There Is a River

by Thomas Sugrue

  “Quiet now. Watch my hand. Be still,” he said.

  He was just Daniel’s age, and they were riding across the big field, heading for the barns . . .

  He pressed the bulb. The shutter clicked.

  TWO

  They were riding across the big field, heading for the barns. The men were in the machinery house, repairing a binder, and Grandpa wanted to see how the work was coming. When they came to the pond that sat between the road and the barns the horse stopped.

  “Better get down, Old Man,” Grandpa said, “I’m going to give this fellow a drink.”

  He slid down and ran into the tall grass by the water, glad of the chance to get himself cooled off. It was hot up there on the horse, with Grandpa cutting off the breeze and the sun coming down on his bare head. His pants were wet from the lather of the horse and his hands were sweaty from holding Grandpa’s belt. He squatted by the edge of the pond and stared into the water, looking for fish.

  Grandpa walked the horse into the pond and waited while he drank, sitting in the saddle with his hands on his hips. Suddenly the horse threw up its head, reared, and plunged into deep water. Grandpa held his seat and grabbed the reins, pulling on them with all his strength.

  The horse swam to the other side of the pond, galloped to the white rail fence surrounding the barns, tried to jump it, failed, and turned back to the pond. Somehow Grandpa retained his seat.

  As the horse entered the water a second time he stumbled and went to his knees. Grandpa was thrown over his head, landing on his back. The horse got to his feet, reared again, and brought his forefeet down on Grandpa’s chest. Then he turned and ran off through the field.

  Grandpa’s head was under the water. Old Man waited for him to get up. He called to him. There was no answer. Grandpa lay still. Old Man ran to get help as fast as he could.

  Grandpa was dead. They carried him to the house, and Dr. Kenner came, but Old Man could hear his grandmother crying, and he knew it by the funny look on the faces of his uncles as they came out of the room. He sat in the kitchen and talked to Patsy Cayce about it.

  “Grandpa’s dead,” he said. “The horse killed him. Now will they put him in the ground and bury him?”

  “He’ll go to the angels, Old Man,” Patsy said. “Mistuh T. J. was a fine gentleman, and he’ll go to the angels.”

  “Will I see him again?” Old Man asked. Patsy bent down and peered at him.

  “Sho’ you’ll see him again,” she said. “Yo’ has the second sight, ain’t yo’?”

  He didn’t know what she meant by that. Suddenly he wanted his mother.

  “I want to go home,” he said.

  “I’ll take yo’,” Patsy said.

  She took his hand and went with him down to the road and across it, to the little farmhouse where they had been living since his father gave up keeping the store at the crossroads. He told his mother what had happened, and she sat for a long time and told him how death was just going back to heaven, and living down here was just being away from the angels for a while.

  “But Grandfather was my friend,” he said. “The angels should have known that. I needed him to take me riding; and he was going to teach me to fish and hunt.”

  “Perhaps he will, even if he is an angel,” his mother said.

  She took him back to the big house the next day, and he saw them come for the funeral, in their carriages. He saw all his uncles: Edgar, Clinton, Matthew, Robert E. Lee, Lucian, and Delbert Cayce. His granduncles were there, too: George Washington, James Madison, and Franklin Pierce Cayce. His Aunt Ella Cayce Jones was there, and his other uncles, the Majors. There were more aunts, too, from the other Major farms and the other Cayce farms. He couldn’t remember all their names, and they all looked the same when they were dressed up anyhow.

  He stayed at the house with Patsy when they took Grandpa and went away for the funeral. Standing by the window, watching the carriages disappear down the road, he could smell the apple blossoms and hear the bees rushing to their hives.

  It was a lonesome day. He walked home by himself and went to play under the maple trees in front of the house, where his playmates came to meet him when it was too hot to play in the back yard.

  They were nice little boys and girls, and he had wondered for a long time why other people didn’t see them; but one day he found out that they didn’t like other people to see them. His father came to ask to whom he was speaking, and when he turned around to point out his playmates, they were gone. They came back after his father left.

  But his mother could see them sometimes, and it made him happy. One day she looked through the window and said, “Your playmates are waiting for you”; and when he went out, there they were, sliding down the hayrick.

  —

  It was a beautiful land in which to live. He loved the rolling red and black fields that turned green with crops in the summer, and the patches of forest that were haunted by shy animals and filled with pleasant sounds. He liked the big houses and the clusters of barns that dotted the landscape as far as his eyes could see. He could go to any one of the groups of barns and find some of his uncles or cousins working, and talk to them about fishing and hunting, about tobacco leaf, and about the weather.

  There was always something doing in the barns, especially in autumn, when the tobacco was being fired. Great logs were rolled together and kept burning slowly, while the smoke rose to the eaves, where the tobacco hung. He liked to sit and become filled with the odor. He liked the smokehouse, too, where a smudge fire of hickory and sassafras chips sent incense drifting up to the bacon, the sausage, and the shoulders of ham.

  In winter there were all sorts of chores to do among the long rows of stalls, in the harness room, among the nests of machinery, and in the room where seed was kept and prepared for spring.

