The Witnesses
By the banks of Weeping Mother Creek, our family’s three matriarchal aunts sit in lawn chairs and weep, lamenting the decline of our family reunions, which have in recent years closed with the vaporization of a regret-filled watermelon.
I say to hell with regrets. I’ve come by boat, a symbolic way to announce I am not a modern-day Jonah—not running from the call. But as the boat creeps closer to this year’s reunion, I am filled with regret, aimed initially at my first cousin once removed Stan, who failed to dissuade me from my ridiculous idea of arriving by boat.
“You sure you don’t want a hit, David?” asks Stan from the stern as he brings the boat to a stop, per my request, behind a curtain-like stand of willows. “I couldn’t do one of these without.”
Stan and I hung out back in high school, drawn together by THC. I’ve since moved on, figuratively and literally. Stan is still stuck in our tiny Missouri hometown five miles upstream. I decline his offer. Though we’re both approaching thirty, Stan is a generation below me. I am an accident, much younger than my siblings, who all fled town a week after high school. None are coming to the reunion this year with Dad having joined Mom in death. Fewer cousins return to the reunion each year, the distance ever greater even if they live close.
We are—or were—a family of preachers, but three of them have now succumbed to the family’s fried chicken recipe. Only Brother Nelson Stedman has not passed on—passed on a strong family wording preference, and Brother preferred over Reverend. Not every family member will pass on, per the family’s embraced doctrine. This generation will live to see the end, the signs abounding—a listing always posted by Aunt Rose right behind her potato salad.
Brother Nelson, now confined to a wheelchair, will likely pass on soon—perhaps today when I declare the whole Jonah-in-the-whale story a myth, symbolic of the torment that comes when you know you must speak the truth to those who will surely hate you, an interpretation aided by my Religious Studies degree. The degree qualifies me for nothing, save more study.
Through the willows, Stan and I watch the aunts rise from their shoreline chairs, panting in the ninety-degree heat as they help each other navigate the ramp-like path up the creek bank to the broad backyard that cousin Kenny Dean Stedman manicures for this annual Independence Day gathering.
“Better show ourselves,” says Stan. “Don’t want to get seen lurking like creeps. Plus, Liz might leave soon. Holly, too.”
Besides Stan, I want to see only two cousins today—Liz and Holly. I also fear seeing only two—Liz and Holly.
I fear seeing Liz, a high school classmate of mine, because her nine-year-old son, Tim, her only child, drowned ten weeks ago far downstream in the Mississippi—Weeping Mother Creek a tributary of a tributary. At Tim’s funeral, I had nothing to say as I hugged Liz except I’m sorry. Her soon-to-be ex-husband would not sit next to her at the funeral. He blamed her for the accident.
I fear seeing Holly, a sixteen-year-old first cousin once removed, because I assured her last year that anxiety can be conquered without the pills she takes—that I corralled mine through study, which was true, until today. Holly told me she battles her anxiety by writing poetry, which she refuses to show to anyone. I’ve had to battle mine in complete silence, the family considering anxiety unbecoming in a male.
When I was seventeen, all four family preachers paraded me around like a prize horse because I said I’d heard the call. After my parade, everyone lined up to congratulate me, like at a wedding, sweat dripping down my face—only partly because it was a hundred that day. My male cousins all profusely congratulated me for carrying on the family legacy, ending the pressure on them.
That night, I had my first anxiety attack, a chest tightening, soul gripping, mind blanketing hot fear, like hell trying to burn the call out of me, or maybe heaven holding my soul to the fire for having the audacity to think I’d heard the call at all.
Stan motors his little flat-bottom electric boat out from behind the willows. I’d envisioned standing in the bow in my cutoff jeans and deck shoes as we arrived and I pronounced myself the un-Jonah. If true to the biblical account, however, Stan must throw me overboard and a big fish must swallow me until I repent. I’m not worried about that since the biggest fish in Weeping Mother Creek are gars, rarely exceeding three feet, and flathead cats, rarely exceeding four—although Kenny Dean tells a tall tale of a nine-foot flathead that swam up from the Mississippi.
“Hug the shore, Stan. Maybe we’ll escape notice.”
