Seeing Things, page 26
“Are you sure, Dad? I mean—”
Andy put a hand to Fletcher’s shoulder. “Take it nice and slow.”
Fletcher climbed into the cab. The truck shuddered as he shifted into reverse and eased toward the lake.
“Nice and easy, nice and easy. Keep it coming. Stop!”
The raft rolled on scraps of pipe Andy had purchased at the plumber supply store. He’d thought of everything, but that was my son. “Get out here, champ,” he called to Fletcher. “Your raft is about to float off without you.”
“It’s floating?”
“Grab the poles from the truck bed. Let’s get this baby into the big water.”
Suzanne clutched my hand.
“Tell me everything,” I said, nearly spitting my partial into the lake. “What’s happening?”
She gasped.
I squeezed her hand tighter. “What?”
“The raft tilted, but it’s level now.”
“What are they doing?”
“Andrew and Fletcher are standing on each side, pushing the raft away from the shore with the poles. Uh-oh, now the raft is turning to the left.”
“To port,” I said.
“Yes, to port. Andrew has moved to the port side to help Fletcher pole. They’re going straight now. Can you hear them counting?”
I couldn’t.
“They’re poling together, in unison.”
“How far out are they?”
“Not very far, only thirty feet or so.”
“And the raft is level?”
“Like a pool table.”
As if Suzanne’s words opened the door to another world, the raft appeared to me, not as it was—I knew that—but as I dreamed it would be, floating on the ink-black water of the mighty Mississippi with Andy at the tiller and Fletcher casting a fishing line into the water. The moon hung low where no moon hung in our world, a ribbon of light writhing on the swirling current. Embers sparked from the fire pit, ready for the catfish Fletcher would pull off the bottom. Willows bowed over the river and cottonwoods swayed with a breeze I couldn’t feel. A lantern winked a yellow light. Another figure rose from the wigwam and stretched as if to tickle the stars. Huck! Of course he wouldn’t resist the chance to hop a raft, in big water or small.
“They’re in the middle of the lake,” Suzanne said, her voice tight with apprehension. “They should turn back.”
The image of the broad river and the content threesome faded into my perpetual grayness. I caught a tear with the blanket. “They’ll be fine. There’s no other place Andy or Fletcher would rather be right now.”
“How do you know that?” Suzanne said, releasing my hand.
“They’re testing themselves and the work of their hands. Men thrive on that kind of stuff.”
“This is the twenty-first century, for heaven’s sake. What kind of nonsense is this? The ‘work of their hands.’”
It was no small miracle that Suzanne had come to be wrapped in a blanket with me, a woman whose presence she had once despised, watching her husband on what she’d declared a fool’s errand. Explaining the nature of men or mentioning her quest for motherhood seemed unnecessarily provocative. I entertained no claims to having tamed my tongue, but this small victory is counted among the string of miracles from that night that I hold up to the light now and again, not the least being our common purpose. Anyone stopping to look out their window toward the lake that night as they pattered to the kitchen for a second slice of pie would call us a family. That’s a miracle.
The boys made it back to shore without attracting the attention of the law. Getting the raft out of the lake proved more difficult than launching it. Andy called a tow truck to hoist the raft onto the trailer, and he slipped the driver a hundred dollars to turn off his flashing lights.
Back in the kitchen, Fletcher held out his coffee cup to his father. Andy hesitated before filling it. Suzanne served muffins she’d bought at a boutique bakery across from the hospital. Fresh from the microwave, the chocolate chips coated my tongue.
“Oh man, we totally forgot the life vests,” Fletcher said around a hunk of muffin.
“We’ll use them, don’t you worry,” Andy said.
After slaps on the back for the boys and wishes of sweet dreams all around, I hobbled off to my bedroom. Under the blankets, I waited for the warmth to ease the pain in my joints. I patted the spot where Bee should have been. “It’s a good thing you weren’t here tonight. You would have barked your head off, and the neighbors surely would have called the police.” Thinking of Bee reminded me that Emory had a new dance partner, my best friend.
