by Paul Hawkins
"If does occasionally seem that way."
"Did I ever tell you how, as a new doctor here, I got off to a horrible start? I was a young fresh-faced boy from 'the city' just out of school, and I had the town's most popular preacher in my care but couldn't rescue him from years of sclerosis of the liver – even while he'd railed against liquor for years. He died and I couldn't or wouldn't reveal the only facts that would shift at least a little of the blame, and that in turn led to speculation that my ineptitude had accelerated his demise. Folks let me have it. But slowly, over years of delivering babies and curing earaches and setting bones and healing fevers, mostly in the middle of the night, the people began to come around. Soon they didn't mind coming to my office even in daylight, and then lining up and giving me gift baskets at Christmas, even when they couldn't pay their bills. And today, here I am."
"Yes, well..."
"Come on," he said, "You'll enjoy the fresh air if nothing else."
"Alright."
The two men rose to their feet. Mr. White chose a hat from the south-sea deity statue that stood beside the door. The doctor paused to shake Otto's hand farewell, then stopped to select his own hat from the idol. The statue stared at him with an inscrutable, eight-armed Oriental knowingness and pupil-less eyes.
"You know, I've never liked that thing," Dr. Stewart said.
"Funny, it likes you."
Otto opened the front door for the men and pale light flowed in, and the doctor and Mr. White walked across the dry, crunchy yellow grass to the doctor's old black DeSoto. Mr. White got in and pulled the door shut with a solid clunk. The doctor got in, moved the shifter around until he found neutral, then turned the engine over to a coughing start.
"Hold on," he said.
And so they drove on the thin red roads between the fields, then through town and out the side past the new construction, past where gangs of workmen lived in rows of makeshift dormitories, out past where new wide roads were being scraped in directions where nothing was yet, to bring in equipment and move it into place for the dam, out past where hired police watched roads and guarded fences behind which lay equipment and supplies for the effort that would soon be underway.
"You drive like a madman," Mr. White said.
"I could drive these roads in my sleep," Dr. Stewart replied. ""Every inch of them knows me; the cattle alert to the sound of my car – they know the engine noise and get off the road."
Mr. White looked at a field that had been scraped clean and now had tools and steel forms and concrete building blocks piled high in waiting beside it like a giant’s toys. "I have never seen the impact the dam project has been having on the community before," he said.
"Yes – startling, isn't it? Sometimes I feel like we're under siege," the doctor replied.
They flew across the flat land back toward more rolling and wooded terrain, and the river was closer. Mr. White smelled the tang of water in the air. The road came out from under trees and alongside the river itself. It denied all its history of floods and fierceness with a deceptively lazy green flow. Here and there a sandbar pushed from the bank into the water, trying to meet the other side. The smell here was damp and close, hot with dust and sap and sweet warm grass. It was a patient vegetative breath, abundant and hanging above the torpid water to measure a kind of hot, slow time.
The doctor pulled off to the right of the road where a post stood next to an even wilder lane that pushed beneath the shadows and the brush.
"We'll have to walk from here – their bridge is out."
They ducked beneath low branches of blackjack and pin oak and walked on a clay road matted with dead leaves, then carefully crossed a plank bridge that had broken in the middle and sunken into a creek. As the road rose from the creek they saw a stand of towering cottonwoods and one small, white board house. Tilting farm machinery littered the land in front of it. A dog started barking.
"Get back!" a voice shouted. "Get off our land!"
"Now calm down, John, it's me, Doc Stewart. I brought a friend with me. I come by to check on your daddy."
There was silence for a second, then the voice called, "Oh, howdy Doc. Give me a second to leash the dog around back – can't be too careful these days. Okay, you can come on up now, it's fine."
The doctor took a few steps forward, then had to pause to wave along Mr. White, who was lagging behind. He waited until Mr. White caught up with him then the two of them walked up the few, austere concrete steps and knocked on the white wooden frame of the screen door.
"Come in," shouted the young voice that had reined in the dog.
They entered through the creaking screen door and walked into the living room. The inside of the house was cluttered and wore a dim brown and blue hue of ever-shuttered windows. It smelled of dogs and dampness and sweat and medicine. Two chairs presided at the far end of a coffee table covered with dishes and newspapers. In one chair sat an old man in a plaid shirt and dull jeans that were now too big for him. His face was pale. He had a canister of oxygen on the floor beside him and a tube looped beneath his nose. His hair was lank like someone had cracked an egg on his head.
He nodded to the doctor. "This his boy?" he asked Dr. Stewart gesturing to his white-suited companion.
Dr. Stewart nodded. The man motioned to the doctor and Mr. White to sit in two kitchen chairs set against the wall at the end of the room, and they did.
Mr. White felt the man's small eyes upon him. The odor of sickness and squalor offended him, and the man seemed to sense this. He stared all the more and his breath came in gasps.
"Don't look like much," the man said to the doctor.
"Now Ed," the doctor said. "You told me you had a story for us."
"I do - I do."
