by Eugene Jones Baldwin
“Marry me.”
Perhaps it is the limnetic sound of lush rain that motivates Amanda Crowder to importune her lover, Orville Miller. The sound is an evocation; they stand in the middle of a large, rectangular-shaped field of corn, the rain effect composed by a southwest breeze rustling the slender, brown, heavily leafed stalks, this middle week of October.
She had dressed in her best ankle-length, white cotton dress, Orville’s favorite, and donned her earthen-colored bonnet, her long, grey braided ponytail trailing down her back. She is playing offense and defense. He hasn’t a prayer of dodging her.
He hooks his thumbs into the straps of his denim overalls and assumes his patented Germanic-solipsistic-farmer’s silence to consider his options. She might have said, “Carry me,” which makes no sense at all, given the frailness of his bent frame and the closeness of the corn stalks and his lover’s pleasing plumpness. “Ferry me,” makes even less sense as the field is not close to the banks of Cahokia Creek.
No, she said, “Marry me.”
“Silence will not bail you out, sir. I believe I have put an offer on the table.”
“What table?”
“You think it’s a joke. You have been having your way with me for fifteen years—I want to know your future intentions.”
“We are one hundred fifty-four years old.” Orville means their combined ages, a figure he is fond of pronouncing at social gatherings, which amuses tipsy men and offends testy women. “Why would we marry? We having kids?”
“Well then,” Amanda says, hands and seed catalogue on ample hips, her cotton dress flapping in the breeze. “Consider this opinion, sir. I wish to be married. I am lonely in my cunabula.”
Orville dreads it when his love, a retired English professor, uses twenty-dollar words, and she’ll assume he doesn’t care because he, a hardscrabble farmer with a sixth-grade education, couldn’t possibly know what “cunabula” means, so she’s testing him and there go his damn testicles, trying to climb back up into his body cavity.
“What’s ‘cunabula’ mean, sweetheart?”
“It means ‘cradle,’” Amanda says. “It means my Whitehall house up in Carlinville, with my tastefully appointed, unused Victorian furniture, hand-blown glass water pitchers and oval-framed photographs. I am the chief antique of the house. I sleep in the bedroom I had as a girl.”
“I know, Mandy—”
“You were married fifty years, me not one.”
Orville repeats a familiar refrain in his head: My fiancé died in a car crash . . .
“My fiancé died in a car crash.” Amanda slaps at a mosquito with the catalogue. “On the way to our wedding ceremony, 1939, Mr. Ray Thompson, him with a thousand acres of corn and soybeans . . .”
And an apple orchard . . .
“And an apple orchard.”
And the first vineyard in the region . . .
“And the first vineyard in the region. On the way to our wedding, he smashed his sedan into the side of a passenger train bound for Chicago.”
Orville has wanted to ask, but never had the nerve, how a sober prospective groom could be so stupid as to try to out-race a train to a railroad crossing. Did he get cold feet and choose the train?
“I have to go.” Amanda hands him the seed catalogue.
“What about our Saturday picnic, old girl?”
“Yes,” Amanda says over her shoulder, “you would think of food instead of me—old boy. Eat the darn picnic by yourself.” She trips over a cornstalk root, nearly falling, then rights herself and waves him away. “Kindly wash my dishes after and I will pick them up some other time—or maybe there won’t be another time.”
“Stop,” Orville says.
She picks bits of corn stalk from her dress, adjusts her bonnet and looks off toward the south. Tears spring for watery blue eyes.
“I have lost you, the same way I lost Ray Thompson. Only death is easier to cope with than a roving man who pats waitresses’ bottoms because he thinks that is an old man’s privilege.”
“Who is lost?” Orville says, putting his arm around her. “I am right here. Let’s go to bed. We talk better in bed.”
“Bed? BED?”
“I am grievin’”—
“Five years. You will grieve until I shut up—be it a day or a year.”
“You all ever know me to make up my mind on the quick?”
“No,” Amanda says, “and I have never known you to think alone, Orville Miller.”
“What does that mean?”
It means Jessica Violet Rose-Lynn Amber Miller.
Orville sees his dead wife as a heat wave, part of the shimmer, rising above the corn.
“You are looking at her this minute,” Amanda says.
“Talk sense, woman.”
“I will not compete with ghosts.”
He met Amanda in the autumn of 2008, at the Carlinville flea market in the old town square. She wore pearls, a Sunday dress, and a large-brimmed, beribboned hat and high heels and she wasn’t all rouged up, like so many ladies of a certain age.
