The Falls of the Wyona Read online

  Vince tensed beside me. I heard him say in a tiny voice, “Glen—”

  Glen understood without being told (and that’s the way it had to happen) that some high deed was necessary for full acceptance of an outlander to the Order of the Falls. None of us had thought of a handstand. I liked this kid better and better. Glen hung suspended between the river and the empty air. The dragonfly landing on his shoulder could send him down. Then he just stopped. He folded down and stood on his feet again. The stream ran almost uninterrupted for a wide space as it leapt over the cliff, but a few big rocks studded the edge of it. Glen made for one of these. He leapt from one to the other. He maneuvered himself around to find accommodation in the current, and he sat down.

  Vince dropped with a loud splash into the river. The weight of the water hindered his effort to run, so he looked a little stupid thrashing through it with his elbows up. Tilden and I laughed before we realized how serious he was. He got to Glen, reached out and pulled him by his shirt. He said, “Enough.”

  Glen smiled a big smile. He knew whatever the game was, he had won. He was in. We were the best gang in town, and he was in.

  Vince’s face was white, the skin under his sideburns pouring sweat. He waded back without Glen like something in the river embarrassed him.

  Glen and Tilden stayed out in the middle of the river talking. Once Tilden got in he didn’t want to get out. They were out there talking, play-pushing one another to see if they could get the other to fall into the stream. They were laughing like little boys. I suppose that’s what we were, but the Falls made you feel different. Vince came up close to me, the way he did when he wanted to tell something that was just between us.

  “Arden?”

  “Yeah?”

  “I feel funny.”

  “What do you mean funny? You sick?”

  “I don’t know. It feels—funny.”

  “What? Your stomach?”

  “I guess so.”

  “Vertigo, maybe, you were so close to the edge—”

  I wasn’t a doctor, so I waited a minute to see if he had anything else to say, then I said, “He did great.”

  “Who did?”

  “Glen.”

  “Yeah.”

  Vince was holding his stomach, but I didn’t really think that’s what hurt him. The boy had slammed down a whole bottle of cherry pop on the way up and belched out the gas in a magnificent elk-bellow just before we hit the river. I didn’t think there was anything wrong with his stomach.

  Then he said, “I felt . . . something . . .”

  “What?”

  “I’ve never been afraid before. Not like that.”

  “Afraid of what?”

  “If Glen . . .”

  Vince was shaking a little. I pushed up hard against him so he’d have my warmth to calm him. I didn’t want to say what I was thinking, which was “good.” Vince could be a little harsh. He could put a distance between himself and the weakness of others. Cold, he was, sometimes. It hurt Tilden more than it did me. It hurt kids who weren’t one of us, because they didn’t know it was just normal and he wasn’t mad at them. It was good if concern for someone made him sick this one time.

  “Anyway, he made it.”

  I agreed, “Yes he did. Flying colors, I’d say.”

  Vince would bunch up a fist and hold the fist against your rib cage when he was talking seriously about something. I don’t think he knew he did it. The touch was so light that you didn’t always know it was happening. Vince was worked up this time, and I could feel the fist there, warm and urgent. I never moved away. As long as the fist was there, it meant the issue had not been settled.

  “Glen—” he said.

  “Glen what?”

  He might have said it. He might have said it right then and been done with it, but I felt his fist drop away from my side. Vince looked away from me and I looked where he was looking. It was too bright where Glen sat. I had to look away.

  Changing my glance upstream, pondering all these things in my heart, I saw movement in the river that did not look like the river. The light made the water gold-brown, and the thing in the river was gold-brown, so it took a moment before I saw a dog, a golden Lab, struggling in the current. I was already moving toward the lip of the pool when I started shouting, “Glen! Tilden!”

  The dog was a good swimmer, but the current was too fast, the rocks too slippery. She would muscle herself to the side and try to climb the bank, but her foothold would betray her and back she’d splash into the river. I was thinking if only she had hands, already aware beneath the panic that the hands she needed were mine. I hit the river’s edge. I jumped. Whack I went on the wet stone. A blaze of shock went up my ankles and was gone. I was all right. The dog came on at an amazing rate. You could see in her eyes that she had run out of ideas . . . except me . . . she saw me and began paddling wildly, clawing the slick rocks underneath when she could, trying to get to the spot where I could grab her. I knelt and reached my hands out over the river. I got as deep in as I dared, what with the red goo on the rocks like oil and the weight of the river pouring over the lip murderous and irresistible. I leaned over as far as I could. If she was heavier than I thought, I’d be plunging with her into the emerald gorge. Whack! I felt her. I grabbed. The dog relaxed into my arms, but I wasn’t strong enough to pull her out. She whimpered and licked my face, as if saying, “I know this isn’t going to work, but thanks for trying.”

  I decided it was going to work. I slipped a few inches farther, but dug in my heels. I hooked my hands behind her front legs, pulling hard. She was not coming out of the water, but neither was she going over the Falls. I didn’t know how long I could hold on, or when I’d get another idea. Then Tilden came beside me, pulling on the poor dog too. I shifted my grip so he pulled her right leg and I her left. The three of us were enough. The Lab came out of the water and onto the white shingle, on top of us as we fell flat upon our backs. Glen cheered wildly from the wall. The dog was trying to lick our faces off.

