I asked if he didn’t want the baby, but he swore that wasn’t it. He said it was hard to say out loud what was wrong. I realized laying there I didn’t want him to tell, because what if it was me. But looking back I don’t believe it was. Clint loved me and the baby.
Then one night he went swimming and didn’t climb back in the bed smelling like fish and muddy water. I woke up and his side was empty. Dawn was coming under the curtains. I put on my coat and went down to the water with my hands on my belly. I looked across the lake, like me and Clint did when we first came there. Fog hung over the still blue. Everything was quiet. Me and the baby knowed he wasn’t coming back.
I set by the water for two days like a sailor’s wife anyway, hardly ever going back in the house. I wanted to believe Clint was just holding his breath extra long this time. Pretty soon he would break the surface, hung with algae and sputtering water. I had a blanket to wrap him in just in case. It was cold outside and I’d have to warm him up.
On the third day, not long after the sun rose, I saw red and blue lights twinkling through the trees on down the shore. I tried to get up but I was too stiff. I stumbled around for a long time on the sand.
When I finally got to where I could walk, I followed them swooping lights, dragging Clint’s blanket behind me. I picked my way along the edge of the water, climbing over fallen trees and rocks. Seemed like the blanket got snagged every few feet, but I kept going. Weak and cold as I was, I don’t know how I made it. Them lights got brighter the closer I got. Finally the woods thinned out and it got easier to walk. Not far ahead, I seen the neighbor man’s dock and people standing on it. Me and Clint didn’t know him too well. I couldn’t have picked him out of a lineup. I came out of the trees and onto his grass. I meant to ask him what the lights was for, if I could figure out which one he was. That’s when I seen the police cars and the ambulance with its back doors throwed open. Two men was rolling a stretcher across the yard with a lumpy shape strapped to it. Even under a wet-spotted cover, I knowed the shape well.
I wandered toward the people standing around. I didn’t have any more questions. I just needed help for my baby. I was fixing to fall down.
“Hey, little gal,” the neighbor man said, coming to meet me. He had a toothpick in his mouth. He didn’t look too tore up about what was going on. “I found that feller there drownded under my dock, skinny boy with right longish hair. Had a silver chain around his neck. Reckon you know him?”
“I know him,” I said. Then my legs gave out.
JOHNNY
It was a long drive with the windows down, subdivisions and warehouses and restaurants turning to long stretches of farmland. The farther we went, the more the spring smell of cut grass replaced the stink of factory smoke. We traveled west for at least an hour on a two-lane highway, the afternoon heading toward evening. Then he turned off the highway onto a narrow back road that wound and twisted through a patch of thick, dark woods, onto another stretch of cracked asphalt that led us through the trees and petered out, turning into a dusty gravel lane with rolling hills on both sides.
The whole time, Ford talked about his life. He said he was born on a farm outside of Oak Ridge and all those years hearing about his grandfather’s visions had given him a lust to see things for himself. He
got an inheritance from an aunt he’d never met and ran off to travel the world. He claimed he had seen it all, the Highlands of Scotland, the pyramids of Egypt, the Great Wall of China. He said he’d lived on just about every continent and in every state of the union but nothing he saw satisfied him. “What I really wanted to see,” he said, “was the future. Like my grandfather did.” I didn’t ask about his visions, although he probably wanted me to. I kept quiet, waiting for him to slip up and reveal who he really was. He said that even as he roamed, he knew he’d return someday. When he finally went home to the farm where he was born, his parents had been dead for three years and the house they had left him was falling down. He demolished the remains by himself, breaking off chunks of crumbling plaster, tearing off shingles, knocking down walls with a sledgehammer. Then he mentioned the books he found in the rubble.
“I moved some rotten boards I was hauling off and there they were, had been hidden in the house for who knows how long, waiting for somebody to find them. They weren’t rare or valuable, just old. One of them was
Great Expectations
. It must have been a gift to somebody, because there was a name written on the inside cover and a date, June 20, 1889. Well, it was the twentieth day of June in 1957 when that book turned up. I think finding those books got me reading and writing. I know it’s what made me a collector.”
