Dead center of December I heard word the law had found my aunt. I don’t know how they did it, but they did. She was still abroad, spending my dead uncle’s money and doing it in style. She was on her way to France and had plans that she meant to keep, orphaned nephew or not. She wouldn’t be home for another three months.
She reminded me of my mother in that respect. Her own interests superseded those of anyone else, no matter the circumstances. It was like she was saying, “So, his father drowned and Danny barely survived, and his mother, my sister, has run off like a frightened deer? That’s some tough stuff there, but I got plans to see the Eiffel Tower and then go on down to the South of France and sample the croissants, which I hear are simply divine. And you know, maybe his mother will show up before I get home. It could happen.”
I wasn’t bothered by this. I was glad to stay longer with the Candles family. I knew them better than my aunt, as my memory of our one meeting was a thin recollection.
Christmastime, the Candleses gave me a jacket they called a hunting coat along with the first three John Carter of Mars books, some socks, underwear, and a pocketknife with all manner of devices on it. It was like a Swiss Army knife, but not quite as expensive. I thought it might have been bought used from a pawnshop, but I was glad to have it. The three books bent me happily out of shape for the next few days.
During the Christmas holidays, school closed and the weather was a disaster. We all stayed at home, and at night Millie read us poetry. She was partial to Robert Frost but also read Robert Service, the bard of the Yukon, a poet Mr. Candles liked. Me too. Mine and Mr. Candles’s favorite was “The Shooting of Dan McGrew.” Ronnie liked the poetry of Langston Hughes.
After a few days of us boxing in the garage, reading poetry at night, watching a bit of television, Mr. Candles looked out the window one late afternoon, said, “There’s been a crack in the weather. Let’s go fishing.”
Me and Ronnie, bored from being inside, practically jumped to put on our fishing clothes and grab our gear from the garage. I wore my new coat because it was the warmest thing I had.
Mr. Candles had an aluminum boat that was on a trailer in the garage. We fastened the trailer to the hitch of his pickup and away we went, stopping off briefly at a bait shop to buy some worms.
When we got to the lake, I was glad I had the coat I had been given, along with some gloves and a wool hat with earmuffs Mr. Candles loaned me. Ronnie was snuggled up good too; in a wool pullover she had struggled to pull over her hair.
It was damn frosty even though the sun was shining and no wind was blowing. The sky was clear. The trees around the lake were bright with icicles that dangled like glass decorations on fancy chandeliers.
We launched the boat off the trailer rack and into the water. In the sunlight, the water was silvery and blinding to the eyes. It looked warm because of the sun, but when some of it splashed on me as I was leaping into the boat, it was icy.
The fishing boat had a small motor and there were paddles in the bottom. Mr. Candles ignored the paddles and motored us out on the lake. We were down well beyond the bridge, but I could see it in the distance, looking like a strand of tangled string from where we were.
I pointed at the bridge, said, “Would it be all right to go over there?”
Ronnie and Mr. Candles looked at me like I’d just asked if we might taste the worms we had brought for bait.
“I don’t know, son. I thought we were even farther down. I meant for us to be.”
“It isn’t making me feel better or worse not going back there. Can we?”
“I suppose so,” Mr. Candles said.
“You’re sure?” Ronnie said.
“I’m sure.”
Mr. Candles wrinkled his face, worked the boat around, geared up the motor, and set us off for the bridge. I watched as it grew in size and looked less like a long and tangled length of string and more like what it was, a bridge of cables, crumbling boards, and rusty rails and bolts, a wide section split open where, just a few months past, our Buick had broken through.
As we motored under the bridge, we could see the shadow on the water that the cables and slats and rails made. The water was calm except where the boat disturbed it, and that seemed to be calming quickly as Mr. Candles shut the engine off. I tried to look through the water and see the town below, but the water remained silvery from the sunlight and the glare hurt my eyes.
Mr. Candles, knowing what I had in mind, said, “You can’t always see what’s down there. Legend is you can. And sometimes you can. Or parts of it. The higher roofs. But mostly you can’t. Some shadows mainly. When the water’s a bit low, there’s a place over there”—he pointed—“where the old high school use to be, and when it’s low enough, you can step out of your boat and appear to be walking on water, but it’s the roof of the high school. I did it once.”
“I’ve done it,” Ronnie said.
“Is it low enough now?”
“No,” Mr. Candles said. “Has to be a dry time of year. Usually dead summer it gets a little low, and once it does, you can do it. If it’s real low, and it sometimes happens, the roofs of the high school and other buildings stick up out of the water.
