Innocence Drowned

As Florence drove out our mile-long dirt lane, I felt happier than on a Christmas morning. My mother’s friend ignored family protocol to treat the four sisters equally and often brought gifts just for me. I never understood why, but perhaps she had also been a ‘stuck in the middle’ child, wearing faded, hand-me-down clothes and out-grown tattered shoes with crooked heels.

During Florence’s previous visit, she had placed a copy of her first published novel into my hands. I cherished the personal note scrawled on the title page, ‘To Carol: Love the written word, as I do.’ She knew my sisters wouldn’t care about this gift, but she wisely realized that a 14-year-old who dreamed about becoming a future writer would savor it.

The gifts Florence brought on this visit, however, turned my older sister Judy’s envy green as garden peas. My benefactor pulled a chocolate brown, knee-length wool coat with embossed gold buttons and a bushy fur collar from a crinkled, paper grocery bag. A pair of red-leather Mary Jane shoes, with straps that fastened to tiny, covered buttons, fell from the tote. Judy looked on with wide, envious eyes, as Florence handed both items to me, saying, “Carol, I think these will fit you.”

I wore that coat and shoes every day. They were mine and for the second-oldest child in a poor family, possession meant everything. In school, my red shoes strutted down the halls and the coat’s fur collar flipped up around my neck with haughty confidence.

My father, longing for a son to help out on our 25-acre Christmas tree farm, had selected me as his token ‘boy’ from his four daughters. I relished that my three sisters preferred hiding out with Mom in the kitchen, because that allowed me to be Daddy’s special girl.

On a bitter-cold January Sunday, he invited me on a walk around the property. “Carol let’s go down to the river and check if the dock is frozen in the water. You better take that pretty coat off and put on your old jacket,” he advised. “Boots might be better, too.”

“No, Daddy, this coat keeps me so warm, and I’ll be careful not to ruin my shoes.” His eyes reflected an error in my judgment, but his silent lips accepted my decision. Filled with enormous delight that my father had picked me for this sojourn, I marched out of the house, puffed-up and proud. I sensed a lingering wisp of jealousy from Judy as my coat brushed by her.

A stinging wind whipped up the dried leaves covering the path, as snowflakes started to fall. Traipsing through the crunch underfoot, I avoided looking down at the already scuffed red leather. Conversation between my father and me stumbled. I never knew what to say to him during these twosome outings. Thrilled to be with him, but terrified to please.

An icy expanse glistened as we reached the riverbank fronting our property. A thin covering of white flecks frolicked in squally swirls across the unmoving water. I had never seen the Schuylkill River frozen this early in winter. I envisioned an ice-skating party and fantasized that Richard Buckle would skate with me in my brown fur-trimmed coat.

While Daddy was checking the dock, the motionless river begged me to take a risk. I left the safety of wooden planks, tested the ice and braved a few more steps. I turned to look at my father. His red-tinged cheeks drained to pale white, and his wrinkled brow revealed panic. I heard fear resonating from his trembling voice as he shouted, “Carol, come back. It’s not froz…”

His words faded, as the sound of cracking ice ricocheted. The crooked line spread between my feet, expanding from a ribbon to a crevice. Then… the terror of being submerged into the deep shocked my senses. Icy water pricked against my skin, as the heaviness of my beloved wool coat dragged me downward. The dark liquid smelled like dead fish, while the brittle shards of ice numbed my hands and feet. The razor thin icicles of fur bristled and scratched my neck. I saw a faint light through murky, suspended particles, where ice had caved. I had to emerge through that same hole to survive.

Air ran thin as I struggled to propel myself upward toward the light. Images flashed by when my father tossed me, at age 6, into the water and told me to swim like our dog, Rex. Since we lived along miles of riverbank, my dad persisted until every one of his girls knew how to swim. Times when the river felt to be a closer companion than three sisters flickered through my mind. I could see myself swimming across it, canoeing up and down it, fishing for carp along it, but now, I feared drowning in it.

My head popped through the opening. I gasped a breath. Daddy lay prone on the dock, with a long, downed tree limb, stretched from his quivering hands.I extended one arm, but frozen-stiff fingers and the wet brown wool sticking to intact ice denied my rescue. I slipped back into dark, murky oblivion.

My body had turned into a heavy paperweight, as life oozed from my limbs. Memories no longer crowded my mind; everything seemed in slow motion. Panic and determination floated away, succumbing to the power of the frigid water.

Then, the opening above widened, as a rock hurtled through my liquid grave. The momentum of the object sinking past me triggered my body and mind into motion. I was only 14. I had things to do, and stuff to write to make Florence proud. I flapped my arms downward to thrust myself toward the larger breach above. I saw a jumble of thin twigs as I surfaced and sucked in a life-saving breath.

This time, adrenaline clamped numb fingers firmly around the branch. My father pulled the tree limb, with dead-weight torso attached, in deliberate hand over hand tugs. At last, my red shoes cleared the icy water, but my teenage innocence peeled away and slipped into the rupture in the river’s glassy surface. The coat’s gold buttons scraped across the ice like fingernails grating down a blackboard.

Wind gusts flogged me as I lay prone on the dock, dazed. The brown wool sucked at my body, the icicled fur collar matted in clumps and the soggy, leather shoes cracked. I cried frozen tears, shattered by the ‘death’ of my fragile self-assurance and the fleeting power of my pretty things. Part of me had drowned. I couldn’t look at my father. I had ruined our walk.

As I lit the match to set afire my destroyed coat, wrecked shoes and devastated confidence in the 55-gallon drum we used to burn trash, my mind would not release the image of what happened immediately after my father pulled me from the icy crevice. Had he hugged me, had he yelled at me for being so foolish, or did he just get me to my feet without a word, disappointed in ‘his boy’? Memories are too painful at times, so I will make up the fantasy that he folded his strong arms around my soggy, limp body and told me he loved me. In truth, I don’t think it happened that way.