Prologue: The Buffalo Creek Flood 

excerpt from the unpublished novel Native Trees

Andréa Fekete

 

I’ve had the same nightmare about Buffalo Creek, West Virginia since around 1988. I was still in elementary school when the dreams started. I’m a native of that creek, a little hollow in West Virginia almost nobody has heard of where green stretches and blooms like smoke out of the dark hills. On February 26, 1972 123 people died in a flood of black coal slurry. Governor Arch Moore told the newspapers it was an “act of God.” Everybody in “West by God” Virginia knew it was man-made. The coal company knew the clogs might burst but rolled the dice and warned no one. It never had to happen. Three clogged makeshift dams burst early one February morning after days of heavy rain. My parents would pass down the trauma to me and my sisters. Some families were able to escape and run up the hillsides to safety. I was still in the womb when my mother ran up the hillside in her nightgown, cold winter rain on her cheeks, her bare feet deep in mud as she climbed with my father. I must’ve shifted restlessly in her womb, eyelids flitting like butterflies, dreaming of the black water sweeping away screaming women, while their lovers jumped off the bank to rescue them, to their own deaths. 

The dream always begins the same way. I’m standing alone on the train trestle, barefoot in the sweltering August heat, the sound of Buffalo Creek shush shushing against the rocks. Dragonflies zip manically through the sultry air. I can almost taste the odor of railroad-track grease and pine. Sweet vines of yellow honeysuckle and wildflowers entwined through the hillside thick with briars and green, the sweet odors and man-made mixing. 

My silk nightgown sticks to me with perspiration, a bead of sweat scurrying like an ant, tickles down my cheek. I listen carefully, knowing something is coming. Wind blows through my hair cooling me momentarily. It’s so miserably hot, I crave the cold water below, but I’m too scared to jump, my brother Ben having drowned after swimming at this same trestle when we were kids. I watch the water lapping gently against the bank. Then, the wails come from the distance. A wall of voices in different melodies. Dozens of people suddenly appear on the hillside, some running, some stuck in their places, all pleading for me, “Swim in our direction! Reach! Here!” Women weeping. Men yelling, “Jump now! Swim this way!” I can’t move. Rain falls. The temperature suddenly drops to near freezing. As fast as the wails came, the summer day transforms into an early February morning. I shiver hard, covering myself with my naked arms as if to stop the cold from splitting me. My breath shows in the air. My muscles tighten and teeth chatter. Bone crack cold wind beats against my breasts and cheeks, rain stinging my naked legs like frozen teeth.

Trestle rumbles under my bare feet. The once quiet creek vibrates as if there’s thunder beneath. The water turns black and slowly rises like a giant standing up from a grave. The black water swells into a pillar, a wave 40-feet tall. Water rises black against the gray sky, swollen storm clouds cupping the water like hands. The wave bends slowly above me, gently in my direction, hovering, a moment of yawning before tipping and crashing toward me. I can’t move or run as it rushes. Bodies float inside the black waves. Their naked, pale skin shining in the terrible, cold morning light. The screams of onlookers grow more frantic. The smell of death curls into my nose and rests there as my stomach folds in and over itself. Frozen, I shiver hard and pray, squeezing myself with my own thin, goose-bumped arms. I yell over the roar of the water, “Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death!” rain slapping me in my tongue as I scream at nothing. The waves consume the trees along the valley, crashing and pulling them along as it comes for me. I wake, shaking, gasping, sweating a chilly sweat, my uncovered legs like ice. Darting straight up in bed, it’s always their shining bodies I see with my waking eyes, their sickly pale bodies glistening in light, turning over in the water and over, their mouths open in what would be a scream or a breath, if they weren’t filled with mud. Like their eyes.

When I can’t sleep, I drive up and down this hollow at 3 AM, my low beams the only light around, white fog seeming to glow as it rolls along the wet, black road. Sometimes, when I’ve had just one too many beers, I swear I can feel ghosts looking on from beside the road, hitchhiking. I habitually check the rearview too many times, a tick, like a junky’s hand tapping her collarbone, by a locket filled with cocaine. All I’ve ever seen is the glow of red taillights and beyond that, blackness. There aren’t streetlights in unincorporated hollers like Buffalo Creek, so the valley holds darkness deep, a well, or like a mouth half-closed full of dry red wine, the blackest black, found nowhere else but the galaxy. Come daybreak, those dark hills where my parents, all the survivors stood watching their houses and friends wash away are once again bright in the morning light, inhaling deep, stretching, having shaken the ghosts from her hair during a sleep more restful than my own. I’ve never really slept, even though West Virginia really is almost heaven in the daylight, well, was, before the opioid crisis. Now, it’s always dark.

As a little girl in the 1980s, I imagined the wind talked through the trees whispering to the leaves storms are coming, turn over and catch your water, because before a storm, like magic, the green snaps clean, sharp and clear as the color of a fresh peapod. Come winter, naked branches appear black in the shadows. Once lush limbs, now naked and gnarled, rise like bony fingers from their graves desperate to reach the clear, stubbornly high blue sky. There’s nothing out there now but bones.

Originally published in Golden Seal Magazine (2021).

 

Andrea Fekete is author of Waters Run Wild (2018) a historical fiction literary novel of the West Virginia coal mine wars. She is a coal miner’s daughter from Buffalo Creek, WV, granddaughter to Mexican and Hungarian immigrant coal miners. She co-curated Feminine Rising: Voices of Power and Invisibility (Cynren Press) Foreword Review’s Silver Winner for Indie Book of the Year in women’s studies. Her work appears in journals and anthologies such as Chiron Review, Borderlands: Texas Poetry Review, Adirondack Review, ABZ, and books such as Eyes Glowing at the Edge of the Woods: Poetry and Fiction from West Virginia and many others. (WVU Press) She earned her MA in English from Marshall University and MFA in Creative Writing fiction from WV Wesleyan College. She now resides in Cleveland, Ohio. A segment of her memoir about her medical journey won 2024 Blue Earth Review summer dog daze prize in CNF.