Clear Springs (46 page)

She was gasping at the chill of the water. She could not touch bottom. She was clutching the edge of the bank, and the water was up to her neck.

She hadn’t imagined the pond was so deep next to the bank. The fish in her hands, she hugged the bank, propping herself against it with her elbows. She tried to get a toehold against the side of the pond, but as she shifted her weight, the solid matter fell away and her foot seemed to float free. She kept a tight hold on the fish, pointing its head away from her so it would not grab her fingers. Sometimes a channel catfish would grip bait and not let go, even after the fish was dead. It could bite a person’s finger off.

She still couldn’t touch the bottom, but she balanced herself against the side of the pond and held the fish’s head out of the water. The water helped buoy the weight of the fish. The fish gaped, and the baited hook floated for a moment. The hook was not even sunk into its flesh. Then the fish clamped onto the hook again.

The fish was a fine one, she thought. It would make good eating. She was pleased, even amazed that she had caught it. It had lost much of its strength. She would have to wait for it to die. When the mouth stayed open, it would be dead, even if it still seemed to be breathing.

She managed to scoot it up onto the bank, inching it in front of her. She laid it in the ooze, placing it by the gills. Its gills were still working, its mouth loosened now. She held it down hard against the mud. The fish gaped, and she lessened her pressure. She floundered in the water, repositioning herself against the muck. She realized the water no longer seemed chilly.

The water was high, submerging the lower branches of the willow bushes. The willows were only a few feet away, but she did not want to get near those bushes. She was sure there were snakes around the roots of the willows. The snaky tendrils of the pondweed brushed her legs. She kicked and stirred the water while holding on to a tuft of grass.

To make her way to the shallow end, she would have to maneuver around the willows. But she would have to launch too far out into the pond to do that. She wasn’t sure she could swim, yet her clothes did not feel heavy. She was wearing her old tan stretch-knit pants and a thin blouse and a cotton shirt and tennis shoes.

She noticed it was shady in the direction of the shallow end, so she decided to stay where she was, where she could feel the sunshine. She expected that someone would see her presently and come to help her out. With difficulty, she twisted her body toward the road, where cars were passing. She let out a holler. More cars passed. She hollered again. The cars were driven by the blind and the deaf. Their windows were rolled up tight.

“Hey!” She let out a yodeling sound, and then a pig call. “Soo-eeee!” She tried all the calls she knew, calls she used when she had to reach the men working in the fields, sounds that could carry across creeks and hollers. “Sook, cow!” she called, as if summoning a herd of milk cows.

There was no one at the house now, but she thought the renters would be there soon. The car she had seen was gone. Her car gleamed fire-red at the stable. In the smooth surface of the pond before her, stretching toward the soybean field and then the road, she saw the upside-down reflection of the chicken-feed mill. The sky was bright autumn blue, and the reflection of the tower was like a picturesque postcard, still and important-looking.

Balancing against the bank in the water up to her neck, she gazed across the field toward the houses and the road. In that panorama, her whole life lay before her—a rug at the foot of the feed-mill tower. She saw her own small house in the clump of trees. The bulldozer still had not come to demolish it. She was sure the house could be fixed up, if
she could only tend to it. Leaving it vacant had caused it to deteriorate. The loss of her house probably hurt her more than anything about the farm. But she couldn’t keep everything up. It was too much for her. She’d had the stable repainted—a clear red—but it needed more work. Her thoughts weighed her down with the heaviness of the farm’s history. Her memories mixed together in a mosaic of hard bits, like chicken grit. She saw the calves, the horses, the corncrib, the gardens, the henhouses, and other buildings no longer there. She saw the onions and potatoes she stored in one of the stalls. She saw mules and tractors and bonfires of leaves. What she saw before her eyes now was the consequence and basis of her labor. Years of toil were finished now; sometimes she wondered what it had all been for.

She seized a clump of grass but could not nudge her weight onto the bank. It was like trying to chin herself on a high bar. She did not have the energy. Then the grass pulled loose. The fish gaped again, and she managed to push it farther up the bank. She avoided its mouth.

