LITERAL REMAINS

Loss Creek

We grew up in Loss Creek.  Born, raised there.  It was a town that had seen its prosperity and promise evaporate a half century before we were born.  It was a small town, smaller than most, a railroad town that the trains bypassed.  A speck of dust on the road, a smudge.  The mills had closed, they were distant history, having been lured away by bigger towns, bright cities.  The steel factory had shut its doors.  Why would the trains stop anymore?  They didn’t even pass through, no lonesome whistles to fuel the dreams of us kids.

Why would anyone stay?  It was a poor place.  Rich in trees and hills, streams and rivers, but not much else.  It was home, though, to all of us, all of our parents and grandparents, and so on and so on.  Maybe we were all too poor to move away.  That was true of most everyone.  Even as adults, most of us stayed.  Those who did leave eventually returned, a little more broken than when they had left.  A little wiser for the journey, heartsick to come back.  Forced by circumstances.

It was habit for us as children when the school bell rang to run with all our might to Daniel’s General Store.  Mrs. Daniel’s front window displayed televisions.  She left the televisions on, and we would all stand on the sidewalk watching Mickey Mouse and Superman.  Most of us were lucky enough to have electricity, but very few of us had televisions.

Loss Creek School housed all the grades, kindergarten through twelfth.  Three floors: elementary grades on the first, middle school on the second, and high school on the third floor of the wide-eyed windowed brick box.  It seemed a lifetime that one was trapped in that place, and once you made it to the third floor, you knew there was no place to go but down having reached the pinnacle.  Once you graduated, college was not much of an option for us, it was something we knew little of; once you graduated, you joined what little work force was available in our town.  If you were lucky, you could get a job in one of the neighboring communities.  But luck could only do so much.

It was when we were attendants of the third floor, having survived our budding, middling, middle school years, that we first really, and truthfully, noticed Molly.  We noticed the changes in her without much attention to the changes in ourselves.

We knew Molly from our first days in school, in our first day of elementary school.  Most of us knew each other from before that; it’s that way in towns like ours.  Lifelong.  If we were not kith and kin, we were neighbors.  There was hardly such a thing as a stranger in Loss Creek.

Molly had never been a quiet, shy girl.  She was outspoken, she didn’t care what was said about her, didn’t care what opinions people held about her.  At fourteen, she enraptured us.  At seventeen, she haunted our dreams.  Even the rumors spurred us, wanting to know if any of it was true.

We goggled over her dresses which she seemed to nearly burst from.  We whispered about her jeans, tight and perfect to her form.  We ogled her as she walked down the street, smoking, smiling, hips swaying.  There were rumors about her, plenty of rumors, stories of her and the men at the Stumble Inn Tavern.  Hushed gossip of her and certain teachers.

Were they true?  None of us knew for sure.  Someone always knew someone who was certain; there was always second-, third-, fourth-hand information.  There was always someone, usually an older classmate, who claimed to have “been there, done that”.

We weren’t in love with Molly, I don’t think.  We were in love with the idea of her, most likely.  Teenage hormones, raging libidos.  The yearning for experience, for adventure.  That was what she was to us, a risk, a chance, heavenly temptation.  Our parents, mainly our mothers, always warned us against girls “like her”.

It was lust, I guess.  Infatuation.  We wanted the rumors about us, we wanted to be Molly’s partners in crime, so to speak.  We all talked about her; speculation, fantasies.  How did she kiss?  What did she look like naked?  How would it feel to touch her?  We could guess.  We could dream.

We all had talked to her, but she never showed interest in us.  She didn’t show much interest in any of us in her class.  Her attentions were always toward the men, the manly, our dads, and those upperclassmen who seemed to have been born with stubble.

Molly was our object of desire.  Forbidden.  Maybe we did love her, in our own way.  I’m sure it was a better love than what she had experienced at the Stumble Inn Tavern.  We fixated on her.  Even after she disappeared.

All over the world people have a way of disappearing, even in a forgotten little place like Loss Creek.  People seemingly fall the through the cracks.  Molly didn’t come from the best family, even in Loss Creek standards.  When she didn’t show up for school, no one thought much of it.  She must have quit.  When no one saw her about town, they dismissed it.  She was gone.  Good riddance, our parents said.  Good riddance, a lot of people said, and forgot she ever existed in such a short time.

Days went by.  A week.  It seemed we were the only ones concerned.  We stood vigil on street corners, watched from our frosted bedroom windows, stared longingly from the classroom.  Molly only showed herself in our minds.

Snippets of conversation from the true adults didn’t reveal any clues.  We talked, speculated, not about her as a lover, but now about where she could have run off to.  We didn’t want to think the worst, that she was in a big city, maybe stripping, maybe selling herself, doing anything to earn her keep so she wouldn’t have to return to Loss Creek.

It wasn’t long before we learned the truth.  And the truth, though it may set you free, can haunt you more than a fevered, adolescent, dream.  More than any regret.

We found her, strictly by chance, one frozen January Saturday.  We were hiking to Loss Creek Falls to drink stolen beer among the icicles.  We found her body lying beside a rotted tree trunk.  She lay sprawled, discarded like common trash.  Her face was crusted with ice and dirt and blood.  We could tell her nose and jaw were broken.  Her head was split open.  Molly was naked and blue.  Her left arm was bent backwards.  Her shin bone jutted from her leg.

We stared, breathless and silent.  This wasn’t our Molly.  At least not the Molly we had always appreciated.  The Molly we longed for.

Iced tree limbs cracked around us.  We stood.  We didn’t know what else to do.  We had nothing to say.  Was this what happened when you were forgotten?  Were as expendable?

There was still dignity.  One of us covered her with a coat while another ran home and returned with a shovel.  In the hours it took for us to dig in the solid earth, we each said our own soundless prayers of benediction.

We dug, and before the grave was ready we all had bleeding hands and sore backs, and moist eyes.  We were apprehensive of touching her, but we did without complaint.  The sound of her tearing free from the ground…we knew we would hear it for the rest of our lives.

In the reverence of the woods we buried her without a eulogy and with the hymns of sniffling noses, marking the spot with a white, round, stone.

No one else ever knew what we did.  We never learned who had hurt her.  We kept silent.  We guess he did as well.

No one in Loss Creek ever questioned Molly’s whereabouts, if she were alive or dead.  No one said much of anything about her, except to say she didn’t live here anymore, that she had left.  Her parents only said she ran away, and that was fine by them.  “She was a devil from day one,” her mom often commented.

I still visit her grave.  I take my children for walks through the woods, to the falls, and I stop and think.  I look at my wife sometimes, and I wonder what kind of wife Molly would have been.  What kind of mother.  Maybe, one of those days long ago, me or one of my friends, maybe we should have just told Molly how pretty she was, or how nice.  Maybe if we had said something instead of just standing back.  Maybe if we had known the right words to say, but even now I’m not sure what those words are, I’m not sure what those feelings were.

But maybe…if only…

the_novacula