“You can have him.”
I turned toward the wall, and after a considerable amount of shifting to ease the pressure on my hip and shoulder, I let silly half dreams usher me into sleep.
Chapter 41
I’d only seen Josie talk on the phone one time. She’d held the receiver at arm’s length and shouted for the plumber to come to her house. She gave him her address and hung up. He showed up before lunch. Wouldn’t you?
“Don’t be an idiot!” she said. “There’s nothing going on between us! Emory loves you! Good-bye!” The phone line clicked a few times before it buzzed incessantly. I hit the off button and sat on the edge of the bed.
Lupe stepped into the room. “So, this Emory guy loves you. He’s got a good job, right? What you going to do?”
“You heard that?”
“Me and everyone from here to Kansas. Even my sister Jacinta could hear that, and she doesn’t hear so good.” She planted her fist on her hips. “You’re avoiding the question: So what are you going to do about Emory?”
I felt myself smile. “Maybe I’ll call him.”
“Maybe?” She pointed an accusing finger at me. “Love is not so easy to find. You should know that by now. I think that maybe you should wake up and smell the . . .”
“Coffee?”
“Nah, you smell the coffee just fine. What you need to smell is something rare and beautiful, like . . . ah, like an agave. Mi abuela tiene un agave—”
“In English, please.”
“When I talk about home . . . well, I forget.” She shuffled across the room and sagged into the recliner. “My grandmother waited and waited for her agave to bloom. Her mother, my great-grandmother, she planted the agave in the garden of mi abuela when my mother was born. She hauled water from the house. My grandfather, he made fun of her. The kids, my brothers and sisters and all the cousins, we hated that plant. It had thorns like fish-hooks all along the edges. The boys, they liked to chase the girls with the leaves like they were pirates with long swords.
“I’d just had my quinceanera when my parents moved us to the United States, and still that agave didn’t bloom. I got married, had children. Still no flower. The spring my grandfather died, a shoot as tall as a telephone pole grew out of that agave. Mi abuela, she made us all come home to see it blooming. We had a party. The newspaper came and took a picture.”
“Did it smell good?”
“Who would know? The flower was too tall.”
“You said—”
“I said you needed to smell something rare and beautiful, not something that smelled good.”
I would call Emory, beg his forgiveness, and tell him it was time for me to come home, but first there was something I had to do.
Chapter 42
Before popping the shu mai open, I used my cane to walk around the house. It wouldn’t do to have an audience. Satisfied that the house was empty, I opened the take-out box. The steam bathed my face with ginger and garlic. I popped a whole dumpling into my mouth.
“Come on out here, Huck. We need to have some words.”
Only the gray orb floated in front of me. Perhaps I needed to sweeten my words.
“I want to thank you, Huck, for providing my family with a grand adventure. I hope you enjoyed floating on the raft.”
He walked out of the bedroom. “I can’t see how you’re any better off, seeing I’m so ignorant and so kind of lowdown and ornery.” Huck lounged on the leather sofa like a king being carried on a litter. I half expected him to flip an offhanded salute to the peasantry. And why not, there had been an amazing transformation in Huck. His hair was combed and clean, streaked with highlights from endless days in the sun, and his feet were scrubbed pink. He pulled at the collar of his shirt, a blue calico.
“What you gawking at?” he asked like he’d swallowed a spoonful of castor oil.
“New shirt?”
“It might as well be a feedbag for how it sets a body itching. Aunt Sally has a mind to adopt me and civilize me, but I had a taste of that before.”
“I’m surprised she’d want anything to do with you with all the trouble you and Tom dished out at her expense. You nearly drove the woman crazy.”
“She wanted to tan the Old Harry out o’ the both o’ us.”
“You look awfully handsome in your new clothes, Huck.”
