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Parallel Perspective / Hope Fails
by: Terri Ann Bird
May 15 2015
When I was a kid I spent my days, mostly alone, in my own quiet company, three miles from home at the river’s edge fishing with the homemade pole I whittled out of a willow tree branch.
The fishing line and hook I found floating in a tangled bunch of knots in the sea-foam shores of the lake near my home. It took hours to untangle all that line. Because I didn’t have line cutting pliers I became proficient at using the small sharp chip in my front tooth to shear the line. I dug choice bait from under piles of leaves where the earth was dark and pungent. I collected my live lures in an old tin can that I borrowed compliments of my Grandmother’s trash can. The worms would wriggle the peg I put through them and squirm for a solid thirty seconds after I dropped the line into the slow moving currents. I watched more amazed than horrified when the Bluegill bit at the worms head or tail but never the hook itself. I knew, feeling the snap and recoil of the pole my worm had found its way into the hungry belly of the fish, the fish I rarely caught.
Standing under the old gravel road bridge, wading in the water up to my knees with my feet pruned and planted in the dark murky soils of the river bank, the blood-suckers, came. Called directly by my open ankle cuts, skinned knees, and barefooted feet and toes. The open hollowed bloody holes the leeches left in my skin after they had their fill I would later claim as war wounds and accept any sympathy deemed appropriate. It also proved I had walked to the river again, where I wasn’t supposed to be, at the tender age of eight, all by myself.
I watched the dust rise up on the old country road camouflaging the pick-up truck that was rumbling towards the bridge, leaving a cloud of dirt in its wake. Only the front two round glass headlight bulbs and part of the grill showed. I listened to the gears shift as the driver picked up speed, One, Two, Three, Three on a Tree. When the driver pulled the truck off the side road and parked near the bridge I got a better look at the vehicle, Ford, Red and White, rusty, maybe a 1963. I was the only girl baby born into a family of 12 Uncles and all my cousins (17 of them) were boys. Learning about trucks, tractors, hunting and farming our land was an inevitable pleasure and blood right, fostering my desire to be a treated equally and my tom-boy tenacity.
Growing up in an isolated area with thousands of acres of romp around ground my mother taught me to use caution, pay attention to my surroundings, listen, mark my place, use the sun to gauge time and direction so I wouldn’t get lost or miss lunch and to pay attention to the specifics of strangers less any of them try to scoop me up and take me away. A debilitating fear my mother had was that within the quiet slow steady of our country rural living that a random stranger would snatch me up; my Uncle’s would kid that may be so but that whoever did would quickly return me. Regardless, I learned to pay attention and always had my escape route planned in advance whenever I encountered anyone unfamiliar.
I couldn’t see the driver’s side of the truck but based on the loud creaking of the door and hard thud his shoulder made to push it open I imagined there must have been some damage to the vehicle. He had to slam it hard to get it to shut. I stood, like a nervous Doe, piqued, ready to run, waiting, determining the risk, disguising my fear with careful feigned disinterest. But, like my mother taught me, I had his description memorized and stored for the police report before he took three steps. Age: My Grandfather’s, 60-65, Height: My Uncle Mike’s height 6’2, weight: my Uncle Danny’s weight, 220-240 with a big round belly, eye color: like my father’s, crystal Blue and squinty, hair color: grey with thick sideburns, wardrobe: dirty, greasy, blue and white pinstriped overalls, white stained t-shirt with a train conductor’s blue and white pinstriped hat. I studied his face, the thickness of his spread out nose, the deep grooves in his pores, the dirty stains on his whiskered chin from too much tobacco, the wrinkles that mapped themselves like a rain eroded field across his face. He stood in the middle of the bridge and looked down at me in the river, there were no niceties, no quick smiles, or false hellos. His face was harsh, joyless, mean, so my own, mirrored his, a stand-off.
