Authors: Deborah Bedford
“Who?” she asked, her voice gone weak. “Who did you say?”
But she had heard. At his name, something war-torn and leaden had taken hold in her chest.
“You heard me, didn’t you?” Shelby said, holding up the second thumbnail to compare it with the first. “You know who he is?”
In the silence, Lydia made a choking noise. Step by step into the dark journey she went, the weight of horror pitching forward
and slamming her. Not Charles Stains.
Lydia stared hopelessly at the empty ring finger on her left hand. “Yes. Yes, of course I do know him.”
“The woodshop teacher.”
“I know who you’re talking about.”
“The one everybody calls ‘Mr. S.’”
“I know who he is, Shelby.”
On the outside, her words sounded as calm as a lapping lakeshore evening, the precise moment of stillness as the stars set
in and the breeze dies away.
On the inside, Lydia felt as roiled up and out-of-control as the water that churned between the bluffs of Viney Creek.
No. Oh, please, God. No.
Oh, no no no.
Let it be anybody but Charlie.
Folks in Shadrach, Missouri, liked to say their town had high ground and low ground, with nothing much in between.
Along the northeast edge of town, where fingers of Brownbranch Lake poked between high hills, bald eagles chose the heights
to build their nests. In the lowlands that fell off to the south, the mist sank and skirted each swell of land, dropping heavy
as maple syrup into each draw.
From the high places to the low places, from the crests of the sycamore trees to the tangled brambles of hawthorn and Sweet
William in the bottomlands, the sun never really got the chance to sift through.
“This Shadrach land,” a travel journalist from the
Kansas City Star
had written once, “is nothing more than a mess of hollers and knobs.”
Yes, Lydia thought. A person was either always standing at the top looking down or standing at the bottom looking up. There
was no such thing as level ground in St. Clair County.
When Lydia had visited as a girl, it was her Uncle Cy who had always brought her here to this place, from his old clapboard
house on the hill to the gloss-smooth lake that lay below it. On the water, Cy had taught her how to coax the decrepit Evinrude
motors to life on the rental boats. She had yanked the cord until her small arm throbbed, then twisted open the throttle so
the ancient outboard could sputter to life. When the engine caught, the air billowed with acrid, blue smoke. Then the water
slid away beneath the hull like murky, satin skin, alive above the propeller.
Lydia had learned long, long ago to take her problems to the Brownbranch.
A fifteen-minute drive carried her east from the high school to the marina. Her decade-old LeSabre crunched on the gravel
and, when she turned the engine off, above its hot ticking she heard only the chortling of scaups and mallards, the lapping
of wavelets against the shore.
She climbed out and looked around for somebody. “Uncle Cy? Jane?”
Cy hadn’t paid much attention to women after Lydia’s Aunt Donna had died. Until Jane Cabbot stumbled up onto Cy Porter’s doorstep
one rainy afternoon seven years ago, looking to rent a boat, and never left. Soon they had become a couple and later they’d
married. Lydia thought it mildly romantic when she watched them gassing up and hiring out motorboats together, coaxing the
outboards with language she hadn’t known people like Cy and Jane understood. Together they sifted through damp dirt in search
of the most luscious night crawlers. They sold wooden plaques carved with jokes and mottos, fishing licenses and Spin-a-Lures
and stink bait. They pointed out the Polaroid photos on the wall labeled with the length and weight of bass that had come
out of the lake, pictures of fish carcasses and bodies—all remembrances of that one summer in 1979 when someone had a camera.
Of course those people in the photos were long gone. But, no matter. It was the fish everybody wanted to talk about anyway.
Lydia watched the couple with yearning every time Jane skirted the display of Rapala reels and gave her uncle a fond pop on
the rump with her chamois. And every time Lydia saw the tender expression in Jane’s eyes when she sidled up next to her husband
behind the cash register, laid a possessive hand on his shoulder and announced, “There’s not anybody I know who can sink a
bait hook better than Cy Porter.” Each time Lydia thought,
Surely God intended for someone to love me that way. Surely there’s somebody in the world God wanted me to have, too.