  The Lab was generous with her thank yous, but she had a life which she needed to take up again, just like everybody else. At last she waggled her way back into the forest, heading for town, stopping every now and then to look over her shoulder and bark one more thanks. We watched her go.

  Tilden said, “You know, it could be that we were brought here at this day and hour so we could fetch that puppy from the river.”

  Glen said, “It’s also possible that the pup was sent to us. A test, you know. She had the look about her. Like she was in control the whole time, waiting to see what we would do.”

  Vinny said nothing. It wasn’t like him.

  The sun moved and the glancing of it off the Falls changed to glory. You had to hold your hand in front of your eyes, or look away. From the air or from some point downstream it must have seemed a snow-white conflagration. Gulls from saltwater far away lived at the Falls, circling white upon white all day so far as we could tell. We threw shadows to the east as tall as trees. We sat and ate sandwiches and cookies in a cup of fire.

  High in the north a cloud formed, fast, dark, undulating in a way unlike the wind. I elbowed Vinny and he looked. Tilden saw what we saw and pulled himself up on the bank to be standing on solid ground for it. Glen, oblivious at first, noticed all eyes on a certain spot in the sky. He turned his gaze there.

  “What the—?”

  It was the greatest thing that happened around our town—twice a day at that, once coming and once going. People talked about it sometimes, but many had never seen it. Some people don’t see anything at all. The cloud grew, darkened, and tilted toward us at about twice the velocity of the wind. It did not come direct, but detoured and looped and undulated, as though there were obstacles in the clear air we couldn’t see.

  “What the—” Glen tried again, pulling himself up off his cozy place on the rocks as Tilden had done.

  Vinny stopped chewing on the bit of grass he’d stuck into his mouth. I could see him looking up into
the air like a contemplative calf, cud suspended. Something changed. Light thickened. The air condensed. Wind came up and began to make noise in the angles of the rocks and in the distant trees. Shapes appeared in the purpling vault of the sky, at first a few, then more, and then more. They approached, their dark mass hovering upon uncountable wings. Whatever one might have imagined, they were birds. As the first outriders circled high up in the air, they were joined by others, ten and then hundreds and then of thousands of others. Were there a million? We stopped counting or estimating. Except for far away, at the horizon, they filled the sky. The noise they made was as loud as the falls, though higher pitched and more varied. We were caught between two parts of a tremendous music. Glen covered his ears.

  Black ribbons of birds joined and separated and interwove. It was more intricate than it appeared at distance, less a funnel than a great folded cloth weaving and raveling. What was remarkable close up was that there were no collisions, no tragedies midair, but a dance which never went wrong and never varied in grace. The black shapes darted and twittered. They began to whirl above the gorge like water in a draining tub.

  “Birds,” Tilden said, unnecessarily. “A million billion birds. There’s a cave under the falls—I guess there is; nobody’s ever been there—and they sleep there at night and fly out through a hole in the water in the morning, and come back at night.”

  Vince said, “They’re blackbirds.”

  Glen corrected, “They’re swifts.”

  The swifts circled for a while. Something boiled up from the gorge to meet them. We looked down and saw bats—hundreds, perhaps, but nowhere near the myriad myriads of birds in the air above us. Bats zoomed out of the falls as the swifts zoomed in, one battalion replacing another in the seething air. The bats did not go straight up into the whirling mass, but spread out into the gorge, low and cautious. A few flapped directly over our heads, so you could see the little smiles on their faces, the thin squeaking which is what a human can hear of their song. The swifts let the bats clear, then the whole mass of them leapt up a hundred feet higher into the air, like a diver bouncing on the board before descent. It was plain that one bird flew at the head, one bird leading them. Whether it was the same bird all the time or a new one each night, one didn’t know. When this vanguard bird judged everything felt right, down he fell, power-diving directly into the plunging face of the falls.

  Twenty by twenty they entered the gap in the waters. We thought they could never be done at that rate, but they could. We watched until they were safe in, except for stragglers which kept arriving, one by one, two by two. Loners would be homing most of the night. We allowed our concentration to lapse, so we could talk of what we saw.

  Tilden said, “Swifts. Is that really their name, or is that just how they are?”

  “Both,” Glen answered.

  Tilden peered steadily down into the purple gorge. He said, “If you wanted to kill yourself, that would be the way to do it.”

  I offered that it wouldn’t be like killing yourself at all, but a sort of sacrament. Diving into the middle of the world.

  It was getting ever darker and we couldn’t see it very well, but Tilden’s voice said, “People do it all the time.”

  “Do what?”

  “Throw themselves over the Falls.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Stands to reason. My uncle did. I think that’s what happened. It’s there. The Falls and the gorge. It’s big, and nobody told us about it. They’re protecting us. Must be some sort of temptation. Must be people sailing off those rocks all the time. Nobody told us because we’re kids and they’re afraid it would put ideas into our heads.”

  Glen said, “Would you do it?”

