Amos and I made our pact with the river long ago. We built a raft, shoved off, and never complained. Rain, no rain, sun, no sun, wind, no wind, hot, cold, fast, slow, wet, dry. It really didn’t matter to us. We were just boys, happy to go wherever the river carried us. And all the river cared about was that we were going in the same direction it was and that we could swim, because it didn’t like us dying.
Rivers don’t do death, that’s why they flow. You may drown, sink to the bottom, and lie there a few days, swelling, getting all puffy. You might even get caught on a downed tree with bream and bass nibbling on your nose, but eventually the river’s going to lift you up and beach you. Spit you out like Jonah. You’re not going to make the trip. You can’t go where the river goes. Rivers do life, and the dead don’t dance.
On our maiden voyage, a three-day float, we read Huckleberry Finn, switching turns every chapter. Our favorite scene was Huck sitting on the raft, deciding whether or not to rescue Jim. “All right then, I’ll go to hell” became our motto.
For us, the raft was a safe and easy place. While I read, Amos would lie flat, listen, and try to smoke a pipe. He coughed and sputtered a good bit, about like the Evinrude, but eventually he got it and seemed to enjoy it. I, on the other hand, tried Red Man. A mistake. Every time I put that stuff in my mouth, I’d end up chumming. Why in the world I continued to try still amazes me. Glutton for punishment, I suppose. I figured if Josey Wales and John Wayne could chew, then so could I. The only difference was that my life was not a movie. Mine was real life and showed all the unedited stuff, like me hanging my head overboard.
My dancing with the river was never poetic, but Amos got pretty close.
I JUMPED INTO SOME SHORTS AND GRABBED MY POCKETknife, Papa’s yellow-handled, two-bladed Case Trapper.
Amos started in again. “Come on, boy. I’m always waiting on you.”
Amos and I lit out the front door and headed for the barn, where Pinky met us at the gate and tried to flip me with a stiff shoulder. She’s got about 130 pounds on me.
Amos laughed, and I shooed her away. “Get out of here, you ol’ biddy.”
“That is one mean pig,” Amos said as Pinky grunted and ran in circles around her offspring.
“You ain’t seen nothing. That pig is the Antichrist,” I said. The Evinrude hung on a little rack I’d made years back. Even though we hadn’t used it in a few years, I started it up every now and again just to hear the sound. We loaded it into the wheelbarrow—actually it was more of a manure cart, but we called it a wheelbarrow—and grabbed a couple of gas cans. Two cans were plenty for a one-night float.
It was getting dark, but the trail alongside the cornfield was light enough. The moon shimmered off the sand, and shadows followed us through the long, tall grass and even taller corn. Blue bounced along beside us.
“What happened to your arm?” Amos asked while pushing the wheelbarrow and nodding at my forearm. “That’s a pretty good one.”
“Oh, that’s just, uh . . . I was moving some stuff in the barn, and Pinky tripped me up. Just came down on it wrong.”
“You ought to send that thing to Smithfield. I’d tell you to make sausage out of her, but she’s probably too dang tough.”
“You got a point there,” I agreed. A half mile later we rolled up to the riverbank and into the hollow where we hid the raft. The river was high, due to the moon, so floating it out would be easy. We pulled off all the branches that had either fallen on it or we had put on it, but there didn’t seem to be as many as the last time we had done this.
“I think somebody’s been on our boat,” I said, pointing. “Less cover.”
Amos nodded and looked at the raft. “Sometimes a man likes to be alone.”
“When?” I asked.
“’Bout four weeks ago. I got tired of sitting there feeling useless and watching you hold Maggs’s hand.”
“Oh.”
Amos mounted the motor and loaded the gas inside the lean-to. We had sealed it when we built it, so it was pretty good and dry. Matches even lit. Which would be nice once we got going. A fire helped keep the mosquitoes at bay, and this end of the Salkehatchie Swamp produced some big mosquitoes.
I grabbed the push pole, jumped on top of the poling platform, and backed out the raft.
