(2006) When Crickets Cry

by Charles Martin

  I pointed at his magazine and then the bait shop. "And if that guy in the office sees that magazine, he'll fire you for sure. He doesn't put up with that stuff around his docks."

  Termite dropped his shoulders like he knew he was about to start looking for another job. "You gonna tell him?"

  I shook my head.

  "You sure?" he asked again.

  "I won't need to."

  "What? Why's that?" he asked.

  "Because of something my wife read to me that I have since found to be true."

  Termite dropped his shoulders as if he knew he was about to get another sermonette. "Yeah? What's that?"

  "From out of your heart, you speak." I pointed at the magazine. "You put that crap in your heart, and you can't help but find it coming out your mouth. It'll color and flavor your whole person. Pretty soon, it'll eat you up."

  "Yeah, well ... I still want to get me some of that."

  "Termite, every man does. It's in our makeup. Something would be wrong with you if you didn't. That's why they sell so many."

  CHARLIE AND I DROVE HAMMERMILL'S BOAT THE LONG WAY home. He smiled over every ripple, wake, and current. I just wanted him to keep the thing moving. Despite my affinity for working on boats, I don't always like riding in them. I have a tendency to get a little woozy. As long as we're moving, I'm great, which is why rowing is no problem. But the moment we stop, and that boat rocks the least bit, I'm about three minutes from hanging my head over the side.

  We docked, lifted the boat up out of the water, and Charlie said he was taking the rest of the day off. He slapped me on the back and started feeling his way down to the dock while practicing his steps.

  "Dance class tonight?"

  "Yup," he said, looking like Fred Astaire dancing with a walking stick. "We're learning the mambo. Probably end with a waltz."

  "Charlie, you're a piece of work."

  "You ought to see the instructor. She's French and ..." Charlie smiled and continued dancing across the dock. Clicking his stick down the stone steps, he said, "It's Tuesday. You know what you're doing?"

  I knew what he was asking, I just wasn't sure how to answer him. "Not really."

  "I can tell." Charlie spun around. "Holler if you get stuck."

  "Thanks."

  He felt his way along the side of the dock, lowered the sandbags that raised the guide wires we had strung underwater from his dock to mine, and he took a flying leap off the dock.

  The last couple of days, I'd had a nagging feeling that my promise of a boat ride to Cindy might have gotten me in over my head. Charlie's question had pretty well convinced me that I had, but I didn't have time to worry about it too much because the phone was ringing when I walked in the back door.

  "Hello?"

  "Reese? Reese Mitch?"

  "Speaking." I knew who it was.

  "You still want to take two girls for a boat ride?"

  "What makes you think I'd change my mind?"

  "Experience."

  "Sounds like a story there."

  "You might say."

  I laughed. `Just filled up with gas. Tell me where you live."

  Chapter 22

  y our senior year in high school, our physical activities together had become somewhat limited. We could go to the movies or dinner or shop through one or two stores, but we couldn't stroll the mall or a park for four or five hours unless we rented a wheelchair, and Emma hated to be seen that way.

  Her forced idleness told me the clock was ticking, so I continued to read every scientific book I could get my hands on that dealt with the human heart. But the more I read, the less I understood why textbooks treated the heart like Humpty Dumpty. Medicine and science-thanks in large part to Aristotle and Descartes-had divided the body into systems and parts. As well they should. How better to understand it? But I was learning that getting well and finding healing are two very different things.

  We were walking home from school one day when Emma took me by the hand and pulled me through old man Skinner's apple orchard. She had grown more quiet and idle, sketching less and seldom leaving the house without me. She looked brittle and pale, and a sadness had crept in behind her smile. It was as if the oil in her lamp were running low.

