The next afternoon Sasha works the ferry, Lou is aboard, and he sits beside her at the helm, the river breeze rustling in his hair. Luckily, he hasn’t brought any of his moonshine along this time; even the smell of that stuff might be enough to tump them right over. “Well, I’m going to get my suit taken in for old Russ’s memorial,” Lou tells her sadly. “I’ve been on that Atkins diet, and all my clothes are just falling off me.”
Sasha’s hand is loose on the wheel. The river is drowsy and compliant for once. “Don’t lose too much, Lou.” She checks him over. “There’s not enough of you to go around as it is.” That summons a quick whip of laughter. He has a handsome, dark brown face, the ponderous forehead of a scholar incongruously combined with a Peter Pan smile. Lou’s probably an older man, maybe pushing even sixty-five, but he looks younger.
Lou’s curiosity and repair shop, a town institution for forty years, is all strangeness and clutter, teetering piles of rusting treasures displayed according to his own private design. Everything inside is theoretically for sale, but Lou makes better money with his canny repair work. Mostly, folks go in with things that need fixing, and though Lou always charges fair for his work, the things he repairs aren’t likely to break again.
“I just don’t know what I’m going to do without Russ to talk to all the time.” Lou wipes absently at his face. “Me and this town just keep getting smaller. Next thing you know the Finch trees will be going fallow just like all the rest.”
“I’ll miss him too.” Sasha lays a hand on his shoulder. “But we aren’t all gone, are we?”
“No.” Lou’s voice is warm and melancholy. “No indeed.”
“And there’s still Jason Finch to take over for Russ at Honeysuckle House,” Sasha points out.
Lou waves his hand in dismissal. “That boy’s changed. He’s got some kind of fire in his belly that means he can’t stay. Even if he wants to.” Sasha has no answer to that, and Lou continues. “Anyway, it’s those orphaned trees that are the problem.” His hand passes over and under his eye, weaving the story between them. “Something’s rotten down there in the roots, and it moves fast. The nuts stop falling, and instead there are hungry children. Children of the trees with heartwood eyes. Voices like the wind.” He sounds hoarse for a moment, air through a screen door.
Sasha scoffs, trying to laugh off the chill in her gut. “What are you talking about, Lou?”
“I’ve told you before, honey. The trees bear them,” he murmurs, staring out over the water now. “More and more every year.” He glances at her shocked expression, then away, weary. “I’ve been doing all I can, but y’all never seem to notice what’s broken around here.”
She puts her hand over his for a moment. She can’t quite grasp what he’s saying, but a thread of guilt pulls taut in her gut. “We Clearwaters can get a little absorbed in our own problems. I’m sorry, Lou.”
When he looks at her again, frustration sparks in his eyes. “Sorry enough to say so but not enough to do more, I guess.”
Sasha isn’t sure how to respond, and she’s still fumbling when they dock on the other side of the river. She offers Lou her hand as he hoists himself up onto the ramp, but he merely gives it a dusty pat on his way by.
She sighs, putting her hand over his for a moment. “I know.”
They make dock on the other side of the river, and Sasha offers Lou her hand as he hoists himself up onto the ramp. Never one to need much, he merely gives it a dusty pat on his way by. The other passengers follow him off—first the young woman, her toddler on one arm and a bucket of cleaning supplies on the other, then a snooty First Presbyterian lady who used to work in the school office. It was a light trip, and Sasha is about to clip the rope back in place—But oh, she must have forgotten this last passenger, a wizened old casino-lover shuffling off toward Tunica. And following them, a pock-faced teenager with a guitar case. They don’t take her hand or even meet her eye as they move up onto the ramp and diffuse away like mist. It irks her a bit. She pulls the rope taut again—
The last man aboard is slow, his body bent with fatigue as he creeps down from somewhere at the back. He is deathly pale under his wool cap, his cheeks desperately hollowed. Not someone Sasha recognizes from town. She checks the empty parking lot, but Lou is long gone. Their eyes lock as her last passenger stops in front of her, much too close, lipless mouth parting—Sasha had automatically closed the gate again. Frozen deep inside, she pulls the rope back yet again and, out of habit only, offers him her hand.
The hand that makes a hard and fast grab for hers is blued and veiny, cold as if it has just been submerged in an ice bucket, or in the deepest currents of the river itself. There is a dark brownish stain at the cuff of the hand that snatches at hers, at the flesh right above her digital watch, which has been on the fritz, just four flickering zeros. He leans into her weight as her gaze flashes down from those eyes, those two burned holes in a blanket, as Russ used to say sometimes. She’d never known what he meant by that.
The pale stare does not leave her. The eyes are fixed on her even as he shambles up the step. The weight on her arm increases, increases, becomes untenable, like her arm will snap from bearing this man up. She grits her teeth, shoves the cry back down her throat and bears it and bears it and—
He is gone, finally, and now she’s alone again. Antsy, heart pounding, Sasha paces the length of the riverboat. She checks every seat, every corner. She climbs to the second level and bends low to glance into storage compartments at moldy life preservers. Empty. All empty.
There is no one to return with her across the river. She shoves off and gets the paddleboard moving again, anxious energy clotting in her arms and legs. The river is still mirror-smooth, a golden-brown sheet in the afternoon light. Sasha spins the wheel to depart with nervous, jerking turns, and spares only one glance back.
