The Promise of Jesse Woods

by Chris Fabry

  “Looks tasty, don’t it?” Jesse said.

  “Not to me.”

  “You got to think like a fish. You’re setting his dinner table. There. Now, you have to do the next worm.”

  I stared at the worm as she adjusted the bobber.

  “You don’t fish, you don’t read to us. Got it?”

  “Okay.”

  The three of us sat back in the worn grass on the side of the bank. Jesse placed her pole beside her and put her hands behind her head. “How many books you think they got in that library about the Mothman?”

  “They got magazines about him, so I expect there would be lots of books,” Dickie said.

  “What are you guys talking about?” I said.

  “You ain’t never heard of the Mothman?” Jesse said. She shook her head and cursed under her breath. “They must not teach the fundamentals up there in Pittsburgh.”

  I pulled my line up and it was Dickie’s turn to shake his head. “Don’t be fiddling with it. Leave it alone. You only pick it up when you get a bite. Put dinner on the table and leave it.”

  “I know,” I said, dropping the worm back in the water and watching the ripples from the bobber.

  Jesse yawned. “The Mothman is a West Virginia phenomenon.”

  “Nice word,” I said.

  “But he’s not just in West Virginia.”

  “He is too,” Dickie said.

  “Is not.” Jesse turned to me. “You ever hear of the Silver Bridge collapse?”

  I shook my head.

  “It’s the big bridge over the Ohio at Gallipolis. The kind with the cables on top of it.”

  “Suspension bridge,” Dickie said.

  “We’ve got three of those in Pittsburgh,” I said.

  Jesse rolled her eyes. “Here we go. We got one bridge and you have to have three of ’em.”

  “Tell the story,” Dickie said.

  “The other side of the bridge comes out in Point Pleasant, on the West Virginia side,” Jesse said. “About a week or so before Christmas there was all these people driving on it when the whole thing fell. Something like a hundred people died.”

  “It wasn’t that many,” Dickie said.

  “Well, how many was it?”

  “Fortysome.”

  “I didn’t know you was a historical expert on disasters,” Jesse said.

  “What’s this got to do with the Mothman?” I said.

  “I’m getting to that. So there was these kids out taking a ride at night and they seen this huge creature in the road. Eyes as big as saucers and red like blood. Glowing. It had a wingspan something like twenty feet wide. They hightailed it out of there and went racing back toward town, and they said they went as fast as a hundred miles an hour, and the thing flew right over top of them.”

  Jesse looked at Dickie to see if he would correct her. He threw a hand up. “Go on.”

  “That wasn’t the only time they seen him. There was people all up and down the valley that did, and there was news reports about it and people interviewed on TV. And every one of them said he looked like a big moth.”

  “Creepy,” I said. “Did he say anything?”

  They both looked at me dumbfounded.

  “He don’t talk to people,” Jesse said.

  “Did anybody get attacked?” I said.

  “That’s the thing. Out of all the sightings, nobody said they got hurt. And then, one person saw him sitting on top of the Silver Bridge.”

  “I saw a picture of it in one of the UFO magazines at Blake’s,” Dickie said.

  “Seriously?” I said. “What did it look like?”

  “It was just a big blob on top of one of the points in the bridge. They blew it up to see better, but it was kind of fuzzy. But there was drawings of how people said he looked. Like a big man with wings that stretched out.”

  My bobber dipped in the water, but I was so enraptured with the story I let it go.

  “It was a week later that the bridge collapsed and all them people died,” Jesse said. “A hundred of them.”

  “Fortysome,” Dickie corrected.

  “Can you imagine what it must have been like? One minute you’re sitting there in your car, a cold December day, people getting off work and going home or Christmas shopping. All of a sudden the bridge gives way and you’re in the water and there ain’t nothing you can do about it. And you’re drowning.”

  It was a frightening thought and Jesse painted the scene in all its horror. She described some of the bodies pulled out, that some were children.

  “You’re getting a bite,” Dickie said. “Jerk the pole.”

