Down Rivers of Windfall Night by frances garrett connell

Author:frances garrett connell
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2018-06-21T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Baptism: A Parable

October 13, 1985

St. Louis

Night I: James Arthur

They have taken my voice from me, children, and my strength, and you move like patches of light around my bed, your forms no longer clear. Yet I can hear.

This, then, is how it ends, as the light fades away, that light for 60 years that I’ve seen around some people, but never been allowed to speak of, or people would have thought me quite mad. In the end, then, that aura is all that is left to be seen.

And where was the beginning?

I remember how the creek was a fickle watery source, sometimes small and silent as an unassuming brook, other times too large and spirited for even a river. From the point where it ran between my father’s house and the nearest neighbor, it wound lazily along the northern border of Wetherford, acting to buffer the hot Texas days like a wet napkin on a feverish head. Through the dry days of early summer it serviced the town, until, absorbing all the heat it would hold, changing the blowing dust to a hard sand in its bottom, it grew smaller and died for a season. We children had to go elsewhere to wade and fish, and the small gardens behind the clapboard houses were not watered so often.

Then in the downpours of late summer and dawdling early fall, the muddy eddies spun across the deep cracks of its bed and pushed far beyond the town, cutting new streams in the soaked earth, finally dwindling to tiny webbed fingers far away. In the dry coolness of winter, the land froze, and the solid moisture slept in the creek bed until its time to flow again with the lively spring rains, when its banks and the meadows beyond it would explode with wild flowers, the blood-red blossoms of trumpet vines, blue bonnets and Indian paint brushes, their heady stalks bouncing up and down the stream.

When I was a child, our house was the only “town” house located across the creek. Perched on a spread of raised land, it was encircled by a dirt road that ended in a wide wooden plank bridge. The bridge converged with the main street of Wetherford at a point with only a few dozen yards between our kitchen window and the Carney’s back yard in town.

It was the proper place for a country doctor’s house, perched as high above the rest of the land as it could be on that flat Texas plain. I thought later, hearing Mother tell the old stories and reading them myself, that doctors among the ancient Celts had been members of the aes dana, and as an upper class were allowed to sit at the king’s table at the ceremonies and banquets, high above the rest of the subjects. Perhaps there was some of that. But also Dr. Arthur, like his ancient, ancient ancestors, had known of the importance of fresh air and clear running water and cleanliness, so that a

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