What I really want to escape is a theology that creates a heavy gravity in the mind, locking you into an orbit you can escape only by falling into the sea or floating off into an outer darkness.
I fight an urge to tell Stan to motor on past this farm where my father and his siblings grew up. The farm has been passed down for three generations to the Stedman child fool enough to farm 160 acres in a floodplain. Kenny Dean, two years older than me, is the current fool.
Stan guides the boat into the swimming hole behind the farm, the creek pooling in front of the gravel-and-mud shore. This swimming hole has produced some of my most intense memories, especially cousin Alvin’s rope swing near-drowning.
We almost land unseen, but Kenny Dean spots us when he brings out the miniature black powder cannon that will later vaporize the regret-filled watermelon.
“Well, if isn’t Stony Stan and Bad Jonah come to finally grace us with their presence!”
Walking up the steep path to the plateau-like yard, I spot the jagged-striped watermelon slated for vaporization. Kenny Dean, blessed with thick dark hair, a strong dimpled chin, muscles, and natural confidence, started the tradition of vaporizing watermelons at these reunions a decade back. Three years ago, he proposed we each write out a regret and stuff it inside the melon. We could thus blow our regrets to bits before the whole family’s eyes—the family likely responsible for the regrets.
“I hear you finally graduated, David,” Kenny Dean says to me.
It took me eleven years to earn my degree, in and out of college between vagabond jobs—once including urn salesman, something the preachers considered horrifying. You must be buried, facing east to greet Jesus.
“And I see,” Kenny Dean adds, "that you've come to finally answer the call. Maybe you too, Stan."
“No way,” says Stan. “I never did even think I heard the call.” Raising his hands and eyes skyward, he adds, “Thank you Lord for that!”
Looking up, I see the rope swing above the swimming hole. It has still not been torn down despite second cousin once removed Jeb’s anxiety-provoking splashdown and overly long reemergence at last year’s reunion. The swing has a history of near fatalities when the water is low, as it normally is by reunion time. The rope is attached high up a hard-leaning sycamore that’s long seemed destined to crash into the creek any minute now. Kenny Dean nailed the launch platform so high that it takes goading—or alcohol—before anyone dares try.
Only fools have dared since cousin Alvin nearly drowned a year after the rope’s debut. I was to have gone after him, goaded up there by Kenny Dean a week before my parade. I stood on the platform right behind Alvin as he swung out, dropped, and executed a half-flip dive upon splash-down. His motionless body soon floated back to the surface with a concussion, but Kenny Dean swam in and saved him.
The incident proved that spring floods can deposit dangerous items in the muddy swimming hole. A late-summer drought that year revealed what Alvin had hit: a 1976 Chevette. Kenny Dean pulled the rusted junker out with a tractor, no bodies inside.
Across the flat backyard, the three aunts gather around Uncle Nelson’s wheelchair, praying over him. While the call escaped my father—or vice versa—his two brothers became preachers and his two sisters married preachers—all four men passing through the same seminary, one heavily focused on the end, soon creating reunions that felt like revival meetings.
The revival fires dampened as three of the preachers died out. Their legacy, however, dances like flames over embers. Every Stedman can still hear the preachers’ voices exhorting us to witness, to go out and make known that the end is near, so believe every word or suffer the unquenchable fire that shall torture you without end, forever and ever, amen—but God loves you.
Kenny Dean places the watermelon atop an old stump at the creek bank edge. Over his shoulder I see a gar rise and break the surface of the water, its long, razor-toothed jaws almost visible. While true fish, gars also gulp air. When I stood on the high platform with Alvin, we watched the gars become arrows pointed at us like marks on a clock. They can see you, apparently wondering if you are edible. Kenny Dean says he once saw the gars strip a cow to the bones in minutes, but that’s just Kenny Dean being Kenny Dean. He always tries to goad someone onto the rope swing, seldom getting a taker after spreading tales of piranha-like gars and a flathead catfish the size of a Chevette.
Kenny Dean positions the cannon three feet from the stump, its barrel and the melon’s long axis pointing at each other. Near the melon, he’s provided pencils and cut-up slips of white paper.
