What the Creek Said

The hills in that part of the county had no use for you. They went on being hills whether you stood on them or lay under them and the creek that ran along the Darnell property came down out of the ridgeline cold and tobacco-colored and said nothing about what it carried.

We were fifteen that summer. All of us except Jolene who had turned sixteen in April and held it over us the way she held everything, quiet and absolute, a fact of the world you could either accept or leave. She was the tallest of us by three inches. She had her mothers jaw and her fathers hands and she moved through the hallways of Crockett County High like something the school had been built around.

I loved her. That is the truest thing I will say.

The boy lived in a shack down where Sinking Creek met the tree line at the base of Clinch Mountain. Everybody knew about him the way everybody in a small place knows about the thing they wont say at church. His name was Garlan Prewitt. He was seventeen or nineteen — nobody was sure. His mother had died or left or both and his father was in Brushy Mountain for what people called trouble, which meant something with a knife.

Garlan came to town on foot. You would see him walking the shoulder of Route 33 with a plastic bag, headed for the Dollar General or the gas station, and people would drive past and not stop. He had a face that looked carved from something harder than skin — cheekbones like the edge of a hatchet, eyes set deep and colorless as creek water. He smelled of woodsmoke and the particular sourness of a body left too long alone. The boys at school called him Creekwater. They called him worse. The guidance counselor had tried, once, and given up. The sheriff checked on him every few months and reported that he was alive, which was the most anyone required.

He had been alive for years without anyone asking him what that meant.

Jolene noticed him first. That was how it always worked. Jolene noticed things before the rest of us had finished looking.

There were five of us. Me, Jolene, Dana, Caitlin, and Reese. We were not cheerleaders or athletes or any of the clean categories adults use to sort girls into groups they can understand. We were something else. Something that had formed in the particular pressure of that place — a town losing its population one family at a time, the tobacco money gone, the mine jobs gone before that, the new Dollar General the biggest thing built in a decade. We had organized ourselves around Jolene the way iron filings organize around a magnet, not by choice but by physics.

She decided what we did on Friday nights. She decided who we talked to and who we froze out. She decided the temperature of every room she walked into and we calibrated ourselves accordingly. This was not cruelty, though it could look like cruelty from the outside. It was architecture. Jolene had built something in that nowhere town — a structure, a kingdom no bigger than five girls and a borrowed pickup truck and the back roads between the church and the creek — and inside that structure we were real. We were not invisible. We were not the daughters of men who drank too much and women who prayed about it.

Dana was the one who asked. We were sitting in the bed of Reese’s brother’s truck behind the abandoned IGA, sharing a bottle of peach schnapps that tasted like cough syrup and futures we were trying to burn through faster.

That boy, Dana said. Garlan. You reckon hes dangerous?

Jolene didnt answer right away. She had her legs stretched out on the truck bed, her bare feet hanging off the tailgate, the mud still drying between her toes from where wed waded the creek earlier. The last light was going out of the sky behind Clinch Mountain and the air smelled of cut hay and the first smoke of autumn.

Dangerous how, Jolene said.

Like would he hurt somebody.

Jolene turned her head and looked at Dana with that look she had, the one that made you feel like shed seen every version of you that would ever exist and had already chosen the one she preferred.

Everything hurts somebody, she said.

What Jolene wanted from Garlan Prewitt was hard to name and I have spent years trying. It was not exactly desire, though there was desire in it — I could see it in the way she watched him when we drove past his shack, the way her eyes tracked his body with the same attention she gave to dangerous things, copperheads on the trail, the drop-off where the old quarry met the road. It was not exactly pity, though there was something in her that responded to damage the way some people respond to music, involuntarily, in the body.

I think what she wanted was to prove something. To herself. To us. That she could enter the darkest room in the county and come out holding the light.

She started going down to the creek alone.

This was a violation. We did everything together — that was the covenant, the unspoken law that held the five of us in formation. When Caitlin had started seeing a boy from Rogersville without telling us, Jolene had frozen her out for two weeks, and Caitlin had come back with her eyes red and swollen and grateful for re-admission. You did not go off alone. Your body belonged to the group.

But Jolene made the rules, which meant Jolene could break them.

She went down to the creek bottom three times in one week. She came back smelling of woodsmoke, her hair tangled, a scratch on her forearm she didnt explain. She sat with us and said nothing about where she had been, and we said nothing about knowing. The silence grew its own weather. You could feel it pressing down on every conversation, thickening the air between us like the August haze that sits in the hollers and wont move.

I watched her face for damage. For the particular bruise that comes from touching something you shouldnt. But what I saw was worse than damage. I saw satisfaction.