  She sat me down beneath a big apple tree, surrounded by fallen fruit, and handed me a box wrapped in a red bow. The sun hung low and lit the gray streaks that had recently appeared above her brow and above her ears, highlighting her brunette hair. I untied the ribbon, and inside sat a small gold medallion, about the size of a quarter, clasped to a gold chain. On the front was engraved Above all else, guard your heart ... And on the back ... for it is the wellspring of life. Thirteen magical words. She hung them around my neck, and we sat beneath the tree, surrounded by green grass, apples, and uncertainty, her listening to the beat of my rower's heart, and me concerned with the weakening and distant beat of hers. I stroked her hair, breathed deeply, and whispered inside myself, I knew it was love, and felt it was glory.

  That afternoon many of the pieces fell into place, and it struck me that doctors can help people get well, even prolong their lives, but they cannot heal them or make them whole. That's something else.

  Chapter 23

  opened the boathouse door, eyed my two choices, and dropped the lift. I knew Hammermill's Greavette would make a better impression, but I guess I'm just a fan of worksin-progress. Finished boats don't need me, and Podnah still did. Once she had floated clear, I cranked her up and backed out of the boathouse. I cleared the slip, slid into the Tallulah, and turned south to pick up Cindy and Annie.

  They lived in a two-room cottage along one of the finger creeks that fed the lake. Much like the fish camp Emma and I had first slept in, it was long on character and short on everything else.

  When the engineers flooded the town of Burton, the waters rose up the sides of the small Appalachian Mountains and formed what are now fingers where people built houses, or shacks, depending on their budget. On one of those fingers is Wildcat Creek Cove. The farthest reaches of the creek are narrow and overhanging with trees where more than one rope swing has been hung.

  Somewhere in the fifties, Cindy explained, her parents had bought what they called their "Sugar Shack"-a summer vacation spot and weekend getaway. The creek that led to their walking path and small dock was narrow, about three times the width of the Hacker, but looked deep, so I dunked the paddle in the water and checked, then eased up to the dock.

  From the boat I could see Cindy standing over the sink in the kitchen and Annie hovering in the shade near the back door. The girl I had met on the sidewalk was now more frail, less bouncy, wearing a faded baseball cap on her head and a bulky cast on her left arm and walking with small, unsteady steps. She was engulfed in a blaze-orange life vest and looked like a floating fish bobber.

  I tied off the boat, and Annie waved me closer. She placed a handkerchief over her mouth, coughed quietly, and smiled. She'd developed that fragile eggshell exterior that most kids have when they get pretty sick. I'd seen it a hundred times. It grew out of uncertainty and the realization that life is not open-ended. I had seen it in Emma. On days when she felt worse or just plain lousy, she'd try to cheer me up by telling me what she'd learned from King Solomon. She'd raise her chin, which usually brought on a cough, and stick a finger in the air and quote, "A joyful heart is good medicine, but a broken spirit dries up the bones."

  Annie needed some good medicine.

  She was standing by a box about two feet square with walls maybe two and a half feet high. It had been built out of junk wood, so none of the pieces matched. It stood on four legs that lifted it off the ground, and the inside walls were covered in wire mesh except for the top six inches, which were covered in slick nylon. The box had no cover or top.

  As I walked closer, I noticed that it smelled. Almost rotten. I looked inside and saw three or four half-eaten chunks of potato, a few vegetable slices, and ten thousand crickets.

  Annie whispered, "This is my cricket box."r />
  I nodded and watched as the bottom of the box moved: crickets crawling on crickets crawling atop other crickets.

  "I grow them here and then sell them to the bait shops. I sell them at $2 a dozen and they sell them for $4."

  "I never knew there was such a high markup on crickets."

  She nodded. "Folks around here like to fish with them. So me and Aunt Cici built this box and started growing them about a year ago."

  I nodded again, just getting used to the smell and the sight of so many crickets crawling across one another.

  "I sell about ten dozen a week during the summer. Sometimes fifteen. That's twenty to thirty dollars a week, and I really don't have to do anything." She looked up at me and smiled. "Pretty easy work, huh?"

  «yup „

  "I've made almost $600 this year just in crickets alone. If these make it, I've probably got another couple thousand in here."

  "That's an expensive box."

  She nodded and looked inside. "Tell me about it." We both studied the chaos crawling below us. "Sort of weird when you think about it."

