I. Low Water
The Edisto is the longest free-flowing blackwater river in North America, a fact printed on a brown sign at Givhans Ferry that every child in Dorchester County has read and no child has ever found impressive. It rises in the sandhills above Aiken and comes down through the county the color of strong tea, so slow in summer that a dropped leaf will sit on it for a minute deciding which way to go, and so fast in a wet spring that it will take a johnboat off its trailer and a trailer off its hitch and a man off his feet if he is fool enough to stand in it. It floods when it wants to. It goes down when it is ready. People who have lived along it their whole lives do not say the river took a thing. They say the river kept it, and they say it the way you would speak of a relative who is difficult but has always been there.
The spring of 2027 was wet. It rained through March and most of April, and by the third week the river at Givhans was eleven feet over the landing and up into the picnic shelters, and the state park people had closed the gate and gone home. Then on the last Tuesday of the month the rain stopped as if a hand had been laid on it. The water fell four feet in two days. On Thursday morning it fell the rest of the way, and Kayla Dukes, who was twenty-six and the park’s only full-time ranger and Harold Dukes’s granddaughter, drove down to open the gate and walked out to see what the river had done to the landing.
There was a car on the sandbar.
It sat square on the sand below the boat ramp, nose toward the water, as though somebody had driven it down the ramp to look at the river and gotten out to stretch. It was a two-tone Chevrolet, cream over turquoise, with the wide cat’s-eye taillights and the gull-wing fins that meant 1959 to anybody who had ever been to a car show, which in that county was everybody. It was not muddy. That was the first thing Kayla noticed, standing on the ramp with her coffee going cold. The flood had left mud on everything, on the shelters and the signs and the pines ten feet up their trunks, and this car was clean. The chrome was bright. The whitewalls were white. The windows were up and there was no silt on the glass, and when she walked around to the driver’s side and looked in, the seats were dry.
There was a girl asleep on the front seat.
She was lying on her side with her head toward the passenger door and her knees drawn up, in a dress of pale yellow taffeta with a full skirt that spilled over the edge of the seat, and white gloves to the elbow, and one shoe. Her hair was dark and done up in a way Kayla had only seen in her grandmother’s photographs. A wilted gardenia was pinned above her left breast. She was breathing. Kayla watched her breathe for perhaps ten seconds, long enough to be certain, and then she walked back up the ramp with great care, as if the sand might give, and sat down on the bumper of her truck and called the sheriff’s office, and then she called her grandfather, because it seemed like a thing he ought to know, and she could not have said why.
By nine o’clock there were four county cars at the landing and a wrecker from Ridgeville and a crowd of perhaps forty people standing along the top of the ramp, which was as close as the deputies would let them. By ten there were a hundred. Word moves through Dorchester County the way water does, downhill and into every low place, and by the time Marla Jenkins got there from St. George with her camera there were people on the bank who had driven from Walterboro.
Sheriff Lonnie Pell was standing at the bottom of the ramp with his hat in his hand, looking at the car the way a man looks at a tax bill.
“She’s awake,” he said, before Marla could ask anything. “Woke up about twenty minutes ago. Asked Kayla what time it was. Asked if her daddy was going to kill her.” He put his hat on and took it off again. “Then she asked where Toby was.”
“Toby who?”
“She didn’t say. We’ve got her in the back of Voss’s car with a blanket and a Coke. She won’t take the gloves off.” He looked at the car. “Marla, I ran the plate. It’s a South Carolina plate, 1961 issue, and it comes back to a Wendell Quinn of Pine Street, St. George, who’s been dead since 1979. That car went in this river on the twenty-ninth of April, 1961. It’s in the file. Two juveniles, one recovered, one not. I’ve got the report on my desk. It was typed on a typewriter.”
Marla had been editor of The County Line for nineteen years and had the paper’s morgue in her head the way other people had hymns, and she did not have to ask who the one recovered was. Every soul in the county who had lived long enough knew it, though nobody had said it out loud in her hearing, and she understood now why they hadn’t. There was only one Quinn on Pine Street.
“And the girl?”
“Says her name is Delia Weathers. Says she’s seventeen. Says she’s a senior at St. George High School, which has been Woodland High since 1996, and that she went to the prom last night with Toby Quinn in his daddy’s car, and that they drove down here after to look at the river.” Lonnie Pell looked at her, and his face was the face of a decent man standing at the exact edge of what he had been trained for. “Last night, Marla. She says it was last night.”
