Down by the Riverside

by Jackie Lynn

  “Well,” I said as a means of departure. “It’s getting late and I’m hungry again. I think I’ll go fix myself a sandwich.”

  Mary glanced up at the clock on the wall. “The day almost half over,” she said and shook her head as if she was behind on her daily tasks. “Thank you for watching the office.”

  She returned the blue book to the top drawer, placed a couple of pens in the cup on the top shelf.

  “Perhaps we should reduce her rate of stay since she performed a bit of my work today.” Ms. Lou Ellen winked at me and waited for Mary to respond.

  “Nah, that’s fine.” I said, figuring Rip would pay the bill anyway. “I was glad to help out.”

  “It was a pleasure meeting you, Ms. Lou Ellen,” I said.

  “The pleasure was all mine.” She drew every word out, punching each syllable like a poet.

  “Well, good-bye then,” I said to them both.

  “Bye, dear,” Ms. Lou Ellen said.

  Mary threw up her hand at me while she continued arranging and rearranging the items on the counter.

  I waved my good-bye and walked out of the office, making my way to the river.

  SEVEN

  I fell in love at 11:59 A.M. on a Tuesday, a hot June day when the sun stood alone in the clear blue Arkansas sky. Just before the falling, there were highway sounds off in the distance, jake brakes on eighteen-wheelers slowing down as they headed toward the construction work on Highway 55, southbound. There were river sounds, water slapping against the sides of a two-tiered tug and barge going toward Memphis against the muddy current, waterfowl—sandpipers, I think—splashing themselves along the edge of the smallest pond.

  There was a gentle hum of a conversation between two men, fishing talk, lines and lures and catches. A light breeze blew through the leaves on the small, knotty birch trees that lined the bank. A swishing sound, like something going by too fast. A car on gravel near the office. A woman speaking softly to her dog. A train whistle, far away, but moving in the direction of the railroad crossing at First Street and Broadway.

  I was forty-one years old, single, recently divorced, not looking for companionship. I had my grandmother Burns’s narrow chin, my mother’s dark eyes and thick hair, her father’s peach skin, fifteen extra pounds, and I was on my way to somewhere other than where I was. I was walking, not too fast, not thinking that I was paying close attention to the path or the sky or the sounds of the late morning. I was thinking about what I had to eat in the refrigerator of my camper.

  I fell in love with Thomas Sawyer as soon as I laid my eyes on him, maybe before, since I recognized him when I saw him, knew I had waited for him for more years than I had been married.

  Dark as a thundercloud, tall, lean-boned, looking ten years younger than what he was; I felt him before I saw him. I sped up my pace without even understanding why, just to get closer to him. Knew I loved him even before he stood up, turned around, and faced me.

  It was the way I had always hoped falling in love would be.

  “You’re new,” was what he said to me, even though he doesn’t remember those being his first words.

  He says that he said to me, “Well, here you are.” And even if that wasn’t what he said it would make for a more interesting story, but that isn’t what he said. He said, “You’re new.”

  He was standing up from the chair that he had placed near the short pier at the big pond. There was a bucket hidden in the tall grass. He gently laid his fishing pole beside where he sat, and was getting ready to reach into the small cooler he had next to him, going to get a soda and the egg salad sandwich he had made and packed for his lunch.

  I was heading the long way to river row, to my camper, going past the big pond, on the other side of the office. So unusually attuned to the things around me, all the sounds and the signs that something important was about to take place, I almost walked right into him.

  “New?” I asked, surprised at the observation, stunned at the level of emotion filling me on such a clear and satisfied morning, dizzy-headed from the way things were spinning, outside in the white sun and inside the tight spaces of my heart.

  “New,” he said again.

  I think my mouth stood wide-open.

  “At Shady Grove.” And he smiled.

  “Yes,” I answered, pulling my mouth shut, pressing my lips together. “Yes, that’s right.”