The next week, she drove to his farm, posing as a customer for his “Pick Your Own Strawberries” enterprise, and when Farmer Miller “happened” to walk by, she re-introduced herself. He invited her in for lemonade, and days later they went out on their first date, a catfish fry. And somehow they ended up sinking into Orville’s featherbed.
“At ten, two nights from now, should I not have heard from you, I will consider this affair over.”
“What brought this on?” Orville shoves his hands in his overalls. “Yesterday, we’re fine. Today, you all drop by for a picnic—”
“It is my anniversary,” Amanda says. “My not-to-be wedding day.”
Orville thinks, Who knows their not-to-be wedding day?
He stands on the dirt road and watches her drive off. He can’t decide if he is relieved or saddened. He feels it is calculating of her to leave jam and pie and tomatoes.
Why didn’t you go after her? Jessica Violet Rose-Lynn Amber says. You know she was praying you would stop her.
“You know why, Jess.”
His feelings are hurt; he is expendable, he had assumed such a moment would slide by—he and Amanda were too old, too set in their ways.
Shall we walk, love?
All their married life, Orville and Jess walked. They thought nothing of holding hands and walking the six miles to Bunker Hill, to the Dairy Queen for Blizzards, then walking back down through Miller Hollow.
They pass the Indian burial mounds and walk along the steep rim of Cahokia Creek. Huge cottonwood trees, roots exposed by erosion, lean out over the edge, threatening to topple. A pile of dead trees block the main channel of the creek bottom.
They climb down onto the sandy beach. Fresh hoof prints of a doe and fawns are all about them. Fallen tree limbs are matted with the detritus of spring floods which had temporarily engorged the creek.
I won’t mind if you marry Amanda.
“Why’d you all have to die on me, Jess?”
God’s will.
“What kind of God wills breast cancer? I need to fish. Johnboat’s anchored up at Kampsville. I will drive me to the Illinois River tonight, camp out in the pickup. Catch me some big ol’ channel cats first light . . . My God, it feels like I am preparing for a new life, like I was a kid. Explain that, will you?”
He looks toward his lover, but she has vanished.
Sunrise on the river. There is little motion to the sluggish, coffee-colored river, like a long and wide and still lake. Fish slap on the surface of the water—largemouth bass and carp—jumping for joy, his father used to say. Herons and white pelicans line the riverbank, some roosting atop vacant duck blinds. A persistent whippoorwill sings maniacally from somewhere along the east bank. Gulls dive in the wave chop along the water’s surface.
Orville guides the flat-bowed johnboat downstream through a hole in the heavy vegetation of vines and thick moss between the tree-lined shore and a long, narrow island. He cuts the motor and grabs a low-hanging branch of a swamp maple, stopping the boat’s motion, disturbing two black-crowned night herons perched in the shallows.
He sets out three fishing rods with nylon, ten-pound test lines crimped with lead weights, the hooks baited with stink bait and moldy bread, to attract channel catfish. He pops open his first Pabst beer of the day, sits on the middle seat. The boat drifts until it bumps against a tree stump. He comes face to face with a tiny screech owl, tucked into a knothole of the stump. The bird screams and flies past his right ear, causing him to duck and tremble from sudden fright. Even the damn birds are taking his girlfriend’s side.
A barge horn blares. He waves and watches the south-bound, coal-laden barge pass, and he reels in the three lines. The baits are gone. He stands and stretches, the wake of the barge rocking the boat up and down. Asian carp flip up and out of the water then splash down.
“Aw hell, I am going to marry Amanda Florence Crowder.”
He repeats the words to a muskrat whose head pops up through a mass of water lilies. He looks at his watch. He hasn’t brought lunch and the fish are uninterested in eating, content to lurk in the cooler, deeper holes of the river.
He sets the poles in the bottom of the johnboat; vaguely aware he has but a few hours of freedom left. He opens another Blue and swallows half the beer in a single drink. He sets the motor into the river and pulls the starter rope. Nothing. He pulls several more times, then slumps back against the gunwale of the johnboat, waiting for the flooded engine to settle, feeling the sharp edge of the boat dig into his backbone.
His arthritic shoulders are killing him. He surveys the river, barely able to see rooftops upstream at Kampsville. He is at least a mile from the launch ramp. He looks around for the oars and realizes they are leaning against a wall of his barn, left in storage from last fall.
“Stupid ass.”