We bumped into some old cedars, and Amos said, “D.S., you’re getting rusty.”
I gave a hard push and Amos, who was standing, lost his balance and almost went in the water.
“D.S., you get my Kimber wet and I’m gonna beat you like a drum right here on this raft in the middle of the river.”
I laughed. “I ain’t that rusty. And you might could whup me, but you’re gonna have to catch me first, Mr. Donut.”
Amos was actually pretty fit. He had gained a few pounds since high school—I’d say about ten—but it was mostly muscle. After high school his hair started thinning up top, so he just shaved it off. He said it was cooler and less hassle. Although I’d never tell him, Amos is a pretty handsome man, and he takes good care of himself. Spends about four days a week in the weight room. So between his head, his muscles, and the moon, he looked like a shorter, thicker, blacker version of Mr. Clean. I was glad we were on the same side.
“Listen here, half-pint, I’m within ten pounds of my playing weight. What are you? ’Bout a buck-seventy?” He eyed me up and down.
“One sixty-eight,” I said.
“That’s what I thought. You’re almost thirty pounds under your playing weight.”
“Yeah, but I can still outrun you,” I said, laughing and looking downriver.
“But when I catch you,” Amos said, flexing his right arm, “I’m gonna put you in the Carolina cruncher.”
“Ebony,” I said, smirking, “I think you’re losing a bit. Your arms ain’t what they used to be.”
He took two steps, grabbed my legs, and tossed. The whole thing didn’t take a second and a half. I went about fifteen feet in the air, then dived deep into the water. I swam back over to the raft and climbed up, something I’d done a hundred times. I wrung out my shirt and watched Amos stand atop the polling platform, smiling. It was good to be back on the raft.
We floated a few hours, not saying much. About three o’clock in the morning, Amos looked up from his pipe and broke the silence. “Have you been thinking what I think you’re thinking?”
I knew what he was asking. This was why he had brought me to the river. Amos was checking my pulse, but it hurt too much just to come outright and say it. We needed the river and a few hours beneath the shadow of the moon to get him to the place where he could ask and me to the place where I could answer.
I looked up from my seat on the front of the raft. “If Maggs is already sitting in heaven, rocking our son, laughing with Nanny and Papa and our folks, and looking down on me, then she’s never coming back, and I might live another sixty years.” I shook my head. “I just don’t know that I can make it through those years without her.”
We floated along in the quiet, listening to the ripple and flap of water against the cedar timbers. An owl hooted, and on the air I smelled a charcoal fire thick with lighter fluid. Amos stood atop the poling platform on the back of the raft, his sweat glistening in the moonlight. Minutes passed, during which neither of us said a word.
My pulse must have been pretty weak, because Amos pressed me one more time. “What keeps you?”
I splashed water on my face and rubbed my eyes. “The thought of Maggie waking up. Her hand without mine. Her without me, staring at the same future that’s bearing down on me.”
Blue slept next to me, his ears pricking up every once in a while. We probably floated four or five miles while Amos wordlessly and methodically worked the pole. It was a warm night, so I dunked my head in the water and let it drip down and soak my neck and chest. Amos lit his pipe, and in the flash of the match I saw tears streaking his cheeks. At daybreak, we napped and fished. We caught a few bream, one or two bass, and ate lunch around noon. About dusk, we crank
ed the Evinrude and puttered back home, arriving around midnight.
I stepped onto the porch and pointed to the stringer. “Keep the fish. I’m not too hungry.”
Amos nodded, looked as if he wanted to say something, and then stuck his right index finger in the air. He opened the trunk of his squad car, pulled out a cardboard box about two feet square, and set it on the porch. “Maggie found this at an antique shop in Walterboro. She was real excited. Stored it at my house so you wouldn’t find it. I think she meant to give it to you on your first day of class. After the, uh . . . well, I didn’t know what to do with it. So here it is.” Amos looked out over the field toward the river. “I don’t think she ever got around to writing a card.”
