Trouble the Water Read online

  “I bet your dad’s making that cabin up,” George told Wendell over his bowl of cereal. Summer mornings started late at George’s house, all the children still in bed as late as nine, so that Mrs. Franklin could get her housework done in peace.

  “He might could be,” Wendell admitted, having had that same thought himself riding over. “But he sounded pretty serious about it. I think he was too sleepy to make anything up.”

  George wiped a dribble of milk from his chin. “I’ll go out looking with you tomorrow. Mama’s taking us to the swimming pool this morning. You could come.”

  Wendell weighed this out in his mind. The town swimming pool was new and something of a wonder. For ten cents you could spend all day splashing around, racing up and down the lanes, or wait in line to jump off the high dive, your knees nearly buckling underneath you as you walked the narrow plank out over the water. The joy of it was cut into by all the nervous mothers, George’s mother being the worst. The mothers of Celeste, Kentucky, weren’t used to swimming pools and were constantly on the lookout in case the water decided to swallow their children up like Jonah’s whale.

  “I guess not,” Wendell said after a minute of thinking on it. “Your mother and everything.”

  George nodded. He and Wendell had been friends a long time and didn’t take offense over much, least of all their mothers.

  Wendell decided to ride downtown before going back home. He had a dime in his pocket just waiting to be spent (even though his mother insisted he didn’t have to spend every red cent he had—that was her expression, “every red cent,” like money came in all the different colors of the rainbow—he could save some of his money, maybe send it to the poor people in Africa, at which point Wendell always started edging out of the room, because when his mother started talking about poor people in Africa, she had a hard time stopping). He thought about comic books and he thought about candy, but he let the thought about candy go, since it was only ten o’clock and already it had to be about ninety degrees. In this heat a Hershey’s bar wouldn’t last the bike ride home. It’d be a puddle of chocolate in his pocket, a waste of a nickel.

  So probably a comic book, which meant a trip to McKinley’s Drug. He pedaled the two blocks over and leaned his bike against the store’s brick wall. When he pushed open the door, the smell of ammonia practically clobbered him. Looking around, he didn’t see anybody he knew, so he waved at Prissie McKinley, who was over at the ice-cream counter, wiping off the glass cases with Windex and a rag. Prissie was his cousin Mary Anne’s best friend, and once, two years ago, she’d given Wendell a free chocolate soda. She hadn’t ever done it again since, but Wendell stayed hopeful and was always cordial to her if no one was around to witness it.

  There was a colored boy standing in front of the comic-book rack, reading the latest Spider-Man, which Wendell had read the week before, standing in that very spot. Wendell had a fifty-fifty arrangement with McKinley’s Drug—he bought 50 percent of the new comics on the rack and read the other 50 percent in the store while Mr. McKinley wasn’t looking. He was pretty sure Mr. McKinley wasn’t aware of this arrangement, but it had a certain logic to Wendell, and he was happy with it.

  The colored boy nodded at Wendell, not bothering to unpeel his eyes from the comic book, and Wendell gave a slight nod back. There was a common vocabulary of nods and shrugs among the comic-book readers of McKinley’s Drug, who liked to keep things quiet, so as not to draw attention to themselves. It made Wendell a little nervous to stand next to the boy because you never knew who might make a fuss about a colored kid loitering in the store and not moving on about his business. If someone complained, then Wendell would have to move on too, or worse, Mr. McKinley might decide to make a rule about boys standing in front of the comic-book rack for more than a minute, and then Wendell’s fifty-fifty arrangement would be done for.

  He’d read most all of the comics in front of him, the Superman and The Spirit and Captain America. There was a new Wonder Woman, but Wendell had mixed feelings about Wonder Woman, having mixed feelings about females in general, even his mother, who he liked pretty well but thought was too bossy. Besides, he’d never pick up Wonder Woman standing next to another boy, even a colored boy. He found a Batman he hadn’t read and took it up to the counter. Prissie came over and smiled at him but didn’t offer any ice cream.

