Walking on Water

Southern Quarterly, Winter 2004 by Ruffin, Paul

A SON OF THE DEEP SOUTH, I never knew the kind of long, intensive cold we saw in movies back then, where people skirred about on the mirrorlike surface of ponds, wearing strange-looking skates with runners instead of wheels; where dogsleds crossed vast, lonely, warmth-stealing continents of white, driven by men whose beards streamed icicles down to their waists; where fathers and husbands shoveled out corridors through head-high snow from door to mailbox; where fishermen sawed holes in ice and dangled lines for a different kind offish than what I grew up with. all that was another world, as distant and unreal to a Southern country boy as Atlantis or the moon. I have since known serious cold, mostly in other parts of the world, but I was merely on the way to warmer places.

It came to pass, the winter of my twelfth or thirteenth year-who can remember such things precisely?-that the cold came down like a dome on north Mississippi, clamping the landscape, icing the trees, and all the ponds froze over, not just a skim for crashing rocks through but thick enough to walk on. It was before the age of television weather, with spiked blue lines that announced a front, and the cold came unexpected in the middle of the night, and not with stealth-it roared and flung against the windows and doors sheets of rain, then rattling sleet, and the trees tossed about and the house groaned and creaked from a wind that would not be satisfied until it worked its mischief all the way to the coast and mellowed somewhere far out in warm waters of the Gulf. Then there was only the moaning wind and far above it sharp stars hanging in a moonless black vault that sapped what little warmth remained in the earth. The thermometer fell and fell, and even when the sun came round again, the silver column sayed locked, steady as stone, near zero, that magic number that is not a number but the absence of all that registers in our lives, and there it stayed for days.

Our windows fogged over, and rivulets of condensate trickled down and pooled on the sills, while the gas heaters hissed and glowed and kept the cold at bay as long as we hunkered near them. Trips to the kitchen were swift, without ceremony, and what we ate steamed, though it was not hot to the tongue. Trips to the outhouse were swifter. There was no school since the buses could not make their runs on the icy roads.

But such cold, alien though it might be, will not keep a boy from venturing forth, determined to see the strange changes it has wrought, and so it was that on the morning of the first day of what my parents called "the spell" I bundled tight and doubled my socks and walked out into air that seemed to suck the very breath from me. The vast blue dome of the same sky that sealed in the sultry days of summer now trapped the cold. My dog refused to come, preferring to lie curled on the back side of the wellhouse, waiting for whatever warmth the rising sun would bring. he had had enough cold.

My face was wreathed in vapor as I headed toward the Luxapalila, crunching across frozen grass and frost heaves, then through bushes that in summer would be velvety with leaves, almost hot to the touch, now every limb hard and stiff and sheathed with dazzling ice. But the river moved on, as it had to, unfazed by cold that coaxed steam from it and left the woods it cut through smoky looking and blue.

I studied the architecture of icy trees for awhile, until my feet and hands grew so numb that I could no longer feel them, then returned home and huddled beside a hissing gas heater and read and waited for the warm to come again.

On the morning of the third day of this aching cold-a Sunday, I believe, though no one thought of trying a perilous trip to church-my curiosity got the best of me and I went forth again, this time farther afield, my reluctant dog trailing along behind, preferring the heat of his own curled body on the sunny leeward side of the wellhouse. Sand Road was still a sheet of ice unbroken by traffic, so 1 scooted along it, like a skater. The little gravel pit near Guy Russell's house was frozen thick and solid, and when I threw rocks onto it, they chirped against the ice and bounced and skittered all the way to the other side. I slid out onto the pan of ice, rose to my feet, and glided across it, effortlessly, waving my arms for balance, until I reached the other side and stepped off. Now that was something. The dog merely watched, and perhaps he wondered.

But I was headed for the fog-gravel pit, on the old Marshall place, a couple of miles down the road from the house, one of the finest swimming holes I knew, with water deep and green and a beach formed by sand that fanned out from the separating towers. Now it stretched gray and still and solid, and when I threw a rock high it fell onto the ice and bounced and skidded into the frosty willows on the other side. The dog stood watching, only watching.

So I did what a boy will do, driven by innate foolishness as most young males are-I started out across the ice. Like a bird coming to terms with glass, I slid first one foot, then the other, hold back my weight and breath until they had to come. The ice spanged and creaked as I edged out toward the gray, awful middle, where if I went through no one could reach, even if I managed a cry for help before sinking, even if someone were close enough to hear. The dog had not moved one foot onto the ice, as if he knew better, though he could have known no more of ice like this than I did. Perhaps this was reason enough not to follow. The ice was not for him. he stood on the beach like something made of stone.