By Dalton Miller
ARTHUR SPENT THE majority of his time fishing, away out on a river somewhere between Clay County and Braxton, nestled in the foliage and away from the view of passersby, few as they were. Just as he had always done it, just as his daddy had done it, God rest him.
The Elk River provided the backdrop for dozens of houses on its banks, winding and drilling further into the forests and the mountains settled in the region. The people living there, descendants of poverty, manifested again as temporary visitors to old, dilapidated trailers on the soft earth. Through the gaps in the trees, Arthur saw light breaking through and occasionally he’d get a glimpse of Route 4 as the boat floated downstream.
The day began to get away from him. He put three fingers up to the sun and determined that there was only a fraction of time left before the darkness overtook the water. It was at that time of day when the whispers started, coming from every direction and their origins nameless and unknowable. His aging mind couldn’t determine if it was the onset of dementia or the spirits of the land finally breaking free from their vow of silence and speaking out for the justice of the mountains once more. That was the very same lament he had sung himself first as a child, then as an adult, and now as an old man, deep in the throes of long life and tradition.
The bluegill had been biting since morning but now that the sun had begun to die, the nibbles had quieted and no splash could be heard in the water sans that of a rare bullfrog from the bank. The boat had taken him to a ring of cattails, triumphantly rising up through the water and the loam to greet him. They were the witnesses upon the river and would stand at the tribunal to measure his character should he disrespect this world. He felt comfort in that.
He had taken up the habit of keeping a notepad in his shirt pocket. It was a cheap dollar store variety with the wire spiral at the top and flimsy blue lined pages within. He would jot down notes to keep his memory sharp and keep him from falling into the fervent dream of his dementia. He flipped to the most recent page and read:
You’re fishing today
Don’t stay out too late
Feed the dog.
He put the book back in his pocket and paddled ashore. His truck, an old rusted Ford Ranger, was waiting for him on the bank. Behind it stood the Sugar Creek Baptist Church in its antiquity, glowing under the darkening sky as if painted in the colour of a forgotten moon. He’d been dunked under the water in that church when he was a child and he could still remember the burning of his nostrils when it flooded in.
It was nearly dark when he got home. He didn’t feel like unloading the boat back into the shed so he left it in the truck and sauntered up to his trailer. Strung around the porch were potted plants of various heritage. They were Esther’s and he’d kept them alive since her death. They were memories of her and there was something about caring for them that kept her alive in his heart. Instead of holding her hand he now caressed their leaves. There was a sentiment in that, in the connection he felt with something alive yet frozen in time. Sometimes he could feel them touch back and that took him away from the world that was melting around him for a moment.
Before he could even get the front door open he heard Rusty howling and the sound of his nailed feet clacking against the linoleum. He swung the door open and was greeted by an aging grey mountain feist, jumping up and pushing his paws against his belly, nearly knocking him over in the process.
‘Yeah yeah yeah. You’re only happy to see me because I feed ya.’
Rusty looked up at Arthur with a confused look, tilted his head, and allowed his ears to perk up in the faint orange of the overhead stove light. Arthur shut the door behind him and made his way into the kitchen.
‘Well, come on if you’re coming on,’ he said as he reached into the cabinet and emptied a can of wet food into the dog’s bowl. He petted the dog’s head for a while as it ate and then he ventured over to the couch, sat down, turned on the TV, and pulled the notepad out from his pocket.
You’re fishing today
Don’t stay out too late
Feed the dog
Arthur stayed up for around an hour, watching television. He flipped through the channels and sighed at their banality. After a while, sleep caught up to him and he nodded off, not rising until the early morning.
His dreams the night before were filled with his wife’s face. Her countenance was ghostly and ethereal, burning into him as a firebrand of remembrance. Upon waking he was covered in pools of sweat. Delirious and groggy, he staggered over to the kitchen counter and took his medicine. He washed it down with a glass of tap water and sucked in all the air he could, relieving that burning sensation he felt in his chest.
