The Keeping Water

Low Water

Eleven. Twelve. Thirteen.

Asa counted the way his lungs counted, not in numbers so much as in pressure, the slow squeeze that started behind his breastbone and spread outward like a hand closing. He was fourteen feet down and dropping, and the count was the only clock he trusted. Watches lied. His father lied. The lake told the truth if you went into it the right way, which was alone, on one breath, with nothing strapped to your back to make a sound.

Sixteen. Seventeen.

The water above him had gone from green to a brown-gold murk, the color of weak tea, and then to something dimmer than that. Down here the July heat couldn't follow. Up top it had stood over the Ridge for thirty-one days now, a heat that made the asphalt sweat tar and the cicadas saw the same two notes from dawn until it was too dark to see your own hand. Down here it was almost cold. That was the thing nobody on the Ridge knew, because nobody on the Ridge went under. They sat on their docks that ended now in mudflats, their boats canted on dry trailers, and they cursed the drought and read the lake level off the news like a stock price. Lake Ammon, lowest since the dam closed. Lowest on record. They said it the way you'd say a man was dying. They did not go and look.

Asa went and looked.

He had read about the divers in Mexico who went into the cenotes, the ones who held a breath for four minutes and brought up bones a thousand years old, and he had practiced in the bathtub until his mother banged on the door, and then in the swimming hole below the spillway until he could do two minutes flat with his pulse loud in his ears like a fist on a screen door. He was not four-minute. He was a fifteen-year-old who'd taught himself off the internet. But he was patient, and he was small, and the lake had come down to meet him.

That was the part that still didn't feel real. The lake was coming up to meet him. It was coming up the way a tide goes out, baring its floor, except this floor had a town on it.

Twenty-four. Twenty-five.

His fingers found the first roofline.

He knew it by feel before his eyes made it out — the long slope of it, shingles furred over with fifty years of slime so the whole roof had gone soft and rounded like a loaf of bread left in the rain. He swam the ridgeline with one hand trailing it, the way you'd run a hand along a fence in the dark. A chimney came up out of the murk, square and patient. Last summer this roof had been thirty feet down and he hadn't dared. The summer before that, deeper still. The lake gave a foot back a week now in this heat, a foot of itself surrendered to the sky, and what it gave back was Carrow.

That was the name. He'd had to dig for it. It wasn't on any sign. The Howell Mercer Library had a whole local-history room with his own family's name carved over the door in stone, and not one photograph of the place that used to be down here. Founders' Day every August out on the water, fireworks off a barge, and nobody said the word. Carrow. He'd found it in a county atlas from before he was born, a thin spidery grid of streets laid along the River Hush, a mill, an orchard, a chapel with a bell. He'd memorized the grid the way other kids memorized cheat codes. Mill Street ran to Chapel Street. Chapel Street ended at the church. He was on Chapel Street now. He was almost sure of it.

Thirty-three.

He let a little air go to sink the last of the way, two silver coins of breath wobbling up past his face, and he settled his bare feet into the silt of a street no living person had walked in fifty years.

The mud took him to the ankle, soft as ash. When he moved it bloomed up around his legs in slow clouds, and he had to wait for it to settle or swim above it. Everywhere the walls wore the same mark — a pale band, chest-high on the drowned houses, where the mineral in the water had laid down a crust like the ring in an unwashed tub. The bathtub ring, the old men at the marina called it, pointing at the gray stripe climbing the boat ramp. Down here it was on everything. It ringed the chimney. It ringed a doorframe with the door long rotted out of it. It was the lake's own record of how high it had stood, written in lime on every wall it ever covered, and the band ran level and true through the whole sunk town like a line a giant had drawn with a string.

Asa hung in the cold water with his heart going and looked at the street.

There was a fence. There was a thing that had been a wagon or a cart, gone to rust-lace. There were the stumps — a whole field of them off to his left where the silt thinned over a slope, low broad stumps in rows, and he knew without being told that this had been the orchard, that men had stood here in the air and picked apples off trees that were now these black dissolving teeth in the lakebed. Somebody had cut them down before the water came. You couldn't drown a standing orchard; the trunks would foul the props of every boat for a generation. So they'd taken the saws to it first. He thought about that, about a man cutting down a tree he'd grafted, knowing the water was already on its way, and the thought sat in his chest next to the count.

