Cemetery Road

I managed to stay close to him for another five minutes, but then we got separated again. Adam called out that he was okay and I should keep going. I did, but much more slowly than I could have, and I did a voice check every twenty seconds or so. I risked going a little ahead because I wanted to sight the opposite shore as soon as possible, to correct our course if we weren’t moving aggressively enough across the current. The sun had cleared the horizon by then, but with the fog it didn’t help much. As I swam, I realized my teeth were chattering. I wondered how long I had been shivering. I also sensed a vibration in the water, a subsonic rumble that felt more like my body was generating it than some external source. When Adam cried out for help, I turned back instantly, but again it took some time to find him in the fog.

As soon as I did, I saw he was in trouble. He was doubled over in the water, struggling even to stay afloat.

“My legs cramped up,” he choked out. His face was gray, his eyes glassy, and his teeth were chattering. “My calves. I can’t get them loose!”

I knew what had happened. The past thirty-six hours—which included the state track meet, serious alcohol intake, the foot race on the levee, and the long tower climb—had depleted Adam’s potassium to the point that his skeletal muscles wouldn’t function properly. I tried diving to massage the cramps out, but it did little good. I needed to get him to shore.

“Trey!” I shouted. “Dooley! Adam’s in trouble! We need help!”

“They won’t help,” Adam said. “They’ll be lucky to make it themselves.”

“Listen, I need you to go limp. Try to relax. I’m going to put you in a buddy tow and swim you to shore.”

“You can’t tow me that far. Not in this river.”

“Bullshit. You know I can. Do what I say.”

“I can make it,” Adam insisted, trying to pull himself through the water.

“Not cramped like that, you can’t. Lie back! I’m going to tow you to Louisiana.”

“Just gotta wait for my legs to …”

He fell silent. Adam had heard what I had. The rumble I’d barely perceived before seemed suddenly upon us, around us, beneath us. Somewhere in that fog, not far away, a string of barges was being pushed by a tugboat. Pushed toward us. Panic bloomed in my chest, and Adam saw it in my eyes.

“We’ve gotta move!” I cried. “Lie back!”

I’d never seen my brother’s eyes fill with fear, nor his face look so exhausted that I doubted his ability to continue. I had never seen him helpless. I couldn’t have imagined it. No one in Bienville could. But in that river, on that morning, our golden Apollo was as helpless as a newborn baby. Worse off, actually, since I could have easily hauled a baby to shore, whereas dragging 190 pounds of muscle would be like trying to swim an anchor through the water. Nevertheless, I dove and swam behind Adam, then surfaced and got my arm around his neck, up under his chin, and my left hip beneath his lower back. Then I started the “combat stroke” I’d been taught by my swimming coach, a former navy rescue swimmer. I had long since abandoned any thought of the Mathesons. From that point on, our lives depended on me.

The tugboat was closer, I could feel it. That meant the barges, which might extend a quarter mile in front of the tug, could run us over any second. Abandoning the alternating scissor-kick-and-pull stroke, I kicked constantly, with all the power in my legs. But as I did, I realized something that took my fear to a higher pitch: I was shivering; Adam wasn’t. His core temperature had dropped. The combination of cold water, exhaustion, dehydration, and alcohol was killing him. If I let go, he could sink without even struggling.

Summoning every atom of energy in my body, I kicked with focused violence and pulled water with my right hand, vowing I could do the work of two. But after the long day’s exertion, this was akin to hauling my brother up a mountain on my back. Worse, the diesel rumble had steadily grown louder, yet the fog still prevented me from determining the exact direction of the threat. I only knew it was upstream from us.

“You’re fading!” Adam gasped in my ear. “You can’t do it, Marsh.”

“Bullshit,” I panted, worried I was hyperventilating.

“You’re gonna kill us both. That barge is coming downstream, hauling ass.”

“Shut up, why don’t you?” I snapped, kicking like a madman.

“Can you see the shore?”

“Not yet … can’t be far, though.”

Before Adam spoke again, a gray wall as tall as a house appeared out of the fog to my right. It was the flat bow of the lead barge, maybe thirty-five yards away, growing larger by the second. I couldn’t scream or speak.

“Let me go,” Adam coughed.

I suddenly realized that I’d stopped swimming. I started kicking again, searching the fog for the edge of that wall.

“Let go!” Adam screamed. “You can still make it!”

Tears streaming from my eyes, I kicked with everything I had left, but it wasn’t enough. I felt five years old. The next time I looked up, the barge was twenty yards away. In that moment Adam bit into my neck. As searing pain arced through me, my brother punched me in the face, then kicked free of me. Separated by three feet of water, we looked into each other’s eyes with desperate intensity. Then a mass of water lifted us both, shoving us several feet downstream.

“Go,” Adam said with a calmness that haunts me to this day. Then he smiled sadly and slid beneath the surface.

