Tallahatchie Bridge

It’s strange, isn’t it? How the days begin to fold into one another, one after another, and they seem to become each other, indistinguishable, as if time itself — like a slow river — washes over all of it, all the little things we think we remember: the smell of bread baking in the oven, the clink of the spoon against the glass, the faint hum of the old fan in the corner that we somehow never quite fix — and still, there it is, turning in circles like the thoughts that never seem to settle. Always moving, always the same, but somehow different.

I was out chopping cotton and my brother was baling hay. And at dinnertime we stopped and walked back to the house to eat. And Mama hollered out the back door y’all remember to wipe your feet. And then she said I got some news this mornin’ from Choctaw Ridge. Today Billie Joe MacAllister jumped off the Tallahatchie Bridge.

It was Thursday, or it could have been a Tuesday, or perhaps it doesn’t matter at all, but it was definitely the third of June, another sleepy, dusty, Delta day, and I remember the sun — it was heavy and hot, the kind that makes everything feel sticky and worn — and there was that faint, lazy sound of the wind pushing its way through the trees, almost like it was tired itself, too tired to keep pushing but too unwilling to rest, and I remember my mother’s voice, that peculiar note in it, sharp like a pebble dropped into still water, the ripples coming out and spreading and spreading until they reached the very edges of me.

“Billie Joe MacAllister,” she said, and I didn’t know what to do with that name. I didn’t know what to make of the way she said it, as if it were something both too familiar and too strange, something that had been with us so long it had become invisible, hidden in the crevices of our minds. I looked at her then, as she set the cup of tea down with a kind of finality, a noise that reverberated in my chest like the sound of a door closing, a door I had no business opening, a door that should never be opened. “He jumped,” she said, so simply, as if the event were no more than an ordinary fact, something that had to be told, the same way she would have said, “The garden’s full of weeds,” or “I think the meat is burning.”

He jumped.

And Papa said to Mama, as he passed around the black-eyed peas: Well, Billie Joe never had a lick of sense, pass the biscuits please. There’s five more acres in the lower forty I got to plough. And Mama said it was shame about Billie Joe, anyhow. Seems like nothin’ ever comes to no good up on Choctaw Ridge. And now Billie Joe MacAllister’s jumped off the Tallahatchie Bridge.

Wasn’t it always the way? Always some distant figure, hovering at the edges of our lives, never quite a part of it, never quite touching it. And yet, when the news of his death reached us, it seemed too simple to bear, too small and too large, as if the ground had cracked open and we hadn’t even noticed. He had been there, and then he was gone. The thinness of it — how easily one can slip from the known to the unknown, how the interstice between the two is just a whisper, a moment, and then the story ends. He jumped, yes, but it was never about the jump, was it? It was about everything that led to it, everything that had been running beneath the surface, invisible, until it wasn’t anymore.

And Brother said he recollected when he and Tom and Billie Joe put a frog down my back at the Carroll County picture show. And wasn’t I talkin’ to him after church last Sunday night? I’ll have another piece of apple pie, you know it don’t seem right. I saw him at the sawmill yesterday on Choctaw Ridge.

And now you tell me Billie Joe’s jumped off the Tallahatchie Bridge.

I remember the river that ran beside the bridge, sluggish and dark, slow as though it were caught in some eternal waiting, never able to move forward, never able to forget what it had seen. And the bridge — how it stretched there, steady, unyielding, as though it had no choice but to stand there and bear witness to everything it had ever seen. And then the months. The months between that Thursday and now — how the air had a way of thinning, how time seemed to slide between our fingers, how everything just drifted in and out, like smoke caught in the wind.

Mama said to me, Child, what’s happened to your appetite? I’ve been cookin’ all mornin’ and you haven’t touched a single bite. That nice young preacher, Brother Taylor, dropped by today. Said he’d be pleased to have dinner on Sunday. Oh, by the way, he said he saw a girl that looked a lot like you up on Choctaw Ridge. And she and Billie Joe was throwing somethin’ off the Tallahatchie Bridge.

But time does not stop, does it? And a year has come and gone since that afternoon, that news, that fact — and things have changed, or maybe they haven’t, and we all have our ways of carrying on. Brother married Becky Thompson, and they bought that little store down in Tupelo; it’s a shop of things no one needs, but we buy them anyway, because that’s how it goes, isn’t it? You fill the emptiness with something, anything, and we pretend not to notice it. Papa — he caught that virus, the one that made the rounds, and in the spring he was gone, like a leaf caught in the current, swept away, leaving nothing but a sudden, aching silence in the air where his voice used to be. It seemed to come so quickly, as though it had always been there, waiting to collect him. And Mama — Mama doesn’t seem to be the same anymore. She’s slower now, softer somehow, as if she’s been worn down by all the things we never said, the things we could never say. She moves about the house, drifting through the rooms as if there is no particular reason to be anywhere, no particular place for her to go.

And me — what am I now? I spend a lot of time walking up Choctaw Ridge, picking flowers, picking at the edges of a life I cannot seem to hold. And I take those flowers, those frail little things, and I drop them into the water. I watch them float away, spinning, the way everything seems to spin if you let it — our lives, our losses, our deaths, our loves, all of it spinning away, moving so slowly, but always moving. I watch the flowers sink into the mud beneath the Tallahatchie Bridge, and I think: how strange it is, how strange it must be, to be both here and gone, to be everything and nothing all at once.

The bridge stands — solid, unmoving. And the river flows, without care, without remorse. It is always the same, and yet it changes, doesn’t it? Everything does.

I drop them into the muddy water off the Tallahatchie Bridge.