Endria Isa Richardson
S— died the spring I turned sixteen. In between her living and her dying, it rained. Hard drops dripping. Turned grass green. Turned dirt brown. Brought out the black spiders to drink at grass blades. Drenched the lambs and the goats. Drenched the horses. Got the cows wet. Had the coyotes stepping to shake their pelts. Our own roof leaked. The sound of water dripping swept me into dreams: overflowing toilets, loosened teeth, visits from ex-lovers I’d never had. I saw a vision: a tower of water running toward her. She was carrying shrouds, standing in a blue dress, looped in pearls.
It rained one week. Mud locked the north road, the east road, and the paved road. Water rushed, then pooled. A big black oak toppled right onto her cabin. I hope she was dead already.
Like all things, the rain slowed, then stopped. You couldn’t have imagined it before, with everything blurry and running wet. The dawn sky breaking over the ridge. Every blade of grass and every black branch as clear as glass. A crow like a hole punched in the sky.
The steady dripping of water in all that silence would have reached her. She would have been just a blip at the edge of the hill. She would have been a little bird in the bushy grass. She would have been a brown grub. But once she heard the water dripping, the overflowing cisterns, she would have heard everything. A bird singing. Leaves uncurling. And there she would have been: a woman in a scoop necked blue linen dress with cream dots, standing on a ridge, still and clean as a painting.
Stillness was a cold trick in a hot hand.
I came up the eastern fire road. I almost lost my good boot climbing the pile of earth that had slid over the road. Once I had got over, I saw her fully. She was bending to pull a blade of grass from her bare calf. Then she got herself a drink of water from the wood cistern. When she was done drinking, she splashed some water on her face. That small, brown, hard face. Thick fingers moved in and out of her curls. Her long, rough, brown hair. I thought I might cry.
“Hello,” I called. I was out of breath from the climb.
She straightened and looked at me.
“I decided to come up. And get you,” I said.
But even after I waited a long time, she wouldn’t speak, so I said, “The hill looks nice after the rain.”
I wanted her to answer me, so I kept waiting.
I waited and listened.
The sun was coming over the hill behind us, and it lit the tips of new spring grass white, and made wet drops shine like jewels on the tree branches. Clouds ran above us, and the sky was clear and unruffled in their wake. I was growing my hair out, and the moisture in the air frizzed it into a fine halo around my head. I kept touching it because I worried about how it looked. S— looked at me and I touched it again. I could see her lips trembling.
“What’s wrong,” I asked.
I kept looking and her mouth kept trembling.
I had never held her hand before, so when I took it I was not shocked by any change death had wrought. I had nothing to compare to it. I led her along the narrow shoulder of the road that wound from the hill down into the canyon. At the bottom of the canyon was our town. I would not take her back to our town. Even though she came willingly enough, and there was no resistance in her, and there was no doubt that she would come, as I led the way through scattered cow patties gone the slick texture of melted chocolate, I did not let go of her hand.
Love wants an object, but objects have other uses than love in mind. Months before, when the road had still been drought hard, I’d come halfway up the hill. I had met S— coming down with her cart full of jugs. Since the only reason I’d been going up was to see her, I turned and went back the way she was going. I got myself ready to tell her what I meant to tell her. But then I got in step with her, and I smelled the perfume she used to wear, and the words I’d come to tell her sat in my throat and refused to move.
That walk down was so quiet. Our boots didn’t even kick dust up on the road.
S— looked at me sideways. “Honey, you got something to say, then say it.”
In those days, I heard everything she said as though it carried layers of meanings. And I thought she must have known what I wanted to say even better than I knew it. She turned back to the road we walked down.
I walked in step with her. The road was carved by loaders and crawlers and excavators running over our land, taking earth and praying for water. S—’s cart bounced over its pits and gullies. Her jugs did not spill a drop.
After a while I thought of something to say, because I could not bring myself to say what I wanted to say, and I said, “You told me to come. So I came.”
She kept on walking with her eyes on the road. “Did I ever tell you that I had a bitch once? She came when she was called. So you come when I call, too?”
