by Ron Rash
A hound came off the porch, barked until it recognized Ethan. The buggy halted in front of the farmhouse and Ethan wrapped the check reins around the brake and jumped off. He helped Pastor Boone from the buggy’s seat, being careful not to bump the bandaged wrist. The front door opened and Helen came out on the porch. Pastor Boone took the Bible off the seat.
“Bring the package,” Pastor Boone said to Ethan, and stepped onto the porch.
“What happened, Pastor?” she asked, but then her face paled.
Ethan brought the package and Pastor Boone used his elbow and side to secure it.
“Stand behind me,” he told them. “I’ll call you when it’s time to come inside.”
Pastor Boone entered the parlor’s muted light, set the Bible and package on the lamp stand. Mrs. Davidson offered to take the overcoat and he told her she’d have to help him. She held the overcoat in her hand, did not move to hang it up. Pastor Boone opened the Bible with his hand and found what he searched for. He left the Bible open and slipped two fingers between the pasteboard and the knot of twine. He lifted the package with the fingers in the manner of measuring its weight. He crossed the room to where the Colonel sat.
“I take you as a man of your word, Leland,” Pastor Boone said, and set the package beside the Windsor chair. “Open it if you wish.”
Pastor Boone went to the door and motioned Ethan and Helen inside. He took up the Bible and balanced it in his hand, positioned himself between the two young people.
“Mark 10, verse nine” Pastor Boone said. “What therefore God hath joined together.”
The Woman at the Pond
Water has its own archaeology, not a layering but a leveling, and thus is truer to our sense of the past, because what is memory but near and far events spread and smoothed beneath the present’s surface. A green birthday candle that didn’t expire with a wish lies next to a green Coleman lantern lit twelve years later. Chalky sun motes in a sixth-grade classroom harbor close to a university library’s high window, a song on a staticky radio shoals against the same song at a hastily arranged wedding reception. This is what I think of when James Murray’s daughter decides to drain the pond. A fear of lawsuits, she claims, something her late father considered himself exonerated from by posting a sign: FISH AND SWIM AT YOUR OWN RISK.
She hired Wallace Rudisell for the job, a task that requires opening the release valve on the standpipe, keeping it clear until what once was a creek will be a creek once more. I grew up with Wallace, and, unlike so many of our classmates, he and I still live in Lattimore. Wallace inherited our town’s hardware store, one of the few remaining businesses.
“Bet you’re wanting to get some of those lures back you lost in high school,” Wallace says when I ask when he’ll drain the pond. “There must be a lot of them. For a while you were out there most every evening.”
Which is true. I was seventeen and in a town of three hundred, my days spent bagging groceries. Back then there was no internet, no cable TV or VCR, at least in our house. Some evenings that summer I’d listen to the radio or watch television with my parents, or look over college brochures and financial-aid forms the guidance counselor had given me, but I’d usually go down to the pond. Come fall of my senior year, though, Angie and I began dating. We found other things to do in the dark.
A few times Wallace or another friend joined me, but I usually fished alone. After a day at the grocery store, I didn’t mind being away from people awhile, and the pond at twilight was a good place. The swimmers and other fishermen were gone, leaving behind beer and cola bottles, tangles of fishing line, gray cinder blocks used for seats. Later in the night, couples came to the pond, their leavings on the bank as well—rubbers and blankets, once a pair of panties hung on the white oak’s limb. But that hour when day and night made their slow exchange, I had the pond to myself.
Over the years James Murray’s jon-boat had become communal property. Having wearied of swimming out to retrieve the boat, I’d bought twenty feet of blue nylon rope to keep it moored. I’d unknot the rope from the white oak, set my fishing gear and Coleman lantern in the bow, and paddle out to the pond’s center. I’d fish until it was neither day nor night, but balanced between. There never seemed to be a breeze, pond and shore equally smoothed. Just stillness, as though the world had taken a soft breath, and was holding it in, and even time had leveled out, moving neither forward nor back. Then the frogs and crickets waiting for full dark announced themselves, or a breeze came up and I again heard the slosh of water against land. Or, one night near the end of that summer, a truck rumbling toward the pond.
