If the Creek Don’t Rise

by Leah Weiss

  Opposite Birdie is a low stool, and I fold myself down, down low to the ground, until our eyes are level. Then I wait, acutely aware of my breathing.

  There’s a dry rustling in the walls, and I wonder if the room breathes with me. All the while Birdie sucks on her pipe, squints through blue smoke, and studies me. I vaguely wonder if she has slowed time to a crawl.

  Not that I care.

  Cocoon.

  That’s what this place is. A soft cell of heady comfort and wisdom culled from a great student of life. Birdie’s home isn’t an eerie place. It makes me curious. Feel safe.

  “Them things I give. You like?”

  I’m pleasantly surprised I understand Birdie’s speech perfectly.

  “Sadie said they’re from you. Thank you.” My voice is mellow and easy.

  “You even know what you got?”

  “Sadie says the eagle feather means you think I’m brave. And the bones of the child’s hand represent a spirit who watches over me.”

  “That girl smart.”

  “Do you know about the blue bird who lost his head?”

  “That indigo bunting give his life for you.”

  “And blood and guts smeared on my door?”

  “They done. Over with.”

  “How do you know?” My words leave my mouth, thick, and float in the air in front of my eyes.

  “I been watching you these weeks. Make sure you was safe.”

  “You have? How kind.” I feel drunk and loose, but I haven’t had anything to eat or drink. It’s just this lovely, marvelous, blue smoke.

  “Did you tell the troublemaker to stop doing those awful things?” I use my little-girl voice I thought I’d lost.

  “Kate Shaw, you done passed.” Birdie’s voice sounds far away. “This here mountain is pleased.”

  The last thing I hear is the mountain is pleased, and the next moment, I wake in my loft, under my blanket, wearing pajamas. I blink against sunshine and wonder if I dreamed the whole thing.

  Miraculously, my headache is gone.

  • • •

  September 24

  My dear Rachel—

  Do you remember all the years I struggled to fit in at other places? How I longed to make a difference but felt I always fell short or was spinning my wheels, fighting futile battles? Do you remember all the self-doubts that plagued me before I came here, and all the fears and headaches that followed me to this end of the world?

  They’re gone.

  Love,

  K

  • • •

  On the second Saturday in October, in an iron skillet, venison stew simmers on the woodstove, thanks to Jerome Biddle’s generosity. Oil lamps stay lit in the tin, dull day. Rain that won’t stop prattles on, and the roof leaks into buckets and bowls I’ve scattered around the floor to catch the steady plunk of drips. The creek has risen and steadily inches toward my door.

  I lay content, warm, and dry on the sofa with my copy of To Kill A Mockingbird, and Dog sleeps on the floor, happy to be out of the elements. Out the window, I watch Jerome chop wood in the rain. Then he stops, looks up the hill for something, then chops more wood.

  Suddenly, Dog sits at attention and Jerome drops his ax and runs. I jump up too, and spill the book off my lap. Over the ridge, I see Sadie Blue, pale as the mist, make her way through the icy drizzle. She limps and clutches her tummy. I grab the blanket off the back of the sofa, hold it to the woodstove to collect warmth, and watch Jerome and Sadie’s final steps. I open the door, and she collapses in the blanket’s warmth. I carry her to the sofa.

  “Get Birdie,” I say.

  I tuck the blanket around the girl, put on more water to heat, all the while thinking about Jerome scanning the hills like he knew Sadie needed help on the day the rain wouldn’t stop.

  In minutes too quick for real time, the door opens, and Birdie and Jerome enter with a sack of herbs and clay pots they stack on the table. Earthy fragrances crowd the air. I step back and watch Birdie probe Sadie’s bruised head, arm, belly. She mixes a pungent tea, and while it steeps, she coats the injured arm with a green salve and wraps it in strips of cotton. A hot water bottle made from a deer or goat’s stomach goes under the blanket and rests on the girl’s mounded belly.

  “How far along is she?” I ask.

  “Not far enough,” Birdie answers.

  “My baby…” Sadie murmurs.

  “It’s Roy, isn’t it?” I whisper.

  Birdie doesn’t have to answer.