Mr. White looked back at him and tried to ameliorate what he felt was a scowl on his own face. The man looked at him, saw White’s effort, and sighed.
"I thought you might want to hear this," he said.
"Back about 40 years ago three men ran this town. You'd know their surnames even now – Larr, Sweet, and White – yes, your uncle Chris had struck it rich by then. When those three men ran the town there was a young woman got pregnant, and nobody knew which of them was the father. But once they found out she was pregnant they would have nothing to do with her. The whole affair addled her mind and she tried to drown herself and the baby she had, that none of them would claim and none would help take care of. I know the man that found that baby near the river."
"It was a damp evening after heavy rains and the woods were dark and alive. Two young men out hunting seen this woman and her baby jump into the river, so they jumped in. They tried to save her, but this woman wouldn't let them – she twisted like a cat and tore away. But they saved her baby.
"Before she jumped in there had been men escorting her against her will someplace. When these men saw her jump, and heard voices down below trying to save her, they fled. But these two hunters, more boys than men, they knew who she was, and they suspected who those men up on the bank had been, or who they worked for. They knew what they wanted to accomplish by shutting up that crazy mouth of hers that was always turning up and ranting against them in town."
"Your father Isaiah saved that baby. It was him and me out hunting that night. He jumped into that rain-swollen creek to do it. The child was put up for adoption. Isaiah didn't trust the state agency and he found a church group to help him, and they had a regional agency that eventually found the child a good home. But he risked a lot doing so. The big men in town, the folks who had anything to do with that woman now wondered about him – yes, even Chris, his own brother – put the air of uneasiness between them. The men who ran the town wondered what he knew, why he did what he did. But to your father it was just saving a life, even jumping in that wild, rain-swollen river, it was just saving a life, and he spoke nothing about it after that, and he didn't let the cold shoulders in town bother him."
Ernest stared at him.
"Isaiah, would have told
you all this if he could – if he knew a way to tell you without making you distrust everybody in this town."
"I doubt that," Mr. White said.
"Do you?" the man looked sharply at him. "Even now aren't you grateful for how he tried to raise you? He may have seemed stern but he was a compassionate man. He tried to give you a normal life after the loss of your folks."
"Thank you," White said.
"You needed to know," the man said. "I did it for Isaiah, not for you. I owe the man to make the effort for his son, whether or not he deserves it."
The doctor felt the tension in the air and quickly excused White and himself, and the man's son saw them to the door. Gravel crunched beneath their feet as they walked to where the doctor has parked his car.
"Your reaction is odd," the doctor said.
"A man in my position gets contacted all the time by people claiming to know something you might be interested in, something to link them to your past some way, or your present, something that always combines the sentimental with the pecuniary."
"Well, I've found him to be trustworthy," Doc Stewart said.
Mr. White shoved his hands in his pockets, and the two of them climbed slowly back into the car, which the doctor brought noisily to life and set once more along narrow roads back towards White's house. Mr. White looked silently out at new construction and new faces in groups, all lean and unbusy and hungry.
The doctor let him off at the red dirt lane leading from the road to his house. Mr. White turned and waved as the doctor sped off in a cloud of dust, then he turned back toward his tall gray mansion. As he approached it he heard repeated staccato raps coming from behind it, so instead of going into the front door he wandered around the side. He came in view of the back and looked past the sagging clothesline to see Otto in the distance, standing beside his study. The staccato beat ceased.
"Hello Mr. White!" Otto shouted out. Ernest noticed that Otto had put plywood walls on his shed. Mr. White walked closer with slow steps. He could see his valet beaming and standing to one side, hammer in hand and nails in his mouth.
"What do you think?" Otto asked proudly. "I had them deliver the panels this afternoon."
Mr. White kept his hands in his pockets and slowly circled the building. It looked smaller. There were gaping rectangles in the sides where the door and the windows would go. Still, it was a more secure brown box with a tarpaper roof.
"Step inside!" Otto said.
Mr. White did, and bare stud and plywood walls enclosed him. He looked down at his desk then pulled out the chair tentatively. He sat down.
"Oh, I admit it's still not much yet, but it'll keep you more secure." Otto said. "You can move some of your monographs out here now."
"Does it look smaller to you?" Mr. White asked.
"Does it? I hadn't noticed. It'll certainly be more secure – a better place to work."
Otto beamed in through one of the windows while Mr. White sat like a sack of wheat in the chair. He raised a hand as if holding an imaginary pen, writing a few stokes on a notepad. Then with his left hand he pretended to sip from a coffee cup. He sat and appraised the imaginary implements of study, then turned and looked at Otto. "Yes, this will do fine. Thanks, Otto, for taking the initiative."
Otto smiled. "I just figured it was something I could get around to sooner than you could, something that might make you feel like there’s some progress to be made here after all."
Mr. White rose from the chair and emerged quickly from the shack. Otto was surprised at his jack-in-the-box alacrity but was placated by Mr. White's smile.
"Good job!" Mr. White said, clapping him on the back. "Now please direct some of that energy toward something for yourself, Otto. You've been wasting your talents taking care of an eccentric for too long."