  I lifted the line out of the water and the tugging stopped.

  “No, you gotta jerk it to set the hook,” Jesse said, frowning. “Like this.”

  She showed me, whipping the pole back quickly. I tried to mimic her wrist motion. When I had it down, I lifted the line and saw most of my worm was gone.

  “Bring it up so you can rebait it,” Dickie said.

  I pulled the line in and Jesse generously rebaited my hook. I tossed it back into the water. “I still don’t get why the Mothman is so important.”

  “He was warning them,” Jesse said. “Don’t you see? He was telling them something bad was about to happen. Because as soon as the bridge collapsed, people around there never saw him again.”

  “You have to admit they were busy cleaning up the bridge and burying the dead,” Dickie said.

  Jesse ignored him. “And the same thing happened with the Marshall plane crash. I know this lady who lives down in Kenova—”

  “This is not true,” Dickie said.

  “It is too. You can ask her.”

  “Ask her what?” I said.

  “About the sighting a couple of days before the crash. There he was, up in the trees on the side of the hill where that plane came down. He was trying to warn people that something bad was coming.”

  I glanced at Dickie and he rolled his eyes.

  “Same thing happened before President Kennedy got shot,” Jesse said, her eyes wide.

  “She’s spinning one now,” Dickie said.

  “There’s no spin to it. People over in Welch saw him before the president got shot by the school depository.”

  “If the Mothman was trying to warn about a shooting in Dallas, why would he show up in Welch?” Dickie said.

  “I don’t know. You’ll have to ask him. I’m just reporting what I heard. And just before Farmington happened, he was seen too.”

  “What’s Farmington?” I said.

  “Coal mine,” Dickie said. “It exploded and killed seventysome.”

  “You best pay attention when the Mothman shows up, is all I have to say,” Jesse said.

  “Hey, look at that!” Dickie yelled, and I just about jumped out of my skin, looking back at the thick woods behind us.

  “Not there, silly,” Jesse said.

  “I got one!” Dickie pulled the line out of the water and a long, silver fish with a big mouth was on the hook.

  “That’s too little to take home,” Jesse said.

  “It’s a wide-mouth, though,” Dickie said. “Maybe we’ll catch his daddy.”

  I was still thinking about the Mothman and the prospect of riding my bike alone lost all allure. I was about to open the book when Jesse shrieked, “Set the hook, Matt!”

  I jerked on the pole and immediately felt the weight on the other end of the line. The bamboo bent at the end.

  “Don’t pull it up too fast,” Dickie said. “Flatten it out and get him up to the bank. It looks like a big one.”

  Dickie crept to the edge of the water. He had said this was a place where the reservoir was deepest and added that several people had fallen in and drowned in this very spot. I backed up, the fish weaving in the water, and Dickie navigated the biggest bass I would ever catch in my life onto the bank.

  Jesse gasped. “Would you look how pretty he is?” She went down and held him up in both hands. “He’s got to be at least five pounds
.”

  Dickie pulled the hook from his mouth. I asked if I could be the one to let him go.

  “What do you mean let him go?” Jesse said.

  “We always let them go when I’ve fished.”

  The two looked at each other and then back at me.

  “You can do what you want—he’s your fish,” Dickie said. “But I usually give anything I catch to Jesse.”

  “Daisy Grace loves her some fried fish,” Jesse said, sizing up the catch.

  “That’s fine,” I said. “I didn’t think about you eating it.”

  Dickie got out a long piece of string with knots in it and put it through the fish’s gills, then put the fish in the water and tied the string to a branch he stuck in the mud. We caught two more keepers that day, one catfish and one large bluegill, and a lot of other smaller fish. I couldn’t help but feel like I had contributed in a small way to Jesse’s family. Jesse covered the fish in her front basket with leaves and placed Harper Lee on top and we pedaled home.

