"Why?" said Pinckney Prioleau. He said it gently, but he said it. "Forgive me. Why did you think he was dead?"
She told them about the storm.
The radio had said all day Thursday that it was going to hit north of Charleston and that McClellanville should go, and their mama was on shift in Mount Pleasant and could not leave her patients, and she called at four and told Dessa to take Tilly to the shelter at Lincoln High School, where the county said it would be safe, because Lincoln High was a long way back from the water and up on high ground. The shelter did not take dogs. The Red Cross shelters never took dogs. It was a rule. So Dessa filled the bathtub with water and put out two bowls of food and a whole bag of Gravy Train torn open on the kitchen floor, and she shut Bosun in the house, and she told him to stay. She told him she'd be back in the morning.
"He knew," she said. "He tried to get out the door with us. I had to push him back with my knee. Tilly was screaming. I shut the door on him."
Lincoln High School flooded. Toomer knew that already. Everyone in the county knew it by then. The water had come up in the middle of the night, the storm surge, higher than anybody had said it could, up over the parking lot and into the halls and into the cafeteria where a thousand people were sitting on the floor in the dark. They had climbed onto the tables and then onto the stage, Dessa said, and people had lifted children up into the ceiling, they had pushed up the ceiling tiles and put the little ones up there in the dark on the pipes, and the water came up to the grown people's chests and stayed there. Tilly had held on to the pink bag the whole night. She had it around her neck, both straps, so it couldn't float off. Dessa had held on to Tilly.
"In the morning," Dessa said, "we walked home. And our house wasn't there."
It was not gone, exactly. It was a quarter mile up the creek in somebody else's yard, on its side, with a pine tree through the roof. Dessa had gone into it through a window. Everything they owned was inside it and none of it was any good. The kitchen was full of marsh mud to the counters and there was a dead mullet on the stove.
There was no dog.
"I looked for him six days," Dessa said. "I walked every road between there and Awendaw. Me and some boys from church. We found a lot of dogs. Not him. We put up signs at the Red Cross and the fire station. We didn't have a phone, so I put the number of the motel where we went, after, and then we had to move motels and the number was wrong. I called here from a payphone on the thirtieth. The lady said y'all had about forty yellow dogs, come look. So my mama drove me down on her day off, and we walked the whole place, and the warehouse too, and he wasn't here." She looked at Toomer. "That was the thirtieth. And when did he come in?"