Many Waters

by William Woodall

  Chapter Twelve - Lisa

  Jenny, on the other hand, was another matter.

  “How cute,” she said, as soon as she saw my ring the next morning. We were supposed to be going to the mall in Longview together, and true to my promise to Cody, I was determined never to take that ring off my finger.

  “Yeah, he gave it to me last night,” I said, and Jenny rolled her eyes.

  “Come on, Lisa; are we still in high school? Don’t you think you’re a little bit too old to wear a guy’s class ring? Much less with tape on it?” she asked, looking at the band in horror.

  “I can wear anything I want to. What are you now, anyway, the fashion police? You’re just jealous, that’s all,” I told her.

  “Jealous? Of what?” she asked.

  “You’re jealous because I’ve got a boyfriend who really loves me and all you ever end up with are dirtballs, that’s what,” I said. It was harsh, but there was a grain of truth in it, too.

  “You think he loves you, huh?” she asked, ignoring the comment.

  “I know he does,” I said firmly.

  “How do you know?” she asked, and in spite of her attitude I thought I detected a note of something deeper in her question, like maybe she really did want to know. Which might make sense, if she was even half as jealous as she seemed to be.

  But on the other hand, what could I tell her that she’d believe? A hundred things came to mind, but I knew Jenny could shoot them all down if she wanted to. Any one of them might be a lie, or a hoax, or whatever the case might be.

  “It’s no one single thing, Jen. I know he loves me because he shows it in all kinds of different ways, even when he thinks I don’t notice. Sometimes you just know,” I told her, knowing she wouldn’t be satisfied with that.

  “Yeah, maybe so. We’ll see,” she said.

  “Yup, we sure will,” I said firmly.

  “Well in the meantime will you at least take that ridiculous thing off your finger? People are laughing,” she complained.

  “No, I won’t. I haven’t heard anybody laughing, and honestly I don’t care if they do,” I said.

  “You’re impossible,” Jen said.

  “You better believe it,” I said smugly.

  But in spite of Jenny’s insinuations that I was being juvenile, I never had anybody else laugh or complain about the ring on my finger.

  It was just me and Mama for supper that night, so I showed her the ring and for a long time I sat there telling her all about Cody and the things we’d done together and all the hopes and dreams I had for the future. She couldn’t answer me, of course, but sitting there talking to her was almost like old times.

  I hauled my canvas and brushes up to Mount Nebo to give it a try, and soon took a real liking to the place. It was an awesome spot to paint. Early mornings were best, when it was cooler. There was something about the way the light struck the trees and the lake, and the color of the sky. Sometimes in really dry years, the dust comes up and fills the sky with brilliant colors at sunrise and sunset, so maybe the drought did have one or two minor good points about it, too. It still hadn’t rained a drop, and there was no prospect of it anytime soon.

  Sometimes Cody would come up there to watch me work when he could get away from his own chores for a while. He said I had a way of capturing the exact way the light fell and making the picture look almost more than real, which of course pleased me to no end.

  He was up there with me one morning when I finished a particularly nice pink and gold sunrise scene with a blue, blue sky, and when I put the final touch on my signature he clapped his hands.

  “Beautiful work!” he said.

  “You think so?” I asked, flattered.

  “Absolutely,” he agreed.

  “Then it’s yours, baby. My first commission,” I said, laughing self-consciously.

  “That’s perfect. I’ll get Marcus to make a frame for it and then we’ll put it up in the house somewhere,” he said.

  “It’s nowhere near good enough for that,” I objected.

  “You’re right, it’s better,” he said, and I could have kissed him for saying it. In fact I did kiss him, but not too lingeringly.

  “Well, I guess I’m done up here for today. Want to help me take all this stuff back down?” I asked.

  “Sure,” he agreed. We gathered up the canvas and the paints and all the other stuff, and slowly made our way towards the path. But when we got to the cemetery I stopped.

  “Your dad is buried up here, isn’t he?” I asked, glancing at the stones.

  “Yeah, back there in the corner,” he agreed.

