Floodright

On the Missouri side of the Mississippi lies the Ninemile Floodway, ninety thousand acres of the richest ground in America and a promise written into every deed: when the river rises high enough, the levee will be blown and the water let in, so the town across the river can live.

It has happened once, in 1943. Cal Hensley has sixty thousand bushels of soybeans nobody will buy and a mortgage he has told no one about. His sister Ruth is the Corps of Engineers engineer who wrote the plan and will have to say yes to it. Their father, eighty-six, keeps asking about a family no one remembers. And in Tanis, Illinois, Lu Mabry, who kept the floodwall shut for forty years, knows a name he has never said out loud.

Across one season of high water, a family, a town and a country find out what a promise made by the dead is worth to the living.