A Summer Wind
By Josh Covington
A SUMMER WIND. Copyright ©2009 by Josh Covington. All rights reserved. United States of America. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.
Smashwords Edition
A Summer Wind
If I didn’t know better, I’d say a bomb went off here. Bits of trash and scraps of wood lay scattered. A remote control from a television long gone lies cast off to the side, now no more than a battered chunk of plastic. A toilet ripped from the floor lies on its end. A mattress sits upended against the lone standing wall. A piece of our neighbor’s front porch, twisted and broken, leans against a pile of what is now junk. Nails wrenched from their boards are scattered along the sandy ground like chickenfeed.
“You see that?” my wife asks, pointing.
I look. Our neighbor’s home has been pulled from its foundation by the tide, spun, and dropped. It now sits in the gravel road, nearly intact, an incongruous remnant of what was just two days ago.
I lower my head against the wind and begin to sift through the rubble.
◊
My parents bought our summer house on the Rappahannock River in the summer of 1970. I was eight years old.
I don’t remember much from that summer, just the feeling of walking through that house for the first time, how it was cool and damp inside and smelled of mildew and dirty concrete. I remember my mother cleaning, pulling down the cobwebs that seemed to fill every corner and stretch across the ceiling, scrubbing the floors with Pine Sol until the whole place stunk of disinfectant. I remember my father, sweat streaming down his face as he lay upside down under the kitchen sink, trying to get a monkey wrench around those old pipes. I remember the sound of the water licking up along the beach and crashing into the pylons of the pier. I remember the silky feeling of the sand beneath my feet.
Pop worked two jobs when I was a kid to buy the place, filling candy bar vending machines across town at dawn every morning, carrying mail until dark. He’d come home in the evenings gruff and drained, his sandy blonde hair sagging down across his eyes, a limp in his step, toss his coat onto the rack and settle down at the table with a long, hard sigh. Dinner would be there waiting for him. We’d sit and eat, waiting for Pop to break the silence. If he said nothing then nothing was said. There was no speaking unless spoken to.
He seemed taller then, before the arthritis began to eat away at his joints, with strong slim shoulders and skin baked a deep bronze from the sun. A Pall Mall always rested between his fingers or his lips. His hazel eyes, nearly glowing against his dark skin, seemed to forever hold a fuzzy, tired look. The only time I ever saw that look brighten was when he looked out over that water. It was as if the peacefulness of the tiny waves reflected back into his eyes.
But what I remember most about Pop was the feeling of safety that he brought to a room, like nothing bad could ever happen, that there was nothing to worry about when he was there. It’s hard to describe now but yet at the time, it was undeniable.
◊
The high whine of a chainsaw drones on in the distance, slicing through the eerie silence of the afternoon. I stand on the beach, looking out toward the far shore that sits a mile in the distance. The air is thick and humid, like a wool blanket that drapes over us, blurring the distant tree line, turning it to a smudge of green and yellow. To my right, the mouth of the river opens wide where it dumps into the Chesapeake Bay.
“Ty, come down from there,” I turn and call to my son. He has climbed atop the pile of rubble. I’m afraid there will be an avalanche of waterlogged timber and glass. “Ty!” I yell louder this time.
“Don’t make me come up there and get you, Ty,” Campbell shouts from my side. The wind whips her chestnut hair across her face and makes her eyes water.
Campbell and I both know it’s an empty threat, that neither of us has the strength to drag him down. Ty listens nonetheless and staggers down toward us, nearly tripping over a television antenna that now rests splayed across the ground.
Upriver, the sun hangs in the distance, high above the horizon. The water, now smooth and serene, laps up along the beach in insignificant ripples, as if to mock me.
◊
Our first boat was a flat bottomed john with two bench seats and a rusty ten horsepower motor. A chunk of plywood covered a two inch hole in the stern where water would seep through, slowly filling the back end and pulling the belly of the boat lower and lower into the river. It always got us home, though. Except for the one time it almost didn’t.
