The Creek

Miss Houser led our excursion down the railroad tracks. Danny Tate and Alex Dell raced, arms outstretched, a test of balance atop opposite rails. Tony Atwood’s hurled stones scattered the wire-perched starlings. A mid-June morning, warm and bright and blue. Butterflies in the pokeweed. The last days of school, our summer anticipated and rightfully earned, but also in us a melancholy, for we loved Miss Houser. The girls openly, with notes tucked into her pocket and unashamed tears and whispered secrets, their hands cupped to her ear. Us boys a bit distant, watchful, the emotions we couldn’t name twisting in our guts. Last September, she’d inherited both us and our reputation. We were fist-fighters and window-gazers and more than a few of us still struggled with our multiplication tables. The grades behind us full of the teachers who’d yelled and slapped the backs of our heads. The others who’d cried. Miss Houser became ours a kindness at a time. With each applied Band-Aid. With her calm amid our tumult and the guitar she strummed during the cabin-fever weeks of indoor recess. With the lunches she secretly bought the Carney twins after their father fell from the foundry catwalk. For Miss Houser, we wrote poems. For her, we polished our shoes and kept our hands to ourselves as we sang “Silent Night” in the Christmas pageant. In these ways, we gave ourselves to her. A thanks for the gift of making us feel like we mattered.

Miss Houser turned off the tracks, and we followed. Our destination less than a half-mile from the school, those days before air conditioning and permission slips, our exit made with jeers for the others left behind, and perhaps, for once, they wished they were one of us. A narrow field separated the tracks and the creek. Miss Houser pointed skyward and asked if we remembered the name of summer’s feathery clouds. She invited us to hold out our arms and feel the sun’s touch on our skin. She asked us to close our eyes and step back into last winter’s blizzard, the chatter of teeth and the crunch of boots, the streets where nothing moved and the feeling that every clock in town had stopped. We fanned out on either side of her. The grass trembled with fleeing grasshoppers.

We paused atop the creek bank. At the water’s edge, Miss Houser slipped off her sandals. We scrambled down to join her. The water cool and shallow, these dry weeks. We carried nets and old jars and magnifying glasses. We’d come to feel the water on our bare feet, to witness the confluence of a thousand forces, the random and the eternal. Miss Houser pushed up her sleeves. On her forearm, a bruise, wide and circling. A mark those of who grew up with heavy-handed fathers understood. Our questions swallowed back when Becky Green blurted, “Miss H—black butterflies!”

Miss Houser smiled. They were damselflies, she said, and if we returned later in the summer, we’d find their exoskeletons, gray shells, delicate as whispers. Other damselflies appeared, black traces against the blue. No, Miss Houser told Becky, these skeletons didn’t mean they were dead. They simply marked a moment on their journey, a shedding of one life before they moved on to the next.

~

We met that summer at the schoolyard. Afternoons of stickball and kick the can. After July 4^th, we lost track of the days, and the heat blurred our sense of time and made all the hours the same. The sun on our necks. Our talk of the lakes and pools where we wished we could swim. We rode our bikes across the playing fields, kicking up dust and, after it rained, mud. We ate Icees in the school’s shade, our tongues blue, our lips sticky. We told stories about our parents, their drinking and fights, the peculiarities that drove us mad. We told stories about our older brothers, their backroads drag races, the ones heading to prison or the army or disappearing into the mill. We told stories about our sisters, the boys they kissed, their whispered dreams of leaving the valley. We shared these tales the way we tried on hand-me-downs, our conversations less gossip than attempts to understand the world we’d soon inherit.

But after Miss Houser’s disappearance, our games lost their joy, and we returned to the gym wall’s shade. We brought folded sections of newspaper and passed them between us, careful not to tear them or smudge the ink. We talked about the reports we’d seen on TV. The footage shot outside her apartment. The search teams wading through junk-strew fields. We took turns giving each other boosts, a scraping of knees on stone, a tenuous windowsill grip as we peered into our old classroom. Inside, a new teacher, a young woman too busy to notice us as she stapled up bulletin boards and organized shelves.

~

Summer’s last week. The railroad tracks, a view straight and hazed. No rail-balancing races or throwing stones. Darting swallows feasted on gnats, and the starlings cawed. Robbed of a proper ending, the TV reporters and newspapers had forgotten Miss Houser, her story replaced by other tragedies that had nothing to do with us. At first we overshot the path, the landscape so lush, the brambles and vines. We moved through the field. The grasshoppers of our last visit replaced by the scurry of rats. We stood atop the bank and considered the water. The flow and the rocks she’d stood upon remained. The starlings fell silent. Becky Green crouched and pulled an exoskeleton off a blade of grass. She cupped it in her palm, and we gathered round. Our touch gentle, all of us remembering Miss Houser’s voice, her promise of what we’d find here at summer’s end. We broke away, pushing through the grass, a tender harvest, our hands filled with testaments to the life drawn to this shore.