There was a man who pulled the drowned out of Cane Hollow Lake for forty-one years, and the town loved him for it, and not one soul in it ever understood that he was the reason there were drowned to pull.
But that came later. First there was the water, and the town under the water, and the long dry summer that started to take the water away.
Cane Hollow wasn’t a town so much as a habit the land had gotten into and couldn’t break. Forty miles up a county road that the state had quit grading, in that part of the mountains where the hollows run so deep and narrow the sun has to be directly overhead to find the bottom of them, and most days can’t be bothered. The mine had closed in ’71. The mill that took the mine’s leavings had closed not long after. What kept the place alive — what little life it had — was the lake, and the trout the state stocked in it every spring, and the tourists who came up from the flatlands to stand on the dam with a cooler and a rod and pretend for a weekend that they knew how to live close to something.
The lake was new the way these things are called new. Forty-odd years. The power company had thrown up the dam in ’63 and let the river back up into the valley, and the valley had a town in it — Old Cane Hollow, they called it now, when they called it anything — and the town had a church and a school and a store and ninety-some houses and a graveyard, and the company paid everybody to leave and most of them did, and then the water came up over all of it, slow, over a winter and a spring, the way a stain comes up through plaster.
They were supposed to move the graveyard. That was in the paperwork. The company hired a crew out of Bristol to dig up the dead and carry them to high ground, and the crew worked three days and quit, and would not say why, and after that the company decided the graves were deep enough and the water was coming regardless, and the dead of Old Cane Hollow stayed where they’d been laid.
Asa Renfro had been nineteen years old that spring. He had helped the Bristol crew for those three days. He was the only one of them who ever came back.
Now Asa was sixty, and then seventy, and then somewhere past it that he’d stopped marking, and he was the lake. That was how the town thought of him. Not the warden of it, though that was his title and his county check, eleven thousand a year to keep the boat ramp clear and the no-wake buoys painted and the drowned accounted for. He was the lake, the human face of it, the man you called when the water took somebody, because the water took somebody most every year and Asa Renfro always brought them back.
He was good at it. He was better at it than any man had a right to be. The state divers would come up with their sonar and their grapples and their grids drawn on laminated maps and they’d drag the cold green water for two days and find nothing, and then Asa would put his flat-bottom johnboat in at first light, alone, no sonar, no grid, an old man with a cane pole and a coil of rope, and by noon he’d have the body. Every time. Tourists drowned in the deep water off the dam and Asa found them in the shallows. Children went under at the swimming beach and Asa found them a half mile up the lake in the flooded timber. It made no sense and so nobody made sense of it. They just said Asa’s got a feel for it, the way you’d say a man had a feel for weather or for horses, and they were grateful, and they did not ask, because a town that has decided to be grateful will work very hard not to learn the thing that would spoil it.
What Asa had a feel for was where the lake wanted them found. Which was a different thing.
He’d learned it those three days with the Bristol crew, down in the mud of the graveyard before the water came, when the thing that lived under Old Cane Hollow — that had always lived there, that the town had been built on top of the way a scab builds on top of a wound — had first taken notice of him. The crew had opened a grave that should have held a Methodist circuit rider dead since 1890 and what was in the box was not bone and was not still and it had looked at Asa Renfro with the circuit rider’s eyes and it had told him, without words, in the cold root-language of the deep ground, what it wanted and what it would give.
It wanted to be fed. It had been fed by the graveyard for a hundred years, by the slow seep of the buried down into where it waited, and now the company was going to take its graveyard and give it a whole lake instead, a hundred feet of black water and everything that came to the water, and that was a fine trade, that was a feast, but the dead in the ground were a slow drip and a lake full of the living was a thing that needed tending. It wanted a man up top. A man to keep the count right. Not too many, so the town wouldn’t run, wouldn’t bring the state up to dynamite the dam and drain the valley and let the sun down onto the thing in the mud. Not too few, because it was always, always hungry, and a hungry thing left to feed itself is not careful.
And what it would give the man, in trade, was a feel for it. A way of always knowing where the bodies were. Which would make him a hero in a town that needed one. Which would let him do the work in plain sight, in daylight, with the whole grateful county standing on the dam watching him bring their dead home, and never once seeing that he’d sent them out to the water in the first place.
Asa had been nineteen and the rest of the crew was running for the trucks and he had stood in the open grave with the circuit rider’s wet eyes on him and he had said yes.
