The Fireman's Wife

by Jack Riggs

  And neither have I wings to fly,

  Build me a boat that can carry two,

  And both shall row, my love and I.

  I am handed to Phil Roddy, who helps me down onto the sand where I can rest and watch as Teddy and Kelly push out into the waves, Peck's urn carefully carried under Teddy's arm. I don't know what this man will do without Peck. They were like brothers, and I'm ashamed I never understood that, never tried to understand. But as I watch Peck carried out, I am brought to smiles to see Teddy in the surf taking him home, taking him to his final resting place.

  A ship there is, and she sails the sea,

  She's loaded deep, as deep can be,

  But not as deep as the love I'm in,

  I know not how I sink or swim.

  When Kelly and Teddy are out past the break, a good distance beyond the length of Kingfisher Pier, Phil Roddy helps me stand. The distant figures on the water trick me for a moment, and I see Peck and Teddy out there playing as the boys they've always been. But it is only for a moment that I hold this image because I know the figure with Teddy is my daughter, and when she holds the urn high above her head, I wave, smile, and say one last prayer for Peck, that he forgives me my life with him, and that I remember his love for me, always.

  Love is handsome and love is fine,

  The sweetest flower, when first it's new,

  But love grows old and waxes cold,

  And fades away, like summer dew.

  The chaplain stands along the water's edge, the tide wetting his pants, but he doesn't seem to mind. He waves to Kelly. Beside her, Teddy raises his hand, giving the sign of peace as Peck flows into the water, his ashes scattered in the very place he loved so much. Kelly sets the urn in the water as I told her to do, lets it fill and then releases it to sink to the bottom, deep enough that the tide will never bring it in, yet close so that whenever she is on the water, she will be near it. She will be there with Peck always.

  Give me a boat that can carry two

  And both shall row, my love and I.

  When Partee finishes, he comes over to hug me, his strong able body not enough to save Peck from this moment, but his voice beautiful enough to help him go across. I am grateful for the friends I have here, friends I never understood until now. We watch as Teddy and Kelly find a wave, pull up on it at just the right moment that it catches them, Peck somewhere out there molding the surf into perfect form, the wave breaking easily to bring Kelly and Teddy back to the beach. When they are on solid ground, when we have huddled and cried our eyes dry there is nothing left to do but go home.

  JUNE 1970

  Cassie

  AFTER MY FATHER DIED, I hurt for a long time. I tried attending church in Murrells Inlet, a small Methodist chapel nestled beneath a grove of large oak trees and next to Oliver's Lodge, but it didn't help. Peck and I argued constantly. I left him at home, taking Kelly and staying with Pops and Cealy for days on end. I went back and forth to Whiteside Cove where Momma's grief was overwhelming. In the years that followed, I failed to find a way to reconcile my father's loss. What I regretted most was that he had never seen his granddaughter, never held her, never had the chance to know what a wonderful child she was growing up. I was angry at him for excluding her from his life. I didn't care about me, our battles were different, but Kelly had done nothing to deserve exile. It wasn't fair and I let him know it in the form of letters and phone calls, in which I begged Momma to tell him to call me. If Kelly could at least see him, I was sure she'd win him over. There was no doubt in my mind he would fall in love with his granddaughter just like Peck and I had when she was born. But my father never called, never wrote a letter, and so he died never knowing this wonderful child.

  The spring that Kelly turned five, I came back home from a drive that was intended to take me away from the marsh for good. It was late and Kelly was still asleep in the backseat of the car. I came into the house, exhausted and lost, Peck sitting in the living room. He was off duty, and had found my note, one of many over the years. He had read the cruel words I wrote, my desire to leave him and my life along the marsh spewed all over the paper, and he still stayed up waiting for me to return.

  “How did you know I'd come back?” I asked.

  “I didn't,” he said. “I was just hoping you would.”

  I started back out to get Kelly, but Peck stopped me. “Let her sleep,” he said. “She won't know the difference for a while longer.”