Down on the sandbar the wrecker driver had put a hook on the Impala’s rear bumper and was waiting for somebody to tell him what to do with it. The river went by below, brown and quiet and wholly unconcerned. On the far bank the cypress stood in a row like people who had come to watch and would not be asked to leave.
Marla walked up the ramp to Danny Voss’s patrol car and looked through the back window.
The girl was sitting very straight with the blanket around her shoulders and the Coke untouched in her gloved hands, and she was looking at the crowd on the bank, at their phones held up, at the women in yoga pants and the men in camouflage ball caps, with an expression that Marla would spend some weeks trying to find the right word for. It was not fear. It was the look of someone who has walked into the wrong room at a party and is too polite to walk back out.
Then the girl turned and looked at her through the glass, and blinked, and Marla felt the ground move a little under her feet.
She’s here, she thought. God help us all, she’s here.
II. The Morgue
The edition was in the third cabinet, bound in a cracked green ledger with the others from 1961, and Marla found it in four minutes because she had known for nineteen years approximately where it was without ever once letting herself open it. May 4, 1961. The headline ran the full width of the front page in the old Cheltenham the paper had used until Bud Rawls’s time.
TWO ST. GEORGE SENIORS LOST IN EDISTO AFTER PROM.
Under it, two school photographs. A boy with a flat-top and a serious mouth and ears he had not grown into. A girl with dark hair in a flip and a smile that had been told to hold still and had not quite managed it. Tobias Wendell Quinn, 18, and Delia Ann Weathers, 17, both seniors at St. George High School, were lost in the Edisto River at Givhans Ferry late Saturday night when the automobile in which they were riding left the boat landing and entered the river, which was at flood stage. The story said Quinn had been recovered from the water a quarter mile downstream by a catfisherman named J. T. Jessup, who had heard the splash and gone out in his boat with a lantern. It said the Weathers girl had not been found. It said the Chevrolet had not been found. It said the search, conducted by the sheriff’s department and volunteers from the Ridgeville and St. George fire companies, had continued through Tuesday and been suspended on account of the current. It said the Weathers girl was the daughter of Mr. and Mrs. Hollis Weathers of the Reevesville community and was survived by a sister, Inez, 16.
The following week’s edition had a paragraph. The search for Miss Delia Weathers, 17, has been discontinued. The week after that had nothing. The week after that, St. George High School graduated fifty-one seniors on the football field, and the paper printed every name, and hers was among them with an asterisk, and at the bottom of the column in six-point type the asterisk said in memoriam.
Marla sat with the ledger open on Bud Rawls’s desk for a long time.
She had known Tobias Quinn for thirty years. She had sat next to him in Kirk’s Barbershop perhaps three hundred times while he read a Field & Stream that was older than the boy cutting the grass outside. She had watched him arrange his face into nothing on the worst nights of other people’s lives, including, six months ago, on a swamp boardwalk, for a boy named Wade Talley. She had never once heard him speak of a girl. She had never once seen him with a woman. He had served twenty-seven years as a deputy and lived alone on Pine Street in the house his father had left him and driven the same truck since the first Bush, and she had assumed, the way one assumes about the furniture of one’s own life, that this was simply what he was. A bachelor. A quiet man. She had never asked. Nobody had. In Dorchester County a thing that happens before you were born is a thing that has always been, like the river, and you do not ask the river what it is holding.
She closed the ledger and drove to Summerville.
The girl was in an interview room at the sheriff’s office with a sandwich she had not eaten and a woman from the Department of Social Services who had plainly never been issued a form for this. Lonnie Pell met Marla in the hall.
“She has no birth certificate,” he said. “I mean she does, Hollis and Mary Weathers, Reevesville, June of 1943, it’s in the vital records in Columbia, and it belongs to a woman who’d be eighty-three if she were alive and is listed as deceased in absentia since 1968, when they finally got around to it. That girl in there is seventeen. The nurse says so. Teeth, bones, the whole thing. Seventeen.” He rubbed his face with both hands. “DSS wants to put her in foster care in Dorchester as a juvenile with no identification. I told them she’s got identification, it’s just sixty-six years old. Then DSS asked me what I’d like them to do instead, and I did not have an answer, Marla, I did not have one single answer.”