Rusty followed him around the trailer as he took dirty dishes to the sink, fluffed couch pillows, and tidied up the living room. The trailer was old and the carpet was long taken by decay but still he felt a need to keep up appearances even though he hadn’t had a visitor in a few weeks. It was another way Esther lived on through him, in her gentle, knowing ways.
The dog and the old man needed a few things for the house and so they went to Sam’s Grocery, an old country store right on the bank of the Elk, for the afternoon errand. Arthur’s truck spat and grunted as they pulled into the paved lot. Doug, the owner, smoked a cigarette by the door and held it open as Arthur and Rusty made their way inside. The door shut behind them and Doug made his way behind the counter. Canned goods, some TV dinners, and a bone were brought up to the counter and laid down on the plywood top.
‘How’s things over at the holler?’ Doug asked.
‘Not too bad for an old man. You?’
‘Store ain’t doin’ as good as it used to but you know how it goes.’
‘Yeah.’
‘Fair season pretty soon though. Oughta make a bit then I’d say.’
Doug put all the items in old Wal Mart bags and gave him his total. Nineteen dollars and twenty eight cents.
‘Jesus, that’s high,’ remarked Arthur, reluctantly pulling the money out of his wallet. It wasn’t enough.
‘I know it but that’s what I’ve had to do now. Can’t make any money if I keep everything low.’
‘You still do credit?’ he asked. Sam’s Grocery had been a lifesaver for those living on the banks of the Elk. Work was rare and the wages worse so Doug had taken to a great deal of empathy for the working man. However, times had changed since then and Arthur could even smell that change in the air itself, as if a phantom had changed scent and became a mystery even to its hauntings.
‘Well, Arthur,’ Doug started. He stopped speaking when he saw the old man’s face, hopeful and faded by time. He thought for a moment, took a breath in, and continued. ‘I can do it for you. For Rusty. But just don’t tell nobody.’
‘Appreciate ya, old buddy. And I know the old boy does, too,’ said Arthur, looking down at Rusty, the dog’s tongue lingering out his mouth in expectation of the bone hidden beneath the pinto beans.
‘Used to be I’d lend an old boy a few things and he’d tell me he’d come back Tuesday mornin’ to pay me. Back then you could count on that.’
‘Not now.’
‘Not now. Now you give a son of a bitch some money you’ll never see his ass again.’
‘A lot’s changed since back then.’
‘You ain’t lyin’. Girl came in here the other day. From Ohio. Had a bone through her nose. Couldn’t hardly stomach lookin’ at her. Not sure where it all went wrong.’
‘I ain’t sure it ever did.’
‘How’s that?’
‘I don’t know. I reckon it’s always been some shade of bad. It’s just gotten worse. Never really went one way or the other. Just kept down the same path.’
‘Yeah. Maybe so. Still, just can’t come to terms with it. I think about moving sometimes when I’m laying in bed. But then I wake up with a change of heart just about every time. This place has a way of keeping you here, I think.’
Doug looked downward at the counter and Arthur could see in his eyes a stirring. It was the same look that men coming back from war had on them and Arthur couldn’t reconcile the man’s suffering with anything to say. He took the bags off the counter, thanked Doug, and headed towards the door. Rusty followed behind him, tail wagging and hitting the glass case of jewellery and paraphernalia.
The dirt road winded and sharply twisted up and down the mountain as the Ford Ranger spun up the dust and rocks on its way. Rusty’s head was hanging out the window, his tongue lapping in the air, as Arthur smoked a hand rolled Bugler cigarette in one hand and steered with the other. The poplars and dogwoods bent over the road, speckling its topography with lances of hollow dark like reaching arms of inequity.
When they reached the trailer and parked in the grass before it, he could feel a difference in the air. It was that familiar autumn weather but the usual campfire smell that occupied it in the evenings of the holler had turned into something else. He detected a presence there, somewhere, in the river. The Elk flowed behind his house and he could hear the water if the birds and squirrels quieted enough to allow it. That day he could hear everything, everywhere, all at once.
‘You ready, old boy?’
Rusty’s brow furrowed and he dug his snout into Arthur’s arm, whining.
