Watermelon Summer (6 page)

 

    It was a couple of hours after I got home and
finished baking the apple-raspberry pie Kat had helped me start when the
cramping and diarrhea started.  When researching my original
summer-traveling adventure, I'd learned that it's not always safe to
drink the water when you're on the road, but I'd assumed the admonition
only applied to places like Mexico and Africa.  So I'd seen no
reason not to fill my water bottle from the jugs hand-labeled "Spring Water" at the
Viking Festival—big mistake!  Apparently, spring water is full
of microscopic this-and-thats, which you get used to if you grow up in a
place like Appalachia, but which can tie the intestines of city
slickers into knots.  Like most parts of
living in the countryside, you'll grow accustomed to untreated water
in time, but you'll likely get heartily sick first.

 

    Which is why I spent my second afternoon at
Greensun—and half the night—running back and forth to the
composting toilet.  At first, I'd thought this structure was
inspired—doing your business with a view of the creek and hillside seemed
like bliss.  It was much less paradisiacal at midnight during
the pounding rain when I arrived in the outhouse soaked, turned off
my flashlight because I knew I'd be making a dozen more trips and
didn't want to run down the batteries, and then repeated the endeavor
five minutes later.  I do have to admit that the sound of water
pounding on the tin roof was comforting, but only a little bit.

 

    So when I woke up the next morning, I was all set
to laze in bed reading for hours.  My stomach felt much better,
but I wasn't quite ready to put anything into my mouth.  So I just
lay there, enjoying how good the sun
shining in the window felt on my skin.  The creek, which
had been a gentle gurgle the previous morning, was now a solid roar,
and the noise had almost lulled me back to sleep when I heard a male
voice hollering above the water. 
"Hello!" whoever-it-is yelled.  "Is Forsythia Green there?"

 

 

 

    Now didn't seem like the time to split hairs and
mention that I'd taken my step-dad's last name and went by Forsythia
Hall.  Or to ponder the notion that my bio-dad came up with the
term "Greensun" to memorialize himself.  Both fathers aside,
there was yet another stranger on my doorstep, and it definitely
seemed worth crawling out of bed to see who this one might be.

 

    When I made my way out onto the porch, though, I
discovered that stranger 2.0 (or maybe 3.0 if you counted Jacob in the airport)
wasn't actually on my doorstep at all.  The previously
mild-mannered creek had flooded up to the top of its five-foot-high
banks and was beginning to spill out over the sides, so the stranger
was marooned on the opposite shore.  Or, perhaps more
realistically, I was marooned on this one.

 

    "Hello?" I called as I walked across the sodden
lawn to within speaking distance.  This stranger, actually,
didn't look any more scary than the last visitor, and it seemed rude to
be yelling at a sixty-year-old man who had such a kindly twinkle in
his eye.  "I'm Primrose," I added when I was near enough to
speak instead of shout.

 

    It turned out my newest visitor was even less a
stranger than the last one, as I soon realized when he told me his
name.  Arvil was the sole Greensun-affiliated person Mom had
stayed in touch with, and she'd given me his number in case of
emergencies.  Which this seemed to be.

 

    "I don't want to alarm you," Arvil said after the
introductions were concluded.  "But I have some news.  And
I'd really feel better if I told you while we're both on the same side of
the creek."  He and I scanned the raging floodwaters,
watching Lucy leap into the fray, swim madly against the current,
and still end up twenty feet downstream before she reached the other
shore.

 

    "I'm really okay over here," I said
finally.  "Whatever's wrong, I can handle it."

 

    I later realized that Arvil's chivalry was in
large part due to his sense of adventure, in the face of which a
flooded creek was akin to a red flag waved at a bull.  "There's
a fallen tree down there," he pointed.  "I could probably walk
across."

 

    The tree he'd noticed did seem to be
well-anchored and pretty level as it spanned the creek.  And if
the trunk had been a foot above solid ground, I would have pranced
across it laughing.  (Well, maybe not pranced, but you get the
picture.)  Still, I could easily imagine Arvil slipping and
falling, hitting his head on the wood, and sinking beneath the muddy
waters before I could leap in and rescue him.  Lucy would
probably be the only one left alive.

 

    But Arvil was already striding downstream toward
his found bridge, so I rushed after him on my side of the
creek.  "No, I'll cross!" I called.  What else could I
do?  The guy was almost geriatric.

 

    The log really wasn't that bad once I took off my
shoes and could grip it with my bare feet.  I'm not sure I
actually breathed until I got to the other side, but the wide smile
on Arvil's face made the effort worthwhile, even after Lucy joined
the party and shook muddy water all over us.  I grinned back at
both of them, letting the shoes I'd slung around my neck fall to the ground, already thinking of the log as an
adventurous story to tell someone (other than Mom) in the near future.

 

    Which is when Arvil dropped the bombshell. 
"Your father's in the hospital.  He's okay, but he had a heart
attack."

