Three Rivers Read online

  “You doubt me.” Pisa grinned at Geneva.

  “It’s seems pretty unlikely. He’s never been the same since…”

  “Since we saved his life?”

  “Yes.” Geneva paused, careful not to offend Pisa. “I know. I’m grateful. We saved his life, but I can’t help thinking we might have let some part of him drown. He has no drive, no ambition.”

  “Ambition is not everything.”

  “No. Not everything, but it’s something. Something important, if you ask me.”

  Pisa took Geneva’s hands again. “Have I ever told you about my son?”

  Geneva figured Pisa had sprung up from the ground fully formed and unburdened by anything as ordinary as family.

  “He’s a wonderful man. Strong and fierce. He has a son of his own.” Pisa’s voice dripped like tree syrup, like she was trying to sell Geneva something. “There’s been a spot of trouble and he needs a safe place to stay. You have so much land.”

  Was Pisa really asking Geneva for a favor? Maybe Pisa realized Geneva’s wealth was drying up and she would no longer be able to pay for these pilgrimages. She’d barely scraped together the fee for this one. Even so, she didn’t much care for the idea of a strange man in her house. She was nursing a glut of trouble at home already. No sense inviting more.

  Pisa kept right on talking like she could hear Geneva’s thoughts. Likely she could. “He is perfectly happy to camp outside. He prefers it. He will cause you no trouble. He can help you with things that need doing.”

  Geneva could spin a list a mile long of things that needed doing. Bruce stopped fixing stuff around the house years ago. She was a deadbeat housekeeper and Bobby couldn’t be bothered to wash his own dishes. When things needed doing, Geneva ignored them for as long as she could and then broke down and called someone. Plumbing, carpentry, electrical work: it wasn’t cheap. She’d been letting things go for some time now. Money was tight as a dress at a shotgun wedding. She had insurance for that hospice nurse, but it would run out soon. If Bruce didn’t die within the next three weeks, she might have to kill him. It wasn’t out of the question.

  “Is he good and handy?”

  “Oh yes,” Pisa said. “He can fix almost anything. Plus, of course, I would consider this a personal favor.”

  Geneva liked the idea of Pisa being indebted to her rather than the other way around. She agreed with a quick nod. Pisa pressed a package of gifts on her, a basket full of fragrant herbs with directions to burn some and to tuck some into Bruce’s pillow. She passed along two magic chants for when he was in pain and when he wasn’t. She wrote down a blessing for Bobby and one for Melody. She handed her a jar of blackberry jam and a pot of clover honey.

  “I knew I could count on you,” Pisa said. “We’ll get you back to your car within the hour. You can meet him there.”

  Geneva sighed. “Well…”

  “You are going to that man.” Pisa’s voice, which had been so happy and light, turned thin and accusing.

  Geneva braced herself.

  “No good will come from seeing him. I warned you last time.”

  “You warned me,” Geneva said. “But nothing bad happened. I love him.”

  “Love is just a feeling. It is easy to feel love when you do not see someone very often. It is harder when the person is with you every day.”

  “He loves me. I deserve to be loved, don’t I? Is it really so much to ask?”

  “It is,” Pisa said. “Love is not rational. You are not rational when you cry love.” She flicked a bit of lint off her dress.

  Geneva pushed her hair back. It did no good to argue. “This is the last time. I won’t see him again, but I can’t just spin off the planet and disappear.”

  Pisa wagged a long bony finger in Geneva’s face. “If you go to him, trouble will follow. There will be death.”

  “You’re the one who said we all die,” Geneva said. “You can’t blame death on me.”

  “There will be terrible consequences. You have no idea the amount of violence that will be set in motion. You must go straight home.” Pisa’s eyes flashed.

  Pisa had never gotten so wound up before. Geneva figured she was worried about her son. “I’ll call home and set everything straight. Don’t worry.”

  Pisa slapped her palms down on the floor between them. She leaned in and put her nose just a few inches from Geneva’s face. Geneva saw her own reflection in Pisa’s eyes. She saw a glint of brightness followed by a rolling darkness, like storm clouds descending. Geneva pulled back, but could not look away.

