Ruffin - The time the waters rose and stories from the Gulf Coast

The Time the Waters Rose

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Stories of the Gulf Coast

Other Books by Paul Ruffin

NOVELS

Pompeii Man

Castle in the Gloom

STORY COLLECTIONS

The Man Who Would Be God

Islands, Women, and God

Jesus in the Mist

Jsus dans le brouillard

Living in a Christ-Haunted Land

ESSAY COLLECTIONS

Heres to Noah, Bless His Ark

Segovia Chronicles

Ruffin-It

Travels with George in Search of Ben Hur

POETRY COLLECTIONS

Lighting the Furnace Pilot

The Storm Cellar

Our Women

Circling

The Book of Boys and Girls

Cleaning the Well

Paul Ruffin: New and Selected Poems

NONFICTION

The Browning Automatic Rifle

The M240 Machine Gun

The Time the Waters Rose

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Stories of the Gulf Coast

PAUL RUFFIN

The University of South Carolina Press

2016 University of South Carolina Press

Published by the University of South Carolina Press

Columbia, South Carolina 29208

www.sc.edu/uscpress

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
can be found at http://catalog.loc.gov/

ISBN 978-1-61117-614-8 (paperback)

ISBN 978-1-61117-615-5 (ebook)

Grateful acknowledgment to the following:

Arkansas Review: Islands, Women, and God

Boulevard: The Drag Queen and the Southern Cross and The Time the

Waters Rose (under the title The Time the Rains Came)

California Quarterly: Devilfish

Louisiana Literature: Mystery in the Surf as Petit Bois

Louisiana Literature Press: Excerpt from Pompeii Man

Pembroke Magazine: Cleo (under the title The Boat)

Texas Short Stories II: The Hands of John Merchant

Front cover image by Tarek El Sombati

For Amber, as always

The sea, once it casts its spell, holds one in its net of wonder forever.

Jacques Cousteau

Contents

Preface

I was brought up in rural Mississippi, where fishing was usually a pleasant experience with reasonable expectations: You went after a certain kind of fish with certain baits, and you knew that what was at the end of your line lay within those expectations. It would be only so long and weigh only so much, and it would look right, the way a fish ought to look.

Only an occasional water moccasin or loggerhead turtle represented a threat, and they were easily dealt with, usually by removing their heads one way or another and making them wish they had chosen an easier meal.

I married into deep-fishing shortly after I earned my PhD from the Center for Writers at Southern Mississippi and for over thirty years spent several weeks a year on the Coast, primarily in the Moss Point/Pascagoula/Gautier area.

My father-in-law owned a twenty-five-foot Cobia, Sundowner, which we took fishing out on Petit Bois and Horn Islands and the deeper water beyond them several times a year. We fished the surf, we fished the wrecks, and sometimes we went all the way down to the Chandeleur Islands off the Louisiana Coast.

Some nights we would wade in the surf for flounder, looking for that faint outline of a flatfish lying just below the sand waiting for prey.

Some of the most interesting times for me were when we would rig the boat for shrimping and drag in the Sound, pulling in an incredible range of sealife. I would hold up one strange fish after another, and my father-in-law would patiently name it and tell me all about it. (Ill never forget the day I held a little elongated oval fish out to him and asked him what it was. Its called a cunt cover, he said, without elaboration. I was more careful with future inquiries.)

No matter how many times I went out into the water of the Gulf, I never failed to sense the mystery of the sea, which has served up its secrets to man since the time that he discovered it and will continue as long as he ventures into it. This is the way it has always been and always will be, and it is good.

The stories in this collection all celebrate in some fashion the mysteries of the sea, and most are drawn from experiences I had along the Mississippi Coast, a lost time now but a long way from forgotten.

The opening story is a crazy thing I started when I was ten or twelve years old and suffering the interminable Sunday sermons I had to live through in an Assembly of God church near Columbus, Mississippi. The preachers were called to spread the Gospelcalled meaning that they did not have to trouble with earning any sort of degree to prove themselves worthy of entering the ministry. All they apparently needed was a memory sufficient to recall the high points of their sermons and the oratory skills required to rattle off platitudes to support them.

They told the same old Bible stories the same way year after year, leaving me simply dying to hear about three dumbasses riding into Bethlehem on donkeys, bearing goat-horn rattles and wool blankets for the Baby Jesus, maybe a grass-stuffed doll covered with rabbit skin. I wanted Moses to sashay out there in the mud and pick up baskets of fish and then have the walls of water engulf him, just before a big-ass whale came along and swallowed himjust see how well he would handle it. Let ol Lot turn to a pillar of salt, name him Morton.

In time I began writing these stories to suit myself, and I can promise you that not one of them turned out the way they were supposed to. The Noah story was one of them.

One day a couple of years ago I was sitting at the computer recalling some of those old Bible stories I wrote, and I got to thinking about how much fun it would be to finish the story on Noah. Which I did.

Yeah, I know that its not a Gulf story, but it does have saltwater in it, big-time, and it has some rednecks doing what rednecks do long before they were invented. As Flannery OConnor once said, every story should have some humor in it, some leavening agent. Most of these stories are downers to one degree or another. The Noah story was meant to be fun, so dont be offendedenjoy it.

Paul Ruffin

The Time the Waters Rose

I knew the minute the wild-eyed sonofabitch hobbled up to the house babbling about how a great flood was looming on the horizon and that wed better get ourselves right with the Lord and help him build this big Goddamn boat that he was just nuts. And the wife said so too. We had seen him the week before downtown in front of the bakery up on a barrel yelling at folks to listen to him about Gods warning to the wicked of the world. Kids was throwing donkey turds at him and yelling, but he went right on ranting about the great flood that was coming to wash away the slime from the Earth.

Two of every animal there is? she said when he had shuffled off into the dark.

Hell, he could barely walk. I didnt know whether he was drunk or just old and tired, but I sure couldnt fancy him building a boat big as he was talking about and herding a big bunch of animals onboard and taking care ofm. He didnt look like he could do much more than take care of hisself.

What he said, I told her.

Thats the first Ive heard of it. And if anythings on the wind at all, one of the women in my mohair quilting club woulda said something about it. They got their nose in everything. So-and-sos fourth cousin by his third marriage got knocked up by a shepherd over in Ajalon and you can bet well know about it before she gets her first round of the morning sickness.