“Don’t pay no attention,” he said, staring into his bowl. “She’s all talk.” I could tell he wasn’t too sure, but, like always, he kept his worries quiet.
After that run-in with his mama, Clint quit eating as much and started losing weight. I’d take hold of his sharp hipbones and say, “I got to fatten you up. I can’t get big as a house all by myself!” I acted like I was kidding, but he went around with dark rings under his eyes not smiling near as much, and I didn’t know how to make him feel better. It should have been a happy time for us. One night I couldn’t help crying beside of him in the bed. He knowed why I was upset. He said, “I’m sorry. I can’t help it.”
I asked if he didn’t want the baby, but he swore that wasn’t it. He said it was hard to say out loud what was wrong. I realized laying there I didn’t want him to tell, because what if it was me. But looking back I don’t believe it was. Clint loved me and the baby.
Then one night he went swimming and didn’t climb back in the bed smelling like fish and muddy water. I woke up and his side was empty. Dawn was coming under the curtains. I put on my coat and went down to the water with my hands on my belly. I looked across the lake, like me and Clint did when we first came there. Fog hung over the still blue. Everything was quiet. Me and the baby knowed he wasn’t coming back.
I set by the water for two days like a sailor’s wife anyway, hardly ever going back in the house. I wanted to believe Clint was just holding his breath extra long this time. Pretty soon he would break the surface, hung with algae and sputtering water. I had a blanket to wrap him in just in case. It was cold outside and I’d have to warm him up.
On the third day, not long after the sun rose, I saw red and blue lights twinkling through the trees on down the shore. I tried to get up but I was too stiff. I stumbled around for a long time on the sand. When I finally got to where I could walk, I followed them swooping lights, dragging Clint’s blanket behind me. I picked my way along the edge of the water, climbing over fallen trees and rocks. Seemed like the blanket got snagged every few feet, but I kept going. Weak and cold as I was, I don’t know how I made it. Them lights got brighter the closer I got. Finally the woods thinned out and it got easier to walk. Not far ahead, I seen the neighbor man’s dock and people standing on it. Me and Clint didn’t know him too well. I couldn’t have picked him out of a lineup. I came out of the trees and onto his grass. I meant to ask him what the lights was for, if I could figure out which one he was. That’s when I seen the police cars and the ambulance with its back doors throwed open. Two men was rolling a stretcher across the yard with a lumpy shape strapped to it. Even under a wet-spotted cover, I knowed the shape well.
I wandered toward the people standing around. I didn’t have any more questions. I just needed help for my baby. I was fixing to fall down.
“Hey, little gal,” the neighbor man said, coming to meet me. He had a toothpick in his mouth. He didn’t look too tore up about what was going on. “I found that feller there drownded under my dock, skinny boy with right longish hair. Had a silver chain around his neck. Reckon you know him?”
“I know him,” I said. Then my legs gave out.
JOHNNY
It was a long drive with the windows down, subdivisions and warehouses and restaurants turning to long stretches of farmland. The farther we went, the more the spring smell of cut grass replaced the stink of factory smoke. We traveled west for at least an hour on a two-lane highway, the afternoon heading toward evening. Then he turned off the highway onto a narrow back road that wound and twisted through a patch of thick, dark woods, onto another stretch of cracked asphalt that led us through the trees and petered out, turning into a dusty gravel lane with rolling hills on both sides.
The whole time, Ford talked about his life. He said he was born on a farm outside of Oak Ridge and all those years hearing about his grandfather’s visions had given him a lust to see things for himself. He got an inheritance from an aunt he’d never met and ran off to travel the world. He claimed he had seen it all, the Highlands of Scotland, the pyramids of Egypt, the Great Wall of China. He said he’d lived on just about every continent and in every state of the union but nothing he saw satisfied him. “What I really wanted to see,” he said, “was the future. Like my grandfather did.” I didn’t ask about his visions, although he probably wanted me to. I kept quiet, waiting for him to slip up and reveal who he really was. He said that even as he roamed, he knew he’d return someday. When he finally went home to the farm where he was born, his parents had been dead for three years and the house they had left him was falling down. He demolished the remains by himself, breaking off chunks of crumbling plaster, tearing off shingles, knocking down walls with a sledgehammer. Then he mentioned the books he found in the rubble.
“I moved some rotten boards I was hauling off and there they were, had been hidden in the house for who knows how long, waiting for somebody to find them. They weren’t rare or valuable, just old. One of them was Great Expectations. It must have been a gift to somebody, because there was a name written on the inside cover and a date, June 20, 1889. Well, it was the twentieth day of June in 1957 when that book turned up. I think finding those books got me reading and writing. I know it’s what made me a collector.”
I looked out the window, trying to keep my face neutral. He couldn’t have known about the poetry books, hidden in the duffel bag at my feet. It felt like proof that we were connected. He went on talking, telling me how he camped out on the farm until he had enough money to buy a trailer. He did all kinds of work, pulling tobacco, roofing houses, cleaning chimneys, mowing yards. It took a while to save enough and during that time he built bonfires in the field and read and wrote and played his guitar every night under the stars. He said an odd thing happened while he was living outdoors. One by one stray dogs had come out of the woods into the light of his fire and by the time his year of camping was done he had six of them, sleeping at his side and sharing the meat of the animals he hunted. “I still keep a pack of dogs around,” he said with a smile. “They seem to like my company.” He also claimed he had finished the first of several novels he’d written that year. I wasn’t sure if I believed any of what he was telling me, much less that he was a writer. He never let it slip how he really lost his finger, but I knew I had to find out.
After what seemed like miles of bottomland with not a house in sight, Ford grinned and said, “I bet you thought we were never going to get here.” From the road I saw his trailer at the end of a dirt driveway, surrounded by hills and woods and grassy fields. It had been built onto, with a long porch across the front hung with plants and wind chimes. When we got out of the truck, a pack of dogs just as Ford had described came running. There were at least eight of them, mutts of all sizes and colors, tongues hanging and tails wagging. Ford patted their heads as they jumped on him, muddying his jeans with their paws. Then I looked across the yard and saw the wife, Carolina. There was no way to hide my surprise. I had been expecting a graying older woman but this was a girl of no more than eighteen, wearing a floppy T-shirt and cutoff shorts. She was standing barefoot in the balding grass by the clothesline. She paused to watch me cross the yard and her eyes never left my face, even as Ford went to kiss her cheek. “He looks different than I imagined,” she said.
It was hard to stop looking at Carolina as she went back to the laundry. She wasn’t beautiful, but there was something about the geography of her face. She had dirty blonde hair, olive skin, and light eyes under heavy brows. Climbing the porch steps behind Ford, I nearly stumbled looking back at her. Then I was inside the trailer and the clutter was hard to walk through. There were books everywhere, spilling out of cardboard boxes, piled on the matted shag carpet, stacked against the dark paneling walls, their dusty smell mingling with mildew and woodsmoke and cooking grease.