River Rolls a Silent Blanket of Watery Death Over Town : Flood: The Mississippi takes an Illinois burg, with a malice and force that can only be feared, and recognized.

The river was not to be denied. It crept in like an encroaching fog, securing the land in silence.

The Mississippi’s conquest of the tiny hamlet of Hull started out discreetly, hours after the river had first breached the sand wall of the massive Sny Island Levee. Probing fingers of river water ran along ditches and culverts, into the hidden corners of 45,000 acres of fertile farmland. Corn and bean fields were next, throttled by rising blankets of water--silvery under a punishing sun--that washed into hog pens and seeped through cracks in mobile homes and old farmhouses.

By dawn Monday, the river had invaded the whitewashed chapel of the First Baptist Church of Hull, lapping at wood pews that prayers had kept dry for more than a century. It came to Walnut Street, inching up the flagpole where Richard Saxbury had hung the Stars and Stripes at half-staff, in mourning for his abandoned town. It swallowed up the lawn jockeys next door and curled around Hull’s ghostly grain elevator. It was on Cherry Street too, pouring into old man Pothast’s garage and climbing up his neighbor’s birdhouse.

Possession and memory meant nothing: The river enveloped the modest white clapboard house Marvin and Betty Gudger had called home for 60 years, and it took the stately, creaky Victorian that Mary Shirley dreamed of restoring.

This was how Hull was lost, a long day that started in panic and ended in slow motion, in a somber twilight of waiting that budged forward like a funeral caisson. This is the way the Mississippi is taking back the land that was once its dominion, rolling into river towns with leisurely malice, giving fleeing residents a few final moments to reflect on their impotence and behold the implacable power of nature.

“This was ours,” sighed Mary Shirley when she heard the Mississippi was a mile west of town. “Now it’s the river’s.”

She stood under a spreading maple, gazing forlornly down Illinois Highway 57, a deserted strip of roadway that only eight hours earlier had been as congested as a Calcutta alley.

“The entire world was down here,” she said. “I saw people I haven’t seen in years.”

They came after the siren wailed at the Hull firehouse--a sound residents had hoped they would never hear. Within minutes, Illinois state police cars and National Guard Humvees were cruising though the town’s tree-lined lattice of streets. Official voices rasped through loudspeakers: “The levee is breached. Please prepare to evacuate.”

The town, population 500, had been preparing for weeks. Most residents had moved out by the second week of the floods, when sandbaggers were run off the levee by lightning strikes and things seemed so dire for the Sny. The townspeople returned when they had free time, carting off truckload after truckload of possessions, hauling whatever they could carry to neighbors’ sheds, storage warehouses, motel parking lots.

The siren’s sound was last call; if there was anything left to get, it had to go quickly.

Driveways filled with pickups and U-Haul trailers, campers and station wagons. At the Railsplitter, the town’s only motel, owners Helen Friedlein and her husband, Oliver, a professional rail-splitter, crammed their belongings into a semi-truck. They took everything they could fit into the cavernous trailer: beds and furniture from their home, cans of Vienna sausage and bags of Cheetohs from their convenience store, P.L.’s Place.

Out on Highway 57, a pickup loaded with squealing hogs vied for space with a trailer packed with bed frames. Leroy Leonard, Mary Shirley’s brother, used a chain saw to cut down two spiring pines in her front yard. Slicing them up like cordwood, he heaved the logs into the back of his camper.

“It’s a shame to see them go down, they’ve been here forever,” Leonard said. “We can use them for cabinets or doors or something.”

By 6 p.m., most of the movers had taken their last loads. Power company crews had come through town, killing off the electricity. Gas company workers had pulled all their meters. Only the telephones still worked.

Hull belonged to the die-hards now. In the Hull Implement parking lot, a dozen men clustered around a black pickup. They were sunburned and weary. Sweat stains ringed their shirt-sleeves. Some swigged sodas, some gnawed at chewing tobacco. The massive steel-walled warehouse was locked up. They were done.

Yet they lingered, as if they needed some glimpse of the advancing Mississippi for confirmation that the town was no longer theirs. There was nothing much left to say, just a few stories about the levee break that morning and the requisite gallows humor.

“I think I’m going to go home and take two aspirin and a bottle of whiskey,” said Mike Kroencke, the owner of the warehouse. “And I think I’m going to paint a big ‘For Sale’ sign on this place.”

“I got a better idea,” said Bill Dunker, a river-bottom farmer who was losing 1,100 acres of farmland to the river. “We’ll paint a bull’s-eye on it and let the National Guard use it for target practice.”

No one laughed. Kroencke grimaced and looked to the west, toward the river.

“You know, you build a life in a place like this,” he said, “and you learn to respect the river, what it does for the farmers down here, its beauty. You know it can be an enemy, but when you live with the Mississippi every day of your life, you forget about that part. That’s what hurts people so much. It’s like we were betrayed, you know?

“But the thing is,” he said, “a river will do that. That’s what a river does.”

The horizon was darkening. The sun glowed orange in the west, a pale half-moon was rising in the east. Deprived of power, Hull’s houses darkened. Some were sealed like tombs. Others were left open and exposed by owners who no longer cared.

On Highway 57, supper had just ended on Mary Shirley’s porch. Gatorade bottles and Pringles cans lay emptied on the deck. Mary and her children, April, 14, and Robert, 12, waited with her brother Leroy’s family. Their last loads were packed. But like the men in the parking lot, the Shirleys and the Leonards were hesitant to leave.

“I wish the river would come and get it over with,” said April. “I’m so tired of this.”

Mary Shirley sighed. “The river does what it wants to do, honey. When it’s ready to come, it comes and we go. When it’s ready to go, and only when it’s ready, we’ll come back. You know we will.”

The Shirleys had been sleeping on the floor for two weeks, spreading out blankets, sheets and pillows over the ripped linoleum that was exposed after they tore out their carpeting. This night, they would finally be in beds again, on high ground at a sister’s house.

They went outside and made for Mary’s Mercury Topaz.

“The kids want a last look at the town,” she said. “We’ll be back in a few minutes.”

The car glided off to town. No one was left in central Hull except five workers atop the town’s brick-walled well house. Kirk Rueb and Bill Bainter were among them, making final preparations to secure the town’s water system.

From the roof, the workers could see the advancing river, a line of pewter just two miles off, separated from the town by a lush bean field.

“That’s an awful nice-looking bean field,” Rueb said.

“Gonna be an awful wet-looking bean field in an hour,” Bainter replied.

It was nearly 9 p.m. when the Shirleys returned from their last ride around Hull. April and Robert tried to be nonchalant. Mary Shirley concealed nothing, daubing at her eyes with her hands.

“Well, I guess we’ve said our goodbys,” she said. “I guess we can go now.”

The Shirleys and the Leonards moved off into the night, the last caravan from Hull. Only the police were left now, watching the roads, turning back gawkers, moving slowly back themselves as the river drew near.

A one-armed Pike County deputy sheriff stood between the river and the town. His name was Thomas McCarter and his pinched face lit red in the glow of a sparking road flare.

“You best head out of here now, son,” McCarter said, “before there ain’t no here left.”

* RAIN KEEPS FALLING: The great rivers of the Midwest continue rising as waterlogged levees begin to give way. A12