When Crickets Cry Page 5

  Having seen my work with at least one frog and the neighbor's Siamese cat, Charlie offered me his limp hero, and I set to work reattaching his arm and then forcing the goo back in so it would regain its shape. After I tied my final knot, I painted the stitching with superglue to seal the wound. Ugly, yes, but it worked, and Stretch survived to be a hero another day. I handed him back to Charlie, who yanked and pulled and then said, "Thanks, Stitch." The name stuck, and so did my friendship with Charlie.

  Chapter 7

  he morning of the last school day before Christmas break in third grade, I was walking past the O'Connors' house thinking about how much I wanted a Red Ryder BB gun when Charlie hopped out of the bushes and told me that Emma had had a "spell" and his folks had taken her to the hospital. I listened to him tell me what had happened, and then I said, "Charlie, I'm not going to school. I'm going to see Emma. What're you gonna do?"

  He looked back toward the house, then down the street toward school, threw his backpack into the bushes and said, "I'm with you."

  We ran all the way to the hospital and into the emergency room, where I didn't see anyone I knew. Acting like a lost kid, I told the lady at the information counter that I couldn't find my mom and sister and could she please tell me where they were. She bought it.

  Charlie and I got off the elevator on the third floor and found Emma's niom leaning against a Coca-Cola machine, crying. She walked me down to Emma's room, but Emma was secluded behind a plastic tent. She waved at me and smiled, but they wouldn't let me any closer. That's where she spent Christmas. Me too, except for Christmas morning.

  Just before the New Year they brought her home, and I had to throw rocks at her window to show her my new rifle. Emma eventually got better and returned to school a few weeks into the spring quarter, but from then on her walk was slower, her breathing different, and her parents treated her like their good china.

  One afternoon when the three of us walked in from school, Emma went upstairs to get some sleep, and her mom pulled me aside and handed me a pill container. "Emma's got to take these. They're like vitamins, and ..." She paused. "They're real expensive, but ... Emma's got to have them." She gently put her hand below my chin, and I looked up. Her eyes were tired and red, and the bags beneath them were almost as big as her eyes. "Honey, every day at lunch, you make sure Emma takes her pill."

  I wrapped my fingers around the container and nodded.

  "You got to promise me."

  "Yes ma'am, I promise."

  Each day at lunchtime, I'd open the container and hand her one. Emma would run her fingers across her lips like she was zipping her mouth shut, cross her arms, and shake her head.

  I'd wait patiently.

  Between gritted teeth and zipped lips she'd say, "That's a horse pill. Makes me gag every time I try to swallow it."

  To make it easier, I'd cut it in half with my Swiss Army knife and then ask the lady behind the cafeteria line for some chocolate pudding or soft yogurt. It was easier to get down that way.

  She'd look at me, and I'd whisper, "Emma, I promised."

  She'd put the pill in her mouth, take a bite of pudding, and mutter, "Yeah, but I didn't." Threatening not to swallow, she'd say, "Take back your promise."

  I shook my head.

  "Take it back, Reese."

  "I can't."

  "Can't or won't?"

  "Both."

  Emma's eyes would burn red and she'd swallow. She stopped speaking to me for almost a month, except for our lunchtime fights. From third grade on, I turned into the pill patrol, and Emma hated me for it.

  Or at least I thought so.

  Chapter 8

  t was after I found the key that I started having the dream. It faded in, imprinted me, and has been there ever since. Like all dreams, mine are odd and don't always make perfect sense. This one doesn't have a crisp beginning and ending, but it is consistent and shows up every time I close my eyes.

  I am standing in an eighteenth-century home. Stone walls, wood floors, fireplace, and on the table before me lies somebody, maybe the owner of the home, who has been mortally wounded in battle and is gasping for breath. He is in horrible pain, dying a slow and terrible death. I think I've been in the battle too, but not as a soldier. And probably not a medic. Maybe a flag bearer, but I can't really say why I think that other than that I'm draped in a flag.