He told himself, for forty-one years, that he’d said yes to save the town. That was the mirror he kept, and like every man’s mirror it showed him the one face he could stand to look at. If not me, somebody worse. If not careful, then a slaughter. He kept the count. One a year, two in a bad year, never children if he could steer it to a grown man instead, always a stranger when a stranger could be found — a tourist, a drifter, somebody the town wouldn’t grieve too hard or look at too close. He was a careful shepherd of the thing’s appetite. He told himself the town would have lost ten times as many without him riding herd on it. He told himself he was the levee, not the flood.
He had been telling himself that for forty-one years and most days he still mostly believed it, and the days he didn’t believe it he had a way of holding the water that fixed him. He’d go down to the dam at first dark and stand at the rail and look at his own face in the black still surface, the slack flat water with no wind on it, and he’d wait, and after a while the face looking back up at him would not quite be his. The mouth would be wrong. It would smile when he wasn’t. And the thing wearing his face from the underside of the water would look up at him with a great and terrible fondness, the way you’d look at your own good right hand, and Asa would feel the doubt go out of him like water out of a pulled plug, and he’d go home steadied and sleep like a stone.
He’d taken the boy on six years back.
Travis Renfro was his sister’s daughter’s boy, and his sister was dead and her daughter was on the methadone down in Knoxville, and the boy at eleven had nowhere, and Asa had a spare room and a thing that would need tending after he was gone. So he took him. He didn’t decide it cold like that, or he told himself he didn’t. But the want underneath the kindness was real, and the lake had put it there, and Asa Renfro had stopped a long time ago being able to tell the difference between what he wanted and what the water wanted through him.
The boy was seventeen now and quiet in a way that wasn’t sullen, just watchful, a child who’d learned early that the world told you the truth in the half-second before it remembered you were looking. He learned the lake. He learned the boat and the buoys and the ramp. He learned to find the bodies — not the way Asa found them, not yet, the water hadn’t spoken to him yet — but he learned the shallows and the timber and the cold seams where the green water turned black, and he was getting a feel for it that wasn’t quite the gift but was its shadow, the way a son will sometimes have his father’s hands without his father’s trade.
He watched Asa the way Asa had once, for three days, watched a thing watch him out of a dead man’s face. He didn’t know that’s what he was doing. He just knew his uncle went down to the dam alone after dark and came back changed, and that the families always thanked the wrong man, and that there were summers Asa seemed to be waiting for something to happen before it happened.
The boy hadn’t said yes to anything yet. That was coming. The lake was patient. It had a hundred-year drip and a forty-year shepherd and it could wait on a boy.
Della Combs came up the county road in June in a Honda with a Knoxville plate and a kayak strapped to the roof, and she took the cabin at the end of the gravel that the Pruitts rented out, and she did not leave when her week was up, and she did not leave when her month was up.
Her husband had drowned in Cane Hollow Lake the September before. Tom Combs, forty-four, an experienced paddler, life vest on, calm water, no wind. He’d gone out at dawn to fish the flooded timber and he had simply not come back, and the state had dragged the lake for three days and found nothing, and on the fourth day Asa Renfro had put his johnboat in and found Tom Combs by ten in the morning, in eleven feet of water, snagged in the top of a drowned oak with his life vest still cinched and his eyes open and no water in his lungs.
That last part was in the autopsy and the autopsy was a public record and Della Combs had read it forty times. No water in his lungs. A man who drowns, drowns — his lungs fill, that’s the whole of it, that’s what the word means. Tom Combs had not drowned. Tom Combs had died of something the coroner in a county that needed its lake had written up as drowning, presumed, and had gone into the cold green water either dead already or to die of something that left his lungs dry as a July ditch.
She’d come back to understand it. That was what she told the Pruitts and the woman at the store and anyone who’d hold still. She was a hospice nurse; she’d sat with the dying her whole working life; she knew what bodies did and didn’t do, and Tom’s body had done a thing bodies don’t do, and she was not going to drive back down the mountain and spend the rest of her life with that.
She started with the old man. Everyone said start with Asa. Asa found him, Asa finds them all, Asa’s got a feel for it.
She sat across from him at the picnic table by the boat ramp with two paper cups of coffee from the store and she watched him not look at her, and she said, “How’d you know where he was.”
“Feel for it,” Asa said. “After this long.”
“Sonar didn’t find him. Divers with a grid didn’t find him. You found him in two hours with a cane pole.”
“Water’s a funny thing, ma’am. It’ll tell you, you listen long enough.”
“His lungs were dry,” she said.
And Asa Renfro, who had sat across from a hundred grieving people and given them the kind eyes and the steady voice and the careful nothing, felt something he hadn’t felt in forty-one years, which was the particular cold of a person who is not going to be comforted because they are not, in fact, looking for comfort. She wasn’t a mark. She wasn’t here to be told it would be all right. She’d already decided it would never be all right and had come up the mountain to find out exactly how wrong it was going to stay.