Forty-one. Forty-two.

His lungs spoke up. Not panic — he knew panic, panic was for people who fought it — just the body putting in its first quiet request. He had maybe twenty seconds of comfort and another twenty of work after that, and then he had to go up or be the next thing the lake kept. He let the request go by like a car on the road. He had come down for one thing, and he could see it now.

The steeple.

It rose at the end of the street out of the brown light, and the top of it — he tipped his head back, following it up — the top of it was gone. Not broken. Gone into brightness. The peak of the chapel of Carrow had come up through the surface of Lake Ammon into the open air for the first time since the autumn the gates closed, and from down here it was a black spire climbing into a ceiling of moving silver, and where it pierced that ceiling the light poured down it in ropes. The bell was up there. He could see the dark mass of it inside the louvered cage of the belfry, just under the waterline, swung still in its yoke. The old men said the Carrow bell still tolled in storms, that you could hear it off the deep water on a bad night, that it had lost its true note the year of the flood and rung sour ever after. Asa had filed that with the rest of the marina lies. But hanging here looking up at it, he wasn't so sure. It was a real bell in a real tower and the sky was right there above it, close enough that a man standing on the bell could have put his head into the air.

He wanted to touch it. That was why he'd come — to be the one who touched the bell of the drowned town. He had a story in his head where he did, and where someday he told it.

He went toward it along the base of the chapel wall, and that was when his hand found the other thing.

He thought it was a root. The silt sloped up against the foundation in a soft dune, and out of the dune came a pale fan of sticks, and he closed his fingers around it to push himself off and turn, the way he'd grabbed a hundred sunk branches, and it was not a branch. It did not have the give of wood or the slick of a root. It was light, and it was jointed, and as the silt sighed away from it in a slow brown curtain he was holding a hand.

He did not let go right away. That was the part he would think about later, biking home, lying awake — that for one whole second he did not let go, because his mind would not say the word. The fingers were long. The mud had kept them. They lay in his palm half-curled, the way your hand falls open when you're asleep, and the lake-cold of them was the same cold as the water so he couldn't tell where the water ended and the hand began, and the band of pale mineral that ringed every wall in Carrow ran right across the wrist of it like a cuff.

Then the rest came clear.

The dune was not a dune. The silt had been falling away from it all this dry summer, an inch at a time, the way it had fallen away from the roofs and the orchard, and what it had been hiding was the shape of a man lying along the foot of the chapel wall. Asa could read it now that he'd started reading it — the long line of him, the cage of the chest half out of the mud, and down at the far end, half-sunk still, a darker mass, squared and wrong, lashed to the body with something that had been rope and was now just a stain and a shape. Weighted. Somebody had tied a weight to him. You did not tie a weight to a man who drowned by accident. Even a fifteen-year-old who'd taught himself everything off the internet knew that. You tied a weight to a man you wanted to stay down.

The arm he held — he was still holding it — the arm had a bend in it below the elbow that arms don't have. An old bend, healed crooked, a long-ago break set wrong and grown back wrong, so that even now, even like this, the forearm angled off true.

Asa let go.

The count was gone. He'd lost it somewhere around the hand. His chest wasn't asking anymore; it was shouting, the diaphragm jumping against the locked breath, and a band of black crept in at the edges of everything, and he kicked off the wall hard enough to send a whole hillside of silt up into the water and turn the brown light dark. He went up blind. He went up too fast — he knew it was too fast, knew the rule about coming up slow, and could not obey it. The steeple slid past him on his right, the bell a held shadow in its cage, and then the silver ceiling was rushing down to meet his face and he broke it.

Air.