  “Can we see his grave?” I said. It was partly just an impulse, for no particular reason that I knew of, but I’d also been thinking about painting a scene with those magnificent cedar trees, and I wanted to walk around the cemetery a little bit and see where I could get the best view of them.

  “Uh. . . sure, I guess,” Cody agreed dubiously, setting down the canvas. He opened the wrought iron gate and led me way back to a double headstone of pink Texas granite, with the name Blake McGrath on one side and Josie Grey on the other, and below them this epigram:

  Many waters cannot quench love,

  Neither can the floods drown it.

  I noticed there were fresh yellow roses on Blake’s side of the grave, and wondered how they’d gotten there.

  “Mama brings them up here, every Sunday afternoon,” Cody said quietly, watching where my eyes had rested.

  “What happened to him, anyway?” I asked, unsure what to say in the face of such steadfast devotion. Love seemed almost too tepid a word for it. Cody had already told me how she felt about him, of course, but I guess seeing it in person makes a lot bigger impression than just hearing about it.

  “He drowned. We went camping on the Brazos River one spring at Possum Kingdom, because he always liked to fish for rainbow trout below the dam out there. Anyway, the water level was high and some kids were out messing around in the edge of the river even though you’re not supposed to do that because of the undertow. A girl got swept away, and he went in after her. Never made it out,” Cody said.

  “What about the girl?” I asked.

  “Yeah, she made it. We think Daddy might have hit his head on a rock and that’s what kept him from swimming, but nobody knows for sure. It was a pretty bad scene, I hear, but they didn’t let me see that part, thankfully,” he said softly, running his hand along the top of the stone.

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  “It’s all right. Mama always says he died the way he would have wanted to, saving somebody else, and that now he’s safe in the arms of God. I know that’s why she picked that verse on here, though,” he said.

  “The one about many waters?” I asked.

  “Yeah. . . because he drowned in the river, you know. That verse was her way of promising him one last time that she’d love him forever, no matter what. So she tells me, anyway,” he said.

  When I thought about the unswerving way that Miss Josie had kept that promise for all those years, it was enough to bring tears to my eyes.

  “That’s a beautiful story,” I said.

  “Yeah. . . I always thought so, too,” he admitted.

  “I don’t know how it keeps from breaking her heart,” I said.

  “Sometimes I think it still does. You know that song she always likes to sing?” he asked.

  “Leaning on the Everlasting Arms?” I asked.

  “Yeah, that one. Whenever you hear her singing that, she’s thinking about him,” he said.

  “How do you know that?” I asked.

  “Because that’s what the name of the river means. Brazos de Dios, the Arms of God. She says things like that are never a coincidence, and part of the reason why he died in that particular place was to always remind her that God is love and would never forsake either one of them, even when something terrible happens. She says whenever she thinks of that, it remin
ds her that everything happens for a reason. So she’s loved that song ever since, even though it still makes her cry now and then,” he said.

  I wondered if I could have had the courage to see things the way Miss Josie did, if Cody had been the one who drowned on a fishing trip and left me a widow at the age of twenty-five with a young child to raise and a ranch to manage all on my own. I honestly didn’t know the answer.

  All this talk about death and tragedy reminded me uneasily of all that stuff Cody believed about having a curse on his family, and I felt a chill in the pit of my stomach. Yeah, I know I said I’d never let it matter, and to be honest it was easy to blow it off as an old wives’ tale most of the time, but standing there in front of Blake McGrath’s grave and hearing that story about how he died. . . it suddenly made the whole thing seem a lot more credible.

  “So who all else is buried up here?” I asked, not liking the subject anymore.

  “Oh, lots of people. My grandparents, great-grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins, you name it. All family, though,” he said.

  “What’s the oldest one?” I asked.

  “Um. . . My Grandpa Reuben is buried up here. You remember him, don’t you; the one who fought at Goliad and first settled here? His stone’s over here,” Cody said, walking across to another part of the cemetery. I couldn’t help noticing how young so many of the people were when they died, and that made me even more uneasy. Try visiting a cemetery chock full of twenty-somethings and see how it makes you feel. I guarantee you won’t like it.