“Oh-oh,” says Kenny Dean. “The aunts have spotted you, David. They were worried you wouldn’t show. They’ve been praying those magic pills are in your past.”
The aunts have long believed I partake of magic pills. They say such pills are from the devil, but I know that’s not true because I got them from Stan.
Two of the aunts, Gloria and Rose—both widows of my father’s preacher brothers—waddle my way, fanning themselves by pulling their dress collars in and out. The third, Aunt Betty, my father’s younger sister, pushes her husband, Brother Nelson, in his wheelchair. My father’s older sister, Rachel, and her preacher husband each succumbed to the chicken recipe two years ago, within hours of each other they say, so deep was their love of chicken.
I solemnly march toward the four, trying hard to smile, if not overly so. They’ve all reached their seventies, each with many health issues they’re quick to list. The three aunts are clothed in bold floral prints, Brother Nelson in a white shirt and tie despite the heat. The aunts open their mouths in big, toothy smiles. I remind myself it is not true that aunts can strip your soul to the bone in minutes, but Brother Nelson, his mouth set in an age-permanent frown, maybe could.
Aunt Gloria, the youngest of the remaining aunts, gives me a full body hug with her enormous breasts. She presses her sweaty cheek against mine before standing back, hands on broad hips. “Let me look at you. What a fine-looking young man.”
Aunt Rose, her eyes always bright and wide, like a baby taking in the world, gives me a warm, sweaty, mosquito-repellent hug.
“We haven’t seen you since your father’s funeral,” Aunt Rose laments. “Your father ran the good race. Your mother, too.”
My father’s fatal heart attack last fall followed my mother’s death from pancreatic cancer back when I was twenty-one. Mom lasted just three weeks after the diagnosis, dying proud of me because I hadn’t yet reneged. The last thing she said, her voice so faint I had to put my ear to her dry, cracked lips, was, “I pass on happy, knowing you’ll preach.”
Aunt Betty wheels Brother Nelson up to me. He’s bent over, skin dry as burnt paper, eyes languid, voice like wind in a cave.
I hug Aunt Betty, who returns only a light hug due to her arthritis, which she manages with a stiff upper lip, prayer, and gin
Brother Nelson looks up at me. “Are you ready,” says the wind-like voice. “Are you ready to carry this family onward to glory, or shall you and your cousins continue to fall into Satan’s arms?”
The voice reaches into me, seeking the chains that bind.
“Come out from Satan’s grip!” it commands. “Be released like Lazarus from death!”
Brother Nelson’s head falls forward, like he’s just used up his last living breath, leaving his voice forever on my soul, alongside my mother’s.
“I’ve got to get you out of the heat,” Aunt Betty tells him, fanning him with his own tie. She wheels Brother Nelson toward the two-story farmhouse, so old it seems to lean like the sycamore.
“Where’s Liz?” I ask Aunt Gloria, Liz’s mother.
“Oh, she’s here,” says Gloria with a deflating sigh. “It’s all so very tragic, yes, but instead of being comforted she’ll see Tim again, she just wanders around saying, ‘He’s not here. He’s not here.”
I feel the hairs on the back of my neck rising, envisioning a shattered Liz searching for her missing son.
“Is Holly here?”
“Oh, yes,” says Aunt Rose. “I’d say poor thing but she’s so in your face with her anxiety. We used to call that nerves and just get on with life. I want to tell her, put on your big girl pants.”
Aunt Gloria puts a hand on my shoulder. I know what’s coming.
“You heard your uncle. It’s time to stop running, David. Time to answer. You’ve been in that whale long enough.”
It now strikes me that if I am truly following Jonah’s path, extricated from the whale and ready to preach, I am now standing among my peoples’ enemies, who are my people.
“It’s the last generation,” says Aunt Rose. “The signs are everywhere. You can start your preaching and saving right here with Liz and Holly. Liz has got her spirit broken. And Kenny Dean snuck a look at some of Holly’s poems. He said she’s so confused they don’t even rhyme. He could tell some bad things must have happened to her, so he said he’d figure a way to find out what.”
“Let us pray over you,” commands Aunt Gloria.
