Tilden said, “Fuck me.”
Mom had been making coffee. She began pouring it into Thermoses, adding a Thermos when she saw Tilden.
Dad walked into the room. “Is the car in the drive, Andy?”
“Yes.”
“We’ve got to go. We’ve got to go down to the river. To help.”
“Was it those sirens? Is someone drowned?”
“Yes. I don’t know. They think someone is missing. She left a note—Judy. Dale Herman’s little girl.”
“Muffin?” Tilden said. A smile flickered at the corners of his mouth. Surely it was a hoax. A New Year’s prank. I wanted to smile too, but fortunately forced it back. Dad didn’t look like he thought it was a joke.
Andy said, “I have to get to—”
Dad interrupted. “We’re all going. There aren’t enough cops. Even with you, son. The call went out for the men.”
The men of the town were mustering to meet calamity, just as in days of yore. It was rather grand, after all.
We piled into the car. Dad followed, plopping heavily down into the driver’s seat. Andy handed him the keys. The fact that he didn’t speed toward the river frightened us. Maybe there was no more need to hurry.
Riverside Park blazed with flashlights and the beams of cars, a confusing jumble of black and gleam and falling sleet. Coach stood in a ring of light with a look on his face that I couldn’t identify. He was holding coffee, but he wasn’t drinking it. He had a hood on his slicker, but it hung limp down his back, while his hair flattened and his face gleamed with droplets. People spoke to him and he answered, but he didn’t move from that spot. Whether he helped or not, the men needed him, and he seemed to know it. You didn’t appreciate how slight he was, really, until he got among the other men.
Chief Dadlez directed the operations. He sent me and Tilden upstream to check if she might be hiding in the little woods with the cement pagoda where kids played all the time. He gave us a flashlight. The pagoda woods were small, even in the dark. The pagoda looked like it was trying to hide under a wet mass of English ivy. Tilden and I knew she wouldn’t be there anyway. It was upstream from the bridge, from which any sensible person would jump, if they were going to jump. Maybe Dadlez just didn’t want a kid to be the one to find her.
Tilden said, “I keep seeing her going over the Falls.”
“Me too. Like that dog.”
“Except we aren’t there to stop her. Everything that goes into the water here goes into the air there.”
“Yes.”
“I hope Glen was right about that door at the bottom.”
Walking back into the confusion of lights I realized something. Coach Silvano was gazing downstream, but nobody was going downstream. Chief Dadlez had sent no one that direction, the one it was almost 100% certain she had gone, if she had gone into the water at all. It wasn’t an oversight. They didn’t want to know for sure, just yet. They didn’t want to find her. They wanted Judy Herman to come strolling down the road carrying an umbrella, late home from a party, sorry that she had caused so much to-do. At worst, they wanted to find her by the light of day. I walked up to the chief. I hadn’t realized he was old and frail, because he didn’t look it most of the time when he was bossing people around. I said, “Chief Dadlez, you know we’re not going to find her up here.”
Dadlez said, “I don’t know anything of the like.” But you knew he did.
Andy was less doctrinaire about things, and soon he got a group including my dad and Tilden and me moving downstream, sweeping our flashlights over the opaque brown river. If she had sunk we would never see her. We’d have to go all the way to the Falls and hope she snagged on something. Finally most of the party moved west, downstream. Coach carried the coffee cup in front of him like he’d forgotten it was there. It must be half sleet water by now. All of the men had Thermoses. You had to stop to drink out of them, or else you’d slosh scalding coffee onto your face. The milling, raincoated contingent eased forward foot by foot, blasting the mud and the agitated water with rays of light as it went.
Tilden said, “Why is Coach here?”
One of the boys from school—it was hard to tell who under the rain gear—shouted, “Because there wasn’t a day in the week he didn’t wait at the door to call her ‘Muffin’ when she came in.”
