The Man Who Walked on Water

by Jacob Beaver

  That was when I announced my plan for the afternoon. I’d expected a fight with Steve, especially in this mood, but he liked the idea. For some reason it cheered him up. He said I should take some clearance forms, in case I came across good interviewees, and he handed me a small camera.

  “Keep it,” he said. “I brought another one as backup. These digital cameras are getting cheap, and they’re good quality. They even do a bit of video.”

  “But what it’s for?”

  “Prep work,” Steve said. “Anything that strikes you, that makes you stop and look. Show it to Tino. We’re making a film, remember?”

  * * *

  Just before two, fresh from a shower, I left my room and saw Summer across the parking lot. She was standing by a long white car, the kind of gas-guzzler you see in seventies movies. As I walked over, she dropped a cell phone in her bag and said, “Hi.”

  “Hi,” I said. “Nice ride.”

  She looked at the car. “It was my daddy’s. He loved these big old Fords. You wanna go?”

  Summer talked slow but she drove fast, and with surprising ease. She held the steering wheel loosely at three o’clock, spinning it this way and that as the road twisted upwards. From where I sat, I couldn’t see the empty left sleeve of her blouse, and I soon forgot about it. There was so much else on my mind. The flickering woods. Splashes of light and sudden long views, mountains lost in haze. Summer’s beautiful laugh. She told me she’d just been texting Kendra—“My friend? From last night?”—who thought my brother had been hitting on her, and I said that if she had to think about it then he wasn’t, because Steve had the subtlety of a hammer, and Summer burst out laughing. I hadn’t seen a woman laugh so loudly for a long time, unless she was faking it. Summer wasn’t faking, not in the least. This was a hundred-percent laugh, a tip-your-head-back, eyes-and-mouth laugh. It was a laugh that stayed with you, that you kept.

  When Summer had recovered, I asked if she had any Cherokee in her, and she said, “Because of the hair?”

  “And the cheekbones.”

  “My great-grandfather was a full-blooded Cherokee. His wife was Irish. I mean she was born in Ireland. My daddy always said she had the bluest eyes, and that was why his momma had green eyes, like me. Brown and blue makes green, according to Daddy. He said that if I married a blue-eyed man, we might get violet. My daddy was full of crazy notions.”

  “And are you married?” I asked, because I had to ask, even though it hadn’t occurred to me before.

  “I was,” she said. “And he had blue eyes. Troy had real blue eyes. But my daughter’s eyes are like mine.”

  “Daughter? Really? You have a daughter?”

  Summer glanced at me. “I’m twenty-seven. It ain’t a big surprise. Yeah, I have Deedee. She’s seven now. She was four when I threw Troy out. You wanna hear about it? I’ll tell you if you like. I don’t care.”

  I didn’t take in all the details, but I learned that Summer used to work at Food City in Boone, and that Troy became addicted to OxyContin, a prescription drug known as “hillbilly heroin.” Troy usually fetched Deedee from day care, since he wasn’t working much, but one afternoon he didn’t show. The day care called Summer, who called Kendra, who picked up Deedee and kept her for a few hours, then brought her home. This was July. A warm evening, still light. Summer pulled in at the same time as Kendra and found Troy lying in the front yard—in the middle of the front yard, on his side. She just knew he was dead.

  But he wasn’t. He was asleep.

  When she woke him up, he hit her.

  “It flew all over me,” Summer said. “And then I went somewhere else. I don’t remember it, but Kendra says I beat the tar out of Troy. Evidently I lit into him and didn’t stop till he got in his truck. I remember that. I stood by the truck and cussed him out, called him everything but a white boy.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “Why’s what?”

  “Why didn’t you call him a white boy? Was he black?”

  “Black with blue eyes? No, Troy’s white.” She sighed. “I’m sorry. It’s a dumb expression. I ain’t prejudiced, I really ain’t.”

  “Your language is,” I said, and I couldn’t believe that I was saying it, that I was taking such a risk. But what was I risking? I thought I was risking Summer’s respect for me, which I was, but I was also risking my respect for her. I was risking both of us, in each other’s eyes, for the sake of the moment, and the day, and maybe days to come. I see that now. I see it with enormous clarity, as if I were holding this moment up to the light—like Steve holding up the french fry, turning it slowly, noticing the angles.