They stretch their arms out, fat swinging below biceps, each putting two hands on my head, wrapping me in flesh.
“Dear Lord above,” says Aunt Gloria, “fill your wayward servant David with the truth and courage needed to fight the forces of darkness. In the name of Jesus, Amen.”
I thank them as graciously as I can without implying anything.
I don’t see Liz among the older cousins, so I head for a younger group surrounding Kenny Dean and the cannon. The power of the eighteen-inch-long artillery piece, loaded with only tamped-down newspaper wadding, is startling. Each year it’s announced by an ear-splitting blast that echoes up and down the creek. First there is a watermelon, then there isn’t. It vanishes as if raptured.
Kenny Dean exhorts his admirers to swing from the sycamore—unlikely since the creek appears a tad lower than last year when Jeb took the bait. Over parental protests, fifteen-year-old Jeb crawled up the big sycamore and pendulum-swung with a rebel yell, letting go at the highest point. He remained underwater so long women started screaming. Some men jumped in just as Jeb came up, swimming ashore to tell a tale of having to punch the nose of a nine-foot flathead that lived inside a 1984 Ford Crown Victoria. Jeb said the big catfish tried to eat his left leg, showing us the scars—not convincingly since they appeared healed, but Jeb said he’d prayed for healing on the swim back.
“Now for any of you boys who choose to go,” Kenny Dean says, “be sure you have on a tight pair of shorts and strong underwear, so you don’t end up like cousin Rod.”
Every cousin knows the tale of Rod’s rod, who is said—by Kenny Dean—to have lost his most vital appendage to a gar after swinging naked in moonlight. Rod moved to Oregon soon after the alleged loss, confirming the tale in many minds.
“And don’t fret about Alvin,” Kenny Dean adds. “He went in headfirst. That’s stupid. Just be sure you let go at the highest point. It’s too shallow until you’re that far out.”
Kenny Dean, despite being something of a prick, has no trouble staying in the family’s graces because he goes to church regularly, if often missing during planting and harvesting.
I finally spot Liz, tall and elegant. She captained our high school cheerleading team. Wearing a brown summer dress with a black sash, Liz still looks eighteen. I reach the older group in time to hear her saying, “He isn’t here. He isn’t here.”
The cousins look down at their shoes.
Cousin Sarah, my sister’s age, blessed with a rich husband, four children, and a big house, gives Liz a hug, which Liz stiffly accepts.
“He is here, Liz,” Sarah whispers.
“No, he’s not.”
The cousins look toward me, making Liz whirl around, her face ashen and blank.
“Oh, David,” she says, hugging me. Liz has always treated me like the brother she never had. She buries my face into her lemon-smelling wavy brown hair. “He’s not here, David. And he wasn’t there. Where was he? Why could he not lift a divine finger for two seconds to help me save Tim?”
The other cousins remain silent, avoiding eye contact. I know the silence. They can’t disagree without saying, in so many words, I understand God, who I’ve been told is beyond understanding.
My misunderstanding of who’s not here clarified, I can only say, “I don’t know what to say, Liz.”
“No one’s ever said anything that touched me except Holly. Let’s go find her.”
We soon spot Holly by the creek. I follow Liz toward the bank. Holly’s golden hair and petite body rise into view as we approach. She has her shoes off, toes squishing in the muddy creek bottom—a feeling easily ruined by objects sharper or more locomotive than mud.
Kenny Dean looks up from finishing ramrod work with the black powder and newsprint. “Well, Jonah has returned with Sad Sadie.”
Liz kicks a pebble toward him. “I’m starting to regret you’re my cousin, Kenny Dean.”
“Oh, you don’t mean that, Liz. All those great times you had right here with the senior boys who hung out with me. The bonfires. The skinny dip dares.”
“Yea—all done for your entertainment.”
“So whatcha gonna do, Liz? Wallow in your mud like a hog?”
“Jeez, Kenny Dean. I bet your regret is being filled with so much empathy.”
“No, I have no regrets. The only way to not have regrets is to not have them,”
Liz huffs, sees Stan, and abruptly runs to give him a hug.
