Riverboat

There were many days, during a summer of many days, during a time when God still had hands for us, when his hands would evidence themselves in our lives. He would reach down and refresh us each day with the desire for displacement. He seemed to us to understand that we were tired of the public pool, that we needed a change of mission to keep us interested. Displacement began appearing around us in different forms.

Our eyes were led increasingly towards the backyard. Through doors and windows and trees; Renaissance theories of light at play. Our eyes were led increasingly towards the grassless corner of the backyard. Our eyes were led increasingly.

The grassless corner of the yard was the only corner which had been able to remain this way and it did it only through the force of its own resolve. Grass had never been able to supplant it. The grassless corner remained fine yellow sand and did not take this property at all lightly. At the time it reminded me of Constantinople, it is reminding me of it now.

Our mornings were not the same after we discovered Constantinople and replaced our boredom with its limitless potential.

We began getting up early and demanding our grits early. We had little trouble adjusting our grandmother to our schedule. I imagined that she was cooperative out of pride in being involved in our work.

The smell of bacon would push away our sleep at exactly 8 o’clock. If it were any later we would have something to say about it. If we had something to say about it we would say it to ourselves. We knew to keep our dissatisfaction from our grandmother because we had tried out a “Jesus Christ” on her in unison one morning and had all been enlightened one at a time. To her, Jesus Christ was available one day a week and in a different tone.

She didn’t seem to understand that we had a hole to dig with a sense of urgency attached to it by God himself.

There were always four shovels standing side by side in the huge silver shed, which had come to rest in the same spot where the grapevine had once twisted. We had four shovels to try to split evenly between the three of us. This cause problems and endless disagreements about the loss of the grapevine.

Two of the shovels had short handles and two had long handles. The short handles had easily as many splinters as the long handles with the only difference being that they were more densely placed.

We had a system for beginning our days, which would replace grits at 8:20. Two of us would go to the shed for the shovels. One would get the long handled shovels and the other would get the short handled shovels. We never mixed them if we could help it. We did it this way for reasons that were obvious to us then.

The third of us would go directly to the hole to inspect our work from the day before and begin setting goals for the day at hand. This duty carried with it the most responsibility and the one who got to do it was in charge for the rest of the day. The rhythmic rotation of this duty could be easily interrupted if one of us were feeling particularly confident.

Once we got the shovels to the hole there was nothing left but the digging and it came easy to us and the heaviness of our arms was pushed away by lightness.

We would begin by shoveling out the loose dirt which was all there was left of the night before. We did this quickly and in complete precision.

Occasionally during this stage our grandmother, watching us through the kitchen window, would mistake us for a riverboat going through the Mississippi of her backyard. She would run to the dock on her bad feet, but by the time she got there we had pushed the riverboat and the Mississippi back into her past.