I looked out the window, trying to keep my face neutral. He couldn’t have known about the poetry books, hidden in the duffel bag at my feet. It felt like proof that we were connected. He went on talking, telling me how he camped out on the farm until he had enough money to buy a trailer. He did all kinds of work, pulling tobacco, roofing houses, cleaning chimneys, mowing yards. It took a while to save enough and during that time he built bonfires in the field and read and wrote and played his guitar every night under the stars. He said an odd thing happened while he was living outdoors. One by one stray dogs had come out of the woods into the light of his fire and by the time his year of camping was done he had six of them, sleeping at his side and sharing the meat of the animals he hunted. “I still keep a pack of dogs around,” he said with a smile. “They seem to like my company.” He also claimed he had finished the first of several novels he’d written that year. I wasn’t sure if I believed any of what he was
telling me, much less that he was a writer. He never let it slip how he really lost his finger, but I knew I had to find out.
After what seemed like miles of bottomland with not a house in sight, Ford grinned and said, “I bet you thought we were never going to get here.” From the road I saw his trailer at the end of a dirt driveway, surrounded by hills and woods and grassy fields. It had been built onto, with a long porch across the front hung with plants and wind chimes. When we got out of the truck, a pack of dogs just as Ford had described came running. There were at least eight of them, mutts of all sizes and colors, tongues hanging and tails wagging. Ford patted their heads as they jumped on him, muddying his jeans with their paws. Then I looked across the yard and saw the wife, Carolina. There was no way to hide my surprise. I had been expecting a graying older woman but this was a girl of no more than eighteen, wearing a floppy T-shirt and cutoff shorts. She was standing barefoot in the balding grass by the clothesline. She paused to watch me cross the yard and her eyes never left my face, even as Ford went to kiss her cheek. “He looks different than I imagined,” she said.
It was hard to stop looking at Carolina as she went back to the laundry. She wasn’t beautiful, but there was something about the geography of her face. She had dirty blonde hair, olive skin, and light eyes under heavy brows. Climbing the porch steps behind Ford, I nearly stumbled looking back at her. Then I was inside the trailer and the clutter was hard to walk through. There were books everywhere, spilling out of cardboard boxes, piled on the matted shag carpet, stacked against the dark paneling walls, their dusty smell mingling with mildew and woodsmoke and cooking grease.
Ford showed off his collection proudly, like a father. “Look,” he said, holding up one of the books. “This is a first edition, John Steinbeck’s
Burning Bright
. It’s in good condition, still got the dust jacket. It’s probably worth around two seventy-five, but I couldn’t part with it.” He replaced it carefully and took the next book off the pile. “Here’s another first edition. Harriet Beecher Stowe,
We and Our Neighbors
. I had somebody offer me eighty dollars for this one.” I began picking through the books myself, turning them over, enjoying the weight and heft of them in my hands. Finally, I lifted a thick hardcover from the coffee table and saw Ford’s name on the spine.
“You really are a writer,” I said, tracing the faded gold letters.
Ford laughed. “You mean you didn’t believe me?”
Then Carolina was standing in the door with a clothes basket on her hip. “He’s been nominated for a Pulitzer Prize,” she said.
Ford went to her and took the basket. “Carolina likes to brag on me, don’t you, honey?” He sat down on the flowered velvet couch and began folding clothes. I felt awkward, standing there with my hands in my pockets.
“Do you want something to drink?” Carolina asked, heading into a small kitchen divided from the living room by a bar with mismatching stools.
“No, thanks,” I said.
“Have a seat and I’ll fix you boys some supper.”
Ford looked up from the clothes basket. “You don’t have to cook, Carolina. Me and Johnny had a bite to eat in town.”
“That was a long time ago,” she said. “I bet Johnny’s starving by now. I’ve got some pork chops thawing out anyway.” Reaching into an upper cabinet for the frying pan, she looked over her shoulder and smiled at me. A tingle raced along my spine.
I moved a stack of books from an old recliner and sat down. It was so comfortable that I nearly dozed, listening to the sound of pork chops frying and Carolina talking about her garden and the fruit trees she was nursing. A contented feeling washed over me, an ease sinking into my limbs as she talked and Ford sorted through his books, dividing them into piles according to those he would keep and those he would sell.
When Carolina called us to supper, we ate around a small table with our knees and elbows touching. Carolina lit candles and passed around a cheap bottle of wine. “We’re not always this fancy,” she said. “This is a special night.” It took a minute to realize she meant because I was there. I wondered how long it would take her to slip me a note or brush against me or make some excuse to get me alone, like girls at the children’s home and at school always had. I waited for the greediness in her eyes, but it never came. She was only friendly and comfortable with one leg tucked beneath her in the chair.
