One Minute You’re Here
By Ray Morrison // November 16, 2023
The first drops of rain hitting the tin roof sounded like fingers snapping. I was in the kitchen helping Mama shuck runty cobs of corn we’d picked from the patch just beyond the box garden where parched pole beans waited to be harvested. We both glanced up at the sound.
“Thank goodness,” Mama said. “Lord knows, Ruthie, we need rain bad enough.”
The sound above us grew steadily louder, quickening to a drumroll. I stepped over to the screen door and looked out back. The sky, which half an hour before was bright and hot as we snapped off the corn from the brittle stalks, was now drab and gray, and the falling rain shimmered silver against it. The sodden air smelled earthy and sweet through the mesh. Beyond the garden, in the closest of our three tobacco fields, flat shriveled leaves bounced in the pelting rain, dancing with relief, it seemed, in the downpour. Far off in the distance thunder rumbled.
“Your poor daddy will be running in here any moment, soaked to his bones,” Mama said, peering out the small window above the sink. I saw her bite her lower lip. “I hope he don’t get caught out there if lightning starts up.”
“Will he bring the boys here?” I asked.
Mama tilted her head slightly and pursed her lips. “Maybe. He might just have sent them on home. They can run like the wind, those boys.”
The boys were Lucas and Mateo, sons of a migrant family who lived in a shack across Timmons Creek beyond the woods edging our farm. Lucas was fifteen and Mateo was thirteen. I was fourteen, right in between. Over the summer the three of us had become good friends. They lived with their mother who cleaned houses and did odd jobs to make ends meet. Daddy told me their father died last year from tuberculosis, which he said was a lung disease that could have been treated, but Doctor Adams had informed Daddy he won’t treat what he called “wetbacks.” Mama had convinced my father to hire the boys to help with the harvest even though they were young, since Eddie and Luke, the two guys who normally worked on the farm each summer, had been drafted into the army and were fighting in Vietnam, clear on the other side of the world.
I walked back to the sink and picked up an ear and began shucking. Mama peeled her leaves slowly, her focus on the view outside the window, staring at the rain that fell so hard by then all you could see was a wall of water. The pounding of rain on the roof became so loud we had to shout to hear each other. Twenty-five minutes passed. Mama picked up another ear but dropped it back into the sink.
She leaned closer to the window, squinting. “He should’ve been back by now. They were working on the west field.”
“He’s probably hiding under a tree to stay dry, don’t you think, Mama?”
“There aren’t really any—”
A sudden flash of white caused me to flinch, and an instant later, thunder crashed so loud it was like a shotgun had fired right next to my ear. Mama and I both jumped, startled.
“It’s okay, sweetie. We’re safe inside,” she said. She stroked my hair, but I could feel the trembling of her hand against my head.
She went over to the screen door and cracked it open. Rain splattered her face, so she let the door spring shut. Mama stood clutching the top of her dress, a nervous habit I’d seen many times. All of a sudden, her head inched forward, like she’d seen something outside and a minute later Daddy burst through the screen door, drenched and dripping, but laughing.
“Run and get some towels for your father!” Mama shouted to me.
I ran to the back of the house, to the small linen closet outside the bathroom and grabbed as many towels as I could hold. When I returned to the kitchen, Daddy was wiping his face with a dishcloth. I handed him the towels.
“Thanks, Ruthie,” he said and winked at me.
When Daddy finished drying off, he went and changed into dry clothes while Mama and I finished shucking the corn, adding it to a big pot of boiling water on the stove.
“Well, that was a sudden and unexpected storm,” Daddy said, coming back into the kitchen. “Guess I picked the wrong day to start harvesting.” He came over and squeezed me against him. His shirt was damp, but I didn’t mind. There was no hint of trembling in his strong hands.
“Daddy, did the boys get home okay?” I asked.
“I’m sure they did,” he said. “I sent them off when the rain started to get serious.”
The pattering on the roof softened to a steady tapping. I looked outside and the rain was easing to the point where I could begin to make out the dim shapes of the garden box and some of the bent corn stalks behind it.