A familiar figure stands on the far bank behind her, watching, auburn hair snapping in a wind Sasha cannot feel. She, in her scribbled sneakers and oversized Zeppelin shirt, is somehow more solid, more real to Sasha than any of those who just left the boat. Sasha ditches the wheel to hurry back and stare out over the growing distance between them. She hasn’t seen her in ages and ages. Where has she been?
“Autumn!” Sasha shouts, waving in huge arcs over her head. She feels better, the horror of the moments before fading into a dream at the sight of her. “Hey, Autumn! I’ll loop around and get you, okay? Just wait there.”
Autumn doesn’t seem to hear. And she doesn’t wait, either. By the time Sasha eases that heavy old boat around and chugs back, she’s already gone.
As a teenager, Lil liked falling asleep outside, under the shade of tall trees. When she hit her teenage years—and her teenage years hit back—when the inside of the house felt too tame and soft for her sharp edges, Lil would spread out a blanket under the trees, where she was finally able to breathe. She’d feel silk nighttime breezes, hear the coo of the far-off train. She’d entertain fleeting dreams of catching one. But she never would. Because curled against the roots of those trees, it was as if she grew roots of her own. She felt right within herself among the trees. It wasn’t nice. The hard limbs bruised her. Bugs bit at the lines of her socks; sometimes nighttime things skittered just beyond the fences. And yet, she was safe. She never overslept there; the trees dropped pecans on her head if she was going to be late for school.
She falls asleep under the trees again today. She doesn’t mean to, but she must have. Because she wakes up to a change in the sunlight, near the fence. Lil’s neck aches from the angle and she eases up. Her caning pole is nearby, laid neatly against the tree she slept under.
It’s only when she stands up that she feels a tether at her ankle. Lil trips, catches herself on her knee and twists around. The fence at the border of her property is still broken in one place, a stone’s throw from the front gate. That’s right; she’d come over expecting to fix it and gotten sidetracked, then sleepy. And under the break, a thin line of kudzu has encroached while Lil was dozing. Creeping past the broken post, it has slithered into the grass and threaded around her ankle.
Lil kicks once, twice—she pulls at its tendons and the vine shreds under her hands. As soon as she’s free, she attacks it, fighting its weak hold on the ground. She rips up young, tender roots, and grassy dirt clods come with it. Even the hammer she’d brought has been partially covered. She untangles the handle. It’s just a lone scout testing a border, easy to stamp out. She tosses the leash of leaves back over the fence and all the little scattered bits with it.
Lil scans the ground. How had it come so quickly? How had she not seen it until it was over the border?
Her breathing isn’t quite steady. Her hands feel useless and shaky, and they shouldn’t. She won. It’s fine now.
She’s only a little tired.
“I’m so tired,” Mom murmured many times over endless nights, stretched on the couch with one daughter under each arm, her body smelling of sweat and earth. “I don’t think I can even make it up the stairs today…”
But Lil’s the one who can’t quite get herself up and moving now. This harvest feels like it may never end. She’s still staring when the Clearwater truck trundles up the road. For a stupid second, Lil mistakes the shadowy figure driving it for Mom, recognizing the cut of her jaw, the familiar curl of feathery hair. The next moment, she remembers. Lil waves, and Sasha pulls to a dusty stop, reaches over the dash, and pops the passenger door open. She tucks her camera back behind the seat to make room.
It’s too late in the day to fix the fence now anyway. She’ll do it first thing in the morning. Lil jogs toward her, swings herself into the cab, and flops down in the passenger seat.
“You okay?” Sasha laughs, brushing dirt from Lil’s arm. “Did round two with Jason involve mud wrestling, or what?” She and Sasha have been running counter to each other for days, catching each other up in brief sentences exchanged halfway up or down the stairs.
“I haven’t seen him again.” Lil fiddles the dial on the radio. Still nothing. “Just took a nap.” Sasha has brought the smell of the river with her, and wind in her hair. “How was the ferry?”
Sasha stares out the windshield, her fingertips running over the skin of her other arm. “Autumn hasn’t been home in forever, has she?”
It’s been a while since Lil thought about her. “No. Not since before the road closed. Main Street isn’t the same with the bakery shut.” Sasha always had a soft way she talked about Autumn, a lilt when she says her name, like it means hope. “I figured you were in touch with her. Why?”
“Right.” Sasha frowns, kneading at her forehead. “We may have been in touch a bit.” Had she called? There were no saved messages from Autumn on the answering machine. “Not since the road…right; she didn’t even make it for our birthday. Was that—before the road?”
“It must have been.” Lil remembers past birthdays so clearly, Autumn in her apron from the bakery near town square, embroidered honeysuckle vines on the faded blue denim. The cake, always a towering masterpiece under the trees.
“What about her little place above the bakery?” Sasha wonders. “Just empty? Can’t imagine anyone would rent it from her these days.” It’s getting hot in the truck, like the sun is suddenly roasting them through the roof.
“Why do you ask?” Lil watches thoughts flicker across Sasha’s face. Sasha hasn’t mentioned Autumn in a long time. But it’s easy enough to conjure an image of those two class cutters in their high school days, swinging their legs off the bleachers, Sasha’s head in Autumn’s lap as they cackle their way through some half-remembered in-joke.
They pull up beside the house and Sasha gives an airy, deflecting shrug. “I thought I saw her on the river today.”
“I wish she’d stayed around,” Lil replies. “Her baking would bring some stragglers back to town for sure.”
Sasha cuts the engine and hands Lil the keys. “I wonder if she knows about Russ.” Something in her seems to brighten. “Maybe she’ll come for the service.”
If anything draws friends, enemies, and lost loves home, it’s a funeral.