The heavy leather aprons slapped onto the tile floor, then Miss Charlie dropped down onto the table, free of her harnesses and crouching on her skinny legs. Two pairs of leaded glass goggles hung from her cord belt.
“Suit up!” she said. “I’ll let them know at the hall that you worked for me today, get you some credit.”
Which was better than chopping holes in the river ice, so long as he finished the assignment intact.
Miss Charlie took four of Gather’s baking pans from the cupboard and laid them on the table. Gather liked to make cookies, when he could get eggs, and so had lots of pans. She laid each of the papers in its own tray and that made three different rectangles, three different ratios, with one table and four trays and four papers for the quantities. “Oh, Lord,” said Gather. “Oh, Lord.”
Miss Charlie made comforting noises and slung the heavy apron over Gather’s head. “Put on your goggles, young man. How often do you get to play with fire?”
Not often. It was true that Gather did not often get to play with fire. But this wasn’t comforting.
The first part of the experiment was designed to determine if the paper could burn. Gather had never seen paper that would burn, but Miss Charlie claimed to have heard of it, to have heard of paper that would immolate. So Gather tonged a coal out of the stove and placed it squarely on each of the papers, one by one. That was called the scientific method.
None of the papers even curled up brown like burning things do when they start to burn, so Miss Charlie had Gather fetch down a rag from the cupboard while she pulled a tiny clay bottle from a pouch at her belt. She poured a scant two or three drops from the bottle into the water from Gather’s saucepan, then took the rag from Gather and swabbed it around and around. The water went from smelling of metal to smelling of lemons. Miss Charlie then squeezed the rag over the papers. Each of them flickered on and off once, then shriveled up, twisting back almost to how they’d looked when they still held pepper seeds.
“That’s a datum!” said Miss Charlie.
Which was very exciting, but it was well into the afternoon by then, and the children had coaxed Gather onto the river without his breakfast. Between those labors and now all this science, he was very nearly starved.
Since the pans were laid out, and since he had plenty of sugar and even a few eggs, the thing to do seemed to be to bake cookies. Miss Charlie, long resident above Gather’s kitchen, knew his baking and was very excited by this plan.
“I’ll do more on this tomorrow,” she said, and swept the papers together onto a single pan. While she cast around looking for a receptacle she might deem appropriate to carry the papers upstairs, Gather pulled a mixing bowl out from beneath the dry sink.
He went to set it on the table and saw the soaked, twisted papers gathered all together. He raised his hands above his shoulders and keened. He began to breath in and out and in and out fast.
Miss Charlie took his hands and hummed. She breathed slower, slower, slower, slower . . . slow.
Then she saw the papers, too. She saw how’d they flickered back on and smoothly scuttled together into a new, single sheet. She saw that the words had crawled to the edges and she saw the finely detailed, heretic drawing that took up the center of the page.
“Why—” Miss Charlie was not a churchgoer, but she saw it. “Why, it’s God.”
How Miss Charlie convinced Gather not to go to the mayor or to the preachers with news of the picture was to: sing to him for one hour; tell him the names of all of his sisters that she’d ever known; give him the dried apricots she had tucked away in a burlap bag beneath the eaves in her apartment; promise him that the two of them knew as much about what God needed as anybody on the side of the river where people lived.
The whole time she was singing and listing and fetching and talking, Gather kept watching the paper on the table. It kept being God. God with people.
There was God, all of God, not just a little bit like on a coin, not just told about like in a sermon. All of God was on the papers on Gather’s table, and more. Because, unheard of! Untellable! There was a man with his hand on God’s flank and a woman kneeling next to God’s ferocious mouth. God, with people.
People lived on this side of the river. God lived on the other. Even should God want to cross, the river was too swift in the summer. The ice would not bear God’s weight in the winter.
It was impossible to know what to do, so Gather decided to let Miss Charlie decide. He was frightened, too frightened even to bake the cookies.
“I think there are three things we can do,” said Miss Charlie. “We have to choose one of these three things.” Miss Charlie held up three of her fingers and waved them around in a scientific way. Gather didn’t like threes. They made people mad. They were odd.
“Take it to a preacher,” she said. “But we’ve struck that already.” Gather saw then that she’d only started with three so that she could get to two right away, which was easier and soothing.
“We can hide it and never speak of it.” Miss Charlie looked at Gather very carefully when she offered that up. “Gather, could you do that? Could you never speak of it?”
Gather scrunched up his face and thought. “I think I would do a pretty good job for a pretty long time, Miss Charlie,” he said. “But I think that then I’d forget and tell.”
“That’s what I think would happen, too,” Miss Charlie said. “And I think you are very wise to be able to predict things like that. Don’t tell me you can’t be a scientist!”
“But what is number two?” Gather asked. He remembered that there were really only two.
“God . . .” Miss Charlie was thinking very hard. “God must be lost. God must need to get back across the river.”