Coach looked like he was just staring off into space, but it was he who shot out his arm and shouted “There!” dropping the cup into the speeding water. Something that was less like water than everything else was bobbing on the near side of the river, snagged on the roots of a clump of willow. In the dark you couldn’t see the color, but it was blue. It was Judy’s blue raincoat that everyone knew—once they stopped to think about it—and she was still in it. The way the Wyona was treating her, it almost looked like she was alive, lifted up by the waters, then settled gently down. Maybe she was alive, those last few moments. But she was gone by the time we got her to shore. Coach was the one who waded into the furious freezing river—it was up to his chest most of the time—and grabbed the coat. He could get her to solid ground, but he couldn’t carry her through the close trees and the underbrush. He was howling down there in the blackness until we got there to help. I’d never heard such a sound from any man, and never expected it from Coach. Was it fear or grief? You couldn’t tell from his face. When he thrashed back up on shore, carrying the body with four others, his face was back to a cipher, cruel and handsome in the swiveling flashlights.
Poor Muffin. Everyone went to her funeral. Some of the guys from the team couldn’t stop giggling and elbowing one another in the ribs. Mom said it was nervousness, how uncomfortable people, especially the young, were around death. I hoped so.
XI
Mrs. Herman, Judy’s mother, appeared at assembly one morning to thank us for our kindness toward her daughter. She wore one of those hats where the pheasant feather curves all the way around to the back. Anyone with a straw of conscience bent over in his seat in an attitude of mortification. Thank God the posture could be taken for reverence. You focused on the feather because otherwise you’d be sick. We had not been kind to her daughter. Some of us had been neutral, harmless, as it were, but search as we might we could not find one person who had actually been her friend. Some of us scanned Mrs. Herman’s face for the scalding irony that should have been there. Not a trace. The woman was straightforward as a wife on a radio play.
“. . . and I know all is in God’s hands, and that you will not blame yourself for the terrible thing that happened. All ways are mysterious, and none more so than the ways of youth.” She was eloquent, really, her wide brow clear under pale brown hair. She looked like her daughter, and maybe her daughter’s skin would have cleared and she would have grown up to be a handsome woman.
Judy and her mother had been working on a project together, which she had completed alone and meant to present to the school as a gift and memorial. It was a quilt of the North Carolina flag. She held it by the top edge and let it unroll toward the floor. The gasp from some of the girls was genuine. It was quite lovely. And then she said, “Will one of Judy’s special friends come down and accept this gift on behalf of Rickenbacker High?” The smile on her face could have lit a campfire. I have lived life not devoid of embarrassment, but that moment was the worst of all. Agonizing. Excruciating. But in less time than it probably seemed, someone was moving down the aisle. It was Sherry. Of course it was Sherry, beaming a smile back to match Mrs. Herman’s. God had given me the best girl in the world. This time she saved us all. Sherry took one side of the quilt and motioned for Mrs. Herman to take the other, and they held it up before us all. When Sherry nodded we knew we were meant to applaud.
The quilt went up in the lobby opposite the dining hall, where everybody would see it all the time. It hung there in lone splendor for a while, but then Mrs. Herman began to do an odd thing. She began to gather remnants and remembrances of all the Rickenbacker kids (and those who’d gone to Borderland High before the name was changed) who had d
ied before they graduated. She got the principal to get the janitor to set up a cabinet like a trophy cabinet, and into the cabinet went sad little tokens of lives cut short: Chancel Beatty’s gym shirt from the day he collapsed at recess and could not be revived; Clarence Burden’s varsity letter; Timmy Hanson’s ball cap; Anita Coleman’s bracelet with the single cultured pearl hanging like a dewdrop. When long-grieving relatives heard of the project, they sent items and pictures in tarnished brass frames. The collection grew. Kids die of all sorts of things, but what was creepy was how many of us had died on the Falls or in the gorge. One in every generation, at least, just as the local wisdom prophesied. The principal turned his countenance against it, saying it was “morbid” and that youth is a time not to think about such things (he’d evidently forgotten about the War, just two years in the past), but we overruled him by simply standing in the lobby and looking our fill, quiet for once, contemplative. When I dropped by Glen’s parents’ house to see if they had a token of his they’d like to enshrine, it was the first time I realized they were gone, slipping away between one day and another with a word, so far as I knew, to no one.