Then I noticed the weighted burlap bag tied with barn twine in his left hand, a bag typically used when we dug potatoes out of our fields that I did not have a good association with because it always meant a sun burn, a sore back, and field dirt so thick in my ears and nose even a good bar of ivory soap and a scrub in the lake wouldn’t wash it away. He dangled the bag over the bridge, held it there, never taking his eyes off me, then let it drop into the river; the bag landed with a loud splash. I didn’t know what was in the bag and I didn’t dare wade out to get it while he was still on the bridge, I needed my footing firm in case I had to run. He stood on top of the bridge, silent, staring at me, me staring back at him for several minutes until finally, grinning slightly, nodding his head towards me, turned and walked back to his truck, started it, and drove away.
Suddenly, every child-hood fantasy about finding lost treasure, bags of gold, tin cans with coins buried in overgrown plots of land filled my imagination. I threw my pole onto the river bank and quickly tread the water. The slow current up to my knees, my thighs, my tummy, my shoulders, and then my neck. The frigid water shocked my sun burnt shoulders sending just the right jolt of adrenaline I would need to dive against the current to find the bag. I took myself upstream so when I dived down the current would hopefully float me to the exact spot where the bag had landed. I knew the sack had sunk to the bottom because otherwise I would have seen it lift and float downstream. On my fifth dive, scavenging with my fingers on the murky bottom, through seaweed and rocks, I felt the string and trailed it back to the bag. Thankful to have the weightlessness of the water to lift it up and swim with it back to the shore.
I threw myself and the bag onto the river bank taking only a quick moment to rest before feeling the outside of the sack, trying to identify the content through touch, something hard, jagged, rock or jewels, something soft, slightly squishy, and small. I pushed a little against it a couple of times trying to imagine everything it could have been, assuming what I would find would be good. And then, under the gently nudge of my fingers I heard a very low soft whimper, a tiny grunt, something alive, in the bag. Terror and heart hurt exploded in me. I tore at the string of that sack as quickly as I could, fingers unraveling string, pulling out knot after horrible knot until finally, I was able to open the bag. And there, under the giant field rocks the man had used to ensure the bag sunk, buried and crushed under the rock’s weight, with tiny eyes closed lay 8 little newborn brown and tan puppies, some drowned, some deformed from the rocks smashing their skulls. I sifted through the bag as carefully as I could to locate any of them that could still be alive, to find the one that had whimpered, until at last I found the lone survivor- the runt, little itty bitty thing, convulsing, trying hard to take puffs of air, tiny pink paws jerking in spasm every few seconds. I kissed and nudged him, pushing his tummy, hoping to push the water out of his lungs, hoping my love could somehow help him survive. “C’mon little guy, C’mon little guy” I said over and over holding him carefully in my hands. I blew on his face, told him I loved him, told him he would make it. He squirmed a little in my hands and slowly started to open his eyes, dark brown eyes against wet lashes and water logged fur “that’s it, you can do it buddy” I cried, tears and snot dripping down my freckled face. And then, while I held him, he closed his eyes, curled into the palm of my hands, and like all his brothers and sisters, died. “No, no, no, no” I screamed through muffled gasps of breath but the outcome didn’t change. Dead was dead.
I sat holding that pup in my arms until the sun started to set and then I sifted out all the stones from the bag until nothing but the dead puppies remained. I carried the runt in one hand against my chin, the puppies in the burlap bag in the other. I left the twine and stones as well as my own hope and faith on the river bank. I ran the entire 3 miles back to our fields. It was there, on the old tractor, I knew I would find my Uncle Mike. When he saw me standing at the edge of the field, head slumped, he stopped the tractor and ran towards me faster than I’ve ever seen him move. I held the bag out to him, the runt still nuzzled to my cheek with my other hand. He didn’t say anything to me, just grabbed me up and held me close to him before dropping himself onto the ground, with me nuzzled as safe as I could be in his lap. And there, I cried myself to sleep. I woke up with him still holding me in his arms, stars filling our country skies, his body slowly rocking me back and forth. We never talked about it, not a single word, just took the sack and the runt out by my Grandfather’s favorite walnut tree, dug a hole, and buried the bag, the puppies, and the runt in it. He helped me make the mark of a cross, even though that didn’t mean much to me anymore, with our own field rocks, good rocks that never helped drown pups. I never put a hook through a worm after that and I never fished that river again. It was years before I had any comprehension of faith and I still don’t believe in hope.
First Draft / No Revisions / No Edits.
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