  Jerome watches from the corner by the door. Water drips off his clothes onto the floor. Dog walks over and licks the puddle at the man’s feet. I stay out of the way in a cabin too tight for four people and a dog. Birdie spoons tea between the girl’s blanched lips and soothes her swollen face with a compress.

  This protracted scene in primitive Appalachia—in the throes of another angry storm that refuses to end, when political assassinations and civil rights battles and the birth control pill change tomorrows down below—is timeless and tiring. Who will keep sweet Sadie safe from harm’s way? Not the church, though Eli undoubtedly prays every day for Sadie and those like her. Not the mountain or valley laws, which turn blind eyes to this intimate crime. Not anyone who sees consequences of today but can find no easy recourse.

  My anger is focused. I want to dismember Roy Tupkin limb by limb. I’d use a rusty saw.

  • • •

  Dull daylight wanes, and Jerome and I empty pots of water that catch endless leaks in my roof. He refills the woodstove. Now our shadows loom large and crawl up the walls and hover over Sadie in protection. We eat because we should while Sadie fights her fight. She shifts and moans and seeks comfort. Birdie mixes more herbs and steeps more tea and speaks soothing sounds to mend the damage Roy delivered. I sleep fitfully in the loft in hour-long snippets, wake guilty, and climb down the ladder as dawn creeps in.

  The storm finally decides to subside, and Sadie opens her eyes.

  “Hey,” Birdie says. Her voice sounds big in the quiet where the pounding rain has lived for days and has gone away.

  Jerome slept standing. He stirs at the woman’s word and shakes each leg awake.

  “Hey,” Sadie says back and pushes herself up. Birdie stuffs pillows behind her for support. Jerome feeds the fire, I make coffee, and the tinge of color seeps into the girl’s cheeks. Hope shifts to more solid ground.

  “Is she over the danger?” I whisper.

  “The day will say,” Birdie answers.

  The old woman steeps yet another tea that smells more rank than the ones before, so I step outside into the dripping forest with my mug of coffee, and Dog does his business. Jerome is back to splitting wood. He doesn’t want to leave. I think he will find wood and cut and split it as long as Sadie stays. His loyalty is pure.

  “Jerome Biddle,” Birdie calls from the porch. “Come sit with Sadie.”

  He drops the ax and lopes in with a quick step. Birdie squats on the ground to relieve herself, then stands and lights her pipe. Today’s smoke is green. I step closer, inhale deeply, and feel my tired mind clear.

  Out of the blue, she says with a sly grin, “You ain’t got no simpleminded sister named Rachel, do you?”

  I don’t hesitate. “No, I don’t.”

  “You smart.” Birdie cackles and shakes her head.

  • • •

  I realize, with a quickened pulse, I feel more purposeful, accepted, and liberated in this community than anywhere else. Suddenly I’m famished and go inside with Birdie behind me and fix buckwheat pancakes. We spend the damp day as a family of sorts, united by love for Sadie, who is recovering amazingly well, thanks to herbs and youth’s resiliency. By midmorning, the girl stands and sips more rank tea without complaint, her hand tender on her belly, her movements easier, her face calm.

  None of us are surprise
d when Roy Tupkin comes out of the woods in the afternoon, drunk, slipping on slick leaves, stopping short before he reaches my door.

  “Sadie Tupkin!” he shouts. “I come to bring you home. You get outta that place with witches and dykes and shitty retards. They freaks!” Roy wails and whines and turns in dramatic circles, like a spoiled child onstage.

  “You and that baby of mine don’t belong in there.” Roy howls like a wounded animal. “You’re mine, mine, mine.”

  I look at Sadie looking at Roy, and I see how brave she must be to face the volatile danger of him every day. I watch her face shift, turn to granite, resigned. I want to clutch her arms and shout, You deserve more! You are more! This is not your life!

  “You made me hurt that baby,” he rants. “You got me riled is what you done. Made me feel small.”

  Does she see how pathetic he is? Does she see he is a war she can never win?

  “Goddamn it, Sadie. Why you gotta ruin everything?” Roy runs down like a windup toy, drops his head to his chest, and sinks to his knees.