I met her for the first time early that fall. I had just turned sixteen and left high school for good. I did not know what I wanted to do, and I was lost, and I was scared of being lost. I went and got a job at Mary’s, which was run by an ex-hippie named Jimmy. Mary’s was a diner on the one main street. Sometimes people from the city came for brunch on weekends. Mostly you would see the same faces.
Jimmy made me wear a black cap over my hair even though it was as short as Ezekiel’s, who was the line cook, who didn’t have to wear one. And then he looked me up and down in my black pants and blue shirt, and said, “You don’t want to wear the ladies uniform? Most of the other girls do.” By the other girls he meant Neddra, who’d worked tables at Mary’s since I was a baby, and a nineteen-year-old named Alice, who was staying a couple months after summer while she tried to decide which European cities she wanted to backpack around.
I told him I didn’t.
Alice left for Portugal at the beginning of October. So other than Saturdays and the weekday lunch rush, it was me and Neddra and Ezekiel, who went by Easy. Neddra spent the afternoons sitting at the four-top closest to the cook station, chatting with him.
“People always coming to work in Lowridge during the summer then leaving off to Portugal,” she said.
“Do they?” asked Easy, scraping down the cooktop.
“Spain. Paris.”
“Not so much burning in Spain, Paris.”
“It ain’t burned yet. So maybe it won’t,” Neddra said. “A lot of those other places burn.”
“What was that other place?”
“Paradise.”
“Paradise.”
“They ain’t have what we have.”
“I’d say.”
“So say.”
“They ain’t have the water.”
I wiped down tables and swept.
There are three kinds of gold in California. The first kind is gold; the other kind is redwoods; and the last kind is water. We could have named our place Goldrigde because it shone red with gold. We named it Lowridge because we wanted to stay grounded. We did not want to become gold-fevered or to want too much. We wanted only self-determination, and the wants of self-determination demanded enough of us that we had nothing left to give to lesser desires like lust or greed.
About a week into the job, I sat at the checkered bar sucking and chewing on a chocolate-strawberry shake, dipping my fries into ketchup. Debby and Gran had sat me down last night to ask me what I thought I was doing with my life. I told them I did not know. I felt that there might have been a whole river of things to do with life, rushing just beyond the end of Lowridge, flowing and pulling at me, wanting me to join it in the sunlight. But the truth was I had never left Lowridge. I’d been born here and raised here, and as far as I knew, I would die here too. So I had, even in my dreams of what might be beyond Lowridge, only the shape and size and heft of Lowridge to weigh it against.
My milkshake was almost gone and I had gooseflesh on my arms thinking about the possibilities. Maybe I could move to a bigger city. Why couldn’t I go to Portugal, which might smell more like the sea. Then I thought, nah. Gran never left, Debby never left, I’ll never leave. The bell on the door rang. A woman I had never seen before walked in. She was wide and tall and wore bright blue overalls with brown boots. She walked to the counter carrying one of those blue jugs of water and spoke to Easy. He chuckled and went to the back to get something. He came back around the grill area to give her what he had. She offered him the jug. He said, “you look too haggard for me. You keep that for yourself,” and she laughed out loud and then they talked and laughed together before she picked up her jug to leave. She must have felt my eyes patting and pawing at her as shameless as a dog, because when she got to the door, she turned and gave me a wink.
All towns have women who flex their control through generosity. Neddra hosted women’s dinners at her house every month to bring the town together and address any pressing needs. It was for grown women. I was at that point still considered a child, so I did not attend.
“Why don’t you come?” she asked one day, catching me listening as she talked to Easy through the kitchen window. “You come to the next dinner. It’s tomorrow night.”
It is a shock to get what you want. Since that woman had come into Mary’s and winked at me, I had thought many times about where and how I might see her again. When I got to Neddra’s, I had just convinced myself it was a mistake to go when she, S—, opened the door wide. She was head and shoulders taller than me. Her curly hair was tossed all to one side of her head. Her skin glowed like sand beneath a diamond sea. After a pause while she looked me right up and down, she smiled and laughed.
“I seen you at Mary’s,” she said.
“Yeah I work at Mary’s.”
“They got you trained good?”
I felt embarrassed, and stared.
“Don’t let me bother you.” Turning to Neddra, “she doesn’t look a day over twelve does she? Why is she working? She should be in school.”