It was a warm day that second summer. Mom and Pop sat on opposite ends of the boat, fishing off to the East, their backs to the setting sun. I rested on the cold steel of the boat’s bottom, bailing away the trickling flow of water with an old Cool Whip container. The boat rocked and dipped in time to the waves, making my head bob with it and chaffing my neck where the canvas of my life preserver met bare skin.
“Was thinking I’d fry up some chicken for dinner,” Mom said as she fished. “Use up that bird Mrs. Garrett sent us with.”
“Having fish,” said Pop.
“Honey we haven’t caught a thing. And look, your son is starting to burn.” I looked down at my arms. They’d begun to take on a light pink hue I hadn’t noticed moments ago.
“We’re having fish, damn it.” He took a drag from his cigarette and flipped it into the river. It sizzled a moment and began to drift away.
We fished on through the afternoon as my skin baked from light pink to red. I started to doze. Suddenly, after how long I have no idea, Pop yanked back on his pole hard enough to rock the boat nearly to the water’s edge, startling me awake.
“Damn catfish,” he said, beginning to bring it in. To Pop, every fish was a damn something. Damn trout. Damn bluefish. Goddamn stiff-backed perch. “A runner though.”
I watched as Pop let the catfish take his line up and down the river, letting out a bit of line when the drag started to sing, winding it back in when the fish charged toward him. I got the feeling Pop was playing it up a little, making the fish out to be more than it was, just for show. He feigned struggle a moment or two more then, with a last spin of the reel and one hard yank, Pop flipped the fish from the water. He spun on his seat, whipping the pole around and slapping me in the side of the face with the slimy, writhing gray thing.
“Take him off for me, kid.”
I stared at the fish in its glassy eye, watching its mouth gulp at the air. It flipped once on the line and dropped from the hook, splashing into the inch of water that rested in the boat’s bottom.
Just then, thunder clapped above our heads like a cannon.
Forgetting the catfish a moment, I looked up to see a sky dark and sinister. A storm had slid down from behind us, sneaking up from the western horizon as we faced the opposite way. It was only then that I noticed the wind had stiffened and the usually calm surf had begun to roll and break, forming whitecaps across the surface.
Mom poked Pop in the knee with the tip of her pole. “Better head back,” she said.
Pop squinted up at the clouds and flipped his line back into the water. “Got time.”
We sat there a few moments more as the storm bore down on us, bobbing atop the growing waves, the sky darkening to a deep, penetrating gray that seemed to stretch all the way to the bay. Then a second burst of thunder, heavy and steadfast, exploded above our heads.
“Lloyd. Now,” she said.
So Pop reeled in, started the boat, and pointed us toward land. That ten horsepower motor chugged through the chop, pushing us toward the beach, inching us closer and closer toward shore. Above us, a bolt of lightning crisscrossed the blackened heavens, stretching across the clouds like jagged glass.
Pop glanced upward and as we plodded along, pushing the motor to the limit, weaving between the wooden posts that peppered the shore side. Back then, the river was full of those posts, none thicker than the handle of a baseball bat, markers for crab pots, oyster beds, and fishing holes. Looking out across the horizon was like watching a flooded and far off game of pick-up sticks.
Then, just when it seemed we’d beat the storm to shore after all, the boat lurched and the motor sputtered. We stopped.
Stopped dead.
“Goddamn!” Pop yelled above the wail of the wind. He grabbed the motor and tilted it toward him, pulling the propeller out of the water. “Hit one of those damn stobs. Water was so high I didn’t see it.” He looked closer. “Goddamn pin’s sheered clean off. Come here and hold this for me, kid.”
I scrambled toward him and grabbed the head of the motor, leaning back against it with all of my weight to keep it at a 45 degree angle. The river was raging by then, tossing us up and down on swells that seemed to crest above my head.
“Hold her steady.” Pop bent at the waist, dangling upside-down over the stern to put himself eye-level with the propeller. A wave came down across the back of his head, drenching him. “Goddamn,” I heard him whisper.