  He took me back to the bedroom, undressed me, and we made love while Kelly slept in the car outside our window. It was a desperate act, two people trying to find a way to hold on. Peck was more willing than I was. He tried so hard, and there were times that I welcomed it, needed him to work hard for me. But there were others when I just didn't care. That night, it was somewhere in between, and afterward we were exhausted. We lay in the bed holding on to each other, watching out the raised window just in case Kelly woke up. “Why do I hurt so much?” I asked.

  Peck stayed silent for a moment like he might not know the answer, then let go of me, raised up on an elbow. He stroked my forehead, brushed the hair away from my eyes, looked at me and said, “Because you miss your father. Too much left unsaid, I guess.”

  “It's all too painful,” I confessed.

  He turned over, lit a cigarette, blew the smoke out into the room, let me have it and then lit his own. “I don't imagine you ever get over the loss of a parent,” he said. “I just think you learn to live with it.” In two years’ time, Peck would lose Cealy when her heart gave out while cooking a Sunday afternoon dinner. Peck would find her, alone and laid out on the floor in the kitchen.

  And then he said something I have never forgotten. Peck rose up even farther, almost to hover over me and said, “Cassie, if you just let go, great healing can come out of pain.” He waited there long enough to see I wasn't going to argue about that, then kissed me on the lips, a soft, sweet kiss before he got up to bring Kelly in from the car.

  Since Pecks funeral I have been drowning in pain. I cannot forgive myself for the choices that I made, choices that left Peck alone at a time in his life when he needed me. Even if I had been with him, I know Peck would have still gone to fight that fire, the young ranger would have led him in, and mistakes would have been made. That knowledge, however, does not stop the hurt. I have lost Peck forever, something I never imagined when he was alive. Peck was too good, too smart to die like that.

  It seems foolish to have these thoughts, to play the events of the past month over and over trying to reconcile something so irreconcilable. I know this, but I have had a lot of time over the past couple of weeks to think on my own, alone for the very first time in my life. I say alone for the first time because that's exactly what it is. I was born thirty- three years ago, and I have always lived with someone who took care of me. First it was with my parents until I was pregnant with Kelly, and then with Peck. Neither house offered me much of a say in how my life would play out. Now I will have all the say. After fifteen years, I will have to learn to take care of myself.

  I came back up to the mountains alone shortly after Peck's funeral, Momma telling me to go away for a while, agreeing to stay with Kelly at the beach so I could have some space to breathe and work things out. I needed to be in Sylva in early July because of the land dispute, John Boyd Carter and his stable full of lawyers making a run for the land after all by bringing an action to quiet title the property. “He can do that?” I asked Bit over the phone from Momma's house. The machinery around the cove sat silent, the digging stopped until the dispute was settled.

  “Yes he can,” Bit said. “He's claiming now that the land was conveyed as a gift deed, and those are void after two years, if not properly recorded. Obviously it was more than two years old when you filed it. John Boyd's saying his contract to sell the land to the development company is in jeopardy and that the delay will cause irreparable harm if the courts don't act quickly to settle this.”

  “How quick?” I ask. “Will we have a c
hance in this?” I could feel my hand trembling holding the receiver to my ear as I waited for his reply.

  “Cassie,” Bit said. He drew my name out long and slow over the phone just to make the point. “This case will pour as slow as molasses in winter, if you want it to. You had the original deed, a general warranty deed signed, notarized, and submitted to the Register before John Boyd could get the land sold off. You have a letter setting out the terms and conditions of the deed that John Boyd signed.

  “For whatever reason, he was trying to get you to go along with something he didn't have to. He could have transferred the deed that existed, sold the property, and that would have been that. It was his mistake to wait, and now, he's trying to fix a bad deed done, no pun intended, of course. Cassie, we've got him for as long as you want him.”

  When I heard those words, We've got him, I just sat down on the floor in the hall of Momma's house, no longer able to hold back my tears, joy and sorrow all mixed up into one bad heartbreak. Kimberly got on the phone and told me not to move, that she was on her way.