"Well, I might have some plans, down the road," Otto said.
"Good good," Mr. White said, placing a hand on his shoulder and decisively steering both of them away from his study and back toward the house.
The afternoon waned in solitary, brain-wandering studies of historical trivia for both of them, but after supper Mr. White got into his car and tried to remember the route the doctor had driven this morning. After some mistakes he found the narrow road beside the river as twilight hung like a bruise. He parked and walked the matted lane and elicited the dog's barking.
"It's me!" he shouted in a higher-pitched tone than he'd intended. "It's Ernest White. You met me this morning."
Silence permeated like the fog that would rise from the river, but then a voice answered. "Dog's chained now. You come on up."
Ernest walked the gold and grey botanized shadows that hung in the dusk beneath the cottonwoods, on up once more to the dingy house. The man with the oxygen still sat in the far chair, though he slumped lower now like the declining sun. A plate of half-eaten dinner lay scattered on a tray beside his chair.
"You again?" the man asked with some effort at harshness, though after a second the glare he had been able to muster faded from his eyes. "I'm surprised you want to know."
"I would like to know more about the woman you talked about. The one whose child my father saved. She interests me." he said.
A black and tan hound at the man's feet rolled and moaned but not uncomfortably. The man looked down at her then back at Mr. White. "I did not know her name, but I think I know where you might find it."
There was silence. "Well?" Mr. White asked.
With a heavy breath the old man told him, and White took note. And then White thanked him, and the man very nearly almost smiled, but waved him off.
White drove to town in the hot evening and with a little talking uncovered an old woman who could admit him to the morgue of the town's newspaper. The tired woman opened the door to a musty small room full of filing drawers and bound books.
"Most of it burned in a fire years ago," she said dryly. "Should've seen how much we had before."
Mr. White looked at her, nodded, sucked his teeth appreciatively, and felt a small worry that he might not find what he wanted. But he then regained his composure and stood stock still in the middle of this repository of information. He raised his right arm, rotated it, and then began to sway like a compass needle finding its direction. The old woman shook her head and left. In moments White was striding purposefully across the room.
Ernest's gaze settled on one of the file cabinets with wide flat drawers. He opened them to see bound volumes of old and especially brittle newspapers. He read the yellowed tape labels of dates on volumes and founds the ones he was seeking. He moved these to a table and began to leaf through them.
After going through several faded and frayed pages, a headline caught his eyes. It read:
Local Woman Drowns in River Accident
Infant Rescued
His eyes ran down the article. The quotations from local authorities added no details save that the river had been swollen by flooding. Finally he noticed the victim's name: Kaye Green. But no details about her were given, not even her age. He perused the text fruitlessly for information about the woman but then he reread a small quotation near the end:
Friend Ella Miles said, "She was a bright soul. We will miss her."
He took an envelope out of his jacket and jotted the woman’s name on the back of it. He then folded the envelope and returned it to his pocket.
He was returning the books to the drawer when one fell off the stack he was carrying and hit the floor. He bent to pick it up and his eye was caught by an article and picture on the page that had fallen open.
Town Leaders Commemorate Opening of Library
There in a photograph from 1909 stood three young men of different height and build standing on the steps of a small brick building; one stocky and shorter, one tall and languid, and one of middle height with a bright, smiling expression on his face and a shock of somewhat misdirected hair. The caption read, "
John Sweet, Noah Larr, and Christopher White proudly inaugurate the new county library."
Christopher White. Ernest bent down and looked at the man. He wore a recognizable happy grin. There was some inviting careless in his face that was not to be found in the stern, almost frozen visages of the other two men. Christopher White clearly suited the photographic medium.
Ernest thought of removing the paper from the book and taking it with him, but instead he marked the date on the back of the envelope he carried as note paper, then turned the page. Here and there other small articles caught his eye. Between headlines about fires or floods or bad crops or railroad strikes he saw the same names mentioned over and over: Sweet, White, Larr. Three men closely connected with the civic duties of the town. But after several more pages, White disappeared. It was only Sweet and Larr, and then only Larr.
This was understandable, Ernest thought. Christopher had moved away before too much longer, set out on the world with a new wife on his arm, a woman as eager as himself to see the world.
He closed the book and returned it to the cabinet. He exited the stuffy room, turned to the woman at the desk outside of it, and thanked her for her time. She yawned.
As he walked into the evening he heard a commotion down the block. Men, workmen, mostly, were calling to one another. Some ran past him, pausing to stare callously, but too intent to devote energy to him.
"He's arriving. The Congressman's here!"
The energy and moving bodies were all directed down toward the depot. The whistle and grind of the train filled the air, rattling buildings too old to notice anymore. Mr. White's own feet felt energy coming up into them.
"Congressman Larr is here!"
Down in the distance he saw a mass of people crowded on the depot's boardwalk. Before long train cars laced with red, white, and blue bunting came limping up, bright color against tired countryside. Then there was a pause and a hush of both machine and men, of locomotive and waiting crowd, and then the Congressman descended.
