There Was a Story About the James

by Duston Spear

1.

            There was a story about the James. A river fed by a hundred tributaries that looped and curled in on itself so that midway through Virginia, near Baker’s Pond, the artery was more of a strait between two halves of the same river. It flowed east from the Appalachian Mountains over three hundred silky looped miles toward the Chesapeake Bay, an open mouth to the Atlantic. To the sea. The river’s purring sepia water had begun as a firm line back in West Virginia, a liquid arrow, headed fast like it couldn't wait to get inside the Commonwealth of Virginia. Except for that near-circle at Hunnicutt’s Place the soft water ran in lyrical bends and sometimes opened out to receive the lush feathery capillaries of streams near Turkey Island, across from Shirley Plantation, or ‘Shirley Hundred,’ as plantations used to be known. A big brick main house, built to be three stories tall, sat at the neck of the Serpent’s Head (if you looked at an old map, where the James took on a serpentine shape.) Then a bulbous tom turkey snood lists out with some more circles inside the moist wetlands. The James gathers force around Pesky’s Corner, and it rounds out into a fire-spitting dragon’s body near Jordan’s Journey. The widest section, bloated, full of male copperheads coiling round each other turning the inlet into a near pink frenzy in summer, faces Berkeley Plantation, inhabited by the Harrison family until the state took ownership. From there it stays thick and heads further east toward the state capital, Richmond.

            There are maps from Colonial days, ‘Curles of the James’ they’re named, listing the major houses and the smaller creeks that ran to fill the rivers surrounding marsh lands, but the story of those peculiar four days and three nights on the James, when mostly men, and a few tenacious young women, wandered out into the oozing mud with small-scale boats tied to their ankles, that story is un-recorded, not found in any documents, maps or otherwise. 

2.

            I first heard the tale about the empty river one steamy summer afternoon on my grandparent’s front porch. It was always told to me in sweet soft whispers while Miss Tee gently scratched the small of my back. The rhythm of the well-worn glider, maintained sure and steady by my grandfather’s oscillating knees, would have made sleep an easy companion— but the story always held me.

            It happened during the night, just two months before all the young men of the county ran like wolves out of their small village and into the woods of France to fight in the thousandth war between men and countries. This one was later given the name World War One, as if the recorders of conflicts had run out of numbers, so someone decided to reset the battles at One. Some change, some shift occurred, that summer night, before the United States entered the Great War, and no one except George Land was there to witness it, and no one ever believed George Land about anything. When he did wake up with his morning hangover, leaning back on a cane chair in front of Warren’s General Store, and opened his good eye, the bright sunlight blinded him for a full minute before George concluded that he was looking at an empty river. A brown bed where the brown water had run deep before dawn. Or so he thought. He noticed the Jamestown Ferry, oblong and squat, sat almost buried in the mud, still tethered to its lone berth at Scotland Wharf. The thick ropes that tied it to the docking piles were dripping with river grass, slowly being pulled up by the ferry’s downward journey. The oily smell of the wood was made even stronger without the break of the water to dilute it. In all directions, west to east, every way the tide flowed, the water was gone. While the riverbed lay glistening with moisture, the spongy sepia mud that slipped through a crabber’s toes at the shoreline now covered the wide basin and held a wasteland of wet treasures, all coated in the viscous brown stuff.

            Those dirt-poor Virginians who lived on the land that led to the river’s shores all had a sense of their state’s history. They knew about the three little boats that had fought their way over mile high waves sailing from England to find the “New World”. Descendants of those first ships sat listing in the mud across from this point, on the Jamestown Settlement side of the river, their masts and riggings slowly sliding toward the bottom, so that from the shore at Scotland Wharf it looked like the site of the crucifixion at Calvary in the distance. 

            Mr. Harrison, the last direct descendent of the original owners of Berkeley Plantation, had his buggy driven to the pier the minute he heard about the disappeared water.