  In my hands is a pitcher of water. The pitcher is cracked and chipped, and when I hold it upright it leaks like a sieve. Water is pouring everywhere. I haven't got enough fingers to plug all the holes, so the floor is a puddle of his blood and my water. But when I turn the pitcher over and pour, it stops leaking. And though I pour it completely over, it never runs out of water. I stand over this person I've never met and pour water over his body. Despite my pouring, I cannot determine what is wrong with him. I'm frantically trying to find out where he is wounded, but he shows no visible signs. All I know is that when I pour, he can breathe and seems to be getting better. But the more I pour, the heavier the pitcher grows, and pretty soon, despite the feeling that I am using both my hands and all my strength, I am unable to hold it any longer. Exhausted, I collapse to the table where the wasted water leaks, spills around me, and the person on the table begins screaming and dying once again.

  Every night it is the same, and just before the dying man takes his last gasp of air, I wake up, drenched, cramped, suffering from muscle spasms in my hands and arms, thirsty beyond belief, my ears ringing with his screams and wrapped in the fear that he is dying from something very simple. Something everyone should have seen by now, but no one has. Something I can't see, because I too am blind.

  Chapter 9

  t the far end of Emma's backyard ran a creek about ten feet wide, usually only ankle-deep, though it varied with the rain, and flowing with a gentle current over sand and rounded baseball-sized rocks and marble-sized pebbles. The creek collected in the mountains, wound through the low-lying hills, and then passed Emma's house on its way to a lake. At times we'd see small trout, even caught a few with a butterfly net, but mostly the creek formed the barrier of her backyard.

  One of our favorite activities was building sailboats out of board and newspaper and then setting them afloat, and afire, down the creek. Charlie would cut several flat boards, the belly of the ship, and then we'd drill and tap wooden dowels into the front and center of the boat to serve as our masts. We'd empty the trash can looking for the morning paper and then take an entire section and fold it several times, giving us a sail that was about twenty sheets thick, making it sturdy and self-holding. We'd cut a slit at the top and bottom, slide it down the mast, and then douse the bottom of the boat with kerosene. We'd light a small candle, place it in the stern of the boat, and set it afloat in the creek. The ship would gently roll downstream while we followed in our bare feet. A hundred feet downstream the candle would burn down, light the kerosene, and ignite the entire ship. We built and burned entire fleets as the years went by.

  I WAS WAITING IN THE KITCHEN WHILE EMMA DRESSED upstairs. Her mom stood over a griddle, busily flipping pancakes. I sipped a glass of orange juice, trying to get my nerve up. I had rehearsed my question enough times that I thought I could get it all out at once. Finally I said, "Miss Nadine?"

  "Yes dear?"

  "Can I ask you something?"

  "Sure."

  "Well, why is Emma always taking those pills?"

  Her mom put down the spatula, teared up, grabbed a tissue off the kitchen counter, and sat down next to me at the breakfast table. She wiped her nose, looking for the words. "Emma has a hole in her heart."

  That struck me as incredibly wrong, so I thought about it for a minute.

  "Is that why she sleeps more than other kids? And why she doesn't ever play any sports with the rest of us?"

  Emma's mom nodded.

  LEARNING HAD ALWAYS COME EASILY FOR ME, ESPECIALLY when it came to books. I could read most anything once, even just skim it, and if you asked me to regurgitate that same informat
ion a year later, I could give it back almost word for word. But what I knew in my head stayed up there, swirling about the other ten zillion things I had retained. That knowledge informed my actions, what I did and how I did it.

  What Emma knew filtered from her head down into her heart and informed who she was-what I have since come to call the Infinite Migration. If my wonderings about life were scientific, bent toward examination and physical discovery, Emma's all leaned toward matters of the heart. While I could understand and explain the physics behind a rainbow, Emma saw the colors. When it came to life, I saw each piece and how they all fit together, and Emma saw the image on the face of the puzzle. And every now and then, she'd walk me through the door to her world and show it to me.

  I THOUGHT FOR A MINUTE. "CAN'T THE DOCTORS JUST SEW IT

  shut?"

  Her mom shook her head. "They don't know how. It's ... it's complicated."

  I looked up the stairs, listened to Emma's light footsteps as she scurried about her room, and then back at her mother. Somewhere in that moment, thunder clapped in my head, and life became real simple. Singular in purpose and in vision.

  "Miss Nadine," I said, nodding. "I can fix it. I mean, I can fix Emma's heart."