“Does she know?”
“She knows something’s wrong. She’s not simple. She saw the phones, she’s seen the cars. The nurse was Black and had a badge and called her honey, and she took that in and didn’t say a word, and I watched her take it in.” He looked at the door. “She keeps asking for Toby. I told her we were trying to reach him. I haven’t tried. I can’t make myself pick up the phone.”
“Let me sit with her.”
The social worker left with visible relief. Marla sat down across the table. The girl looked at her with the same expression she’d worn in the back of the patrol car, polite and alert and waiting for the room to explain itself. Up close she was smaller than Marla had thought, with a chipped front tooth and a mole beside her left eye, and the gardenia on her dress had gone brown at the edges and smelled, faintly and impossibly, of the night before.
“I’m Marla Jenkins. I run the newspaper in St. George.”
“The County Line?” The girl’s face opened. “Mr. Rawls runs that.”
“Bud Rawls was my—” Marla stopped. Bud had been twenty-four in 1961, a cub reporter, and would have written the story she had just read. “Bud retired. I took it over from him.”
“Oh.” The girl folded her gloved hands. “Is it tomorrow? They won’t tell me. The lady with the badge kept saying soon, and that man with the hat looks at me like I’m going to break.” She leaned forward. “Is Toby all right? He went under. I saw him go under, and I couldn’t get the door, and then I don’t remember, and then I was in the car and it was morning and the car was on the sand. Did they get him out?”
“They got him out,” Marla said. “Mr. Jessup got him out in his boat.”
The girl sat back and closed her eyes and let out a breath she seemed to have been holding since 1961. “Thank God. Thank God. Daddy’d have killed him, after he killed me.” She opened her eyes. “Can I see him?”
And there it was. The whole thing, in one question, sitting on the table between them beside an uneaten sandwich.
Marla had spent her life deciding what to print and what to put in a drawer, and she understood in that moment that there was a third category, which was the thing that was going to happen whether you printed it or not. This girl was going to find out. The county was going to tell her, in a hundred small ways, with its phones and its badges and its yoga pants, and the only question was whether somebody would tell her first who loved her.
“Delia,” she said. “How old do you think I am?”
The girl looked at her, puzzled, and then with care, the way one is taught to look at an elder. “I don’t know, ma’am. Fifty?”
“Fifty-two. I was born in 1974.”
The girl’s face did not change for a count of three. Then it did, slowly, a thing going out of it and a thing coming in, and the gloved hands came apart on the table.
“That man in the hat said the sheriff’s name was Pell,” she said, very quietly. “Sheriff’s name is Ravenel. It’s been Ravenel since I was little.”
“I know.”
“The deputy’s car didn’t have a radio. It had a—he talked into a thing on his shoulder.”
“Yes.”
“How long?”
Marla told her.
The girl did not cry. She sat very still and looked at her own hands in their white gloves, and after a while she said, “Mama,” not as a question, and Marla shook her head, and the girl nodded as if that were only to be expected. Then she said, “Inez,” and Marla said that Inez was alive, in a home here in Summerville, and the girl nodded again. Then, after a long time, with her eyes still on her hands, she said the thing Marla had been waiting for and dreading since she’d seen the plate.
“And Toby?”
“Toby’s alive, honey. He’s eighty-four years old. He lives on Pine Street in his daddy’s house, and he gets his hair cut at Kirk’s on Thursdays, and he never married.”
The girl took that in the way she had taken in the nurse and the badge, without a word, all the way down.
“He said he’d take me to Folly Beach,” she said. “After. We were going to drive down and watch the sun come up. That’s why we went to the landing. He wanted to look at the river first because it was so high. He said he’d never seen it so high.” She looked up. “Does he know I’m here?”
“Not yet,” said Marla. “I’m going to go tell him now.”
III. Pine Street
He was not at Kirk’s. It was Thursday, and he was always at Kirk’s on Thursday, and Carl, when she came through the door, only shook his head and nodded toward the window and the street beyond it, and said, “Harold Dukes called him at eight this morning. He got up and walked out without his magazine.” He looked at the empty wooden chair. “Forty years I’ve cut that man’s hair. He has never once left this shop without finishing what he was reading.”
From the end chair, Ellis Kirk said, “Luther pulled a mule out of that river in 1938. Walked it home. Mule lived eleven more years.” He sipped his coffee. “Luther always said the Edisto didn’t take. It kept. And it gave back when it was ready, not when you were.”