            Mr. Harrison, same as all those landed gentry, preferred the sound of his own voice to labor, and lectured the frantic crowd on the moods of the James River, describing ‘tidal bores’ where a wave met the tide heading in, “bursting at each other with enough strength to make a wall of water as tall as a tree in the middle of a still stream.” He suggested that the eager crowd of would-be scavengers avoid the fate of his English forebears, and each build a small boat, single occupancy, to keep with them, just in case the river turned in on itself and flushed out again fast. Doc Edwards was the only inhabitant of Isle of White County who kept the right kind of wood for making the stunted dinghies that Mr. Harrison was prescribing for the crowd of excited would-be diggers. The young doctor used balsa wood for splints but had taken to building airplanes, un-flyable but aesthetically pleasing. He’d lost interest in his hobby and now his shed was stacked high with the lightweight boards. Someone took up a collection, rode off in his cart and bought a wagon full of it off the good doctor. Anyone able to pound a nail worked fast to fashion a one-person boat; a miniature gondola light enough to drag onto the riverbed with a loose knot, tied from the hull of the boat to just below the knee. Some of the little barges were draped with the long skirts of a few brave ladies. Those crafts looked more like sedans than ships. Some were flat, rushed jobs, more raft than craft. And there were a few anxious men who wanted to go it alone and argued about the validity of shaping a ship for a single sailor saving a single life. Mr. Harrison repeated his warning about his distant relation who had witnessed the frozen river back in England at the close of some century, leaning over to whisper near the ears of the frantic ship builders, “Can’t be too careful, remember what happened to those folks in England when the ice broke—water is unforgiving I tell you what…” 

            Suspicion grew among one group of poor farmers. They huddled close, in tight circles, worried the boatbuilding was just a stall. Those men, used to being cheated, hiked up their loose pants and wandered out into the river’s wet bed, running in teams to collect the trophies its wet marshes had previously hidden.

            “Treasure!” The word started a frenzy—like yelling “Gold!” knee deep in a creek during the days of the Gold Rush. The scramble toward the riverbed included the people who each had built a bucket-boat, then spread to the ones who’d settled on carrying flat wooden lids crowbarred off every supply Mr. Warren kept in his store; everyone left just grabbed shovels and rakes off the store’s covered porch and threw themselves onto the slimy bed. A hay wagon came over from a nearby settlement with the unlikely name of “California.” A tight-knitted neighborhood of black families, most everybody who lived there had been enslaved or were a direct descendent of someone who was. They carried their own day-laborer tools. Jumping off the moving rig, they headed in and ran straight toward the mud, already tasting the silver and pewter and maybe gold and fat jewels that might have fallen into the river. 

            Every farm worker knew the history of the state; they knew that when the colonies were being settled ships stuffed with merchandise sailed to and from England (and later from Africa, but they weren’t being taught that part of their state’s history back then.) They thought of Native American arrowheads, maybe hatchets and tomahawks, lots of things you could sell. They dug alongside the white folks with their boats strapped to their ankles, or carrying thick laundry baskets, stooped over in the quicksand of the new flat land, filling their shirts and skirts with muddy shapes, not knowing till they could find some clear well water to pour over it if they had found treasure or trash. A mob of locals, skipping their jobs, ignoring their fields, clogged the one lane dirt road with Sunday buggies and plows. Lone riders arrived on mares and mules. Everyone heading toward the empty river. 

‘In all directions, west to east, every way the tide flowed, the water was gone.’

