The Arrowhead
By Brandy Bell Carter // October 13, 2023
Waverly looked up from his chicken potpie. He could never finish eating them; they were too much for his eleven-year-old stomach to hold. “Are ya goin’ with us to the rock?” his brother asked. Marlin was fifteen and secretly didn’t want to take Waverly along with him to the river.
“Yeah,” Waverly replied, his mouth still full of pastry. “If Momma’ll let me, I am.”
“You better hurry up cause I’m ready to go.” Marlin pushed his chair away from the table in the small dining room and walked through the kitchen to his bedroom. Waverly guessed that his brother was getting his swimming trunks.
“Momma!” Waverly yelled.
“Yeah,” She responded from a few feet away in the kitchen. She was at the stove making some cookies to give to Ms. Hattie, who was sick at home and didn’t come to Sunday school the day before.
“Can I go to the river with Marlin?”
“You ain’t gonna try to jump offa that rock, are you?”
“No, Ma’am. I promise. I’ll just swim, if you’ll let me go.”
“All right then. Be sure y’all come back before dark. Ya hear?”
“Yes, Ma’am,” Waverly blurted out as he shot past his mother. As soon as she had said he could go, he had pushed his chair away from the table, sprinted into the kitchen and dumped his plate beside the sink in one swift series of movements.
Within two minutes, Waverly had pulled on his swimming trunks and burst out the front door just in time to jump into the back of Marlin’s friend’s pick-up truck. Chase was Marlin’s best friend, and they were inseparable. “It’s a good thing you haul’d your butt out here,” Marlin yelled through the back glass. “We was about to leave your tail at the house.” Both Marlin and Chase laughed. They liked to pick on Waverly in a good-natured and brotherly way. They were always beating him up and giving him swirlies in the back bathroom toilet.
“Shut up,” Waverly muttered. He liked going to the river, even though he wasn’t supposed to jump off The Rock. Even if he had wanted to jump, he probably couldn’t have made the climb to the top. To get to the fifty foot rock ledge above the river you had to be able to pull yourself up on an old rope and climb the rest of the way on an almost vertical embankment with only a few widely spaced crevices to hold on to. When the three went to the river, Marlin and Chase only let Waverly go because they could climb to the top of the rock and talk about whatever they wanted. In fact they usually spent most of their time at the edge of the rock instead of in the water. Waverly stayed on the opposite bank and swam in the shallows or played in the sand. He didn’t really mind playing by himself. He liked the water. He felt cool when his brother let him tag along. He was tired of being thought of as a baby. Couldn’t his parents and Marlin see that he was grown up? He was already eleven after all.
The ride to the river only lasted five minutes. The boys drove over the bridge and looked down at the water below. “Is the water up?” Marlin yelled to Chase over the noise of the wind.
“A little bit, but it’ll be okay.”
Chase pulled the truck over on the left side of the road in a small clearing. The rest of the path down to the water was too steep for the truck. They would have to walk.
Chase and Marlin jumped out of the truck and started to walk quickly down the path. Waverly jumped out of the back and yelled, “Wait for me, y’all!” Chase and Marlin began to jog and finally started to run down the steep path. “Hey! Wait!’ Waverly whined. They always did this. They’d say that he could come along and then leave him out of all the cool stuff. It was bad enough that he couldn’t jump off of the rock. It didn’t take long before the two were out of sight, and Waverly picked his way carefully down the rest of the slope to the riverbank.
By the time Waverly got there his brother was halfway up the bank on the other side and Chase was sitting on top of the rock. They looked so far away to Waverly, almost like they were little dolls set on a shelf up near the ceiling. He started playing in the sand on the bank. First, he took some sticks and built a fort out of sand. Pretend battles raged between his stick soldiers for several minutes before he became bored.