  In the quiet, Sadie says low, “Him a big baby. I don’t need me two babies.”

  My jaw drops, and Birdie claps and does a little jig. Sadie giggles and covers her mouth with her hands. Laughing, Birdie walks out the door and mumbles chants with outstretched arms and twitchy fingers. We watch little boy Roy back step, and slip and stumble, and his ignorance chases him over the ridge where the weak morning sun breaks through soggy clouds.

  Sadie Blue still stands straight with her legs planted wonderfully strong, a warrior newly born. I take a step to hug her, and she grabs her belly, doubles over, and cries out Oh Lord! and instantly a tiny creature falls between her legs in a swoosh of crimson that splats on the wooden floor just as Birdie steps back inside. The old woman scoops up the lost hope in one hand and puts it in the empty bag that held healing herbs. Jerome grabs the bag, clutches the remains of a lost soul, and scuttles off into the wet woods.

  Emptiness fills the cabin. It stretches thin around Sadie, Birdie, and me, three women who look for the why wrapped in grief that numbs us. Hope propelled the last day’s efforts but now it evaporates.

  All for nothing.

  All for everything that matters.

  Birdie finds purpose first and reaches for a clean rag. She dips it in the pan of warm water and wrings it out in hands as gnarled as tree roots holding tight to this mountain place. She kneels on swollen knees beside young Sadie Blue and washes away traces of her loss.

  I get on my hands and knees and scrub the blood off the floor.

  Tattler Swann

  Like most folks round here, I live on Bentwood Mountain near Baines Creek all my days, and I scrape out a living in the backwoods that suits me fine. I don’t need schooling or messing with a jumble of letters and numbers like that fancy teacher from the valley pushes. Mama says Preacher Eli’s been by a time or two hoping to change my wandering ways, but I ain’t buying what he’s selling. He’s good-hearted. Even had me try my hand at building a chicken coop for Miz Marris that still stands, but the building life don’t take like fishing and hunting do. Truth is, this mountain and Birdie Rocas and them crows she hangs with be teacher enough. My mama Dottie’s smarts fills in some more. Then there’s my friend, Jerome Biddle.

  Jerome Biddle lives at the lonely side of Good Luck Pass in a trailer that leans to the left. That don’t bother him none cause his right leg is shorter than the other by two inches. He looks strangely upright when he stands in his little house or walks the right side of the mountain. But he looks off-kilter in the valley where land is flat and people normal.

  Nothing’s normal bout Jerome Biddle.

  Not a single hair grows on his flat, spotted head, and his beard’s a foot long, matted with leaves and bits of bone and bird feathers, and it flutters in the breeze. His leather skin is seasoned dark like a Injun’s. His blue eyes washed out like a winter sky. You never know if Jerome Biddle looks at you or through you. He don’t mind looking odd, but it scares the bejeezus outta me when I come up on him in the woods. I be hunting or fishing or checking traps and find Jerome Biddle standing so still he’s like a tree trunk.

  I say, “Jerome Biddle, why you standing like that? You got nothing better to do?”

  And the odd man answers real careful so only his mouth moves and words slide sideways through the crack of his lips. “I plant this tree to tie me to eternity.”

  Or he says, “I listen to the moaning of time and take it to the borderline.”

  Jerome Biddle calls his self a poet. I say he speaks in riddles, and stuff like that don’t do a body good. I know what I talk bout cause Saturday brings trouble neither of us is ready for—least of all Jerome Biddle.

  The river is worrisome high after six days rain. My lucky fishing spot on the riverbank is underwater, and I finally take to scooting out on a sycamore tree felled over thick water and drop a line. I know no fish will likely pay attention to my worm in the churning water. I’m more gambler than Mama likes. Plus I got me a streak of lazy. She sometime says, “Tattler Swann, you waste more time than is good for a soul that’s gotta feed and clothe his self.”

  I say with a smile that always turns her soft, “Mama, don’t worry none. Life’s too short to work all day. I got time enough to do the necessary.”