  “You going swimming today?” she asked as she rang up the comic book. “I bet there’ll be a hundred kids over there.” She leaned over the counter toward him and whispered, “You know all those little kids pee in there. I wouldn’t swim in that water if you paid me.”

  Wendell didn’t know what to say to that, so he didn’t say anything, just took his comic book and gave Prissie a wave good-bye.

  Back outside, the hot air pressing hard against him, Wendell abandoned the idea of biking around town. Maybe he’d just go home and read his comic book, or work on making some new bass lures. Last week he’d bought three blocks of balsa wood at the hardware store, but so far all he’d done was trace minnow patterns on them with pencil. Now he could imagine the feel of sitting at the workbench in the corner of the garage, the one little lamp turned on, the damp cool coming up from the cement floor as he whittled the lures with his pocketknife and thought about what colors to paint them.

  Wendell headed south out of town and in ten minutes was back home, sweat rolling off his forehead and falling into his eyes. The house was empty when he went inside, so Wendell was free to rummage through the cupboards and refrigerator without anyone commenting on what he was taking or how much. Maybe before he worked on his lures, he could make himself some lunch, take it down to the river. He’d found a good rock a little ways down from the bend, one with a worn, flat place just right for sitting. When he was done eating, he could go to the creek mouth, where he and his dad liked to fish, see if there were any bass hiding out in the cool spots. You didn’t see a lot of bass during the day in the summer, but maybe Wendell would get lucky.

  Wendell made himself two chicken sandwiches, five peanut butter and saltine crackers, wrapped five chocolate chip cookies in a napkin, and stuffed all of it into his knapsack along with the sports page, his new comic book, and a jar full of water from the pitcher in the refrigerator. The sack was on the heavy side when he hoisted it over his shoulder, but it would be light as air on the walk back, when Wendell was more likely to feel the weight of things.

  The backyard stretched out for half an acre behind the house and then met up with the woods in a give-and-take of grass and weeds and spindly pines, before surrendering completely to trees and a tangled undergrowth of vines and ferns and low-lying bushes. The path through the woods stayed clear in all seasons, pounded out over years and years by human feet setting off on hikes and fishing trips. Wendell whistled for King, his redbone coonhound.

  “You’re a good boy,” Wendell told the dog, who took the compliment in stride, his nose sniffing the air, alert to the wide range of smells and stinks that the woods put forth every new day. Wendell didn’t say anything else, aware that the dog was preoccupied, but later he would start making observations, asking King questions and waiting a respectable period of time for answers. He had a habit of doing this and hadn’t even realized it until George overheard him once and asked, “You know that dog don’t actually talk, right?”

  Sure, Wendell knew it, but that didn’t stop him now from asking, “I wonder if there really is an old cabin back in the woods? You think we’d have come across it, wouldn’t you?”

  King seemed to consider this, seemed almost on verge of a reply, when his ears raised up in that way that let Wendell know some other animal was nearby. King put his nose in the air and sniffed it, then let out a low growl.

  “What is it, boy?” Wendell kneeled down and looked around, but there wasn’t anything there that he could see. King’s growl bottomed out into the lower notes of a bay and then rose into a clip of staccato barks. Wendell could sense he was waiting to be released, that every muscle in King’s body
was telling him to go after whatever was out there, but Wendell held back on giving the command. More than once King had reappeared after a hunt with a mangled rabbit in his mouth, and not always a dead one. If it wasn’t dead, then Wendell would have to kill it to end its suffering. He wasn’t so weak stomached that he couldn’t do it, but it made him feel lousy for the rest of the day.

  “Let’s leave it, boy,” Wendell told King. He started walking again, but King didn’t follow him right away, so he said “Leave it” again, and then King followed him.

  He thought that maybe when he got to the river, he’d find Ray Sanders or Will Cortland hanging around, fishing or just throwing rocks. But there wasn’t anybody at the river when Wendell got there, and for a minute he couldn’t think of what to do next. He found the rock with the flat place for sitting, took his sandwiches out of his knapsack, and started mapping out the woods in his mind. They ran for miles and miles along the southern edge of town and the countryside east and west of it, so maybe he ought to mark out the spots he’d already explored. He realized there were plenty of spots close by he’d never set foot on, since he tended to stay on the path to avoid the poison ivy. Wendell hated poison ivy worse than anything in the world and would walk a mile out of his way to avoid it.