            “Your grandfather’s brother, Curtis, was the fastest young man.” This always drew a quick snort from my grandfather, his lips pressed tight around the last inch of his cigar. Tee ignored his silent jeer and went on to describe the scene. “Curtis took wide steps toward the center; he knew that the other side of the river would be richer than Surry’s.” Eighteen, athletic, he was a student of history and he’d read about the early settlers in Jamestown who’d gone mad in their first freezing winter, starving to death; some ate their own fingers. Still, enough survived to keep it settled and eventually they moved inland to Williamsburg, and lots of fine stuff accompanied those trips. The wealthy colonists wanted everything to have an English label on it: furniture, furs, brocades, silver tea sets, and tips for their canes. He knew there’d be lots to dig for on the farther side of the river. So, he pushed himself to go further, stepping over the catfish that lay writhing, their greasy whiskers coiled around their last dry gasps, stepping around the river snakes that didn’t seem to mind this new environment, still slithering, sucking the water out of the sand. There were muddy angular protuberances, the bones of suicides and murders. He might have mistaken river rocks for the delicate lumps of unwanted babies, half formed and finally held, if only by the cradle of the warm riverbed. A skull still circled with a long rope cracked beneath his stride and Curtis guessed he’d felt a crime, so he trudged on, careful not to look down at the clue his foot might have found. 

            The shoreline filled with dark silhouettes against the midday sun. The elderly and infirm joined the frantic crowds unable to enter the riverbed but eager to cheer the assortment of diggers on from the shores. Just below them the mud-explorers took on safari shapes with their wares, bulging like hippopotami, three-humped camels, certainly elephants. Dark outlines marked their moves well into the dusk that was threatening to end that first afternoon’s hunt. Finally, the sun wasn’t having it, the sun was calling it a day, and no one had a candle that would stay lit in their wet muddy hands. They all returned to their familiar shores, two sides of the same river, where they lit campfires. Many of them burned the silly boats that had only slowed them down, charring the lids that would not have floated them anywhere anyway, and waited for the dawn. 

            Three cloudy days and two black nights of this pattern. On the third night Tee slept in the little boat she had made for herself, following Mr. Harrison’s instructions, surrounded by the low breathing of her three exhausted brothers. She watched as the full moon balanced on the mast of the tallest of the Jamestown ships, the vain little ball looking lost without the water there to mirror its rippling reflection. The next morning all the scroungers began harvesting the mud again in the daze of blinding sunshine. Instead of sludge, now they were digging into cracked dried dirt, sticking spades and shovels and hoes into the center, the prime cut of the riverbed. A line snaked its way from Scotland Wharf across to Jamestown and up towards Petersburg. A single file of trappers kicking the dirt, digging with their hands, crawling on their knees, hiding their bounty when—a distant sound. A soft metallic booming coming fast and faster. Rolling thunder, on a blue-sky day? An urgent noise. A demanding noise. Noise with a purpose. 

            WATER!

            Stunned into stone. Then, they all stood up as one and scattered like mercury, scrambling across the pock-marked ground, turned and uneven. Running, holding on to brown shapes that looked like cartons and canisters and candelabras. Running across small rivulets the size of worms, now filling up fast and faster, tripping over the digger’s deep holes. They ran and fell, tipsy with their loot, dropping their spoils back into the violated bed to feed the greedy new river. None of the shore-huggers stayed to watch the exodus. Everyone there turned away from the sight of the water rushing back from both sides, downstream and up. They rushed inland as fast as they could, grabbing hold of wagons filled with flatbeds full of the river’s crop, scared to look back. 

3.

            My grandmother told me she had been right in the dead center of the riverbed when the water returned. A burst of water roaring on both sides, squeezing together, just as Mr. Harrison had predicted it would on that first, dry day. Seventeen, tall for her age, she was the only girl who had stuck out the siege. Earlier that morning she’d dragged her little boat through the upturned riverbed, stinking with three-day old dead fish, their stout bodies swollen and splitting from the hard sun. Shad cut open for their roe lay rotting in bloody puddles, right beside shit from all the animals, including these new miners, who pissed where they stood. Determined, she was out digging in the cakey dirt, tossing her treasures into the hull of her little boat, which she dragged with the clothesline tied to her ankle as she followed the new center path. When the water burst back, she saw two of her brothers, Thomas and John, cut through the mounting torrent at a clip, nodding at their sister and her silly ship, now bobbing waist high beside her in the rising waters. Each boy gave her a nod but hardly a thought, as they held tight to a canvas tarp over their heads and made quick for the crowded shore. Tee worked her legs as fast as she could. “I was a strong swimmer,” she told me. The current was rushing at her from two points when she remembered Mr. Harrison’s warning about the tidal bore and realized that bad luck had placed her at the site of the water’s showdown. 

