When Crickets Cry (8 page)

Davis serves the coldest beer and the best cheeseburgers in the state of Georgia. His menu is printed on the wall and lacks any frills. From the "Slight Murmur" with its single patty and slim trimmings to the "Persistent Palpitation" with its three cheeses and sauteed onions to the "Carotid Clotter" with its two patties and chili and jalapeiio slices to the "Cardiac Arrest" with its onepound patty wrapped in smoked bacon and covered with three types of cheese to the heart stopping "Quadruple Bypass" with its four succulent patties just dripping with saturated fatty acids and Davis's secret sauce to the "Transplant," which is a large platter mounded high with all of the above, Davis's burgers are nothing short of a heart attack on a plate. And I eat one every Friday night whether I need to or not.

Around the corner from The Well is a double ess called Harley's Curve that has taken more than its fair share of prisoners. About seven years ago I was driving through on my way back to Atlanta-intent on buying a big Harley motorcycle just after a guy on a Japanese crotch-rocket had failed to navigate both turns. He was faceup in the street with blood oozing out his nose and ears. I knelt and attempted CPR, but halfway through the first chest compression I realized his entire chest cavity was nothing but mush, and the only purpose his helmet served was to keep his brains from spilling onto the asphalt. I never bought the Harley.

I passed The Well, zigzagged through Harley's Curve, and headed home, where I was sure that Charlie had given up on me. Home was cold when I arrived, and Charlie was nowhere to be found, but I could hear him across the lake blowing on his harmonica. He was getting pretty tuned up, so I knew it wouldn't be long before he started tapping his foot and really breathing. From bluegrass to classical, he knows hundreds of songs, and he can transition seamlessly through all of them.

LAKE BURTON IS MY BACKYARD. RICH WITH HISTORY, BURTON was once a prospering town, but they flooded it to generate hydroelectric power for the rest of the state. The locals didn't care. They took the money, moved their stills, and watched the water level rise and cover the sidewalks and the stones in the cemeteries.

In the early 1800s, after the departure of the Cherokee Indians, Burton grew into a thriving gold-rush town situated at the intersection of the Tallulah River and Moccasin Creek. Relatively untouched by the Civil War, the town became one link in the chain of the great railway explosion of the 1880s and 1890s. By the turn of the century, Rabun and Habersham counties held the largest tourist attraction in the country, second only to Niagara Falls. The Tallulah Gorge, called the "Niagara of the South," attracted wealthy tourists as well as Georgia Power.

The sheer rock walls that fell for hundreds of feet made a perfect place to construct a series of dams to generate hydroelectric power. In 1917, Georgia Railway and Electric Company bought up the town of Burton-which by then boasted three general stores. They built a dam and began flooding the surrounding land on December 22, 1919. The eighty-some-odd homeowners, whose homes had just been flooded, hopped into their canoes and runabouts and watched the lake rise up beneath them. When the lake topped out, the tips of the sixty-foot-tall pines were some thirty to forty feet below the surface of the water, which was as clear as green ice. In a sense, Burton became a flowing cemetery-a lot had been buried up there. Tucked in nooks and crannies all around the lake are more than a dozen cemeteries, some with stones dating back to the 1700s.

At its highest point, the cliffs at Tallulah Gorge drop twelve hundred feet to the bottom. Twice men have ventured across the chasm. Professor Leon made it across on July 24, 1886, and Karl Wallenda retraced his steps eighty-four years later on July 18, 1970. Once the dams were built, the engineers squeezed the mighty Tallulah down to a trickle. Old men in nightly bathroom runs now pee more liquid than she flows at this point. But all that backed-up water has to go somewhere, so thanks to that trickle, the lake has a surface area of more than twenty-seven hundred acres and sixty-two miles of shoreline. Today Rabun County is home to five hydroelectric lakes, consuming about 2 percent of the county's 377 square miles.

Burton didn't really get famous until Elliot Wiggington wrote his Foxfire books, and then Jon Voight climbed out of the gorge in the movie Deliverance, and the state of Georgia constructed Highway 400, so romantically depicted in the many chases of the Burt Reynolds classic, Smokey and the Bandit.

Today Burton is the weekend vacation spot for the millionaires from Atlanta and their kids-every one of whom owns a jet Ski. Rising up out of the oak, pine, hemlock, and mountain laurel, most every inch of shoreline is covered with somebody's dream second home. When it's not being run over by the jet Ski crowd, the lake is home to migrating mallards, buffleheads, mergansers, and loons. Come springtime, cardinals, finch, and mockingbirds sport their mating colors and nest all around the lake. Local year round residents are the hummingbird, osprey, bald eagle, kingfisher, and a few great blue and green herons. And twice a year, the monarch butterfly migrates through.

In my front yard-which could be my backyard, depending on your point of view-I feed deer, turkeys, squirrels, chipmunks, raccoons, rabbits, and a black bear I've named George, because he's curious. And I am told that, thanks to the Lake Burton Hatchery, the lake is full of rainbow, brown, and brook trout. All told, there are some forty-two species of fish in these waters-including bluegill, red-breasted sunfish, largemouth bass, and yellow perch-although I've never caught a single one despite hundred of hours of trying and Charlie's tireless encouragement.

Oh, I can see them. I can see them just fine, but getting them to take my bait is another matter entirely. Most folks, including Charlie, use crickets. Which is the heart of the problem. I won't fish with crickets. But despite my inabilities and eccentricities, Charlie still asks me to tie his knots because I'm pretty good at it. I've had a lot of practice with knots.

