The Promise of Jesse Woods (13 page)

“There’s a lot I don’t know.”

“Maybe you can check out
To Catch a Night Crawler
next week,” Dickie said.

“I don’t mind being read to, but I don’t like to read,” Jesse said. “Makes me nervous.”

“How’s that?”

“I remember in first grade reading about Dick and Jane and Spot and it never made no sense. They did a lot of running around but they never got anywhere. And then in second grade they put you in a reading group and you had to go around and read a paragraph and I always tripped on the words.”

“The worst was the reading machine,” Dickie said. “Remember when Mrs. Edwards got that thing out?”

“My lands, I wanted to throw up every day of second grade.”

I asked what a reading machine was and the two were surprised I had never experienced it.

“It was like an overhead projector,” Dickie said, “but it only showed a few words in the sentence and you had to keep up with it. It gauged how fast we could read, but it just made me dizzy.”

“‘Slow it down, Mrs. Edwards!’” Jesse said. “That’s what everybody said, but she’d put the thing in high gear.”

Jesse and Dickie felt about reading the way I felt about fishing. I had gone with my uncle Willy to the lake one vacation, but I didn’t bait my own hook. Catching fish was nerve-racking because I was afraid the fish might bite me—and the smell turned my stomach.

We struck out for the reservoir and on our way passed a farmer pulling a wagon of what looked like black dirt. Jesse waved at the man like she knew him, but Dickie stopped.

“Hey, mister, whatcha got in the wagon?”

“Cow manure,” the man said, spitting a brown stream at the other side of the road.

“What are you going to do with it?” Dickie said.

“Take it home and put it on my strawberries.”

The man rode on and Dickie turned to me, the smell of the manure lingering. “I like whipped cream on mine. But to each his own.”

Jesse slapped her leg and laughed hard and so did I.

When we reached the reservoir, I watched Jesse and Dickie in fascination as they baited their hooks and dropped their lines in the water. They each used a long, thin bamboo pole
with nylon string tied to the end and a bobber in the middle of the line. They adjusted the bobbers and sat on the bank.

“You fishing or spectating?” Jesse said.

“I think I’ll watch,” I said, grabbing the book.

“No way. You have to fish.”

“I think he’s scared the worms will bite him,” Dickie said.

Jesse stuck her hand in the Maxwell House can and pulled out a juicy worm. She stuck the hook into one end of the slimy creature and worked it up on the hook so that it was secure. The end of the worm wriggled.

“Looks tasty, don’t it?” Jesse said.

“Not to me.”

“You got to think like a fish. You’re setting his dinner table. There. Now, you have to do the next worm.”

I stared at the worm as she adjusted the bobber.

“You don’t fish, you don’t read to us. Got it?”

“Okay.”

The three of us sat back in the worn grass on the side of the bank. Jesse placed her pole beside her and put her hands behind her head. “How many books you think they got in that library about the Mothman?”

“They got magazines about him, so I expect there would be lots of books,” Dickie said.

“What are you guys talking about?” I said.

“You ain’t never heard of the Mothman?” Jesse said. She shook her head and cursed under her breath. “They must not teach the fundamentals up there in Pittsburgh.”

I pulled my line up and it was Dickie’s turn to shake his head. “Don’t be fiddling with it. Leave it alone. You only
pick it up when you get a bite. Put dinner on the table and leave it.”

“I know,” I said, dropping the worm back in the water and watching the ripples from the bobber.

Jesse yawned. “The Mothman is a West Virginia phenomenon.”

“Nice word,” I said.

“But he’s not just in West Virginia.”

“He is too,” Dickie said.

“Is not.” Jesse turned to me. “You ever hear of the Silver Bridge collapse?”

I shook my head.

“It’s the big bridge over the Ohio at Gallipolis. The kind with the cables on top of it.”

“Suspension bridge,” Dickie said.

“We’ve got three of those in Pittsburgh,” I said.