  Thank God, Summer took it well.

  “It’s the language, not me,” she said. “You can’t avoid it living in the South. We shouldn’t even say ‘black.’ My daughter says ‘African American.’ And you, you should call me an ‘Appalachian American.’” She smiled. After a few seconds she said, “I guess language is a kind of history, a living history.”

  She was right. I’d never thought of that. It reminded me of my conversation with Wade Henderson, and I said, “Like music.”

  Summer smiled again. “Like music.”

  Now we hit a level stretch without houses. Trees overhung the road on both sides, scattering the sunlight, so that we seemed to glide down a long twinkling corridor. At the end of the corridor was a big green sign with a flag.

  “Welcome to North Carolina,” I said. “We’re going to North Carolina?”

  “We are,” she said, “and now we’re in North Carolina.”

  The road dropped through trees and then we shot out into an empty meadow beneath an empty sky. Beyond us were mountains, a world of mountains. The scale was hard to grasp. The more I stared into the distance, the less distance I saw, until I lost perspective on the mountains near us. They didn’t even look like mountains. They looked soft and airy, like great piles of blue dust.

  “Wow,” I said. Then I said it again, and then I felt silly, so I said something else. “Can I ask you a question, a personal question? What happened to your arm?”

  “Nothing happened to it,” she said. “I never had a left arm. I was born like this.”

  “Oh.”

  And that was that.

  We dropped through trees again, down and down, in a series of tight switchbacks with little margin for error—only a foot of asphalt beyond the white line. Summer braked on the curves, but not much. If anything, she drove faster downhill. Even on a motorbike I couldn’t have kept up with her, and I was glad when we sailed into a valley dotted with barns. I saw a big red barn, a green one, a black one, and then Summer turned down a gravel driveway beside a creek. The driveway ended at a white two-story house. On either side were low wooden buildings, also painted white, and in front was a hammock strung between two fruit trees.

  Before we’d stopped, a dark-haired girl slid out of the hammock, fell over, picked herself up and came running towards us.

  Summer hugged her daughter, who looked up at me with big green eyes. Then a woman appeared on the porch and tripped down the steps. She jumped the last step and marched across the grass to meet us. I knew immediately that I had to be on best behavior—sometimes you just know. Summer introduced her mother, Madge, who crossed her arms and glared at me.

  “I’m Margaret,” she said. “Margaret is my name.”

  I said that I was a carpenter and I’d come all the way from England to help her, which had no effect on the woman. She stayed exactly as she was, glaring, with her thin arms crossed, until Summer led me over to the porch. The bottom step was rotted. I asked Summer about tools and she said, “In the shop.”

  “Shop? You have a . . . store?”

  “Workshop,” she said. “Over there. That other building is the sawmill. Daddy built it first, then cut the lumber to build the shop. He also built the porch, I think, but my grandfather built the house.”

  The workshop was dark and dusty, and had a particular smell. It was a mixture of damp and sawdust, with a
hint of something else, perhaps something beyond smell—a sense of silence. As I peered at the workbenches, Summer told me her daddy had died two years ago, in a farming accident. He fell off his tractor, somehow. She reckoned he’d been drinking, but Momma didn’t want to hear that. Now they leased their fields to a neighbor, a good man who paid them more than he had to, but the man didn’t go to church, and his sons were wild, and Momma . . . well, Momma was still grieving, but she didn’t want to hear that either, and did I need to look in the sawmill?

  I found a plank—in fact, lots of planks—and trimmed it with a circular saw, and cut it to length, and rebuilt the porch step. It didn’t take thirty minutes. When I was done, I stood on the step and said, “Voila!” I doubt that Summer’s mother had ever heard anyone say “Voila!” But she ignored my strange oath and tested the step herself, and this did have an effect on her. She nodded to herself. Then she laid a hand on my arm, very gently, and asked if I’d like some lemonade.

  We sat on the porch in the afternoon sun, while Deedee showed Summer what she could do with a hula hoop, which wasn’t much, and Margaret scolded her granddaughter for various things, like stepping in a flower bed and pushing down her sweatpants.

  “Deedee, pull up your britches!” she said.