“Daddy.”
“I’m just saying what Luther said.”
The house on Pine Street was a white frame bungalow with a tin roof and a porch swing and azaleas that had been trimmed within an inch of their lives, the house of a man who had learned in the sheriff’s department that order was the only thing that could be relied on. The truck was in the drive. The front door was open behind the screen. Marla knocked on the frame and, when nothing came, let herself in.
Tobias Quinn was sitting at his kitchen table with a yearbook open in front of him.
She had never seen him without a shirt collar buttoned to the top, and he had one on now, and had put on a tie, and she understood that he had done it this morning, after the call, the way a man dresses for a funeral or a court date. His hands were flat on the table on either side of the book. He did not look up.
“I know,” he said. “Harold told me. Then Lonnie called. Then Kayla.” His voice was perfectly level. “I’ve been sitting here since about ten past eight trying to make my legs work.”
Marla sat down across from him. The yearbook was the 1961 Georgian, and the page it was open to was the senior class, and halfway down the right-hand column was the girl from the front page, in the same photograph, with the same smile that would not hold still.
“She asked for you,” Marla said. “First thing. Before she knew anything. She asked if they’d gotten you out.”
Tobias closed his eyes.
“She’s seventeen, Tobias. She’s got a chipped tooth and a gardenia on her dress and she thinks it’s the thirtieth of April, 1961. She wants to know if you’re going to take her to Folly Beach.”
For a long time he did not move at all. Then, in the same level voice, looking at the table, he began to talk, and Marla, who had sat across from a great many people telling her things for the first time, knew enough to put her hands in her lap and say nothing.
“Her daddy didn’t want her going with me. Hollis Weathers. He thought the Quinns were trash because my daddy sold used cars and drank, which was true. She snuck out her window to go. I had the Impala because Daddy was passed out and didn’t know. We danced every dance. I was not a dancer, Marla, I was a boy who could throw a baseball and that was the extent of my gifts, but I danced every dance that night because she asked me to.” His thumb moved on the edge of the page. “After, we drove down to Givhans to see the river. It had been raining a week. I’d never seen it so high and I wanted her to see it, I don’t know why. Showing off. The water was up over the bottom of the ramp. I pulled down to the edge and we sat there with the lights on the water and I told her I was going to marry her.”
He stopped. The refrigerator hummed.
“She laughed at me. Not mean. She said, ‘Toby Quinn, you ask me again when you’ve got a job,’ and she took her shoe off and put her feet up on the dash, and I reached for her, and I don’t know. I don’t know what I did. I’ve had sixty-six years to work out whether my foot came off the brake or the sand went out from under us or the river just reached up and took hold, and I do not know. We went forward. The water came over the hood. It came in the floorboards and she screamed and I got my door open and I got out and I turned around and the car was gone.” He looked up at Marla for the first time, and his eyes were dry and terrible. “Gone. In the time it took me to turn around. It was there and I turned and there was black water and my own headlights going down under it like two eyes closing.”
“Tobias—”
“I went in after her. I’d like you to know that. I went in and it took me a quarter mile before Jessup got a hand on my collar, and I fought him. I fought that man in his boat with my fists until he hit me with an oar. I was in the hospital in Walterboro three days.” He looked back at the book. “They dragged for her through Tuesday. Hollis Weathers stood on that ramp four days without sitting down. When they called it off he walked up to my daddy’s house and knocked on the door and when I came out he looked at me for about a minute, and then he said, ‘You ought to be where she is,’ and he turned around and walked home. He never spoke to me again. I went in the sheriff’s department two years later because I thought if I spent my life pulling people out of trouble it might go some way toward it. It didn’t. Nothing does. You just get older with it.”
Marla found that her own eyes were wet, and that his were not, and understood that he had used his up a long time ago.
“I never told anybody I loved her,” he said. “Not then. Not after. There wasn’t anybody to tell. Her daddy’d have shot me. Her mama went into the bedroom and didn’t come out for a year. Inez was a child. And after a while it was just a thing that had happened before everybody was born, and nobody asked, and I let them not ask.” He closed the yearbook. “I was eighteen, Marla. I had a flat-top and ears like a jug and I was going to marry her. And now she’s down at the landing seventeen years old, and I’m—” He held up his hands, the big brown-spotted hands, the knuckles gone to knobs. “I’m this.”