  By March the sun was lingering, and the earth turned wet and soft. The brooks became loud and filled their eddies with green scum. Walking along their edges he found crocuses lifting their heads. Shoots of jonquils pushed open the long rows of the gardens.

  Soon there was planting, and in May and June the tobacco was put in. By then the woods were a fairyland, full of dogwood and redbud, hickory and red and white oak trees, hazelnut bushes, violets and jack-in-the-pulpits, skunk cabbage, pawpaws, and May apples—the little plant that is the mandrake of the Bible, with a blossom in May and a fruit that is ready to eat in late June and early July.

  There were quail and rabbits, which he learned to hunt, as he grew older, with an ancient muzzle-loader. His equipment was a powder horn, a shot flask with caps, and a newspaper for wadding. Sometimes the newspaper was not tightly packed and would stream out when the gun went off, catching fire and making a wonderful sight.

  There were plenty of fish, too, both in the brooks and in the ponds. In summer fishing was his greatest joy. Then the days were long and hot and the men worked in the fields. The women stayed indoors, canning fruits and vegetables, and he had no playmates but his sisters—a new one was being born all the time, it seemed to him, until there were four of them: Annie, Mary, Ola, and Sara. From them and their dolls he was glad to get away for long hours beside the water, dreaming as he waited for a fish to come and take the worm he offered. His little play folk came to him there, to be with him.

  They were always his size; as he grew older, they grew older; what he wanted to do was always what they wanted to do. Sometimes there were only a few of them, sometimes there were many. One day they would be all boys, another day they would be all girls. They went away when another person came, unless it was little Anna Seay. She was a neighbor’s daughter and just his age. The play folk seemed to like her, and she could see them and even talk with them.

  She was inquisitive. One day when it rained and they all ran to the playhouse they had built in the top of one of the barns, she asked the play folk why they didn’t get wet.

  One of the
m said, “Oh, we can’t get wet. We live in the flowers, and the music.”

  “What music?” Anna asked.

  “The music of everything,” the little fellow said.

  Once he and Anna waded out to an island in the creek at the back of her father’s farm, and there, at the water’s edge, they found other little folk. But these would have nothing to do with them. They said they had never been girls or boys, and would rather play with the dragonflies.

  He wondered if the play folk would ever come back after the cold winter during which Anna and her father both died of pneumonia. He thought that either they would go away with her, or she would come to him with them. When spring came and he went to the woods, they were there, but she was not with them. As he played with them he suddenly realized that they had stopped growing, that they were no longer keeping pace with him. He knew then that he was going to lose them.

  He could barely remember the time when he had not known them. He had made a little house under the butter bean vines in the garden, and one day a boy came to play with him. He told his mother about him, but she had not seen him. The next day the boy came back and brought some others with him. It was after that, one day, that his mother saw them.

  He dreaded the day when they would not come to meet him, but when it arrived he found that he didn’t mind. He listened more intently to the calls of the birds and to the other sounds of the woods, until the living things around him took the place of his invisible friends. The loneliness he had been afraid of never came.

  After a while his father began to run the store at the crossroads again. There he sat quiet among the barrels and boxes and listened to the men talk of politics and tobacco and the women discuss styles and the prices of things. He liked to listen to the grownups talk, while they bought yards of cloth, barrels of flour, sacks of rice, herbs, tea, medicine—everything they did not raise or make on their farms. With every dollar’s worth of goods they were entitled to a drink from the whisky barrel, which stood in a corner with a dipper hanging above it. The men paid the bills and collected the premiums.

  Next to his mother his grandmother was his best friend. His father was nice, but he didn’t have time for a small boy; he was always smoking a cigar, pulling on his mustache, and talking to the men about politics; he was justice of the peace now, and everyone called him “squire.” Grandmother was always alone, or just fussing around the kitchen with Patsy Cayce; she had lots of time to talk, and she liked him to tell her about seeing Grandpa. He saw Grandpa sometimes in the barns, usually when the tobacco was being fired. He never told anyone but Grandmother; it was a secret between them. Of course Grandpa wasn’t really there; he was like the little playmates, you could see through him if you looked real hard.

  He found that people meant things to talk about. Grandmother meant talking about Grandpa and about the farm, and about what he would do when he grew up. Patsy Cayce meant talking about good things to eat and about how fat he was getting, except that he wasn’t, he was nearly skinny. His father meant talking about growing up and being a big fellow and going to school, and whether he had done his chores. Talking to his sisters meant listening to them tell about their dolls, and what they did that day, and what they were going to do tomorrow. His mother was the only one who didn’t mean certain things. They just talked about everything and anything, and that was why he liked her best of all. She never laughed at him or teased him, so he never was afraid to tell her what he thought. She never needed to scold him, because he knew that she didn’t like to, so he always did what she asked, and even more. It was nice to be with her and do things for her. She was a good friend.

  He was seven before he went to school. That year his aunt, Mrs. Ella Cayce Jones, had a boarder named Mrs. Ellison, who had come from the West, where she had been a Mormon, and, so she said, one of the wives of Brigham Young. She had also been a schoolteacher, and the parents of the neighborhood asked her to conduct a class for the smaller children. Mrs. Jones provided a room in her house, and Squire Cayce brought his son and several daughters to the class.

