HOME

The gray, weathered boards never changed.  She walked across the dock watching her feet and measuring her steps by the width of the planks, just as she had as a child.  "step on a crack, break your mother's back..." The river rippled and shimmered below, water and shadow cut by lines of sunshine.  The marsh didn't change either, not year over year anyway.  Alive with fish and birds and reptiles, the river marsh was new every hour, different every moment almost, but the same.  Home.  It smelled warm and salty, of bracken and oysters.  It rose and fell with the tides every half day like the warp and weft of a piece of fabric.  This was home.

He was here, somewhere among the giant oaks.  His house that had been hers was just there beyond the end of the boardwalk, white clapboard with a deep porch curtained in Spanish moss.  Tall grass parted in a path between the back steps and where she stood now looking into her past: 

"Carolina!  Girl, you come on in now."  Suppertime.  She could see her mother standing on that back porch hollering her in from the marsh, where she was catching blue crabs with old chicken necks and livers.  At no more than seven years, she could throw a casting net with skill enough to catch her own bait for fishing on a hook while the crabs gathered, feasting in her sunken baskets.  A net thrown every few minutes came up dotted with tiny spot fish and shrimp so that she could fish forever.  She never ran out of bait or time to fish.  She could fish forever, she thought.

But she had to go in at supper.  Dinner was the noon meal.  Supper was the evening meal and everybody in the South knew that.  Yankees called the evening meal dinner and Carolina had scoffed at that, as a child.  But then they were the folks who thought the marsh smelled bad, so what did they know?  The marsh smelled like heaven and even now she breathed it in deeply and felt a tingle down her spine.  Home at last.

She'd been away a long time.  She wasn't sure but it felt like centuries.  She could see him now moving past a window inside the house.  Her husband, Tabor Wells.  Her very own.  She began walking up a slight incline towards the home place where generations of her people had lived and died.  Carolina had thought about this moment for so long, how she would feel seeing him again, how he might feel to see her.  She straightened her back now and walked with resolve beneath the largest of the oaks.  How much had that oak seen in its time?  How many arguments?  How many reconciliations?  How much love-making?  Children playing.. Fishing..  A breeze picked up the oak's leaves and made them quiver a bit.   Now the oak would have another event to hear and never tell. 

The bottom step didn't creak as she thought it might.  It seemed like it did last time.  There was that big, old polished stone by the backdoor jamb.  She never knew what it was.  Her granddaddy had told her it was petrified dinosaur dung and though doubtful, she had no proof it wasn't.  She still wrinkled her nose at it involuntarily, but more now because it was so dirty.  There was an undusted layer of grime on the porch things now.  No one had cared for them as they should have been.

She was through the backdoor without even thinking to stop or knock.  It was her home, yes, though in thinking back afterwards, she should have been more respectful.  She didn't say anything, was careful to make no sound at all - she just wanted to look around for a minute before he noticed her there.  How could she begin?  What should she say? 

Some things had changed.  There was an easy chair that wasn't there before. An old Field & Stream magazine from 2007 lay beside it, but hunting and fishing changed little so it didn't matter how old it was, she reckoned.  There were tools by the back door in a heap that she would never have allowed.  And, his boots...  They could have been the very same boots, but were more likely the latest in a succession of work boots growing worn with brackish muck and labor. 

Some things were unchanged.  Pictures sat untended in their same positions on a shelf by the door to the kitchen.  There they were, Carolina and Tabor, smiling at something she could not now recall.  It made her heart churn a bit that he still had that picture out. But maybe it was just another ignored dust-catcher, given no more thought by Tabor, walking past it every day, than Carolina had thought of it miles and years away.  She'd never thought of that picture - not once. 

He was towards the front of the house now, so she moved quietly down the hall taking in more lost memories.  That small telephone table with the built-in chair.  The broken toe-molding in the hallway where her cousin had run through the house one day when he'd hooked his first shark off the dock.  It had been a hammerhead and he was so excited, he'd run right into the doorframe hard enough that his boot busted off the wooden molding along the floor.  That made her break into a smile she might never have had again without that one little memory.  How many other happy times had she lost?

 She passed by the hallway bathroom and as if an apparition, he saw her lovely reflection in the mirror, disbelieving.  Tabor froze, not breathing as his heart jumped in his chest.  "Carolina?', he whispered.  Out of the bathroom, he looked towards the front of the house down the wide hallway that split the house in two, in the direction he'd seen her pass.  She stopped and turned, looking back into the face she had never forgotten.  "Carolina," he said, his voice breaking.  Tabor's face melted into a mask of pain right before her eyes.  His misery became hers in an instant.  Her sudden absence, his unbearable loneliness.   He stared but didn't move.  He looked away squeezing shut his eyes, then back again to prove she was there.  Carolina smiled then and started to step towards him, but he drew back just a bit, not even a step but one small movement of retreat.   

That motion.  That defensive gesture was her great fear.   The hopeful images she'd nurtured of late were just wispy shatters now.  Nothing would be as she'd hoped it might.  She stood one moment longer, smiling a little, then shook her head slightly and turned for the front door. 

She went out across the front of the house, not looking back to see him at all.  With evening coming on, frogs croaked in opposing teams answering each other rhythmically across the yard.  Carolina walked out the gravel drive a ways then took a path towards the low country palms that looked too thick to walk through, unless you'd lived there all your whole life and knew you could.  Into the woods she went towards the small place where her mother and father were laid, along with grandparents, great-grandparents, aunts, uncles and some she didn't know.  One last visit there before she left.  Names and dates, names and dates.

 There, then, she stood before her own future, she figured now, apart from Tabor from now on. 

Carolina Wells

Born September 3, 1958

Died March 12, 1996

She wondered why she'd had to go through her whole life knowing only the first date.  Every year, celebrating her birthday but passing secretly over that second one that was just as important.  How is it that she never knew?