“She knows,” Marla said. “I told her.”
“Told her what?”
“How long. How old you are. That you live here. That you never married.”
Something went across his face. “What did she say?”
“She said you promised to take her to Folly Beach.”
He put his face in his hands then, and sat that way, and Marla sat with him. Through the kitchen window she could see the azaleas, and beyond them the street, and down the street at the end of the block a county car idling at the curb with Danny Voss in it, because Lonnie Pell had understood without being told that somebody ought to be near.
“I can’t let her see me,” Tobias said through his hands.
“Why not?”
“Because she’s seventeen. Because the last thing she saw was a boy. Because I don’t want her to look at me and have to be kind about it.”
Marla thought about that. She thought about a little white dress in a drawer, and a barber’s ledger, and a bell in the ground, and all the ways she had watched people in that county decide what other people could bear on their behalf.
“Tobias,” she said. “That girl woke up this morning in a car on a sandbar and found out her mother is dead and her sister is eighty-three and the sheriff’s name is Pell. She found all of that out in about ten minutes, sitting in a room with a sandwich, and she didn’t cry. She asked for you. Every single time, she asked for you.” She stood up. “Don’t you dare decide what she can bear. She’s borne more today than you have in sixty-six years, and she’s still asking.”
He did not answer.
“She’s at the sheriff’s office until they figure out what to do with her. Then I’m taking her to see Inez. Then I’m taking her home with me, because nobody else in this county has the first idea and I’ve got a spare room.” She went to the door and stopped. “The river kept her for you, Tobias. Luther Kirk said it never takes, it keeps. Sixty-six years it kept her, and it gave her back on a Thursday, and you’re sitting in your kitchen with a tie on. You go put that truck in gear.”
She let the screen door close behind her, and walked down the steps past the azaleas, and did not look back, because she had learned that you cannot watch a man decide a thing like that. He has to do it alone, in his kitchen, with his hands on the table.
IV. Summerville
The home was called Magnolia Trace, a long low brick building off Bacons Bridge Road with a circle drive and a flag and the particular hush of a place where people are waiting. Inez Weathers Cato had been there four years. She was eighty-three, a widow, a retired second-grade teacher with a stroke behind her that had taken her left side and not one particle of her mind, and she received Marla in a wheelchair by the window of a room full of photographs with the air of a woman who had long ago stopped being surprised by what walked through her door.
Marla had not brought the girl in. She had left her in the car in the circle drive with Danny Voss, because there is a way to do a thing like this, and it is not to walk a dead sister into a sitting room.
She told Inez about the car on the sandbar. She told her about the dry seats and the yellow dress and the gardenia and the gloves. She did not get to the end of it. Inez Cato held up her good hand and said, “Stop,” and sat looking out the window at the circle drive for a long moment with her mouth working, and then said, “Is she in that car out there?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Does she still have that mole by her eye?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
Inez closed her eyes. “Daddy wouldn’t let Mama put it on the stone. The date. He said you don’t put a date on a child you haven’t buried. So there’s a stone up at Reevesville with her name on it and nothing else, and I’ve been going up there sixty years putting flowers on a girl who isn’t under it.” She opened her eyes. “Go get her, Marla. I’m eighty-three years old and I’ve had a stroke. I don’t have time to be eased into anything.”
What happened in that room Marla did not watch, because she walked the girl to the door and then stepped back into the hall and stood with her back against the wall and her eyes closed and listened to it, and later, when she tried to write it down for herself, she found she could not, and tore the page up. She heard the chair’s wheels. She heard a sound from Inez Cato that she had never heard a human being make, a sound that had been sixty-six years coming up out of somebody. She heard the girl say Nezzie, which was a name nobody had used since the Kennedy administration, and then she heard nothing for a long time but two women breathing.
After a while she went in. Inez had the girl’s gloved hand in her good one and was looking at her face the way one looks at a thing one has memorized and is checking against the original. The girl was kneeling by the chair with her yellow skirt pooled on the linoleum.
“You got old,” the girl said, wondering, not unkind.
“I got old,” Inez agreed. “You got lazy. Sixty-six years and you didn’t age a day.” She touched the chipped tooth with her thumb. “Daddy was going to have that fixed. Said no daughter of his was walking across a stage with a broke tooth.”
