Anyway, the Reverend got curious about the Creek. I’m not sure how exactly. Something he overheard one of the older members of his congregation say, I think, that stirred up his interest. He asked me about it one Sunday morning, but I was new here myself, just come down from Providence, where I’d made a go at writing a novel no one wanted to publish. I told the Reverend I couldn’t help him, but added that he was right, the locals were kind of funny when it came to that creek. I like to do a spot of fishing myself, in case you didn’t notice, and the one time I’d mentioned trying out the creek, which I’d stumbled across on a map, a couple of customers had done their level best persuading me you couldn’t pull anything worth eating out of it. They’d been emphatic, and the thing was, these guys weren’t that old — you expect weird advice from old guys, right? — in fact, they were younger than I was, barely out of high school. They raised my curiosity, yes, but they spooked me, too. I tried to learn what more I could, asked some of the regulars, the older fellows, what they knew, but no one was talking.
Reverend Mapple had an idea. Part of his duties as minister included making the rounds to visit the sick members of the congregation. Some were in the hospital; some were shut in at home. Like me, he realized that, if anyone would know what the story behind the creek was, it would be the old people. He hadn’t had any luck getting them talking when he saw them together at church or in town, try though he did. But he thought if he could talk to one of them alone, his chances would be better. Like I said, he was a big man, and his presence could be pretty imposing. Hell, he almost had me going to his church, and I was raised Catholic. I guess his plan makes him sound a bit cold-blooded, doesn’t it? I suppose it was, at that.
Even speaking to people one-on-one, though, in the privacies of their own homes, he had the devil’s own time learning anything. The most anyone wanted to say was a handful of words, and few said that much. He did learn that the stream had originally been called “Deutschman’s Creek,” as in German’s Creek; it’s like the Pennsylvania Dutch, you know? Same thing. One old lady said her daddy had made reference to it as “Der Platz das Fischer,” but she wasn’t sure what the words meant. When she asked her pa, he gave her about the only beating she ever had.
The Reverend looked the words up. As you might have guessed, they were German, too, and meant something like “the place of the fisherman.”
[At the word “Fischer,” I had the briefest sensation of déjà vu, as if I’d heard that word once before, as if I’d dreamed it, and hearing Howard pronounce it, it was as if my dreams and my waking life had momentarily overlapped. I shook my head.]
To make a long story short — well, to make this part of a long story short — the Reverend was asking questions for a good year before he found any answers. These came from an old woman. Her name was Lottie, Lottie Schmidt. He went to visit her down in Fishkill. Her family had put her in a nursing home down there; I think so she’d be close to them. Yeah — her son was a guard at Downstate Correctional. Reverend Mapple would go to visit her every other week, because she asked for him and because he was that kind of man. He’d asked her about the creek, of course, and like everyone else she hadn’t had anything to say.
Until this one Saturday. Lottie’d been sliding downhill at a pretty brisk clip ever since she’d been put in the home. That kind of thing happens to a lot of old folks, doesn’t it? Whether she had Alzheimer’s, was going senile, or had just decided to give up the ghost, I can’t say, but it wasn’t too long before the Reverend found it a challenge to do much more than pray with her when he visited. Sometimes, after they were done praying, he’d talk to her, although from the blank look on her face he suspected it was mostly a case of him talking at her. Still, as he said to me once, “There may be someone in there, Howard, way deep down, and it’s important to let them know they haven’t been forgotten.” So he’d ramble on about his life, tell her what he’d been up to since he’d been around last.
He got to talking about his researches into the creek, asking her did she remember him asking her about it and her not telling him anything? Well, he’d finally learned something: it wasn’t much, but it was a start. He’d found out about Deutschman’s Creek, he said, and Der Platz das Fischer.
The Reverend had turned away from Lottie while he was speaking. He was filling a paper cup from the sink in the corner of the room. When he turned back around, the cup held to his mouth, what he saw made him jump and spill his water all over himself. There was Lottie standing not two feet away, her eyes open and clear and fixed on him. Reverend Mapple was speechless. He hadn’t heard her get out of bed, cross the floor to him, anything. Before he could say anything, Lottie said, “That is a bad place, Reverend. It is a bad place, and you should not be asking about it.” Her voice — well, that only made everything that much stranger. Lottie’s parents had been German and Lottie herself had been born over there. The family had moved when she was a girl; although her English was fine, she had never completely lost her accent. You’d hear reminders of it every once in a while. When she prayed the Lord’s Prayer with the Reverend, “Father” was “Fadter,” that kind of thing. Now, Lottie spoke as if English were a language she was still trying to master, as if her mouth were still full of German. That wasn’t all. Lottie had what you might call a typical little-old-lady voice, kind of high-pitched and crackly, like your grandmother’s. It had vanished, replaced with a strong, clear voice, the voice of someone six decades younger.
Thrown as he was by all of this, the Reverend managed to ask Lottie why Deutschman’s Creek was such a bad place. His curiosity was that strong. At first, Lottie wouldn’t say anything, just shook her head and refused to look at him. Finally, he said, “Now Lottie, you can’t tell me the creek is bad and not say any more. That isn’t fair. In fact,” the Reverend said, “that kind of talk makes me think I should take a stroll out that way, see what all the fuss is about.” Without exactly intending to, he’d lapsed into talking to Lottie as if she were a girl again.
When he threatened to visit the Creek, Lottie near lost her mind. She grabbed Reverend Mapple’s hands and said he mustn’t, he couldn’t, it was too awful, it was terrible, and then a flood of German came pouring out of her, all of it, I’m sure, saying more of the same. She was truly agitated, the Reverend said, it was all he could do to keep her from collapsing into sobs. She kept asking him — begging him to promise he wouldn’t go to the Creek. For sheer pity’s sake he almost promised, too. But Lottie’s agitation — well, it seemed like proof there must be one hell of a story connected to Dutchman’s Creek. Suddenly, the Reverend was on the verge of finding out the answer to the question that had been obsessing him for the past twelve months, and you can appreciate how that feels. He told Lottie the only way he was going to know if he should avoid the Creek was if someone told him the truth about it, the whole story, and didn’t hold anything back. Then, if he thought the reason was sound, he’d give Dutchman’s Creek a wide berth.
Lottie still held out. Her father, she claimed, had sworn her to secrecy. At that, the Reverend lost his temper a little bit, and said, “Am I not a minister of the Lord? Are not all things disclosed to Almighty God? Is there anything that can be hidden from Him? And if the Lord God knows all, then should His minister not be trusted with a secret?” When he told me about this later, Reverend Mapple looked kind of sheepish. I guess ministers have their own temptations.