  Britches. I remember that so well. It sounded like Shakespeare, and it triggered something inside me. Suddenly I had the dreamiest feeling. It was the sun too, the way it shone gold over the plowed fields and the barns and the little creek, giving it all a fairy-tale glow, as if I’d wandered into a Disney movie about ye olde days, before machines took over, when people spoke like Shakespeare and painted their barns different colors and drank lemonade as the sun went down . . . Movies again. I couldn’t escape them, couldn’t see beyond them, even though I knew, I knew, they were blinding me to the world. Because movies aren’t how the world is. Disney doesn’t show beautiful young women with one arm, or fathers who die in farming accidents because they’re drunk, or husbands who take pills and beat their wives. That’s the world, whatever else the world may be. Life is not a dream. We are the dream, with all our glowing ideas about life. Like movies, we flash and fade.

  Anyway, we sat on the porch.

  After an hour or so, Summer said she’d take me back to the motel. Her mother offered to pay me for my work, and I said no, it was a pleasure, and she touched my arm again and said, “Bless you.”

  As we drove away, I asked Summer if her mother was religious.

  “Southern Baptist,” she said. “Hellfire and brimstone. Momma’s not as bad as some, though. You know those people who just can’t wait to die? So they can be with Jesus? They’re cuckoo.”

  “Do you go to church?”

  “Sometimes, with Momma. If she wants to take Deedee, I’ll go along. I like it fine. I mean, I believe, but I don’t go on about it like . . . Hey! See that house up on the hill? That’s where Goose lives. Goose saw Lee Buckner walk on water. So I heard. Wanna talk to him?”

  It wasn’t what I’d call a house. It was a small cabin, like something pictured in a storybook (or a Disney movie). The walls were made of horizontal timbers, with plaster in the chinks, and the porch roof was held up by tree trunks, actual tree trunks, with knobs where branches had been sawn off. To complete the picture, the cabin had a rock chimney running up one side, and the chimney was smoking!

  As we came up the driveway, a man got to his feet and raised a hand. He was a big man, in overalls, with a straw hat pushed back on his head. He looked pretty old and pretty hardy.

  “Goose is his name?” I said.

  “Nickname,” she said. “’Cause his last name is Gosnell, I guess.”

  That made no sense to me, but I let it go because we’d arrived. Summer pulled up beside a vintage jeep, complete with camouflage, as if it had just driven out of World War II. I was admiring the jeep when Summer pushed me forward.

  “Goose, this here’s John. He flew all the way from England.”

  “Flew from England?” Goose said from the porch. “Hoowee! Your arms must be tired. Better set down, son, take a load off. You’uns thirsty? Y’anna sody pop?”

  Or something like that. I don’t honestly know what he said. I could only catch one word in three, and he didn’t catch anything I said. Summer had to translate in both directions, and even then it was hard work, because her translations sometimes needed translating. At one point Goose grinned at me and shook his head. He said, “Who’s got the accent, you or me?”

  But then, gradually, I tuned in to Goose speak. I also changed the way I spoke. I tried to phrase things as Summer would, and tried to slow down. “Tried to slow down.” That’s like saying, tried to relax—if you’re trying, you’re not relaxing. The only way to do it is really relax, really slow down. So I did.

  And here’s what Goose told me, more or less:

  The year before, in the summer, his riding mower tore up. He worked on it, but the job took a while because it was smothering hot, and then it poured with rain. The grass grew. It got long, and long grass is snaky. So Goose called up a feller he knew, Charlie Spears. Charlie worked on small machines and always had old mowers sitting around, and Goose asked if he could borrow one. Charlie said sure thing, but he was going to Greensboro next day to visit with his daughter, which shocked the hell out of Goose because Charlie never went anywhere. Charlie said no problem, though. He’d leave the mower in the backyard and Goose could come get it any time he had a mind to. Of course, Goose ran down there in the morning, early, but Charlie had left already. Now, Charlie lived right on the lake—not in a big fancy house, but a nice place. As Goose was getting the mower onto his trailer, something caught his eye. It was real misty out on the water, but he swore he could see a man walking. The man stopped about fifty feet from Goose and looked at him, just looked at him, and then he turned and vanished into the mist.

  “How’d you react?” I asked.

  “Say what?”

  “What did you do?”

  “I come unglued.”