The room filled with the smell of Mama’s roast in the oven. I added water to a stockpot for potatoes. The sky lightened and through the window I glimpsed a sliver of blue splitting the breaking clouds.
“The storm’s moved through quickly, thank goodness,” Mama said. “The plants sure needed it, but, Lordy, did it have to come all in one rush?”
“Well, any’s better than none, that’s for sure,” Daddy said.
“Did you see the lightning, Daddy?”
“Hard not to, Ruthie. It was close enough to make the little hairs on my arm stand straight up.”
“I was frightened about you bein’ out there with it,” Mama said.
Daddy smiled and walked over and put his arm around Mama’s waist as she strained the water from the corn pot into the sink. He gave her a peck on the cheek and a light swat on her fanny. I loved watching my parents in moments like that, hoping that someday I’d marry a man who’d love me like daddy loved Mama.
I set the small kitchen table for our meal. Daddy asked me if I knew where thunder came from and when I said no, he explained how lightning causes the thunder by superheating and expanding the air as it shoots through it and then it cools so fast the air collapses on itself. This makes a sound wave that we call thunder. Before he inherited the farm from his own father, Daddy had gone to State University in Raleigh, where he studied agriculture, but he learned all kinds of things that didn’t have to do with farming. He said he hoped someday I would go there, too.
We sat down to eat. Daddy sliced off a hunk of Mama’s delicious roast, while I smashed a large slab of butter into my potatoes with my fork. I began gnawing on an ear of corn when I heard a faint noise through the screen door. At first, I thought I’d only imagined it, but it grew louder, and soon I recognized the sound as someone yelling. Mama and Daddy heard it too and we all stood and hurried to look out back. Running out of the woods beyond the corn rows was Lucas, his black hair soaked and dripping on his face. His eyes, even from a distance, were wide and terrified.
“Señor! Señor!” he shouted toward us.
Daddy ran down the back steps, one foot slipping on the wet grass below them, and caught the boy, who was running so fast, the momentum nearly caused him to flip upside down.
“What’s the matter?” Daddy asked.
Lucas stood a moment, trying to catch his breath. Mama and I dashed outside. We stood in a small semicircle around Lucas, the rain just a drizzle now.
“It’s Mateo. Come quick, por favor. He’s hurt bad.” Lucas grabbed my father’s hand and pulled him in the direction he’d just come from.
Daddy turned to Mama and told her to call Dr. Adams to come right away. “Don’t mention who needs help. Just tell him it’s urgent. Ruthie, you stay here with your mother.”
Then Lucas and Daddy ran back toward the woods. After a moment, I ran after them. I reasoned that Mama didn’t need help making a phone call, but maybe there was something I could do to help my friend. Daddy and Lucas were much faster than I was. I saw them disappear into the trees way ahead of me, but I figured they were heading to where the boys lived, and I knew the way. I ran as fast as I could, but with the ground slick from the rain still falling lightly, my feet kept slipping. I fell twice, muddying the knees of my blue jeans. When I came out of the woods by the edge of Timmons Creek, I saw it was swollen and rushing from the storm, more like a river than a creek. I spotted Daddy and Lucas some yards down the bank, kneeling on the wet ground next to the water, and when I caught up, I saw Mateo lying on his back in the mud, his arms down at his sides, his feet still submerged in the rushing water. Lucas was holding his brother’s limp hand. Mateo’s skin looked pale against Lucas’s dark brown hand. Daddy was leaned over, his ear against Mateo’s mouth, listening.
I could feel my heart galloping. “Is he breathing?” I asked.
Daddy ignored me and stood. He grasped Mateo by his armpits and drug him up onto flatter ground. I went over and hugged Lucas, who hugged me back so hard it hurt, but I didn’t say anything. Both of us were crying and watching my father.
“We try to cross,” Lucas said, gesturing with one arm toward the raging water. “I make it okay, but Mateo, the water too strong and he not swim good. His head go under the water and no come back up. When I went in, I was pulled down, too. The water is very strong…” He began sobbing, and I pulled him tighter against me. “I-I lucky to find his arm and pull him here.”
