The Lost Skiff

by Donald Wetzel

  “Pa sent me to bring a message to you,” was the first thing she said.

  I was still standing there holding onto the boat, like it might float away if I moved. “About Jack?” I said.

  She nodded. “His father has come and got him, and you are to be back at their landing no later than Saturday noon, with the skiff if you have found it, but without it if it still should be lost. That’s all of it. Pa thought you should know.”

  “To tell the truth,” I said, “I have known it all along. But I sure am glad you have gone to this trouble to come and tell me.”

  “I have known it all along, too,” she said.

  “I had guessed as much,” I said.

  “I figured you had,” she said.

  Then for a minute I couldn’t think of what to say next, and I guess Brenda Sue couldn’t either, and we just stayed there, looking at each other, with the sun beating down on us and the wind blowing our hair around, not either one of us even smiling, and then I said, “Well, I am sorry to have put you to so much trouble for nothing, but if you are not in a big hurry to get back up the creek, there is not much sense in our staying out here in this wind and hot sun like we are. Back up by that bank there is some shade.”

  Just for a second then, Brenda Sue smiled, or started to, and then in that straight honest way I had noticed before, she said, “Rodney, if I had not wanted to see you again, I would have told Pa the truth and stayed at home to start with. You are right, it is hot here in the sun.” Then she stood up and walked toward me as easy as if she was walking along a path, stepping up on the seats when she came to them and jumping down as light as a cat, and when she got to the end of the boat I held out my hand, not to help her, and she took it, not needing any help, and I held onto it and she held on, and we walked back up across the clearing to the shade.

  13

  I don’t know how long it was that Brenda Sue and I stayed there at that clearing, but I believe it was longer than either of us had meant it to be. Because first it was strange, being altogether alone, just the two of us, back up under the bank in the shade, where no one could see us or even hear us talk, with no one to look at but each other, and yet with no place else to look, either, except out at the creek, with the sun so bright on the water that you could hardly stand it, and with it seeming like we were practically on an island, sitting there side by side so close that when we looked at each other it was almost like we had touched. It took us some time just to get used to it, and it was somehow not always the easiest thing in the world to find something natural to talk about. Particularly after we had used up the subjects of Jack’s broken wrist and the lost skiff and the unusualness of the weather. After that, there seemed nothing left to talk about but us, which we hardly needed called to our attention.

  Yet we got used to it finally. And more than that, if I am going to stay honest about it. Without all the details, there was some time passed in this way, too. Considerable.

  But unless I should seem to be hinting at some bigger deal than there actually was, maybe I should stop right here and make it clear that nothing was done that would shame either Brenda Sue or me if it were to be known, or which we should have to worry about in the days to come, if that is plain enough.

  Maybe this should not really have had to be said, but without the details, some doubts might be left, and there can be details in things between a boy and girl, it seems to me, wonderful in themselves, but somehow dead wrong in the telling. And which won’t be told by me, anyhow. In the name of honesty, I will only say that there is a limit to the way a boy and girl can get to know each other just by talking, especially if what they have got around to talking about is how surprising it is the way it seems they have known each other forever. In a case such as that, I found out then even two of the shyest people in the world can come to the limit of their words. And then they’ll just naturally find some other ways of finding out and knowing more, not just how they feel about each other, but how they actually feel. Which I have said less nicely than it happened. But while this is a general subject surely better known by others than by me, and no big news to the world, still it seems to me that the details are no more the same for everyone than are people’s fingerprints. And this kind of specialness, these details, because we’re born that way, I guess, no two alike, is no one’s business but my own. In this case, mine and Brenda Sue’s. And that is every bit as honest as I mean to get.

  Except to say that for a time, at least, I have never been less clumsy in my life.

  And then somehow time had slipped well on into the afternoon, surprising us both, and while I didn’t say anything about it, it began to seem to me that it didn’t look as though I would be able to get down to the basin and back up to Byrd’s landing before dark after all. But it had been so unexpected and perfect a day up until then that I couldn’t let it worry me too much. Even so, I might have still had time enough if I hadn’t decided that it would not be right to let Brenda Sue start back for the landing, a thing we had finally started talking about, at least, without having some food first, something we both had forgot all about. For a while she argued that she shouldn’t take any more of my time, that I was a good ways off from the basin still and that finding Mr. Haywood’s skiff was more important. But then I convinced her that we could at least have a kind of dessert together, if not a regular meal such as Jack and I had been used to, and I went down to the boat and got out the can of pitted yellow cherries I had been cooling in the fish well, and the tin of homemade cookies Mrs. Haywood had sent along, and we took the time to eat the can of cherries and some cookies together. And then I still might have had time to make it there and back by dark, if I rowed hard enough, if it hadn’t been for one last thing. We had finished eating and were standing up and looking around, getting used to the idea, it seemed, of going two separate ways again, which was strange, how strange this could have come to seem to us in so short a time. And then Brenda Sue looked off up the river and shook her head. “It’s hard to believe,” she said, “that two days ago we did not even know that each other was alive. And yet here we are. When you first saw me coming, did you know it was me?”