“Can you fix it?” I yelled.
“Just hold her steady, kid. Don’t let it slip and smash my fingers.”
Pop always had a knack for fixing what was broken but to this day, I don’t know what he did to that motor as he hung there, inches above the rolling river that afternoon. But after what could have been no more than two minutes, he popped back up and settled into his seat.
“Let’s give her a yank,” he said, pull cord in hand. I nodded and scurried back to my spot in the bottom of the boat and grabbed onto each side.
One pull. Nothing. The wind howled in response.
Two pulls. A shudder, nothing more. Thunder crashed again above us.
Three pulls. The motor started, smooth and slick.
We continued on. Walls of water arced along the river’s surface, splashing down across the bow, drenching us. With each moment that we chugged along, the shore drew closer but the wind, that relentless wind, continued to batter, seeming to push us two feet back for every foot closer we came to the beach.
When we finally did reach shore, Pop slid us right up onto the sand. Even above the wind and surf, I caught the long sigh that left his lungs.
It was only then that the rain began to fall, as if a faucet somewhere had suddenly opened. I remember standing there on the beach, the three of us trembling and laughing at the same time, as the rain fell in buckets, thunder splintered overhead, and the wind bent the trees, folding them nearly in half.
I remember it just like it was yesterday.
◊
I grab a chunk of soggy drywall and toss it to the side like a Frisbee. A strand of pink insulation flies through the air with it, becoming caught in the breeze.
“Anything worth saving?” Campell asks.
I shake my head and kick a pile of cracked timber that at one time had held up these walls. Again I’m amazed by the sheer power of the storm. “Not looking like it.”
Campbell says nothing, turns, and walks toward the water’s edge. She stands there, sneakered toes just on the rim of the wet sand and arms folded across her chest, staring out across the water. I watch her a moment before turning in the opposite direction, my back to the water now, to look off toward the far horizon.
My throat feels tight as tears well in my eyes.
◊
By the third or fourth summer, the john boat gave way to an honest to God fiberglass fishing boat with padded seats and an anchor tucked away in the bow. Pop bought it from Joe Woods in the place right across from ours for $400. I never saw him so happy as when he pushed that boat on its trailer into our yard.
The first morning Pop slid that boat into the water was damp and chilly. I remember it being early, so early that a foggy mist still clung to the top of the water. Pop fired that boat up and opened the throttle, sending the three of us shooting downriver and pushing that chill down deep into my bones. I pulled my arms under my lifejacket and shivered as we skimmed across the waves. Familiar landmarks flew past.
“Joe said there’s an old oyster bed over here,” Pop said, killing the engine. We were a mile from anywhere I recognized. “Drop that anchor, kid. Let’s see if he’s right.” He pulled a Pall Mall from his pocket and lit it, shielding the flame from the morning breeze. The tip glowed orange as he pulled the smoke into his lungs.
I scurried to the bow, the air feeling warmer and heavier than it had a moment ago, pulled the anchor from under the seat, and tossed it overboard. It hit the water with a gurgle and plunged to the bottom.
Pop tossed his baited hook into the water, jigged it twice, and let out a long, hard sigh. “Ain’t no fish here. Not that I should be surprised with you two lying in bed all goddamned day. Don’t even know why I’m wasting my time.”
According to Pop we’d always just missed the best fishing or were at the very least, a half hour late. It was inevitable, no matter how early we got on the water.
“Let’s pull up, move over yonder,” he said. “That’s where they’re gonna be. Just toward that point.”
So I pulled the anchor from the bottom, my arms straining against the weight, the rope digging into my palms. When I got it to the top, two chunks of black, sandy mud clung to each fluke. I dipped the anchor into the water twice, watching the mud scatter with the current as Pop fired up the boat. We puttered about a hundred yards toward shore before he cut it again.
“Drop it here, kid. This is the damn spot.”