‘What’s the matter now? I bet I know. You want that damn bone.’
The dog’s head popped back up and his ears took on a life of their own at the sound of the word. Arthur reached behind him into the bag and pulled out the bone, unwrapped it, and gave it to the poor creature. He reached over and opened the passenger side door, letting him jump out and run across the yard with the bone in his mouth, oversized as it was for him.
He watched the dog disappear behind the trailer and he took time to finish his cigarette before letting out a rough cough and finally leaving the truck. He grabbed the bags out of the cab and shut the door and began walking up to the porch. He stopped to listen to nature. He heard a sparrow, then a crow, then something else. It began as a whine like a loon but it wasn’t the right time for it yet. He turned his head over towards the river and he saw the slow moving water and the occasional ghostwind in the trees but the source of the sound remained to him a mystery.
He stomped out the cigarette in the old, tired earth and went inside, set down his hat on the kitchen table and put away the things he bought. He took out his notepad and flipped to its newest page and clicked his pen.
Clean up yer house
Go to Sam’s
Get the dog a bone
Accept her calling
His heart felt as if it had stopped and fallen into the pit of his stomach for a moment. He steadied himself by holding onto the kitchen counter, closed his eyes and began to breathe intently. He focused on his breath, inhaling through his nose and exhaling through his mouth, until he was able to come back to his centre and read the note again. It still said the same thing. He stared at it for a while before ripping the page out and throwing it in the trash. He sat down on the couch and leaned his head back, staring at the ceiling. The texture of it began to spin and blur and Arthur closed his eyes, allowing himself the mercy of a small escape.
When he awoke it was dark and cold. He steadied himself, drank a glass of water and turned on the furnace in the hall. He figured he must’ve been out a couple hours and so he went to open the front door and call for the dog. He called out to him over and over, in his own beckoning siren song, but the hound did not return. This had only happened once before when Rusty treed a raccoon and Arthur had spent most of his night getting the dog back, much to the coon’s satisfaction, he wagered.
He grabbed a flashlight from the closet, put on his coat, and set out. The air was sharp and unforgiving, cutting into his bare neck and face as a callous razor in the night. He turned on the flashlight and pointed the light towards the back of the house. As he walked and called for the dog, the trees became illuminated and obsessive. Their branches reached out to him in shadowy serpents before retreating back into the dark and shedding their personifications. He thought back to when he was a child in those woods at night, hearing the yipping of coyotes and the scraping sound of a haunt’s footsteps behind him, only to look back and see nothing but miles of dark. He felt like that child now, in the bitter end of his long life, still vividly aware of the breath on the back of his neck, as if it had followed him through the ages. He came closer to the river and the light painted the dog in clarity.
‘Rusty! Come on boy,’ he said in a loud whisper. The dog turned back and looked at him but then moved his attention again to the river from the bank he sat, nestled in the overgrowth. A muskrat, maybe. Leave a dog to his own devices and he’ll find a way to entertain himself.
‘Come on, Rus, let’s go. Ain’t nothin’ out there.’
He heard her the first time but it was not until the second that he believed it. Her voice, mellisonant and irrefutable, glided over the river as a wisp in the night and wrapped itself around him in sempiternal clasp. He felt cold, now within, and the chill came over him in paralysis as the flashlight dropped to his feet.
The cone of light rolled along the bank for a moment, bringing into its glow parts of the night. Rusty whined and fell to his stomach, laying his head on the weeds and staring out into the dark. In the sliver of light left to him, Arthur saw her face breaking through the fog and black water, her eyes peering at him as emeralds on an heirloom lost to time and grieving.
She looked as she did when he first set eyes upon her as a young man. The bell rang as he walked into John’s department store and she had been hanging suit jackets when he entered. He remembered her polka dot sundress and the bow she wore in her crimson hair, waves of wine upon a beautiful pale face and the Shenandoah in her eyes. Her smile was that of a cherub, entering his heart as an arrow and bleeding out into her life. He remembered hoping he’d die before she did and her promising that wouldn’t happen. She was always right. About everything.