  Mrs. Ellison was a pretty, soft-spoken brunette. She was gentle with the children, and they loved her. The squire’s son learned things quickly in her class, because he wanted to please her. “I know my lesson,” he would say, and she would bend down to question him. Then he could smell the sachet she wore, and sometimes her hair would brush against his cheek as she looked over his shoulder and listened to his answers.

  But Mrs. Ellison went away when spring came, and in the fall they sent him to the subscription school, by the crossroads near Liberty Church. He was frightened the first day; the desk was too small for his long legs, he didn’t know any of the lessons they talked about, and when the teacher spoke to him all the children watched him and he got his feet tangled under the desk and couldn’t stand up.

  He didn’t like school. Every time the teacher called on him he was thinking about something else, and didn’t know the answer to the question.

  “Don’t you ever stop dreaming?” Josie Turner, his first teacher, would say.

  He tried to keep his mind on the lesson, but it was no use. While one of the other children was reciting he would look out the window, toward the woods, or his grandmother’s, and away his thoughts would go.

  Grandmother was building a new house. There had been a big fire the year before, and the old house had burned to the ground. Now the new one was nearly finished, and while the work was going on Squire Cayce decided to put up a place of his own.

  He picked a spot just at the edge of the woods that stood between the barns of the big house and the road. It was a pretty place, and when the cottage that he and his brothers built was finished, everyone called it “the little house in the woods.”

  “Old Man, will you read the next sentence?” Josie Turner would say.

  But he would be staring out the window, dreaming of his new home, and the brook that ran through the woods, and would not know the right place in the book.

  When Dr. Doolin married Josie Turner and she left the school he had to do better, because his father took over the teaching job. His father was a stern man with a quick temper; he struck first and asked questions afterward. But still he dreamed and didn’t know the lessons, until his knuckles had no skin on them for being rapped so often.

  It was different when they took him to church. He was ten the first time he went to services at Old Liberty. He liked the story the preacher read from a book and wanted to know all about it. When they got home his mother gave him her Bible, and he read it all the afternoon, until she took it from him.

  “You’ll burn your eyes out,” she said.

  “I’ll get you a Bible of your own, next time I go to town,” his father said. He was proud of his son at last. “I’m glad you like the Bible. It’s the greatest book in the world.”

  Next Sunday at services the preacher said the church needed a sexton.

  “What is a sexton?” he asked his mother.

  “He’s the one who takes care of the building and cleans it up,” she answered.

  “I’ll do it,” he said. “I’ll be the sexton.”

  It was a small building, and the work was not hard. He swept the floors, dusted the pews, and fixed the pulpit for the preacher. His father brought him a Bible from town. Mr. Hopper, the owner of the bookstore, had refused to take any money for it when he learned it was for a ten-year-old boy who had asked for it himself. “Every boy should have a Bible,” he told the squire, “and when a boy asks for it, it’s a privilege to give it to him.”

  He wrote the date on the flyleaf—January 14, 1887—and began reading. By the end of June he had gone through the entire book. That summer the Reverend John T. Hawkins held a series of meetings at Old Liberty, and stayed at the big Cayce house. Sitting by his grandmother’s side, the new sexton heard his first theological discussions. He asked questions himself, and when Mr. Hawkins had gone he
began to interrogate any preacher who came along. Whenever the officers of Old Liberty got together he was there, and it was he who usually started them discussing the Bible. He asked all of them questions: his granduncles George Washington and Franklin Pierce Cayce; his cousin Isaac H. Cayce; Daniel Owsley; his uncle by marriage, Ed Jones; and any others who would listen and give him answers. Once he had them started he withdrew and listened to the arguments and opinions.

  Sometimes the men talked about things he did not understand at all. The congregation of Old Liberty belonged to the Christian Church, a sect of the Presbyterian Church. A branch of it had been founded in North Carolina by Barton W. Stone, and another branch had been founded in Pennsylvania by Alexander Campbell. It was in Old Liberty that these two men met for the first time.

  The Christian Church practiced open communion and held the service every Sunday. It was when they talked about this, and about hymn singing and Stone’s opinions and Campbell’s opinions, that he was puzzled. Then he would quietly move away, open his Bible to a favorite passage, and live in the strength of Samson or David, or help heal the sick and the lame with Jesus. One day he conceived a great ambition. Often one of the men would say, “Well, I’ve read the Bible through a dozen times, and it seems to me . . .” or another would say, “As often as I’ve read the Bible through it never seemed to me that . . .” He wanted to be able to read the Bible through many times. It would be nice if he could say that he had read the Bible, well, say, once for every year of his life. He had heard one of the men say, “I read the Bible through every year,” and that gave him the idea. He would read as fast as he could until he had come even with his years, and after that he would have to read it only once a year to keep his record.

  As soon as the idea entered his head he turned to Genesis and began the task. From then on he never went anyplace without his Bible, though he generally managed to conceal it so people didn’t know he had it with him. He read at every possible moment, giving only the time that was absolutely necessary to his chores and paying almost no attention to his schoolwork, since his father was no longer the teacher.