“Under the bridge here was Main Street. Main Street usually has good fishing. Ronnie caught an eighty-five-pound mud cat. It damn near straightened out the hook. They say they don’t grow that big. Biggest ones I’d seen up until then was thirty-five pounds, but I’d heard of fifty-pounders. Still, this one was ancient and bigger than any I’d ever heard tell of. I wouldn’t have believed it, but that’s what it weighed when they put it on the scales at the feed store. Got it home, we weighed it twice on the garage scale, had friends over to see and photograph it. Even with that, most wouldn’t believe us. It was an old man of the river. No telling how long it had lived before it washed into the lake and made its home there. We kept it hosed down and in a tub of water for a while, its tail flipping up over the edge of the tub. Then we took it back to the lake and let it go.”
“I enjoyed watching it swim away,” Ronnie said. “Could see it partly on the surface for a moment, see how long it was, and then it dipped and was gone. It was like magic. It visited our home, got weighed, and was sent back into the water. It was like a doctor’s visit without a prescription.”
A shadow moved across the water. For a moment, I thought a great bird had passed before the face of the sun, but when I glanced up, there was an abnormally big man up there, young, white, and ragged-looking. From where we sat, the sun seemed to be resting on his shoulders.
He looked down at us for a long time as if considering hawking up a wad of snot and spitting it onto us, but all he did was look. He had a flashlight in his hand even though night was hours away.
I waved. After a long delay, he waved back, and then he moved on.
“Winston Remark,” Mr. Candles said when the man was gone. We could hear the bridge squeaking, see it swaying, and I could see through gaps in the slats Winston’s feet stepping from one board to the next. His shadow moved on the water along with that of the bridge.
“That poor young man,” Mr. Candles said. “He comes out here and wanders and looks at the water. Even at night, wandering around with that flashlight. No one knows what he’s looking for, but I got a guess. His past. He’s a bit head-addled. I’ve seen him quite a few times. His tongue and his mind kind of ramble about. Might be mute. Just kind of makes noise.”
“Where does he live?” I said.
“Good question, but I haven’t an answer. Me and him and even you, Danny, have something in common.”
Mr. Candles was interrupted by Ronnie saying, “Oh, I got one.” She pulled a sun perch in, unhooked it. Mr. Candles dipped a bucket we had brought into the cold water and she put the fish in it.
Then I caught one, and Ronnie another, and then Mr. Candles, and then me. They began to come as fast as we could put worms on our hooks and catch them and put them in the water bucket. Pretty soon the bucket thrashed with fish.
As the day continued, the fish hit hard and for a long time, and then they didn’t hit at all. By that point, the bucket was nearly full, and Mr. Candles took out the smaller fish and eased them over the side.
“Can only eat so many, and for me, fish three days in a row is one day too many. We can keep some in the freezer for a while, though.”
“I could eat them every day,” Ronnie said.
“I bet you could at that,” Mr. Candles said. “Ronnie has always liked fish, liked water, swimming. She’s like a seal.”
“Her being a swimmer was my good luck,” I said.
“It was indeed,” Mr. Candles said.
I suppose we could have moved on when the sun went down and it grew quite cold, but we didn’t. We night fished, even though now we weren’t catching anything. There was a scimitar moon. It was bright even though it was thin, and you could see its shape on the water. Water so still, I felt I could step out of the boat and walk across it.
“You were saying about Winston,” I said. “That we had things in common.”
Quite a bit of time had passed since Mr. Candles had mentioned it and been interrupted by our run of fish, but I hadn’t lost interest.
“Oh, I forgot,” Mr. Candles said. “I said me and Winston had something in common, and in a slightly different way, so do you, Danny.
“Down where the lake thins, and the spillway, fed by the river, leaks water through the new dam, that was the colored section of town. We were under the shadow of the old dam during the time the town was segregated. White people lived on the other side of this bridge. Town was in the middle and there were houses on both sides of it, the colored section and the white. Those who lived on the border between white and colored, they were what you might call the elevated colored people. That was your mother’s family, Ronnie. Your mother, she’s what saved me, how I got what real education I ever got. Rest of it I learned from Shakespeare and the Bible.”
“We say black now, or Afro-American,” Ronnie said.
“Oh. Well, it changes all the time, the names we get called. Long as it’s a good name and not meant to be a bad one, I’m okay with it. Black, then. Afro-American sounds like some kind of desert.”
Mr. Candles paused as if studying the moonlight on the water, the dark line of trees on both sides of the bank, then the white barrier of what they called the new dam, way off at the far end of the lake.