“Girl,” said Neddra, raising an eyebrow.
“But she got herself a different angle, huh? She’s going to change the world with us. What’s your name anyways?”
“It’s Dot.” I wanted to smile but hardened my face instead. I did that when I was embarrassed. “I brought some biscuits from Mary’s.”
“That was sweet of you,” S— said, and took the box of biscuits from my hands. “Come in. I’ll warm these up for us okay, Neddy? What’s Dot for?”
“Dorothy. After my great-aunt.”
“They call you Dotty?”
“They do.” Now I did smile. “It’s me and Debby, that’s my mama, and Miss Gran, my gran, my dad’s ma.”
“We had a Dotty on my daddy’s side. What is it that you feel today? I want to know exactly what you think. What do you want to do? How do you want to be?”
I couldn’t help it. I laughed and raised my hand over my mouth to hide my smile. “I don’t know! How should I know?”
“When you figure it out, I want to be the first person you tell.” She smiled, and that time I smiled back.
Two more women arrived at the door. Neddra told everybody to sit down with their plates Everybody settled down to eat and Neddra settled on her couch, smiling at us enjoying her food. I chewed a biscuit that became chunks of flour on my tongue. Too quick for politeness, a woman put down her plate and cleared her throat.
“Now, I’m the last to want to get to business too quickly—” a glance at Neddra made clear that it was too quick, but she might as well go on “—but we need to talk about the drought.”
A minute passed through the room, and it seemed like everybody started talking all at once about the drought. It was worse than last year, which had been worse than the year before. So and so’s walnut trees needed to be mulched if they stood a chance of surviving the winter and could anyone come by next Saturday to help with the job? Could the school discuss the possibility of composting toilets during the winter at the least? Businesses were accounting for too large a percentage of our winter water budget and what did Jimmy have to say about his brood of too-many-hens out back? Someone else was quickly accused of liking her eggs as much as the next one. I listened as closely as I knew how, but when S— came back to the living room with a second helping of biscuits and sat on the floor right next to my knee, I stopped paying attention to anything other than how close her shoulder was.
Courtesy of the artist and Swivel Gallery.
I walked home from Neddra’s that night down streets I had known all my life. They smelled new and different. The mint and honey and vanilla of our trees, and the hard dirt smell, and beneath it, the cold sweet water deep below. All above me our trees stood up, tall redwoods and spindly pine and eucalyptus, higher and darker than ever before. A low hoot from that high dark air above me came, and again, and another. Owl looking, calling for owl. I felt our water flow beneath me. The same water flowing beneath that woman’s hill flowing beneath me. By then I was sure who she was. The hidden mascot of our town, the woman on the hill. She had a name, and a face, and a laugh that was full of itself, and left no room for any comparison. I had in one way known who she was as soon as she’d come into Mary’s carrying that blue jug of water. The way that, seizing a new thought for the first time, you hold it up against the many kinds of thoughts you’ve had before, and finding that it has an extra side or angle to it, know that the very shape of your understanding has changed to meet it. There was only one woman in Lowridge I had never seen before, so it must have been her. But I had never thought about her as a real woman if that makes sense. How you know your teachers are people, but you are still surprised when you see them at the store. That’s how it felt to see her.
I stopped and stood in the street trying to feel our water beneath me, and through the water, the hill and the woman. I thought maybe I could feel it rushing all around me, a slow feeling of searching and calling and all sorts of mysterious changes pulling at me. It was the feeling of hope, mild and scant as dew. But then I thought, naw that’s just the wind. Then I thought, naw maybe it’s not the wind.
But the next morning, walking to Mary’s to start my shift, I looked around at the lighted trees and the hard road and thought, “Naw. It’s all the same as it was.”
We did not want only to stay. We wanted to live. But we were always only tenants, and could be swept off our land not by man only, but by senseless nature. Our gold was trees because we were loggers, not miners. By an accident of deed, we were allowed to stay on this land. But whether or not we could live was always an open question. We cleared the redwoods and sold the lumber. We didn’t take too much. We weren’t greedy. When the land was cleared, we stayed. We built our houses and shaped our roads. We quickly learned how to master all that could nudge us closer to living: food, shelter, hygiene, work. Through work came relationships, the sturdy union of people to make more together than they could apart. The only problem was that this is always a dry land in summer and sometimes even a dry land in winter. The redwoods got water from the fog, but we weren’t redwoods. After we had done all we could do, still we had to depend on the fickleness of nature to let us live, or make us leave.