  “I thought I saw Ledford drop you off yesterday.”

  He’s been watching me, I thought. Without either one of us knowing it, he’s been waiting for me like I’ve been waiting for him.

  My first love, Rip, my ex-husband, was not waiting for me when we met. Rip has never waited for anybody. I just came across his path when he was getting ready to graduate from college, and he didn’t have a job or a place to live or a plan for what he wanted. Marrying a nurse, a young woman settled and submissive, buying a house near his parents; I was just a means to make sense of the complexities of life to a boy needing direction.

  Oh, I don’t want to sound completely pessimistic about my marriage. I do think Rip loved me, wanted to make a life with me. I just think I could have been any girl, that anybody would have been qualified for the position he was seeking to fill. I just happened to be the one who walked through the door when he opened it. I just happened to be the one he met on the night he had decided he needed something stable to which to cling.

  And at the age of nineteen, almost finished with nursing school, already living on my own and paying my bills, I was the poster child for stability.

  And Rip was a good-looking boy. He was every girl’s idea of a great catch. I thought of nothing except how lucky I was that he chose me. It never crossed my mind that it might not be a choice that lasted very long. Nor did I think that the choice for a wife is altogether different from the choice for a woman to love. Unfortunately, it took me more than twenty years to figure that out.

  Tom wasn’t looking for stability when we met. He wasn’t looking for an anchor or a stronghold or a port to dock his boat. He wasn’t looking for anything. He was just waiting. He says now that the not-looking was what made our love so sweet to him in the beginning.

  He says that it’s the surprise of love that gives the relationship its strength. That it’s not the attraction or the devotion or even the commitment. It’s the surprise, he says, the unexpectedness of finding somebody that fits you, the unlikelihood, especially at a late date, of finding another complete human being who matches up to you eyeball to eyeball and who loves you the way you’ve always longed to be loved.

  That, he says, is the best thing about living and the most important gift of life. The surprise of finding love at exactly the moment you’re not looking.

  “Rose,” I said to him before he asked.

  “I’m Rose. Rose Franklin Burns Griffith. Rose Franklin.”

  I wanted no detail of my life withheld from this man fishing on the Tuesday I fell in love.

  “That’s a powerful string of names,” he replied and then said, “Thomas Sawyer.”

  He wiped his fingers on a red handkerchief that was stuck in his front shirt pocket, then reached out to shake my hand.

  “Tom,” I replied. “Tom Sawyer,” I repeated, our hands still clasped. “I’ve heard of you.”

  He pulled his hand away gently and nodded his head slowly. “Yep,” he said. “It’s a common name.”

  “No,” I replied, realizing he thought I was making fun of him.

  “No,” I said again. “Not that way.” I was embarrassed. “Well, I mean, I have heard of that name, too. But that’s not what I mean,” I stammered. “Mary and Ms. Lou Ellen said I should talk to you.”

  He lifted his eyebrows, interested. He studied my face, which I felt start to flush.

  “About what?” he asked and I wasn’t sure what he meant.

  I paused, then shook my head, demonstrating my confusion.

  “Mary and Ms. Lou Ellen said that you should talk to me about what?” he asked.

 
; “Oh, right,” I said, suddenly remembering.

  “Uh . . .” I stumbled with my words, “About the river and this area.” I glanced around. “About Lawrence Franklin.”

  His head jerked up when I said his name.

  “You were friends, right?” I asked, hoping I wasn’t being too nosy.

  He walked down a couple of steps to the bank and pulled his line out of the water. He stuck the pole in the ground beside the bucket, the line swinging around the top, and he sat down on the pier across from where I was standing. I loomed over him.

  He peered up at me, the sun causing him to squint, smoothed his hands across the tops of his legs, and said, “Have a seat.” He motioned with his hand to his folding canvas chair.

  I sat down.

  He asked, “So what do you want to know?”