“The old dam was built to keep most of the water out. The new dam is designed to keep the lake from flooding broader. That way it doesn’t spread too far, overflow everything. The spillway lets in more than the old one did, though, because there’s no town to protect from the branch off the Angelina River. Back then, there was just enough water to fill a pleasant little creek that ran through the center of town.”
I remembered Dad talking about that, the creek.
“In the summer, in our section of town, close to the water, we got mosquitoes and blackflies in abundance. There were colored businesses on either side of the creek, though not many. We had a picture show and a couple of small stores, a car lot and so on.
“Town was built during Prohibition, and there were secret places to drink in both our part of town and the white side. I knew black men who had hauled liquor into the white and black sections, made extra money. Hauled it out of town to customers all over East Texas and likely beyond. Anyplace that was dry of alcohol and wanted to get wet, the wet was provided. There were vast tunnels under the town—suppose there still are. They were built by rich men and used for shipping liquor about so as to make them richer. They were the ancestors of the city council folks who run everything now. Come right down to it, they made all the money.
“Most everyone else worked at the sawmill, which was up the hill beyond those trees, close to the rails, next to the junkyard. Not far from that was a colored cemetery—black cemetery.
“You had a place to work, junk your car, and be buried, all within a rock’s throw of one another. Later, when Prohibition was repealed, the sawmill gained more workers and I guess the old tunnels were forgotten, maybe filled up with water.
“Where we lived in town, it was down in a kind of earthen decline, like a bowl, deeper than the rest of town, and the noise from the trains would travel through gaps in the woods and make our house rumble. We could hear the big sawmill blade too, chewing trees up, turning them into lumber, railroad ties and such. The air smelled like turpentine.
“Junkyard wasn’t quite as high on the rise as the mill. It was full of old cars. White man who owned it was said to be the meanest man that ever learned to walk. Said he treated his son bad and let others treat the kid worse. Boy mostly roamed the woods with a flashlight.”
“Winston,” I said.
“That’s right. What we have in common is we both lived in the old town or around it. He mostly grew up in his father’s wrecking yard up there beyond the trees, near the top of the hill, back when it was still a working business. No idea about his mother, but whoever she was, she wasn’t in the picture.”
Mr. Candles dipped silently into his memory for a moment.
“That black cemetery. My mother and father and brothers are buried up there. Other relatives. People I know. I don’t visit, I’m sorry to say.
“One day, walking home from work at the mill, my father’s heart burst. Exploded like a bomb. Mama said he worked himself to death. I was the man of the family suddenly. Had my mother and four younger brothers to take care of, so what there was for me was the sawmill. It was full-time, god-awful work. Hot and nasty, backbreaking and dangerous. It wasn’t just the air that smelled like turpentine—you did too. That odor got in your hair and clothes. It took a lot of lye soap to get rid of the smell, and then next day, you were up there again.
“Saw a white man get his sleeve caught up in the big saw one day. Jerked him into the blade and chewed him up. Like Humpty-Dumpty, he couldn’t be put back together again. The saw room was red with his blood. Days after, we kept coming across pieces of him. I found his ear. Terrible stuff. Sorry, kids.”
“Keep talking, Daddy.”
“Sawmill began work early and went on late. I’d start walking home about dark, sometimes just after. We didn’t have a car. Closest thing we had to that was watching one drive by.
“There were nights I’d go home and couldn’t sleep, because I felt I was wasting my life away. Wasn’t in school anymore, didn’t have any real future. Being a colored fellow, I wasn’t never even going to make leadman at the mill.
“When I couldn’t sleep, even tired as I was, I’d get up and wander outside. I’d walk the streets. There weren’t any streetlights in our section. Somehow the all-white city council felt colored folks did just fine in darkness, like we were a bunch of bats. Also thought we did just fine with holes in the road, faulty sewer and water lines, electric wires that sometimes fed us electricity and sometimes didn’t. But you can be damn sure we paid for the services if we got them or didn’t. Complain too loud, you didn’t get anything at all. I remember not being able to pay all the bills, and the lights getting cut off, and us doing our evenings by candles and lantern. Wasn’t so bad, but it wasn’t so good neither.
“Won’t kid you, I was angry. Angry at my life. I was young and had dreams and knew that I’d have to forget them or dress them down from a tux and bow tie to short pants and sandals.”
Ronnie laughed at that. “One thing I don’t see you doing is wearing short pants and sandals.”
“We’re talking what your mom would call a metaphor.”
“So, you walked,” Ronnie said.
“Lights on the white side of town would pull me like some kind of bug that wanted to flitter around a porch light, and when I got close to that side, I could hear music, see cars rumbling along, people walking about with all the confidence pale skin had given them.