“I know. He said that every day.”
“He said it every day till he died.” Inez’s face worked. “He never got over it, Delia. Mama neither. I want you to know that, because they were hard people and you might have wondered. They never once got over it.”
The girl nodded and put her forehead on her sister’s knee.
They talked for an hour. Inez told her the sixty-six years in the only way they could be told, as a list: who had married, who had died, where the farm had gone, what had become of the school. The girl listened to all of it with that same stillness, taking it down, and asked few questions, and the ones she asked were small. Whether the pecan tree in the side yard was still there. Whether Inez had ever learned to drive. Whether Mama had kept her room.
“Mama kept it eleven years,” Inez said. “Then she went in one morning and packed it all in boxes and gave it to the church. I came home from school and it was gone. She never said why and I never asked.” She looked at Marla. “That’s the Weathers way. Toby Quinn’s the same. The whole county’s the same. Lord, the things we don’t ask each other.”
“Toby,” the girl said.
Inez’s mouth tightened. “I taught thirty-one years in that county and he never once came to a thing I was at. Never once. I’d see his truck turn around in the road if he saw my car at the Piggly Wiggly. Daddy told him he ought to be where you were and I believe Toby Quinn spent his whole life agreeing.” She looked at her sister. “I used to hate him. I don’t anymore. I’m too old and he’s too old, and he’s been punishing himself better than I ever could have.” She squeezed the gloved hand. “He never married, you know.”
“Mrs. Jenkins said.”
“Sixty-six years. For a girl who told him to ask again when he had a job.” Inez shook her head. “Men are the most foolish creatures God made, and that one’s the king of them.”
The girl was quiet for a while. Then she said, “I want to see him.”
“He’ll come,” Inez said, and looked at Marla over the girl’s head, and her eyes said he had better.
It was four in the afternoon when they came out, and the circle drive was in shade, and the girl stopped on the walk and looked up at the sky with an expression Marla could not read. Then she asked whether they could go back to the river. She wanted to see the car, she said. She wanted to see if her other shoe was in it.
The Impala was no longer on the sandbar. Lonnie Pell had had it towed to the county impound lot in St. George, a fenced acre of gravel behind the public works building on Highway 15, and it sat there now at the end of a row of wrecked pickups with the afternoon sun on its turquoise roof, looking, Marla thought, like something that had been let out of church into the wrong century. A deputy opened the gate for them without a word. The girl walked to the car and stood with her gloved hand on the fender.
“It’s warm,” she said.
She opened the passenger door. The seat was dry. Her other shoe was on the floorboard where she’d kicked it off, a white satin pump with a strap, and she picked it up and held it and did not put it on. Then she walked around to the back and, before anybody could stop her, pulled the chrome handle and opened the trunk.
It was full of water.
River water, brown and still, filled the trunk to the lip, as if the Edisto had been poured in and had not thought to run out. There was no leak. The gravel under the bumper was dry. Danny Voss said something under his breath that Marla did not hear. The girl stood looking down into it, and the water showed her back her own face, and the yellow dress, and the sky.
Something was floating in it. She reached in, to the elbow, soaking the white glove, and drew it out.
A boutonniere. A single white carnation on a pin, gone to brown, the kind a boy rents with his tuxedo. She held it dripping and looked at Marla.
“He took it off in the car,” she said. “He said it was making his neck itch. I told him to put it in the glove box and he threw it in the back.” She looked down at the trunk again, at the water that should not have been there. “It’s been keeping that, too.”
Marla took her home to St. George, to the little house on Minnesota Avenue with the pecan tree in the side yard, and gave her the spare room, and a pair of pajamas, and a sandwich she ate this time, all of it. The girl sat at the kitchen table afterward in borrowed pajamas with the shoe and the wet carnation in front of her and did not speak, and Marla, who had learned her trade from Bud Rawls and her silence from Carl Kirk, let her not speak.
At nine-fifteen the phone rang. It was Tobias Quinn.
“Tell her,” he said, and stopped, and started again. “Tell her I’ll be at the landing at five. Sun comes up at six-eighteen. It’s an hour and forty minutes to Folly, if we leave by five we’ll make it.” A pause. “Tell her I’ve got a job now.”