  “And you’re sure it was a person? How are your eyes?”

  “My eyes are good. If my knees was good, I’d go hunting. I can’t climb up into a deer stand. Can’t sit in one neither, not for three hours like I used to could. But my eyes are fine, son. It was a man I seen on the water, and I know the name of that man. Lee Buckner. I seen him a time or two, before and after. He lives down the road from Charlie.”

  “Did you tell anybody about this?”

  “I told friends.”

  “But you didn’t report it?”

  “Report it? To who? The police?”

  “So you didn’t talk to newspapers or TV stations? You didn’t tell the story to . . . anyone else? Why?”

  “No one asked me.”

  I took a photo of Goose standing on his porch, and I gave him a clearance form, for what it was worth—not much, I’d say. The photo was worth it, though. I kept it, and still have it. Goose is a little blurred, because he was spitting tobacco juice, but then, that’s how I remember Goose, a little blurred. It was so hard to understand each other, and I’d already had an eventful day.

  After we said goodbye, Summer asked if I wanted to drive, and I said, “Can I?”

  “Well, can you?”

  “I suppose I can,” I said.

  I liked driving the long white Ford. It turned with a terrific sweep, as I imagined a speedboat would turn. And I liked having Summer beside me, talking and laughing, as our speedboat rode the mountain waves. It felt funny driving on the wrong side of the road, but then I realized it wasn’t wrong, it was just different, and all I had to do was relax into it—not try to relax, really relax.

  Part 3

  The making of Steve’s film, and Steve’s many thoughts about his film, didn’t interest me much. I had my own thoughts. In my memory, these thoughts loom so large that they practically eclipse Steve. What he did over the next few days, morning to night, I’m not certain. What happened to me, or happened inside me, that I can tell you. I wan
t to tell you. It’s part of the reason I’ve been sitting here in the early mornings, typing away at this laptop.

  When Summer dropped me at the motel, the other three were in Steve’s room. The door was wide open, but the room smelled of feet. It was a mess in there. Steve’s stuff was scattered over the floor and on both chairs, everywhere but the bed. That’s where they were, sitting gloomily in a row, Dave and then Steve and Tino at the end. They looked like the three bears without their own beds.

  Their day hadn’t gone well. They found the journalist who wrote the piece about Buckner, and she phoned the fisherman who’d told her the story, but the man’s wife answered and said he was in the hospital. He’d just had a stroke and couldn’t talk.

  “Unbe-fucking-lievable,” Steve said. “And that was pretty much it, apart from a short interview. We did it there in her office, just basic questions, chit-chat about southern fundamentalists. One thing came up, though. There are these people in Newport who handle snakes. Poisonous snakes. In church. And some of them drink poison too. Strychnine! They drink it and praise Jesus, because Jesus is the antidote to all poisons. Now, that’s hardcore. Compared to this lot, Buckner is Pentecostal Lite. Those are her words, and she should know. She’s from Newport. It’s some little town near here. What d’you think? Might be worth checking out.”

  “Why?” I said. “It’s nothing to do with the film.”

  “What film? The Man Who Refused to Walk on Water? Who wants to see that?”

  But then I told them about meeting Goose, and I showed them my photo. Immediately the Terminator came back to life. And Tino liked the photo. Dave did too. Dave was so impressed that he actually spoke. What he said, and it’s the only thing I remember him saying, were these words of wisdom: “Snakes are bleedin’ dangerous. You don’t wanna mess with snakes, in a church or anywhere else. I vote we film this bloke.”

  So they filmed Goose next morning. I did the driving and made the introductions, but I didn’t go into Goose’s cabin with them. I don’t know why. Perhaps it was too small for all of us. Anyhow, I walked around outside and inspected the cabin, partly just to keep warm. The weather had turned again and clouds hung in the treetops. I soon forgot about the cold, though. That cabin was a master class in carpentry. I couldn’t find a single nail or bolt. The whole structure held together purely by virtue of its design, plus a few wooden pegs at critical joints. Tobacco barns used to be built the same way. They’re disappearing now, especially the big ones, because few people still grow tobacco, but those old barns are the cathedrals of Appalachian carpentry. Someone should write a book about them, someone who’s built them and knows what they’re talking about, which isn’t me.