Then, Waverly started to wade into the water. He had learned to swim a few summers before, but he still wasn’t very good at it. He could try to swim, but he usually just ended up dog- paddling around. The rocks along the riverbed poked the bottoms of his feet and made it hard to stand up straight. He drifted a little further out. The buoyancy of the water helped take some of the weight off of his tender feet. The river water was so clear that he could see his feet on the bottom. The rocks were mostly dull colored, tan, brown, and pink. Waverly watched his toes sift over the river bottom. Suddenly, he caught a glimpse of something dark right at his feet. It looked odd, like it didn’t belong there. Waverly quickly glanced up at Chase and Marlin. They were engrossed in some deep conversation about the size of the deer that they killed a few months ago. Waverly looked around at all the dense foliage covering the land rising up from the river. His daddy had often told him about the Indians that had lived all along this river. They were the ones that had named it the Buttahatchee. He wasn’t sure what that word meant in the Indian language, but his dad had shown him some of the arrowheads that were found when the tractor turned the fields over in the spring.
“Sometimes they would lose the arrowheads, and they would get stuck in the ground. So when we till up the ground, sometimes we can find ‘em. If you are out in the woods and fields, keep your eyes open for ‘em. These arrowheads are good to have. It’s like ownin’ part of the past,” Waverly’s daddy told him. He looked through the crystalline water again and moved the dark stone around with his toes. He couldn’t tell exactly, but it sure did look like an arrowhead. If it was, it was different from the ones his dad had shown him. They had all been made of light colored flint, but this one was so dark. Waverly decided that he would try to dive down into the water and get it.
* * *
Marlin glanced up to check on Waverly. He looked up and down the entire riverbank on the opposite side. He couldn’t see anything except for the reddish brown sand and masses of underbrush sticking out from the bottoms of the trees. “WAVERLY!” he screamed. He yelled again and again. Finally, he turned to Chase. “That little goober is hiding from us. I’ll bet he thinks it’s funny. I’m gonna beat his tail when I find him. Momma’s gonna kill me, if we can’t find him and get home before dark.” Both boys stood up and looked down at the fifty-foot drop into the water. “You jump first, Chase.”
“No, you. We’re going to find your stupid brother.” Marlin stepped up to the edge and hesitated for a moment before he leapt from the edge. He knew he had to jump up and out to keep from hitting his head on the rock or worse hitting a dead tree limb at the base. The fall seemed to last for an eternity. He always waited until he was halfway down before he held his breath. He finally broke through the water and his skin stung with the impact. He instantly started kicking and pushing back toward the surface of the water.
“Aight! I’m clear. You can jump!” He yelled up at his friend. Chase stepped up and jumped from the edge. Within moments both of them were on the opposite bank where Waverly had been a few minutes before. “What should we do?” Marlin asked. “Should we try to sneak up on him, or should we yell that we’re going to leave him?”
“I don’t know. Sneaking up on him would be funnier, but I don’t know if we can find him out here in all these weeds and stuff. He could be anywhere, behind a bush or behind a rock. Besides, we gotta get home. It’s getting dark,” Chase said. He wasn’t crazy about wandering around in the woods after dark. He was ready to go home.
“Okay, we’ll just act like we’re gonna leave ‘im,” Marlin climbed completely out of the water and sucked in a huge lungful of air. “WAVERLY, WE’RE GOIN HOME. WE’RE GONNA LEAVE YOU IF YOU DON’T COME OUT!” The two stood there for a few moments waiting for a response, some sort of muffled laugh or a rustling of leaves, but they heard nothing. “Come on, Chase. We gotta start going up the path. He probably don’t believe that we’ll leave him here by hisself.” Marlin and Chase started up the dirt footpath a few steps and stopped to listen. They figured that Waverly would try to follow behind them and jump into the back of the truck at the last minute. They still couldn’t hear anything.
“Let’s keep going,” Chase whispered. “He’ll come on once we’re out of sight. It’s not that far to walk home anyway. It ain’t dark yet either.” Marlin nodded and they continued the trek back to the truck. Since the path was on an incline the trip back to the truck was always more difficult than the sprint down the hill to the water. The two boys walked slowly the entire way. As quietly as they could they climbed the hill and listened for any noise that might give Waverly’s hiding place away. They made it back to the truck without hearing any unusual sounds. When they got to the truck, they decided to get in and start the engine.
“He’ll come out now,” Chase said with a grin. “That boy hates bein’ left behind.” They sat for a full two minutes, and still Waverly didn’t appear.