S— came to Mary’s for lunch. I was surprised to see her. It was the third time in just a few weeks. She sat at the bar. Neddra was out for a personal day, so I fixed my face and walked over to take her order.
“Come on, join me.”
“Oh,” I said. “I’m working.”
S— looked around the place. “There’s no one here but me. Work on me.” She smiled to let me know she was being friendly.
“I guess I can. But Jimmy comes—”
“I’ll tell him I was ordering you around.”
“I’ll get you some fries and something. You want a shake?”
“It makes you feel better.”
I fixed her a plate of french fries and ketchup and a chocolate milkshake.
When I sat the food in front of S—, she laughed, and said, “That’s for you, not me.”
I laughed. I didn’t think I could eat. But I took a fry.
“You sit here,” S— said, and moved her stool over. I sat. And she pressed her arm just so against mine.
“What’s wrong, baby?” she asked. She must have noticed how still I had grown. I could barely breathe, let alone talk. I just held a limp fry in my fingers and tried to get myself to act right.
“Why are you being nice to me?” I said.
She didn’t say anything at first. Finally, “Neddy tell you where I usually stay?”
“Up that hill?” Neddra hadn’t told me.
“That’s the one. I wanted to tell you, you are always welcome to visit me.”
I nodded, but I didn’t understand.
“You know why I live there?”
I nodded again. Then I shook my head.
“I grew up here, just like you did. But I never did fit in. It’s a small town. Too small and too regular for me. Maybe too small and too reg- ular for you. I don’t know you enough to know. But I sense it when I saw you. You hearing me? I sense something like that about you when I saw you.”
I laughed because I didn’t know what else to do. S— didn’t laugh back.
“You know I take care of our water?”
I didn’t reply. I knew and I didn’t know.
“You know that’s not all of the job though?”
I stared at my hands.
“You still there?”
I nodded. “You got a purpose,” I said. “You take care of all of us.”
S— didn’t say anything for a while. Then she said, “You know what I thought the first time I saw you, sitting here alone at this counter?”
I shook my head.
“I looked at you and I saw someone who is lost. And when you are lost, sometimes you take the first hand that is offered to you, whether or not it’s the right hand.”
I felt my face heat and I didn’t say anything.
“You ever want to come talk to me and see what this job is really about, you come on up that hill okay? It’s not really far.”
I nodded. I felt silly doing so much nodding.
“You finish those fries.”
The warm pressure against my arm was gone, and the bell on the door was chiming, and I was still sitting at the bar staring at a plate of cold fries and wondering what had just happened when Jimmy came in and asked me whose time exactly I thought I was free to waste.
A person who is pitied will find ways to exert her own will, even if that will has to act without her knowledge. I knew that I wanted from S—. I didn’t know what, but I knew that. Which was funny, because it was clear as day in the dreams I had. In the one that came over and over again, I was walking slowly up that hill to find her. I would get to her cabin and knock, but nobody would answer. I would walk around the house and find a back door standing open. I would go in. I would walk around, and then I would sit on her sofa. After a while I would lie down, and I would fall asleep. And just as I fell asleep, she would come in from a long walk along the ridge—it was always a long walk along the ridge, not down into the canyon—and find me sleeping. She would sit on the sofa next to me, and I’d know she was there. Then I would feel her touch my arm, and I’d know she was looking down on me. And I wouldn’t wake. She’d just be looking down on me wanting me to wake and I wouldn’t. That was it. That’s how the dream ended.
The second to last time I saw her, S— was sitting in a chair, and I was on the floor letting my back lean against her legs. I had been surprised, when I got to the apartment that Sunday, to find Neddra’s bright living room full of a dozen women, sitting on the two floral couches, the one soft chair, and on hard chairs pulled in from the kitchen.
S— leaned down to whisper in my ear. “Watch what you say.”
I nodded, though I didn’t understand.
“These women here,” S— said, loud enough for the room to hear, “want to talk about our water.”