Jesse rolled her eyes. “Here we go. We got one bridge and you have to have three of ’em.”

“Tell the story,” Dickie said.

“The other side of the bridge comes out in Point Pleasant, on the West Virginia side,” Jesse said. “About a week or so before Christmas there was all these people driving on it when the whole thing fell. Something like a hundred people died.”

“It wasn’t that many,” Dickie said.

“Well, how many was it?”

“Fortysome.”

“I didn’t know you was a historical expert on disasters,” Jesse said.

“What’s this got to do with the Mothman?” I said.

“I’m getting to that. So there was these kids out taking a ride at night and they seen this huge creature in the road. Eyes as big as saucers and red like blood. Glowing. It had a wingspan something like twenty feet wide. They hightailed it out of there and went racing back toward town, and they said they went as fast as a hundred miles an hour, and the thing flew right over top of them.”

Jesse looked at Dickie to see if he would correct her. He threw a hand up. “Go on.”

“That wasn’t the only time they seen him. There was people all up and down the valley that did, and there was news reports about it and people interviewed on TV. And every one of them said he looked like a big moth.”

“Creepy,” I said. “Did he say anything?”

They both looked at me dumbfounded.

“He don’t talk to people,” Jesse said.

“Did anybody get attacked?” I said.

“That’s the thing. Out of all the sightings, nobody said they got hurt. And then, one person saw him sitting on top of the Silver Bridge.”

“I saw a picture of it in one of the UFO magazines at Blake’s,” Dickie said.

“Seriously?” I said. “What did it look like?”

“It was just a big blob on top of one of the points in the bridge. They blew it up to see better, but it was kind of fuzzy. But there was drawings of how people said he looked. Like a big man with wings that stretched out.”

My bobber dipped in the water, but I was so enraptured with the story I let it go.

“It was a week later that the bridge collapsed and all them people died,” Jesse said. “A hundred of them.”

“Fortysome,” Dickie corrected.

“Can you imagine what it must have been like? One minute you’re sitting there in your car, a cold December day, people getting off work and going home or Christmas shopping. All of a sudden the bridge gives way and you’re in the water and there ain’t nothing you can do about it. And you’re drowning.”

It was a frightening thought and Jesse painted the scene in all its horror. She described some of the bodies pulled out, that some were children.

“You’re getting a bite,” Dickie said. “Jerk the pole.”

I lifted the line out of the water and the tugging stopped.

“No, you gotta jerk it to set the hook,” Jesse said, frowning. “Like this.”

She showed me, whipping the pole back quickly. I tried to mimic her wrist motion. When I had it down, I lifted the line and saw most of my worm was gone.

“Bring it up so you can rebait it,” Dickie said.

I pulled the line in and Jesse generously rebaited my hook. I tossed it back into the water. “I still don’t get why the Mothman is so important.”

“He was warning them,” Jesse said. “Don’t you see? He was telling them something bad was about to happen. Because as soon as the bridge collapsed, people around there never saw him again.”

“You have to admit they were busy cleaning up the bridge and burying the dead,” Dickie said.

Jesse ignored him. “And the same thing happened with the Marshall plane crash. I know this lady who lives down in Kenova—”

“This is not true,” Dickie said.

“It is too. You can ask her.”

“Ask her what?” I said.

“About the sighting a couple of days before the crash. There he was, up in the trees on the side of the hill where that plane came down. He was trying to warn people that something bad was coming.”

I glanced at Dickie and he rolled his eyes.

“Same thing happened before President Kennedy got shot,” Jesse said, her eyes wide.

“She’s spinning one now,” Dickie said.

“There’s no spin to it. People over in Welch saw him before the president got shot by the school depository.”

“If the Mothman was trying to warn about a shooting in Dallas, why would he show up in Welch?” Dickie said.

“I don’t know. You’ll have to ask him. I’m just reporting what I heard. And just before Farmington happened, he was seen too.”