Marlin hung his head out the window and yelled, “WAVERLY! This ain’t cute boy! We are seriously gonna leave you here. Come on now!” The little boy still didn’t appear. Marlin got out of the truck and deliberately slammed the door. “That’s it. I’m gonna beat the turds outta him.”
“Calm down, Marlin. Maybe he’s scared or somethin’. He’s just a little kid. Let’s just go find ‘im.” So they took the path back down to the water. They yelled the whole way. “Waverly! We’re worried about you. Come out! We gotta go home!” The two scanned the riverbank.
After a few minutes of searching, they decided to split up. “You go that way,” Marlin said pointing to the left side of the path. “And I’ll go that way.” They took off in different directions. Their search didn’t continue for long because darkness fell. After an hour they met back at the truck. “Thank God, Chase. I’ve been sitting here waiting for you forever. I thought I’d done lost you too.”
“You didn’t find him?” Chase asked incredulously.
“Nope. I just can’t think where he could be. It’s not like him to be off by hisself after dark. I think we need to go back home and tell Momma and Daddy.” Chase nodded gravely as the whine of the truck engine drowned out the soft sound of the river.
The trip back across the bridge was one of total silence. Each of the boys was wondering what could have happened to Waverly, and they felt silently guilty for not watching him better. What if something had really happened to him? What if he got hurt or something? Chase glanced over at Marlin, sitting motionless in the passenger seat. Chase kept shifting his eyes from Marlin back to the road ahead. Marlin ran his thick fingers through his coarse sandy-blonde hair. As he brought his hand back down to his lap, Chase noticed his hand shaking with a tiny tremor, and Chase felt his stomach turn. He hoped that they found Waverly soon. Since he was an only child, to Chase, Waverly and Marlin were just like brothers.
Marlin and Waverly’s parents didn’t handle the news very well. “What do you MEAN you lost your brother? He was YOUR responsibility!” their father screamed at Marlin. Marlin stood there with his head down waiting to find out what his father planned to do to find his brother.
“Charla, we are going to go back down there and look for him,” Marlin’s father said to his mother. “Marlin, I want you to get on the phone and call all the neighbors and the sheriff’s office. Tell them to come to the river and bring flashlights.”
“Yes, sir.” Marlin pulled out the drawer that held the phonebook. He called the Emersons, who lived next door. “Hey. Yeah, well, we can’t find Waverly. He was down with me at The Rock, and now he’s lost. Can you help us come find him?”
***
They didn’t find the body until morning. All night long the entire community scoured the riverbank and surrounding woods calling his name. “Waverly!” echoed through the chilly night. It was the sheriff that suggested they start moving downstream.
They searched over a mile until they got down to the military ford near the Indian Mounds.
The morning sun was shining on the mound that stood directly on the bank of the river. Ms. Johnston, Waverly’s Sunday school teacher, was the one who found him. He was lying there on the edge of the mound. His skin was bluish-gray and small pieces of leaves and sticks were matted up in his curly brown hair. The blue eyes that had danced so often with laughter were now staring blankly ahead. Marlin was the first member of the family to make it down the mound to the place where Waverly lay. Marlin knelt down beside his little brother, and his gaze went from his brother’s tangled hair to his limbs that rested at awkward angles from his body. The dead boy’s lips were slightly parted as if they were on the verge of whispering a secret but had frozen before the words could be born.
In the hazy morning light Marlin could see a glint coming from Waverly’s left hand. He reached down, hesitant to touch the cold, lifeless body. When he grasped Waverly’s hand, stiff with rigor mortis, he pressed the object through the wooden-like fingers. The hand resisted as if it didn’t want to let go of its treasure. Then Marlin realized what it was -- an arrowhead. He held up the dark stone; it was a piece of finely chiseled obsidian that had once been held in an ancient hand.
___________________
Brandy Bell Carter lives near Wake Forest with her husband and hound dog. She teaches high school English, grows flowers, and reads widely. She is inspired by the Psalms, folk music, and Mary Oliver's poems. Her poetry can be found in Volume One of The Wake Forest Review.