  “You are the one who should worry,” Pisa said. “Heed my words. You must go home. You must go now.”

  Chapter Ten

  Melody was having a hell of a bad time. Her father was cranky and needy, her brother had disappeared again, and all she’d managed to eat was a handful of crackers that may have been previously nibbled on by a rat. There was a ragged hole at the bottom of the cellophane wrapper and a few suspicious black pellets in the box, but it didn’t stop her from cramming a handful of salty crumbs into her mouth as she fetched her father’s lunch. And that was another problem. Her father was existing on a liquid diet of nutrition shakes that were advertised as tasting like a delicious milk shake. He hated them.

  Melody held the straw up to his mouth and coaxed him along. “Just a few more sips.” She wiped a dribble of the chalky white liquid from his chin. “Mmmm, it’s good.” She hated the condescending tone in her voice, but she felt like she was feeding a baby, and her voice betrayed that.

  Her father wasn’t amused. He spit out the straw and a stream of thick, sticky liquid sprayed across the bed and splattered across Melody’s arm. “It’s goddamned awful, little girl. You drink it.”

  Melody slammed the can down on the table beside her father’s bed and wiped her arm roughly with a ragged paper napkin. The napkin shredded and tore, sending linty bits flying. The smell and the texture of the spilled drink reminded her of the time she’d eaten too much homemade peanut brittle at the school harvest fair and woke up in the night to vomit hot chunks of it onto her cotton gown. The drink was supposed to provide the vitamins, minerals, and calories Daddy needed, but without all the hassle of chewing and digesting actual foods. He was supposed to consume three a day, but Melody was having a hard time getting him to suck down one. She tasted the drink.

  It was nothing like a milk shake. It certainly was not delicious. Melody thought it tasted like badly set Jell-O mixed with cough syrup. No wonder he spit it out. “Fine, Daddy. Don’t drink it. You’re right, it’s goddamned awful. I’ll head out to the store in a bit and find shakes that taste better.” She hoped they made shakes that tasted better than this one.

  He glared at her, then sighed; a long, rattling breath that vibrated through his body. “I don’t feel so good, little girl.”

  “I know, Daddy. I can see that.” Her head throbbed and a dull pain spread behind her eyes. The handful of rat-crackers had done nothing to sate her hunger, and she still needed sleep. It was wrong to be annoyed with Daddy, but she couldn’t help it. She’d done the right thing, she’d come home and was trying to be a good daughter, but it was so hard. Even when her father was well, he was difficult. Sick, he was impossible.

  He closed his eyes. She cleared the straw and the nasty drink from his bedside, took a few gag-inducing sips of the drink with the idea that any nourishment would be better than none, then turned off the lamp and stared out the front window. Menacing clouds gathered in the distance; the sky above the house was a hot, hazy, silver shade of blue. Wavy heat warped the horizon and made the dogwood trees seem soft and fuzzy. The air pressed in heavy and tangible with the promise of rain. It smelled electric, like a wall plug gone bad. She wished the storm would move more quickly, bring on the cooling rains, wash away the bugs and the misery. She yanked the curtains closed, aware that her motions were too vigorous for the task. The curtain rings screeched across the metal rod and made her teeth ache. Dust rained down on her shoulders. She sneeze
d. Daddy moaned.

  Melody’s mother had always been a god-awful housekeeper, but it seemed she’d completely given up now. Bobby was no help. Melody thought they’d screwed up with Bobby. They shouldn’t have coddled him after the baptism. He took no responsibility for anything. Dusting, for example, was not beyond his capabilities, and yet there was a thick layer of dust on every surface.

  “Bobby!” she called out, walking into the kitchen. The least he could do is help her clean. If she was going to shop and pull together dinner for his new best friend Maurice, then he could damn well push a broom. No response. No sound of rustling from upstairs. She squinted out the kitchen window, scanned the property for some sign of him.

