Going back to the river was different, though. He couldn’t stop himself from that.
Then, only then, John Drew sees her again. The girl is flying a kite. It cracks in the wind, so angular, so white, made of stolen sheets. She twists the string and makes it buck-dance and wheel. John Drew follows the kite with his gaze — he has never seen a thing so pretty. She walks it up and down the bank like a tethered calf, thinly smiling, her admirer following as she drifts it to the island’s point. The string breaks. The kite crosses the river and falls at John Drew’s feet. Well, not at his feet, but near enough in the laurel he knows it’s meant for him.
The struts are broken, but he takes the sheet in hand, holds it close, wraps it round his fist, touching what she’d touched. He will mend the struts with green branches and gut and mail it back across. He’ll tie a note to the tail. Sure, she can read — he imagines her quite intelligent. He lifts the fabric to his lips. He waves goodbye, a gesture she returns with a hand slender as a lancet in the distance, and he is lanced by all he feels. Too far away to notice how wan she is, how she musters the dregs of strength to go outside and parade her weeping boils.
The kite is carried home.
It doesn’t take long to fix a kite. It doesn’t take long for his brother and sister to fall ill. It doesn’t take long for his mother to go to bed in despair. Thinking nothing of it, shortly after John Drew brings it home, she finds the sheet and cuts it up for kitchen rags. She scrubs plates, table, sill. Fastidiously she distributes the disease. Boils break on his brother and sister. Tethered boats rock on the river.
John Drew says nothing. He’s disappointed when he finds the sheet is gone, but he scrounges up a gingham cloth, to give the kite something to fly upon.
His parents hide the children in back of the house and quit talking to neighbors, quit all but the mines, even quit the church, a scandal. Their mother is glassy-eyed, silent. When will the neighbors realize? How long before the county sends the children away? This is hell. This is a father’s hell.
Frantic, not angry, not even sound of mind, cajoling. “You didn’t swim acrost, did you?”
John Drew can’t speak.
“I know. I’m sorry,” his father says, taking John Drew’s arm in a soft grip. “You’re a good fine fellow.” His father is near to weeping, and he looks a different man altogether. An empty keg. A hollowed skin. “You always been.”
He’s supposed to respect his father, honor a good name, but at this talk, this soft grip, this begging, John Drew feels disgust wash over him. Can the father sense it? John Drew’s father is looking him in the eye, plumbing this stranger who shares his blood, but he’s too addled to learn anything of worth. A decade later, he will see John Drew outside a poolroom in the state capital and say, after a moment of hesitation, “Son, why didn’t you come home? There’s nothing so bad you can’t come home.” John Drew won’t know what to say. What has he been doing all these years? Working, it seems: his clothes, there in Ruffner Avenue, will smell of singed hair and tannery putrefaction. He’ll drop his cigarette, shy of the habit. The two men won’t embrace. They won’t shake hands.
Standing now in the shack’s parlor, John Drew’s father lets go of his arm, murmuring, “You’re a good fine fellow,” and John Drew feels another trill of disgust and walks outdoors.
He discovers the sliver of ice in his own heart. He doesn’t care about his brother and sister, he doesn’t care for his pathetic father and deadened mother, but if the island girl dies, he’ll mourn it for a thousand years.
Spend your time out of doors, he tells himself. Leave that grim invalids’ home.
In sullen wanderings, sucking the paws of his gloom, he finds the rowboat buried in the weeds, a blue chipped hull that is beautiful to him.
An old fellow hand-lines catfish and lays trap for otters, and this is his. A bit leaky but it will hold, sure, caulked with pitch, oarlocks strong.
It is time to go. It is time to go. Forget the kite. Make a kite of your own body.
You must fly in the night, when no aged trapper can stop you, when no man swings his angry maul. Take the gunwale in hand and roll it over. You only know this long desire.
The boat slides over the year’s last, greasy grass. Shivering water rides up his shins. Much moonlight and seeing is easy.
With an oar’s push, the river takes him out into the channel.
He’s never used a rowboat — the oars confuse. He seems to move opposite of whatever he desires. He jabs them at the river. Nothing helps.
Speed finds him. Past the reed beds, past the cut. Past the island — he launched too far downriver. Its yellow flag becomes small in the moon. An oar slides up the lock and cracks his eye and makes him recline.
Blood rushes to fill his eye like a bowl. The oar is gone. Spun upriver, he hears a bleating sound like a lamb: the wincing of timbers.
Rocks catch and the hull gives with a sickening crack. Is she on shore waiting for him? No. He knows it now: she has her own frigid, revenging heart.
The boat, small in the moon, lifts and rolls. He’s bucked off, and the river takes him, that dark strong indifference that is a drowning river even on the brightest of days, rumbling, dragging — it stings him like a knotted lash.
He sees the lights of heaven, but they are pale and indistinct and more than a little disappointing: Fayetteville, with its new row of gaslights on the river road. He drags himself to the shallows with fistfuls of reeds and spends a long time there, coughing up cold water. John Drew is alive. But he can’t go home to face his mother and father, where they mattock small graves from a hillside, and that is a kind of death. He has a sliver of ice. Home is not for him. He lies breathing. He is rushing on.
ROCKING STONE
“SEE HOW IT ROCKS BACK AND forth, sister?”
Uncle Vaughn wasn’t a big man, but with little more than a brush of his fingers, the stone fell forward and caught in the crook of rubble beneath. You could push it back from the other side, too, rocking it like a cradle. This boulder — roughly egg-shaped, flecked with green — must have weighed three tons. Uncle Vaughn showed them the magic a few times over.
Neely, one of his two nieces, asked how long it had been that way.
“All my life,” said Vaughn. “And some before.”
“You’re not that old,” said G, his other niece.
“I’m a hundred!”
Uncle Vaughn — their great-uncle, really — lived above the garage. He had never married, never left the county but for a spell in the navy, and didn’t even own a car, so he was grand company, forever willing to take you berry-picking or deal a hand of rummy for matchsticks. Yet he would twist your ears and hide your toys. There was a touch of madness in that family. Uncle Vaughn once alarmed Neely and G’s father by telling him he saw a green sheep climb up over the cliff. A green sheep? their father asked. A green sheep, said Vaughn.
He rocked the stone again. No matter how hard you pushed, it would never crash over the hill in that horrible avalanche that little girls and boys so desire.
They were lucky, said Uncle Vaughn, to have such a wonder on their property. If he had run of things, he would charge people a dollar to see it.
Neely said, “What’s in that hole beneath?”
“Maybe it’s the Indian treasure.” He stooped down and reached into the blackness under the rocking stone, a wonderful place of rattlesnakes and mouse skulls.