They started talking about the drought, first. It was most of the way through December and there had been no rain. And after last year having no rain until January. And the year before that rain all November and nothing after. They were saying that with the droughts coming year after year, the water was being used too fast.
Graphite, Foam, Epoxy, Cow Skull, and Powdered Pigment. Courtesy of the artist and Swivel Gallery.
A small white woman named Clara raised her hand as though she needed permission to speak. Neddra nodded, and Clara said, “It seems to me we are talking around the real issue.”
There were some murmurs of agreement but there were some stares at Clara. Someone said, “Can you say what you mean, Clara?”
“What I mean is that we should be clear about what we mean when we talk about the water.”
“I’ve been saying it.” A dark brown woman named Joan said this. “What exactly have you been saying?”
“That we ain’t supposed to be taking this much water.”
“I seen you with your jugs must have been five, six times last month.”
“That’s only because her baby was sick.”
“And you know it!”
“I think we should be asking ourselves whether Lowridge can be sustained on so little water.”
“Isn’t that what we been asking ourselves for the past how-long- have-we-lived-here?”
“This ain’t the way. This can’t be the way.”
Neddra frowned from her place on the couch, wrapped in blankets. “What ain’t the way?” she asked, looking down her face at us.
“Neddy, what do you think, honey?” S— spoke for the first time. “Do you think we can go on without more water?”
I felt her legs behind me, and it seemed to me that she was too still. I realized, with an adolescent shock at feelings that existed apart from me—feelings for which I was neither cause nor beneficiary—that she was nervous about what could happen in that room. That she was, beneath her stillness and calm, pleading for something. I changed my position then, so that I was leaning over my knees, and my back was no longer against her legs.
Neddra took a breath, and with her eyes closed said, “Maybe we can’t. Shit. I know droughts are hard times in Lowridge, but I also know that you agreed to your role. Just like my grandmother agreed to her role.”
S— started jiggling her legs behind me, but she didn’t say anything. I wished she would stop. I felt embarrassed for her. And for some rea- son, for myself.
“Neddy, your grandmama was seventy-five if she was a day!” someone said.
“What’s seventy-five got to do with anything?”
“Now, she ain’t more than thirty-five!” This was said on behalf of S—.
“How many years you got honey?”
“Thirty-six,” said S—.
“I think after all these years we ought to try,” Clara spoke after no one spoke. “I think that after all these years, we ought to say what we mean when we talk about the water.”
About half the women in the room nodded. And about half frowned and looked from S— to Neddra.
“What do you think, Dot?” I was surprised that Neddra was asking me. Even at Mary’s, she hardly said a word to me unless it was about an order or a table.
I knew what Clara meant. We needed to say what we meant when we talked about the water. What we meant, of course, was S—, because S— was the water.
Every town has its pattern of beliefs, and every pattern of beliefs are, if held against the light, a perfectly reversed image of its material existence. We loved trees but we did not worship them. Worship was saved for what we needed but did not have.
Those first years of Lowridge were high-water years. Without the rain that giveth, we might have taken shallow root only to be blown away in a season’s time, dispersed to seed ourselves in more suitable soil. Of Lowridge there would be only memories of the-place-we- stopped-through on our way to find a true home. But mud has a way of sucking you in and making you stay, no matter how dirty a business.
It was only after we had become established as not-just-a-place- but-a-home that we discovered the meaning of “drought.” Not a one-year drought or even a two-year drought, in which crops might sicken but not die and livestock might decrease but still rebound. Not a four-year drought in which our four wells might drop but not dry. But six years of lower-than-average rain. Isolation and lack had been the price of self-determination until then, and the wages could only increase without water. Two of our wells dried. Summer winds brought dust, discomfort, and bronchitis. A third well became over- grown with soft green and turquoise life and could not be used. The following spring, an outbreak of a virus, carried by the mosquitoes that had made homes in what used to be our water supply, sickened half the town.
Finding ourselves on our knees already in the hard California dirt, we decided that we might as well pray. Not to the God in heaven, whose pleasures and laws we had already fled, but to the god whose fickle presence beneath us could keep us here or send us wandering: the god of groundwater, of crop life, of clean hands.
