Gather at the River. David Joy
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faucet squeak on and the water spew from the pipe. You’d hear scraping, scratching, ripping flesh, and cracking bone. You’d hear guts slop in a bucket. And if you listened close enough, you’d hear blood, little rivers of it running. Mama’d be there, barefooted in cut-off shorts with her long, love-at-first-sight legs, tearing off a head. Pam would be there with her viper-eyes, sweet-talking and flinging scales into her flaming red hair. Wanda would crack a joke with bream eggs in her hand, and Mema, more glamorous than a young Liz Taylor, would be there laughing with fish guts on her diamonds. A moth might flutter by, a whippoorwill might scream. And I’d be under their feet, wondering how could so much murder be so pretty?
Somebody would light the fryer. You’d smell hot grease. I’d run over to watch Mama drop in a fish, and I’d stare into a swirling black galaxy of cornmeal shooting stars, tempted in a weird way to put my fingers in it.
J.T. always said the blessing, before him it was Hines. It got to Harold after J.T. died and now it’s Bond’s job. One day I hope it will be one of yours. We would sit and eat what we had worked for, what we had caught. After supper, I’d slide underneath the table and hide among cords of naked knees. In a few minutes, they’d get to telling stories.
They told stories of the people who died before I was born and never got to meet. Like my snuff chewing great grandmother, Vida, how she fished from the banks and was never seen in a boat, how you could hear her squealing all the way up the hill every time she hooked a redeye, how if the bream weren’t biting it was the signs, and if they were, she’d hike her dress up and go out deeper.
They told stories about Jew Baby, a man who served time for cracking safes and worked off his sentence in the Georgia State pen, cleaning debris from the electric chair helmets. Jew Baby had a stutter and a fat wife named Maw-rie. He’d come out to Reedy with a pole, a croaker sack, and a can of gasoline to catch rattlesnakes for the Rattlesnake Roundup. After he competed and collected his prize money, he’d kill the snakes, eat or freeze the meat and make wallets and belts out of their hide.
I never knew Jew Baby, but my ass certainly did. It’s been striped many a time by a belt he made for my Daddy. You know the belt. We call it The Rattlesnake Belt.
The first time you felt its venom I’d caught you trying to hide the matchbox cars you’d stolen out of the classroom’s toy bin your first day of pre-school. Stealing, little men, deserves a whipping in my book.
“Why’re you being so mean to your little brother?” I asked you a few days later.
“That rattlesnake’s still in me,” you said.
And I smiled, proud at knowing Jew Baby lives in you, too.
They’d tell stories about Marshall A. Byrd, also known as Model-A. Fresh out of Reidsville prison, Model-A walked into great uncle Hines’s furniture store and asked for a job. When Hines asked Model-A if he’d killed a man, Model-A said, “No sir. I didn’t kill him. I just cut him. And he died.”
They’d tell about old times, about the Depression and the Tinker Man. About my great granddaddy, Sheriff Tom Watson Brantley, who never learned to drive. They’d tell that sad story of how one of his prisoners who he thought he’d redeemed shot his heart out. After that, things would get quiet for a while until somebody else told another story. They’d tell stories about Aunt Soph and Saphie Sarina Sapphire. They’d tell stories about the good times, the summers out here, playing bridge, and couples taking turns by the woodpile. They’d tell about that one time they left the children on the hill, caught ninety-eight fish, and returned to find little Wanda had almost chopped off her foot with an axe. It’s a miracle we survived our childhood.
This is what’s most different. We don’t do this anymore. A pile of us don’t ride out to Reedy at ten in the morning and fish till sundown. We don’t come into the screened-in porch, sunburnt and stinking like cricket guts and fish slime, hauling in a catch that could feed a hundred men. The women don’t come out with knives. You don’t hear the faucet squeak on. We don’t gut and clean the fish, dust them in flour and cornmeal. You don’t smell warming grease. There won’t be a pile of us huddling, bowing our heads in prayer. You won’t see them there. You won’t hear them telling stories until midnight. This is what I can never give to you. No matter how good I am, this I can never recreate. And it makes me sad. Because this, little men, is what it meant to me to fish. Gone, in an instant.
For a large part of your life, I’ve tried to make my childhood yours. My biggest fear was that these things would disappear with me. But they won’t. You’ll hear me tell their stories, and you’ll hear me tell mine, and one day you’ll tell your own.
Today when we ride down that dirt road, it’s the four of us. We let you drive. We let the dogs chase. I hold your Daddy’s hand, and we smile at what we have, at what we’ve made. The truth is, I’m still growing up here.
“Whose land is this?” I ask.
“Our land!” You say.
“Whose land is this?”
“Our land!”
You’ll remember that chant. You’ll remember skinny-dipping and cannonballing in rainbows. You’ll remember your first ant bed, getting lost in the woods and finding your way back home. You’ll remember Gaga and Granddaddy, Wanda and Pam, Bond, and your crazy Uncle Mike. You’ll remember him half naked, wearing J.T.’s safari hat with an AK-47 strapped across his back talking about the end times while drinking Kool-Aid and Vodka because he’s dieting. You’ll remember your Daddy snorkeling the entire pond, scouting for bream beds and bass hideouts. You’ll remember how he always stood in the boat and how he always threw back every fish he ever caught. You’ll remember him teaching you to cast. You’ll remember catching your first fish, both of you.
Some mornings when you are still asleep in your bunk, I sit on the porch and watch your Daddy fish. I don’t know which sight is more reverent, watching you fishing with him or watching him on the water alone. He stands in the boat, casts his line in the mist. Your father walks on water.
I sit and I listen. I hear birdsong and butterfly wings, the slither of a snake. The wind picks up, and I hear them in the pines, the ones who came and left before my birth, the ones I’ve eulogized and buried. I hear them telling stories.
One day you’ll wake up, and I’ll be gone. Promise me, little men, you’ll keep us alive.
If you drive on the Blue Ridge Parkway from Blowing Rock to Boone, North Carolina, you will come across a brown sign that reads, “Aho Gap Elevation 3,722 feet.” A road comes in from the left side. If you look down that road, you will see a small white farmhouse on the right. My aunt lives there now, but once my grandmother did, and for much of the summer from when I was age eight to seventeen, I lived there as well.
It was a childhood and early adolescence unimaginable today—part Huck Finn and part Fern Hill. My grandmother lived alone, my grandfather dead, her eight children now living elsewhere. There was no vehicle on the farm, and her black-and-white television picked up one channel, on a good day. The closest store was a gas station four miles away. On those summer mornings my grandmother fixed a breakfast of eggs, cathead biscuits with gravy, jam, or butter she churned herself, and milk that came from the Guernsey in the barn. I’d usually wrap up a couple of biscuits in a backpack, fill a canteen my uncle had brought back from the army, and go get my rod and reel. Until I was twelve, when I received a fly rod and reel for Christmas, I’d dig a few worms near the barn. After that it was trout flies or, if I used my spinning rod, Mepps spinners.
I fished several streams, but often I’d walk up the dirt road to the Parkway and go