The Creek Behind My Farm

Danny

I have put this off long enough. I told you I would get to the reason, and the reason has a name, and the name is Danny.

Danny was my little brother. He was six years old the summer he died, and I was eleven, and it happened in this creek, in this same bend of water, on a hot afternoon in the middle of July, more than sixty years ago now.

Our folks farmed the place I still live on. It was a hard year, a dry one, and that afternoon our mother was putting up beans in a kitchen with no air conditioning in it, and she sent the two of us outside and told me to watch my brother. Those were her words. Watch your brother, Ruthie. I have heard those three words every day of my life since.

We went down to the creek. Of course we did. It was the only cool place on the whole quarter section on a day like that. Danny could not swim. Neither could I, really, not properly, but I could keep my head up in the deep part and he could not, and I knew it, and I took him down there anyway because it was hot and I was eleven and I was not thinking about anything except how good that water felt.

A boy from the next place over came by on his bicycle, a boy I was sweet on, the way an eleven-year-old girl is sweet on a boy, and he stopped up on the bank and talked to me. That is all. He talked to me, and I climbed up the bank to be closer to him, and I turned my back on the water, and I turned my back on Danny, for I do not know how long. A few minutes. Long enough.

When I looked back he was not on the gravel bar. He was not anywhere I could see. The water was still and smooth and brown the way it always was, giving nothing away.

I went in after him. The boy went for help, pedaling that bicycle up the gravel road screaming. But the bend is deep in the middle and the sand bottom drops off fast, and I was eleven and I could not get down to him and back up, and by the time the men came from the fields it was already the worst afternoon this family has ever had or ever will have.

My mother never once blamed me. Not with a word, not with a look, not in sixty years, right up until the day she passed. She said it was an accident, she said I was a child myself, she said the Lord had Danny now and there was no fault in it. And her never blaming me was somehow the heaviest thing of all, because I had a blame in me that needed somewhere to go, and she would not take it, and the Lord would not take it, and so it just stayed, down in me, where I carried it.

Watch your brother. I turned my back on the water. That is the whole of it. That is the thing under forty years of Junes.