I settled into the ride, keeping to the middle of the creek. As ugly as it was, the ride itself was surprisingly stable. My grandfather had built the boat the way he had because Rose was afraid of the water. As an epileptic whose seizures grew in frequency and intensity as she’d aged, she’d never learned to swim, so he’d designed something impossible to capsize or sink, with rails to keep her from falling overboard. Even then, it usually took some convincing for Rose to accompany him, so my grandfather often went alone, at least until my mom was old enough to join him. When I began spending my summers with him, we spent almost every afternoon on the water.
Boating always seemed to put my grandfather in a contemplative mood. Sometimes, he would tell stories about his childhood, which was far more interesting than my own, or talk about bees or his work at the mill, or what my mom had been like as a child. Almost always, though, his thoughts would turn to Rose, melancholy settling over him like a familiar shawl. The older he got, the more he repeated himself, and by the time of my last visit, I’d heard all of his stories often enough to recite them by heart. But I would listen without interruption, watching as he lost himself in the memories, because I knew how much she’d meant to him.
I had to admit, their story was charming; it harkened to a place and time I knew only from black-and-white movies, a world replete with dirt roads and homemade bamboo fishing poles and neighbors who sat on their front porches to beat the heat, waving to passersby. After the war, my grandfather had first spotted Rose having a soda with her friends outside the drugstore, and he’d been so taken with her that he swore to his friends that he’d seen the woman he would one day marry. After that, he saw Rose everywhere, outside Christ Episcopal Church with her mother or strolling through the Piggly Wiggly, and she began to notice him as well. Later in the summer, at the county fair, there was a dance. Rose was there with her friends and though it took him most of the evening to work up the courage to cross the floor to ask her to dance, she told him that she’d been waiting all night for him to do just that.
They married less than six months later. They spent their honeymoon in Charleston before returning to New Bern to settle into their life together. He built the house, and both of them wanted a brood of children. However, perhaps because of Rose’s condition, one miscarriage followed another, five in total over an eight-year period. Just when they’d given up hope, my mother was conceived, and the pregnancy went the distance. They considered my mom a gift from God, and my grandfather swore that Rose had never been more beautiful than when he saw mother and daughter together, playing hopscotch or reading or even standing on the porch, shaking dirt from the rugs.
Years later, when my mom went off to college on a full scholarship, my grandfather told me that he and Rose enjoyed a second honeymoon, one that lasted until their very last day together. Every morning, he would head out early to pick Rose a bouquet of flowers; she would make breakfast, and the two of them would eat together on the back porch, while watching the mist rise slowly from the water. He would kiss her before heading off to work and again when he returned at the end of the day; they held hands as they took their evening walk, as though touch could somehow make up for the lost hours they’d spent apart.
My grandfather found her on the kitchen floor on a Saturday, after he’d spent an afternoon building additional hives. He took her lifeless body in his arms and held her. He cried for more than an hour before finally calling the authorities. He was so destroyed that for the first time ever, my mom took a monthlong leave of absence from her practice and came down to stay with him. He spent part of the following year carving her headstone himself, and up until our last phone call, I knew he continued to visit her grave every single week.
There was Rose and only Rose; he’d always sworn no one could ever replace her. There was no reason to doubt him and I never did. Toward the end, my grandfather was more than ninety years old, with arthritis and a dying truck; he led a simple life that included tending to honey bees and tinkering with the boat, all the while cherishing the memories of a wife that he could never forget.
I turned all these things over in my mind while my thoughts circled back to my conversation with Jim. I tried to reconcile Jim’s comments with the grandfather I’d known but simply couldn’t do it. Despite what I’d been told, I knew with sudden certainty that my grandfather had never, nor would have ever, gone to South Carolina to visit a woman named Helen.
*
I continued upstream, motoring from one curve to the next, eventually reaching the public boat ramp in the Croatan National Forest. Interesting tidbit about the forest: It’s one of the few places in the world where you can find Venus flytraps and other carnivorous plants growing in the wild. My grandfather used to bring me out to search for them. Somehow, despite constant poaching, they’re still relatively common.