“Later, I started dating your mother. She lived right on the border between colored and white town. Her house was painted bread-slice white, and there was a golden light on a high pole not twenty feet from her yard. At night that light would fall across her house and yard, splicing it in light and shadow.
“In time, I knew her and her family and came there to hear her father read poetry, her mother play boogie-woogie on the piano, watch your mama sing and dance in the living room, and I sang and danced with her. Her grandparents lived with them, and they knew more gospel songs than were in the hymnals, and some of them were so inspiring they made you jump up and dance.
“But what I’m telling you now was a little before that. Back then, I’d walk at night to that dividing line, and some nights I would walk up to it and step over. I thought maybe I’d feel different in the lighter part of town, and in a way, I did. I got so I started coming out late at night with a couple cartons of eggs in a tote bag that was tucked up under my arm, bold as you please. I’d come into white town with those eggs, and in the dead middle of the night, I’d plaster parked cars and toss them at houses.”
“Daddy!” Ronnie said.
“I was angry, darling. Angry for being black, and I was angry at them for being white. I was angry about every damn thing, and a lot of it with good reason, some of it with little to no reason at all. Not saying what I did was right, and I wouldn’t want you to do such a thing, but that’s what I did, and that’s the truth of it. And Danny, no offense, son, but back then I hated those white people in their white houses on their brightly lit streets. Hated them bad, God forgive me. I felt cheated. Robbed. Not like I was dealt a card and lost due to the luck of the draw, but like I wasn’t ever given any cards.
“One late night I was on my way with my eggs, knowing full well I was going to get caught eventually, and I passed this house in the colored section. It wasn’t far from the white line but wasn’t as close as Millie’s house. But you could damn sure see the streetlights glowing from the white section.
“I’m strolling by this house, and the garage door was open next to the house, and it was filled with light. I could hear a steady thumping as I came nearer, and then I could see this muscular, dark-skinned man with close-cut gray hair in there. Had leather gloves on, was hitting this big bag hanging from a rattling chain. Way he hit, how hard he hit, fascinated me. I stopped and stared at him, watched him float around that bag, light as an angel’s ghost, slamming it with his fists.
“He looked up and saw me standing there in my patched clothes and ragged shoes with cardboard soles I’d cut out and placed inside, my bag of eggs under my arm, and it was like he was seeing right through me.
“He said, ‘What you doing there, boy?’
“‘Standing here.’
“‘I can see that. Come on over here.’
“I didn’t know this man, not really, but I recognized him. Seen him around, here and there, and he had a powerful presence. I go to the garage, and he says, ‘I see you pass by sometimes. Got an idea that bag under your arm isn’t full of hymnals. I sit on my porch in the dark and drink a beer and see you come by, and I think you’re up to no good. Doing whatever you’re doing in white town, that’s going to lead to something bad. I’m suggesting to you, kindly, that you don’t do it. I don’t want to read about you in the morning papers. Give me your name, so at least if your name comes up, I know who I’m reading about.’
“I told him my name, and he said, ‘Come on up in here.’
“He took off his gloves, using his teeth to untie the strings on one, sticking the glove under his arm and pulling his hand out of it, then untying the other glove with his free hand. He handed me the gloves.
“I sat my package of eggs aside and took the gloves. ‘Let me help you put those on,’ he said.
“The gloves were sweaty, but I liked the way they felt. He said for me to hit the bag a little. I don’t know why, but I did. I hit it a few times, and he said, ‘Naw. That ain’t right.’ And he started showing me how to punch.
“His name was James Turner. He was retired from the railroad, one of those jobs where you actually got a pension. He liked to sleep days and stay up nights. Had once been a professional boxer, and good, too, or so he said, and I believed it. But he killed another black man for insulting and knocking down his mother, and he went to prison. Killed that man with a hard right cross.
“First night I trained a couple hours with him, and we fried up about half them eggs, ate them until we near popped. His house was full of photos of children grown up and a wife long dead. I came to realize that Mr. Turner was an older man than he seemed.
“I dragged out of there early morning, went on back home long enough to drink a cup of coffee with my sweet mama and say hello to my younger brothers, then went on to work. I felt fine, though. I had found something that meant something to me. Never threw another egg, and I tossed the meanness out of me on that bag. I spent a lot of time with Mr. Turner, and he taught me more than boxing. Despite prison time, he was a good man. I wasn’t so angry anymore, and I began to feel sorry for white folks. They were what they were taught.
“Then there came talk of the lake, about how we had to move, and many did. But some of us, white folks too, we thought if someone stayed in Long Lincoln, they couldn’t release the water. Wouldn’t release it.