Pop flipped his line back into the water, jigged it twice just like before, and muttered something under his breath. Thin tendrils of smoke leaked from the corners of his mouth and seeped from each nostril. “Damn,” he said.
I had my hands on the anchor rope before he gave the order. We moved another hundred yards and the process repeated. Over and over we did this until my arms ached and my hands burned from the stiff rope. Meanwhile, the chill evaporated from the air and the sun began to pound down on us.
Then, after what must have been a dozen moves, Pop got a bite.
“There she is,” he yelled as he set the hook. “Damn bluefish.”
Pop cranked the fish in, his hand a blur as he spun the reel. I grabbed my own rod and dropped my line in. No sooner had it hit the bottom did I get a bite so strong it nearly jerked the rod from my hands. For two hours it was like that, pulling fish in as fast as we could bait the hooks.
Pop was pretty full of himself that night, sitting at the dinner table, head high, back straight. He had been too obstinate to give up that morning and to be honest, he couldn’t have been prouder about it. I think that was probably Pop in a nutshell.
That boat sat in our garage for a long time before this storm rolled through. I hadn’t even put it in the water in years. Pop was the only one stubborn enough to find those fishing holes, and with him gone, I just hadn’t known where to start.
◊
“Who’s this, Dad?” Ty asks. He is holding what looks like a framed black and white picture.
I walk over and take the frame from his hand. It’s an old photograph, so old it looks to be tinted brown in the sunlight. Water has seeped in behind the glass, but I recognize it immediately.
“That’s your granddaddy and his parents,” I say, running my fingertips across a crack that snakes down the middle of the glass. “I haven’t seen this in twenty years. Where’d you find it?”
Ty points to an overturned bureau. The drawers are spilled across the ground and a half dozen framed pictures like the one in my hand lay strewn about. I squat and begin the sort through them as my heart pounds.
“Come over here, babe,” I say to Campbell. My voice cracks. “Check these out.”
My wife and son watch over my shoulder as I sift through the pile. Behind us, the sun sits perched just above the river’s surface, as if threatening to slip below the horizon at any moment and drench my family in darkness.
◊
The day Pop tried to teach me to water ski was the day I almost lost my left hand.
It was hot and dry that afternoon, with the sun baking the sand until it burned our bare feet. I remember being excited and nervous as I bobbed there in my life vest just below the waves, ski tips pointed toward the sky. I had seen skiers gliding across the river dozens of times, dashing back and forth across the horizon. I imagined what it would be like to be them, feeling the spray in my face, the rush of the wind as I cut through it. I gripped the handle ever tighter.
“It’ll be just like somebody pulling you upright from a chair,” Pop had told me that morning. “Skis in front of you, let the boat do the work. Once you’re up, the rest is cake.”
I’d nodded, wondering at the time if anything could be simpler. Now, I wasn’t so confident.
“Ready?” Mom asked from the boat. She sat beside Pop, facing toward the back so she could watch me while he drove.
“Hit it!” I shouted.
Pop gunned it. As the boat shot away from me, I watched the loops of the rope unfurl, disappearing one by one as the boat took up the slack. I braced and tightened my grip, ready to feel the rope yank me from the water when it pulled taut.
It was then that I noticed the loop around my wrist. I stared at it a moment, the drone of the boat suddenly little more than a background noise. Something about it didn’t seem right. My brain clamored to figure out what it was, desperate for the answer as the slack vanished.
Then before I could react, the rope snapped tight with a twang, cinching the loop around my wrist in a knot. The force jerked me sideways, pulling me facedown into the river and dragging me forward. I screamed and gulped brackish water as I torpedoed forward, being dragged by my bare wrist. My skis tore from my feet. I twisted and reached forward with my other hand, fighting the drag of the flowing water, and tried in vain free myself. Panic attacked me. The pain was sudden and immense.
