She went back to her crossword puzzle.
After that, I refused to go back to Grandpa's. Being strong was fine, but
the last thing I needed was Uncle Stanley thinking I was coming back for
more of his fooling around. I did whatever it took to wash myself at
Little Hobart Street. In the kitchen, we had an aluminum tub you could
fit into if you pulled your legs up against your chest. By then the weather
was warm enough to fill the tub with water from the tap under the house
and bathe in the kitchen. After the bath, I crouched by the side of the tub
and dipped my head in the water and washed my hair. But lugging all
those buckets of water up to the house was hard work, and I would put
off bathing until I was feeling pretty gamy. In the spring, the rains
came, drenching the valley for days in sheets of falling water. The water
ran down the hillside gullies, pulling rocks and small trees with it, and
spilled across the roads, tearing off chunks of asphalt. It gushed into the
creeks, which swelled up and turned a foaming light brown, like a
chocolate milk shake. The creeks emptied into the Tug, which
overflowed its banks and flooded the houses and stores along McDowell
Street. Mud was four feet deep in some houses, and folks' pickups and
mobile homes were swept away. Over in Buffalo Creek Hollow, a mine
impoundment gave way, and a wave of black water thirty feet high killed
126 people. Mom said that this was how nature took her revenge on men
who raped and pillaged the land, ruining nature's own drainage system
by clear-cutting forests and strip-mining mountains.
Little Hobart Street was too high up in the hollow to get any flooding,
but the rain washed parts of the road into the yards of the people who
lived below us. The water also ate away some of the soil from around the
pillars holding up our house, making it even more precarious. The hole
in the kitchen ceiling widened, and then the ceiling on Brian and
Maureen's side of the bedroom started leaking. Brian had the top bunk,
and when it rained, he'd spread a tarp over himself to keep the dripping
water off.