  Her mom wiped the tears off her face and patted me on the knee. She waited a long minute and then said, "Son, if I ever met a kid who could, it's you. You have gifts I've never seen in other people. So ..." She closed her eyes a long minute, then opened them on me. "You do that, son. You do that, you hear?"

  Nobody needed to tell me that Emma was special. Even at eight she had a rare ability to express on the outside, whether through word or action, what her heart felt on the inside. While I got all bottled up and couldn't get out my mouth what my heart felt, Emma had no such difficulty.

  That afternoon, beneath the maple tree in her front yard, while the sun hung dusk on the fencerows, Emma grabbed me by the hand, pulled me close, and hid us beneath the shadow of its branches. She sniffled, checked the windows over her shoulders, and behind her eyes I saw something that had not been there that morning. Years later I would recognize it as the seeds of hope.

  She checked the windows again and said, "Heard you talking to Mama today."

  I nodded with my head while my heart noticed something different. Emma placed her hand along my cheek, leaned closer, and kissed me on the corner of my mouth. And when she did, the veil lifted.

  From then on, making sure she took her pill became something I did out of protection and not obedience.

  Chapter 10

  slipped through Ingles to pick up a few groceries, then drove west on Highway 76 past the civic center, library, elementary school, and the hospital. I needed to stop in, deliver something other than a teddy bear, and pick up my heart-rate monitor, but that would wait. I drove past The Well, Davis Stipes's bar, and took in a deep whiff from the grill, but I didn't have time for a cheeseburger.

  Davis serves the coldest beer and the best cheeseburgers in the state of Georgia. His menu is printed on the wall and lacks any frills. From the "Slight Murmur" with its single patty and slim trimmings to the "Persistent Palpitation" with its three cheeses and sauteed onions to the "Carotid Clotter" with its two patties and chili and jalapeiio slices to the "Cardiac Arrest" with its onepound patty wrapped in smoked bacon and covered with three types of cheese to the heart stopping "Quadruple Bypass" with its four succulent patties just dripping with saturated fatty acids and Davis's secret sauce to the "Transplant," which is a large platter mounded high with all of the above, Davis's burgers are nothing short of a heart attack on a plate. And I eat one every Friday night whether I need to or not.

  Around the corner from The Well is a double ess called Harley's Curve that has taken more than its fair share of prisoners. About seven years ago I was driving through on my way back to Atlanta-intent on buying a big Harley motorcycle just after a guy on a Japanese crotch-rocket had failed to navigate both turns. He was faceup in the street with blood oozing out his nose and ears. I knelt and attempted CPR, but halfway through the first chest compression I realized his entire chest cavity was nothing but mush, and the only purpose his helmet served was to keep his brains from spilling onto the asphalt. I never bought the Harley.

  I passed The Well, zigzagged through Harley's Curve, and headed home, where I was sure that Charlie had given up on me. Home was cold when I arrived, and Charlie was nowhere to be found, but I could hear him across the lake blowing on his harmonica. He was getting pretty tuned up, so I knew it wouldn't be long before he started tapping his foot and really breathing. From bluegrass to classical, he knows hundreds of songs, and he can transition seamlessly through all of them.

  LAKE BURTON IS MY BACKYARD. RICH WITH HISTORY, BURTON was once a prospering town, but they flooded it to generate hydroelectric power for the rest of the state. The locals didn't care. They took the money, moved their stills, and watched the water level rise and cover the sidewalks and the stones in the cemeteries.

  In the early 1800s, after the departure of the Cherokee Indians, Burton grew into a thriving gold-rush town situated at the intersection of the Tallulah River and Moccasin Creek. Relatively untouched by the Civil War, the town became one link in the chain of the great railway explosion of the 1880s and 1890s. By the turn of the century, Rabun and Habersham counties held the largest tourist attraction in the country, second only to Niagara Falls. The Tallulah Gorge, called the "Niagara of the South," attracted wealthy tourists as well as Georgia Power.