“Lungs do all kinds of things,” he said. “I’ve pulled a hundred out of that water and no two the same.”
“How many,” she said. “In forty-one years. How many have you pulled out.”
He should have said I don’t keep count. He’d said it before, it was a good line, it was humble and it shut the question. But she had her dead husband’s dry lungs in her eyes and the lake was in Asa’s and what came out of him instead was the truth, just the bare bone of it, before he could stop it.
“Sixty-three,” he said.
She wrote it down. He watched her write it down and he understood, the way he understood where the water wanted them found, that Della Combs was going to be a problem he could not steer around. She was going to pull the county records. She was going to map the sixty-three. She was going to see what he’d seen for forty-one years and called a duty — that they came one a year, two in a bad year, steady as a tithe, in a lake too small and too cold and too dead to take that many honest souls — and she was going to do the arithmetic that the grateful town had spent four decades declining to do.
He went to the dam that night and looked into the slack water and the face that wasn’t his smiled up at him and showed him what it wanted, and for the first time in forty-one years Asa Renfro stood at the rail and was afraid of his own reflection.
Because it didn’t want him to steer around her.
It wanted her.
The drawdown notice came taped to the door of the store the second week of July.
The power company, in the dry print of a public utility, regretted to inform the residents and visitors of the Cane Hollow recreation area that, owing to a fissure detected in the upstream face of the dam, the reservoir would be lowered approximately sixty feet over the coming month to permit inspection and repair. Boat ramps would be closed. The public was advised that exposed lakebed could be unstable.
Sixty feet. Asa stood in the gravel lot and read it twice and felt the bottom go out of him. Sixty feet would put the old graveyard back in the air. Sixty feet would bring the church steeple up out of the water like a black finger, the way it had stood the winter the lake first filled before the water finally closed over the cross. Sixty feet would let the sun down onto the mud where the thing waited, the mud it hadn’t seen the sun touch in forty-one years, and a thing that has been fed in the cold dark for a hundred years does not want the sun and does not want the air and does not want to be looked at, and when it is afraid — Asa understood this the way he understood everything about it, in the root-language, without words — when it is afraid it does not go careful.
It goes hungry. All at once.
The water started down the next day. You could see it on the rocks at the ramp, the wet line dropping a hand’s width, then a foot, the lake pulling back off the land like a sheet pulled slow off something you didn’t want to see under it. By the end of the first week the no-wake buoys were lying over on their sides in drying mud. By the end of the second the flooded timber stood up out of the shallows in black skeleton stands, dripping, and the tourists stopped coming, and the store quit ordering bait, and the town that lived off the water watched the water leave and felt, without knowing why, the way you feel in a house when the person who keeps it has gone too quiet in the next room.
Della Combs walked the drying lakebed every morning with her phone out, taking pictures. She found the old roadbed first, the macadam coming up cracked and pale under a skin of green slime. Then a foundation, then another, then the bones of Old Cane Hollow laying themselves out in the mud — the store’s stone steps going down into nothing, the school’s brick stub, the rusted shape of a car somebody hadn’t bothered to drive out in ’63. She photographed all of it. She was a careful woman. She was building a case the way she’d built charts at a hundred deathbeds, the dry facts in a row, and she did not yet know that the case did not matter, that there was no court in the world for it, that the only thing her care was going to do was bring her to the one place on the drying ground where she should not be when the steeple came up.
The boy watched her too. Travis would sit on the closed ramp with his arms around his knees and watch the woman move across the lakebed and watch his uncle watch her, and he was getting old enough to lay two things side by side and see the shape they made. He’d looked at the county records himself by then. He’d done it on the library computer in town and printed the pages and hidden them in the box spring, sixty-three names and sixty-three dates, one a year, two in a bad year, and he had not yet said the thing out loud to himself but it was sitting in him like a stone in a shoe.
The steeple came up on a Thursday.
Asa knew the night before. The water in the dam pool went slack and flat at dusk with no wind to flatten it, slack as it never went anymore, and the face came up in it before he’d even bent to look, came up eager, and what it showed him was not the kind fondness of forty-one years. It showed him the trade was over. The graveyard was coming back into the air and the lake was draining away and the long careful arrangement of one a year, two in a bad year, was finished, and the thing under Old Cane Hollow was going to eat everything it could reach before the sun got down to it, and what it could reach was a drying mud flat and whatever walked out onto it.
It would start with the woman. It had decided that. She walked out onto the mud every morning, alone, far from the bank, and a thing that has been a careful shepherd’s secret for forty-one years takes a certain pleasure, if it can be called that, in the one who came to expose it. But it would not stop with the woman. It had a town. It had a boy. It had its shepherd. The careful days were done and the only count left was all.