4.

             “Swim, Tee!” she heard, audible as a thought above the thunderous churning. Slowed down by her waterlogged dress, struggling to paddle, she caught sight of her brother Will. Just ten months between them in age the mystery of their red hair somehow tagged them as both being born in a millennium year. She reached for his outstretched arms. The water was chest high on her by then, her little handmade vessel bouncing on a steep crest; the frayed rope, still attached to her ankle, was extended way out behind her. “Swim to shore Tee!” Will’s words were inaudible, hollow things carved from the fright in his face. His strong hands pushed hard against her grip. “Go! Go!” She was close enough to read her brother’s terror. “I’m stuck Tee—something’s got my foot. I can’t wiggle out.”  The frenzied water rushed at both, working hard to separate the counterparts. Tee used the waters’ gyrations to slip out of her brother’s grip and dove deep into the rush of it, grabbing the stubborn root that was holding Will’s foot to the river floor. But the boy remained stuck. They were looking into the mirror of each other’s eyes when Will’s big hands clamped her at the waist and hurled her up, up, up, soaring above the seething river, aiming Tee toward her little craft. The water had reached her chin when she felt him push with all he had left, propelling her into her bouncing boat as it caught the new current—now with her in it. Will began to submerge, watching her high in the sky. He thought his sister looked like a magnificent raptor, red breast feathers facing down at him through the bubbling waters, her wingspan full out, got to be six feet wide! grabbing all the wind the river was making. Rushing, deafening, low booms held her inside the backward pull of the spinning dinghy, twirling in its private eddy surrounded by the dregs of what hadn’t been poached from the vengeful river, churning inside the thick dead stench. The tide turned her around and around to look back at nothing. A horizon line of angry water. 

5.

            “Here comes the part about me.” My grandfather walked home from the county courthouse every day for lunch. Tee’s stories allowed him to linger, he knew the cues as well as the sadness that accompanied this section of his old wife’s story. His long front teeth gripped the cigar’s mouthpiece, cracked open just enough to share a gentle smile. “Tell Rebekah this part Tee-Bird.” Now I would learn the origin of his pet-name for her, coined at the first sighting of Tee when she was young and still able to fly.

“Yes, Charlie Mac. Your grandfather’s family lived further toward Smithfield. He was farm-lean from planting peanuts, and years of swimming the James. He knew the river well enough to find the rip current and swam around trying to help his panicked neighbors get through it.”

            Looking up Charlie Mac had caught a glimpse of a flying object breaching the air, a tangle of a long auburn braid floating above a brown dress, petticoats, everything coated in wet mud, now mixed with the ebbing tide. An albatross flying too low, lost without any familiar landmarks to track its migratory path.  Rising into the wind, a slight dip leeward, mimicking the new waves below it, then falling faster down into the tiny bobbing confection a few feet from where it was thrown. Not a bird—a girl! Her fragile boat spinning and turning in its own tempest. Turning and turning and turning nearer to him. 

‘The tide turned her around and around to look back at nothing. A horizon line of angry water.’

            Charlie Mac had read the river, given her boat a shove, certain that she made it to shore okay. A look of confusion filled the girl’s wide square face. Her eyes were set, not on the young swimmer edging toward her but on the middle distance. A wild-eyed search for her missing brother. “I never saw a look like that on a girl,” my grandfather remarked.  Determined. Stuffed inside her little boat, moving at a good clip, her skirts soaking up the river's brown water, her rust-colored hair tied in a ponytail, dragging behind her thoughts. The tip of it was ribboned with a length of satin that had once been pink but now, stained by the mud, it held its own delicate puddles. He loved her on sight.  She passed by at a near enough range, quickly catching his serious dark brown eyes with her own searching blue ones. Rocks that until the emptying had been invisible, big granite gray boulders with green slime covering their rugged chests, intercepted her landing— jostling her back into the deep panic of her brother’s disappearance.