He stood and pulled the hem of his shirt out of his pants, scratching his belly and back. “I’m lightin’ out for the territory first chance I git and dumpin’ these clothes in the ditch. I have my old things holed up under a rock down by the river.”
“Huck, I need you to sit down and give me your attention for a minute.”
He plopped on the sofa, arms and legs bouncing from the fall. He huffed and looked at me through his eyebrows.
“Sit up, and don’t be giving me any of your lip.”
“I never said nothin’.”
“You didn’t have to. Now, I must admit to enjoying, for the most part, our visits, but they have to come to an end.”
“It gets powerful lonesome on the river.”
“You might rethink Aunt Sally’s offer. You liked her pies well enough, and the river isn’t so far that you couldn’t take a line down there to catch yourself some dinner now and again.”
“There’s nothing like the bullfrogs a-cluttering through the night when you’re floating down the river, but she warn’t that bad of a cook neither.”
“There’s nothing like three hot meals a day and someone to keep an eye out for your well-being.”
He pouted now. “She smiles about as much as a ham.”
“She’s willing to put up with your shenanigans. Getting on in the world means learning to do the same for others. It’s called love, Huck.”
“You ain’t willing to put up with me no how.”
“Visiting with you filled a need, I can’t deny it, but I’m determined to have those needs met by flesh-and-blood people, friends and family, and the Good Shepherd who doesn’t give a lick that I’m a lunkhead. I’m asking you, as a friend, to move on. But please consider Aunt Sally’s offer.”
Huck stood, his head hung low, and I just about told him to sit back down for a spell. He looked at me with those sky blue eyes of his and drew a finger across his lips. He scuffed across the floor toward the front door, and the closer he got to the door, the lighter his footfalls. By the time he touched the doorknob, his movements made no sound. He turned, set his ratty old hat on his head, and winked.
Chapter 43
“I thought you wanted to come home,” Emory said, breaking the ragged silence on our drive from Denver back to Ouray. “That’s what you said. That’s what you told me.”
“Yes, I did ask you to come.”
“You’ve changed your mind?”
Bee whimpered from the cargo area.
“We’d better stop.” The canyon hugged the interstate, so I knew we’d entered Glenwood Canyon, but that was about all. “Where are we?”
“We just passed the Bair Ranch exit.”
“Grizzly Creek exit then. That’ll do.” I turned in my seat toward Bee. “You better cross your legs, little missy.”
Waiting for the exit, I did my best to wink away the tears, but they streamed down my cheeks and dampened my T-shirt. I finally swiped at my eyes and made like I was cleaning my glasses. We drove on as silent as two fence posts—me in my hole and Emory in his. As he pressed on the brake to exit, he said, “You told me to come. I came. Now . . . now you’re all sappy and weepy. I thought you’d be happy.”
I didn’t understand the brew of doubt and anticipation that bubbled inside me. How could I explain it to Emory? A heart doesn’t move from one place to another just because the rest of the body logs miles on the interstate. As for me, I’m well acquainted with the strange things that tether a heart in place, like when my family left the farmhouse in the Smokies. I was ten years old. I barely waved good-bye to Leslie, my best friend, but I ached for months for the dependable water stain on the ceiling and the way the house accompanied the wind with snaps and creaks. Being homesick for a water stain? That’s a fickle heart. Walking away from Andy, Suzanne, and Fletcher? That was a different story all together. I was straining against the most primal of instincts: to run through fire and brimstone to be with my family.
Emory opened the car door, and the rush of the Colorado River bounced off the canyon’s towering walls to welcome me. “Wait here while I get Bee,” he said.
“Wait!” I grabbed at his sleeve. “Do you hear that? Oh my, I’d almost forgotten.”
Emory offered his elbow, and Bee pulled hard at the leash. Fletcher had taught her to heel and to heel smartly.
“Are you sure you can manage both of us?” I asked.
“I’ve learned to hold on for dear life when I’m around either one of you.”
