The Crush (The Crush Series Book 1)

The Water

Once upon a time in Texas, the sky refused to rain.

A dry spell turned biblical plague, “the drought of record” spanned seven seemingly unending years, marking the 1950s as the hottest and driest ever known in my home state. Years when crops withered and pastures turned to dust, when cattle cried from hunger and thirst, when a way of life seemed destined to die.

By the time it was over, tens of thousands of farms and ranches had disappeared from the rural landscape, and all but ten of Texas’s 254 counties had been declared disaster areas by President Eisenhower. The government aid that came with that distinction, the plans to expand the state’s reservoirs, and the promises of “never again” were of little comfort. After all…all it takes is one time for you to lose everything.

Many farmers and ranchers, particularly hard hit by a combination of skyrocketing feed costs and plunging market prices, hadn’t been able to hang on until the rain returned, and generations of hard work and tradition were lost as people fled to the cities and their water. A mirage in the desert that they crawled to with promises to themselves that they’d return.

They didn’t.

My family had been one of the ones able to remain…though perhaps unwilling to leave would be a more honest way to put it. My father’s father held the reins of his home in an iron grip, deeply resentful that Mother Nature would burn the land so soon after he and his fellow veterans had returned home from the hell of World War II. So much for peacetime.

By June of 1953, just three years into the drought, things had gotten so bad in Laredo that even the river went dry for the first time in recorded history. A fact that made it all the more surprising when it flooded one year later as Hurricane Alice dumped more than thirty inches of rain north of Del Rio, the water rising so high that the bridge connecting Laredo, Texas, and Nuevo Laredo, Mexico was swept beneath the current.

More devastation on top of devastation, the return of water enough to drive even more people from their homes on both sides of the river. Enough to drown you when all you needed was a drink.

At seventeen years old, my father had fought floodwater to get from his ranch in La Orilla to the small restaurant in Laredo owned by my mother’s parents, had sat on the roof with her and watched the water slowly recede over the coming days.

At least now, the drought will end, he thought. At least now, things will get better.

They didn’t.

The drought would last for three more years until April of 1957 when a storm would unleash tornadoes, hail, and rain over Texas in a matter of hours. Only a few days shy of the duration of Noah’s flood, the rain kept falling for more than a month, the very definition of too much of a good thing as every river in Texas overran its banks.

My grandfather ultimately decided it was divine retribution, penance extracted for the lives he and others had taken over the course of the war. God must have been angry with them, even if they’d merely done what they had to do to survive. Even if they had been the good guys.

I never met my grandfather. He died not long after the rain returned, before Aarón was born and became the fourth generation to carry the name. By then, my grandmother and father only spoke of him rarely, enough that he was remembered but not quite missed.

Uncompromising. Relentless. Resilient. A hard man. An even harder legacy to follow. Whether you wanted to or not.

The day my father first held his eldest son in his hands he told him he would never be to him as his own father was. That he’d be different. A promise he had every intention of keeping.

He didn’t.