  I paused, thinking about the unformed questions, about the things Mary and Ms. Lou Ellen thought I should ask, about his relationship with the dead man, about life on the Mississippi.

  “Tell me something about your friend,” I replied.

  He glanced away for a second and then turned and faced the water. I could tell that he was thinking about what he wanted to say.

  He cleared his throat.

  “Lawrence loved this place. Except for the time we were both away at war or at school, we fished together at this very spot practically once a week for more than forty years.” He nodded slowly as if he was remembering each and every time.

  “We grew up together. Our lives were very similar,” he added.

  I didn’t comment. I figured he wasn’t waiting for anything I could say in reply.

  “And we were both drawn to this river. It’s as if her stories bound us together and bound us to her banks. She was our primary teacher in life.”

  I considered what he was saying, thought about the relationship the two men had with each other and with the Mississippi River.

  “What stories?” I asked.

  “Lots of them,” he answered.

  He paused and could see I was waiting for one or two that he might share, and he decided to oblige.

  He smiled. “The Mississippi,” he said proudly, each syllable a dance across his tongue. “Well, let’s see. The Indians were here first, of course. The Chicasaws. The first white man who discovered it was a Spanish explorer named de Soto in 1542. He wrote others about it, but they must not have been very interested in it because nobody else came for more than a hundred years.

  “Then later a man by the name of La Salle returned to the area. He sailed it and wrote about it, but again it was awhile before anybody else from Europe wanted to visit this part of the new country.”

  He scratched his chin and continued. He apparently enjoyed giving history lessons to newcomers.

  “In 1863 the basin was known as the ‘Body of the Nation.’ It was said that it would contain Spain five times, France six times, and Italy ten times. According to Mr. Mark Twain in 1883, if you consider the Missouri River its main branch, the Mississippi is the longest river in the world, but we now consider both the Amazon and the Nile as being longer. Every year the river shortens by thirty to fifty miles, but today we estimate it as being about 2,350 miles long.

  “Twain also claimed that it was the crookedest, and I guess that idea has not been challenged. Every year it deposits millions of tons of mud into the Gulf of Mexico. And because of this, it has also been called ‘the Great Sewer.’ ”

  Then Tom leaned forward.

  “That’s just the details though,” he noted. “Not a real story. Maybe you’d be most interested in the story about the buried treasure.”

  “Sure,” I answered. “What story is that?”

  “The story of the slave’s gold,” he answered.

  Then he blew out a breath as if he was thinking of the best way to begin, as if it was the kind of story he both liked and disliked.

  I settled in his chair, forgetting that I was hungry or sitting in the sun without sunblock. I was thinking that it was about the oddest thing in my life to be lounging at a pond with the man I was going to love, listening to him tell me about life on the Mississippi River. Odd maybe, but I was so caught up in what he was saying, I was sitting on the edge of that canvas fold-up seat.

  “In 1855, a few years before the start of the war, a slave by the name of Percy Dalton escaped from a sugarcane plantation in Hardwood, Louisiana. He hadn’t planned on running, hadn’t considered how he would do it or where he would go, but one night there was a thunderstorm and lightning caused a fire at the stables and the place went crazy just long enough so that he found himself with the perfect opportunity to steal a horse and start riding toward the river. He knew it would be hours before anyone missed him because of the fire and the storm and the dark night and the frenzy of disaster.

  “He was new to Hardwood, having only recently been sold from a plantation in Mississippi, not too far from his new quarters, but far enough never to be able to see his wife or be a father to their two children.”

  Tom stopped, stood up, came very near to me, reached into the cooler and took out his soda. He popped the top, poured part of it in an empty water bottle that he had and handed the can to me. I took it and thanked him. We drank a few swallows and he told more of the story.

  “When Percy ran, he thought about trying to get to his wife and children, but he knew the chances that he could find them and help them escape were very slim. So he decided instead that he would make his way north, earn some money, then send somebody back to the South to purchase his family.