Then, as simply as it had tightened, the rope slipped free, rolling me onto my back as it zipped off into the distance. I lay there a moment on top of the boat’s wake, limp and gasping for breath, the clouds above me spinning in my eyes. From somewhere far off I heard someone calling my name. I twisted again, planted my feet on the muddy ground and wrenched myself upright. I howled as my hand dropped below the waves and the water enveloped my raw skin. It felt as if it were on fire.
When I looked up, Mom and Pop were nearly to me. Pop cut the motor and let the boat drift. Mom’s face was draped with worry.
“You alright, kid? What happened?” Pop asked, flicking his cigarette into the water. Specs of foamy water spotted his glasses. He pulled them off and began to wipe them on his shirt.
“Yeah, I guess. I don’t know. I think I broke my wrist.” The urge to cry was nearly overwhelming. I fought against it. If there was one thing I hated, it was crying in front of Pop.
Pop reached down and grabbed my wrist, turned it over once, twice, then let it dip back into the water. I winced.
“Cowboy up, kid,” he said. “You’re alright. It ain't broken, just a little tore up. You wanna go again?”
“Jesus no, I don’t want to go again. That thing almost ripped my hand off.” My voice was shaky and I could feel my pulse beating in my injured wrist.
“Aw you’re full of prunes.” This was another one of Pop’s expressions. I was never sure what being packed with dried fruit had to do with anything. “Come on. Almost dinner time anyway.”
I waded back to shore and took a seat on a jetty as Pop backed his pickup to the water’s edge and pulled the boat from the river. With my good hand wrapped around my aching wrist, I watched the water drip from the hull and pour from the crevices of the trailer as he pulled it around to the boathouse. I kept waiting for Pop to ask for my help, but he never did.
My wrist swelled to the size of a softball that night but Pop was right, it wasn’t broken. Mom told me later that he felt terrible about what happened, like it was somehow his fault. If that was true though, you’d have never known. Pop carried on just as he always had, never saying anything more to me about it.
That was nearly thirty years ago. If you look closely, you can still see the halo of a scar around my left wrist. I haven’t skied since.
◊
My hands shake as I go through the pictures. My parents on their wedding day. Pop seated on his tractor back home, me on his lap. Pop and me building a deck for a neighbor. The three of us huddled together in winter coats just after sunrise on Easter morning. Campbell sitting in the setting sunlight, looking down at a newborn Ty in her arms.
“I’ve never seen most of these,” Campbell says over my shoulder.
“Been years since I have,” I say. “I knew they were here but I could never find them. Even tried looking last year. They were right here, Ty?”
“Yep. I tripped on this one. Right there.”
“I figured Mom must have tucked them away, but I just didn’t know where. I could have sworn I dug through this bureau three or four times. I must have been looking right at them and never knew it.”
I hunker down on a chunk of wet two-by-four with my wife and son and begin passing around these pictures I had been sure were lost. Each one has a story to go along with it, each one its own unique history.
◊
Nights at the river always seemed carefree and endless, with a crisp breeze that blew from the bay to drain away the heat that had built up during the afternoon. Pop and I spent many of those nights together on the end of the pier, fishing pole or crab line in hand. Often, we sat in the thick darkness without saying a word to each other. Often, but not always.
One night in particular stands out in my head.
It was late in the season, when the days are steeped with humidity and the nights are often even worse. Pop and I walked together along the beach toward the pier. He carried a wicker bushel basket and a net tethered to an eight foot wooden pole. I held an old camping lantern that doused us both in an eerie yellow glow. The sand, like the surface of a frying pan hours ago, now chilled my feet as it filtered between my toes.
We walked along the pier in silence. At the end, I set the lantern on a bench, sat, and tilted my neck to stare up at the stars. The darkness of the night was so dense that it made them appear to be more than single points of light against a black sky, but instead a smear of brightness that stretched from one horizon to another in a sweeping arc. As I stared upward, a streak of light, as if someone had taken a pen and slashed a line across the sky in fading ink, shot across the heavens.
“Pop! Shooting star!”
Pop dropped the bushel basket to the deck and tossed the net beside it. “Yeah?”