Some say prayers that are answered are messages from god. Others say the answers are plain insight, won in the silence of contemplation. Still others might argue that they are madness without meaning. Whatever the answers are, the actions that follow are often impossible for mere humans to grasp. What I know is that living fully, which required not only to know and exercise the extension of life, but to control—to wield—its limits and boundaries, was a dream that the founders of Lowridge, all extending from slavery, all cloaked in relative shades of blackness, were determined to explore in its entirety. Maybe that is why, just as the moon was rising in another empty sky, Neddra’s grandma walked up the hill- side—taking our good road—and, perhaps after sitting for a while on its rim, praying and thinking, let herself down into our last flowing well. What she thought as she fell into the water, searching for a future, I will never know. Perhaps she knew that some women are destined to be sacrificed at the altar of History, unknown or symbolic in life, given meaning only once they have joined that nameless rank of Man, in the afterlife.
The next morning, the well was full of water running over. The well was full.
But History has its own appetite, and is never satisfied for too long. Neddra’s grandma was the first to give the water her own life willingly. She was not the last. We have always had a caretaker who cares for the well water. They spend their life on the well water. And when necessary, when the water is low, their life is given over to the life of the water. And once they feel their life going, they choose another person to take over their role. And that’s how we’ve lived since those days. We don’t burn or grow old and we don’t die and don’t leave. And yet, our only future is death.
S— was still sitting behind me. And I wanted nothing more than to feel her warmth. But I leaned forward and held my own knees.
There were no words to match the shapes of my thoughts and the feelings inside of me. When it became clear that I wouldn’t speak, Neddra spoke.
“You and her seem real close,” she said.
I looked at my hands.
“Leave it.” S— said. “Leave her.”
Neddra kept frowning.
“Naw,” said S—. “Well here it is.” And she pointed to the water she’d brought from the well, her well, down from the hill. “Go on and take it.” And I thought she would reach to touch my back, but she didn’t.
Some of the women got up and said, “Thank you.” They took their water from the jugs S— had brought down for them. But it was only some of the women. Clara didn’t get any, and neither did Joan, or Alice, or Mary. Probably they still had some at home and would drink it. But at least Clara stopped taking the water, and she did end up getting sick, and ultimately that led to her leaving Lowridge altogether.
I was angry that day that I met S— coming down the hill with her cart full of water. I must have thought that something was leading up to something. And somehow, maybe without even meaning, she had dashed all the hopes that I felt. By that time, it was obvious that she was not well. She had dark circles under her eyes, and she was too thin. Before we reached town, she asked if we could stop awhile. She sat right on the ground.
I stood and stared down at her.
“Sit down,” she said.
“Why did you invite me up to visit you if you didn’t really want me coming?”
S— looked up at me when I said that. And I, usually shy and unable to meet anyone’s gaze, looked back at her. I realized that I never looked at her so closely before, but I was looking now. And she was looking back at me, and there was something naked on her face. It wasn’t that she was just too skinny. She was pleading with me. Something deep and hot like shame mixed with something slippery and evasive in my belly, to be looked at the way S— was looking at me. There is an idea of life, and there then is its reality—all that it takes, all that it costs, and all that it will never repay. I want to protest that I was not prepared to see the cost because I was only sixteen. But age has nothing to do with this.
“You want to know why I asked you up on that hill.”
And in the silence after that, she reached up, and touched my hand softly. She just held my hand, softly. And I thought, she wants me to see her. She wants me to see her and still feel the same way about her. But if I see her, I will pity her. And I could bear to be pitied, but I could not bear to pity her. It never occurred to me, not then, that I could see her without pity. That I could refuse to see her either as life wasted—in pity, or lives saved—in justification. But see her, and let the world be changed by seeing.
“Nobody asked me,” S— said. “I asked you, like a person should be asked.” And then she stood and left.
I never saw S— alive again. I thought, once or twice, about going up to visit. But something held me back. I would think about the naked way her face looked and I would feel awful all over and decide to wait until the next day. She got other friends, I told myself. Only I knew she didn’t. Not really. Winter turned into spring with no rain. I knew by then that I was never going to move to any city.
