I have a dam made out of stones, between two rocks. When I look around I see the fisherman behind me.
He has a strange dark face; I saw someone like him in a movie once. He has a fishing pole and a paper bag and some things in his pockets. His hat looks dusty. “Do you live up there?” he says. He has a nice voice.
That makes me think of my mother. I don't know how to talk to grownups. They talk too loud to you, and something is always wrong. I don't say anything to him. There are two crabs behind the dam, little ones. Their bodies are soft to touch but they'd bite you if they could; their pincers are too little. Tommy and the boys use them for fishing, instead of worms.
“Do you live close by here?”
The fisherman is squatting on the bank now. His hat is off and next to him. He has dark hair. I tell him yes. My face is prickly, because of him looking at it. There is something funny about him.
“How old are you?” he says.
They always ask that. I don't answer but let a stone fall in the water to show I'm not afraid of him.
“Are you fishing?”
“No.”
“What are you doing?”
He is squatting on the bank and calling over to me. A grownup would just walk out and see what I had, or he would walk away; he wouldn't care. This man is squatting and watching me. The bank is bare from people always standing on it. We play here all the time. When I was little I could look down from higher up and see the boys down here, playing. Mommy wouldn't let me come down then. Now I can come down by myself, alone. I am getting big. The bank tilts down toward the creek, and there are a whole lot of stones and rocks where the creek is dried up, then the water begins but is shallow, like where I am, but then farther out it is deep and only the big rocks stick up. The boys can wade out there but not me. There are holes somewhere too; it is dangerous to walk out there. Then, across the creek, is a big tangle of bushes and trees. Somebody owns that land. On this side nobody owns it, but that side has a fence. Farther down where the bushes are gone, cows come down to the creek sometimes. The boys throw stones at them. When I throw a stone it goes up in the air and comes down right away.
“What have you got there?”
“A dam.”
He smiles and puts his hand to his ear. “A what?”
I don't answer him, but pretend to be fixing something.
“Can I come look?” he says.
I tell him yes. Up there, nobody cares about what I do, except if I break or spill something; then they holler. This man is different. He is like my father but not like him because he talks to me. My father says things to me but doesn't talk to me, he doesn't look at me for long because there are too many other things going on. He is always driving back and forth in the car. This man looks right at me. His eyes are dark, like Daddy's. He left his hat back on the bank. His hair is funny. He must have been out in the sun because his skin is dark. He is darker than Tommy with his suntan.
“A little dam,” he says. “Well, that's real nice.”
The crabs are inside yet. He doesn't see them.
“I got two crabs,” I say.
The man bends down right away to look. I can smell something by him, something sweet. It makes me think of the store down the road.
“Hey, look at that—I see them crabs. They'd like to bite a nice little girl like you.”
I pick up one of the crabs to show him I'm not afraid. I am never afraid of crabs but only offish that they catch and tear off the hook and let lie around to die. They flop around on the grass, bleeding, and their eyes look right at you. I'm afraid of them but not of crabs.
“Hey, don't let him bite you!” The man laughs.
“He can't bite.”
The crab gets away and falls back into the water. It swims backward in quick little jerks and gets under a rock. It is the rock the man has his foot on. He has big black shoes like my father's, but caked with mud and cracked. He stands with one foot on a rock and the other in a little bit of water. He can do that if he wants to, nobody can holler at him.
“Do you like to play down here?”
“Yes.”
“Do you go to school?”
“I'm going next year.”
The sun comes out and is bright. When I look up at him my eyes have to squint. He is bending over me. “I went to school too,” he says. He smiles at me. “Hey, you got yourself dirty,” he says.
I look down and there is mud on me, on my knees and legs and arms. It makes me giggle.
“Will your mommy be mad?” he says. Now, slowly, he squats down. He is leaning over me the way some of them in town do, my mother's people. You can smell smoke or something in their breaths and it isn't nice, it makes me not like them. This man smells of something like candy.
“Little girls shouldn't get dirty,” he says. “Don't you want to be nice and clean and pretty?”
I splash in the water again because I know it's all right. He won't holler.
“Little boys like to be dirty but little girls like to be clean,” he says. He talks slow, like he was doing something dangerous—walking from rock to rock, or trying to keep his balance on a fence.
“You've got some stuff in your hair,” he says. He touches my hair. I stop what I'm doing and am quiet, like when Mommy takes burrs out. He rubs the top of my head and my neck. “Your hair is real nice,” he says.
“It's got snarls underneath. She has to cut them out.”
“It's real pretty hair,” he says. “Hey, you know in the city little girls have two daddies. One goes to work and the other stays home to play. Do you know that?”
Something makes me giggle. His hand is on my shoulder. He has dark, staring eyes with tight lines around them. He looks like he is staring into a lamp.
“Would you like another daddy?” he says.
“I got a daddy.”
He touches my arm. He looks at me as if he was really seeing me. He is not thinking about anybody else; in a minute he won't stand up and yell out to somebody else, like my mother does. He is really with me. He puts his finger to his mouth to get it wet and then he rubs at the dirt on my arm. “I wouldn't never spank no little girl of mine either,” he says. He shifts forward. His legs must ache, bent so tight like that. “You think they'd spank you at home for being dirty?”