He raises the motor’s propeller on the hinged mount, locks it in position and strips to his undershorts and boots, his arms and neck and face bronzed, the rest of him white as a catfish belly. He takes hold of the side of the boat and rolls into the murky river. It is warmer than bath water. The tips of his shoulders are just below the surface.
“Shit!”
He holds on to the side, making his way hand over hand to the bow, then he takes hold of the rope and begins to tow. The thick sludge and mud of the river bottom suck at his boots.
He calculates it is three hundred yards to the bank of the slough, part of the journey threading through vines and overhanging trees.
He can hear Amanda: “I smelled the river stink before you even drove up. Don’t you step into my cunabula with those muddy boots.”
Ten minutes pass; he has scarcely moved fifty feet. His skinny legs wobble from exertion. Several times, the water level reaches his lips; he has to tiptoe to make progress. An Asian carp breaches the water and slaps against his head, its fins cutting him and blood streaming down his unshaved face.
He reaches a darker patch of water where the river bottom inclines by a few feet. His body emerges, until the water is waist deep. He dares to hope that the rest of the walk be in this shallower water. He hums a song and shifts the rope over to his right shoulder, holding it with both. The river bottom abruptly drops off, forcing him to let go of the rope, spitting furiously to keep the river out of his mouth, his heavy boots pulling him down further.
“Anybody out here?” The only answer is the sucking mud.
He pulls on the tow rope, his left boot suddenly sinking down, down, until his foot comes to rest on the bottom of the river, his head below the surface. He has sunk into a bull spring, the volcano-shaped vent spewing spring water from the riverbed. His right leg floats up and free. He had enough warning to catch a breath.
His only chance is to right himself and pull out of the boot. He grabs the tow rope and pulls straight up, the boat bobbing above him. He plants his right boot, pulls on the rope, using the foot as leverage. The left boot sinks further, his head now three feet below the surface of the river.
Jessica Violet Rose-Lynn Amber Miller, naked and gray-haired, comes to him, breast-stroking along the river current the way angels fly through clouds, gracefully, slowly. Her hair rises like seaweed, and her withered body, so horrible to him before her death, is softened by the water, pale and luminous against the murk. His chest feels like it is caving in. He shakes his head at her, signaling that he cannot talk.
I am not marrying Amanda Crowder.
No.
He takes her hand. And there are his loved ones, translucent, like vertical ribbons of light, bodies forming, dissolving, reforming with others, relatives and old friends and enemies, strings of lights swirling in a vortex, rising and falling. He sees all this with wonder. He holds Jessica Violet Rose-Lynn Amber, collapses into her, and they become strands of light.
Sheriff Brawer knocks on Amanda’s door. His uniform is sweat soaked.
She peers at him through the chintz curtains, smiles, and opens the door looking up at the tall, uniformed man before her.
“Miz Crowder,” Sheriff Brawer says.
“Chris, won’t you come in?”
“No thank you, ma’am. Miz Crowder, I have bad news.”
Amanda looks across the street and sees two barefooted, bikini-clad girls, no more than ten, playing hopscotch on the chalked sidewalk. An older boy on a bicycle watches them.
“Will you look at those imps,” she says. “Practically naked. What are mothers thinking nowadays.”
“I just came back from Kampsville, ma’am. We found an empty johnboat floating on the river. There was a body below the surface, standing upright, stuck in the river bottom—”
“Orville.” Amanda says this calmly, politely, focusing on the two-girl game across the street.
A grandfather clock in the living room strikes the half hour, quickly joined by other less strident clocks in other parts of the house. Across the street, the taller of the two girls punches the boy on the shoulder. He rides off, the girl screaming epithets at him.
“I am sorry, ma’am. Orville was good people. I know you and him were—”
“We were friends.”
Amanda looks to her left through a doorway at her dining room table, where young Ray Thompson, her fiancé, decked out in his Sunday best suit, sits, and smiles back at her.
“Pardon, Miz Crowder,” Sheriff Brawer says, “I understood you were—”
“He already had a sweetheart,” Amanda says, more to Ray than to the sheriff.
The girls run up on the lawn across the way and dance in a sprinkler.
“Oh. Oh, then I should notify that lady.” Sheriff Brawer pulls a notebook from his breast pocket. “If you would be so kind—”
“She knows,” Amanda says.
Eugene Jones Baldwin is a playwright, poet, fictionist, and musician. His nonfiction book “There is No Color in Justice.” about the civil rights struggles of his hometown, the Underground Railroad in Illinois, and racism in general, will be published in September 2025.