Bee sniffed every square inch of the rest area. All of our pleading for her to hurry her business only made her more determined to find the perfect spot to mark. “Good grief, Bee. We don’t have all day!”
“Don’t we? What’s the rush? I have a rope in the car. It’s long. Bee can sniff around as she pleases, and we can sit here and admire the scenery.”
I laid my head on his shoulder. “You’re right. This is a lovely place.” Emory handed over Bee’s leash. I pushed Bee’s rump toward the pavement. “Sit! I won’t be tugged at, you bamboozler. See if I ever stop a car for you again.” Bee lay at my feet, and I considered feeling sorry for sassing her. Instead, I closed my eyes to listen to the river’s song and the rattle of aspen leaves overhead.
Do you trust me?
My eyes popped open. I closed them against the disappointing fog.
Do you trust me?
“Emory!”
“I’m here, I’m here,” he said, drawing me into his arms. “Did something startle you?”
“What should I do? I haven’t a clue. Andy doesn’t have a job. They have that big house to take care of. Fletcher has so many questions. We talked for hours after every youth group meeting. And Suzanne—well, she really is a fragile thing. How will she manage all of her new responsibilities?”
“Without you?”
“Now that I’m getting around better, I could—”
“Answer me this, Birdie: Can God accomplish good things without you dabbling your fingers in everything?”
I sat up. “What are you trying to say?”
“It’s a question we all have to answer sooner or later, some of us many, many times. When you were off in Denver, it seems like the question came to me a hundred times a day in one form or another. I agonized over being so far away. Who could take care of you as well as me? In case you’re wondering, the answer was no one.”
“I didn’t realize . . .”
“Birdie, I want to take care of you every minute of every day from now until forever, but I know that’s not possible. You’ll fly off with your Round Robins, or I’ll have to deliver insulin to Crazy Bill up to Beaver Lake, or—and this is the toughest separation of all—one of us will enter forever before the other.”
“I was hoping for a two-seater blaze into glory.”
“That would be just fine with me.” He stroked my cheek. “But we both know . . .”
“Only too well.”
“Loving you has introduced me to a whole new kind of faith. It’s not enough for me to believe my Savior loves me. Now I have to believe he loves you too, that he can do wonderful things in your life, with or without my help.” He sat quietly for a moment. “I will treasure every moment we do have together. I can promise you that.”
“That’s enough for me.”
Chapter 44
I used a painter’s brush to drench the sky penciled onto the watercolor paper with pools of water. Evangeline grunted from her infant seat. Bee sniffed her, whimpered, and then slunk away into the house. I swirled a fat, round brush in cadmium red and tapped the point into cerulean blue before blending the colors on the palette. Suzanne slept in the hammock, shaded by a stand of aspens flittering in the breeze.
“Hey there, Grandpa, it’s time to go to work,” I whispered.
Emory looked up from a pharmacological journal. “Huh?”
I loaded the brush with fuchsia and dipped it into a puddle on the paper. A firework of color exploded on the page. “You can’t smell that?”
“What?”
“Evangeline’s been busy, and as I remember, our agreement was Suzanne rests, I paint, you change.”
“Already? When are Andy and Fletcher back from the river?” He lifted the baby from her seat. “Oh my, you have been busy. Wow. I say it’s bath time.” And off they went, a bundle of pink over Emory’s shoulder.
Painting with watercolors required too much patience, and yet I loved the movement of color the technique brought to my work. I rinsed the paint out of the brush, tapped it dry on a paper towel, and considered my options. Cadmium yellow with red? Cobalt violet? Ultramarine with Indian yellow? I lifted my eyes to the far horizon to catch the dance of the dragonfly sky. I loaded the brush with ultramarine and cadmium yellow. Yellow and red. Violet. And then I stood to stretch my back and to wait, wait, wait for the paper to dry.
A coyote yipped nearby, so I closed the door. Sure enough, Bee barked to be released within a heartbeat. “Don’t go sassing me, you old hound,” I whispered through the glass.