“I can wash it off.” I put my arm in the water. When you knock over a stone in the water a little puff of mud comes and hides the crabs that jump out—that saves them. When you can see again they're all hid.
“Maybe you better get washed up down here. I sure wouldn't want you to get spanked again,” the man says. His voice is soft, like music. His hands are warm and heavy but I don't mind them. He is holding my arm; with his thumb he is rubbing it. I look but can't see any dirt where he is rubbing it.
“Hey, don't touch your hair. You'll get mud in it,” he says. He pulls my hand away. “You can wash right here in the crick. They won't never know you were dirty then. Okay? We can keep it a secret.”
“Tommy has some secrets.”
“It can be a secret, and we'll be friends. Okay? Don't you tell anybody about it.”
“Okay.”
“I'll get you all nice and clean and then we'll be friends. And you won't tell them about it. I can come back here to visit sometimes.” He looks back at the bank for something. “I got some real nice licorice in there. You like that, huh?”
I tell him yes.
“When you get cleaned up you can have some then. I bet you like it.”
He smiles when I say yes. Now I know what the smell is about him—licorice. It reminds me of the store down the road where the licorice sticks are standing up in a plastic thing and when you touch them they're soft. They stick to your teeth.
“Little girls don't know how to wash themselves,” he says. He pats water on my arm and washes it. I sit there and don't move. There is nothing that hurts, like there is sometimes with a washcloth and hot water. He washes me slow and careful. His face is serious; he isn't in a hurry. He l
ooks like somebody that is listening to the radio but you can't hear what he hears.
He washes my legs. “You're a real pretty little girl,” he says. “They shouldn't spank you. Shouldn't nobody spank you. I'd kill them if I saw it.” He looks like he might cry. Something draws his face all in, and his eyes seem to be going in, looking somewhere inside him.
“But I'll get you clean, nice and clean,” he says. “Then you can have some licorice.”
“Is it from the store?”
He moves his hand on my back, slow, like you pet a cat. The cat makes his back go stiff and I do the same thing. I understand what it is like to be a cat.
“Do you want to walk in the water a little?”
“I can't do that.”
“Just here. By these rocks.”
“They don't let me do it.”
I look at him, waiting for permission. My shoes are already soaked. But if I play out in the sun afterward then they will get dry.
“Sure. They ain't nowhere around here, I say you can do it,” he whispers. He leans back and watches me. Because he is so close I am safe and it's all right to wade in the water. Nobody else ever sat and watched me so close. Nobody else ever wanted me to walk in the water and would sit there to catch me if I tripped.
“Is it nice? Does the water feel nice?”
The water comes up to my knees in the deepest place. I can't go out any farther than this. I was swimming somewhere, but not here; we go to a lake. There they have sand and people lying on blankets, but here there isn't anything except stones. The stones are sharp sometimes.
After a while the man stands up. His face is squinting in the sun. He walks alongside me, watching me; his feet will get wet. Something makes me yawn. I feel tired. I look down and see that I am making clouds of mud underwater.
“You better come out now,” he says.
When I step out on the stones my shoes make a squishy noise. It makes me laugh to see the water running out. Inside my shoes my toes are cold.
He takes my hand and walks with me back to the bank. His hand is very warm. “You had a real nice time out there, didn't you?” he says. “Little girls like to play in the water and get clean.”
He wets his finger and rubs something on my face. I close my eyes until it's clean.
The licorice stick isn't as good as the ones at the store. I want to take it back home but the man says no, I have to eat it down here. I keep yawning and want to go to bed. When I play in the water I get tired, the sun makes my eyes tired.
The man washes my hands with creek water, his own hands wet and rubbing with mine like he was washing his own.
“This is our own secret and don't never tell anybody,” he says.
He wipes our hands on his shirt. He is squatting down all the time to be just as tall as I am. He has a black comb he combs my hair with, but there are snarls underneath and he has to stop. He pulls the hairs out of the comb.
“Now you have another daddy, and don't never tell them,” he says.
When I turn around to look at him from higher up on the path, he is bending to get his fishing pole. I forgot about looking at the pole and want to run back to see it, if it's a glass pole like some of them, but now he looks like somebody I don't know. With his back to me he is like some fisherman from the city that I don't know and am afraid of.
II
I am six years old. At this time we are still living in the country; in a few years we will move to the city, in with my grandmother. But now my father is still well enough to work. My brother and his friends have gone on a bike trip. They have mustard sandwiches wrapped in wax paper and emptied pop bottles with water in them. I went out to the road and watched them ride away. Nobody cared about me; the boys call me baby if they are nice and push me away and tease me if they're bad. I hate my brother because he pushes me with his hand, like people do in the movies when they want to knock somebody out of the way. “Move it, Kid,” he says and pushes me. If I run to Mommy it won't do any good. He is four years older than me and so I can never catch up to him.
