Chapter 10 - The River Road
The spring came late that year, but when it broke, it broke with a sudden, violent green that turned the red clay pastures along the Blackwood into carpets of wild clover and purple vetch.
It was the first Saturday of May.
The river was running bank-full, five feet of clear, cold water coming down from the Blue Ridge, swirling around the roots of the bald cypresses with a low, continuous murmur that sounded like an old woman singing to herself while she worked the garden.
I stood on the timber bridge Carol and I had built across the creek in nineteen-eighty-one.
The bridge had new decking—two-inch white oak planks that Mason and I had milled ourselves on the portable band-saw down at Martha’s place, secured with three-eighths-inch galvanized lag screws that would hold the timber down through forty years of high water.
I had my old tackle box sitting on the rail—the green steel Kennedy box with the scratched paint and the three drawers of lead sinkers and hand-tied bucktail jigs that had belonged to my father.
Down by the water’s edge, where the gravel bar sloped gently into the current, Lily was kneeling in the damp sand.
She was nine years old now.
She had grown two inches since the winter, her legs long, brown from the sun, covered in small, pale scars from blackberry briars and the sharp edges of creek stones. Her hair was down past her shoulder blades, thick, dark chestnut, tied back with a piece of blue surveyor’s tape so the wind wouldn't blow it across her eyes while she baited her hook.
Beside her stood Mason.
He was eleven, nearly as tall as my shoulder, wearing an old denim shirt of his father's that we had cut off at the elbows, his hands dark with dirt and worm bait, his eyes focused on the red-and-white plastic bobber that was drifting through the eddy behind the second bridge pier.
"Watch the line, Lily," Mason said, his voice dropping into that serious, elder-brother register that had replaced the frightened silence of the closet. "When it hits the slick behind the stump, that’s where the big bream sit. Don't jerk it until the red goes under twice."
"I know how to fish, Mason," she said, but her hand stayed steady on the cork handle of the cane pole, her small thumb resting against the line with that delicate, intuitive sensitivity that only comes from hours spent listening to the water.
The bobber twitched.
Once. A small, concentric ring of ripples broke across the brown surface of the pool.
Then it dipped—clean, fast, disappearing into the dark current with a sharp plop.
Lily didn't scream. She didn't panic.
She set her heels into the wet gravel, leaned her shoulders back against the pull, and lifted the tip of the pole with a smooth, continuous arch that brought a twelve-inch copperhead bream flopping out of the river, its orange belly and green scales flashing like jewels in the late afternoon sun.
"I got him!" she yelled, her laughter ringing out across the pasture, clear, loud, and unburdened by anything that had ever happened inside a house with a locked door. "Grandpa! Look at the belly on him! He's bigger than the one Mason caught on Tuesday!"
I leaned over the wooden rail, my forearms resting on the fresh white oak, the smell of sweet pine and cured timber rising from the new planks beneath my boots.
"He's a good one, Lily," I called down, my voice steady, warm, and deep enough to carry across the water to the far bank where the water oaks were leafing out into the May sky. "Bring him up to the bucket before he shakes the hook into the grass."
She ran up the gravel bank, her sneakers throwing up small showers of gray stone, her face bright with the fierce, wild joy of a child who had discovered that the world was wide, that the sun came up every morning at six, and that there was always someone waiting at the top of the hill with a clean towel and a hot skillet.
Mason followed her, carrying the canvas creel, his face split into a wide, toothy grin that showed the gap where his second bicuspid was coming in.
"We need six more, Grandpa," Mason said, setting the creel on the timber rail beside my tackle box. "Martha said she’s bringing the cornmeal over at five, and if we don't have enough for eight people, she’s going to make us eat the gizzards."
"We'll get the six, Mason," I told him, reaching out with my right hand—the hand that was scarred, stiff, and seventy years old—and ruffling the dark, sun-bleached hair at the crown of his head. "The sun won't hit the ridge for another two hours. We have all the time in the world."
I looked across the three hundred acres of the river bottom land.
The winter wheat had been harvested three weeks ago, leaving the fields covered in a soft, golden stubble that was already being turned under by the green shoots of the summer clover.
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Down by the line fence, the thirty-year-old water oaks were standing tall, their broad branches reaching out over the water, their roots deep in the limestone bedrock, holding the banks against the flood, holding the soil against the wind, holding the earth together for the people who were coming after.
The house on the hill was white.
