My father leaned over, switched on the Buick’s headlights.
“We need to get home,” he said. “Your mother will be worried about us.”
The pill bottles remained unopened the rest of the summer, and there were no more attempts to cauterize my father’s despair with electricity. Which is not to say my father was a happy man. His was not a religion of bliss but one that allowed him to rise from his bed on each of those summer mornings and face two classes of hormone-ravaged adolescents, to lead those students toward solutions he himself no longer found adequate. I did not tell my mother what I had seen that Wednesday evening, or what I refused to see. I have never told her.
MY FATHER DIED that September, on an afternoon when the first reds and yellows flared in the maples and poplars. We’d driven up to the lake house that morning. My father graded tests until early afternoon. When he’d finished he went inside and put on his diving gear, then crossed the brief swath of grass to the water — moving slow and deliberate on the land like an aquatic creature returning to its natural element. Once on the dock he turned toward the lake house, raised a palm, and fell forever from us.
My mother and I sat on the porch playing Risk and drinking tea. When my father hadn’t resurfaced after a reasonable time, my mother cast frequent glances toward the water.
“It hasn’t been thirty minutes yet,” I said more than once. But in a few more minutes half an hour had passed, and my father still had not risen.
I ran down to the lake while my mother dialed the county’s EMS unit. I dove into the murky water around the dock, finding nothing on the bottom but silt. I dove until the rescue squad arrived, though I dove without hope. I was seventeen years old. I didn’t know what else to do.
The rest of the afternoon was a loud confusion of divers and boats, rescue squad members and gawkers. The sheriff showed up and, almost at dusk, the coroner, a young man dressed in khakis and a blue cotton shirt.
“Nitrogen narcosis, sometimes called rapture of the deep,” the coroner said, conversant in the language of death despite his youth. “A lot of people wouldn’t think a reservoir would be deep enough to cause that, but this one is.” He and the sheriff stood with my mother and me on the screened porch, cups of coffee in their hands. “If you go down too far you can take in too much nitrogen. It causes a chemical imbalance, an intoxicating effect.” The coroner looked out toward the reservoir. “It can happen to the most experienced diver.”
The coroner talked to us a few more minutes before he and the sheriff stepped off the screened porch, leaving behind empty coffee cups, no doubt hoping what inevitable calamity would reunite them might wait until after a night’s sleep.
ONCE HE HAD no further say in the matter, my father was again a Presbyterian. His funeral service was held at Cliffside Presbyterian, his burial in the church’s cemetery. Mr. Holcombe and several of his congregation attended. They sat in the back, the men wearing short-sleeved shirts and ties, the women cotton dresses that reached their ankles. After the burial they awkwardly shook my hand and my mother’s before departing. I’ve never seen any of them since.
In my less generous moments I perceive my mother’s insistence on Presbyterian last rites as mean-spirited, a last rebuke to my father’s Pentecostal reconversion. But who can really know another’s heart? Perhaps it was merely her Scots-Irish practicality, less trouble for everyone to hold the rites in Cliffside instead of twenty miles away in the mountains.
After my father’s death my mother refused to go back to the lake house, but I did and occasionally still do. I sit out on the screened porch as the night starts its slow glide across the lake. It’s a quiet time, the skiers and most of the fishermen gone home, the echoing trombone of frogs not yet in full volume. I listen to sounds unheard any other time — the soft slap of water against the dock, a muskrat in the cattails.
I sometimes think of my father down in that murky water as his lungs surrendered. I think of what the coroner told me that night on the porch, that the divers found the mask in the silt beside him. “Probably didn’t even know he was doing it,” the coroner said matter-of-factly. “People do strange things like that all the time when they’re dying.”
The coroner is probably right. But sometimes as I sit on the porch with darkness settling around me, it is easy to imagine that my father pulling off the mask was something more — a gesture of astonishment at what he drifted toward.
Last Rite
When the sheriff stepped onto her porch, he carried his hat in his hands, so she knew Elijah was dead. The sheriff told how drovers had found her son’s body beside a spring just off the trail between Boone and Mountain City, a bullet hole in the back of his head, his pockets turned inside out. He told her of the charred piece of fatback in the skillet, the warm ashes underneath, the empty haversack with the name Elijah Hampton stitched into it. The drovers had nailed the skillet in a big beech tree as a marker and then buried him beside it.
“Murdered,” Sarah said, speaking the word the sheriff had avoided. “For a few pieces of silver in his pocket.”
It wasn’t a question but the sheriff answered as if it were.
“That’s what I reckon.”
“And you don’t know who done it.”
“No, ma’am,” the sheriff said. “And I’ll not lie to you. We’ll likely never know.”
The sheriff held the haversack out to her.
“Your daughter-in law didn’t want this. She said she couldn’t bear the sight of his blood on it. You may not want it either.”
Sarah took the haversack and laid it beside the door.
“So you’ve already been to see Laura,” she said.
“Yes, ma’am. I thought it best, her being the wife.”
The sheriff reached into his shirt pocket.
“Here’s the death certificate. I thought you might want to see it.”
“Just a minute,” Sarah said. She stepped into the front room and took the Bible and pen from the mantel. She sat in her porch chair, the Bible open on her lap, the piece of paper in her hand.
“It don’t say where he died,” Sarah said.
“No, ma’am. That gap where they found him, it’s the back of beyond. Nobody lives down there, ever has far as I know.”
The sheriff looked down at her, his pale blue eyes shadowed by the hat he now wore.
“Mrs. Hampton,” he said, “they don’t even know what state that place is in, much less what county.”
Sarah closed the Bible, the last line unfilled.
EIGHT MONTHS LATER the dew darkened the hem of her gingham dress as Sarah walked out of the yard, the cool slickness of the grass brushing her bare feet and ankles. She followed Aho Creek down the mountain to where it entered the middle fork of the New River. She stepped onto the wagon road and followed the river north toward Boone, the sun rising over her right shoulder. Soon the river’s white rush plunged away from the road. Her shoulder began aching, and she shifted the haversack to her other side.
Sarah stopped at a creek on the outskirts of town. She drank from the creek and unwrapped the sandwich she’d brought with her, but the first mouthful stuck in her throat like sawdust. She tore the bread and ham into pieces and left it for the birds before opening the haversack. Sarah knew she looked a sight but could do nothing about it except take out the lye soap and facecloth and wash the sweat from her face and neck, the dust from her feet and ankles. She took out her shoes and put them on and then walked into Boone, the main street crowded with farmers and their families come to spend Saturday in town. Sarah searched the storefronts until she found the sign that said BENEDICT ASH — SURVEYOR.