  “I hoped it was,” I said, and then I said, “I will never forget it.”

  “I will tell you something, Rodney,” she said. “Coming down the creek with Pa’s message for you, I kept thinking that I had a kind of message for you, too, only I was sure I would be too scared to come out and say it, that you might misunderstand or just not care. And I was still not sure if I should tell you or not, when I caught up with you here. Because I could see what a hurry you must be in to find that skiff, to have got this far so quick. And anyhow, this didn’t seem the place to talk about anything. I guess you don’t know it, but hardly nobody comes here any more. Not since several years ago, when they found the dead nigger here, floated ashore. That’s what it’s called now, Dead Nigger Point. Yet even so, I won’t forget it, either. Our being here.”

  “Dead Nigger Point?” I said.

  “How could you have known?” Brenda Sue said.

  It was foolish what I said then, as though I still hadn’t heard her right. “Is that all it’s ever called? Not just Dead Man’s Point or something?”

  “I don’t know,” Brenda Sue said, looking at me sort of surprised. “If it had of been a white man, I guess that’s what they would have called it, Dead Man’s Point, or something like that. But it was a nigger.” I guess what surprised me most of all was the easy way she said it, like she didn’t even notice it, the word nigger. “Didn’t Jack ever mention it to you?”

  “No,” I said.

  “It was an awful thing,” she said. “They say he might have been killed and not just drowned. There were all sorts of stories. And they never even found out who he was. Hardly more than a child, Pa said. But that was years ago, Rodney. I was hardly more than a child myself. I’m surprised that Jack had not told you about it before.”

  And for a second or two all I wanted to do was to forget it, as
though it was just something that had come up by accident and had nothing to do with Brenda Sue and me at all. I could see Brenda Sue watching me, sort of puzzled but smiling a little, and I thought that what she was probably waiting for was only for me to ask her what it was that she had been about to say, her own message that she wasn’t scared to tell me now. And then a feeling came over me worse than when I had seen my uncle’s barn going up in flames, or when I had come down to the edge of the creek and found Mr. Haywood’s skiff gone, a sick feeling, that everything had changed so fast and gone wrong, somehow because of me, and with no way left for me alone to make it right. I never wanted harder just to forget a thing in all my life. Because if I didn’t, then whatever I said would not be at all what Brenda Sue was expecting, and after all we had said and done, it could hardly seem fair or right to her. And I knew it was true. It wouldn’t be fair or right, because with the time we had spent together, and knowing Alabama as well as I did, I had never bothered to take the time or to take the chance to let her know, as I had done with Jack, how I felt about some things. And the way she stood there, just smiling and waiting and not knowing, it half killed me, knowing that whatever I said I would probably say it wrong and end up only hurting Brenda Sue’s feelings and not helping some poor, dead, unknown black man at all, or anyone else, black or white, and certainly not myself. And the thing that struck me as most crazy, the saddest thing of all, was standing there realizing almost for the first time that Brenda Sue was so darkly colored herself, and that from the first I had liked her for it, her own special color, the way she was so beautiful and so special in every other way, too.

  And then I said it about as wrong as it could be said. “Speaking only for myself,” I said, practically like I was talking to a stranger, “if a man is dead and unknown and possibly murdered, that seems enough. I could not see a reason for calling him nigger as well.”

  It was like I had slapped her in the face. She pulled back, her smile still lasting for a second or two, and the waiting look still sort of showing in her face and eyes. I had caught her that much by surprise, so that even as she pulled away, like I had hit her, she was still smiling and waiting, still not expecting trouble at all, even though it had already come. Then her face went blank. If she had turned her back to me, or held her hands up over her face, her expression could not have been more hidden, that quickly, from my sight. She just looked at me, as though I had gone that blank to her, too. I had said it too sudden, too stupid, and all wrong. And I stood there staring at her and not knowing what else to say. I felt like a freak.

  And then finally I said, “I am sorry, Brenda Sue. I didn’t mean to sound so smart like that. I guess I was mostly surprised. I mean I know this is Alabama and people will say nigger without thinking much about it, while back home when they say it they will always mean something ugly; but even so, somehow it surprised me, to hear you say the word so easy. Especially you.”

  The way she stepped back a step and stiffened up, I knew, almost for certain—suddenly understanding what it must always have been like for her, growing up so dark-colored in a place where this could be something so serious that you wouldn’t even be teased about it to your face, where no one would dare, but where you would still always wonder what was being whispered about it behind your back—I knew I had said the wrong thing again, for sure, saying how the word had surprised me, especially from her, the word nigger.

