Late in the evening, to arouse as little notice as possible, the New River boatmen tied bandannas about their own mouths, all the way up to the eyes, and took pains not to inhale too much, despite their rowing, despite the shortness of their breath. They wouldn’t look at the dying people who reclined in their boats. Drawing close, they heard the puttering of a weird machine: the steam autoclave into which the doctor stuffed bandages. Afterward, their hard money won, the boatmen washed down their hands and implements with burning lye.
The island had been timbered over like the rest of the lands, so from the far shore you could see the dying who milled about. It was just far enough out in the river to render the people a blurry mystery — this near the mouth of Pinch Creek, where it spilled coal slurry into the New. A tote road gave way to a muddy landing where boatmen had tramped down the bank.
Across the water, the dying and their nurses slid from building to building, digging graves, washing laundry, unhooking themselves from voluminous greenbrier, wincing in the powerful sun. Not that anyone on the mainland stared. That would have been in poor taste. And the region was thinly populated anyhow. The nearest settlement was the coal camp of Pinch, four miles up-hollow, and the miners of Pinch never left. Few people had call to pass by the island.
Except for the roaming gang of boys. They wished they had field glasses to look through, or even a tube of parchment paper. They left the landing to get a better view, finding the fisherman’s trail that ran for miles along the river, a mere ditch through weeds and the rank, green smell of life. They waved to the islanders. Now and again, an islander waved back.
“I know that one,” said a loud boy named Burl.
“Oh no, you don’t,” the others said. To deny him this glamour.
“Yeah I do. Look.”
This islander was a girl their age, nine, ten.
She lifted her skirt and shrieked, a joyful sound that cut through the whitewater roar. The boys couldn’t see much, but the pale flash struck them. She wore nothing beneath. At first they were shocked, then fell to the ground in laughing piles. She turned around and let the skirt drop.
The boys would remember it all their lives — or John Drew would, anyhow. He felt things more than most. The greatest day.
John Drew, sheepish, turned away. He couldn’t believe what he saw.
The girl ran off to the infirmary building. There were two or three other dying on the far shore, but none paid the girl’s antics any mind, absorbed as they were in the end of time.
“John Drew loves a dead girl,” Burl chanted. “John Drew loves a dead girl.” They laughed at blushing John Drew. They skipped stones, seeing if they could make it to the wretched island.
For days John Drew thought of that girl across the waters. She lifted her skirt at him, only him. He was sure of that.
He returned to Pinch, waiting for the mine whistle to break the day into pieces. When it did, the miners surfaced with empty lunch buckets, leaving the portal, walking the narrow main drag with its bank, post office, and commissary. They found their own company shacks in straggling rows three deep, each one identical, with the same stovepipe, same curl of smoke, same yellow dog lazing in a bare yard, its tail beginning to wag. John Drew’s father returned in the fall of evening, shedding bituminous dust. The home a dingy white blur in front of him, eyes still adjusting. The family came out to greet him. He patted John Drew on the back. Behind the shacks, beehive coke ovens in the hillside pulsed redly in the night.
John Drew’s father bathed on the porch in a galvanized tub, his nails forever lined in black, the chunk of lye a rock in his fist. An oil lamp stood on a ladder-back chair. Its light drew stoneflies off the river, pert yellow sallies and bigger black ones with orange collars that looked clerical. John Drew walked out to pass time with his father, as he would. Their schedules hardly crossed, save for Sundays, taken up with church. Cooking smells from other shacks came to them. John Drew lived for these moments.
“I went to see them sick people.”
His father winced. The man had a long-handled brush in hand and could strike you with it. He was broad across the chest, solid as a keg of nails.
“No,” John Drew corrected, “I just looked acrost. I didn’t go.”
His father knowingly scraped arms with soap, the water turning to silt. “I feel bad for them people. I do. But the county’s damned foolish. People use that water. My God, them nurses washing and burning rags and burying, and just hells of people downriver.” His father’s voice was dreamy.
“That won’t hurt us.”
“Listen! That river goes right to Fayetteville. That’s the county seat. Won’t be nobody fit to work. They’ll shut down the mines. I’m just waiting on the day I see that yellow flag flying.”
John Drew felt the twisting pain — his father had grabbed him hard by the suspenders, not hatefully, but enough to startle and hurt him. Bathwater sloshed all over his clothes.
“I don’t want you swimming. Stay up here. I don’t want you fishing neither. Who was with you? Who?”
John Drew couldn’t lie. “Burl and them others.”
“Who?”
“Jaimy. Ow. Buddy.”
“That woman lets Burl run wild. John, I hate this damned county government. Them people in Fayetteville just do what they wish. If I see that damned commissioner, I’ll give him five knots.”
His father let go. John Drew stood there, breathing hard.
In afternoons, after school, overcome by his day of longing, John Drew would walk the great river, before the sun went down, alone these times.
He never spoke to the girl — the river was too much for young voices. They would wave back and forth, she would smile, but she never lifted her skirt like before.
Then, one day, she tossed a thing in the water: a bottle! He ran through briars that ripped his shirt and waded out on the shoal. He reached for the bottle and missed. It was out too far in the curl of the current. The New, of course, swept it on, around the bend. Where did it go? Maybe on to other rivers, maybe as far as Baltimore City, to the ocean and milldams. John Drew could die. He would mourn the bottle’s lost message all his life — surely a paper note was corked inside, though there was no way of telling, really. He kicked the water. When his mother saw his shirt, she pitched a fit. He didn’t care a pin.
In October, the girl quit arriving to their afternoons. No one moved on the island much. The dying had repaired to the infirmary, to rest in cots, be fanned by nurses, prepare for the end that was rushing them down. John Drew waited for a week, then two. He had piercing headaches — the form his shock took.
Burials took place of a morning, so John Drew never witnessed them. Of a night, when he was home in his family’s shack, boatmen brought a few more sick to replace the dead. He had no idea how they came and went. She could be dead. Or she could be shunning him. He wasn’t sure which was worse.
The only person still moving on the island was a bearded man who split wood with a short-handled maul. When he noticed John Drew, he walked to the river’s edge, cupped his hands, and bellowed to go on now. Go. John Drew stood awhile, to show he didn’t care. Water stood between them. John Drew no longer had friends. He had this place, and this girl — the sinew of his days, now stripped out and gone for good. He accepted the fact with grim resolve, as his father had taught him. Once, it seemed so long ago, a dog of theirs had vanished, a mountain cur, and they found it dead upon the ridge in a cold season — some predator had worried it apart. Ice had formed in thin crystals in the red, ripped cave of its belly. Could your own true blood freeze? The ribs stood. He didn’t cry. His father was watching him watch the dog. He didn’t cry.