Lydia was proud of being a Porter. “Like a porter on a train,” she’d heard her father introduce himself dozens of times. And
nothing had seemed more exotic and exciting when she had been a little girl than that—being named after a porter who worked
on an eastbound train all the way to Providence, on the westbound train clear through Missouri into Kansas, a man whose face
shone like rock polished in a tumbler, deft gloved fingers barely touching the tickets while he nicked their corners with
a punch.
Nothing had seemed that exotic or exciting, that is, until Maureen Eden, the school nurse, began gossiping about Charlie Stains
in the teacher’s lounge last year.
“When he was a kid, all he wanted to do was get out of this place.” Maureen had stood in the doorway with a CPR mannequin
draped like a carcass over her arms. “Now, why on earth would an English Lit professor come back to teach woodshop in Shadrach?”
“How are you doing, Mo?” the art teacher asked. “You’re supposed to talk about yourself before you walk in and start talking
about somebody else.”
“I’m losing my mind is how I’m doing. I was on my way for something and I don’t remember what.” With the entire length of
rubber body, Maureen gestured her loss.
“Anything to do with”—Lydia nodded toward the mannequin—“that?”
Maureen had stared down at it as if she’d never seen it before. “Oh, yeah. Wiley wanted this. I was taking it down to vocational.
Health occupations.” She sighed and turned to leave. “What can I say? I’m going through menopause. I live in the present because
I can’t remember what happened five minutes in the past.”
“Everybody around here has known Charlie forever.”
“It’s good he’s coming home.”
“Charlie Stains was a professor? At a college?”
Everyone nodded. “University of Missouri. In St. Louis.”
“Left here the year he graduated from Shadrach and said he never intended to be back.”
“Hm-mmm. Well, you know the only thing that’s ever constant is change. Maybe Charlie needed a change of life, too.”
“That’s what he thought he was getting when he left here.”
“Anybody see him downtown? He doesn’t
look
like a college professor.”
“Well, he doesn’t look like a woodshop teacher, either.”
Lydia had opened the refrigerator door and searched the aluminum shelves for the raspberry yogurt she’d brought in yesterday.
Mo said, “My dad has known the family forever. Good people. Such a nice young man, he says. You can’t have too many people
like Charlie around.”
“Still, it’s interesting.” Brad Gritton, the journalism teacher, also worked as a freelance reporter for the
Shadrach Democrat Reflex
. They teased him at the school all the time about being a fact worshiper. “When you don’t know what somebody’s been doing
all these years…”
Lydia’s yogurt had vanished. Somebody had eaten it. She shut the refrigerator with a little snap. “So, you tell us, Mo. What’s
a woodshop teacher supposed to look like?”
Maureen rose to the challenge. “He’s supposed to look like Dave Whitsitt when he was framing in the snack bar at Fire-Rattler
Stadium. You know, with his knuckles bunged up, scabs on his arms, and his hair all full of sawdust. You’ve seen woodworkers’
hands before. Rough as Taum Sauk Mountain.”
“Hands. Now that’s what I notice about a man first. Big, wide, working hands.” Patrice Saunders warmed her fingers around
her favorite coffee mug, with
TEACHERS DO IT WITH CLASS
emblazoned all the way around. “You just get to see those other things, Mo, because you’re the school nurse.”
That’s when they turned to Lydia with a conspiratorial expression in their eyes, as if they’d just realized the possibility;
all of them except Brad Gritton.
“What about you?” Mo asked. Smiles passed around. No matter what Charlie Stains had come back for or what he’d been doing,
they each knew that a new man in town might mean a new chance for Lydia. “What do you notice first in a man, Lydia?”
Five pairs of eyes had locked onto her.
“I don’t know,” she said, staring them down.
Jean Lowder aligned her latest pop quiz in the copier. The machine began to click and whirr, and pages began to feed out of
the other side like a pile of drifting feathers. “First thing I noticed about my husband was his Adam’s apple,” she said.
“Darney was out on the basketball court in Springfield and I thought ‘That boy’s got the biggest Adam’s apple I’ve ever seen.’
It was even knobbier than his knees.”
THE SIGHT OF
her uncle’s AM radio on the steps brought Lydia back that Tuesday evening. Such a simple thing, with its bent antenna and
its Panasonic speaker that looked like the underside of a George Lucas star-cruiser.