  "What's that?"

  "That I'm selling crickets so I can buy somebody's heart."

  I nodded. "I guess that's one way to look at it."

  We walked down the steps, and Annie's hands shook as we neared the dock. I cranked the engine and then watched Cindy run out the back door drying her hands. I lifted Annie in and pretended to straighten her life vest with one hand while the other felt gently for a radial pulse.

  When Annie looked up at me, she also lifted her eyebrows. Her chest followed suit, and the result filled her lungs with air. It was a purposeful filling, like when Sal placed his stethoscope on her back and listened. Only this time, nobody had asked her to. I listened, knew she was struggling, and remembered listening to Emma do it ten thousand times. She breathed out and floated above the satisfaction of two seconds of just-enough air.

  I cut the engine and spoke: "I shot an arrow into the air, it fell to earth, I knew not where; for so swiftly it flew, the sight could not follow in its flight. I breathed a song into the air, it fell to earth I knew not where; for who has sight so keen and strong, that it can follow the flight of a song? Long, long afterward, in an oak, I found the arrow still unbroke, and the song, from beginning to end, I found again in the heart of a friend."

  Annie raised her eyebrows, sucked in again, and then sank once again inside her life vest. "Shakespeare?" she asked, smiling.

  "No," I said. "Longfellow."

  Cindy smiled, climbed into the boat, and drank deeply of the air. The only difference between her breathing and Annie's was that Cindy looked like she was hooked up to an oxygen tank and Annie wasn't. She sank down in the middle cockpit, letting her hair spill across the mahogany top and her sunglasses reflect the sky.

  I looked in the rearview mirror and noticed that last week's utilitarian dress of function over form had been replaced. In jean shorts that looked like she'd hemmed them herself, sandals, a white cotton button-up, Georgia Bulldogs baseball cap, and sunglasses, Cindy was doing a respectable job of revealing the form that had been disguised by work and necessity. With her head titled back, I hoped she hadn't observed my double take. She looked like anything but the cashier at the hardware store.

  The Velvet Drive transmission has only three settings: forward, reverse, and neutral. As with most boats, the speed was obtained by revving the rpm's of the engine, not shifting to higher gears. The stick used to engage any one of the three stood in front of Annie's knees like a lever working a secret trapdoor, so I pointed and got her to help me.

  "We need to go forward, so pull in that hand lever and push the whole thing forward."

  Annie gripped the handle and squeezed with both hands, but noticed she needed a little more oomph. So she closed her eyes, squeezed harder, and pushed. The engine slipped into gear, and we idled out of Wildcat Creek.

  We motored past a few larger homes that had grown up along the creek in the last decade and approached the open waters of the lake. Annie looked excitedly at Cindy and then at me. "I've never been out here."

  How can you live on this lake and not get out on it? I wondered, then felt guilty for thinking it. Dumb question.

  "Where would you like to go first?"

  Annie pointed south, and I turned as directed.

  The shoreline of Lake Burton is a monument to big houses, most of which are the second or third home of those who stay there. Each new construction is an attempt to outdo the neighbor next door. Owners brag, letting the practiced names and descriptions roll off their tongues like memorized poetry. Oh, so-and-so was our architect. It's a such-and-such home from this-or-that period. I know because after I had put them back together again and they had gotten off my table, every single one of them invited me to their second home in Vale, Aspen, or Bermuda ... or Lake Burton. For some, it was a way of saying thank you.

  Everywhere Annie's curiosity pointed, I turned the boat. For two hours we rode the creeks and shoreline of Burton. The smile and amazement never left her face. Dick's Creek, Moccasin Creek, Old Murray Cove. And when I showed her the dam, her eyes grew as large as half-dollars. Cindy, too, looked relieved, like she was glad to see Annie smiling but also grateful for the adult company. As we rode north, Annie placed her head on Cindy's lap and napped beneath the rumble and hum of the engine. Knowing she'd do well to sleep, I motioned to Cindy and asked if she was comfortable. She nodded and I motioned again at the lake, wanting to know if she'd like to keep going. She smiled, tipped her hat back, and we drove another hour around the lake.