I had a few weeks there in town—I was still working at Mary’s—after that meeting at Neddra’s and enough people must have heard about the dinner and what Neddra had said, so that people started treating me differently, even before S— had died. They knew before I did. The world had changed, its covers ripped from me while I slept, and I stood as though lying down naked—all the world and all its parts suddenly facing a different direction, covering their eyes to me.
Jimmy started asking about whether I wanted to cut down my hours since summer was coming and he’d be expecting a few summer work- ers coming in. “You’ve been here almost a year,” he’d said, like he was grateful but it was time for me to move on. It had really only been about eight months and the summer help never came until the end of June at the earliest. But I took his hint and gave my notice. Debby and Gran stopped asking what I was planning to do with my life.
If you take the eastern fire road down from the hill, about a mile down you reach a turn where you can go further down, and that will take you to town. Or you can go left and go up the canyon and over the slightly higher ridge that forms the northern boundary of Lowridge. When we reached this fork, I could feel S— start to tremble again.
Maybe she was hoping that if she trembled enough the whole rain- soft hillside would tremble and crumble. And the town beneath it would crumble. And that water beneath the town would be filled in with earth and dust. And we together would never have to be a part of it again. But everything would all at once stop trying to hold up the weight of change and sorrow and all of our troubles, but would crumble, taking her and me and everything away with it.
We just paused for a little bit while she kept on trembling. Without rain moving down from the sky, there was silence and growing things. Everything changed and was always changing. Houses leaked and roads caved and hillsides sank into nothingness. I heard one wild call, a bird I couldn’t place. And the whole ridge came alive again, sounding in rhythm.
We climbed out of the canyon onto the ridge. I’d never been this far from town before. Even before looking I knew there would be water at the bottom, a fast-flowing creek, swollen from the rain. Just as I knew it would be—there, beneath us, was the water, flowing and moving.
We made our way down, slipping and holding onto each other, until we stood at the muddy edge. We watched the creek, overfull and car- rying sticks and leaves in it. I toed off my boots and socks. I unclasped my overalls and let them fall. I stepped out of the pants and lifted off my shirt and then I stood, naked and brown and shivering with my arms wrapped around my chest. I stepped into the creek water and it came midway up my shin. I stirred my feet, first one and the other, in the water, kicking up dirt from the bottom in brown clouds. Leaf litter caught around my ankles.
Next to me, S— was a ripple in the creek flow. She was a blackbird on a high branch. A brown mouse in the duff. She stepped one foot and then the other into the creek. I remembered the first time I saw her, and knew I had not been seeing her, not really.
We waded into a pool between two rocks until our calves were in the water. The soft creek bottom, slimed with leaves, sucked at our toes. We waded in the soft mud until our knees were in, then our hips. Walked between two large rocks that caught the water in a pool. We let our knees give way. Our pelvis, belly, chest, arms, neck, in the water. Even the head.
Beneath the water, I touched her on her face, and touched her on her lips. I opened my arms. I waved my arms to push myself down. I sank down under the water and opened my eyes. I opened my mouth. Let her water flow into me. Down my throat and into my belly. Sputtering, coughing, my belly spasming against the cold water, I stayed down.
The water, close over my eyes and mouth, gentle around my skin, moved. Strange rivulets brushed me. Light popped on and off some- where in the distance of my eyes. Water waved around my body. Through my legs, beneath my armpits, across my stomach. It brushed at my face and swept against my lips. It pushed up into me. It held me and moved me and spoke to me.
I gathered my clothes up from the creek. I turned toward the changing light above the ridge line, making its way from white to blue as the sun crept across its vernal line.
I stood at the creek and felt, as if for the first time, round pebbles pushing against the soles of my feet. Wet dirt beneath the soles of my feet. I dressed again in my overalls and shirt, socks and boots. My wet hair streamed down my back, chilling me.
I shut my eyes. I want to go back to what I used to know. I want to believe in living. But I think there is no such thing as life now. But maybe S— will come out of the water. And behind her a man. And behind him a woman. And behind them, a whole chain of the dead breaking out of the water, and breaking the water into ripples of light, circles of ripples in the water before me. I can almost see them moving. Rippling and flowing. She might come rising out of the water any minute now. And her and them all holding out their hands for me.