On Saturday I leave at two o’clock when the other shift manager comes in. I no longer live near the pond, but my mother does, so I pull out of the grocery store’s parking lot and turn right, passing under Lattimore’s one stoplight. On the left are four boarded-up stores, behind them like an anchored cloud, the mill’s water tower, blue paint chipping off the tank. I drive by Glenn’s Café where Angie works, soon after that the small clapboard house where she and our daughter, Rose, live. Angie’s Ford Escort isn’t there, but the truck belonging to Rose’s boyfriend is. I don’t turn in. It’s not my weekend to be in charge, and at least I know Rose is on the pill, because I took her to the clinic myself.
Soon there are only farmhouses, most in disrepair—slumping barns and woodsheds, rusty tractors snared by kudzu and trumpet vines. I make a final right turn and park in front of my mother’s house. She comes onto the porch and I know from her disappointed expression that she’s gotten the week confused and expects to see Rose. We talk a minute and she goes back inside. I walk down the sloping land, straddle the sagging barbed wire, and make my way through brambles and broom sedge, what was once a pasture.
The night the truck came to the pond, an afternoon thunderstorm had rinsed the humidity from the air. The evening felt more like late September than mid-August. After rowing out, I had cast toward the willows on the far bank, where I’d caught bass in the past. The lure I used was a Rapala, my favorite because I could fish it on the surface or submerged. After a dozen tries nothing struck, so I paddled closer to the willows and cast into the cove where the creek ended. A small bass hit and I reeled it in, its red gills flaring as I freed the treble hook and lowered the fish back into the water.
A few minutes later the truck bumped down the dirt road to the water’s edge. The headlights slashed across the pond before the vehicle jerked right and halted beside the white oak as the headlights dimmed.
Music came from the truck’s open windows and carried over the water with such clarity I recognized the song. The cab light came on and the music stopped. Minutes passed, and stars began filling the sky. As a thick-shouldered moon rimmed up over a ridge, a man and woman got out of the truck. The jon-boat drifted toward the willows and I let it, afraid any movement would give away my presence. The man and woman’s voices rose, became angry, then a sound sharp as a rifle shot. The woman fell and the man got back in the cab. The headlights flared and the truck turned around, slinging mud before the tires gained traction. The truck swerved up the dirt road and out of sight.
The woman slowly lifted herself from the ground. She moved closer to the bank and sat on a cinder block. As more stars pierced the sky, and the moon lifted itself above the willow trees, I waited for the truck to return or the woman to leave, though I had no idea where she might go. The jon-boat drifted deeper into the willows, the drooping branches raking at my face. I didn’t want to move, but the willows had entangled the boat. The graying wood creaked as it bumped against the bank. I lifted the paddle and pushed away as quietly as possible. As I did, the boat rocked and the metal tackle box banged against its side.
“Who’s out there?” the woman asked. “I can see you, I can.”
I lit the lantern and paddled to the pond’s center.
“I’m fishing,” I said, and lifted the rod and reel to prove it. The woman didn’t respond. “Are you okay?”
“My face will be bruised,�
�� she said after a few moments. “But no teeth knocked out. Bruises fade. I’ll be better off tomorrow than he will.”
I set the paddle on my knees. In the quiet, it seemed the pond too was listening.
“You mean the man that hit you?”
“Yeah, him.”
“Is he coming back?”
“Yeah, he’s coming back. The bastard needs me to drive to Charlotte. Another DUI and he’ll be pedaling to work on a bicycle. He won’t get too drunk to remember that. Anyway, he didn’t go far.”
The woman pointed up the dirt road where a faint square of light hovered like foxfire.
“He’s drinking the rest of his whiskey while some hillbilly whines on the radio about how hard life is. When the bottle’s empty, he’ll be back.”
