Tobacco Styx Bridge

On his way back to the office, Charles stopped for a moment to sit on a bench facing the old barn. The smells of late spring came to him with a sigh of pleasure, and the sun had warmed the bench and taken away its hardness. He thought of Reuben and the invitation to meet him at the old family home tonight where sister, Haley, was “kinda taking care of him.” Then he thought of his sister. Haley Gandy, Reuben’s older sister, played the piano in church for all the years that Charles could remember. She had a pounding left hand that pushed chords through a hymn with vigor and soul-wrenching belief. Although some people became ugly as they sang, Haley’s face lit up with an elegant tilt of chin that put sounds from her mouth to the last pew in the church, straight and true. Haley was quick-smiling and cheerful despite having been born with a shriveled leg that made her walk with a limp—Charles supposed it was the reason she never married—but it was a beautiful and elegant woman who played and sang from that piano bench on Sunday mornings. Charles’ mind went back to that summer long ago when they all went to be baptized at Willow Run, a cold pool of water that collected from clear springs in nearby Pisgah. Adults and children stood in white robes at the side of the pool while the minister, wearing a pair of fishing waders, was immersed to his hips to receive members of the flock, one by one. Haley walked cautiously down the sides of the pool, careful of her halting gait. The minister placed his hand on her head and said, “Dear God, do not take away the beauty of her infirmity, but let her walk with pride and glory in the footsteps of the savior Jesus Christ. Let her music rise to the heavens in the glory of His name. Amen.” He took water in his cupped hands and opened them over her forehead where it descended in rivulets around her face. Then, grasping both of her wrists lightly, he dipped them gently in the water and brought her hands to his mouth and kissed them. When she walked out of the water, her eyes shining in the wetness, a lock of her dark hair stuck tightly against her forehead, young Charles offered her his hand to keep her from slipping on the bank. When Charles walked into the water, the minister mumbled a prayer over him, mispronounced his full name and bent his entire body beneath the surface. He retreated to the bank, sputtering from the cold, stabbing, spring water, feeling no particular infusion of religious enlightenment. Reuben, still dry, standing near the end of the line, quietly slipped off his gown and, unnoticed, lay down in the bed of a pick-up truck, using his gown as a pillow. He figured he would bring nothing out of the water worth freezing for. That was Reuben all over, Charles remembered: quick to sidestep the hand of God. The thought of helping Haley out of the pool brought back another memory: on a hot summer day when he was twelve, Charles walked into the Gandy kitchen looking for Reuben to play ball and found only Haley there, flat-ironing her blouse in a room sweltering from the fire in the stove. She was working over the ironing board in a thin, rose-colored, too-small bra—going to the stove to fit the handle with a click into a hotter iron, leaving the cooler one to regain its heat. She invited Charles to sit down at the kitchen table until Reuben returned. He was in the outhouse, she said. Charles watched the sixteen-year-old Haley closely and saw a bead of perspiration trickle down her neck and into the cleaved hollow separating her breasts, diminishing as it ran into a shining little line that vanished secretively into her navel. The gentle swell of her belly, the rounded fullness of her breasts, half uncovered and smiling at him beneath the cupping cloth, lifted his young heart and struck him with pouting nipples until he stared unabashedly at what he knew to be heaven. “There’s some biscuits left over from breakfast in the pantry,” she said. “You can get them and put some molasses on them, if you want.” He just shook his head slowly from side to side in total astonishment, his thin body drained and left still, as if the life had been sucked out of him. Charles was lost in the hypnotic reminiscence of Haley Gandy, oblivious to the students and faculty members strolling by, waving, offering comments on the beauty of the day. That vivid, sensual memory of his childhood faded, as a consciousness of the people, the sidewalk, the hulking barn, crept slowly back to him. He rose from the bench and walked lightly back to his office.