  I stayed with her at her parents’ home in Cashiers through July 4th, hiked the old trails, and sat on outcroppings of Chimney Top Mountain, the sun melting away in front of us. We watched fireworks explode over High Hampton after dark and I told her about my life with Peck, how it had fallen apart and then come back together, but not soon enough to tell him before he died. We sat in silence, traffic moving along 107, the distance great between me and the rest of the world. “This is what it feels like,” I said.

  “What?”

  “Losing Peck, everything. It's like being lifted up onto the top of some great mountain and left there alone. I can see all the life below me, but I can't get to it. I can't be part of something that's going forward, not right now, not yet.” Kimberly looked at me then, reached over, and wiped away my tears.

  I spent the next afternoon sitting out in Momma's backyard remembering the cove, my father, and the life we led here so many years ago. When I became restless as a young girl, when I could no longer stand living here, that great wall of rock hemmed me in, left me a prisoner. When I sat there on that last day I would for all practical purposes live in Momma's house, Whiteside was like old blood running deep inside of me. It stood quietly, the one constant that would never change, always here to mark the lives of those who lived below its ancient walls.

  I closed Momma's house up, left Whiteside Cove after that. For the past couple of weeks, I have been on my own, driving endlessly through the mountains of North Carolina and Tennessee thinking, crying a lot, but mostly thinking. In this time I have been a stranger on sidewalks of small mountain towns where I walked, ate in restaurants, and slept in motels, all of it done alone. I have lived anonymously. I haven't said two dozen words to anyone since I left Whiteside Cove, sort of an unintentional solitude.

  It's mid- July now and everywhere I go, Chattanooga, Asheville, Cherokee, there are posters for Tallulah Gorge and the great Wallenda's tightrope walk. It haunts me seeing posters of a man walking across a narrow strip of words. ACROSS THE AWESOME GORGE, it says, the slight image of man holding a large stick balanced on top of the word awesome. This is where Clay had promised to bring me and Kelly, a celebration that was to mark the beginning of the rest of my life.

  In the Asheville newspaper there was a picture of the rope, a cable actually, of spun steel that had been fabricated in Georgetown. It was being hauled up to Tallulah Gorge on a flatbed railroad car, each stop along the rail documented by pictures and commentary. An editorial inside the paper criticized the need for such a spectacle that would no doubt erode the pristine nature of the gorge. Everyone has a point of view these days, but nothing, I have learned, is ever black and white.

  My plan was to have returned to the low country by now, but instead I piddled around long enough that I ended up in Franklin, North Carolina, about the time of the walk, too close to find an excuse not to drive the short distance to Georgia and the gorge. And so, here I am, July 18th, having paid my five dollars for a ticket, endured crowds ten times worse than any in Garden City Beach during the summer season. Someone near me has said there are twenty- five thousand people here to watch this walk. I have been camped out in a single spot all day seated along a makeshift rail constructed so no tourists can fall into the gorge and kill themselves. Only the Great Wallenda will be allowed to do that today, if it is to happen at all.

  I wonder as a lady sings “America the Beautiful” how many of these people here actually want to see Wallenda fall. Peck always said that people love a tragedy more than they do a miracle. He was always concerned about those who stopped to witness accidents and fires, afraid someone would end up hurt because they just couldn't keep going and stay focused on their own lives. They had to try and watch the heartbreak of others.

  I also worry that I might see Clay Taylor among the crowds. I have not talked to him since I thanked him for bringing the news of Pecks death to me. At Pecks funeral, we kept our distance. I plan to do the same if he is here. I'll leave if I have to. I don't want Clay in my life anymore. That whole idea was dead even before Peck was.

  I rub my tummy, the curvature more recognizable, a baby growing inside me. I'm not sure of the exact date. I haven't counted the days, looked at a calendar to figure out when I will deliver, because I'm not ready for what is happening to me. I can't get excited about bringing a new life into this world. I want to believe that this baby is Peck's, but I know there is a chance Clay is the father. What a mess I have made of my life, I think. I have made such a spectacle of it that I wonder if I ought not to be put on display, a sideshow folly at some county fair where people would pay a dollar to come in and see me.