He got it in a sound that wasn't a word, half a shout and half a sob, dragging it down so fast it hurt, and then another, treading the warm top water with his arms while the cold of the deep let go of his legs. The heat came back down on his wet head like a hand. The cicadas were sawing. A jet ski whined somewhere out past the point, oblivious, somebody's idea of a good day. The sun stood high and white over a lake the color of a nickel, and out here in the middle of the dead-low water the steeple of Carrow stood up into the afternoon, black and dripping, with the mineral ring drawn around it three feet below its peak where the lake had stood last month, the bathtub line of the whole valley, and Asa floated there gulping and looked at it and could not stop seeing the cuff of pale lime around the wrist.

He swam for the canoe.

It was beached on the bared mud off the old roadbed, where he always left it, where the willows used to come down to the water and now came down to fifty yards of cracked gray flat that smelled like a struck match, like rotten egg, like the bottom of something that should have stayed the bottom. He dragged the canoe down the stink of the flat and got in and paddled, and his arms did it without him. The whole way across he kept his face toward the steeple and then he couldn't anymore and turned his back on it and paddled to the far landing where his bike was.

He told no one.

That was the strange part, the part he didn't decide so much as discover, the way he'd discovered the hand. He came up the boat ramp with the lake drying on him and the gray mud already going pale and tight on his arms, and there were people — a man hosing a trailer, a woman with a cooler, a couple of kids his own age he half knew — and his mouth was right there full of it, there's a body, there's a man, somebody put him down there on purpose, and he walked past every one of them and said nothing. The not-saying went into him and stayed, a second held breath that he took on the ramp and did not let out, and it sat in his chest exactly where the first one had, in the same place, with the same weight.

He got on his bike.

The road up to the Ridge was two miles of switchback in full sun, heat coming off the blacktop in sheets you could see through like bad glass, and he stood on the pedals and climbed it with the lake-mud drying to a crust on his hands, cracking gray across his knuckles when he gripped the bars. Carrow Apples, said the faded board at the orchard turnoff, the orchard that wasn't down there anymore, that was a field of black stumps under a town under a lake. Howell Mercer Library. Mercer Bridge. Mercer & Sons, his father's sign, fresh-painted. His own name was on half the things he passed. The Ridge floated on the lake; everybody said so, said it proud — the water they sold to Thann, the summer people, the docks. His family had built it. His family had built all of it on top of the water, and now the water had gone down past its bones and given back a man with a weight tied to his arm, and Asa was riding home with the proof drying on his hands.

He pictured the kitchen. His father at the counter with his phone, the way he stood, what is it, Asa. He tried the words out against the climb, fitting them to his breath the way he fit the count. Dad. There's something in the lake. No. Dad, I found— He'd have to say where. He'd have to say he'd been diving Carrow alone, all summer, the place nobody named. He'd have to start, and he didn't know how you started a sentence that ended with a dead man under your family's water, so he climbed the hill in the white heat and said none of it yet, and held it, and counted.

The Keeping Drawer

She had wiped the counter once before the kettle, and now she wiped it again.

The cloth went over the same square of laminate, over the place where the pattern had worn pale under thirty years of her hand, and there was nothing on it — no crumb, no ring of cup, nothing — but the wiping was a thing to do with the morning, and the morning needed doing with. Heat had got into the kitchen ahead of the sun. It stood at her shoulder where the third chair used to be, close as a body, breathing on the back of her neck while she worked, and she would not open the window. Outside the heat was worse and carried the smell. Three weeks now the smell had come up off the lake on the early air — a low mineral reek, the breath of stone that had not been in the light since Nixon, with something under it that was older and wetter and she did not name.

She folded the cloth in three and laid it over the faucet to dry.

In the front room the radio went on talking. She had turned it down but not off, the way you keep a hand on a child you have decided to ignore. The man from the county station had been saying the same thing since six, in the gentle excited voice they used for weather that was a calamity but not yet anyone's fault. Lowest in the recorded history of the impoundment. He said impoundment like a man who had just learned it. Down past the old hundred-year mark and still falling, folks, and you would not believe what's coming up out there. Then a woman called in, breathless, to say her boy had walked out on the mudflat at the old Carrow landing and found a doorstep. A whole stone doorstep, she said, with the step worn down in the middle where feet had gone in and out, and you could stand on it.

Norah turned the radio off.

