1

With what felt like superhuman effort, I turned and faced the bright morning sun.

The world moved beneath me while it burned me from above. My head hurt and my eyes felt sealed shut. Worst of all, my mind was a blur of memory, sensation, and sound, all of which conspired to create a glaze of hazy dread.

My entire being was a question mark, a mystery, a painful knot I could not untie.

Then the screaming started.

I recognized the whiskey-soaked drawl immediately. It hardly mattered that he’d amped it up to a place where the dial didn’t turn. It was Rufus. Why was he screaming at me like the goddamn world was on fire?

I tried to open an eye, but the glare was too bright. I closed it again, willing the confusion to stop, hoping to find something solid enough to hold onto. That was when my mind clicked back to the last thing I remembered. Nighttime, high in the mountains. Backslide Gap, the smell of afternoon rain still wet on the grass. My bare cheek scrubbed raw against the splintered wooden planks of the suspension bridge where I lay with the bottle of whiskey, daring a strong wind to tip me over into the ravine, into that long and inevitable fall. But that strong wind never came, only a soft breeze that rocked the bridge so gently, it might as well have been a lullaby, while the North Georgia night sky remained a still life framed raggedly by pines, basswoods, and oaks as old as the very dirt from which they grew.

Now—back in the brutal now—the world was moving, alive with kinetic energy and jarring possibility. There was wind for sure, and behind the constant screams from Rufus, I heard the snarl of an almighty engine, tuned for maximum menace.

“Stop,” I managed at last. To the world. To the engine. To Rufus who was still screaming at me.

Neither the world, the engine, nor Rufus stopped. Hell, Rufus didn’t even slow down. That was when something rough and wet touched my face. Goose. It had to be my dog, Goose, licking the dried whiskey from the corners of my mouth. I tried to open my eyes again. The light made me wince in pain.

Pain. Shit. I remembered the pain. It was physical. Some of it, but not the worst parts. “Let me alone,” I said. “Let me die.”

“Fuck dying,” Rufus said, or maybe I imagined he said it. It sounded like something Rufus would say. He was stubborn. The world could scramble itself into a thousand different variations, but that would never change. He was immutable, a dark mountain hollow in human form, a legend whispered on the wind come to life. He continued to scream at me, his voice nearly as loud and as rough as the engine rumbling beneath us.

My head swam, my consciousness trying to stabilize, to find a rock to hang on to in a sea of treacherous waves. It was daytime, summer in the Georgia mountains. I smelled blackberries and honeysuckle and something dead, boiling in the unrelenting heat. I was blistered, sunburned. I forced one eye open. My other seemed stuck shut. The light felt like pain, pure and hot.

Reflexively, perhaps instinctively, I reached for a bottle. Where was the whiskey? I flailed my arms around and felt nothing but hot … steel? Aluminum?

My other eye snapped open, and I saw the sky above me, sliding smoothly past the tops of the trees. It was blue and clear and I didn’t understand how it and my misery could exist in the same world, at the same time.

That was when I finally glimpsed Rufus in my peripheral vision. He was sitting near me, his mouth working hard, chewing his words, spitting them out, all of them incomprehensible. I concentrated hard and heard, “You ain’t quitting on me.” The snarl of the engine seemed to echo him, like a hype man whose voice had been shot through a cement grinder and amplified by the world’s most ineffective muffler.

“If I want to, I will,” I said, but was pretty sure my mouth didn’t move. Where was the whiskey?

And then something new. Something overpowering. Something in my gut. It jerked me to my knees and gave me my first glimpse of where I was, what was happening. I was in the back of Ronnie Thrash’s pickup truck, going fast up a mountain road, dense trees gliding past in a blur of branches and leaves and vines. I grabbed the side of the truck bed, leaned my head out over the dusty road, and vomited. I was still vomiting when the truck came to a stop beside Ghost Creek, not far from the old church my father had built. Rufus grabbed my arm. “Come on, Earl,” he said. “It’s time to get born again.”

*   *   *

Ronnie, who’d been driving the truck, helped drag me over to the same creek where Daddy had baptized me so many years ago. They stood me up and made me stare down into it.

“On my count,” Rufus said.

“What’s going on?” I asked. This time the words came out loud and clear. They tasted like bile and whiskey and maybe blood, and they tasted like defeat.

“Full immersion,” Rufus said. “We’re going to dunk your ass.”

“He’s still pretty drunk,” Ronnie said.

“Good. Maybe he’ll scream less.”

“You might drown him.”

“Might ain’t a useful word here. He might never stop drinking neither. He might just kill himself. Might, might, might. The word I need is got. As in, he’s my friend, so I got to do something. Now, are you with me or aren’t you?”

“I’m with you,” Ronnie said, and I was just sober enough to understand that even Ronnie was worried about me. That didn’t speak well for my condition, considering that Ronnie’s lifestyle could best be described as falling somewhere between a backwoods hoedown and a crime spree.