            “Will!”

            “Will!”

            “Will!” 

            She yelled at the riotous crowd. She saw her brother, John, now on shore, the strongman to a human chain of rescuers. Absorbed in his work, John looked at his sister with a face of confusion between the contorted pains of pulling. He was too focused on this rescue to grasp her one-word plea. “WILL!”  She ran toward the ferry pier, now covered with people, standing to shout commands, or lying flat to grab the hands of swimmers before they smashed into the wood piles. Grabbing jackets and junk.  Pulling up everything that was floating on the water. Everyone still hunting for something or someone. Tee climbed over the mounds of debris and frantic bodies, making it out to the end of the pier with her urgency. 

            Nothing. 

            “Nothing but water. Two brown soups pushing against each other to generate a new current for the vanquished river. I was frantic, I climbed down heading straight for the general store at the end of the wharf.”

6.

            Her Uncle Warren’s place, which until that day had always smelled like ginger snaps tucked under glass, was now filled with sounds, guffaws of disbelief and nervous mumblings. Tee rushed into the crowded room, its dark gray floorboards uneven, seeming to droop even more from the new water. The smell of rotten fish and lost fortunes thickened the air. She stood there, the lone girl in a room full of excited men. Young workers who had thrown away four days in the fields and the pay that came with it to hunt for treasures in the emptied river. Younger men who’d walked off their father’s farms to harvest the scoured basin of the James, sleeping on the wood crates they kept as trunks to store their day’s harvest—their clothes still caked with mud and fish bones. Old men who’d hardly used their legs for more than a decade, who’d suddenly felt fresh strength in their tired muscles as they trudged through the mud, using their foggy eyes to identify objects, anticipation filling their tobacco-carved lungs. Older men still who had simply watched from the shore and commented like umpires on the challenges facing the diggers as they observed their sons or servants. But the river needed to rush back in. It had given these men four days to find its hidden history before the water poured back from both ends. Everyone stood cramped inside the general store, flushed with excitement about having escaped the quick flood. 

            “Will’s drowned!” 

            Her young girl’s voice no match for the men’s boisterous bragging. Why were they laughing? Was her brother just something else buried in the water? She had tried to free his foot from the curled root that held him. “Instead of a root I pulled up a baby cup. I mistook the wide curved handle for a thick stem.” She was still holding the cup as she stood there, pressing it between her thumb and forefinger, her body frozen with numb pain. The men would not be quiet, already swapping stories of their escapes. They laughed with relief above her shouts. Then her whispers. 

            “Will drowned.” 

            Finally telling herself as much as them. 

            “I elbowed my way out of the store, stunned, challenging my legs to move, to find the dusty road home. I knew that when I faced my father, when I walked into the kitchen to tell him about Will, that Daddy would think that this river that fed his family, that watered his crops, this river had taken the wrong body. A worthless daughter. He always believed that the river had cheated him of a son.

7.

            There was an addendum to the tale. One that sometimes came with the opening of a sweaty Coca-Cola bottle. Rare moments when Miss Tee talked about returning to the river, seeing a gaggle of scavenger birds poking at a spot, some indentation, not as far from the shore as she pictured when Will was pulled under by the new water. She saw the scrounger birds that picked at floating fish, the ones that got de-hooked for being too small and shapeless, died of their wounds and would float to the top, served up as a meal. The whole summer after Will drowned Tee had taken her small boat out for covert night crossings. She’d learned how to maneuver a skiff from an uncle not unaccustomed to hauling dead things for whoever paid a fee. Crimes were committed and needed to be erased in the brown muck of the river. Even with shovels tied to the body, the wet ropes would loosen and send the corpse up to float. Then those black vultures would have their meal; patient, waiting on the ferry’s pier stacks, eyes seeing inside the nocturnal twilight. 

            Tee looked at the river and tasted feathers. She had returned at night and the next morning and the next and then next, until she saw the birds picking the length of a man.