As the jon-boat drifted closer to the bank, the woman stood and I dug the paddle’s wooden blade into the silt to keep some distance between us. The lantern’s glow fell on both of us now. She was younger than I’d thought, maybe no more than thirty. A large woman, wide hipped and tall, at least five eight. Her long blond hair was clearly dyed. A red welt covered the left side of her face. She wore a man’s leather jacket over her yellow blouse and black skirt. Mud grimed the yellow blouse. She raised her hand and fanned at the haze of insects.
“I hope there are fewer gnats and mosquitoes out there,” she said. “The damn things are eating me alive.”
“Only if I stay in the middle,” I answered.
I glanced up at the truck.
“I guess I’ll go back out.”
I lifted the paddle, thinking if the man didn’t come get her in a few minutes I’d beach the boat in the creek cove, work my way through the brush, and head home.
“Can I get in the boat with you?” the woman asked.
“I’m just going to make a couple of more casts,” I answered. “I need to get back home.”
“Just a few minutes,” she said, and gave me a small smile, the hardness in her face and voice lessening. “I’m not going to hurt you. Just a few minutes. To get away from the bugs.”
“Can you swim?”
“Yes,” she said.
“What about that man that hit you?”
“He’ll be there awhile yet. He drinks his whiskey slow.”
The woman brushed some of the drying mud from her skirt, as if to make herself more presentable.
“Just a few minutes.”
“Okay,” I said, and rowed to the bank.
I steadied the jon-boat while she got in the front, the lantern at her feet. The woman talked while I paddled, not turning her head, as if addressing the pond.
“I finally get away from this county and that son of a bitch drags me back to visit his sister. She’s not home so instead he buys a bottle of Wild Turkey and we end up here, with him wanting to lay down on the bank with just a horse blanket beneath us and the mud. When I tell him no way, he gets this jacket from the truck. For your head, he tells me, like that would change my mind. What a prince.”
She shifted her body to face me.
“Nothing like coming back home, right?”
“You’re from Lattimore?” I asked.
“No, but this county. Lawndale. You know where that is?”
“Yes.”
“But our buddy in the truck used to live in Lattimore, so we’re having a Cleveland County reunion tonight, assuming you aren’t just visiting.”
“I live here.”
“Still in high school?”
I nodded.
“I’ll be a senior.”
“We used to kick your asses in football,” she said. “That was supposed to be a big deal.”
I pulled in the paddle when we reached the pond’s center. The rod lay beside me, but I didn’t pick it up. The lantern was still on, but we didn’t really need it. The moon laid a silvery skim of light on the water.
“When you get back to Charlotte, will you call the police?”
“No, they wouldn’t do anything. The bastard will pay though. He left more than his damn jacket on that blanket.”
The woman took a wallet from the jacket, opened it to show no bills were inside.
“He got paid today so what he didn’t spend on that whiskey is in my pocket now. He’ll wake up tomorrow thinking a hangover is the worst thing he’ll have to deal with, but he will soon learn different.”
“What if he believes you took it?”
“I’ll make myself scarce awhile. That’s easy to do in a town big as Charlotte. Anyway, he’ll be back living here before long.”
“He tell you that?”
The woman smiled.
“He doesn’t need to. Haven’t you heard of women’s intuition? Plus, he’s always talking about this place. Badmouthing it a lot, but it’s got its hooks in him. No, he’ll move back, probably work at the mill, and he’ll still be here when they pack the dirt over his coffin.”
She’d paused and looked at me.
“What about you? Already got your job lined up after high school?”
“I’m going to college.”
“College,” she said, studying me closely. “I’d not have thought that. You’ve got the look of someone who’d stick around here.”
Wallace waves from the opposite bank and makes his way around the pond. His pants and tennis shoes are daubed with mud. Wallace works mostly indoors, so the July sun has reddened his face and unsleeved arms. He nods at the valve.
“Damn thing’s clogged up twice, but it’s getting there.”