Gather attended every Sunday service. Most times, it was the same preacher—the little green-eyed girl’s father—up there. Sometimes, though, if that preacher was away, then it was the mayor up there because he was the lay leader. There were even times when it was a different preacher altogether. And all of them did different homilies—a little bit different, anyway—and all of them always led three songs, an odd number of songs. But the thing that was always the same, no matter who was up there, was the way it ended, when they would say, “This is my God, and this is his body, and this is his blood.” And then everybody would eat the bread.
“Does God need to go across . . .” Gather paused. “Does God need to go back across, because otherwise, everybody will eat God all up?”
Miss Charlie could pitch her eyebrows up as steep as rooftops. “Yes, Gather,” she said. “Yes, I think that’s it exactly.”
Miss Charlie said that Gather should stop taking the work assignments he was given at the hall every morning. “You can work for me full time,” she said. She tucked her bottom lip under her teeth, which meant she was performing a sum. “I have enough points for that to work for a time. For as long as we’ll need, anyway.”
Gather had never had a permanent assignment. It was a comfortable distraction, even when Miss Charlie made him practice being quiet for the whole next morning before they went to arrange it with the mayor.
The mayor was outside the hall, watching preachers push wagons full of soil up the road to the chapterhouse. He spotted them as they approached and fled inside, but forgot to bar the door.
Miss Charlie marched straight past the glaring preachers and on through the door. Gather didn’t know whether his proscribed silence had started while they were still outside, but to be safe he didn’t answer their calls for him to lend his shoulder to their wagon wheel.
The big chimney in the hall had a poor draw, and the air was thick with smoke. The mayor had taken refuge behind his desk and was pushing beads back and forth on a calendar rod when Miss Charlie cornered him.
“Charlie,” said the mayor. “Charlie with the questions.”
“I want—” Charlie began, but the mayor said, “No!”
He stood up suddenly and reached for his stick. Words ran around it in a loop
, blinking on and off when he tamped it against the ground in time with his words to Miss Charlie.
“No, you cannot go to the chapterhouse. No, you cannot have an . . . exemplum of the soil before the preachers bless it. You cannot take a skiff south unless you pair with a bad-batch man, and you will never have a bible!”
At that last, he struck the stone floor so hard that his stick made a buzzing noise and went dark. The three of them all stared at it together for a moment until it flashed back on.
“I want to hire Gather for the rest of the week,” said Miss Charlie.
Even in the dark, Gather was able to follow his sledge tracks from the PK morning back across the river. At first, Gather wanted to find a sledge and pull Miss Charlie on it, but she said that they were equal partners. She said that it was an equal endeavor.
At night, the fires in the watchtower seemed to burn as bright as a pine-wood fire, but Gather knew they weren’t, not really. He had a job once hauling yellow logs out of the water and stacking them to dry by the watchtower fire, but only while the regular man was sick.
They were close enough to the fire for them to cast flickery shadows on the ice, but in the afternoon, Miss Charlie had gone to see the night watchman with some cookies she had made herself—unprecedented—and said that he would be sick tonight. He would not raise the hue and cry.
When they got to where the tracks ended, Gather said, “SHHHHH-CHOOM,” as quietly as he could.
“Is that how God talks?” asked Miss Charlie, and Gather remembered that she could never have been so close to the other bank before.
“The only time I ever heard God was that morning, Miss Charlie,” said Gather. “And that is what God said.”
“Did you know that makes you a prophet, Gather? If you hear God, I mean?” she asked him.
“All those little girls heard it, too. Little prophets,” said Gather. “Little prophetesses.”
“Maybe I’m wrong, then,” she said. “Like on an initial hypothesis. Maybe you have to hear and listen both.”
Gather didn’t understand, but his feet were very cold from the nighttime ice. He shuffled the last few yards to the shoreline and noticed that he wasn’t afraid anymore. He reached his mittened hand up to a branch to steady himself, then gestured back to Miss Charlie. “Give me God,” he said. “I’ll put God up in this tree.”
Miss Charlie had wrapped God up in white clothes from the laboratory. Neutral. Sterile. She pulled the bundle out from the bottom of her leather pack. Mysteriously, she had filled the pack with food and blankets and tinder. She handed the bundle to Gather.
“When God is back on the bank, there, Gather, what about those people? What about the man and the woman with God?”
Gather lowered his hands to his side. The bundle hung in the loose grip of his left mitten. He waited to see if Miss Charlie would keep talking, but she didn’t.
“Is this another experiment?” Gather asked her. He felt himself getting agitated and didn’t know whether to push it down.
“I don’t think so,” said Miss Charlie. “I think this is an exploration.”
That was another word to learn, so Gather said, “What does it mean?”
Miss Charlie put her mitten around the bundle and pressed it against Gather’s palm, so they were holding God there, holding God up and between them.
“I think it means we keep going,” she said.
Then there was no agitation in him, and no hesitation. Then there was some clarity in him. “I think so, too,” he said.
The Force Acting on the Displaced Body
The little creek behind my trailer in Kentucky is called Frankum Branch. I had to go to the courthouse to find that out. Nobody around here thought it had a name. But all the little creeks and branches in the world have names, even if nobody remembers them, or remembers which Frankum they’re named after.