The land in that country was karst. Limestone underneath, riddled with caves and sinkholes and underground rivers that went where they pleased. The soil was thin. The trees grew up twisted and grabbed at the rock with roots like fingers. In the hollows the mist sat until noon and the light that got through was green and undersea and the hollers had their own temperatures separate from the ridge. You could walk a quarter mile and pass through three different weathers. It was not a landscape that encouraged trust. It kept its own counsel. It opened up without warning — a sinkhole in a pasture, a cave mouth behind a laurel thicket — and what fell in did not always come back.

Jolene took me with her on the fourth visit.

Just you, she said. Not the others.

This was the knife. The selection. The being chosen above. I knew what it meant and I took it anyway, the way you take a dare you know will cost you, because the cost is the point, the proof that you are willing to pay.

We walked down the old logging road past the Darnell place. The dogs chained in the yard watched us pass with yellow eyes and said nothing with their mouths, just watched. The road turned to two-track turned to path turned to nothing and then we were in the creek bottom, the water running shallow over limestone ledges worn smooth as old teeth. The shack was set back in a stand of sycamores whose bark peeled in sheets like something shedding its own skin. There was a fire ring. A few buckets. A tarp stretched between two trees. The door of the shack was a piece of plywood on leather hinges.

Garlan came out when he heard us. He stood in the doorway with no shirt on and I could see his ribs and the scar tissue on his chest and arms — burns, old ones, pale and puckered, mapped across his skin like a country with a violent history. He looked at Jolene and did not look at me.

You came back, he said.

It was not a question. His voice was flat and quiet, a voice used to talking to no one or maybe to the creek or maybe to the birds he carved from creek wood and hung from the sycamore branches on fishing line so they turned in the wind like small restless prayers.

Jolene walked toward him with that walk of hers, the one that was all intention, all forward, like someone who had already decided and was just letting her body catch up to the decision. She put her hand on his chest. On the scars. He did not flinch. He did not move at all. He stood there and let her touch him the way the mountain lets the weather touch it, without participation.

This is Bree, Jolene said, meaning me. Shes mine.

I heard that and I felt it in my teeth.

What happened in the weeks that followed was a kind of splitting. Jolene divided herself between us and him, between the kingdom she had built and the wreckage she had found, and in the dividing she became more powerful, not less. She held both worlds in her hands and neither one could see the whole of her. She told us things about Garlan — that he ate what he caught in the creek, that he hadnt been to school in two years, that the burns on his chest were from his father, that he read books he found in the library drop-box, water-stained paperbacks he kept on a shelf hed built from creek stones — and she told him things about us. I dont know what. I dont know what version of our small, fierce, borrowed-truck kingdom she described to a boy who lived in a plywood shack and talked to water.

But I know what it did to us. It corroded us. Not all at once. Slowly. The way the creek eats limestone — you cant see it happening but one day the ground opens.

Dana started asking where Jolene went. Caitlin stopped coming to the truck on Friday nights. Reese said nothing, which was worse than saying something, because Reeses silence was the kind that stored things up and released them all at once.

And I. I went where Jolene told me to go. I stood in the creek bottom and watched her sit with Garlan by his fire and I catalogued every place her skin met his, every gesture, every time she leaned in and spoke low enough that the words were just for him. I was not jealous. Jealousy is too simple a word. I was being unmade. Jolene had built me — had decided who I was, had given me a shape and a name and a place in the hierarchy — and now she was somewhere I could not follow, and the person she had made me was dissolving for lack of her attention.

One night she stayed at the creek and I walked home alone in the dark. The road was gravel and the gravel was pale in the starlight and the trees on either side made a corridor of black. I could hear things moving in the woods. Deer, probably. Something bigger maybe. In that country there were still bears though people said they were gone. The world was full of things people said were gone that were just waiting in the hollows.

I walked and I felt the cold and I understood something that had been coming for me all summer. That Jolene did not love me. That Jolene did not love any of us. That what she did was something else — a kind of collection, a gathering of loyalties she could spend like currency. And that Garlan Prewitt was a new coin she was testing the weight of.

The thing that happened, happened in October.

The leaves had turned and the ridgeline was on fire — red oak and sugar maple and hickory, colors so bright they looked like violence, like the mountain was showing you what was underneath its skin all along. The creek was low. It had been a dry autumn and the water barely covered the stones.

Reese told. She told the guidance counselor that Jolene was going down to the creek to see the Prewitt boy. She told it flat and careful, as a concern, the way women in that town have always told on each other — with the language of worry, the syntax of prayer. And the guidance counselor called the sheriff, and the sheriff called social services, and in twenty-four hours the county had decided that Garlan Prewitt was a danger.

They did not decide this about Jolene. They decided it about him. Because Jolene was a girl from a known family and Garlan was a Prewitt from the creek bottom, and the town had decided about Prewitts long before Garlan was born.