  King barked a friendly bark. Wendell looked up and saw the old yellow dog making its way toward them. The dog had been wandering around the river for a week or so now, but nobody knew who he belonged to. Every time Wendell came down, he’d see him sniffing the banks, up this way and down that way.

  “Hey, boy,” he called out, and the dog gave a muffled bark in response. Wendell wished he had something to give him that a dog might like, a piece of rawhide or a hard biscuit. The dog looked well fed enough, but he gave out the feeling of needing more.

  King ran up to him, and the two dogs sniffed at each other a bit, noses first, then rear ends. Then the yellow dog walked over to Wendell and let him pet him some before he went on his way.

  When that colored girl showed up a few minutes later asking if that yellow dog had been around, it surprised Wendell. It surprised him even more when she said she wouldn’t mind an indoor dog. It had never occurred to him that colored folks kept pets. He’d seen some dogs tied up in the yards down in the Bottom, the colored part of town, but he’d figured they were there for protection.

  On the path back up through the woods, he kept thinking about that girl and why she might be interested in the yellow dog. He wondered if she was like his sister Rosemary, crazy about all dogs, oohing and aahing if she saw one with its head sticking out of a car window or moseying down the street. Rosemary had even gotten bit once by a cocker spaniel that was a lot less friendly than it looked, but that didn’t stop her from loving every dog on God’s green earth.

  He decided to veer off the path a little bit, just in case the cabin was close by but easily missed by a person who might avoid the thicker part of the woods because it was overgrown with poison ivy vines. He’d just keep his eyes open wide and his arms close to his sides so he wouldn’t accidentally brush against anything that would make itchy rashes break out all over his skin.

  He’d only gone about ten steps when, out of nowhere, that old yellow dog appeared right in front of him, barked once, and trotted off again. Wendell stopped short. All of a sudden things seemed to be connecting—the dog, the colored girl, his looking for the cabin. Maybe that old dog lived in the cabin and maybe that girl knew where the cabin was, and if she helped him find the cabin, then he’d help her find the dog.

  There wasn’t one thing to do but go back and get that girl.

  6

  How the Cabin Became Home

  Jim didn’t know how he’d gotten to the cabin, and most mornings it took him a few minutes to remember where he was. Where was his Cincinnati Reds pennant? The Dutch Masters cigar box that held his arrowhead collection? Where was the blue-and-white quilt Granny had given him that time he had chicken pox in first grade? Then the chinks between the cabin’s logs would come into focus, and he’d see the sunlight streaming through the cracks around the door and remember he wasn’t in his room at home anymore.

  Sometimes Jim felt like he’d been here before, but no memory ever rose up to tell him when that might have been, so he figured it must be the sort of place you read about in books, making it seem familiar. Could’ve been a hundred years old, from the looks of it, an Abe Lincoln sort of cabin with splintery, wide-planked floors and a crumbled stone fireplace. When he came back to it after roaming around in the woods or through town, it felt like home. Some days he pretended he was a grown man who’d decided on a life in the woods, away from civilization. He felt better acting like he had a choice about where he lived, when it didn’t seem to him he had a choice about anything at all anymore.

  Coming inside after seeing Wendell and King in the woods, he took a seat in the rickety rocking chair by the fireplace. One of the strangest things about the cabin was that somebody had carved the name Jim on the wall next to the door with a rock or a pocketknife. Sometimes it spooked him to see it, like the cabin had known before he even got there that he was coming. But other times he liked it. His name on the wall made the cabin his own.

  It killed him that he couldn’t clean out that fireplace. Killed him that he even wanted to, since scooping ashes from the wood-burning stove had been one of his least favorite chores back home, and it killed him that no matter how hard he tried, he couldn’t pick up the small black shovel resting against the wall to do the job.

