Ralph built a fire from dead wood we gathered along the bank. He whittled a few green branches to a point, sticking them in the river to soak before we speared weenies to roast for hotdogs. Mother stirred ketchup and brown sugar into cans of beans she heated on the coals at the edge of the fire. We poked marshmallows on the sticks six at a time and charred them black in the fire. Then we pulled the burnt part off and toasted the gooey part black again.
After we splashed the stickiness off, we begged to play in the river, but Mother said we had to wait an hour so we wouldn’t get cramps. We passed the time by fishing and soon had a whole string of trout. I’d never caught more than a minnow or a crawdad, but Vonnie claimed she’d caught lots of fish before. If she had, I’d sure never seen them. Ralph poured water on the fire and tidied up while Mother tended to my scraped leg, feeling around for splinters. Vonnie started paddling around on one of the inner tubes we’d dragged along behind the boat.
The cries come from a distance.
We look up and see Vonnie halfway across the river, her inner tube nowhere in sight.
Ralph takes off running, thrashing through the shallows until the water is deep enough to swim. Mother and I stand and watch.
Vonnie’s head goes under, an arm trailing down.
Everything is in slow motion.
She comes back up, hair tangled over her face, then sinks again. By my count she’s going down for the third time when Ralph reaches for her. She gets a stranglehold around his neck, but he grips both her hands and turns her to the side before she can pull him under. He swims with one arm, holding her head above water with the other. His arm crooks, dips in and pulls back, but slowly, like the wounded wing of a bird. I want him to swim faster.
Lord don’t let my sister die Lord don’t let my sister die Lord don’t let my sister die, repeats over and over in my head. Ever now and then I add, I am sorry for all the times I’ve been mean to her. And I mean it. I hope God believes me.
Ralph carries Vonnie to shore and lays her on her stomach, head to the side. Coughing and gagging, she retches up a mouthful of river water.
But that’s a relief.
It means she’s breathing, although a bit unevenly at first. Hands shaking, he turns her over to check her eyes. They are bloodshot, but she sees him, knows where she is. Mother rubs her with towels we’d brought and wraps her in a quilt. She starts to pink-up some. The first thing she wants is for somebody to find her inner tube.
I helped Ralph clean the trout on a log when we got back to the camp house. He chopped off their heads and split them down their bellies, stripping out the guts and throwing them downstream for the turtles and crawdads to eat. Mother dredged the fish in cornmeal and browned them in lard. Everything was packed up, so she covered the picnic table with layers of the morning newspaper and laid the fish there to drain, frying up cornbread fritters in the same skillet. We ate in silence, tearing the fish off the bones with our fingers. We never talked about what happened. I knew there were people who would have. But not us.
Grandpa and I are at the river. The sky is silvered, the sun a dull orange ball. Tree leaves tremble over stilled green water. No squirrels chatter, no crows caw, no mosquitoes buzz near my ear. There is only the silence. He lowers a young girl under the water. Her hair, long and straight, floats to the top. Her eyes are wide open, but I can’t make out her face. As Grandpa lifts her up, water flows down her body. Her arms twine above her head. She’s not a girl anymore. She’s a marble fountain.
When the water turns to blood I wake up.
I don’t tell anybody about the dream.
I never knew that dreams could come back and repeat themselves, but this one did. On those mornings, after being startled awake, my breath caught in my throat until I saw Vonnie asleep next to me, hair spread over her rumpled pillow, one pajamaed leg on top of the covers. Then I’d look for the pulse in her throat. I was nicer to her on days after the dream.
Vonnie and I never once talked about her almost drowning at the river. I don’t believe Grandma ever knew about it—Mother wouldn’t have wanted her to worry. Like everything else in my life that needed talking about, I kept the dream to myself. I remembered when I saw the man/woman at the carnival sideshow and how disturbing the images were when they came back in my mind. I had decided back then to put them out of my head by thinking about good things instead. And I did.
I decided to try that with the dream. Before I went to sleep I would think of all the good things I could dream about. It took longer, but the dream did go away. After that, there was a freedom I’d not experienced before. I had discovered a power I never knew I had. I didn’t quite know what to make of it. But I knew there were choices I could make deep inside myself. And I knew my life would be made of those choices.
Grandma saw our red dog road as a place where I might fall down and get hurt.
But I