  Then she took a quick little breath, and for just a second she tried to smile, as though she was trying to remind me how friendly we had been, still able to smile, even with something as awful as this that had already happened, so that we could somehow work it out and stay friends, if I just didn’t make it impossible, if I would just have enough sense not to come right out and mention her own dark color. “I would just like to know,” Brenda Sue said, “what you meant by me especially?”

  I had guessed right. There was no doubt of it left in my mind. Well, I thought, now you have done it, for sure; because if you try and stand here and lie about something real like this, you won’t fool her for one second, and she will think that all you are interested in is the fact that she is a girl. And if you go ahead and lie, that will be the truth, you will be doing it for just that reason. She is not going to kill you or hurt you or even be hurt herself if you tell the truth; but she is apt to tell you to go to hell and mean it. Although at first, it may hurt her feelings some, at that, if you say it wrong, which you probably will.

  I don’t know how long I stood there thinking to myself about it; not long, I guess, but it seemed long. But I finally just went ahead and took a chance, a chance with both of us, that her feelings might get hurt, no matter how I said it, and that I might get told to go back where I had come from and the sooner the better. “I’ll tell you what I meant by that,” I said. “It would not have surprised me, for instance, if it had of been Jack, even though his mother is against saying nigger, and we have argued it out a few times ourselves. But you have to admit that there is nothing either shy or what you might call sweet about Jack. He is apt to say about anything that comes to mind, with one word as good as another, just so long as you know what he is talking about. I would not say that any of this seems true of you. The truth is, I have never met a nicer person than you in my life, nicer acting, or more nicely shy and sweet and everything. Or nicer-looking. That is what I mean by you especially, surprising me, saying nigger so easy. I did not mean the fact that you are far more dark-colored than some girls, but I’m not afraid to say I noticed it, either, if this is what you think I meant. Naturally I have noticed it. I have just never bothered to wonder about it. To me, all it is is beautiful. I hope I have not put it wrong.”

  “Well,” Brenda Sue said, “I do not like hints is all.”

  “I am too stupid for hints,” I said. “If I say something wrong, I generally just say it. Have you noticed any hints?”

  “No,” she said. “You have put it pretty plain, I guess. You don’t like your friends saying nigger.”

  I thought about it a second, and then I said, “Well, I believe I said some other things, too.”

  Then Brenda Sue seemed to relax a little, like the worst was over, even though I had mentioned the fact of her dark-colored skin clear enough. “Ma’s folks have both some Greek and French about them,” she said. “I reckon that’s where the color comes from. It is hardly something we talk about. But I guess it’s something you would have to notice. I have noticed it all right. Mostly I have noticed how other people notice, without ever saying.”

  “Well,” I said, relaxing again a little myself, “I have said it, and I hope I haven’t said it wrong.”

  “You said it nice,” she said. Then she stopped, as though she wasn’t sure about what she was going to say next, and then she said it anyhow, trusting me, I guess. “I have thought about it a lot; and I used to be bothered, you know, and then I would think how awful it must be, well, to be really colored.”

  “It hardly seems fair,” I said.

  Then I could see the real trouble was over, and we both stopped standing around so stiff and uncertain about everything and started smiling and talking about this and that again, and it was all pretty much the way it had been before, except that it took an hour, probably, just standing around, and then getting both the boats back in the water and starting to say good-by, but holding off, only now and then coming back to the thing that had caused the trouble in the first place, a little thing, I guess, and hardly worth the trouble it had caused us, but getting to where we could talk about it like it was something we had known about between us forever, even though we never really got quite natural about it at that, not altogether, like there was something important about it, even so, the word nigger. Something wrong.

  And it wasn’t until Brenda Sue and I had finally said good-by, and she had gone on up the creek and I had started on down it again, with some signs of evening already in the air and the wind blowing just as hard if not harder than it had been blowing all day, that
I thought about it, and realized that it must have been really important, after all; or else how could it have come so close to ruining everything between us?

  And what Brenda Sue had meant to tell me, and what she had finally told me, and the reason we hadn’t had to hurry too much, although in the end we had spent a good hour or so longer there on the clearing than we had meant to, was the message that tomorrow her mother would be gone all day with her father, visiting kin in Mobile. That was all. She would be home, all day, alone.

  It was the last thing she told me before she started back up the creek, and it was about the straightest thing she had told me yet. There were a million ways she could have said it, I guess, pretending it was something she had just remembered or had just happened to think about, or somehow saying it as though it didn’t mean a thing, and going on by it and leaving me to figure it out for myself. But she didn’t do it that way at all. She just said it, and then stood there looking at me, serious and scared. And I knew that by then she wasn’t afraid that it might not matter to me, but only that I might misunderstand.