At some point I noticed that Carolina wasn’t eating her own cooking. When I asked about it, she said, “I can’t hardly stand to eat meat.”
Ford claimed it was because her heart was too tender. He reached out to touch her hair. “It doesn’t bother me for other people to eat it,” she said. “I just can’t hardly stand to myself.” I wondered what she would think if she knew that I had skinned rabbits and squirrels for my mama to cook, ripped the greasy flesh from their small bones without a pang of remorse.
When Ford’s plate was clean, he pushed back from the table and said, “I’ve got to go check my mole traps. They’re tearing the garden all to pieces this year. Carolina, will you show Johnny where he’s bunking tonight?”
I followed her across the grass with my duffel bag slung over my shoulder. She carried a blanket and pillow in her arms. It was turning dark and the yard was a chorus of crickets and tree frogs. There was no sign of Ford checking his traps and the dogs were gone. They had probably followed him to the garden. It seemed Carolina and I were the only people for miles. There was a light burning in the shed and the door was propped open. It was tidier inside than I had imagined, the concrete floor swept with cardboard boxes and gar den tools moved to one side. There was a lone army cot in the corner.
“Ford brought this bed out here a long time ago,” Carolina said, her voice startling me. I wished she hadn’t mentioned Ford’s vision. There was an awkward silence.
“Was he really nominated for a Pulitzer?” I asked.
“Twice. I seen it in a magazine. People don’t believe it because of the way he lives, but this is the life Ford chooses for hisself. Sometimes people come out here and ask him to sign a book. Once there was a man from the newspaper who wanted to write an article. Ford talked to them, but he doesn’t like being found.” She paused, looking down at the blanket and pillow she was holding. She seemed tired, and maybe sad. “He’s got an agent that sends him letters sometimes. She wants him to write another book, but Ford’s stubborn. You can’t make him do anything before he’s ready to.”
We fell silent again, standing in the middle of the shed looking at each other. I wondered what she was doing there with some crazy old man. I couldn’t imagine what she was thinking about me. Finally she said, “Well, here’s you a pillow and blanket.” She delivered them into
my arms and then, without warning, her hands were on me, moving quick and fluttery over my abdomen and ribs like butterflies. My scalp prickled at her touch. I couldn’t move. Her face was still, as if nothing unusual was happening. It was the manner of a doctor giving an examination. “You got a pain somewhere, Johnny,” she said. I could smell her hair, like the woods after a thunderstorm. Then the small hand settled on my chest. She nodded as if she had suspected all along. “It’s right in here.”
I opened my mouth, tried to think what to say. “No. I’m all right.”
“Since I was a little girl,” she said, “whenever I lay my hands on somebody, it’s like they know right where to go to help that person.”
I was about to tell her that I didn’t feel any different when I noticed a loosening in my chest, a lightening, as if someone had taken a rock off it. I took a deep breath and it was like I hadn’t been breathing at all before. Then immediately I felt foolish and weak, having fallen so easily for some kind of hypnotic suggestion. It wasn’t as much of a mystery anymore what this girl was doing with Ford. She was every bit as crazy as he was. I plucked her hand off my chest but she didn’t seem to notice. She smiled and said, “I guess I’ll go on and give you some privacy.” She paused and turned back before closing the door. “Sometimes in the spring it still gets chilly at nighttime. I’ve got a little heater I can bring out if you get to needing one.” Then she was gone. I stood in the middle of the shed for a long time, wondering what I was doing there myself.
LAURA
People said Clint did it on purpose but I think he was just trying to stay down where it was peaceful a little while longer. Maybe he sunk too far and couldn’t get back up before he ran out of breath. But I don’t believe he wanted to leave me. I think he wanted to see our baby get born and be a good father to him. Right after he drowned, I worried things had been passed down from Mama that I didn’t want. I thought I might be cursed to live out the same awful things that happened to her. I knowed from the stories she told there’s been a lot of sadness in our family. Bad times seem to follow our people around. For a minute I wished I was born to somebody else. Then I got to
thinking about Mama and cried again. It wasn’t her fault that Clint drowned. It wasn’t anybody’s.