The Red Scarf I Kept in Cedar

A girl. High and flat and furious, the way a girl sounds when she is more frightened than she has ever been and has decided to be angry instead. She used my whole name, all three syllables, which nobody did but my grandmother. I held. I felt her pulling, and I kicked, and a long thing, a fence rail, I learned later, slid under my chest and I got my arm over it and came up onto the ice like a catfish.

I lay on my back. The sky was a flat white lid and there was a shape above me against it, a cap pulled low and braids coming out from under, and I could not make it a face. My eyes were not doing it. What I could do was hear her breathing, ragged, and see two small hands in gray work gloves, both skinned open across the palms where the wool had run.

She said, “You’re all right, you’re all right.” Then I heard a truck come over the rise on the pond road, the old Lorentz elevator truck, the green one with the dented tailgate, and the girl’s weight went off the ice beside me and I heard her run, up through the Dohrmann pasture. By the time Mr. Lorentz had me wrapped in a horse blanket in the cab, there was nobody on the whole white pond but him and me and a fence rail lying in the snow.

The scarf was still wound twice around my left wrist. I would not let go of it. He had to pry my fingers off one at a time, and he put it in my coat pocket, and he said, “Whoever that was, son, she can pull.” He did not ask me who it was, because I did not know to tell him. That is what I said then. I said I did not know.

The Palms

The Elmcrest Courier ran the story the next Thursday, below the fold: TEEN PULLED FROM POND, RESCUER UNKNOWN. Was it a hunter’s boy? A farmhand? One woman at the Methodist church held it was Mr. Lorentz himself, being modest. I let all of it stand.

I spent two days in bed with a fever and a pile of quilts, and my mother washed my scarf. She came in with it Sunday morning, hung over her arm like a dead snake.

“Where’d you get this?”

“The girl,” I said. “She threw it.”

She turned it over. It was a hand knit, a double rope cable in good red wool, with a rip in one end where the barbed wire had caught it. “Somebody’s grandmother made this,” my mother said. “Somebody’s going to miss it.”

“I’ll find her.”

“You’ll find her,” she said, “when she wants to be found.”

I was back in school Monday, the nineteenth of January, second hour, Mrs. Hendricks’s first speed test. Twelve girls and four boys on the old Underwoods, the ones with the stiff carriage return you had to throw with the flat of your left hand every line.

Marvene Varley sat two rows up from me. She was the quiet girl with the braids, the one who sang second alto and whose father ran the grain scales at the elevator, and I would have told you I had spoken to her perhaps eleven times in my life. She had on a pair of white cotton gloves, in January, in a heated classroom.

She typed with the sides of her hands, the way you do when the middle is raw. Each time the carriage came to the end of the line she reached up to throw it, and her face did a small thing, a tuck at the corner of the mouth. She did it once a line for the whole hour, and never made a sound.

I was sixteen and half-frozen and not especially quick. But I sat there with my own fist wrapped around a pencil and watched that girl wince at a typewriter and I thought of two small gloved hands skinned open across the palms, and I thought: no.

It was a long minute. Then I thought: yes.