For some fraction of time that will always be eternal, I stared at the empty space where my brother had been. Then my brainstem took control of my body. Freed from Adam’s weight, I cut across the water in a freestyle that felt like flying. The barge’s bow crashed past my feet so closely that the wake lifted me like a surfer catching a wave. A vicious undertow grasped at my lower body, pulling me back toward the steel hulk, but terror must have granted me superhuman strength. I fought my way clear.

After twenty more strokes, I spied the low shore of Louisiana 150 yards away. White sand, gray riprap, waist-high weeds. When I reached the rocks, I didn’t have the strength to climb out of the water, only to get my head clear and rest my weight on the submerged stones.

Some of what followed I can’t bear to think about even now. What I do remember is the search for Adam’s body. It will be remembered as long as men live and work along the Lower Mississippi. Everyone took part: the Coast Guard, twelve sheriff’s departments, four tugboat companies, a hundred private boaters, professional salvage divers, and even the Boy Scouts in a dozen counties and parishes lining the Mississippi River.

Nobody found him.

My father borrowed a Boston Whaler from a friend and went up and down the river for months, searching the banks and islands for his lost son. I would have gone with him, but Dad didn’t want me in that boat. Though my eyes were far sharper than his, he couldn’t bear my presence during his search.

That’s how it began. Not so much his withdrawal into himself, which my mother also went through, but his erasure of me, the guilty survivor. That was not Duncan McEwan’s first voyage into grief, of course. He had lost a child once before. I knew about that, but I’d never really thought deeply about it. That before he married my mother, he’d had another family. Sure, my father had always been older than my friends’ dads, but it never seemed like an issue. Yet in the wake of my brother’s loss—while I sat alone at home and my father plied the river in the vain hope of a miracle—his first wife and daughter seemed suddenly relevant.

Eloise and Emily. Emmie was the daughter. Two years old. My mother told me that they’d died in a one-car accident on Cemetery Road in 1966, taking a shortcut home after visiting Dad at the newspaper. I’d ridden over that exact spot a thousand times. It’s a dogleg turn where three sets of railroad tracks cross through the asphalt. Deep gullies gape on both sides of the road. At night, in a blinding rain, their car—Dad’s car, actually, an Oldsmobile Delta 88—spun off the road and tumbled into one of the ravines, coming to rest upside down in three feet of runoff water. Mother and child drowned in less than a minute. I can’t imagine what that must have been like for my father, to have endured that and then have built another life—to have been gifted a son like Adam—and then be told that he’d been taken by the river during a stupid teenage dare. It was more than my father could bear. And without a corpse to mourn, he simply refused to believe that Adam was dead. Who could blame him? When you’re blessed with a god for a son, it’s tough to accept mortality.

Thinking of my father like that, boarding that Boston Whaler down below Front Street every day, on a hopeless quest for his dead son, I suddenly realize that I’ve come to the low stone wall that borders the Bienville Cemetery. Hallam Avenue has intersected Cemetery Road. The bluff and the river aren’t quite visible from here, but I see Laurel Hill, the westernmost hill in the Bienville necropolis, where the monument to Adam stands. The statue—of an athletic young man who appears to mournfully stand watch over the river—was sculpted in Italy, by an artist my father met while working in Rome as an army reporter for Stars and Stripes. Another story for another day. The statue is famous among barge crews, who call it “the Watchman.” Poised 240 feet above the river, it’s the first thing the crews look for as they pass north of Bienville. Despite the tragedy behind the statue’s existence, it reassures them somehow, like a life-size St. Christopher medal.

Its effect on the town was impossible to foresee. Within hours after being erected on the hill, Adam’s statue became a shrine for local teenagers. By that time I was in a pit of despair, suffering from what doctors would later diagnose as PTSD. But I still went to school, and I heard the stories. On any given weekend, you could find kids leaning against its pedestal, watching the sunset. At dawn you’d find different kids watching the sunrise from the same spot. Since coming back home, I’ve been told this still happens, thirty-one years later, even though the present generation knows nothing about Adam beyond what their parents have told them. Pilgrims have prayed to Adam’s statue, conceived children under it, left rafts of flowers and poems at its feet. But I haven’t stood before it in twenty-eight years. I can’t bear to. The last time I did, the experience hurled me back to that terrible morning in the river—just as seeing Buck’s body did today. But the worst hour of that morning, worse even than abandoning my brother to his death under that barge, was the soul-scalding act of walking into my family’s home with the sheriff and telling my parents that their oldest son wouldn’t be coming home ever again.

And then explaining why.

Parked beside the cemetery wall, only two hundred yards from Adam’s statue, I decide I’m still not ready to confront his marble doppelgänger from any closer proximity. Not yet, at least. Better to drive back to town and have a cup of coffee at Nadine’s, settle my nerves, then ride out to the groundbreaking and try to figure out which of my fine fellow citizens acted on the nearly universal desire to silence Buck Ferris.

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