His strength returned and he picked up the light from the ground. He closed his eyes, took a breath, and opened them again. She was still there, only now she had grown closer.
‘I’m old and sick. This is why I’m seeing you. I need to go back inside.’
Rusty turned and looked at him, tongue out and ears perked, and Arthur went to him. He grabbed him by the collar and nudged him back towards the trailer. The dog obeyed and they began to journey on, leaving what lived in the river to stay there and what remained of his lucidity to receive warmth in the long night.
The boy walked along the rocky bank of the Elk behind his mother as they examined the stones and skipped them down the surface of the water towards the tree trunks across. He could get a few skips but she was the best. She’d get nine, ten, sometimes even eleven skips across the water and she made it look effortless.
The two of them walked back to the tree line and climbed up the dirt to their fishing poles. They had forked sticks driven in the ground to hold them, their lines floating out in the water, occasionally dipping ever so slightly in the murk.
‘Arthur,’ she said, running her hands down a thin tree limb and admiring its budding foliage. ‘Come here.’
When he got to her he saw she had bent down a branch of poplar. It was long, knotted and grey like the arthritic wrists of a crone. It had the very beginnings of blossoms upon it, small enough that one had to squint to see them.
‘See the buds on it there?’ she asked. Her accent was pure West Virginia, unadulterated by conformity to the modern world. ‘When the blooms on a poplar are the size of a mouse’s ear, that there means you’ll find the redhorse in the shoals.’
‘They’re down there, then?’
‘Yep. Walk on down there to the edge and you’ll see ’em in the water.’
He put his ball cap back on and walked down to the shoals. The water closest to him was so clear he could see every detail of what lay beneath it. Every crawdad under every rock, every discarded mussel wasted by a hungry otter, and even the broken beer bottles left by drunk fishermen. He stepped into the Elk and felt its cold lapping soak through his shoes and pool between his toes. He crouched down carefully and peered into the water ahead of him.
He saw it there slowly but nervously swimming back and forth in the low water. Its mouth searching obsessively over the stones for something, anything, to inhale. Its scales were shades of copper and bronze, gradually yielding to a white underbelly in their conquest of the fish’s body. He watched the redhorse in fascination as it swam. He had not seen one before but he had heard tales of them from his family. They were a forgotten fish and their lore was lost to time, kept preserved only by the old timers of that land.
The fish began to violently shake its head back and forth as if in seizure, its tail thrashing the water into the air and onto his jeans. He looked back to his mother but she was no longer there. Only the poplars still stood and he felt their eyes upon him. He turned back to the river and watched as the fish spit up something gold into the water and swam away into the depths. The gold floated up to him and the water cleaned it of its impurity. Arthur picked up the ring and looked at it in the sun. Engraved on its inner band was a wedding vow. He felt a soaking hand lay upon his shoulder.
Arthur woke up screaming in his bed, startling the dog and throwing around the blankets before finally coming to. He sat at the edge and held his head in his hands as he sobbed. After a few minutes he composed himself, got dressed and walked into the kitchen. He fed Rusty and himself, tidied up the place and took the truck out to town. Today he would go to the bar and he would drink, by god. He’d drink for the first time in ten years and he wouldn’t give a damn.
The Elk Lunch was a staple of tradition in town. It’d been there as long as he could remember and it served as a touchpoint for all kinds. Reprobates, single mothers, coal miners, and even sometimes the occasional teenager. When Arthur walked in he could barely see who sat at the bar because of the layers of cigarette smoke and the dim red light in the place. The bells rang behind him and Rusty followed.
‘Y’all still allow dogs, don’t ye?’ he questioned the bartender. She looked up from a glass she was washing and examined the creature.
‘He’s gonna sit there and be good?’
‘Guaranteed.’
‘Then yeah, we do.’
He took a seat at the bar, ordered a Bud Light, shook some salt into it and drank. Rusty sat by his feet at the stool as barflies fed him fries and made small talk with each other. After a while, the doors opened and the light poured in, shining so bright in the mirror of the bar that he could hardly stand it. The shadow of the door took over again and a large man took a seat next to him. He was clean shaven and dressed nice but a shade of ferality coloured his aura.