  When we got to the railroad tracks, Jesse stopped and looked both ways, sitting on the tracks. From my vantage point behind her, with her head turned, she looked like the prettiest thing I’d ever seen. Even with all the dirt and mountain toughness, I could see it. And I realized my fear of relating to girls disappeared around her. I wasn’t nervous, probably because she was so much like Dickie and me. Her shirts were sweat-stained and her hair stuck up in the back where she’d slept.

  She looked back, sitting on the tracks, her cute nose that gently turned up at the end glinting in the sunlight and her freckles giving extra color to her face.

  “What’s wrong?” I said.

  “That’s where it happened, right up there.”

  “What happened?”

  “My daddy lost his arm. He was trying to jump a freight and fell underneath.”

  “Where was he going?” I said.

  “Huntington, probably.”

  I tried to think of something to say. “It must have hurt.”

  “He was probably drunk.”

  On the way through town, the talk turned to Mothman again. Jesse said he was still wandering the woods and waiting, biding his time until the next big event. Dickie believed in Mothman but thought Jesse’s version of the story was flawed. When Jesse brought up flying saucers, though, Dickie took the bait. He talked nonstop about pictures he’d seen in magazines and how the government had cataloged UFOs and that officials were hiding men from outer space who had crashed near Roswell, New Mexico.

  “Can we talk about something else?” I said. “Maybe baseball?”

  Jesse and Dickie smiled at each other and I knew I was the one who had taken the bait.

  TUESDAY, OCTOBER 9, 1984

  I awoke to the muted sound of birds heralding Indian summer. Crickets and frogs brought back my childhood in full surround sound as I shook the sleep from me. I had fallen into bed without setting an alarm and slept the rest of the day and night. I wandered outside to the car early enough not to disturb my parents.

  I rolled down the driveway in neutral, starting the car as I coasted onto the road. I had to have a clear plan of action but my brain was foggy. Returning to the Dogwood Food and Drug and catching Jesse before she went to work seemed best. I could have called or gone to her house, but I wasn’t sure who I might encounter. I wanted our conversation to be face-to-face and without interruption.

  The store opened at seven, but I knew if Jesse worked the early shift, she would arrive before that. It was a little after six when I rolled into the Morning Dove to get gas and coffee. I paid inside and noticed a group of men gathered around coffee and pancakes and sausage biscuits served in Styrofoam containers.

  “Is that Matt Plumley?” one of the men said from across the room.

  “In the flesh,” I said, smiling and trying to remember the man’s name.

  I approached and he stood, stretching out a big hand. “Jennings Caldwell,” he said. “I remember when you were this high and this wide.”

  “It’s good to see you, Mr. Caldwell.”

  He introduced me to the other men around the table, all retired—from the glass plant, Union Carbide, driving a bus, and Jennings was retired from the sheriff’s department. He had attended our church before we arrived in Dogwood and then left for reasons unknown. I could, of course, imagine several reasons, all of which were tied to Basil Blackwood.

  “How’s your family?” Jennings said, taking his seat.

  “Mom and Dad are good. Still busy with the church.”

  “How’s Chicago? Treating you all right?”

  I wondered how he knew where I had wound up, but small-town news travels. Before I could answer, the talk turned to the Cubs since Jennings had mentioned Chicago and that led to the Reds and their disappointing season and who they might trade for in the off-season.

  “Baseball’s not what it used to be,” the retired glassblower said. “When I was a kid, there was team loyalty. You played in one place and rooted for that team no matter what. Now, with free agency, it’s all about the money. And you can root for the Cardinals or the Yankees from anywhere in the country.”

  “The Yankees,” Jennings said like he was cursing.

  “It’s always been about the money,” the Carbide man said. “The only question is who’s going to keep it.” The man’s words and tone reminded me of Dickie.

  Jennings turned toward me. “What brings you back, Matt?”

  “Just in for a visit.” The look on his face gave me the impression he didn’t believe me.

  “That girl. Woods. You still keep in touch?”

  “My parents do.”

  He shook his head. “She sure had a tough start, didn’t she?”

  I nodded. “The whole family had a tough time.”