Time passed. For a while, she lay horizontal in the water, clutching grass; then she rested vertically against the sludge of the bank. When occasionally her grip loosened, she had to dog-paddle to keep afloat.

She was panting. She held herself steady until she gathered her strength, then she tried again to pull herself up. She could not. The water seemed quite warm now. She thrashed, to scare off snakes. If she could grab a willow branch, she was sure she could pull herself out, but the thought of snakes underwater around the willow roots made her tremble. Snapping turtles were there too, she felt sure.

The shade covering the shallow end had grown deeper and longer now. She needed to stay here in the sun.

A pack of coyotes could eat a person. Wilburn had said that was not true, but she believed it was. Last year, one of the neighbor women carried dinner to the farmhands at work in one of her back fields. She parked her car on a lane beside the field, and as she started toward the gate with the dinner she saw some coyotes running at her, a whole caboodle of them. She raced back to the car and slammed the door just in time. The coyotes clambered all over the car, sniffing.

Sometimes the siren of a passing ambulance started the coyotes howling. All along the creek, a long ribbon of eerie sound followed the siren. If the coyotes found her in the pond, she could not escape. They might smell the fish, she thought. That would draw them like bait. Her
dread hardened into a knot. She thought she ought to pray. She hadn’t been to church much lately. She had trouble hearing, now that they had a microphone. Its squealing hurt her ears.

Cars passed. She thought she saw her son’s van under the trees. She thought he might be sawing wood. She hollered to the air. After a while, she could tell that what she had thought was the van was only some scrap metal glinting in the sun.

The soybeans had been harvested only a week before, and the combine had missed multitudes of beans. She could see clumps of them dotting the field. There was so much waste. It bothered her. The land itself was washing into the creek. She pictured herself in the pond, washing over the levee in a hard rain and then sweeping on down through the creek.

If Wilburn came along and saw her here, he would grin at her and say, “What are you fooling around in the pond for? Got time on your hands?” She wondered what it would be like to while away the hours in a country club swimming pool. She had never had time to idle like that. She did not know how people could piddle their lives away and not go crazy. She had stopped going on the senior-citizen bus tours because they wasted so much time at shopping malls. She told them she’d rather eat a worm.

She recalled falling into water before—it was familiar. She was a little thing, fishing in Panther Creek with her grandmother and aunt. Suddenly she slid off a log, down the bank, and into the water. Mammy Hicks and Aunt Hattie laughed at her. “You got wet, didn’t you?” Hattie said, bobbing her pole. A whole life passed between those two splashings.

Her hands were raw. She thought she could see snakes swirling and swimming along the bank some yards away. She had never seen a cottonmouth at this pond, but a snake was a snake, poisonous or not. She shuddered and tightened her grasp on the grass. She kicked her feet behind her. Her shoes were sodden.

A pain jerked through her leg—a charley horse. She waited for it to subside. She did not know how much time had passed, but the sun was low. She was starting to feel cooler. Her legs were numb. She realized she could be having another stroke. For the first time, it occurred to her that she might really be stranded here and no one would know. No one knew she had come fishing.

She scrambled clumsily at the bank. Now she knew she had to get out. No one was going to come for her. She knew she should have tried
earlier, when she had more strength, but she had believed someone would spot her and come to help her. She worked more industriously now, not in panic but with single-minded purpose. She paused to take some deep breaths. Then she began to pull, gripping the mud, holding herself against it. She was panting hard. Little by little, she pulled herself up the mud bank. She crawled out of the water an inch at a time, stopping to rest after each small gain. She did not know if she felt desperation. She was so heavy. Her teeth were chattering from the cold, and she was too weak to rise. Finally she was on the bank, lying on her belly, but her legs remained in the water. She twisted around, trying to raise herself up. She saw a car turn into the driveway. She hollered as loud as she could. Her teeth rattled. After a moment, the car backed up and drove away.

The western sun was still beating down. She lay still and let it dry her. As her clothes dried, she felt warmer. But her legs remained in the water, her shoes like laden satchels. She pulled and pulled and crawled until her legs emerged from the water. She felt the sun drawing the water from her clammy legs. But as the sun sank, she felt cooler. She crawled with the sun—moving with it, grabbing grass.