“Right over our heads!”
He took a cursory glance up at the stars. “Meteor showers all week. Read about it in the paper.”
Pop grabbed the lantern, knelt, and held it just above the water. The halo of light shimmered atop the waves, giving the river a green, hazy shine. It was an easy way to catch a few dozen crabs back then. They’d see the light from the bottom and swim upward toward the surface.
Pop waited. After a moment, a crab appeared, followed by another. In one smooth motion, Pop scooped them both into his net, turned, and flipped them over his shoulder into the bushel basket. They settled there with the scuttle of claws and shell.
“Couple of nice ones.”
“Yeah,” I said, my head still tilted toward the sky. Just then, another stripe of light shot through the blackness, using the smear of stars as a backdrop. “There’s another one!”
Pop kept his eyes on the greenish water. “Your Mom’s gonna be pissed unless I come back with at least a couple of dozen. What’s been with her lately? She’s been biting my head off left and right.”
“I dunno, Pop.” I had only heard half of what he’d said. My attention remained on the meteor shower.
“It’s like I can’t do anything right. Goddamn! Missed him.” He was silent a moment, then: “You think she’s worried about you going away to college?”
“Little early to be thinking about that.”
Zip went Pop’s net into the river as he brought up another. He flipped it into the basket with the others. “Not really.”
“Feels a long ways off to me. Two years. That’s like forever.”
“You get a little older you’ll realize two years ain’t nothing, kid.” He speared the net into the water again, pulling up a monster that spanned six inches tip to tip. He turned to flip the crab into the basket but instead of dropping in with the others, it held onto the cotton net just long enough to throw off Pop’s timing. The crab bounced on the edge and dropped to the dock in a flutter of flippers and legs. “Goddamn,” said, getting up.
The crab scurried sideways toward the shadows of the pier’s edge. Pop stepped on the crown of its shell, pinning it down, and grabbed it behind the flipper. The crustacean froze in Pop’s grip, claws outstretched and bubbles spilling from its alien-looking mouth.
“Can’t get you when you grab ‘em back there,” he said, tossing the crab into the basket.
“So you think she’s worried, huh?” The sky above me was alive with streaks of light now, one every five seconds or so. I couldn’t take my eyes off of them.
“Probably. Told her she shouldn’t be though.”
“Why’s that?”
Pop tossed the net onto the dock where it dropped with a wooden clatter. He sat down beside me and looked upward at the stars. I could smell stale cigarette smoke on him. “Just…nothing to worry about,” he said after a moment. “Told her we’ve got a good kid here.”
I let a smile leak out to the corners of my lips. It may not seem like much, but that was high praise from my Pop. The two of us sat on that bench, the humid air rippling our hair, for nearly an hour that night, keeping our eyes to the sky as it came alive in front of us. Neither of us said another word.
It’s been fifteen years since the heart attack took him. Sometimes I still find myself staring up at the stars thinking about him, hoping I’ll see a streak of light slice through the sky like we saw together that night. I wonder if he’s up there somewhere, still keeping an eye on things. I wonder what he thinks of me.
I wonder what he’d say to me now if he could.
◊
I bundle the pictures together, wrap them in an old blanket, and lay them in the backseat of the car. I don’t even hear Ty as he comes up behind me.
“We taking those?” he asks.
“I think we should.”
“Nothing else?”
I look out across the debris. For a moment I wonder what Pop would do if he were here. I shake the thought away and smile at my son. “Nope, I think this is it, kid,” I say.
The river is as calm as a sheet of glass as Campbell, Ty, and I pile into the car. As we pull away, the sun sets in our rearview mirror, sending streaks of orange, red, and purple across the sky. The colors reflect atop the water’s surface like a mirror, making the sunset feel as though it stretches off toward infinity, as if the horizon is not the divider of water and sky, but instead a place where memories and dreams come together.
A place where they can live forever.
© Josh Covington 2009
www.JoshCovington.com