Daddy wiped the rain from his eyes. He tilted Mateo’s head and probed his mouth with his fingers, then he pinched the boy’s nose before pressing his own mouth against Mateo’s, blowing hard. I saw Mateo’s small chest move. Daddy leaned back, sucked in a huge breath, and repeated it. Three, four, five times. He’d stop and press his palm against the boy’s chest and then repeat the mouth-to-mouth breathing. Finally, he put his ear to Mateo’s chest and listened, concentrating, his eyes squeezed closed.
Daddy sat back on his heels, his own chest heaving, and stared off across the creek. Then he looked over at me, then Lucas, and shook his head.
As I look back, I can’t say how long my father tried to resuscitate my friend. It might have been ten minutes, it might have been thirty. Daddy picked up Mateo’s limp body and carried him through the woods back to our house. Lucas and I followed, holding hands, neither of us able to speak. I can remember as we walked I became keenly aware of my own breathing, how it was happening, so simply and effortlessly, taken for granted.
We crossed the yard and I saw Dr. Adams’s car parked on the side of the house. Mama flung open the screen door and hurried down the steps. Following her, coming slowly with his black bag in one hand, was Dr. Adams.
Daddy lay Mateo gently in the grass. Dr. Adams came over and dug into his bag to extract his stethoscope. He hooked it into his ears and pressed it against the boy’s chest and listened. I saw him glance at Daddy, then Lucas, before he shuffled the scope to different spots, pausing each time to listen, but we all knew there was nothing to hear.
“I’m sorry,” he said, standing. It sounded sincere, I thought. “I’ll alert the sheriff.”
He walked to his car, stopping to put a hand on Lucas’s shoulder. We all stood there, not moving, listening to the car door slam, then the engine start up, then the crunch of the tires fading as the doctor drove away.
Mama went into the house and retrieved a quilt to wrap Mateo in. Daddy carried the body to the shed where his truck was parked and laid Mateo’s body on the front seat. Lucas let go of me and climbed up into the truck’s bed. I tried but couldn’t imagine what words Daddy would say to their mother.
After they left, Mama and I went back into the house. The remains of our uneaten dinner sat on the kitchen table, getting cold. I began cleaning it up, happy to have something to do, and after the dishes were dried and put away in the cabinet, Mama and I went into the living room and sat on the sofa to wait for Daddy.
“You okay, sweetheart?” Mama asked. She stroked my hair and gave me a sad smile. “No. Of course you’re not.”
“Mama?”
“Yes, honey?”
“I just can’t get past the idea I’ll never see Mateo again. Yesterday we were playing in the woods, running and laughing. He was so … alive.” Tears slid down my cheeks.
“It’s hard, I know, but life is fragile, sweetheart. One minute you’re here, then the next minute you’re gone. That’s why you must live the best life you can.”
I went back to the kitchen to wait for Daddy, standing at the screen door, staring at the spot where Mateo had been. The rain had stopped. Looking up, I could see the pole beans in the box garden looking bright green and standing up now. Yesterday, they were dried and pale from the long stretch of hot, dry days before the storm. Soon, I thought, Mama and I would pick them. I imagined their sweet, earthy taste after Mama cooked them. But for now, I wasn’t hungry at all. I just wanted Daddy to come back home to us.
Ray Morrison spent most of his childhood in Brooklyn, NY and Washington, DC but headed south after college to earn his degree in veterinary medicine and he hasn’t looked north since. He has happily settled in Winston-Salem, NC with his wife and three children where, when he is not writing fiction, he ministers to the needs of dogs, cats and rodents. His second short story collection, “I Hear the Human Noise,” won the gold medal IPPY Award for Best Southeast Fiction in 2020. His stories have appeared in Ecotone, Beloit Fiction Journal, StorySouth, Fiction Southeast, Brilliant Flash Fiction, Carve Magazine, Night Train, and others. He is the fiction editor of Flying South Magazine.