 

    And then I fainted.

 

 

 

    Once I came to, I was quick to assure Arvil that
I'd only passed out due to low blood sugar from the previous
night's indisposition, but he refused to leave me
alone after that.  My neighbor patted down his pockets and came
up with
a mint, which was enough to fuel my walk up the hill, but he
wouldn't take no for an answer when he invited me to his house for a
hot meal.

 

    It turns out Arvil's home was one of the structures
I'd peered across the road at from Greensun's mailbox.  (I guess I
hadn't been as alone as I'd thought.)  We walked the whole distance
in fifteen minutes, and even though I was a bit light-headed, I didn't
lag behind because Arvil turned out to be a talented storyteller. 
"I love an audience," he explained, which turned out to be code for the
fact that Arvil was an actor who had played small speaking parts in big
Hollywood movies (and leads in smaller independent films)—he did,
indeed, live for an audience.

 

    His stories were light and humorous until he got me
safely ensconced at his dining room table, sipping chamomile tea while
he heated up a jar of last summer's vegetable soup on his stove. 
"Now, tell me what brings you to Greensun," he asked, and finally fell
silent.

 

    I'm not the kind of person who pours her heart out to
strangers (or even to well-known people, for that matter), but I was
speaking to Arvil's back as he stirred with a wooden spoon, the
chamomile tea reminded me of my mother, and my defenses were
particularly low in my weakened state.  Somehow, my experiences
over the last few days came gushing out in a sort of diarrhea of the
mouth—just as embarrassing as the previous night's episode, once I
caught my breath and heard what I'd been saying.  "I don't even
know why I'm here!" I emoted finally, and shut my mouth with a
snap. 

 

    "You're looking for Greensun, of course," Arvil
answered, turning to face me with a bowl of soup in his hand. 
"Here, eat up."

 

 

 

    "I'm looking for Greensun?" I parroted.  "What does that even mean?"

 

    "It means you're just like the rest of us," Arvil
answered.  He'd added some bread and cheese to the table and joined
me for the feast.  I slurped up a spoonful from my bowl to give
myself a minute to think and was momentarily side-tracked by the
extravagant flavor of the seemingly simple tomato-based soup.

 

    "This is amazing!" I exclaimed, without meaning to.  "It tastes like...summer!"

 

    Arvil was clearly pleased by my pleasure but wasn't
willing to be side-tracked.  His slow smile went all the way to his
eyes, but his words stuck to the point.  "Are you ready for one
more story?" he asked.  "Maybe it will help you understand
Greensun...and what you're looking for."

 

    At my nod, Arvil slipped right back into
storytelling mode, but I could tell this tale struck closer to home than
the amusing anecdotes he'd used to pass the time while we climbed
Greensun's hill.  "Your father has been my closest friend for
longer than you've been alive," Arvil started, "which is why I had to
leave Greensun.

 

    "What you've got to understand, is that folks around
here are clannish.  Most of our ancestors hailed from Scotland and
Ireland, where family was everything, and we took that culture with us
to the New World.  Outsiders today tell us our accents are strange,
but the Lord's own truth is that Appalachian English is closer to the
pure English of the 1700s—we just didn't see any reason to change
with the times.  Most of us still don't."

 

    As Arvil spoke, I noticed his vowels lengthening and
his consonants shifting until he sounded more like the people I'd met in
the airport.  Later, I would realize that Arvil's stories were
unconscious chameleons, blending into their linguistic
surroundings.  His previous tales were told in standard American
English because Arvil was speaking entirely to me, but now he was
talking as much to himself as to anyone else.

 

    "When I was a young'un," Arvil continued, "I had more
cousins than I could shake a stick at.  Every year, our family
held a reunion for the sake of the relatives who'd moved down the road a
piece, but the rest of the time, most of us lived in each other's
pockets.  It was comfortable and comforting when I was a child,
like snuggling down into a mess of puppies.

 

    "But try as I might, turned out I wasn't a puppy.  I didn't quite know
what
I was—maybe a skunk or a 'coon—but I soon saw that the puppy
pile wasn't for me.  First thing I noticed was—I didn't want to
be a coal miner like my daddy.  Sure, he made right good money,
but Daddy came home worn down and used up.  I didn't know then that
the mines were poisoning our streams and tearing apart our families, but
I did know that Uncle Tom was on a breathing machine from too much coal
dust, and Uncle Eddie died in a cave-in before he hit thirty. 
Even the lucky ones were all bent over like old men long before their
time."

 

    I shivered but sat in silence, not wanting to
interrupt, even to spur Arvil on.  Although his childhood was
completely different from mine, I could relate to his feeling of not
fitting into the world he was born to.  I'd always felt like an
ugly duckling, too, not able to feign enough enthusiasm in makeup and TV
shows to float along in the stream of modern American youth
culture.  But my trials and tribulations paled in comparison to
Arvil's.