  I am just about to give up, stand and walk away, disgusted by my self- pity, when the whole place falls quiet. We turn collectively toward the steel cord stretched out across the gorge, the walk about to begin. I am on the south rim, so Wallenda will walk toward me, toward the thousands who line the edge over here, everyone holding their breath as the small frail man on the other side steps gingerly out into thin air.

  When Bob Strachen brought me all of Peck's belongings, he hesitated with the last item. He stood there a bit uncertain about what he held, but then he showed me a penny. “I don't know why he had this,” Bob says, “but they found the penny in his boot— well, in his sock actually. It was against his foot.”

  I smiled when he handed it to me, almost like a sign from Peck, a last little bit of himself handed to me, a gift. “It was something Pops always did,” I told him, “a penny in his shoe for good luck.” The irony of what I had just said was not lost on either one of us. Bob shook his head. “I'm sure going to miss him,” he said. I held the penny in my palm, let the near weightless coin sit for a moment, and then I said, “You take this.”

  Bob looked at me, his eyes sad. “No,” he said. “It's yours. Peck would have wanted you to have it.”

  “No,” I said, “he would have wanted a fireman to have it.” I put the penny in his hand, closed it, and walked away.

  I remember this now, sitting here on the side of Tallulah Gorge because just as Wallenda is in the middle of the wire, he stops, a gasp rising from the crowd as he trembles briefly. I look down because I cannot watch him fall, if that is what he is about to do. There has been enough death this summer to last a lifetime. I don't need the burden of another on my mind, so I turn away. And when I look to the ground, between my feet, slightly dusty, tarnished, and beat up, I find a penny lying in the dirt, the date 1954, the year Peck and I were married. The year it all began. The coin brings me to tears, though I try hard not to let those who crowd around me see that I am crying. I take the penny in my hand, hold it tight, and feel Peck there beside me, the touch of his skin, the smell of his body.

  That's when I feel the first kick of our child. Just when Wallenda bends over to rest his head on the wire, to lift his legs up and over into a headstand, I feel the baby inside my tummy kick like it's trying to say, pay attention to what
's going on here. It's impossible, I know that. It's only a little over three months along, but I swear it is there. I am breathless after it, tears streaming down my face as I feel the certainty of life inside me, Peck's child, I know now for certain, already eager to get on with it, to grow and be born, to fight and fight harder to live in this life, to be our child, to be Peck's child.

  Wallenda ends his walk, stepping onto the tower on the south rim, after a mere eighteen minutes of stunned silence. And then cheers across the gorge, some yelling for him to do it again, to walk back across. All the shouts and cheers are met with a wave from the little man hanging off the tower by an arm, and then he disappears into the throng, the spectacle over, someone behind me careless with their words. “That's it? Kind of a rip- off, if you ask me.”

  I stay at the rim long after Wallenda is gone and stare at the wire, feel the wind begin to bring a storm that's been waiting to come up the gorge all afternoon. I close my eyes and promise Peck to raise this child as well as we raised Kelly, but I'm afraid it won't work without him. “I need you, Peck,” I say, my fist tight on the penny in my hand.

  A young ranger walks to where I sit, leans over, and asks if I'm all right. The sudden attention is embarrassing, pulls me up quickly as I wipe my face with the back of my hand. “Yes, I'm all right,” I tell him. “I'm fine, really.” And then I hurry away.

  I catch the last shuttle back to the parking lots, trying to be invisible, wanting to do nothing more to draw attention. When I am at my car, I search my pockets for the keys, find them, and open the door. It's then I realize the penny is gone, no longer in my hand. I look around the car, search my pockets, pulling them inside out, retrace my steps around the parking lot looking frantically for the small piece of Peck that I have no doubt lost.

  When the storm finally blows in, it is a sudden outburst of darkness and torrential rains that move through fast, leaving the parking lots steamy and wet on the other side. It's silly being chased into my car by rain, sitting here looking down at empty hands thinking I have lost Peck again. If he was here next to me, I'm sure he would be laughing, telling me to start the car and be on my way.