Mrs. Herman attended graduation. She stood up and received applause when her daughter’s name was called and after it the words, “In memoriam.” We had forgotten the tormented Judy-mouse haunting the halls, and remembered her as her mother did, the belle of the ball. Maybe that had been Mom’s goal all along.
And then we were high school graduates. Dad gave me two weeks to lounge around in the June sun before I joined him in the hardware store. I took two days. He said nothing. He handed me a brand new apron he had been saving for the moment. I thought how Mom and Dad had been with me all the time, through everything, unvarying, unwavering, root and stone, and I had to turn my face away for a minute.
It’s not that Sherry never said she intended to become a teacher, nor is it that I didn’t take her seriously. It’s that I didn’t know exactly what becoming a teacher involved. I knew Nancy McWhirter had gone to college, but she was an outsider, and I assumed that if you were an outsider you had to go to college, but if you were a local as clearly brilliant as Sherry you just moved right in to a vacant position at the school. No, I didn’t assume that. I gave it no thought at all. I talked from time to time about being this or that—a pilot or a diver or a cop like Andy, but I had no real ambition or desire to take it beyond talk. Sherry talked about being a teacher in the very same tone, and yet she damn well meant to be exactly that. That Sherry would have to choose between me and a profession never crossed my mind, and that she would not choose me was not even a remote possibility. Yet, that’s what happened. She wouldn’t have said it this way. She would say that she just asked me to wait a little while she finished her course work in Cullowhee. I am one of those people who takes a setback for defeat. I sobbed myself to sleep because my time with Sherry was over and I wanted no one else. One minute after noon is night.
She suggested I come along and get a college degree. With her. Leave my home and move . . . to a strange mountain beside a strange river. I couldn’t get my head around that. I intended from my first consciousness to work with my dad in the Summers Family Feed and Hardware, take it over some day, and I could no more have deviated from that than flown to the moon. Sherry somehow took her refusal to stay with me and mine to go with her as equivalent. I didn’t get that at all.
She invited me to visit her at Western for Homecoming, and I did, and we had a good time (she even agreed to leave the dance and make out in her room after about an hour of stupid big-band rumbas), so the pain of rejection began to soften. My suspicion that she was humoring me until she could break away clean lessened, and my fear that she would think me a rube after hanging out with philosophers and mathematicians grew. There was no pleasing me. I would be content relationship-wise only when we were married. I told her this and she said, “You mean, only when you own me.” She was smiling, so I didn’t know whether she was serious.
I did sort of mean that, but I intended for her to own me too.
That was the bad after graduation. The good was that I was, as I always suspected I would be, happy as a pig in shit helping Dad run the store. I adored measuring out the nails and matching the bolts and jamming the big scoops into the bins of seed and setting up the lighted pens for the baby chicks at the end of winter. I ran toward the people coming to the door, desiring to hear what they wanted, desiring to feel myself getting it for them. I made keys and repaired engines and sharpened blades and, after a while, chose what bulbs to get in for the local gardeners in October. I stopped ordering hammer X because hammer Y was a better value, and I trusted myself to know the difference. Dad was so proud he didn’t know where to look. At the business end, I was more up to date than he was, having taken the two business courses offered at the high school. But Dad was way better at talking to the people. I wanted to know what they needed and how I could get it to them. Dad wanted to know how the pig barn was holding up, and was Granny still poorly, and how were those feed bins working? I could do three customers to his every one, but after a while I learned that was not the point. I learned that you could, if you wanted to, retain obscure details of people’s lives and repeat them back to them when they came into the store next time, and that this would make them happy. Some called me by my dad’s name, as though there would be no interruption from one generation to another. This made me proud.
