Board Thread:Writer's Workshop/@comment-25383866-20161021144248/@comment-25383866-20161021233238

Beth's Cairns draft 2

Beth Morris lived half a mile or so down the road from me. We’d play sometimes, I remember, but we never made the crucial step from playmates to friends. She was a shy, pretty girl, in a dark sort of way. Her hair was always short, the unfortunate aftereffect of an impatient mother armed with a ceramic bowl and an electric buzzer, but she never seemed bothered by it. “Ma says it’s a pixie cut,” I remember her saying once.

Her family and mine were two of the ten who lived on County Road 1227 in those days. There was a creek-bed that ran along parallel to it, and my house was across a short concrete bridge that spanned the dry bed. That was one of my favorite spots, under that bridge. The creek only ran when it rained, so it was usually home only to gopher holes and the occasional mangey deer. You could stack the loose rocks to make walls, so the other boys and I would ride our bikes down there to play Bunkers after school.

Beth and I played there a couple of times. I showed her the best way to stack the rocks so that enemy projectiles wouldn’t come through the cracks. “That’s boring,” she said. “I’m going to build fairy houses instead.” As I watched, she started placing rocks one on top of another, starting with big flat stones at the bottom which graduated into smaller and smaller ones near the top, so that when it was done it looked like a kind of spindly pyramid.

She smiled proudly when she was finished, puffing out her chest and placing her scraped-up hands on her bony hips. “Now the fairies have a place to live,” she said. I remember telling her I didn’t believe in fairies and she made a raspberry at me.

I don’t know what her family life was like, but once I had shown her the bridge, I started to see her there by herself more and more, building her cairns. Conversely, I started seeing her less and less at school. She’d smile up at me from the creek-bed with her pleasantly crooked teeth as I rode my bike down to the road, and I could hear her grunts and the powdery-soft clack of rock on rock behind me as I passed. Some days I’d come home from school to find her sitting on a stump protruding from the bank, observing her handiwork. I remember her waving at me with her raw hands as I rode my bike up my drive way. I returned the wave, trying to be casual about it.

If she’d wanted, she could have made better bunkers than most of us boys did, tell the truth.

Slowly, and, it seemed, inexorably, the spot under the bridge was becoming Beth’s. Some of the boys made a spirited effort at reclaiming the creek by knocking down all her little stone towers, but she just came and rebuilt them the next day. Repeated attempts begat the same result, and so the creek-bed was ceded to Beth and her cairns.

One spring, maybe a year later, it rained a lot. I think I was 12, which would have made Beth 11. The boys and I had lost much of our enthusiasm for Bunkers seeing as James Dailey’s parents had gotten him a Nintendo NES for Christmas, but Beth’s cairns had stood all winter, her perfect turrets of stone becoming little more than slight bumps in the snow under the bridge. For a little while I saw tracks in the snow, and what looked like giant, eyeless snowmen, but she seemed to not enjoy stacking snowballs as much as rocks, so she stopped after a few weeks.

Anyway. Like I said, it rained that spring, so much that the creek flooded. It rose by nine feet, overflowing its banks and covering the road. I remember looking out at the foaming water rushing through the metal railings, felt it tearing against the underside of my dad’s truck as we drove to the community disaster shelter, and to me, it looked alive, full of malice, like a seething, rabid animal.

When we got to the shelter, I looked for her among the other children there, to tell her sorry about her fairy houses. The flood would have knocked them all down, sent them skipping along the bottom of the creek-bed in pieces. For some reason, this filled me with a deep, inexplicable sadness.

But I didn’t find Beth Morris. No one found her, not even after the waters had gone back down. She was the only victim of the flood. Her parents knew she liked to play down by our bridge, they said. They thought that she had been down there the day of the flood, that she had been caught by surprise while she was building her cairns.

We all went to her memorial, ate lukewarm lasagna at a fundraiser for her family put on by the H.A. They moved away after that.

When the waters had dried and the roads were cleared, the signs went up: “WARNING: FLASH FLOOD HAZARD.” The creek had flooded before in the community’s history, but somehow, Beth was the first to be killed. Just bad luck, I suppose, or bad timing. Semantics. Needless to say, the rest of us kids were all forbidden from playing down by the creek anymore.

But that didn’t stop me from going.

It was a couple of months later, just after summer vacation had started. I remember the creek was wider than when Beth and I had played there, and deeper too. There were places that were still muddy and wet, where the heat of the coming summer hadn’t yet penetrated, and many of the rocks had been washed away, so I had to work to find ones that I could stack. But I found them, and I set about building a cairn for Beth.

My work was sloppy compared to hers, the rocks mismatched and teetering, but when I was done, I sat back and looked at it in pride. “See Beth,” I said into the buzzing of insects and the chirping of birds, “Now you have a place to live.”

I sat on the bank where her stump used to be, my raw hands smarting and covered in dirt. I stayed there for awhile, breathing in the thick scents of peat and earth, and the tang of pine needles.

The next day, I decided to ride my bike into the neighboring town to rent a video with my allowance. What I saw that summer morning changed me.

My cairn was still there. But it wasn’t the only one. All around it, up and down the creek and clustered around the bridge, were dozens of perfectly stacked stone towers. The whole creek-bed had been torn up, as if by heavy machinery, and the huge boulders lining the bank had also been pulled up, like giant rotted molars, and they formed the foundation for several massive, 10-or-12-foot high cairns. Some of the stones were still clotted with dirt and the alien tangles of roots, and others still dripped mud.

I dismounted my bike in a daze, and left it where it fell to wander amongst the stones. The heat of the day was just beginning to come on, and with it, the noise of the world; but down between the cairns, it was cool and quiet.

As I walked I realized I was heading toward the cairn I had made the day before. When I found it, I squatted down on my haunches in front of it, and sat down in the dirt with my back against a boulder.

My parents found me lying on the bridge many hours later, next to my crashed bike. When they asked me what had happened, I pointed to the creek-bed, but found myself unable to answer them. The cairns had all toppled, reduced to piles of rubble clogging the mutilated creek-bed.

The authorities chalked it up to a freak seismic event, and for my part, I went along with that explanation. But I knew the truth.

That was thirty years ago now. Memories are like muscles; they can atrophy without proper use. I haven’t thought about Beth Morris in a long time, so my recollection of events can’t really be trusted.

Or maybe I’m just a coward who’s leaving himself a way out in case somebody calls him on his bullshit.

Either way, that’s what I remember about Beth Morris.