Manchester Island

On the mainland, Ricky sat on a metal milk crate in a bird blind he’d made of driftwood and jimson weed stems. Leafy branches overhead caged the blue of the sky. At his ear, a mosquito crooned of bloodlines. He raised his grandpa’s antique binoculars towards the arrowhead-shaped wedge of land in the middle of the Ohio River. His grandfather had sold the island to Mr. Greenlee last week. It had belonged to his family for five generations. Wasn’t that the same as forever?

A kingfisher rattled from a cottonwood and then dove sword-first as Ricky watched. Without moving his gaze, he pressed the binocular’s eye cups into his skull, and when he did, the river disappeared. Vanished. Was gone. The air didn’t even smell the same.

In a whoosh the river reappeared, pushed by a wall of glaciers at a thousand frames per second. The island’s head crowned in a watery birth. Night dropped the cloak and dawn scissored the horizon with light again and again. Trees sprouted, grew, died, fell. Rich silt from upstream washed onto the shores over and over. The banks eroded and knuckled up a boneyard of roots. Much later there were people piling the soil in mounds, hunting animals, squatting around small fires, and eventually crouching in wait to ambush rafts of settlers. Now the settlers were burying and unburying gunpowder, and in a blink the natives were gone and the new men and women patted corn kernels into the dirt, dug holes for cherry trees and grapevines. He witnessed a sternwheeler sinking, a boy drowning, a man drowning, a girl’s face pressed into the sand so she could not scream while her clothes were torn from her by a passing riverman. Once, Ricky saw a mob row their boats ashore and throw a noose around a sycamore limb. He saw black feet swinging. The floods arrived like dragons that swallowed farmhouses and washed barns off their foundations. A gambling house full of poker chips came and went. The people rebuilt and the river invariably emptied the island on repeat. Ricky watched his grandpa plant watermelons and tobacco and pound rope in between the planks of a boat and his grandma’s smile pinken into a ripe apple as she wriggled her toes in the shallows…and then they both became old. His mother walked the length of the sandbar and turned and waved. His father swam arm over arm away from him.

The binoculars had suctioned to his face, but Ricky tore them off and threw them. He sat there shaky and panting, his head between his knees. Same freckle on his right kneecap. Same pale blonde hair. But over there, the island was no longer theirs, no longer anybody’s. Never was.

The kingfisher’s rattle roused him to look again. Even without the binoculars, Ricky could see his old rope swing dangling abandoned from that sycamore tree. He saw Mr. Greenlee standing on the island dock with his hands on his hips, watching the storm clouds stacking to the west.