So, that’s the bad and the good. The weird was Vince. UT was not that far away, and yet, after the first few weeks of fall practice, we heard nary a word from or about him. I called him at the university, but could never quite get connected. The university switchboard operator started saying he wasn’t there, but I knew better. He was the star of their football team. I ran into Coach in the grocery store and tried to ask him about his son, but I got a wave of the hand to part me from him as though I had bad breath. Maybe I did. I decided to let that pass. But something about the exchange made me determined to get news of my best friend, so I strolled to the Silvano house when I knew Coach would be at school. I didn’t even need to knock. Mrs. Silvano was sitting on the top step of the front porch with a cigarette in her hand at the end of an extended arm resting on her left knee the whole duration of my approach down the sidewalk, so whether she were actually smoking it or not, I didn’t know. Beside her was a tumbler of clear brown liquid which she moved behind her into semi-concealment when she realized I was coming up her walk.
“Mrs. Silvano!”
“Hello there. If you’re the paper boy you’ll have to come back when—”
“It’s Arden Summers. Remember? Vince’s friend?”
She stared like she thought I was lying. “It’s the middle of the day . . . well, of course you’ve graduated, haven’t you?”
“Yes ma’am. Same year as Vince.”
“Well, isn’t that nice?” She drew the cigarette to her lips but did not quite take a drag on it before she let her arm fall again. That cigarette must have weighed a ton. Mrs. Silvano was thin and angular in a fashionable way. She was dressed pretty well for somebody just hanging around the house in the middle of the day. One leg was crossed over the other all ladylike, enabling a posture whereby she could support that cigarette on one knee.
“Arden, Arden,” she said. “Aren’t you in college? I think one of Vince’s friends is down at Duke.”
“That’s Tilden, ma’am.”
“He was a good boy. He playing ball?”
“No ma’am. He is studying physics.”
“Physics!” She drew the word out as though it were the most amazing concept ever encountered. “You? You’re still playing ball, I hope. Vincent loves his boys so much.”
“I’m working at my dad’s store.”
“Of course you are. HARD-WARE.” The word made her laugh. She laughed a little throaty laugh, paused, and then laughed again at a rather jarring volume. I didn’t know what to do. I waited for it to be over.
“Things going OK for you?”
&
nbsp; “Peachy.” I waited for a moment. She said, “Harris.”
“That’s my dad.”
“I know. I just . . . I just got a clear image of him. Like he was sending me a message or something. You don’t favor him much. “
“I look more like my mom.”
“Don’t remember her.” She lifted the cigarette again, and this time she took a long drag, held it, blew a blue stream of smoke into the air. “It’s your dad I remember. Harris. We grew up together. All of us. Oh, I remember Harris Summers.” She laughed as she had over “hardware,” first perfunctory, then chaotic. After the laugh she had a coughing fit. I waited for it to be over. I thought about asking what the hell she meant, but I remembered one of life’s rules is not to ask questions you don’t want the answers to.
When she seemed to be recovered I said, “Well, I wondered. I haven’t heard from Vince . . . and . . . I wondered . . . if I could get his school address from you. He’s been so mysterious! I’m my own boss now . . . don’t tell my dad I said that . . . and I wanted to drive up . . . maybe pay him a visit . . . me and Sherry . . . if I could . . .”
The look on her face was odd, as if there were a whole array of things to be said and she had to choose but one of them. She took another drag of the cigarette, coughed once, hard and sharp. Then she said, “No. I don’t think that would be a very good idea at all.”
Sherry didn’t take much convincing, though we had to wait until she could take a long weekend. She hitched a ride with a girlfriend up from Cullowhee, then we were off to Knoxville with some little sandwiches her mother had made, like the kind you have at weddings, with olives and cream cheese and weird stuff in them. If we ever got married it was going to be a mixed marriage, bologna and white bread on one side, tiny ethnic smelly cheesy assortments cut into shapes on the other. I loved her anyway.
The Falls of the Wyona Page 13