  She rubbed her head. It was just past noon. Maurice would be back at five. There was so much to do that she didn’t know where to start. The kitchen floor was sticky and black with footprints. The sink needed a good scrubbing to rid the porcelain of tomato stains and scuff marks. The upstairs bathroom where she’d showered was particularly unnerving, with dark scummy patches lining the tub, mildew packed deep between the tiles, and a toilet that looked like it hadn’t been cleaned in weeks. Melody fantasized about leaving, just turning the house over to nature. It wouldn’t last a year, not on this damp, humid, rotting piece of godforsaken earth. The land was supposed to be valuable, but Melody doubted they could give it away in its current state.

  Melody’s father often said this land was one of Mama’s finest attributes, certainly the one that recommended her for marriage. Beauty was fleeting, but property was forever. Old Granddaddy had farmed cotton here until he died. Mama inherited the property and her father’s wealth, which was already waning. Melody’s father was no farmer, but he tried to keep the cotton in production. Then he’d turned over the land and put in soybeans. It would be bigger than King Cotton and would make them all rich, but her father hated tending the fields. He was too lazy even to oversee the laborers he’d hired to harvest the beans, and the crop rotted on the vine. He had more luck raising catfish. The tanks filled with living, swimming whiskered fish pleased him in a way that plants in a field never could. He raised catfish for more than seven years, joining the regional co-op that sold Delta catfish to restaurants, grocery stores, and catering services.

  As a child, Melody rode along in the pickup truck as he drove from tank to tank, inspecting the stock and talking to the workers about yield per feed and other things she didn’t understand. When Melody was thirteen years old, the Tallahatchie, Yalobusha, and Yazoo rivers overflowed during a season of heavy rainfall and terrifying weather. When the water rose, the catfish tanks overflowed. The fish swam toward freedom. Daddy stood waist-deep in the rushing waters, trying to catch his catfish with a net. He looked like a fool. The local newspaper reported on men who’d put out lines in the middle of Howard Street and caught enough catfish to feed their families for a year. The farmers threatened to search the freezers of suspected fish poachers and prosecute anyone found hoarding an excess of the sweet, white fish. It was all bluster. Daddy didn’t have enough money or patience or drive to repair the tanks and to restock. They sold off the equipment that was useful, but much of it still lay rotting and rusting behind the house. After that, Daddy worked on and off at various jobs—light carpentry, house painting, fishing guide—but he never enjoyed work or made any real money. Melody knew her father hadn’t been happy, stuck out here in the middle of nowhere with a wife who was more than half crazy. Still, he chose to marry Mama and to live on this land. Melody was born into it and had no say in the matter.

  She filled the kitchen sink with hot water and dish soap, and threw open the cabinets. There was little worth saving. Just like the crackers she’d eaten earlier, everything seemed to be infested with droppings or mealworm larvae. Mold overtook the lone loaf of bread. Roaches scurried out when she pulled down a sack of pretzels. She bit down hard on her tongue to keep from screaming. She scrubbed every dish and glass in hot water, draining the sink and refilling it again and again. She wiped down the breakfast table with water and ammonia and stacked the clean dishes there while she started on the silverware. She was elbow-deep in suds and covered in grime when she heard her father’s choking cough. He sounded like a man rattling apart, and she knew the filth was not good for his lungs. She went to check on him, wiping her damp hands on her T-shirt.

  “You okay, Daddy? What can I do?”

  Her father waved weakly and trembled between deep, echoing coughs. She put her hand on his chest, thin and hollow beneath her palm. His lungs heaved and struggled to force out whatever poison had taken root. After a long spell, the coughing wound down and his head flopped from side to side on the flat pillow. His sheets were drenched with sweat, and the smell of urine reached her nose.

  “Daddy?”

  “Yeah?” His voice was surprisingly strong.

  “Shouldn’t you be in a hospital?”

  “Hell no,” he barked at her. “I am not going to spend my last days in some goddamned hospital with a bunch of strangers. I am staying right here, little girl. Don’t go trying to force me out of my house.”

  “Settle down, old man. No one’s forcing you to do anything.”

  “I looked after you and your brother your whole goddamned life. You want to ship me off to a hospital. I won’t go. I’ll kill myself first.”

  Melody tugged on the hem of her T-shirt. “No one’s shipping you anywhere. No one’s gonna make you do anything you don’t want to do.” She smiled at him. “Stubborn old man.”

