The white line tugged the bending pole and he began to draw it in, a long cord from the whale’s belly. He felt no pleasure as he squinted to find the hook breaking that low water run beyond its course, only a drenched habitual motion waiting for the surface of stripped branches. Minnows beat more slowly in the basket over his shoulder. The slant of the line reached his feet, the end of it still carried under by the catch, dragging, slow to rise. He lifted the huckleberry pole and there, biting the hook, swung the heavy body of a baby that had been dropped, searched for, and lost in the flood. The eyes slept on either side of the fish line and a point of the barb protruded near the nose stopped with silt. It turned slowly around and around on the end of the wet string that cut in half its forehead. It had been tumbled under exposed roots and with creatures too dumb to swim, long days through the swell, neither sunk nor floating. The white stomach hung full with all it had swallowed.
God’s naked child lay under Luke’s fingers on the spread poncho, as on his knees and up to his thighs in the river, he loosed the hook, forcing his hand to touch the half-made face. His hook cracked through the membrane of the palate; he touched cold scales on the neck. One of the newborn sucked inside a gentle wave to the bottom of a stunted water black tree, its body rolled on the slippery poncho while the crouching figure of a young man shut his eyes, wet his lips.
In both hands he picked it up, circling the softened chest inside of which lay the formless lungs, and stooped again to the water. As his feet moved it thickly eddied, splashed. He held the body closer to the surface, water touched the back of his knuckles, and letting go, he gently pushed it off as if it would turn over and quickly swim away to the center of the bankless stream.
Luke again huddled into the poncho, casting a pinched eye across the grayness of the flood.
The water lay above the roof tops. It stretched thinly for many miles away from the great missing forks country.
“Wade, stay in the car,” and without another word, they kicked through the silent sands in a broken, faceless line to the water’s edge. Not a gull circled their heads, there were no rushes from which the crane could jump and fly with its ill-concealed legs and gawky call. The last drippings of the river lay eighteen feet deep, currentless and pure as rain water, backed without roe or salamander into the shallows. They stood on the low banks like men come upon the severed cathead of a ship or the small prints of wandering herds. All but one stooped to search for his own footfall. In the darkness, a few dunes broke surface, still wet, lean as rocks which before had been merely slopes in a rolling earth.
But even when trying to stand still in the face of the watery discus and stare, if for only a moment, without comment or restless sound, the sands gave way under their feet and they fell to an erect wrestling, laughed suddenly at a hat kicked a few yards along the shore until it landed crown down and out of reach in the water. There was no bean can or grappling pine — the shotguns lay in the truck — but still enough darkness and promise of a wild sunrise to excite them to paw and stumble, a few to expose rashly their seedy chests.
“We all got wounds,” beating the Finn to his knees, “all of us got a share of dickie bird heads desquamated on the river banks,” and the overbearing shadows purled at the moist edge of a hundred and forty miles of milky water. The last of the brooding wranglers laughed for the first time that night and Bohn, now out of their way or batting in their midst and at the cowboy’s side, felt something graze the soft mealy sock of his trouser front.
“Go on, tell about him,” nudging with a familiar elbow, “go on,” said Bohn and began to cough so that both the top and bottom lip of the small mouth — sometimes he dreamed that he could yawn— paled and trembled more thin than ever, pursed by the bitter doctor’s fingers. Luke thought of that slim and vertical mouth as carrying a hook, barbs lodged in the roof years before.
“He was a big baby but a little man. Ma said Hattie told her.” And when they laughed: “She used to keep him covered out of shame for his size.” The rat toothed Lampson, last of the brothers, spilled to them an image of a load too big to move, described, with shoulder sucked into Bohn’s armpit, a man too frail to be crushed. “ ‘I’m in love with a fence post,’ Ma said before he went.”