‘Long time, Arthur,’ said the man as he raised up two fingers to the bartender. She acknowledged it with a nod and began pouring.
‘I knew it was you when you sat down, even though I ain’t seen you gussied up like that in a hot minute,’ Arthur said as he tipped the bottle in the man’s direction.
‘Yeah. I take it upon myself on occasion to dress up and give this town a reason to remember me. Or at least that’s what I tell myself while I’m drinkin’.’
He knew the man as Hollins. He worked at the tieyard and then in the depot up until its closure a few years prior. He was a creature of habit, habits that might be deemed destructive by one side of the church pew and sacred by the other.
‘I heard about Esther. I never got to talk to you about it but I was mighty sorry to hear that,’ said Hollins as he sipped his beer and pulled out a cigarette from his shirt pocket. The end was born into a blaze with the fire of the zippo only to die out to an ember and fill his lungs. ‘But I suppose it might be too late for that sorta thing.’
He exhaled a cloud of smoke that lingered over the bar as an apparition, a perennial haunting of a place long established by the possession of unruly men. Arthur stared down into the bottle and then brought his head up to the bar lights, red as they were in the dark of the shelves, and patted the man on the shoulder.
‘I appreciate you saying that. Really, I do. Lately I’ve taken to thinking about her a lot. Well, dreaming about her.’
‘Nice dreams?’
‘Something like that. I reckon. Been dreaming about when we first started courtin’. Feels like it never happened sometimes. Like I just made it all up to keep myself company.’
‘Maybe that’s your final stage of grievin’. Saw somethin’ about that on the TV.’
‘On the TV.’
‘Yeah, some feller on a mornin’ show. Talked about the stages of grief and all that. Some of it made sense. Might be you’re in your last one.’
Rusty whined and dug his front paw on Arthur’s leg as the old man took a drink. He reached and scratched him behind the ears. He had more grey than he last remembered. He wondered if the dog noticed that too.
‘Well, that’s a nice thought but I kindly doubt it. I don’t imagine grief leaves that easily. Probably waits till the last second, when you think you’re safe, and comes around again.’
‘I’m not sayin’ you should get over it, or that you ever will. Just that maybe this is your way of copin’ with it.’
‘You know, I don’t remember you being such an expert on these matters.’
‘Oh shit, Arthur, I don’t know. I’ve always been bad at makin’ conversation. I see you still got old boy with ye.’
Hollins looked down at Rusty and lowered his beer down for him to get a sniff. The hound, curious at first, quickly retreated from the smell and back around Arthur’s stool. Hollins laughed and tipped the ash from his cigarette to somewhere on the bar.
‘How old is he now?’
‘Old enough. Sometimes I wonder if I’ll even die before he does. Both possibilities ain’t the nicest to think about.’
Arthur took the notepad out from his shirt pocket, flipped open the decaying cover and turned to the most recent page. He pulled a cheap ballpoint pen out, licked the end of it and started to write until he saw it.
The sun is dying
Accept her calling
Till death do us part
He moved his eyes over to Hollins, to see if he had noticed. His mouth had been too occupied with the beer to really give a damn about some old man’s notepad in a dilapidated bar. Arthur flipped the cover back on top and slid it into his pants pocket.
‘Grocery list?’ Hollins asked. He had noticed.
‘Yeah. More or less. I like to write made up shit in there then drop it after I’m done, in hopes some stranger will pick it up and wonder what sort of lunatic shops at Kroger with ’em.’
‘What kind of shit?’
‘Ah, well. you know, pissquick instead of bisquick. The usual.’
The two men shared a laugh and clinked their bottles together. It was a cheers to an undefined future. One in the middle of his life and one coming closer to its end, yet in that moment equal by the scales of solitary life. Deemed ripe for continued living by the reaper far too drunk to care.
