RIVER AS INTERMEZZO
Image obtained from Apple Maps and edited.
Leekin ends at the river. The first people, the Catawba Nation, harnessed it with granite weirs. When whitemen showed up, they used it as a millrace for Leekin's first mill, Barnhardt Mills, the start of Barnhardt Blankets, which, for the next century, will be the town’s economic dreadnaught. The Morgue in the back office of The Leekin Tribune houses the old newspaper stories. You pull out the manilla file folder labeled River: Deaths, Car Accident, 1965, 1977, 1982. In each story, a man in a car, always alone, came screaming down the long decline of Bridge Street, but missed the bridge, vaulted off the initial gentle upswing of the riverbank, did a slow forward flip, and hit the river.
It’s hard to drown in three feet of water. But this morning the river was running so slow, the water was like the granite face on Stone Mountain, and the driver wasn’t wearing a seatbelt. He died before he had a chance to drown. So you walk down to the riverbank. Where the river laps, you put your tentative toes in, the water is clear, and you can see baby brown trout. You bend down, whisper, “Why did I run away from her funeral?” You want the words to float over to the opposite shore, because nobody is there, waiting to hear them, least of all anybody from your father's family, all those sentinels at the funeral under the willows, forever on guard.
Looking over the river, from your crouch, the water loses its silver skin. Just shades of brown and green rushing underneath. The riverbank of orange clay sprouting sedge and poke weed, plus a dusting of sand. A weeping willow every so often, as you walk the bank. A few willow branches feather the water, but the branches aren’t deep enough or strong enough to catch a dead body.
Years later—in fact this very morning—you've called up an online map of the Leekin River. From the satellite, the river is brown and green, with no silver sheen. But you already knew that, so you hit the Map function. Then the river turns blue, a blue you always want the sky to be but never is. When you hit Zoom, you feel like you’re dropping into the blue faster than any dream, and the ribbon of blue you hoped for became the whole screen. Nothing but blue: you’re in the middle of the Atlantic, drowning.
Charles Israel Jr. teaches creative writing at Queens University of Charlotte. He has published a poetry chapbook, Stacking Weather. His poems and stories have appeared in The Adirondack Review, The Cortland Review, Crazyhorse, Field, Journal of the American Medical Association, Nimrod International Journal, North Carolina Literary Review, Pembroke Magazine, and Zone 3.