Amos turned while tears slid off his square chin. He nodded and spoke quietly, as if his voice would amplify across the cornfield. “When you boil it down,” he said, holding out his hand and counting with his fingers, “all we got left, all anybody’s got, is faith . . . and hope . . . and love.” He looked at his three fingers. “And we all gonna make it. All three of us.”
I watched him cross the dirt road and head into his own driveway. I turned on all the lights, showered, wrapped myself in a towel, and stood in the den, staring at that box. An hour later, I sat on the floor and slit the brown wrapping tape. Inside, wrapped in dirty burlap, were a leather-strung drum and two hand-cut drumsticks.
I cried like a baby all the way to the hospital.
chapter eleven
I CONSIDER MYSELF A FAIR TEACHER. I DON’T ASK anything of my students that I wouldn’t ask of myself. And one thing I would not ask of myself is to jump into a cold pool without sticking my toes in it first. Now, Amos, he’s a different breed. It can be thirty degrees outside with a film of ice covering the surface of the water, and it’s “Aw, just jump in. Get it over with. You’ll warm up.” Not me. Especially not when it comes to being cold.
I like to get comfortable with an idea before I take it on. Give me time to ruminate, and I can face most anything, but don’t allow me an experience, and then with the sweat still rolling off my face, ask me to interpret it for you. I don’t know what I think until I’ve had time to look in my rearview mirror.
The English department had structured my class around three papers, but it only cared about the third, the research paper. A passing paper was my student’s ticket out of here. While the third paper had to meet certain length and style requirements, the first two were left up to the teacher’s discretion, meaning I could tailor the assignment to need. Theirs and mine.
They needed to get their feet wet, get their engines running, get comfortable, and I needed to get to know them. I needed to place a face with a writing voice and so have a starting line against which I could compare their other two works. I needed to know who could and who could not. Who did and who did not. The first paper was the plumb line against which I compared the other two. It would also keep them honest.
The first assignment was an autobiographical essay. Easy enough. Everyone is an instant expert on the subject. No research needed. The only requirement is honesty, and sometimes a good sense of humor.
I spent most of Saturday reading essays to Maggie at the hospital. From prom night to car crashes to summer nights with bronzed, big-breasted women, they gave me real and honest stuff.
Marvin wrote about his last football game as a senior in high school. State champions. All-state player of the year. Marvin was no master of the English language, but he was able to get across his humor. He wrote the way he spoke, which to me is the sign of a good beginning. Good beginnings breed hope. And I had hope for Marvin.
Amanda wrote about growing up in Digger, about her dad and his past. She wrote about her desire to be a nurse for the critically ill. She wrote about being pregnant. She had an informative voice, similar to her speech. Her paper told the reader everything you’d want to know about Amanda in three pages. Except for one detail.
Alan wrote about his first car, a ’69 Chevy Camaro. He bought it off a junk lot and set it on blocks for two years. He literally took it apart one piece at a time and put it back together again with new parts. Paint, interior, bodywork, engine, gears, transmission. It was all new, and he had built, rebuilt, or custom-ordered all of it. It sounded like a showpiece, and he provided me with proof. A certificate, “Best of Show,” from the Walterboro Classic Car Roundup was stapled to the last page of his paper. Alan’s voice was rough and his writing skills poor, yet he, too, got his point across. And judging by the erasure marks, he had put some real time and work into this. In some ways, it was clear Alan knew his writing skills needed taking apart and rebuilding, just like his first car. I had hope for Alan too.
Eugene wrote about his experiences in last year’s Freak-Nik in Atlanta. He described four days of bars, the backseat of a big Oldsmobile, and bad indigestion. His paper was essentially his personal chronicle of four days of booze, women, and a dirty hotel, and he didn’t spare any details. Even down to the little machine next to the bed that required four quarters for five minutes’ worth of bad decisions. Eugene’s paper confirmed what I had suspected: here was a ladies’ man who was interested in one thing. His paper also confirmed something else I had suspected: here was an intelligent guy who had yet to put his mind to something other than the next girl or the next good time. Eugene was an entrepreneur, and without his knowing it, his paper illustrated that. He had a unique ability to handle details, to turn a bad situation into a better one, and to say the right word at the right time. I didn’t need to hope for Eugene. He’d get out of there, which was all he wanted.