They went down to the creek in the morning. Sheriff Doughty and a deputy and a woman from DCS with a clipboard. What they found in the shack was what they expected to find because they had already decided what they would find: a boy living in filth, animal bones, a knife, magazines they called pornographic, the squalor of a life no one had bothered to prevent.

They did not find what was actually there. The books he had taken from the library drop-box, read to rags and stacked careful on his stone shelf. The carvings he made from creek wood — birds, mostly, their wings spread, hung from the sycamore branches on fishing line so they turned in the wind. The way he had arranged stones in the creek to make the water sing different notes in different weathers. They did not see this because they were not looking for it. They were looking for the thing they had already named him.

They took him. Some facility in Knoxville. I dont know which one. Jolene did not speak for three days.

On the fourth day she found Reese.

I was there. I was always there. That was my function in the architecture — to be present, to witness, to hold Jolenes coat while she burned things down.

She found Reese behind the IGA where we always met. The light was going and the parking lot was empty and the old IGA sign still buzzed though the store had been dead for years and whatever electricity powered the sign came from nowhere anyone could account for. The asphalt was cracked and the cracks had filled with chickweed and in the half-dark the weeds looked like veins in something that had died but not stopped circulating.

You told, Jolene said.

Reese did not deny it. Reese was brave that way, or stupid, or maybe she had just reached the place past fear where the body stops negotiating.

He was living like an animal, Reese said. Somebody had to.

Jolene hit her. Not a slap. A closed fist to the mouth. The sound was small and definite, like a branch breaking. Reese went down on one knee and her hand came up to her lip and when she pulled it away there was blood, bright in the buzzing light, and she looked at it on her fingers with what I can only describe as recognition. Like she had known this was coming. Like she had told because she needed this to happen, needed the structure to shatter, needed Jolene to reveal the machinery under the skin.

Jolene stood over her. She was breathing hard. Her hand was at her side, the knuckles split — Reeses teeth had cut her. For a moment they were both bleeding, their blood on the same asphalt, and I thought of Garlan and his scars and how damage passes between people like a current, how it finds the path of least resistance and follows it down to ground.

Get up, Jolene said.

Reese got up. They looked at each other. Something moved between them that I could not name, something older than either of them, older than the town. An understanding. That this is what it was. That this is what it had always been. That the kingdom was a fist and they were all inside it.

I stood ten feet away with my arms crossed over my chest and I did nothing. I could tell you I was afraid. I could tell you it happened too fast. But neither of those things is true. I did nothing because doing nothing was what Jolene required of me, and I gave her what she required the way the creek gives the mountain its water, because it cannot do otherwise, because the slope is the slope.

The creek ran on through October and into November. The leaves fell and clogged the water and the water backed up and found new channels the way it always does when the old ones fill. Garlan Prewitt did not come back. The shack sat empty and the plywood door swung in the wind and the bird carvings turned on their fishing line until the line rotted and they fell into the water and were carried away.

Jolene did not speak of him again. She rebuilt. That was what she did — she was a builder, an architect of small, total worlds, and when one collapsed she started another. By December we were back in formation. Caitlin had returned. Reese had returned, her lip healed to a thin scar she wore like a signature. Dana asked no more questions. The truck, the schnapps, the back roads, the Friday nights. Everything the same. Everything different underneath, the way limestone is different after the water has been through it — still stone, still standing, but hollow now, riddled with passages that go down into the dark.

I left that town after graduation. Most of us did. Jolene did not. Last I heard she was still there, managing the Dollar General, living in a house on the old Darnell road. I imagine her in that house at night with the windows open and the creek sound coming up from the bottom, that water that never stops talking in its language of stone and gravity, and I wonder if she hears in it what I hear.

What I hear is this: that we were the danger. Not Garlan. Not the boy in the shack with his bird carvings and his stolen library books. We were the thing the town should have been afraid of. We were the ones who could look at a person and decide what they were before we knew what they were. We were the ones who could love someone so hard it looked like loyalty and feel it curdle in our hands and never name the moment it turned.

Jolene taught me that. She taught me that the most dangerous thing in any room is the person who gets to say what things mean. She taught me that a girl can build a kingdom out of nothing but will and the willingness of others to be organized. And she taught me that when the kingdom falls, the queen does not fall with it. The queen just starts building again. The rubble is the foundation.

I drive through that country sometimes, on my way to somewhere else. The hills are still there. The creek is still there. The karst underneath is still dissolving, slowly, in the dark, making rooms no one will ever enter. The land does not remember us. It was never ours to begin with. We just stood on it for a while and called the standing something it wasnt.

The boy is gone. The birds are gone. The water took them.

But I keep my fist closed, still. Out of habit. Out of what she made me. I keep it closed and I do not look at what is inside because looking is how you find out that its empty, that it was always empty, that the holding was the only thing there ever was.