The Risen
Authors: Ron Rash
For George Singleton
She is waiting. Each spring the hard rains come and the creek rises and quickens, and more of the bank peels off, silting the water brown and bringing to light another layer of dark earth. Decades pass. She is patient, shelled inside the blue tarp. Each spring the water laps closer, paling roots, loosening stones, scuffing and smoothing. She is waiting and one day a bit of blue appears in the bank and then more blue. The rain pauses and the sun appears but she is ready now and the bank trembles a moment and heaves and the strands of tarp unfurl and she spills into the stream and is free. Bits of bone gather in an eddy, form a brief necklace. The current moves on toward the sea.
F
rom the beginning, Ligeia's ability to appear or disappear seemed magical. The first time, forty-six years ago, was at Panther Creek the summer before my junior year in high school. On Sundays after church and a lunch at our grandfather's house, my older brother, Bill, and I changed into T-shirts and cutoff jeans, tossed our fishing gear into the '62 Ford pickup Grandfather had bought us, and headed west out of Sylva. We'd cross the interstate, turn onto national forestland, and drive a mile down the gravel road bordering Panther Creek, rods and reels rattling in the truck bed as Bill veered onto an old logging trail. Soon tree limbs and saplings raked
the hood and windshield. Then there was no longer a road, only a gap in the trees through which Bill wove until skidding to a stop.
Only two miles away, the Tuckaseegee River held larger trout and deeper swimming holes, but the trout and pools here were enough for us. Best of all, we had this section of stream to ourselves and wanted to keep it that way, which was why Bill parked where the truck could not be seen from the road. We made our way through a thicket of mountain laurel whose branches sometimes whipped back, marking us with welts and scratches. At the stream, we baited our hooks and cast upstream where the current slowed, forming a wide, deep pool. Bill and I set the rods on rocks, stripped to our cutoff jeans, and swam in the pool's tailwaters. When a rod tip trembled, one of us got out to reel in what tugged the line. Often it was a knottyhead or catfish, but if a trout we gilled it onto our metal stringer. Grandfather enjoyed eating fresh trout and demanded we bring some back. Our mother rolled the fish in cornmeal and fried them for “the old man,” as Bill and I sometimes called him, though never to his face.
After hours of wearing stifling suits while seated on rigid pews and high-backed dining chairs, to enter
water and splay our limbs was freeing. The midday sun fell full on the pool, so when we waded in up to our waists, heat and cold balanced as if by a carpenter's level. That was the best sensation, knowing in a moment, but not quite yet, I'd dive into cold but emerge into warmth. Years later at Wake Forest, when I still believed I might create literature, I'd write a mediocre poem about those mornings in church and afterward the “baptism of nature.”
We'd caught five trout before Bill lifted the fish from the water, signaling it was time to go. Through a gap in the canopy, the declining sun brightened the stringer's silver sheen, flared the red slashes on each trout's flanks.
A sloshing chandelier
was how I described it to my mother that evening. Bill opened the Ka-Bar pocketknife that had once belonged to our father and locked the blade.
Good practice,
he said, given that after his upcoming year at Wake Forest he'd be heading to Bowman Gray, not to be a GP like our grandfather but a surgeon.
I was lifting a beach towel from the sand when I saw her.
“Someone's downstream,” I said, “in the pool where the creek bends.”
“A fisherman?” Bill asked, and set down the trout he
was gutting. The knife remained in his hand as he took a few steps downstream. “I don't see anyone.”
“A girl,” I said. “She was in the pool, watching us, and then she dove underwater.”
“A girl?” Bill asked. “A child or âgirl' like somebody our age?”
“Our age.”
“In a swimsuit?”
“I don't think she was wearing anything,” I answered.
“Nothing, even on her bottom half?”
“Nothing on the part I could see.”
“Was anyone with her?”
“I don't think so.”
Bill set the knife on the sand.
“Well, let's go look.”
But the pool lay empty, unrippled. No footprints indented the sand.
“You haven't been sneaking into Grandfather's office closet, have you, little brother?” Bill asked.
“She could have gotten out on the other side,” I said. On the far bank, surrounded by rhododendron, a granite slab long and wide as a shed door leaned into the stream. I pointed at a damp shadow. “It looks like water dripped on that rock.”
“A muskrat or otter could do that,” Bill said.
He walked downstream, saw nothing, and went through the woods far enough to scan the gravel road.
“I don't see a vehicle,” Bill said when he came back. “So where did she come from, Eugene? Is she a mermaid who swam up from the Atlantic
?
”
“Someone might have dropped her off, or she could have come over the ridge. There are houses there.”
“Houses, not a nudist colony.” Bill laid a hand on my shoulder, firm enough that I couldn't shrug it off. “We've got to get you a real girl so you won't be dreaming one up.”
“Okay, forget it. I was wrong,” I said, tired of the teasing but also wondering if maybe I had imagined her.
BUT I HADN'T,
and now, all of these years later, Ligeia has, once again, suddenly appeared, though this time not at Panther Creek but on the front page of our county newspaper, and looking no older than she did in 1969. A mermaid who hadn't returned to the ocean after all, which is why I've broken my rule about drinking before five
P.M.
It is morning but an empty pint of Jack Daniel's lies on the coffee table beside last night's wine bottle.
An hour ago I'd read the headline “Remains Identified as Jane Mosely,” refolded the newspaper, and set it facedown on the couch. Now I hope the whiskey buffers me enough to read the whole article.
I crawled into that whiskey bottle and stayed there
. Years ago, I'd heard those words on a Friday evening in the Sylva Methodist Church basement. I'd never thought of whiskey that way before, but it is what you seekâto be suspended in that amber glow. Seek but not always achieve, because this morning I can't find my way to that place.
Bill's office opens at nine. When the stove clock's minute hand reaches its apex, I dial. The receptionist tells me my brother is in surgery.
“When will he get out?” I ask.
“It's an emergency operation, Mr. Matney, so I can't be sure.”
“Have him call me as soon as he returns.”
“I will make a note of it,” the receptionist says.
“Does he have a cell phone or pager?”
“Your brother doesn't answer calls during surgery, Mr. Matney.”
“You can at least leave him a message to call me, or give me the number and let me do it myself.”
For a few moments the line is silent.
“I will text him,” she huffs.
Someone at the hospital might know when Bill would finish, but I'd not be told over the phone. I'm not hungry, but eating gives me something to do while waiting, so I force down a bowl of cereal. Besides, alcohol and an empty stomach are never good. Never.