“What’s Farmington?” I said.

“Coal mine,” Dickie said. “It exploded and killed seventysome.”

“You best pay attention when the Mothman shows up, is all I have to say,” Jesse said.

“Hey, look at that!” Dickie yelled, and I just about
jumped out of my skin, looking back at the thick woods behind us.

“Not there, silly,” Jesse said.

“I got one!” Dickie pulled the line out of the water and a long, silver fish with a big mouth was on the hook.

“That’s too little to take home,” Jesse said.

“It’s a wide-mouth, though,” Dickie said. “Maybe we’ll catch his daddy.”

I was still thinking about the Mothman and the prospect of riding my bike alone lost all allure. I was about to open the book when Jesse shrieked, “Set the hook, Matt!”

I jerked on the pole and immediately felt the weight on the other end of the line. The bamboo bent at the end.

“Don’t pull it up too fast,” Dickie said. “Flatten it out and get him up to the bank. It looks like a big one.”

Dickie crept to the edge of the water. He had said this was a place where the reservoir was deepest and added that several people had fallen in and drowned in this very spot. I backed up, the fish weaving in the water, and Dickie navigated the biggest bass I would ever catch in my life onto the bank.

Jesse gasped. “Would you look how pretty he is?” She went down and held him up in both hands. “He’s got to be at least five pounds.”

Dickie pulled the hook from his mouth. I asked if I could be the one to let him go.

“What do you mean let him go?” Jesse said.

“We always let them go when I’ve fished.”

The two looked at each other and then back at me.

“You can do what you want—he’s your fish,” Dickie said. “But I usually give anything I catch to Jesse.”

“Daisy Grace loves her some fried fish,” Jesse said, sizing up the catch.

“That’s fine,” I said. “I didn’t think about you eating it.”

Dickie got out a long piece of string with knots in it and put it through the fish’s gills, then put the fish in the water and tied the string to a branch he stuck in the mud. We caught two more keepers that day, one catfish and one large bluegill, and a lot of other smaller fish. I couldn’t help but feel like I had contributed in a small way to Jesse’s family. Jesse covered the fish in her front basket with leaves and placed Harper Lee on top and we pedaled home.

When we got to the railroad tracks, Jesse stopped and looked both ways, sitting on the tracks. From my vantage point behind her, with her head turned, she looked like the prettiest thing I’d ever seen. Even with all the dirt and mountain toughness, I could see it. And I realized my fear of relating to girls disappeared around her. I wasn’t nervous, probably because she was so much like Dickie and me. Her shirts were sweat-stained and her hair stuck up in the back where she’d slept.

She looked back, sitting on the tracks, her cute nose that gently turned up at the end glinting in the sunlight and her freckles giving extra color to her face.

“What’s wrong?” I said.

“That’s where it happened, right up there.”

“What happened?”

“My daddy lost his arm. He was trying to jump a freight and fell underneath.”

“Where was he going?” I said.

“Huntington, probably.”

I tried to think of something to say. “It must have hurt.”

“He was probably drunk.”

On the way through town, the talk turned to Mothman again. Jesse said he was still wandering the woods and waiting, biding his time until the next big event. Dickie believed in Mothman but thought Jesse’s version of the story was flawed. When Jesse brought up flying saucers, though, Dickie took the bait. He talked nonstop about pictures he’d seen in magazines and how the government had cataloged UFOs and that officials were hiding men from outer space who had crashed near Roswell, New Mexico.

“Can we talk about something else?” I said. “Maybe baseball?”

Jesse and Dickie smiled at each other and I knew I was the one who had taken the bait.

TUESDAY, OCTOBER 9, 1984

I awoke to the muted sound of birds heralding Indian summer. Crickets and frogs brought back my childhood in full surround sound as I shook the sleep from me. I had fallen into bed without setting an alarm and slept the rest of the day and night. I wandered outside to the car early enough not to disturb my parents.