Kenny Dean grabs a hunting knife, plunging it into the melon. He pulls out a deep triangular plug where people can stuff in their regrets.
I step down the path, onto the dried rocky mud of the small bar. The creek’s dirt wall here erodes a bit with each flood, exposing tendril tree roots that clutch at the air like wiry fingers. Holly pulls her muddy feet from the creek. A nearby eddy displays chemical runoff from farms, a gathering froth atop the water, like muddy soap bubbles.
Holly is cute—her face round like a child’s with big blue eyes. Her muddied feet give off the smell of earth and decayed fish as she gives me a hug, her hair sea breeze-scented. She wears cutoffs and an aqua t-shirt with matching sweatbands on her wrists. We sit in two of the lawn chairs, their aluminum frames squeaking.
Last year, Holly asked me why I still come to the reunions. I told her I would wonder what was being said about me if I didn’t come, a confession that made me tell her about my own struggles with anxiety. That drew us closer. Other cousins, she told me, just say snap out of it—like anxiety is a bad daydream you let your mind get lost in.
“So how you doing now, Holly?”
“Okay,” she says, swatting a mosquito. “Or I was until Brother Nelson put his sweaty old hands on my head, like trying to reach inside my mind.”
“Oh, he’s already in there.”
“Yea, well, how do I get those sweaty hands out of my head?”
“I’m still trying to get them out of mine. But they’re not bad people. They just got steeped, like tea leaves, in a particular view of the world.”
“And what view is that?”
“One that says Satan is the ruler of the world, which is going to end soon—the signs of the end all around. That creates a powerful hold because there’s never a shortage of signs. I’ve long wanted to end its grip on me, but it’s so deeply ingrained it’s like saying I am not who I am. They say I’ve been running—and maybe they’re right.”
“Well, running is all I can think to do, but I can’t.”
“Why not?”
Holly starts wiping some of the mud from between her toes with her fingers, like a delay, summoning courage. “Because running scares me as much as staying, David. To explain why, I’d have to show you my regrets. I made a list and brought it with me this year. But I’d kill myself if anyone saw it, even Liz—or you. I’m a bit worried it might survive the blast.”
“It won’t. I checked last year. Just bits of watermelon rind survive. The rest is just a red mist full of micro-confetti. And your list can’t be all that long, Holly.”
“Oh, it is. Things I’ve done and failed to do. And things others have done to me or failed to do for me.”
“Liz says you said something about Tim that meant a lot to her.”
Holly shrugs. “I just said I would always love Tim. That I liked him so much—such a perfect little boy. And that every memory of him would make me sad for her—and for him. One of my regrets is that I didn’t go on that boat trip with them. I was invited. So maybe … I was meant to save him.”
I grab her nearest hand and squeeze, no words to say but trite ones. My squeeze turns the bottom of her wrist toward me. The aqua wristband moves just enough that I see the scars underneath. I saw such scars on the wrists of a girl I knew in college, a girl no longer with us.
I run a finger over the scars. “Don’t Holly. Don’t ever. You’re a beautiful person. You feel things very deeply, which is hard on you. Promise me you’ll forgive yourself—and others—for everything and keep your eyes on who you know you can be.”
Holly hugs me, hard and long. ‘I … promise I will try.”
“Well, well!” calls Kenny Dean from above. “Here come Stony Stan and Sad Sadie! I hope you’re primed with regrets and ready to swing, because the water’s up just enough I’ve decided I will not light the fuse until someone swings.”
“It ain’t me,” says Stan.
“How about you, Liz?”
“I’m not here for your entertainment.”
Liz clambers down the path, bringing two of slips of paper and a pencil. She settles into the third chair, me in the middle.
Holly and Liz lean over me to hug each other, their hair hanging in my face, sea breeze mixing with lemon and the fish-smelling creek.
Liz writes out her regret, showing it to us.
When Brother Nelson told me great pain and suffering is necessary for God’s plan to unfold, I regret that I told him only a shitty God would let Tim die to make me suffer. I need a better God.
Liz hands me the pencil and a slip of white paper. Battling fears, heat, and mosquitoes, I finish it and show it to them.
