| Welcome | Contents | Submissions | Contact | Privacy | About | The Red Boat by Russell Kesler Sunday morning. Dad starts the Chevrolet, Mother adjusts her hat, and we begin the familiar ride to church. We sit in comfortable silence, Mother occasionally commenting on someone's camellias in bloom, or an addition to a house along the way. Though I'm not yet tall enough to look straight out the window, I know, by the turns we make and the changing pitch of the tires on different streets, where we are. I know that when the row of tall sable palms glides by we're on the road that traverses the lake. And when the live oak and baldcypress appear, I know it's time to sit up straight and look at the boat. It was a wooden rowboat, its red paint fading into the grain. The stern was submerged, invisible in the dark tannic water; the oarlocks hung at the surface. And though it was obvious that it was never going to float again, it was still tied, with a frayed cotton line, to a cypress knee. I wonder now what my parents and my brother were thinking while the car idled on that quiet brick street, and I marvel that my father, his mind always on the destination, indulged my whim. I don't know how I first discovered the boat, and I don't remember at what point the ritual stopped. I do remember that while I put on my Sunday clothes and while my mother read the daily selection from the Bible at the breakfast table, I would be seeing the boat already, thinking that it waited for me to notice it again.

Once, when he was five, our older son Nick turned from the nature program he was watching and asked, "Daddy, do bears know that they're bears?" And I realized then that the inner lives of children are at least as complicated and urgent as ours. In some way, the questions I asked myself about the red boat were like Nick's question about bears, significant because they are unanswerable. I couldn't say, when Mother asked, why the sight of the red boat excited me, and somehow calmed me at the same time. It had something to do with the mystery of it all. Why would someone let the boat sink and rot? Was I alive when it was last used? Why was it painted red? Why, I vaguely wondered, do I feel this way about it? When we arrived at the church, a few men would be standing outside on the steps smoking a last cigarette before the service began. Inside it was cool, smelled of furniture polish and the ladies' mingled perfumes. In the racks on the back of each pew were the hymnals and stiff cardboard fans placed by the Carey Hand Funeral Home, depicting Jesus at Gethsemane, a scene also present on the stained glass window to the left of the choir loft. On the right, three figures hung on crosses. These windows made the progress of clouds across the sun more dramatic than when I stood outside, the garden and the hillside where the crosses stood going light and dark while the hymns were sung and the preacher warned about the lake of fire. The wound on Jesus' side turned bright crimson as the clouds moved away. At some point I'd turn my mind to the boat in its quiet cove, the dense live oak shade and the soft mud that had filled the wooden hull. I'd think about the tall white clouds reflected in the lake and try to imagine what the weather was like the last day someone stepped to the bank and tied the boat to the cypress knee. Thunderstorms build across central Florida almost every summer day, sometimes as early as two, sometimes not until after dark. The first drops hitting hot asphalt and concrete release the bitter tang of the stored-up energy that has blistered it all day. That odor, that moment when the stasis of the long afternoon is broken, always made me aware of myself as someone who could feel, a child who tried to be good ("sweet," Mother would say), but who nevertheless was at times possessed by thoughts and dreams that no adult should ever know about, though I knew I would never be able to express them if I tried. So much of childhood takes place in secret, a shiver of pleasure in knowing that no adult-no one at all-could experience as I did the shapes of the shadows thrown by a certain tree at a certain hour, or that feeling in the gut when I crouched among my father's few tomato plants at the back of the lot, the way their smell, in that moment at high noon, flooded me with desires I couldn't understand. Part of the red boat's magic for me was that it was a useless thing. The lake hadn't claimed it entirely, since the bow still nosed up on the bank, and it wasn't enough of an eyesore for anyone to dredge it up and haul it away. It was as if the boat was there for me alone. Like the shape of a tree's shadow at noon and the rusty odor of rain on hot sidewalks, the boat was there to be made mine, to be imbued with whatever life my imagination could provide. I still live in the town I grew up in. The evocative places of my childhood are there in their essence-they don't have to be imagined. Occasionally, when I find myself in that part of town, I'll follow the brick street around that lake to the spot where the red boat was tied. The same neat bungalows open verandas to the lake and the city skyline beyond, and the cypress trees and live oaks are larger. I'll stop, shut off the car, close my eyes. The small ghost in the back seat, his hair neatly parted, wears a clip-on tie, creased slacks and a sportcoat. He's on his knees, looking out quietly, waiting for the words. Please send us your comments, including the name of the work you are commenting on. | Welcome | Contents | Submissions | Contact | Privacy | About | Copyright © 1999-2003 by Amarillo Bay. All rights reserved. Individual works are copyrighted by their authors.