Arrowhead Grass and River Gods

When I was little, my family used to go to bluegrass music jams and drum circles at the river every week. It was free entertainment for our sore lot of bare feet and it made us feel wealthy, despite living on food stamps and borrowed time. The men in charge of the music had a habit of scheduling the Jams for the hottest days in the armpit of summer. It’d be 100 degrees at 6 O'clock in the evening, and the musicians would still play red faced and sweating, and people would still walk from their homes to dance on blistered feet.

There were great stalks of arrowhead grass that formed a wall around a section of benches by the river bank, small children could burrow into them and feel as though they’d escaped into another place and time entirely. If you made it to the middle of the clearing, and the benches, the only similarity between the grass-world and our own was a blue patch of sky that bled over the wall of greenery.

One bluegrass night I was crawling in the arrowhead, the thick leaves muffled the music in a liminal way. I could tell that I was close to the clearing because I could hear the ever consistent rush of river water spilling and smoothing itself over granite boulders. (I don’t care what anyone has to say about the predictability of fluid mechanics, that water is alive and it always has been)

I reached the end of the tunnel I’d formed – the foliage thinning out considerably; but I drew up short at the sight of not one, but two fully grown adults in the sacred juvenile haven. A man and a woman sat in dusky, diminishing light. The woman had deep Auburn hair, and pearl jewelry that reflected the light of the moon, which made it seem like she was adorned in rocky terrestrials herself. She had the airy confidence of a woman who’d gone into her closet and draped herself with the finest things she owned – silks, diamonds, chiffon, and then the beauty had rubbed itself off on her so effectively that she looked like royalty no matter what she was wearing. The man wore a brown hat and suit, he had a red tie and his face was illuminated by the light of his radiant counterpart.

I’d always been taught to not eavesdrop or spy on grownups, but the pair had me in a trance. They looked like they’d been transported from a long time ago, maybe the 50s? Their faces were smooth and airbrushed and they were so put together compared to the hillbillies jammin’ at the river, or me with tangled hair, dirty feet, and sweat crystallizing on my neck from running around in the heat all day. I watched the couple for a second as they spoke, and they didn’t notice me – all of a sudden the man gets off the bench and onto one knee, and he’s proposing to the beautiful woman. I stayed long enough to catch the glint of the diamond as he slid it onto her finger, and then hightailed it back through the grass to my momma and baby sisters; full of a feeling that I’d witnessed something which had not in fact happened in our concurrent timeline, but long ago.

This moment runs through my head so frequently, that the couple may as well haunt me. Perhaps they were childhood sweethearts, and the man’s proposal was a foregone conclusion to a long love story. Or, they’d been forbidden from each other for whatever reason – Beautiful lady’s father didn’t think man was good enough for his daughter, didn’t make enough money or whatever other frivolity that tends to get in the way of love. Who could I tell that would believe the grass had taken me to a distant time? Likely, I would not be believed and also I’d be scolded for peering on a private moment between two strangers, not to mention the un-ladylike behavior of getting all dirtied up and tugged on by plant fiber hooks and dirt.

Of course, the only solution for the mystery of the beautiful strangers is deification, not of the subject of the memory, but it’s cradle. The god of the meandering river that cuts through my home saw the couple get engaged, she knows every child that digs their fingers into the soft loam of the bank, who pick the water lilies or try to collect the specs of mica minerals in the sand under the current. I assume she’s also aware of the foreign Asian clams which filter the water running through her, or the crawdads sifting through layers of mud. Our neighbor’s son almost drowned in the river when he was 7. He was found standing in an Eddy, taken peacefully down the rapids, unscathed and ready for the arms of hopeful parents. The river god is benevolent, and she is not eager to take credit or life. She knows time too, but she is forgetful. When her water laps up onto the banks, sometimes an old seam will break, and a moment from the past will replay. Somehow in the arrowhead grass, I’d escaped the notice of the adults and the river God – she’d forgotten to knit time back the right way and I saw something I shouldn’t have been able to see. I couldn’t repay this accidental kindness by blabbing it to everyone.

But what greater debt could I have accrued than the river god teaching me about glowing women and couples in love? how I could rearrange my insides to keep this moment between the two of us? Perhaps I can elongate my spine, get taller, fill my lungs up with as much air as they could possibly hold, grow my hair out to contain the secrets of the river god. I can march in tune with the beating and swelling of earth, try and hurt the way she hurts – but I could never pay her back.