“I’m not,” I groaned, and tried to pull away. Going into the creek seemed like a terrible idea to me. Just looking at the brown water made me feel sick again. It wasn’t far from how I’d felt as a kid with Daddy’s big hands behind my head. I’d felt out of control then, subsumed by the whims of a tradition I didn’t understand. I couldn’t ignore how this moment seemed to be the final culmination of the promise of my first baptism. Religion had cut me deep, and now either I was going to drown with it or God would raise me back up again for more misery and purposes unknown.

They slung my rag doll body into the creek, and one of them—Rufus, I guessed—drove me down toward the bottom with both hands. My face slapped mud, and I tried to breathe.

Didn’t work.

Nothing worked. Nothing had ever worked.

Except Mary.

Her name lit up my brain, bringing it all back, every last detail that had led me to Backslide Gap and the suspension bridge, to the very place my daddy had predicted I’d go one day to die if I didn’t ever get right with the Lord.

Mary, goddamn it. Mary. Except that wasn’t right. Mary wasn’t the one who was damned. That was me.

She’d been the only good part of my life. Without her, I didn’t work. Without her, I sputtered and broke. Without her, moving forward felt impossible.

Water rushed into my mouth, my nose, and I was a kid again, shivering in my father’s arms, desperate for the warmth of the sun on that cold spring day.

Hands clutched my shirt, hauling me back up into the now. The hot summer air felt glorious in my lungs. Rufus turned me around until I was facing him. His eyes were savage and dull. They saw nothing and everything at once.

“This,” he said, “was the creek your daddy baptized you in. I watched him dip you under from that bank over there. I remember thinking you was somebody special even then. I thought you were the only one in these whole mountains who had it in him to eclipse your father, to eclipse this whole place. I wasn’t wrong neither. Nope.” He slammed me down in the water again. He held me long enough to make my lungs burn before pulling me up.

“Now look at you,” he said. “Crying over some damned milk you yourself spilt.”

“I’m not crying,” I said. “I’m drinking.”

“Yep,” he said. “That’s ’cause you like to drown. Well, I’m going to show you where all that whiskey is going to get you.”

He shoved me down again, this time harder than ever. The back of my head hit the muddy bottom and cut a groove between two rocks, either of which might have knocked me out if I’d hit them straight on. He held me there, increasing the pressure on my chest, in my lungs. I clawed at his wrists, his arms, but I wasn’t as strong as Rufus, and my weakness was doubled because of the oxygen I lacked. I knew he didn’t want to kill me, but I was afraid he was going to do it anyway.

My father had held me gently at first, as he stood waist deep in the frigid creek water. The banks on either side were lined with members of the congregation he’d worked so hard to build. They hung on his every word, and had become so caught in the high beams of his personality that they could no longer see what was right in front of their face. Daddy kept one hand under my head and pressed the other into the small of my back. I wiggled my bare feet in the water, trying to gain some purchase, but I was so small I couldn’t touch the bottom even in this shallow creek. Daddy spoke, saying the words he was always saying. Heavy words. Words that fell out of the sky instead of his mouth. This time the words were about me. He was praying for my life, for God to turn a watchful eye on me, to keep me safe and to never let me stray.

The hand slipped away from the small of my back, but somehow he kept me above water. I was floating, suspended somewhere between heaven and earth, between the God my father made his appeals to and the man I called Daddy. For a moment, I saw the sky in a new way, and I felt God in my heart. I believed he would take care of me, because in so many ways Daddy was God made flesh, and if Daddy believed in me, so would his father in heaven.

Then the dunk came. Daddy’s big hand covered my forehead as the other hand fell away. The bracing water beneath me, so cold in the early spring morning, vanished, and I fell.

I fell through the years of struggling to come to terms with the broken promise my life had become. I fell through the years of learning to live with myself and the memory of my father, through the years of believing he was dead and the year when, at long last, I found out he wasn’t. I fell through the more recent years of having Mary beside me, of believing I could live and die with something approaching dignity because I’d been to the mountaintop, I’d emerged whole from the first cold immersion in this creek. I’d made it, I’d survived. I’d been redeemed.

But then I fell some more, and Mary was gone. I was alone with the bottle. My days turned to nights, my mornings became eternal, the drunken moments of pleasure all too brief, forever running away from me like a memory of the past I could never quite reach.

When I finally hit the bottom, I found myself back in the moment, Rufus’s hands holding me down, baptizing me again, since the first one so many years ago clearly didn’t take. Now I lay on the bottom of the muddy creek and forgot about breathing and instead inhaled the long-lost feeling of my childhood, the feeling of wanting to be saved, to be redeemed by something or somebody. Full immersion, the water cool and silky around me. Maybe, I thought, the only way to be redeemed was to do it myself.

But how?

I couldn’t help but think if Rufus had held me down longer, I would have known. Or maybe I would have died. There is always a fine line between secret knowledge and death. But he let go, and I floated back to the surface, to the world of the living where I had no choice but to breathe again.