I wanted to know the name when I was planning the trip back to Paris. That’s Paris as in Bourbon kings, not Paris as in Bourbon County. I was writing out my route and Frankum Branch was Step One. I couldn’t afford to fly, so I was going by boat. I didn’t have a boat, so I was going to build one.
I was drinking a lot of wine just then.
I saved the corks.
Before I decided to go back to Paris, I considered using the bottles to build some sort of roadside tourist attraction. I looked into it a little bit, but the math defeated me very quickly. You remember how I am with math.
A boat, though—a boat built out of corks—that turned out to be easy. All you need is a roll or two of cheesecloth and some thread and a needle and of course a whole lot of corks. I put it together in a long afternoon in the field behind the trailer.
None of the bottles, full or empty, would break on the corks, so I never did christen it. I’d be happy to hear your suggestions for a name, though; you were always good at that.
The neighbors had that party, set up the game to name their new kitten. Calliope, you suggested, and nobody else even came close. You didn’t go to the party, though. I carried over the note you’d written.
Frankum Branch, that’s a pretty good name. Even if I couldn’t track the provenance, I know there are Frankums around here, know they’ve been here for a long time. Probably a particular Frankum, sure, but here’s a case where ignorance is kind of liberating. Since I don’t know—since nobody knows, not even the people at the courthouse—it could have been a man or a woman, an old lady or a little boy. It could be named for all the Frankums.
The boat behaved at first. It rolled down the hill and settled into the branch, stretching out long because the stream bed is so narrow. It waited for me to throw my bags in and to clamber in myself, and then I headed downstream.
I only moved at the speed the water moved. I only went as fast as the world would carry me.
How far is my trailer from Sulfur Creek? See, that’s a more interesting question than it might seem. There are so many ways to measure it.
If I walk out my front door and follow Creek Bend Drive to the end of my landlord’s farm, down into the bottom and across Frankum, up another hill and then back down to where the blacktop turns to gravel, it’s about two miles. That’s the closest place, I think. Where the road breaks up into gravel is where Frankum Branch flows into Sulfur Creek.
But there are other ways I can go. I can walk through the fields, cross the branch on rocks at a narrow place, climb through some woods. I think it might only be about a mile and a half, that way.
Then there are crows. “As the crow flies.” Do you think that means that crows are supposed to fly in straight lines? Maybe they used to. I watch crows, and I don’t think I’d trust them to give me advice on distance. I don’t think I trust crows or creeks either on much of anything, except to be themselves.
Finally, there’s time. Nobody ever gives distances in miles anymore, but it’s not because they’ve switched to metric. They measure how far it is from here to there with their watches, not their odometers.
That place, that confluence of water and roads both? It’s about two miles from my trailer, it’s about a mile and half, it’s about an hour if you take Frankum Branch in a boat made out of corks.
So then I was on Sulfur Creek, which is broader than Frankum. The boat rounded itself up into a little doughnut. I smelled the water in the creek and I tasted it, searching for rotten eggs, I guess, or hell.
The sulfur must have washed away, though. Sometimes that happens, things wash away and only the names are left.
My hometown—the town I lived closest to growing up and the one I live closest to again—it’s an island, maybe. At the edge of town, you have to cross a bridge over Russell Creek. At every edge of town. Every road leading in and out passes over Russell Creek.
When I was younger, I thought that meant that the creek flowed in a circle. I’d seen illustrations of the Styx in my mythology books.
It’s not, of course. The creek and the town are neither of them circles, and the roads don’t lead out in per
fect radials along the cardinal directions, something else I used to believe.
What’s the difference between a creek and a river? Length, just length. Nothing about how much water flows through it, nothing about breadth or depth. In Kentucky, if a rivulet you can step across is at least a hundred miles long, then it’s a river. Russell Creek is ninety-nine miles long. Maybe it’s the longest creek in the world.
When I floated out onto it, I started thinking that maybe I should have dug a trench somewhere at the headwaters or made a long oxbow in a bottom. Maybe instead of building the boat I should have lengthened Russell Creek. But then it would just be a short river.
Russell Creek flows around the town, and beneath the bluffs that line one side of my family’s farm, and then winds, winds, winds through the county to the Green River.
The Green River pretty much named itself.
The Green is deep and swift above the first locks and dams, then shallow and tamed below. Floating through the impounded lake at the county line, the boat began to misbehave. It didn’t want to leave town, after all.
It bunched up in a tight little sphere. I bounced on the top, netting my nylon bags filled with wine bottles and this notebook and a corkscrew into the cheesecloth so they wouldn’t drop down and disturb the muskies. Then the boat stretched out, became narrower and narrower, longer and longer, so it almost looked like it was floating forward.
But I could tell it wasn’t really moving, so I tried to paddle for a while with my hands. I kept getting pushed back by the wakes of fishing boats headed for the state dock. When I gave up, exhausted, the boat finally shuddered or shrugged and drifted on through the spillway, through the dam.
Telling the Map Page 10
