Читать книгу Gather at the River - David Joy - Страница 8

Lullaby

J.C. SASSER

If I die before you wake, there is something I must tell you. As your mother, I must.

Like you, little men, I was a child once. We lived in a house, but we grew up in the South Georgia woods, acres and acres of it. It’s where I smoked my first pine straw, stepped on my first nail, and examined my first Playboy. It’s the place that made me wild.

Behind our old house is a dirt road. You know the one. It’s a mile long and cuts through endless games of hide-and-go-seek and tall green soldiers of pine. The dogwoods you see lining the road were planted over half a century ago by Mema and Granny Sills. She’s Mema to me, great-grandma Rubye to you. She was born with a veil over her face. The midwife said it was a sign of supernatural power. Mema could make warts disappear with a penny and a piece of Scotch tape and her magic touch kept a thousand dogwood seedlings alive through a terrible drought. Her trees are still there, and their offspring run wild all over the woods like little miracles. Mema had vision, gave up a dream house to buy this land.

I’ve been carried down this road. I’ve crawled down this road, walked it and run it. I’ve barefooted it and punched its spine with stiletto heels. I’ve tricycled it, bicycled it, and ridden it bareback on a jackass named Hokey. I’ve Honda 50’d it, Yamaha 8o’d it, Kawasaki 250’d it, and my brother, Hec, and I have scarred it with fishtails, pretending we were Bo and Luke Duke and that Mama’s bombed-out Chrysler was The General Lee.

Not much has changed about this road. You’ll still see tortoises and wild hare, swallowtails, and great spangled fritillaries. You’ll still see fox and flying squirrels, turkeys, and coveys of quail. Although they’re here, you won’t see deer on the road. They’re smarter than most deer, a result of the pressure my Daddy put on them for years and whose memory is whispered to their young, knowing it helps keep them alive.

The only thing that’s different is there’s no field at the curve. The gas tank for Carlton’s tractor is gone. And so is he. He and his wife, Claudine, gone in an instant.

At the end of the road is the clubhouse. It’s exclusive in every sense of the word, and you’re lucky you’re part of the club. It’s an old World War II barracks, modified with a front porch with cypress tree pillars and cypress tree rails you can’t trust. There are no lace curtains or lightning rods, and the only reason it has a bathroom is because in 1955 somebody invited the governor. He needed some rest and relaxation and, apparently, a respectable place to piss.

Some of it has changed since I was a child. The floor is spongier and slopes a little more. Some of the things in it are mine now. Daddy’s deer and arrowheads, the rattlesnake skin, the saber-tooth cat mount, and the whale vertebra pierced with a megalodon’s tooth. There’s an additional bathroom now and a special place where you can bunk. The towels are arranged by color in the drawer, and the hallway is decorated with photographs of all your kin. That’s your Gaga’s touch. It belongs to her now. She, too, has vision. You’ll still find rats in the traps, maybe a snake, but you won’t find a cup of worms in the fridge or a box of crickets chirping on the screened-in porch.

Down the hill from the clubhouse is the pond, twenty-five acres of wet black mirror. The water smells the same way it’s always smelled, a smell I can’t bottle, like childhood. The cypress in front of the dock has rotted, but its stump is still there decorated with somebody’s fishing line and faded red floater. The sand Mema hauled in once lightened the bank. It’s where we built sand castles and let minnows nibble our toes. Grass now grows in that little spot, but in the shallows, you can still see minnows and evidence of that stark white sand.

This is Reedy Creek. We call it Reedy for short. Mema named it that because the creek that feeds the pond is reedy. It’s a place we come to escape. It’s a place we come to fish. It’s a place we come to gather.

I don’t remember catching my first fish. Nobody does. Like you, little man, I was the second child. But everybody remembers Hec’s. He was three. He pulled in a bluegill off the dock, took one look at it fighting on the line, and said, “Damn.”

I’ve caught my fair share of fish. Red and yellow breasts, catfish, bluegills, and bass, and I’ve caught my fair share of weeds, logs, beer cans, and sunglasses manufactured in the fifties.

I’ve used all kinds of bait. Red wrigglers, nightcrawlers, and spitballs of Sunbeam White. I’ve lured my line with Beetle Spins, glitter worms, and crickets, of which I went through a spell of sampling myself.

“You better stop eating those crickets. They’ll snatch out your voice and you won’t be able to talk,” Mema told me as I snuck one head-first in my mouth. That was the end of that.

I’ve fished with cane poles, rods and reels, sticks, buckets, and my pinkie toe when I had nothing else.

But what I remember most about fishing was what happened after the fish were caught, on the screened-in porch with the drainboard sink and the two wooden tables that stretch twenty feet long. After sunset, they’d bring in the stringers, garlands upon garlands of kaleidoscopic fish. They’d bring in the Styrofoam and red Igloo coolers full of flopping loot. The men would come in and have a seat, and the women who had outfished them would come out with knives. Twilight would set in.

You’d hear the faucet squeak on and the water spew from the pipe. You’d hear scraping, scratching, ripping flesh, and cracking bone. You’d hear guts slop in a bucket. And if you listened close enough, you’d hear blood, little rivers of it running. Mama’d be there, barefooted in cut-off shorts with her long, love-at-first-sight legs, tearing off a head. Pam would be there with her viper-eyes, sweet-talking and flinging scales into her flaming red hair. Wanda would crack a joke with bream eggs in her hand, and Mema, more glamorous than a young Liz Taylor, would be there laughing with fish guts on her diamonds. A moth might flutter by, a whippoorwill might scream. And I’d be under their feet, wondering how could so much murder be so pretty?