As the night grew older and the sky more empty of stars, Arthur said farewell to his old friend and watched as he walked out into the world of dim streetlights and endless dark. The bar had emptied and all that remained was the bartender, the dog, a few drunks toward the back and Arthur himself. He paid his tab and beckoned Rusty to follow as he made his way out, stumbling this way and that, holding onto the side of the bar on his way to the truck.
He sat in the truck for a while, feeling the warmth and numbness of his face and becoming overly aware of his own breath. The world spun around him, passersby in conversation that seemed to surround him in whispers. The dog looked up at him in what could only be described as a canine’s concern.
‘If you could drive I’d give ‘em to ye,’ he said as he fumbled the keys in his hands. He started the truck and adjusted the seat, looking in his mirrors for any sign of a waiting policeman in the shadows of main street. The warmth of the booze and the numbness of its toll still clung fresh to his mind and body as he drove away from the bar. The streetlights became burning stars, softened in the night and gallant in their astigmatic disposition.
He arrived home without much incident, except for the occasional swerve back onto the road and the then subsequent need to reassure Rusty that everything was alright. Though, Arthur admitted to himself, the dog was more used to it than perhaps he should have been.
He pulled the truck into the muddy driveway and saw through the windshield the rain beginning to achieve new states of heaviness and adversity. The ass, as his father would have put it, had fallen out of the sky. In the fog of the night the river could barely be seen save for a slithering, shadowy serpent out surrounded by the trees that stood guardians of an ancient secret. Arthur found himself staring out into them and for a moment could feel something staring back.
‘She’s here,’ he whispered to himself, in the slow, stretching way of a man imbued with drink. The dog whined and pawed his lap, looking up to him and then laying his muzzle back down again.
The river in all its beckoning became to him an omen, a reasoning put forth to explain the complexities of his life. Arthur, although the drink had taken him, had become conscious of this circular futility. All of his life, all of his running, had been but roads of distraction leading to but one destination. His exhalations became fervent prayers, his breathing a harmony of desire and regret.
As he opened the door and left the safety of the truck he stepped out into the cold of the dark. Tunnel vision assaulted him and swirled his surroundings before his eyes. The earth, lit blue by the moon and lifted by the fog, twisted and turned beneath his feet as he approached her dwelling. He felt her there, her breathing syncing with his own and for a moment he thought he felt her behind him. She had in that instant shifted into a memory of his mother, a recurrence of a plaguing dream, a nightmare wrapped in the silk of a honeymoon bed.
‘What—what do you want?’ he said out into the night. It was so quiet and still that even his low voice seemed to echo across the water and reach the other side, one invisible to him now in the assault of the pitch of the dark.
The dog followed behind him, attempting to usher him back toward the warmth of the truck and the sanctuary of its humming. Arthur continued on toward the river bed. The cattails swayed subtly as wild parishioners in a forgotten church, praising something unknowable yet persistent in the night. When he reached them they seemed to stop their movement and gaze up at him in some sort of clandestine veneration.
Out in the deep of the river he saw her there. From her collarbone down was the thick oily mirk of the water and the crown of her head wore a diadem of fog. Her eyes were green as ever, shining in their sockets as gems mined in heaven’s quarry. Her smile stretched from ear to ear and he shivered from the cold.
Rusty whined and grabbed Arthur’s pants leg with his mouth, attempting to pull him back to the trailer. The man rebelled and pulled free of the dog’s grip but with that liberation tripped and stumbled forward toward the water. The soft yet stable earth once beneath his feet disappeared and was replaced by engulfing wet clay, slick and treacherous as quicksand in a forgotten jungle. He tried to gain his footing but failed as the plants opened up and the bank pulled him in. His feet betrayed him and flew out from beneath him and as he plummeted into the water he saw that she had disappeared into its depths. His body plunged into the cold and he began to sink to the bottom of the river, feeling it rush into his lungs and take him over. He had accepted her calling and now all was black.
The dog waited at the bank for him to surface. It whined and pawed at the mud but dared not follow him into the abyss. As the moon shined and lit the mirror of the water, the dog stared deep into it and felt it staring back into him. All was quiet on the river save for the song of a whippoorwill deep in the woods and a wisp of memory flowing through the trees.