The quiet came in and filled the house the way the heat had. She stood in it a moment, both hands flat on the cool of the counter, and then she got the small saucepan down because Walter would not eat the oats unless they were cooked soft, soft as paste, and even then some mornings he held them in his mouth and looked at her like a man asked to swallow a word he didn't trust.

He was awake. She heard the bed take his weight and let it go, take it and let it go, the small machine of him trying to decide on the day. She set the oats to soak and went in.

"There you are," she said. "There's my Walter."

He had got one arm out of the sleeve and could not find the way of the other, and he sat half-bound in his own nightshirt, patient, his white hair stood up in a crest like a boy's. Seventy-five and the bones of his face had come forward and made him handsome again, handsomer than the careful soft man she had married, so that some mornings she met a stranger in the bed who had her husband's eyes. She freed the arm. She did the buttons. His hands lay in his lap and watched hers as if they were a clever thing on the television.

"The gate's open," he said.

"Is it." She worked the second button.

"I left it open." His voice went thin and urgent and then lost the thread of why, and his face emptied, and he watched her hands again. "I never sent it," he said, comfortable now, conversational.

"No," she said. "You never did."

You learned not to argue and not to ask. The young woman in Thann with the lanyard had told her that, kindly, as if it were a thing Norah could not have come to in fifty years of living with a man — that you went where he was, you did not drag him out to where you stood. So she had learned to take his sentences the way you take weather. I never sent it. He said it often. He said it the way other men said the names of dogs they had owned. Some of what he gave her now was the truth, she thought, knocked loose and floating up out of him with everything else, the way a flood gives back chairs and Bibles and the lid of a churn, all the furniture of a life turned out and meaning nothing because there was no house left to put it in. I never sent it. The bell won't ring true. He said that one in the night sometimes and it stood the hair up on her arms, and she did not know why, and she did not let herself wonder long enough to find out.

She got him to the table. She fed him the oats from the side of the spoon, and he took them, mostly, and the radio stayed off, and through the window over the sink she did not look at the lake.

She never had. Fifty years on the Ridge and she had set this kitchen so the window gave on the road and the redbud and the gravel turn of the drive, and the back door gave on her garden, and from neither could you see the water unless you went out past the clothesline and stood and meant to. She did not go past the clothesline. The whole town lived with its face to the Hush — the marinas, the rental decks, the Founders' Day out on the bright water with the flags — and Norah Mercer had lived with her back to it the way you live with your back to a stove, knowing always exactly where the heat was.

She knew where it was this morning. Down. Down and down, giving up doorsteps.

When she had wiped his chin and settled him in the front chair with the fan turned on him, she did the dishes, and then because her hands still wanted work she opened the drawer.

It was the narrow drawer to the left of the sink, the one a kitchen keeps for the things that have no proper place — the rubber bands, the spare key to a lock long thrown out, the warranty for a toaster three toasters dead. Her fingers knew the dark of it without her eyes. Under the loose pencils and the church-bazaar measuring spoons her hand found the brass and closed on it before her mind had asked for it. The plumb-bob. Heavy for its size, a fat brass teardrop the length of her thumb, the point still keen, the little ring at the top worn smooth where a cord had once gone through. Caleb's. He had pressed it into her hand the last night on the chapel steps with the water already up over the lower orchard, and his grin had been wrong, too wide, the grin he wore when he was most afraid, and he had folded her fingers over it the way you fold a child's hand over a coin you don't want the other children to see.

When the water's low enough to give it back, he'd said, look true down from the bell.

She had not known what he meant. She had thought it was a thing to say — Caleb made his love into riddles, always had, since they were small, measure twice, he'd say, cut once, tousling her hair — and she had put the bob in her pocket and then in a drawer and then in this drawer, and it had moved house with her, the only thing of his she kept where she could touch it, and in fifty years she had not once made herself follow the sentence to where it pointed. Down. From the bell. There was no bell. The bell was under ninety feet of the city of Thann's drinking water and so was the boy who'd given her the brass, gone to the coast, gone the autumn the gates closed, gone like so many who couldn't stomach the Ridge and started over somewhere the state hadn't drowned.