  “No, not us. I didn’t mean that. It’s not for us. It’s for guys who got caught stealing money from the bank, or ladies whose babies died. That’s the kind of people who need it.” Tilden stood up and took a few steps toward the brink to illustrate. “You could spread your wings like one of those swifts. You could just lean over and swan dive in. It would be your greatest moment ever.”

  I recalled, “Some lady at our church killed herself because of cancer. Mom said she didn’t blame her one bit.”

  “The Falls?”

  “Shotgun.”

  “Ladies don’t usually use shotguns.”

  “This one did.”

  Glen had been thinking hard about something. “You said there is a cave, a space.”

  “Has to be. Where else would all those swifts go?”

  “Maybe they turn into fish.”

  “Maybe you turn into fish.”

  “We didn’t see the bottom of the gorge,” Glen went on.

  “Not very well.”

  “Can’t see it now anyhow.”

  “What if there’s . . . I don’t know what . . . what if there’s a door there?”

  “What do you mean a door?”

  Glen arranged his face so it looked solemn in the birdy twilight. “What if it’s the one place where there’s a door out of the world, so you can go without having to die. So the people throwing themselves over don’t die. They knock upon the water, and it opens, and they walk through the door and start again. Somewhere else.”

  We considered in silence.

  Vince said, “Somebody would have to keep the big rocks out of the basin. They’d still kill you even if there was a magic door.”

  “Maybe somebody does.”

  A thought formed in my mind, a thought of such immensity I could barely get it out. “Maybe we will. We’ll clear the rocks away. Maybe that’s why we came here . . . why we were led here. Maybe we will be a secret society to keep the pool down there safe for all the sad divers.”

  I knew by their silence that they were, at least, considering it.

  While we bent over stone cliffs watching the entrance of the swifts, the moon rose in his first quarter, blue-white, almost hurtful in the clear air, brilliant for all his slender newness. We stood. We worked the cricks out of our backs and necks. Vince put his arms around us from the back and lifted us, one at a time, the way he knew how to do, cracking our spines and making the blood flow again. It was so dark in the shadows cast by the moon that we wouldn’t have known we were there, unless we knew. The bats probably could hear our thoughts with their sonar.

  Tilden said, “The swifts leave too early in the morning for people to see. Usually it’s still dark, so nobody bothers with that. But you can see it at the end, in the evening, like this. People come just for it, just to see the birds.” He looked around to make sure. “I guess we’re the only ones tonight. That’s good. That’s the best.”

  “How do you know all this?” Vince said.

  Tilden answered, “Stands to reason.”

  Silence settled, except for the twittering of the swifts. Then, “Sons of bitches,” said Tilden in a tone of awe.

  Glen asked, “How many times you seen this?”

  “Seven or eight,” Vince replied. “It never gets old.”

  Glen said, “I want to live there.”

  “Where?” I said. “In the cave?”

  “Yeah, in the cave under the falls. Where the birds go. I bet it’s room after room. I bet it’s a palace.”

  “You can’t live there.”

  “Maybe you can’t, but I can.”

  Tilden said, “It probably stinks of bird poop.”

  I don’t think Glen heard him.

  We decided we couldn’t stay until the last birds came home. We couldn’t see them anymore anyway, and the twittering we heard might be the settled-in birds singing in their sleep.

  II

  Wyona is a shy mountain boy, reluctant to leave home, rising from the smoky Carolina hills, flowing a little toward the Tennessee Valley, lingering with many a meander among the tulip poplars and sweet gums, looping back, delaying, uncertain, before squaring his shoulders and foaming bold toward the Gulf of Mexico. Once he makes up his mind he goes pretty fast, and our town, or rather the Falls below our to
wn, is the place where he faces the inevitable and all his meandering turns to hurry, the Wyona to the Minangus, the Minangus to the Tennessee, and with all waters reaching the Great Water at last amid the herons and alligators of the Delta.

  Sometimes the river is lazy. Mothers take their children to paddle in the shallows. Sometimes the river possesses terrible purpose, rooting under the mountains, swallowing barns, pushing towns on his back down toward the sea. The flood of 1916, when two hurricanes dumped their torrents at once, left its mark on walls and cliffs, so high that nobody believes there could be that much water on the dry land. Sometimes he plays like a big boy in the rocky shallows, and the gentlest thing can come to him and slake its thirst, the fledgling birds, and the blue-black butterflies that drink from a pool on a stone in a pool of the river bend.

  It’s possible to know a river longer than you’ve been alive, if your father knew it before you and his father knew it before him.

  The river flows sad sometimes because everything changes and he alone remains the same. The river remembers when the industrial park over on 414 was a grove of trees. The river remembers boys shinnying up the waterside sycamores, who now sleep in the Baptist cemetery with the thrushes hymning them at evening. You could fall in love with the one at the barn dance you passed over your arm, and you would live with her until the day you died. In parlors, on dressing tables and dusty mantels, sit portraits of people whom nobody remembers but the river. They’ve sat there so long and people have dusted around them so long that they’re part of the decor, and will not be moved until the last aunt dies and the house is sold to someone new moving uphill from the crowded cities. Everybody remembers something, and somebody remembers everything, and that’s what knits the fibers of the world together.