  The headstone turned out to be another double one, with Reuben McGrath on one side and Hannah Trewick on the other. It was marble instead of granite, though, and in the middle between the two halves was a tapering column about four feet high, with a quartz crystal about the size of a peach pit cemented on the very tip of it like a diamond. It was clear and perfect, with no cracks or inclusions, and someone had polished it so the facets were clean and smooth as a jewel.

  “Where’d that come from?” I asked, staring at it.

  “It’s cool, huh? It was Grandma Hannah’s. She used to wear it as a brooch, or so I’ve heard, and she loved it so much she had it put up here on her tombstone. I tried to pull it loose a few times when I was little, because it was so bright and shiny,” he said.

  “He sure was a lot older than her,” I commented, reading the dates on the stone. Reuben was almost thirty years older than his wife.

  “Yeah, people did that kind of stuff back then, I guess. I don’t think she got along with her family very well, so maybe that was part of it,” he shrugged.

  “Was Reuben really the only one who survived at Goliad?” I asked, nodding at the monument. I knew Cody wouldn’t be able to resist an invitation like that.

  “Oh, no, he wasn’t the only one,” he quickly corrected me, and then he was off to the races.

  So I listened while he waxed enthusiastic about Reuben McGrath’s adventures in the Texas Revolution and elsewhere, with a smile on my face. Who ever knew that a visit to a cemetery could be so educational?

  We did lots of other things, of course. We spent evenings together on the beach at the end of the road, sometimes with Marcus and Cyrus, and sometimes just the two of us. There were several big sycamore trees that leaned way out over the water, filling the air with their strong scent. The boys had nailed little pieces of plank all the way up the biggest trunk to make a ladder to reach the top, and once you got all the way up there, you were nearly thirty feet over the coffee-brown water of the bayou.

  Me and Cody jumped off that tree more times than I could count, hitting the water so hard it stung the bottoms of our bare feet. It was a deep enough hole that we didn’t have to worry about hitting the bottom, and we’d come up gasping and sputtering after what seemed like ten years down under. Sometimes he’d kiss me right there in the water, still too blurry-eyed to see a thing. I loved it when he did that.

  Other times, we’d light a bonfire on the sand and he’d play guitar while we sat on the tailgate till one o’clock in the morning. Cody could play almost anything, I think, and sometimes did. Everything from Lily of the Valley (his favorite hymn) to old Buddy Holly songs, and everything imaginable in between. He particularly liked the ones that took a lot of fast chord changes like I Fought the Law, I guess so he could show off a little.

  I remember one night he sang me Jake Owen’s Barefoot Blue Jean Night, a wild song about sitting barefoot on the riverbank to watch pretty auburn-headed girls drinking iced tea with their ruby red lips, among other things, and that was close enough to describing me that I laughed and turned a little red.

  I think those nights at the river are some of my sweetest memories, actually, full of music and warm kisses and talks that went on for hours. Every time I catch the scent of a sycamore tree, that’s always what I think of.

  We gradually formed a habit of going to the Dairy Dip for lunch every Saturday afternoon, and before long the corner booth was always “ours” whenever we went there. One day when the place was empty and there was nobody to see, Cody slipped out his pocketknife and quickly carved our initials into the surface of the table.

  “What are you doing, you nut?” I asked, watching him in mixed horror and amusement and glancing around nervously. If word ever got back to old Mrs. Gillespie, I’d probably get a good cussing at best and maybe even fired.

  “Hush. Nobody’s looking,” he told me, as he finished the last letter. He carved them deep, too; as long as that table stayed in the Dairy Dip, there was no way those initials were going anywhere either.

  Whatever my objections to his vandalism might have been, I relaxed when he was finished with it and finally even laughed.

  “You’re truly crazy, you know that?” I asked him.

  “Yeah, I know, but you love me anyway, don’t you?” he asked.

  “Yup. Can’t help myself,” I agreed.

  I was so happy that summer I think I could have floated on air. I had the man of my dreams and everything (well, almost) that I’d ever wanted. Yeah, there might have been some clouds on the horizon, but they were faint and far away.

  Things were sweeter than honeysuckle dew, for a little while.