Koy, the silent one, hidden behind sunglasses and long hair in the back of the room, turned in a one-paragraph paper. I had specifically requested three pages. I don’t understand why students do that. If the instructions say three pages, then at least make a go at it. If you want to run the race, then at least do it from the starting line. In Koy’s one paragraph she attempted to hide herself the same way her sunglasses hid her eyes. Problem was, her ability to write was as effective a concealment as her glasses. Ironically, by her effectiveness in keeping the reader at bay, she revealed her remarkable writing ability. Her language skills surprised me. I wanted to hope for Koy, but I couldn’t figure out what or why she was hiding.
The rest of the papers fell in line along the same ideas. Most were informational and dry; the students gave me what they thought I wanted, hoping, no doubt, that I in turn would give them what they wanted: an A.
The last paper in the pile was Russell’s. I had little expectation for Russell because I have known and even played with a few Russells before. He was a gifted athlete, a walking Adonis, and he had no need for school because school was not his ticket. The NFL would be his ticket. Though he was only a sophomore, word was that scouts had been looking at him this year. For Russell’s academic future that meant one thing only: he would transfer out of DJC, but he wasn’t planning to graduate with a four-year degree. In his version of his prospects, Russell didn’t need my class. At least not yet. If he blew out a knee, then he’d need it.
I refilled my coffee cup and propped my feet up on the end of Maggs’s bed, slowly swaying in rhythm with the hum of her monitor. A cool breeze blew in through the window and swept the parking lot clean. The almanac predicted the coldest winter in twenty years. Maggs liked cold winters. One of the things she missed about Virginia was the snow. I liked to watch it fall but not stick, drift, or melt. Not Maggs. She loved being snowed in.
I picked up Russell’s paper and began to read. To my surprise, it bled honesty. It seeped through the pores and bubbled over. And Russell didn’t need to be honest. Why should he? Being honest showed that he could be vulnerable. And to show that he could be vulnerable showed that he could be touched, even beaten. Football players on their way up cannot afford to show what Russell’s first paragraph showed me. Or so I thought. Two pages in, and I felt myself wanting to offer Russell an apology. I had misjudged him. He hid nothing.
Russell wrote ab
out his folks and last year’s homecoming game. His mom and dad drove from Roanoke, checked into their hotel, went to the game, and stood in the rain while their son played football. That night, Russell’s dad caught a cold. The next day they all drove home to Roanoke for Thanksgiving. Russell wrote about his dad’s lifelong work with the railroad. Several times, he flashed back from the action of the football game to times spent with his dad playing catch, fishing, saying “Yes sir,” and just hanging out together.
I’m not sure Russell was aware of the extent to which it came across, but his paper made it evident that he and his dad had something most fathers and sons do not: a friendship. Without sounding clichéd, these two guys loved each other. Following Thanksgiving in Roanoke, Russell’s dad developed pneumonia and died in the hospital two days later.
Two things struck me. One was that I couldn’t possibly put a grade on it. It was one of those rare papers that existed outside of a grade. Two, it was apparent that Russell and his dad shared tenderness, intimacy, and trust. They probably hugged each other good night. Russell’s description of his father’s death was vivid and convincing: the sound of his cough, the color of the mucous, his dad’s wrinkled face, the fear in his mom’s eyes, the last time he kissed him.
I put down the essay, picked up my coffee cup, and watched the clouds roll past the window. Russell had put his heart on that page. All 280-plus pounds of it. Russell, whom I had wrongly put in the proverbial football player’s box, with his big shoulders and deep voice and eyes always looking disinterestedly out the window, had done something no other student in my pile of papers had done. He had touched me.