Unless. The water showed Asa the unless, the way it had shown him the yes in the open grave forty-one years ago. There was a thing he could do. He could feed it himself, fully, all at once, a gift large enough to put it down sated into the mud for the month it would take the company to find their fissure and patch it and let the river back up and close the dark over the steeple again. One large feeding to buy back the long quiet. And the water showed Asa Renfro what would do.
The woman. And the boy.
Two. A bad year’s whole tithe in a single morning, and a fat one — the woman who’d come to expose it and the boy who’d inherit it, the seer-in-the-making and the seen, fed to the dark together — and it would sleep, and the steeple would come up empty, and the town would go on, and Asa could go on being the levee and not the flood.
He stood at the rail a long time. The face waited under the water, patient, fond, monstrous, his own.
He thought about the boy at eleven with nowhere. He thought about forty-one years of telling himself if not me, somebody worse. He thought about how a man learns to use a knife real well after you take away his gun, how a man with nothing left but the lie will hone the lie to a edge that’ll cut anything, even a child, even himself.
And Asa Renfro understood, at the rail, in the slack water, that he had never once been the levee. That there had been no count to keep that wasn’t his own hunger dressed in a town’s gratitude. That the thing in the mud had not needed a shepherd, had only needed a man who wanted to be one, who wanted to be loved for bringing home the very dead he’d sent out, and that he, Asa, had been the easiest mark the lake ever took. The thing hadn’t bargained with him in the grave. It had read him. One look in a nineteen-year-old’s wet eyes and it had seen the whole long con he’d run on himself and known he’d run it for free.
That was the worst of it. Not that he was a monster. That he’d never been anything so grand. He’d just been a lonely man the water had liked the look of.
He could not save the boy by feeding it the boy. There was no version of the arithmetic where that came out a kindness, though God knew he’d found the kindness in worse before.
So he did the only thing the long lie had never let him do, which was the thing he should have done at nineteen and run for the trucks like the rest of the Bristol crew.
He went down onto the mud alone before first light, while the woman still slept in the Pruitts’ cabin and the boy still slept in the spare room, and he walked out across the draining lakebed toward the black steeple standing up out of the mud with the water sheeting off it, toward the open ground of the graveyard coming back into the air, and he carried nothing — no rope, no pole, no gift — and he gave it the only thing it had ever actually had a use for.
The woman found the boat at sunup, the flat-bottom johnboat run up on the mud a quarter mile out, empty, the oars shipped neat the way a careful man ships them. She did not go out to it. Something in her, the part that had sat with the dying and learned what the air feels like in a room a death has just left, told her not to put her feet on that mud, and for once in her stubborn life she listened, and she stood on the rock at the old shoreline and took her pictures from there, and that is the only reason there is anyone to tell it.
They never found Asa Renfro. First man in forty-one years that lake ever kept. The town said the old shepherd must have gone out to his beloved water one last time before the company drained it and his heart must have give out, and they grieved him hard and true, the man who’d brought home sixty-three of their dead, and they put a stone for him up in the new cemetery on the ridge with no body under it, which everyone agreed was a shame, a man like that, but the water was the water and Asa of all people would have understood.
The fissure got patched. The river came back up over the long weeks of August and closed the dark over the steeple and the graveyard and the mud, and the trout came back, and the tourists, and the lake settled flat and green and patient.
And the boy stayed on. Of course he stayed on. He had the cabin and the county check now, eleven thousand a year to keep the ramp clear and the buoys painted. The first body of the new arrangement came up the next September — a paddler, life vest on, calm water — and the state dragged for three days and found nothing, and on the fourth day Travis Renfro put the old johnboat in at first light, alone, no sonar, no grid, a young man with a cane pole and a coil of rope.
He’d been down to the dam in the dark the night before. He hadn’t meant to. His feet had just taken him. And he had stood at the rail and looked down into the slack flat water with no wind on it and waited, the way he’d watched his uncle wait, and after a while the face that came up to look at him out of the underside of the lake had been fond, and terrible, and not quite his own.
By noon he had the body. He always would.
The town thanked him at the ramp, the dead man’s people, holding his hands and weeping their gratitude into his clean young face, and Travis Renfro gave them the kind eyes and the steady voice and the careful nothing, exactly the way it had been built into him, and somewhere under eleven feet of cold green water a thing that had eaten one shepherd and made another turned over in the mud and slept.
The boy had said yes. He didn’t know yet that he had. But the water knew, the way the water knows everything it likes the look of, and it could wait on him learning it. It had a hundred-year drip and a fresh new shepherd and all the patience in the dark.
It could wait.
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