When she finally uprighted herself, the sun was going down. She stood still, letting her strength gather. Then she placed one foot in front of her, then the other.

She had to get the fish. Stooping, she pulled it onto the grass, but she could not lift it, and she knew she could not pack it to the car. It was dead, though its gills still worked like a bellows, slowly expanding and collapsing. It had let go of the hook. Leaving the fish, she struck out across the soybean field toward the car. No one was at the house. She reached the car. Luckily, the key had not washed out of her pocket while she was in the pond. In the dim light, she couldn’t see how to get it in the ignition. For an interminable time, she fumbled with the key. Then it turned.

Instead of following the path around the edge of the field, she steered the car straight across the beanfield. She stopped before the rise to the pond and got out. As she climbed toward the pond, her feet became tangled in some greenbrier vines and she fell backwards into a clump of high grass. Her head was lower than her feet. She managed to twist herself around so that she was headed up the bank, but she was too weak to stand.

She lay there in the grass for some time, probably half an hour. She dozed, then jarred awake, remembering the fish. Slowly, she eased up
the bank and eventually stood. When she reached the fish, it appeared as a silhouette, the day had grown so dark. She dragged the fish to the car and heaved it up through the door, then scooted it onto the floorboard behind the driver’s seat. She paused to catch her breath.

The sun was down now. In the car, she made her way out of the field to the road. Cars were whizzing by. She was not sure her lights were working. They seemed to burn only dimly. She hugged the edge of the narrow road, which had no shoulders, just deep ditches. Cars with blazing headlights roared past. She slowed down. By the time she got into town, the streetlights were on. She could not see where to turn into her street. A car behind her honked. Flustered, she made her turn.

When she got home, the kitchen clock said 7:25. She had been at the pond for seven hours. She opened the back door, and Chester the cat darted in, then skidded to a stop and stared at her, his eyes bugged out. She laughed.

“Chester, you don’t know me! Do I smell like the pond?”

Chester retreated under the kitchen table, where he kept a wary lookout.

“Come here, baby,” she said softly. “Come on.” He backed away from her.

She got into the shower, where she let hot water beat on her. Memories of the afternoon’s ordeal mingled in her mind like dreams, the sensations running together and contorting out of shape. She thought that later she would be angry with herself for not pulling herself out of the pond sooner—she could have ventured into those willow bushes—but now she felt nothing but relief.

After she was clean and warm, she went to the kitchen. Chester reappeared. He rubbed against her legs.

“Chester,” she crooned. “You didn’t know me.” She laughed at him again.

She fed Chester and warmed up some leftovers for her supper. She hadn’t been hungry all those hours, and she was too tired to eat now, but she ate anyway. She ate quickly. Then she went out to the garage and dragged the fish out of the car.

She wrestled it into the kitchen. She couldn’t find her hatchet. But she thought she was too weak to hack its head off now. Using the step stool, she managed, in stages, to get the fish up onto the counter. She located her camera. The flash didn’t work, but she took a picture of the fish anyway, knowing it probably wouldn’t turn out. She didn’t know where her kitchen scales were—lost in the move somewhere.
She was too tired to look for them. She found her tape measure in a tool drawer.

The fish was thirty-eight and a half inches long. It was the largest fish she had ever caught.

“Look at that fish, Chester,” she said.

With her butcher knife, she gutted the fish into a bucket. The fish was full—intestines and pondweed and debris and unidentifiable black masses squished out.

She could feel herself grinning. She had not let go of the fish when she was working it, and she had gotten back home with the old big one. She imagined telling Wilburn about the fish. He would be sitting in front of the TV, and she would call him from the kitchen. “Just wait till you see what I reeled in at the pond,” she would say. “Come in here and see. Hurry!” He would know immediately what she had caught. She had a habit of giving away a secret prematurely. Her grinning face—and her laughing voice—gave her away. When she had a surprise for the children, she couldn’t wait to tell them. She wanted to see their faces, the delight over something she had bought them for Christmas or some surprise she had planned. “Wake up, get out of bed. Guess what! Hurry!”