  “You got that right. I got called over there a few times through the years.”

  “My dad mentioned your name at one point. The night that . . .” I didn’t finish my sentence, and by the look on the man’s face, I didn’t have to.

  “I got the call. When I pulled up, your daddy was talking to her.” He took a big swig of coffee. “I’ll never forget how sad that girl looked up there.”

  A wave of guilt swept over me and I wished I hadn’t set foot in the restaurant.

  “What are you two talking about?” Bus Driver said.

  Before Jennings could answer, I told them I had to get going. “It’s nice seeing you again, Mr. Caldwell.”

  When I made it to the door, Jennings had launched into the story of that night. I didn’t want to relive it, so I drove back to the grocery parking lot and drank my coffee, watching the clouds roll through the sky as it lightened from black to dark blue. Wind blew leaves that wouldn’t give up their losing battle.

  Twenty minutes later a car pulled up by the Dumpsters. I didn’t recognize the man who got out, but a ring of keys pulled his belt low. He disappeared inside. Still hoping to see Jesse, I rehearsed my lines to a script that hadn’t been written.

  A Dodge Omni, a square car that didn’t fit her personality, pulled into the lot and she rolled down the window. She stuck out a hand and opened the door using the outside handle, then rolled the window up again and slammed it without locking it.

  She wore jeans and work shoes and a heavy cotton T-shirt with a pocket over the left breast. Her hair was cut short, just below her ears. She still had the same lithe build I remembered, like a dancer, and that same Jesse saunter, like she could conquer the world, even though she was going to grind beef or cut chicken all day.

  I opened my door and she glanced back and stopped.

  “Jesse,” I said.

  She squinted like she didn’t believe what she was seeing. “Well, look what the cat drug in. Hey, PB.” She crossed her arms and put one work boot in front of the other. “I heard you were in town.”

  “Who’d you hear that from?”

  “People.”

  She stared at me with those blue eyes. I wanted to see her smile, to feel the warm
th of being close, but she seemed like a chicken looking for a hawk. I had to admit I felt just as awkward and nervous.

  “That’s a creative way to get out of a car.”

  “Handle snapped last winter. I do what I gotta do, you know?” She bit her cheek. “So you heard the news?”

  I nodded.

  “Who told you?”

  “Wasn’t my parents, I can tell you that.”

  Her eyes had a deep sadness to them. “And you drove all the way down here for what?”

  With a deadpan face, I said, “Jesse, you can’t get married on the thirteenth. It’s bad luck.”

  “Saturday the thirteenth is not bad. Besides, I don’t believe in luck anymore.”

  “What do you believe in?”

  “I believe you’re going to get yourself into a bunch of trouble—and me, too—if you don’t leave.”

  “Trouble never bothered you before. You thrived on it.”

  “Matt, don’t do this.”

  “Do what?”

  “What you’re fixing to do.”

  “And what is that?”

  She didn’t answer, just looked at cracks in the asphalt and the grass poking through. “I saw you yesterday. In the store.”

  “Why didn’t you come out and talk?”

  “Because there’s nothing to say.”

  “I think there’s a lot to say. I have a lot of questions.”

  She shook her head. “No. Talking time is over. It was over a long while ago.”

  Her face had changed a little. There’d been a hardness to her eyes from the moment I had met her, but it seemed something in the intervening years had softened her. Her hair hung past her eyes like a shadow and she made no attempt to brush it away like she wanted to hide. But she was the same girl I had fallen in love with, the same girl who had cast a spell I wasn’t sure I would ever escape.

  “Do you ever think of me, Jesse?” I said, my voice soft, almost a whisper. I said it with affect, with the dramatic flair of a line I had practiced but never truly gotten right.

  She turned her head like the question touched some open wound. “You need to leave me alone.”

  “I’ve thought of you a lot. And this choice you’re making doesn’t feel right to me.”

  She slung her purse over her shoulder—I could see a brown bag sticking out with her lunch in it—and shoved her hands in her back pockets. “I appreciate your concern.”