of it, swelled and damp at the edges but whole. And underneath the bundles, a plastic sleeve of papers. Birth certificates. A marriage license from nineteen sixty-one. A little laminated holy card, worn soft.
I had called the kids away because for one bad second I did not know what was in there, and a man does not let children stand next to a thing that might be the worst thing. But it was a life. Somebodys whole life, packed in a suitcase and swept out of a house when the water came.
The names on the papers gave us a place to start. It took the pastor two days of asking around, but we found them. An old couple, married sixty-four years, who had lost their little house on the low ground entirely, walls and roof and all. They never trusted a bank. Everything they had saved across a lifetime was in that suitcase, kept under the bed, and when the water rose in the night they grabbed each other and got out and left it behind.
They had already made their peace with losing it. She told me they had decided it was only money, that they still had each other, and that was the deal they made with God on the way out the door.
When the pastor set that suitcase on their borrowed kitchen table, the old man put his hand flat on top of it and could not speak for a while. Then he did.
We told the Lord we would not ask for it back. I guess He sent it anyway, through a fool who does not mind the mud.
That fool was me. Muddy to the chest and grinning like an idiot on a ruined riverbank. Best day of work I have done in years. I would wade in again tomorrow.