  The sheer rock walls that fell for hundreds of feet made a perfect place to construct a series of dams to generate hydroelectric power. In 1917, Georgia Railway and Electric Company bought up the town of Burton-which by then boasted three general stores. They built a dam and began flooding the surrounding land on December 22, 1919. The eighty-some-odd homeowners, whose homes had just been flooded, hopped into their canoes and runabouts and watched the lake rise up beneath them. When the lake topped out, the tips of the sixty-foot-tall pines were some thirty to forty feet below the surface of the water, which was as clear as green ice. In a sense, Burton became a flowing cemetery-a lot had been buried up there. Tucked in nooks and crannies all around the lake are more than a dozen cemeteries, some with stones dating back to the 1700s.

  At its highest point, the cliffs at Tallulah Gorge drop twelve hundred feet to the bottom. Twice men have ventured across the chasm. Professor Leon made it across on July 24, 1886, and Karl Wallenda retraced his steps eighty-four years later on July 18, 1970. Once the dams were built, the engineers squeezed the mighty Tallulah down to a trickle. Old men in nightly bathroom runs now pee more liquid than she flows at this point. But all that backed-up water has to go somewhere, so thanks to that trickle, the lake has a surface area of more than twenty-seven hundred acres and sixty-two miles of shoreline. Today Rabun County is home to five hydroelectric lakes, consuming about 2 percent of the county's 377 square miles.

  Burton didn't really get famous until Elliot Wiggington wrote his Foxfire books, and then Jon Voight climbed out of the gorge in the movie Deliverance, and the state of Georgia constructed Highway 400, so romantically depicted in the many chases of the Burt Reynolds classic, Smokey and the Bandit.

  Today Burton is the weekend vacation spot for the millionaires from Atlanta and their kids-every one of whom owns a jet Ski. Rising up out of the oak, pine, hemlock, and mountain laurel, most every inch of shoreline is covered with somebody's dream second home. When it's not being run over by the jet Ski crowd, the lake is home to migrating mallards, buffleheads, mergansers, and loons. Come springtime, cardinals, finch, and mockingbirds sport their mating colors and nest all around the lake. Local year round residents are the hummingbird, osprey, bald eagle, kingfisher, and a few great blue and green herons. And twice a year, the monarch butterfly migrates through.

  In my front yard-which could be my backyard, depending on your point of view-I feed deer, turkeys, squirrels, chipmunks, raccoons, rabbits, and a black bear I've named George, because he's cu
rious. And I am told that, thanks to the Lake Burton Hatchery, the lake is full of rainbow, brown, and brook trout. All told, there are some forty-two species of fish in these waters-including bluegill, red-breasted sunfish, largemouth bass, and yellow perch-although I've never caught a single one despite hundred of hours of trying and Charlie's tireless encouragement.

  Oh, I can see them. I can see them just fine, but getting them to take my bait is another matter entirely. Most folks, including Charlie, use crickets. Which is the heart of the problem. I won't fish with crickets. But despite my inabilities and eccentricities, Charlie still asks me to tie his knots because I'm pretty good at it. I've had a lot of practice with knots.

  The roads around Burton are a plethora of Norman Rockwell's Americana-apple orchards, dilapidated gristmills, craft stores, comb honey, smoked bacon, Coca-Cola, the Marlboro man, and cold beer at every turn. Vintage cars painted in rust dot the pastures that flow with creeks, cows, and horses. All summer long, hay bales rolled into one-ton mounds sit big as shacks, covered in white plastic like melted snowmen until the winter cold sheds their coat and feeds them to the livestock. And farmers, those whose lives are connected to the lake yet uninterested in it, sit atop green or red tractors beneath dusty brimmed hats, roll cigarettes, and pull at the earth for one more year like a pig suckling the hind teat.

  And God? He's in these hills because we are. No matter how far you run, you can't shake Him. Maybe Davis and I know that best, but Emma knew it first, and Saint Augustine said it best: You stir man to take pleasure in praising You, because You have made us for Yourself, and our heart is restless until it rests in You.

  Chapter 11

  t was clear, growing cooler late one summer evening. I could smell the rain coming. Dark clouds first, followed by the strong, moist winds that rattled the magnolias and then the overwhelming aroma of a coming rain. At first, light drops fell softly, then larger drops smacked as they intersected the handsized, waxy magnolia leaves on their way to earth. Emma and I were sitting on the second-story porch outside my bedroom door, taking turns looking through the telescope pointed out into the Milky Way before the clouds blocked our view.