  It was almost five when Annie woke at the north end of the lake, up near the YMCA camp, just beyond the bridge. As we passed southward under the bridge, I pointed east toward Charlie's and my little creek-with-no-name and said, "I live down there."

  Annie perked up. "I want to see."

  I hadn't thought about that. I was hoping to point and pass by, not point and stop in.

  Cindy motioned behind Annie's back, trying to let me know it wasn't necessary. Annie's face told a different story.

  "I don't have any lemonade," I said to Annie.

  She smirked. "That's okay. I don't drink it anyway. Too sweet."

  I turned into our creek and idled up alongside the dock. Cindy helped me tie up and hang the bumpers alongside. I cut the engine and lifted Annie onto the dock, and their jaws dropped. They took in everything: the boathouse, the workshop farther up the hill, and then the house, barely visible through the dogwood trees.

  "This is yours?" Cindy asked, as if she were afraid the real owners would appear any minute with a shotgun, telling her to get off their property.

  I led them up the walkway, where Annie instinctively grabbed my hand. Her hand was small, cold, a little uncertain-a feeling my hand knew well. What the hand dare seize the fire, and what shoulder and what art, could twist the sinews of thy heart? And when thy heart began to beat, what dread hand, and what dread feet? When the stars threw down their spears and water'd heaven with their tears, did he smile his work to see? Did he who made the Lamb make thee?

  We had stepped onto the stone walkway that led up to the house when Charlie called out from across the lake, "Stitch? That you?"

  "Yeah," I hollered back. "Brought my little cruise in for a tour of home. Charlie, meet Cindy McReedy and Annie Stephens."

  Charlie waved his white stick while Georgia sat ready at his side. "Hi, ladies. You two look lovely. Just lovely."

  Cindy looked at me, a little confused.

  Charlie then turned side to side to show off his suit. He buttoned the top button and snugged up his tie. "I'm off to my dancing lesson. How do I look?" He wore a blue and white, threebutton seersucker suit with white and black penguin wingtips. Add a top hat, and he'd have looked like Chaplin.

  "Charlie, you look ..." I smirked at Annie. `Just great."

  "I know it," Charlie said, dusting his shirtsleeve with the back of his palm. "Let's just hope the ladies do too. Preferably, ones th
at smell good." He smiled, grabbed the cable that acted as a guide wire up the steps and into his house, said, "Ladies!" and then disappeared beneath the trees.

  "Who is that?" Cindy said with a smile.

  I took Annie's hand and began leading her up toward the house. "Oh, that's my brother-in-law, Charlie. He's ..."

  I heard Cindy stop and take a short, quick breath that sounded like the end of it was squeezed off due to a constricted airway. Then I thought about what I'd just said.

  I turned and held up my hands. "My wife, Emma, was Charlie's sister. She died almost five years ago."

  Annie's hand tensed in mine, and the questions in Cindy's eyes disappeared, only to be replaced by twice as many more colored by shades of shared pain.

  "I'm sorry," I said. "I ... Charlie will always be my brotherin-law."

  Cindy's chest rose and fell as another deep breath filled her lungs, and the muscles in her face relaxed.

  "We work on boats together, and he helped me build this house."

  Annie was now holding my hand with both of hers. She pointed behind her. "But he's blind."

  "I know," I said, my eyes following Charlie's suit up through the tree line. `Just don't tell him that."

  She smiled and followed me up the steps. Halfway up she said, "Did he call you Stitch?"

  I nodded and, opening the door and letting them into the back porch, told her the story of Charlie swinging like Tarzan with his Stretch Armstrong rope. Cindy turned her head as though she'd caught a whiff of something she liked to smell. "What's that?" she said, pointing her nose in the air.

  "One of three things." I pointed at the green shoots sprouting up between the house and the lake that covered the underside of the trees like a bed of tall grass. "That's mint. Emma planted it here when we bought this place about seven years ago, and it spreads like kudzu. No weed whacker in the world can tame it."