“A peculiar thing was that the whites and the colored found themselves meeting together at the town hall, which was in the white part of town, of course. Started out sitting in different sections, and then we weren’t. We had a common concern, and we were all underdogs right then. But we also talked about fishing and families, this and that, and we had pretty much the same going on in our lives. We weren’t so different.
“Met your mother at one of those meetings. Fell for her so hard, it was like I broke a leg. Don’t know if she felt the same about me right away, but in time I won her over. One night, as part of our courting, she invited me to a singing over in Garrison, at a church there. She had a car. That was a big thing, being colored—black—and having a car. I walked to her house, dressed in as good as I could find, and we went over there.
“Now, Ronnie, I haven’t told you this part, just hinted at it, and your mama, she won’t talk about it. That’s why we go quiet when you bring up about your grandparents, our old life. Because night it happened, we were singing in a church in Garrison. It was a little black church that was hot as sin and loud with our voices. We were thrilled to be there. We felt special.
“While we were there, the bigwigs didn’t come in and drag the stay-at-homes in Long Lincoln out by the heels. There were no more warnings. Not a word in the last two weeks, and because of that and all the petitions we’d filed, we thought maybe we’d won something. But you don’t beat the moneyman.
“While we sang, back home the dam was blown, and the water roared along, carrying concrete and all manner of stuff. Water wiped the sad little buildings and houses of colored town off the earth as easy as you could take your hand and wipe checkers off a board. Just took it all the hell away, swept away my loving mother, brothers, washed over Millie’s parents, and stole Mr. Turner like a mean thief in the night. Drowned most everyone, all those people who had held out, that had refused to move.
“By the time we got back from Garrison, our souls full of heavenly blessings, the moon lay on the black water where Long Lincoln had been. Water was high on the road, and had we been driving faster, we’d have gone right into it. Those heavenly blessings faded.”
Mr. Candles got a catch in his voice, a bit of hesitation, before he said, “So you see, Danny. We have something in common with this lake. It took our families. They found the bodies of some of the people that drowned on the edges of the lake, like my mother, and she was buried in that cemetery on the hill up there”—he pointed toward the woods—“next to my father, who, like my grandparents, had been lying and waiting for her in his grave for years. Not a one of my brothers were ever found. I guess they are now part of the earth and food for the trees or covered up deep by mud and silt. Mr. Turner was never found, and no one went into the deep water to look for them back then. The fat cats said it was an accident. They said they thought everyone was gone on the night they let loose the water, but they knew, sure as birds sing and fish swim, that they were not. So many of the stubborn drowned and so many of them were poor that though some could afford suits or funeral dresses, a lot of them had to be buried in blue shrouds supplied by the colored funeral home that had already set up shop in New Long Lincoln. They were made of cheap cloth and looked like choir robes. But what money those people had, black and white, was lost in that flood, and some whole families were gone and had to depend on charity to be put in the ground. It was a terrible night. Winston and his father were still up on the hill, but the people who lived in the town had fed their business, and now the town was gone. Winston was pretty much let loose. What do you, me, and Winston all have in common in one way or another? Moon Lake. Winston because when the town was gone, his father’s business was gone, and his father went away. Winston was left on his own like a wild dog.”
“Don’t you hate it?” Ronnie said.
“The lake? Water is water. Why should I hate water? Family members of those who drowned in the town, like me and your mama, we had lawsuits back then, but in time we didn’t hear no more about it. Our lawyer, a good Negro lawyer, followed by a good white one both died in a short time, and the whole thing fell silent.
“The city council saw to that. The new Long Lincoln had been built, and most people from the old town were already living there, and now those who had survived the flood moved there too. It was done.”
Almost on cue, as Mr. Candles wrapped up his story, dark clouds rolled in and wiped out the moon. The lake and everything around it became dreadful dark. Then I saw a light bobbing on the far bank near the base of the bridge. Ronnie and Mr. Candles saw it too.
“That’ll be Winston again,” Mr. Candles said.
I watched the light. It went into the deeper woods and finally it moved away. I realized the light I had seen that night on the lakeshore, recovering from my plunge, had been him.
“We better head in,” Mr. Candles said.
We pulled in our lines, and as Mr. Candles was cranking the motor, tugging on the pull cord, a flash of lightning smashed across the sky, and in the light, I could see the lake and it was suddenly rolling.
Thunder grumbled, and then the bottom of the sky fell out and rain came down in a gush, drenching us and splashing in the bottom of the boat. The water under the boat swelled and heaved us about.