  So, Saturday late afternoon, I sit on a tree that fell across water rushing so loud I can’t hear nothing but the rushing. While I dangle a fishing line with weak hope in the strong-willed water, I look and spy Jerome Biddle downstream two hundred paces on the rocky bank. The man’s got a burlap sack throwed over his crooked shoulder, and the bottom of the poke looks bloody. Black blood drips down his shirttail, down the back of his pants, and into the heels of his moccasins. He looks back to the woods like something fearful is coming. He’s crying, too, wiping his nose on his raggedy sleeve. I forget fishing and turn curious bout my friend’s blubbering and that bloody sack.

  So I scoot back cross the log to the bank and think to follow Jerome when I hear over the water’s din coonhounds coming along the ridge, hot on a trail. They make a racket, and I can tell them owners hold tight to the leashes to keep em from running free just yet. I look back downstream and see Jerome Biddle, chest high in the tangled river, battling the current. He holds tight to the poke that’s mostly underwater now. He works his way round a big boulder with a crack in the side, then ducks down and don’t come up.

  My friend crawled into the rock the weight of water and time wore out hollow. It’s got air enough on a regular day to last for a good while, cept this won’t no regular day with the water high. The seed of worry gets planted in the back of my mind. Few folk know the hiding spot cept me and Jerome Biddle and the Stoner boys from Rock Hall who hid from revenuers one night and caused a bunch of head scratching.

  I look back up the hill as three men and a pack of dogs swoop down my way. I still clutch my fishing pole when the strangers slap up against my space with their sweaty heat.

  Boss Man carries a rifle on his shoulder, a wad of chew in his cheek, and a mean edge. He looks vaguely like my daddy I see once when he come by the house to see Mama. She blocked the door and won’t let him in, but he was coming in anyway till he caught sight of me and stopped. Raised his eyebrow at my five-year-old self. Stared at me and saw responsibility he can’t handle and ownership he won’t claim. He turned round and marched off that porch without a glance back or a fare-the-well.

  Without looking my way, Mama held out one arm, and I walked into her comfort and leaned into her warm side while she leaned into the hard doorframe. We watched the man cross the yard and head down the road. I remember him chewing tobacco and his jaw working. His hair was clipped short enough to see his scalp. His ears stuck out like mine. Most of all, I remember his mean edge.

  “That’s your daddy, Tattler. You won’t never see him again.”

  • • •

  My mouth
goes dry looking at Boss Man who won’t my daddy but could be. The big man raises his voice over the stirred-up water and the racket the dogs make.

  “What’s your name, boy?”

  I raise my voice, too. “Tattler Swann, sir.” Mama taught me to be mindful of my elders.

  “You from round here?”

  “Over a couple of ridges thataway, sir.” I point.

  “What’s your folks’ names?”

  “Dottie Swann’s my mama. Got no daddy to speak of.”

  “You been here long?”

  “All my life.”

  At my sass, Boss Man’s lips draw a stingy line cross his pocked face. “Don’t get smart-assed with me, boy. I ask if you been here at the river long.” His black eyes hold a puny soul.

  “Long enough, sir.”

  He cocks his head to the dangerous side. “You itching for a whipping? What kind of answer’s that?”

  “Long enough to get tired of fishing. Ain’t caught nary a one.”

  Boss Man stares at me hard. Tries to make me squirm.

  I stay put. I can wait out the best of em when I aim to.

  Finally the man says, “Did you see a odd-looking man come this way?”

  “What kinda odd?”

  “Bald head. Straggly beard. Carrying a poke.”

  I size up the posse and know they ain’t in no talking mood. They shoot Jerome Biddle in the back and never think to ask questions till too late. I vex em for spite.

  “That depends.”

  “On what?”

  “What day you mean.”

  “What day? What day?”

  The veins on Boss Man’s neck bulge like fat night crawlers I want to stick a fishhook through, but don’t think a fish would even take the bait.

  “Today, you little snot-nosed bastard! Now! We know we’re on his trail. I’m trying to pinpoint his lead time on us. Have you seen him or not?”

  I don’t know most of these men. They ain’t from round here. One feller I know from Roy’s moonshine business I come up on in the woods awhile back. I hightailed it outta there before they see me cause I don’t borrow trouble if I can help it.