The day is hot. It's August, in the morning. The high grass in the orchard is dried up; the birds are always fighting in the trees; the leaves churn to show their sleek black wings. Tommy has a BB gun and shoots the birds sometimes, but when they hear the noise they fly away; birds are smart. The cat ate one of the dead birds and then threw up the feathers and stuff, right on the kitchen floor.
I am playing with my doll. Inside, Mommy is still canning cherries. On Sundays Daddy sits out front under the tree and tries to sell baskets of cherries to people that drive by. You can't go out by him and talk because he is always mad. The kitchen is ugly and hot. There are steamed jars everywhere, and bowls of cherries. Once I liked cherries, but the last time they made me sick. I saw a little worm in a cherry, by the pit. Twenty-five years from now I will drive by cherry orchards and the nausea will rise up in me; a tiny white worm. My mind will always be pushed back to this farm, and there is nothing I can do about it. I will never be able to get away.
Today is a weekday. Later on I will learn the number of it, from hearing so much about it. But now I know nothing except there are two or three days until Sunday, when Daddy stays home and sits out in front and waits for cars to stop.
My mother comes outside to see where I am. She wears an old dress with cherry stains on it. The stains make me look at them, they remind me of something. Of blood. She has her hair pushed back. Her hair is streaked up in front, by the sun, but brown everywhere else. There is a picture of her when she had long hair; she isn't my mother but somebody else. Around the house she is barefoot. Her legs look strong; she could probably run fast if she wanted to but she never wants to. Everything is slow around her. The chickens are nervous, picking in the dirt and watching her for food. They jerk their heads from side to side. If she raises her hand they will flutter their wings, waiting to be fed.
My mother comes over to me where I am sitting on the branches. She brushes my hair out of my eyes. “Can't you wait for Tommy to come back, to go down there?” she says.
“I want to play with my dam,” I tell her. I lean back so she can't touch my hair. When she works in the kitchen her pale hands are stained from cherries. I don't like them to touch me then. When she gives me my bath they're like that too. I don't always like her. I can like her if I want to, but I don't have to. I like Daddy better, on purpose, even though Mommy is nicer to me. She never knows what I am thinking.
“I can take you down in a while, myself,” she says. “Okay?”
I stare down at nothing. My face gets hard.
“What the hell is so good about playing in that dirty water?” she says.
This makes my heart beat hard, with hating her.
Her eyebrows are thin and always look surprised. I see her pluck at them sometimes. That must hurt. She stands with her hands thrust in her pockets, and her shoulders slump. I always know before she does what she is going to say.
“All right, then, go on down. But don't get wet.”
I run around back of our orchard and through the next-door neighbor's field. Nothing is planted there. Then a path begins that goes down the big hill to the creek. In August the creek is shallow and there is filth in little patches in it, from sewers up-creek. Fishermen fish anywhere along the creek, but there are some spots they like more than others. We always play by the rocks. There are also pieces of iron lying around, from when the new bridge was built. I can't remember any other bridge, but there was one.
I have my own little rock, that Tommy lets me have. It is shaped like a funny loaf of bread and has little dents in it. It looks like birds chipped at it, but they couldn't do that. When I come down and run through the bushes, some yellow birds fly up in surprise. Then everything is quiet. I walk in the water right away, to get my shoes wet. I hate my mother. Yesterday she was sitting on Daddy's lap; she was barefoot and her feet were dirty. They told me to come by them but I wouldn't. I ran outside by myself. Down at the creek I am happier by
myself, but something makes me shiver. It is too quiet. If I was to fall in the water and drown nobody would know about it or care.
A man drowned in this creek, a few miles away. It was out back of a tavern. I heard my father talk about it.
When I look around there is a man standing on the bank. His car is parked up on the road but I didn't see it before. The man waves at me and grins. I can see his teeth way out here.
“Real nice day to play in the water,” he says.
I narrow my eyes and watch him. Something touches the back of my neck, trying to tell me something. I start to shiver but stop. He reminds me of the man that drowned. Maybe his body wasn't taken out of the creek but lost. This man is too tall. His arms hang down. He has a fishing pole in one hand that is long and gawky like he is. There is something about the way he is standing—with his legs apart, as if he thought somebody might run and knock him down—that makes my eyes get narrow.
“You live around here?” he says.
He takes off his hat and tosses it down as if he was tired of it. Now I know what he is: a colored man. I know what a colored man is like. But this one isn't black like the one my grandmother pointed out when we were driving. This one has a light brown skin. When Tommy gets real brown he's almost that dark.
“How old are you?” he says.
I should run past him and up the hill and go home. I know this. Mommy told me so. But something makes me stay where I am. To make Mommy sorry, I will stay here, right where I am. I think of her watching me, standing up on top of the hill and watching and feeling sorry for me.
“I'm six,” I tell the man. With my head lowered I can still see him through my lashes. My eyes are half closed.
Everything is prickly and strange. Like when you are going to be sick but don't know it yet and are just waiting for something to happen. Something is going to happen. Or like when there is a spider on the ceiling, in just the second before you turn your head to see it. You know it's there but don't know why. There is something between us like a wet soft cobweb that keeps us watching each other, the colored man and me. I can tell he is afraid too.
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