The roads around Burton are a plethora of Norman Rockwell's Americana-apple orchards, dilapidated gristmills, craft stores, comb honey, smoked bacon, Coca-Cola, the Marlboro man, and cold beer at every turn. Vintage cars painted in rust dot the pastures that flow with creeks, cows, and horses. All summer long, hay bales rolled into one-ton mounds sit big as shacks, covered in white plastic like melted snowmen until the winter cold sheds their coat and feeds them to the livestock. And farmers, those whose lives are connected to the lake yet uninterested in it, sit atop green or red tractors beneath dusty brimmed hats, roll cigarettes, and pull at the earth for one more year like a pig suckling the hind teat.

And God? He's in these hills because we are. No matter how far you run, you can't shake Him. Maybe Davis and I know that best, but Emma knew it first, and Saint Augustine said it best: You stir man to take pleasure in praising You, because You have made us for Yourself, and our heart is restless until it rests in You.

t was clear, growing cooler late one summer evening. I could smell the rain coming. Dark clouds first, followed by the strong, moist winds that rattled the magnolias and then the overwhelming aroma of a coming rain. At first, light drops fell softly, then larger drops smacked as they intersected the handsized, waxy magnolia leaves on their way to earth. Emma and I were sitting on the second-story porch outside my bedroom door, taking turns looking through the telescope pointed out into the Milky Way before the clouds blocked our view.

Beneath the tripod legs, a collage of jigsaw puzzles spread about the floor in front of us. For me, stars were a fascination and jigsaw puzzles a hobby. While I was piecing together seven puzzles simultaneously, she spent her time reading or sketching. Amid the stereophonic birdsong that surrounded us, Emma read Great Expectations and sketched the birds that perched nearby.

I had taken all seven thousand puzzle pieces, thrown them into the same basket, and then mixed them together like numbers in a bingo game. Then I dug my hand in and began forming the outlines of seven different pictures. I would need two weeks to put them all together, but it was the process that I enjoyed. One jigsaw was difficult enough, but add the other six, and that's when it started to get fun.

It was, I believe, my introduction to the scientific process. With each piece, I'd reason: if not here, then here, and if not here, then here, and ... so on. Puzzles forced me to look at something from several angles before I moved on, to look again, and again, and possibly again because each piece-no matter how small or seemingly insignificant was critical to the whole. With the outlines scattered about me, I let my hands and eyes work the floor while my mind wandered beyond the boundary of the porch and over the surface of the farmer's moon, which was full and had risen early.

After the storm, which was preceded and followed by a good bit of wind, I heard a cardinal singing. But the singing was different from the usual; the sound was hollow and haunting. I looked out my window to see a male cardinal standing on the porch next to the fluttering form of his mate. Apparently she had fallen or been thrown during the storm and had either broken or severely bent her wing. Our neighborhood was pretty well armed with cats so, given time, she wasn't long for this earth. And all her flopping around was only making matters worse-almost like fishing with live bait.

The male stood over her, next to her, encircling her, singing and calling at the top of his lungs. When I walked outside, he hopped up on the railing and eyed me with anger and suspicion-the feathers rising to a point on the top of his head and back of his neck. And when I cupped her in my hands, he flew in circles, just a foot or two from me, between the porch and the branches.

"It's okay, girl," I said. "Let me get you inside where I can take a look at you."

The male cardinal flew up to a branch, changing his tune to alert and alarm. Halfway through the door, I turned and said, "Don't worry, sir. I won't hurt her. You can look inside my window if you want."

I took her inside, placed her under my magnifying glass, and immediately saw the problem. Somehow during the storm, debris had blown through her wing, bending a few feathers, marring the skin, and placing a deep cut in one wing. The fine bone wasn't visibly distorted, but I'd have bet my microscope that it was fractured. I cleaned out the fine debris and then taped her wing closed, but not so much that she felt trapped. I pulled my birdcage off the shelf, filled the water bottle, and placed her inside.

All the while, watching me like a hawk, her fire-engine-red mate was sitting outside my window, singing at the top of his lungs. I knew that cardinals mated for life, so he wouldn't be going anywhere. "Don't worry, sir. She'll be okay. I'll take good care of her."

The loneliest sound I have ever heard is that of a male cardinal calling out for a female who does not answer. And he will stand on that limb and sing at the top of his lungs for days.

Emma whispered, "He's crying."

"You sure?" I asked.

"I know," she said matter-of-factly.

"How? How do you know? Doesn't sound like crying to me."

She looked back at the cardinal and said, without feeling the need to prove it, "That's 'cause you're listening with your ears and not your heart."

"What do they do when they find each other?"

"They sing together."

Emma slid across the floor, sat Indian-style, and bumped knees with me. She raised an eyebrow and whispered, "No man is an island, entire of itself. . . " She placed a finger on my nose. "Any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind ... therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls ..." She tapped me twice. "It tolls for thee."

I have since come to believe that the cry of the cardinal, heard at random across the planet, out every bedroom window or screened back porch, is the sound of the multitudes pleading for the one.

I SET THE BIRDCAGE ON A SMALL TABLE NEAR MY SECOND-STORY window so the female could see her mate and he could see her. I changed the tape every few days, careful not to ruffle her feathers, and let her stretch her wing. And every day, that male cardinal stood like a sentinel at Buckingham Palace, singing for her. Most afternoons I'd collect some seeds, place some in her cage and on the sill, and let them eat together. They seemed to appreciate it, because they didn't waste any time. Eventually, he would fly to the windowsill and then onto the cage, where she'd peck at his feet. He'd flutter to the side of the food tray, and they'd peck beaks through the cage.

After three weeks of recuperation, I took the tape off completely and let her stretch inside the cage. Then I opened the cage door and turned it out toward the window. "Go ahead, girl. It's okay."

She flew gracefully out the door and lit on a small branch next to the male. Those two stayed in that nest outside my window throughout middle school and high school. And every day they sang their love song to each other. Emma used to tell me, when they'd come back to the window, that they were singing for me.