  You can’t build a fire without matches anyway, Jim told himself, and heard Fred’s voice instead of his own. His brother was as practical as a ruler, didn’t have any of Jim’s dreaminess, was always looking for the straightest line from here to there. That’s why he and Jim had fought so much, Jim reckoned, even though they weren’t down and dirty fights. Just yelling, mostly. I’m the big brother, Fred liked to say, and I am here to set an example. You listen to me, son, and I’ll set you on the right path.

  Jim smiled to himself, thinking about it, seeing Fred clear as day in his droopy khaki pants and work boots, a denim shirt buttoned up all the way to the top. Farmer Fred, Jim used to tease him, and Fred always wanted to know what was so bad about being a farmer—hadn’t Trebbles always been farmers, and didn’t their daddy get up two hours earlier than he had to every morning so he could drive out to Uncle Owen’s to check fences before he went to his law office in town?

  Now you boys quit that fussing and do your chores.

  Jim didn’t even bother turning his head at the sound of Mama’s voice. Oh, when it had first started, not all that long ago, the voices coming at him from nowhere—Mama’s, Daddy’s, and Fred’s, Uncle Owen’s and Aunt Margaret’s—he’d gotten as excited as a three-year-old at Christmas. It had been a bad dream after all, he’d told himself, turning this way and that, eager to see his family and have a good laugh. You wouldn’t believe it, he’d tell everybody, but I had this dream where I was almost invisible and didn’t have a shadow and I couldn’t find any of y’all anywhere.

  Now he knew better. Wasn’t nothing but his memory playing a trick on him, putting on a play behind a curtain Jim couldn’t find, no matter how hard he looked.

  There was one voice, though, that he didn’t recognize. He heard it almost every night, a child’s voice, a boy’s, coming to him from the middle of the cabin when he was lying on the cot in the corner, drifting into that strange sleep of his where he never once dreamed.

  You here to carry me ’cross?

  Jim squirmed in his seat, not liking to think of that voice. Wasn’t scary so much as—well, Jim didn’t know what. He just didn’t like it that the voice seemed to know who he was. What he was.

  Jim thought about going and waiting for Wendell to come back from the river instead of heading into town to make his daily rounds, always hoping to find his house, to see Mama and Daddy and Fred. Walking alongside Wendell, listening to him talk to King, it was like having a friend, even though it seemed we
ird to call a kid you’d never met a friend. Even weirder, he guessed, since Wendell didn’t know Jim existed. But Jim couldn’t be picky, not in his current situation, anyway. Besides, he thought he and Wendell would be friends, if they ever met.

  Maybe today would be the day he’d work up the courage to follow Wendell home. He’d hang back in the shadows, read comic books over Wendell’s shoulder, watch Wendell’s mama put supper on the table while Wendell played a game of Monopoly with his sisters or worked a jigsaw puzzle. He’d listen at the window for the sound of Mr. Crow’s truck pulling into the drive.

  Now there was a sound he missed—a truck pulling into a gravel driveway at suppertime.

  Come on, boys, and tell your mama to put supper on the back burner, we got work to do in the fields!

  Soon as they heard their daddy’s voice, him and Fred would fly out to the truck and jump in back, Mama standing at the porch waving a spoon at Daddy, yelling about how he was ruining another supper of hers, but laughing, too, because she knew how much Daddy loved that farm he worked with Uncle Owen. Daddy would back that truck up so fast the engine whined like a tornado wind.

  No. He wouldn’t go to Wendell’s today. He had to find Daddy and Fred. And Mama. That was his job now. If he could only find them and let them know he was still here, well, maybe they could help him come home.

  7

  A Brief History of Celeste, Kentucky

  For such a small town Celeste, Kentucky, was prouder than you might think it had a right to be. Still, it had been home to General Flavius McCarver, Revolutionary War hero, who walked along these sidewalks as a boy, back when they were made out of wooden boards. Everyone in Celeste knew about General McCarver. Any day of the week you could see him in the intersection of Main and River Streets, sitting upright upon his stone horse, one arm pointed straight ahead, like he’d been sent by God to direct traffic.