She held the bob until it was warm from her, and she put it back, and she shut the drawer.

In the cigar box on the high shelf, where she did not need to look this morning and so did not, lay the postcards. Five of them. She knew them as she knew the creed. The pier at Wrightsville with the cars like beetles. The lighthouse. Doing fine, Sis. Work's steady. Don't you worry over me. The hand small and square and back-slanted, the o's not quite closed — she had told herself for fifty years that grief had changed his writing, that a man writes different when he's made himself new. Five cards in five years and then none, the way a man lets a sister go when his life gets full, and she had grieved that silence as a smaller, bearable thing, a brother carried off by his own life and not by the water, and she had been grateful for the cards the way you are grateful for a grave to tend. They proved he had lived. She took them down twice a year and read them and put them up, and that was as near as she came to looking at the lake.

She went out the back to the garden because it was the one place the morning could be borne.

The heat met her like a wall but the green held against it — the tomatoes she watered by the cupful now the county had said no hose, the beans, the cosmos gone leggy. And at the back of the lot, in the only deep shade, the apple tree.

It was a poor crooked thing and she loved it past sense. She had cut the graft herself with her father's knife the last spring of Carrow, a green whip off the old Sheepnose at the head of the orchard, the tree her grandfather had planted, and she had carried it up the ridge wrapped in a wet sock and budded it onto wild rootstock behind the new house while Walter watched from the step and said nothing, because there was nothing to say that wasn't dangerous. It had taken. It had no business taking and it had taken, and every September it gave her a half-bushel of small ribbed apples that no store would buy and that tasted of a place that no longer was — a hard sweet apple with a long finish like cold well water, the last Carrow apple in the living world. She stood under it now and put her palm flat on the trunk. The bark was warm. High up, the green knobs of the fruit had begun to color on the sun side. It would crop. Drought and all, the old wood would crop.

"You'll get yours," she told it, the way she talked to the lake when no one could hear, the way she'd say the Hush has took the dock again in March, the Hush gave back a good year in a wet October — as if it heard, as if it had a will, which down there in its mud it surely did. "You'll get yours."

She came in when she heard the car.

Not Royce's — she knew his engine, knew the over-careful way he took the turn, as if the drive might be watching. Not Mara's; Mara's was a thing that came once a season and was leaving before it arrived. This was a heavier engine, slow, with the particular slowness of a vehicle whose driver was reading mailbox numbers, and a cold went through Norah in the standing heat. She set the colander in the sink. She dried her hands on her apron though they were dry.

Down the lane the woman two doors up was out at her fence in her housecoat, and the man from the brick house had come to his porch, and they were not looking at each other and they were both looking at the same thing, and Norah did not have to see it yet to know its shape. The radio she had turned off was still going in every other kitchen on the Ridge. They found something in the water. The doorstep, the woman had said. A whole doorstep with the wear in the middle. The town came up an inch a day now and gave back its furniture, and somewhere this morning it had given back a thing that brought a county car up a quiet lane at half past nine, slow, reading the numbers.

In the front room Walter stirred in his chair. The fan moved his hair.

"The bell," he said, to no one, to the screen door, to fifty years. "The bell won't ring true."

The cruiser came into the gravel turn — she saw it through the road window, the only window she'd ever let face out, white with the brown county star on the door, and it stopped square across the mouth of her drive the way they stop when they mean to come in and not leave soon. The dust it had pushed ahead of it kept coming after it had stopped, a slow gold roll across the redbud, and settled.

A man got out. He put his hat on.

Norah stood in her clean kitchen with the heat at her shoulder and her dry hands flat on her apron, and she watched the deputy take the measure of the house the way men did before they brought you a thing you could not give back, and she did not go to the door. Her body had gone somewhere ahead of her. Behind her, without her telling it to, without one word from the part of her that had wiped the counter twice and would not look at the lake, her right hand had left her apron and crossed the small kitchen and found the narrow drawer to the left of the sink, and her fingers were already in the dark of it, past the pencils, past the spoons, closing on the brass, on the keen point and the worn ring, on the only thing the water had not yet taken back — and lifting it into the light before the knuckles ever came to the door.