  “I hate hospitals. Damn things are packed with hypocrites and liars and self-righteous bastards. ’Bout as bad as a church, maybe worse. You remember what that hospital was like when your brother—”

  “Of course I remember,” Melody said. “How could I forget? Don’t worry. You can stay right here and suffer at home. The rest of us will suffer right along with you. That’s the way it’s supposed to work, right?” She reached out and stroked his forehead. It was cool and damp. “Okay, let’s get you some fresh clothes.”

  She pulled clean sheets and a fresh blanket from a plastic bin beside the bed. She supposed Maurice was responsible for the relative tidiness of this room. She stripped off her father’s gown and removed his heavy, dank diaper, avoiding his eyes as she ran a damp cloth around his groin and over his shriveled penis. The task filled her with shame. When her father was clean, she pulled the dirty sheets off the corners of the bed and rolled him from side to side. He was thin, but she broke a sweat trying to move him without hurting him. There was so much to deal with: his oxygen tube and his fragile bones and the way he struggled to breathe when she rolled him over.

  “Little girl,” he said. “Getting old is a damned awful thing.”

  She snapped a fresh sheet over him and pulled the blanket up to his chin. “It beats the alternative, Daddy.” She touched his forehead. It was cool beneath her palm. “It sure as hell beats the alternative.”

  Melody knew damn well why her father wouldn’t go to the hospital. After Bobby’s baptism, that’s where they’d ended up. He was right; it was awful. Full of hypocrites and liars and self-righteous bastards. Melody’s father was an ornery old man, but he was no fool.

  * * *

  After the baptism, one of the church deacons drove Melody to the hospital. He prayed with her in the car in the hospital parking lot, but Melody knew God was not listening. She didn’t need God in that moment, she needed her Daddy, but when she called home from a pay phone in the hospital lobby, he didn’t answer. Melody felt completely alone, abandoned by her heavenly father and her earthly father at the same time.

  A nurse led her through an endless succession of motion-sensitive doors to a cold, bright room where her mother lay propped like royalty in a bed full of pillows.

  “Mama.” Melody took her hand. It was cold and dry as reptile skin. “Are you okay, Mama?”

  “I saved him.” Her mother smiled and closed her eyes. “I saved my baby and he’s going to be just fine.”

  That
seemed unlikely. Melody couldn’t get the image of Bobby’s distorted face out of her head. “Really, Mama? Are you sure?”

  “Oh, honey, yes.” She peered at Melody from beneath heavy viper lids. “I cannot do it again.” Her mother’s voice sounded gravelly, like when she drank too much whiskey. “I’m too weakened and I will not be able to do it again. Do you understand?”

  Melody understood perfectly. Bobby was worth saving, but Melody was on her own. Melody fumed. She thought, I wouldn’t save you either, you old witch. I wouldn’t pull you out of a lake. What she said was, “I can take care of myself.”

  There was a window in the room, and the view was nothing but flat, brown earth stretching on forever. Melody felt smothered by the vast emptiness. “I’m gonna call Daddy. Somebody needs to talk to the doctor, figure out what we should do for Bobby.”

  “He’ll be fine.” Her mother settled back on the mound of white pillows. “My baby’s going to be just fine.”

  Melody found the doctor in the hallway. “I did not say he’d be fine.” The gray-haired woman with a face full of soft doughy wrinkles flipped through a pile of papers on a clipboard. “My dear.” The doctor looked at her. “Your brother is lucky to be alive. Electric shock is very serious. His heart is fibrillating. That means it is fluttering rather than beating. A fluttering heart cannot do the job of pumping the blood through the body and to the brain. It’s the brain we must be concerned about now.”

  Melody’s own heart seemed to beat more solidly in her chest when she heard those words. “Can I see him?”

  The doctor nodded. “In a moment, dear.” She gestured to a woman standing a few feet away. “This is Mrs. McNeil. She’s one of the social workers on our staff.” The woman joined them. She was short and round and gray as the roly-poly bugs Melody and Bobby plucked off overturned stones in the creek bed behind their house. She took Melody’s hand and stared at her with an earnestness that left Melody feeling like a lab specimen. “Please call me Margaret. And you are Melody?”