The pond is a red-clay bowl, one-third full. In what was once the shallows, rusty beer cans and Styrofoam bait containers have emerged along with a ball cap and a flip-flop. Farther in, Christmas trees submerged for years are now visible, the black branches threaded with red-and-white bobbers and bream hooks, plastic worms and bass plugs, including a six-inch Rapala that I risk the slick mud to pull free. Its hooks are so rusty one breaks off.
“Let me see,” Wallace says, and examines the lure.
“I used to fish with one like this,” I tell him, “same size and model.”
“Probably one of yours then,” Wallace says, and offers the lure as if to confirm my ownership. “You want any of these others?”
“No, I don’t even want that one.”
“I’ll take them then,” Wallace says, lifting a yellow Jitterbug from a limb. “I hear people collect old plugs nowadays. They might be worth a few dollars, add to the hundred I’m getting to do this. These days I need every bit of money I can get.”
We move under the big white oak and sit in its shade, watch the pond’s slow contraction. More things emerge—a rod and reel, a metal bait bucket, more lures and hooks and bobbers. There are swirls in the water now, fish vainly searching for the upper levels of their world. A large bass leaps near the valve.
Wallace nods at a burlap sack.
“The bluegill will flush down that drain, but it looks like I’ll get some good-sized fish to fry up.”
We watch the water, soon a steady dimpling on the surface. Another bass flails upward, shimmers green and silver in the afternoon sun.
“Angie said Rose is trying to get loans so she can go to your alma mater next year,” Wallace says.
“It’s an alma mater only if you graduate,” I reply.
Wallace picks up a stick, scrapes some mud off his shoes. He starts to speak, then hesitates, finally does speak.
“I always admired your taking responsibility like that. Coming back here, I mean.” Wallace shakes his head. “We sure live in a different time. Hell, nowadays there’s women who don’t know or care who their baby’s father is, much less expect him to marry her. And the men, they’re worse. They act like it’s nothing to them, don’t even want to be a part of their own child’s life.”
When I don’t reply, Wallace checks his watch.
“This is taking longer than I figured. I’m going to the café. I haven’t had lunch. Want me to bring you back something?”
“A Coke would be nice,” I say.
<
br /> As Wallace drives away, I think of the woman letting her right hand brush the water as I rowed the jon-boat toward shore.
“It feels warm,” she said, “warmer than the air. I bet you could slip in and sink and it would feel cozy as a warm blanket.”
“The bottom’s cold,” I answered.
“If you got that deep,” she said, “it wouldn’t matter anyway, would it.”
After we got out, the woman asked whose boat it was. I told her I didn’t know and started to knot the rope to the white oak.
“Leave it untied then,” she said. “I may take it back out.”
“I don’t think you should do that,” I told her. “The boat could overturn or something.”
“I won’t overturn the boat,” the woman said, and pulled a ten-dollar bill from her skirt pocket.
“Here’s something for taking me out. This too,” she said, taking the jacket off. “It’s a nice one and he’s not getting it back. It looks like a good fit.”
“I’d better not,” I said, and picked up my fishing equipment and the lantern. I looked at her. “When he comes back, you’re not afraid he’ll do something else? I mean, I can call the police.”
She shook her head.
“Don’t do that. Like I said, he needs a driver, so he’ll make nice. You go on home.”
And so I did, and once there, did not call the police or tell my parents. I had trouble sleeping that night, but the next day at work, as the hours passed, I assured myself that if anything really bad had happened everyone in Lattimore would have known by now.
I went back to the pond, for the last time, that evening after work. The nylon rope was missing but the paddle lay under the front seat. As I got in, I lifted the paddle and found a ten-dollar bill beneath it. I rowed out to the center and tied on the Rapala and threw it at the pond’s far bank.
As darkness descended, what had seemed certain earlier seemed less so. When a cast landed in some brush, I cranked the reel fast, hoping to avoid snagging the Rapala, but that also caused the lure to go deeper. The rod bowed and I was hung. Any other time, I’d have rowed to the snag and leaned over the gunwale, let my hand follow the line into the water to find the lure and free the hook. Instead, I tightened the line and gave a hard jerk. The lure stayed where it was.