Every day at Viney Creek Marina, Lydia’s uncle held court surrounded by friends, in a row of musty aluminum chairs, the plastic
webbing sagging in the middle from years of use. Now the chairs were empty. She peered into the darkness of the weatherworn
boathouse and squinted, willing her eyes to adjust.
“Uncle Cy? You around?”
Skeletal remains of a gear case lay in disarray on the floor. A dented propeller listed beside a handful of tools. Behind
her, three aluminum fishing boats rocked on their moorings beside a wharf new enough to still reek of cedar.
The sun already cast long shadows. Lydia knew she didn’t have much time. She thumped a battered gas tank to see if it was
full.
It wasn’t.
Slowly, she fed in the premix, listening to the
glub glubbing,
hearing the pitch rise as liquid closed in toward the top.
Charlie is my life now, Lord. I thought that’s why you made this happen between us. I don’t understand. I can’t turn any other
way.
Then she thought,
If he’s done something, if he’s touched Shelby, it will ruin him.
She did not dare think,
If I tell.
Just as she lugged the tank to the waterfront and climbed in over the algae-covered fenders, Uncle Cy came around the ancient
Coca-Cola chest on the sunset side of the marina. He hollered at her across the collar of rocks and sand.
“Lyddie?”
From the rocking, moored boat, she cupped her hands around her mouth to answer. “Hey.”
“Where you going?”
“Oh—” She shrugged, standing straddle legged. “Humbert’s Finger, I guess.”
“It’s late to be going out that far.”
“I’ll be okay.” She attached her tank to the fuel line of the Evinrude, squeezed the primer bulb once, twice, and pulled out
the choke. “You mind?”
“Course I don’t.”
“Charlie called out here a while ago. Wanted to know where you were.”
“Oh.”
Oh.
Three pulls on the starter and the engine coughed, caught, rattled to life. She reversed, banked the metal skiff into a sharp
one-eighty as the low sun illuminated rocks beneath water the same russet-red as a robin’s breast. She waved to her uncle
and headed away.
Usually Lydia hugged the shore until she passed Viney Creek Point. This afternoon she steered into open water, running the
throttle wide open, the motor churning a fine spray behind her. For the first time since Shelby had mentioned Mr. Stains’s
name in her office three hours ago, Lydia felt as if she could breathe.
She rode the bucking waves the way she rode her bucking emotions. To keep herself steady, she locked her eyes on the opposite
bank, where the high-water mark descended into the lake like broad, shadowed steps.
We can only keep you safe,
she’d said to Shelby,
if you’ll let us help you.
Charles Stains had sauntered into the first teacher’s meeting of the year with hands as smooth and big around as rutabagas,
a clipped, careful accent from the opposite side of the state, and rich twill trousers—all of this rare and unfamiliar and
somewhat questionable in Shadrach. During the full first six months of class, in which his students turned black-oak limbs
into candlesticks on the school-district lathe, learned the intricate art of hand-rubbed finishes on wobbly napkin holders,
and built unsteady spice cabinets from planks of hickory, he had remained half welcomed and half suspected by them all.
One Tuesday afternoon late in the spring, he had turned up at Cy Porter’s.
He’d waited in line for his turn at the marina cash register. As he scribbled down his phone number, Lydia noticed his fingers
were torn by splinters and his cuticles dyed brown with mahogany stain.
“How would you feel about my carpentry students rebuilding your dock, Mr. Porter?”
“Don’t know about that,” Lydia overheard while she helped Jane unload a cardboard box of trolling spoons. “One I’ve got out
there seems fine.”
“I didn’t say it wasn’t.” The mysterious professor picked up a Snickers bar from the counter and laid down three quarters.
“But it seemed like an idea. I’ve got a lot of faith in these kids. They could do a good job.”
“Well, you just take another look out there. Tell me why you think I need something better than what I’ve already got.”
“Folks everywhere are putting in those galvanized metal docks that move with the waves. I’d hate to see you do that. My kids
would learn a lot, updating what you’ve got now.” Stains tore open one end of the Snickers and bit into it. “There’s just
something about a wooden dock,” he said around the glob of chocolate and peanuts in his mouth. “It adds to the atmosphere
of a place.”
Cy pushed the cash drawer shut.