  “Percy Dalton rode the stolen horse from Hardwood up to Laurel Hill and across the state border. He rode hard through the forest along the banks of the river to what is now Saint Joseph, where the horse finally died from exhaustion and the sun started rising on them both. Percy buried the horse and hid there, near the lakes, fighting moccasins for clean water and a black bear for food. Finally, six days later, he met a Quaker minister by the name of Eugene Carter who helped him find freedom. They rafted and hid all the way up the river through Mississippi then Arkansas, through Tennessee and up to Illinois, the first free state they came to.”

  Tom took another swallow. I did as well. Then he reached into the cooler again and took out his sandwich, giving me half. I took that, too.

  “He worked in a slaughterhouse for about a year, learned how to read and write, found a way to pass notes and messages back to his family in Mississippi, telling them where he was and what he was doing. Then he met up with some men from Georgia who were looking for a crew of miners to go out west. They had heard about an area near the confluence of Cherry Creek and the South Platte River, in Denver, Colorado, and that there were deposits of very pure gold there.

  “This was sometime late summer of 1857 and this group of prospectors didn’t care about where a man came from or about race or history. They just wanted strong backs and tight lips. So, Percy went along and worked for two years. He earned and saved enough money, he thought, to buy his wife, their ten-year-old son, and an eight-year-old daughter.”

  Tom took a bite of his sandwich and seemed to enjoy my intense interest in his storytelling. He didn’t take long before he started up again.

  “Now in July of 1860, a banking firm from Leavenworth, Kansas, by the name of Clark, Gruber, and Company decided to establish a mint in this new gold mining area and issue gold coins. You see,” Tom said, enjoying the history lesson, “as more and more people went west and the major gold strikes heated up, the population in these western towns grew and commerce quickly started to feel the need for more money. So this banking firm bought machinery and equipment in New York and Philadelphia, got it to Colorado, and began producing coins that actually contained more gold than the coins minted by the government.

  “This,” Tom said with flavor, “is the means of payment that Percy Dalton received for his work. He had about one thousand dollars in these gold coins. And with that money and a heart longing for his beloved family, he walked all the way to Illin
ois, found Friend Eugene, and asked him if he would do the buying of his wife, Lavender, and their children, Percy, Jr., and Lydia. And after not too much deliberation, the gentle abolitionist agreed. The Quaker minister set out on a steamboat from Cairo, Illinois, in September of 1860 headed for Vicksburg, Mississippi, where Percy’s family lived.

  “Only a few months before the start of the war, things were unsettled along the river and the steamboat had a hard time returning to the South. It was stopped by the militia, ran into a violent thunderstorm, and was attacked at least twice, but the preacher wrote to Percy that the money that he carried was still secure. He said they were planning to stop the next day in Memphis to buy supplies and fix a broken section of the vessel and that he would write again from there.”

  Tom took a deep breath. “Percy never heard from the Quaker again.”

  We both took bites out of our sandwiches. In the pause between us, I wondered about a steamboat heading down the river. I watched the muddy current and thought about folks living on these banks almost 150 years ago.

  “They never found out what happened?” I asked, curious about all these people I had just learned about.

  “Percy risked everything and came down himself. He had some papers made up to show that he was free, but still, it was a mighty foolish thing for a black man to do in that time.” Tom shook his head.

  “War about to start. Tempers flaring. Him a runaway. The river so dangerous.” He took another bite. “But that’s the crazy thing about love.” He looked at me.

  I blushed.

  There was a pause.

  “So, what happened?”

  “Well, there was a big storm that blew through while the Quaker was supposed to have been here. Floodwaters rose about forty feet, put everything within six miles underwater. Lots of people died, lost everything. The steamboat was hit pretty hard, capsized. Not much left to sort through. Everybody just speculated the minister, like some of the others on board, drowned, and that the money like everybody else’s wealth and personal possessions, was lost in the river.”