I regret that I don’t have the courage to confess that I never heard God, just the collective voice of this family, which is so loud I think it drowns out a still small voice that really is calling me, calling me to proclaim something I cannot yet hear.
Liz and Holly hug me, one from each side, wrapping me in lithe arms, our temples touching.
“Regrets!” shouts Kenny Dean. “Last call!”
We trudge up to the melon, the last in line. Those ahead of us each stuff their regrets as far down into the wet red melon meat as their fingers and the opening allow.
Liz stuffs hers in and pats the watermelon, like patting a child. Holly guards her regret—a tightly folded slip of pink paper. She stuffs it down the triangular hole as far as her little fingers can reach.
I step up to jam mine atop Holly’s, but Kenny Dean jumps in front. He digs a long finger down, pulling out Holly’s pink regrets slip, unfolding it and starting to read aloud.
“I regret—”
“No!” Holly screams. She tries to snatch it, but Kenny Dean closes a fist on it, holding it high over his head, a paper hostage. Holly pounds his chest with tiny fists, her eyes showing the horror of a rising panic attack. Liz rushes up, screaming at him, but she’s not strong enough to tear it away. I’m not strong enough, either, but I know must do something. What comes to mind is what Kenny Dean said.
The only way to not have regrets is to not have them.
I hold out my regret. “Give Holly’s back and you can read or pass around mine, Kenny Dean.”
He smiles, eyes bright with delight. “Only if you promise to swing, David.”
Swinging from a tree now sounds attractive. Maybe I’ll just float on down the creek to the Mississippi, then into the gulf.
“Give Holly’s back, Kenny Dean, and I will.”
He opens his fist. Holly snatches her regret. She hugs me hard before stuffing her regret way down with a stick, then stuffing the plug back in.
The aunts have now waddled their way to the front, Aunt Betty pushing Brother Nelson, recovered but again sweating. I like the aunts. And I like Brother Nelson as much as I fear him. I liked them all. Good people with an inherited, pessimistic theology and the virtue of fidelity. I regret that Kenny Dean is about to make me hurt them.
I look at the rope swing, so high and far out.
The crowd begins chanting, “Go-go-go-go!”
The sycamore is a yard thick at the base, leaning 45 degrees. A few roots have pulled out of the ground, coiling around nothing. The tree’s bark is smooth, mottled grayish white and greenish gray.
I begin crawling, inch-worming up the trunk, hugging it like a barrel. I reach the rotted platform set in a fork and pull myself onto it, the darkened, splintered plywood giving a little. The end of the very thick rope—tugboat rope, Kenny Dean calls it—is jammed hard into a narrow fork. The platform is two stories above the water—the same height as the rope’s attachment point, the same height I’ll drop from if I let go at my upward zenith.
I wrestle the weathered rope out of the fork. Its spiraling form is like umbilical cords woven together.
The crowd cheers. I look down at the gathering gars—more than when I stood up here with Alvin all those years ago. They point at me like the minute marks around high noon.
Turning half around, I see Kenny Dean has passed my regret to the three aunts, their combined hands wrapping it in flesh. All look like they’re about to faint as they pass it to the last remaining Stedman preacher.
Kenny Dean holds a lighter near the short fuse that will give him only a few seconds to step away. Liz and Holly stand by the Sycamore’s exposed roots, looking up at me, both rapt, their mouths showing worry but their eyes burning with some unfathomable hope.
I turn back to the creek and pull the rope taut, hand over hand. Its thick strands are wiry, abrasive, sandpapering into my palms and fingers. I must lean backward to keep the rope’s weight from pulling me off as I toe the platform edge.
Taking a deep breath, I lean forward and let myself fall, falling hard, the rope nearly jerked from my grasp. I swoop down crazy fast, the rope digging deeper into my hands, the fish-smelling water approaching like I’ll slam into it. The gars scatter and dive like I’m some giant eagle swooping down. My shoes almost skim the surface, but I start going up—and up, arms stretching, the rope cutting into my hands, but I hold on, flying up and up, slowing like a spent rocket, and for a delicious moment I am weightless, just as the cannon thunders up and down the valley, like a voice, and I let go.