Marla carried the phone into the kitchen and held it out. The girl looked at it. Then she took it and put it to her ear, and whatever he said to her, she listened to all of it with her eyes closed, and at the end she said, “All right, Toby,” very softly, the way a girl says it to a boy who has been forgiven for something before he has finished asking, and gave the phone back, and went to bed.
V. Folly Beach
Marla drove her to the landing at a quarter to five, in the yellow dress, because the girl had asked for it, and with both shoes on, and the carnation dried overnight on a paper towel and pinned now beside the gardenia. The park gate was open. Kayla Dukes had seen to that and then gone home, because she had been raised by Harold Dukes and knew when not to be somewhere. The sky over the pines was still black, with the first gray showing in the east the way it does in the Lowcountry in spring, not as light but as a thinning.
The truck was at the top of the ramp with its parking lights on.
Tobias Quinn stood beside it in a dark suit that had been bought for a funeral some years back and let out since, and a white shirt, and the tie. He had gotten a haircut. Marla did not know when, or from whom, and suspected Carl Kirk had opened his shop at some ungodly hour of the night and asked no questions. He stood very straight with his hands at his sides, and when the car’s lights swept over him he did not flinch, and he did not look away.
The girl got out.
She stood for a moment with her hand on the door, looking at him across thirty feet of gravel, and Marla, behind the wheel, could not see her face and did not try to. She saw Tobias’s. She saw a man of eighty-four who had kept his face arranged into nothing for sixty-six years let it go, all at once, the way a dam goes, and she saw what was under it, and she looked away then, because it was not hers.
The girl walked across the gravel. She stopped in front of him and looked up at him for a long time, at the white hair and the spotted hands and the knobbed knuckles and the ears he had finally grown into, and then she reached up and straightened his tie, which had not needed it.
“You got a job,” she said.
“Twenty-seven years. Deputy sheriff. Retired now.” His voice shook on the last word and he let it. “Pension and everything.”
“Well,” she said. “Ask me, then.”
He did. Marla heard it from the car, with the window down and the dome light off, and did not write it down afterward, and will not write it here, except to say that it was not long and that a boy of eighteen had been rehearsing it on and off for sixty-six years and had finally gotten it right. And she heard the girl’s answer, which was two words, and then she heard nothing, because the girl had put her arms around him and her face in his funeral suit and he had put his hands on her hair, and the river went by below them in the dark not saying anything at all.
They took the truck. He held the door for her and she gathered the yellow skirt in and he closed it and walked around and got in, and Marla watched the taillights go up the park road and turn onto 61 toward the coast, and then she sat alone at the landing for a while with the engine off, listening to the river and thinking about Andrew, and about Carl’s middle chair, and about all the people in that county who had never gotten to drive to the beach with the one they’d meant to.
She knew the rest only as Tobias told it to her later, once, in Kirk’s, on a Thursday, with Carl cutting and Ellis asleep and nobody else in the shop, and he told it looking at the mirror and not at her, which was how he could.
They made Folly by ten past six. He parked at the end of Center Street where the pier was, where the pier had been since 1995 and where in 1961 there had been a different pier and a pavilion with a dance floor that he described to her as they walked out onto the sand, so that she could see it. She took off her shoes. She held the skirt up out of the tide line the way girls in that county had been doing for three hundred years. They sat on the dry sand above the wrack with the water going gray and then silver and then, at six-eighteen exactly, gold, and the sun came up out of the Atlantic as it had been doing every morning since 1961 without once being watched by the two people who had planned to watch it.
She asked him about his life. He told her. The sheriff’s department, the house, the truck, Kirk’s on Thursdays, the Field & Stream. She said it sounded lonesome and he said it was. She asked whether he’d ever courted anybody and he said no, and she asked why not, and he said, “Because I’d asked,” and she put her hand on his and left it there. She asked whether he’d been happy and he said no, and then he said, “I was happy about once a year. When the river was high. I’d drive down and look at it. That was the only time I ever felt like you were anywhere.”
They stayed until the beach began to fill with people walking dogs. Then she stood up and brushed the sand from the yellow dress and said, “Toby, take me back to the landing.”
He said he would take her anywhere. He said she could stay with him on Pine Street, that there was a room, that he would sleep on the porch if she liked, that Inez would help, that Marla would help, that the county would figure out the papers somehow, that she was seventeen and had a whole life and he was an old man but he had a pension and a truck and he could at least see her through the start of it. He said all of that standing on the sand at Folly Beach in his funeral suit with his shoes full of sand, and she let him finish.