Somebody would light the fryer. You’d smell hot grease. I’d run over to watch Mama drop in a fish, and I’d stare into a swirling black galaxy of cornmeal shooting stars, tempted in a weird way to put my fingers in it.

J.T. always said the blessing, before him it was Hines. It got to Harold after J.T. died and now it’s Bond’s job. One day I hope it will be one of yours. We would sit and eat what we had worked for, what we had caught. After supper, I’d slide underneath the table and hide among cords of naked knees. In a few minutes, they’d get to telling stories.

They told stories of the people who died before I was born and never got to meet. Like my snuff chewing great grandmother, Vida, how she fished from the banks and was never seen in a boat, how you could hear her squealing all the way up the hill every time she hooked a redeye, how if the bream weren’t biting it was the signs, and if they were, she’d hike her dress up and go out deeper.

They told stories about Jew Baby, a man who served time for cracking safes and worked off his sentence in the Georgia State pen, cleaning debris from the electric chair helmets. Jew Baby had a stutter and a fat wife named Maw-rie. He’d come out to Reedy with a pole, a croaker sack, and a can of gasoline to catch rattlesnakes for the Rattlesnake Roundup. After he competed and collected his prize money, he’d kill the snakes, eat or freeze the meat and make wallets and belts out of their hide.

I never knew Jew Baby, but my ass certainly did. It’s been striped many a time by a belt he made for my Daddy. You know the belt. We call it The Rattlesnake Belt.

The first time you felt its venom I’d caught you trying to hide the matchbox cars you’d stolen out of the classroom’s toy bin your first day of pre-school. Stealing, little men, deserves a whipping in my book.

“Why’re you being so mean to your little brother?” I asked you a few days later.

“That rattlesnake’s still in me,” you said.

And I smiled, proud at knowing Jew Baby lives in you, too.

They’d tell stories about Marshall A. Byrd, also known as Model-A. Fresh out of Reidsville prison, Model-A walked into great uncle Hines’s furniture store and asked for a job. When Hines asked Model-A if he’d killed a man, Model-A said, “No sir. I didn’t kill him. I just cut him. And he died.”

They’d tell about old times, about the Depression and the Tinker Man. About my great granddaddy, Sheriff Tom Watson Brantley, who never learned to drive. They’d tell that sad story of how one of his prisoners who he thought he’d redeemed shot his heart out. After that, things would get quiet for a while until somebody else told another story. They’d tell stories about Aunt Soph and Saphie Sarina Sapphire. They’d tell stories about the good times, the summers out here, playing bridge, and couples taking turns by the woodpile. They’d tell about that one time they left the children on the hill, caught ninety-eight fish, and returned to find little Wanda had almost chopped off her foot with an axe. It’s a miracle we survived our childhood.

This is what’s most different. We don’t do this anymore. A pile of us don’t ride out to Reedy at ten in the morning and fish till sundown. We don’t come into the screened-in porch, sunburnt and stinking like cricket guts and fish slime, hauling in a catch that could feed a hundred men. The women don’t come out with knives. You don’t hear the faucet squeak on. We don’t gut and clean the fish, dust them in flour and cornmeal. You don’t smell warming grease. There won’t be a pile of us huddling, bowing our heads in prayer. You won’t see them there. You won’t hear them telling stories until midnight. This is what I can never give to you. No matter how good I am, this I can never recreate. And it makes me sad. Because this, little men, is what it meant to me to fish. Gone, in an instant.

For a large part of your life, I’ve tried to make my childhood yours. My biggest fear was that these things would disappear with me. But they won’t. You’ll hear me tell their stories, and you’ll hear me tell mine, and one day you’ll tell your own.

Today when we ride down that dirt road, it’s the four of us. We let you drive. We let the dogs chase. I hold your Daddy’s hand, and we smile at what we have, at what we’ve made. The truth is, I’m still growing up here.

“Whose land is this?” I ask.

“Our land!” You say.

“Whose land is this?”

“Our land!”

You’ll remember that chant. You’ll remember skinny-dipping and cannonballing in rainbows. You’ll remember your first ant bed, getting lost in the woods and finding your way back home. You’ll remember Gaga and Granddaddy, Wanda and Pam, Bond, and your crazy Uncle Mike. You’ll remember him half naked, wearing J.T.’s safari hat with an AK-47 strapped across his back talking about the end times while drinking Kool-Aid and Vodka because he’s dieting. You’ll remember your Daddy snorkeling the entire pond, scouting for bream beds and bass hideouts. You’ll remember how he always stood in the boat and how he always threw back every fish he ever caught. You’ll remember him teaching you to cast. You’ll remember catching your first fish, both of you.

Some mornings when you are still asleep in your bunk, I sit on the porch and watch your Daddy fish. I don’t know which sight is more reverent, watching you fishing with him or watching him on the water alone. He stands in the boat, casts his line in the mist. Your father walks on water.

I sit and I listen. I hear birdsong and butterfly wings, the slither of a snake. The wind picks up, and I hear them in the pines, the ones who came and left before my birth, the ones I’ve eulogized and buried. I hear them telling stories.

One day you’ll wake up, and I’ll be gone. Promise me, little men, you’ll keep us alive.