The splash was louder than anything else at that reunion, louder than the kids on the bank and the classic country playing off somebody’s tailgate up the hill by the hay barn.
One second my dad was standing at the end of Uncle Dale’s dock with his hands in his pockets, looking out at the pond.
The next second he was gone, and the brown water was folding shut over the place he had been.
Cindy Moberly, my mother-in-law, stood right where he had stood. She had a paper plate of potato salad in one hand.
Her other hand was still out flat, the way you push a stuck screen door.
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“Oh, Leon!” she called, already laughing, already turning to look back at the bank to see who was watching. “You were so stiff all afternoon. Somebody had to loosen you up!”
I was halfway down the dock before I knew I had moved.
I had been sitting on the bank with a glass of sweet tea and a plate of deviled eggs, and I do not remember setting either one of them down.
Dad came up sputtering. The pond at the end of that dock is only about waist-deep on a grown man, but it is soft mud on the bottom, and he went in sideways with his arms pinned, so he came up slow and wrong.
His light blue button-up shirt was wet up to the chest and stuck to him. The brown water came up past his belt.
He found the bottom with his feet, coughed, and put one hand on the edge of the dock.
Then his other hand went to his left ear. Then to his right ear. I watched his face change, and I knew before he knew it all the way.
Nothing there.
He wore the little kind that sits behind the ear with a clear wire running down into it.
They are smaller than a thumbnail, and they cost more than the first car I ever owned. Both of them were somewhere in the mud under his boots.
Forty people were at that reunion. I counted later, when I had time to think about it.
Forty Moberlys and Moberly in-laws and cousins’ girlfriends, and every one of them went quiet at the same time.
Every one of them except Cindy.
“Leon, honey, you should’ve taken them out!” she said, loud and cheerful, the way you would tell a man he should have worn a hat. “Who wears those things to a pond?”
He couldn’t hear a word of it. He was looking up at her mouth moving, with water running off his eyebrows, and I could see him trying to read it and not being able to.
I got down on my knees on those warm boards in my yellow sundress and reached my hand down to him.
He looked at my hand for a second like he didn’t know whose it was. Then he took it.
My dad is 68 years old. He climbed poles for the electric co-op for thirty-eight years, through ice storms and tornado cleanups and a hundred August afternoons in full gear.
That man does not fall off docks. He got pushed.
“I’ve got you,” I said, even though he couldn’t hear me. “I’ve got you, Dad. Come on. Step up on the crossbeam. Right there.”
There is no ladder on Uncle Dale’s dock. There never has been.
I got him to put his foot on the cross brace under the water, and I braced my knees and leaned back, and between the two of us he came up out of that pond.