Then she said, “Daddy’s waiting.”
He did not understand her at first. He said Hollis Weathers was forty years in the ground. And she looked at him with the mole by her eye and the chipped tooth and said, very gently, the way one explains a thing to a child, that he was in the ground up here. That down there, where she had been, it was still the thirtieth of April, and the sun was coming up, and her daddy was standing on the porch in Reevesville with his belt in his hand waiting on her to come up the road in her yellow dress with her shoes in her hand, and that she had been gone all night, and that she was not going to leave him standing there.
“The river kept me,” she said. “It didn’t let me go. I don’t think it can. I think it just lent me, Toby. For the beach.”
He begged her. He told Marla that plainly, without shame, in the barber chair. He begged her on the sand at Folly Beach the way he had not begged anybody for anything in his life, and she took his face in her gloved hands and told him that he had asked, and she had said yes, and that it was not going to be taken back by anybody, not by the river and not by her daddy and not by sixty-six years, and that a yes was a yes wherever it was kept.
“You’ve got the rest of yours,” she said. “Go live it. I’ll be where I’ve been. It’s not so bad. It’s quiet, and the water’s warm, and I’ve got your flower.”
They drove back up 61 in the full morning with the windows down. She sang. He did not remember what. At the landing she got out and kissed him once, on the mouth, in front of Marla Jenkins and God, and walked down the boat ramp in her bare feet with her shoes in her hand and her skirt held up, the way she had a thousand times walking up the road to her daddy’s house, and did not stop at the water.
The Edisto was down to its spring bed, brown and slow and no deeper at the ramp’s end than a girl’s knees. She walked into it. The skirt floated out around her yellow on the dark water. She walked until it was to her waist, and then to her shoulders, and she did not look back, because she had told him not to let her, and when the water closed over the dark hair there was no sound and no ripple and the river went on by as if nothing had been given to it, which, Marla supposed, was true. It had only been returned.
Tobias Quinn stood at the top of the ramp and watched the place where she had been until the sun was full up over the cypress. Then he got in his truck and drove to St. George and parked on Main and walked into Kirk’s Barbershop at a quarter past eight, and sat down in the third wooden chair, and picked up his Field & Stream, and opened it to the page where he had left off the morning before.
Carl Kirk looked at him in the mirror.
“You want a trim, Tobias?”
“Had one.”
“So you did.”
The Impala was gone from the county impound lot that same morning. The gate was locked and the gravel was undisturbed and the wrecked pickups sat in their row with a space at the end of it, and nobody on the county payroll ever filed a report, because Lonnie Pell told them not to, and because there was no form. Kayla Dukes found a single white satin pump on the sandbar at Givhans Ferry a week later, when the river had gone down another foot, and she did not turn it in. She gave it to Tobias Quinn on his porch on Pine Street, and he thanked her, and she did not ask him anything, having been raised right.
The County Line ran the story on the following Thursday, below the fold, under a photograph of the car on the sandbar taken from the top of the ramp with the crowd cropped out. 1961 Chevrolet Recovered From Edisto at Givhans Ferry. It said the vehicle had been identified as the one lost in the April 1961 accident that claimed the life of Delia Ann Weathers, 17, of Reevesville. It said the vehicle had been remarkably well preserved. It said the Weathers family had been notified. It said nothing else, and nobody in the county who read it, and everybody did, asked Marla Jenkins why.
In May, Inez Cato had the stone at Reevesville recut. Marla drove her up to see it, in the chair, on a Sunday. Under Delia Ann Weathers and the dates, June 11, 1943, and April 29, 1961, which Inez had gotten the stonecutter to put on at last over the objections of a father forty years dead, there was a third line, which Inez had chosen and which the stonecutter had charged her extra for because of the length.
Kept by the river. Lent back for one morning. Said yes.
Tobias Quinn comes to Kirk’s on Thursdays. He reads his magazine. He says very little, as he always has. But Carl Kirk, who has been standing behind men with a razor for forty years and knows every drawer in the county, says that when the river is high, Tobias puts the magazine down and goes to the window and stands there looking up Main Street toward the courthouse with his hands behind his back, and that if you did not know better you would say the man was waiting for somebody, and expecting her, and that it was not so bad, and that the water was warm.
End of Dispatch.
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